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No one prepared you for what it felt like to step out of Hell.
Of course, there had been a distinct lack of sojourner’s accounts in recent years. No one who might frame the experience through a familiar lens had returned to tell the tale. Even the classics upon which the field of Tartarology was built had little to say on the subject, save for Orpheus’ laments, and Orpheus was so riven at the critical moment that he would not have noticed or cared if the barrier between worlds had been shaped of fire or ice.
But scarce has turned him when that well-known form,
Half-spectre still, yet momently more warm
With waking life, dissolves with shrill despair
And looks of anguish on the nether air.
Rose as she sank a universal knell,
And clapped in thunder the grim gates of Hell
Alice, too, had been blinded by her quest. She accepted that now. Her sleepless nights, her painstaking research, had been devoted to reaching her goal, not returning from it. No price had seemed too high to pay, then. In that mindset, she might perhaps have overlooked some reference to the moment of transition. Now, at the moment of truth, there was only the truth to be found.
Alice trusted Lord Yama to be fair with his bargains. She did not believe that Peter’s hand would suddenly turn to dust in her grip and flake away as soon as their eyes met, whether on the final step or after. But crossing from one realm to another was such a re-ordering of reality that she expected, at the least, a dark mirror of the passage they had undertaken to reach Hell in the first place. Darkness where there had been light, expansion where there had been pressure, the brief dizzy terror of missing your footing and falling forward into reality?
At least this time they had each other’s hands for support.
Together they stepped forward, bracing themselves for fire or thunder or tumult as their feet touched the ground -
But it was only a step like any other, just stepping into grass. Coming back to life was simply living.
A delighted giggle burst out of Alice’s throat without her knowledge. Life!
Peter turned to look at her. “Are you all right?”
She leaned her head against his arm, shoulders shaking, and laughed and laughed until he joined in, too.
The sky was dark and the outdoor air verged on frosty. It had been early October when they departed; when were they now? At some point Alice had lost track of days, and Peter of course had been temporarily removed from circulation. What day was it? What time was it? Darkness alone provided no answers, since at Cambridge’s latitude the sun might set before 4pm. Still, the field and its environs were largely empty, with only a few distant passersby too engrossed in their own purposes to have noticed the emergence of two sojourners, and as such it was likely that the hour was at least eight o’clock, perhaps later. Her wristwatch had survived its dunking, but its memory could no longer be trusted. Would Yama’s sense of poetry have led him to place them upon the stroke of midnight? She couldn’t hear any chimes. Even without the sound to guide them, of course, if they walked far enough across the campus they would be bound to encounter a clock tower, but…
“I don’t suppose you can tell time by the stars?” she asked Peter at last, once the laughter had faded.
He looked up, letting the cool clear light wash over his face. Alice wanted to trace it with her fingers. “We could follow the river down to Queens College and use the moondial,” he suggested. “It’s bright enough.”
“An excuse for you to show off your math skills,” she teased. The moondial had been contructed on one of the exterior walls in 1642 and its collection of lines, curves, and zodiac symbols had fascinated passersby ever since. The gnomon was designed to be used for both the sun and the moon, but reading the moondial notoriously required a table and multiple calculations to interpret.
“The tourist pamphlet requires revising, anyway,” said Peter. “Shephard mistook ‘longitudo dierum’ for ‘astronomical longitude’. Still, I wonder what he would make of the geometry of the underworld. The Tilings and patterns of Hell.”
Alice looked in the direction of the river. After her travels, the idea of following that water back into the catacombs of the Cambridge campus was less than appealing. “I have a novel suggestion. We could walk down Chesterton until we find someone and then ask them for the time.”
“Very insightful,” Peter approved. “If I could venture an addendum? We could stop in the Portland Arms for a bite to eat. I’m starving. And if they’re closed, then that will tell us just how late the hour is.”
Alice was grateful that he hadn’t suggested the Pick, where the odds were higher that someone might recognise them. She wasn’t quite ready to explain herself to her fellows. Food - real, Earthly food, prepared by the hands of other humans with the hopes of nurturing and sustaining life - sounded divine. There was only one difficulty. “I’m not carrying any money.”
Peter smiled. “What, with all your preparations, you didn’t take your pocketbook to Hell?”
“Only enough to pay the ferryman, if I had to,” Alice said. “For luck.”
Sojourners’ reports generally agreed that the price for the passage of the dead applied only to the dead, and even then, it was inconsistent. Perhaps it made things easier for some, but as she had seen, it was the completed spiritual journey that summoned the ship across the Lethe, not the promise of payment. Still, she hadn’t been certain of that before she began, and thus Alice had brought a few coins.
It would not have been impossible to source a traditional Greek obolus, Cambridge having no shortage of numismatists, but it was plainly unecessary. The historical record was clear that coinage for the dead appeared in multiple cultures, sharing in common the fact that it was a single low-denomination coin for every dead soul, rich or poor. Presenting a treasured antique would go quite against the spirit of the thing. And after all, hadn’t the British ha’penny once been abbreviated ‘ob’?
Half pennies having just been demonetised a few years prior, Alice had chosen to cast her net a bit more widely. She had brought with her one half-p found clasped in the embrace of a paperclip at the bottom of an office drawer, one standard penny, one American cent that had hitched a ride across the Atlantic in her purse by mistake and she’d never quite gotten around to disposing of, and a 2p coin because some bit of her linguist’s heart was inordinately fond of the word “tuppence”. (Helen Murray had kindly informed her that the coin she held was technically not the same sort of tuppence of her Mary Poppins childhood memories, because that referred to a coin from an entirely different currency system that the British had used up until the seventies. For a country so steeped in custom and tradition and the strength of sterling, they certainly seemed to have difficulty keeping their coinage stable. Alice kept her 2p for luck and a reminder of the absurdity of it all.)
A few pennies would scarcely buy a sweet to suck on, in the material world.
Peter fished about in his pockets - how exactly had his clothing followed him to oblivion and back again, unstained and whole? Best not to think too hard about it, lest the Emperor’s clothes unravel - and came up with two pound coins. “Well,” he said, satisfied. “Shall we?”
They both had jackets, but the British night was colder than a day in Hell. Alice placed her hand on Peter’s arm (whole, solid, miraculous). “May I?”
“Ah?” said Peter, and then, “Oh,” and he put his arm around her.
It was not, perhaps, the most efficient way to walk. Despite all their adventures, they were still inexperienced in matching their strides to each other. But it was warm. They moved together into the town, like any other young couple.
They didn’t make it quite as far as the pub, for Peter paused, seemingly star-struck, in front of the first chip shop that they came across, and Alice, laughing, tugged him through the door. Two pounds was enough for one meal of fish and chips and peas to share, plus drinks. One meal split between the two of them seemed like the best option, after so long subsisting on Lembas Bread and the scraps of Hell. Just the tang of vinegar in the air was enough to make her knees turn to jelly. Properly cooked fish, white and flaky flesh with crispy batter and salt and sauces? An orgasm upon the tongue. More than half a serving might have caused her stomach to lock up out of sheer sensory overload.
(She wondered whether this was a sensible food for Peter to eat, but considering the lengths he’d gone to in order to hide his condition from unwanted sympathy, she was hardly going to blunder around making foolish suggestions over something he understood more than she did. Besides, while she’d been lost and slowly starving in the desert, he’d been dead, so his digestive system was perhaps not as strained.)
The food made her feel almost tipsy, flushed and warm and relaxed as her pulse fluttered through her veins - or perhaps some of that was just Peter looking back at her, his brown eyes alight behind his glasses.
They had so much still to say to each other. She hadn’t even really begun to explain her adventures in his absence. They had a universe of futures ahead of them. They had no idea what was ahead of them.
Peter had said, before, that they would never graduate now that Grimes was gone for good. Which was foolish, really. He still had the Cooke, if nothing else. Either of them could find new advisors, choose a new direction, even a new discipline, and never speak of Grimes or the underworld again. They only had to choose it.
But should they? After everything they’d done, everything they’d learned, would it be a waste to let that knowledge be forgotten? Or would it be a betrayal of their own growth to benefit from it?
Academia was a search for the truth - to find it, to define it, and occasionally to create it out of whole cloth, if the cloth in question was woven from threads of chaos and paradox and human nerve fiber. Analytic magick was a study of the very roots of reality, but even those roots could be cracked open and split apart with the right tools, the right questions.
Truth mattered. Knowledge mattered. But in academia, truth itself was not enough. It had to be proven, supported, peer reviewed. Until then, it did not formally exist.
What Jacob Grimes had done to Alice’s arm was a legitimate magickal breakthrough. Perpetual human enchantment. He had proven a possibility believed to be against every rule of magic. (Though, as Alice well knew, every rule had exceptions.) It was information with enormous repercussions, held now only by herself and Peter, who had seen the work before the Lethe defeated it. If the information were known to scholars it could be a building block for advancements Alice had not yet imagined. Lives could be saved. And yet, the single incident by itself was entirely unpublishable. Grimes had been in the process of building a framework within which to present his result - at least she believed that he had - but with his death, all of that was lost.
Alice and Peter had gained invaluable knowledge about Hell, particularly the issue of how spells did and did not work within that environment and the need to mix the blood of the living with the living-dead energy of the chalk. However, they had not carried out precise experiments. They had not measured the rate of absorption, tested variations in recipe, even noted the amounts that they worked with. If anyone had possessed detailed notes on the mastery of magick in Hell, it was the Kripkes, but they were lost forever.
They knew so much, and yet they had no records, no proof of any of it. What, then, could they say? “It happened, therefore it is true” led immediately to “Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur” - what was asserted gratuitously should be denied gratuitously.
It wasn’t a matter of Russell’s unfalsifiable teapot. The difficulty with replication was the immense and yet entirely personal cost for anyone to cross the boundary into Hell in order to check their results. No scientific journal would sacrifice a researcher so frivolously. The professional ranks, after all, were valued rather more highly than graduate students.
Peter and Alice had, at best, a case report. Purely anecdotal and therefore at the very bottom of the hierarchy of scientific evidence, critically valuable only as a source to generate hypotheses that might be tested by some more rigorous practicioner. Respectable journals would hesitate for fear of adverse effects on their impact factor.
It might be their duty, as seekers of truth, to provide such a report, but it would not serve as even a dissertation subject. Their degrees and their careers would not see any benefit, not unless it attracted the attention of some new advisor who wished to make use of them.
If they took the Kripkes’ approach, if they sold their story to the general public through the papers or Channel 4 or a Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Foot Across the Sands of Hell, it was more likely than not to become a sensation. They could have fame and fortune and international acclaim in exchange for every shred of their academic credibility. They would likely complete their degrees - certain institutions might consider it a boost to their own image to have such an association - but positions would not be on offer. After all, they would have aptly demonstrated that they did not need them. They would have chosen industry after all, the industry of public opinion.
To accomplish your goals, you first had to define them. What did Alice want? A life with Peter, of course, but what else?
She had told Jacob Grimes, once, that she wanted his position and his success, and he had dismissed those as simply by-products of her true, still unnamed desire. For all his faults, he had not been entirely wrong. She wanted, but even as a linguist it was hard to put words to everything that she wanted. Was it academic respect? After seeing the souls in Hell posturing over their pedigrees, respect alone felt distasteful. Alice couldn’t say that she rejected it entirely, but it couldn’t be an end goal. Was it the security, the independence to pursue research in any direction that called her, needing no one’s approval but her own? The commercial route might prove the winner there - even tenured professors sought extra funding. Nabokov (she thought with a pang of Gradus) could not have written Pale Fire without the financial success of Lolita to give him artistic freedom. But even if he didn’t have to beg for advances and chase the highest sales figures, surely he would have been dismayed if no one had read the result. Did research, did creation, have any meaning if it wasn’t shared?
The happiest moments she had felt, not only at Cambridge but in her life, had been in the companionship of fellow minds. Not people who thought the same things that she did, for what good was that? But people who thought. The exchange of ideas, thesis and antithesis, devil’s advocate and improv comedian… It wasn’t just the possibilities that spiraled outward, it was the passion that each speaker brought with their statements and questions. Life! To learn, to change, to explore, to grasp - to share, to laugh.
Alice needed to step outside of the walls of Cambridge. She’d let them define her for too long. But that didn’t mean she needed to reject everything, either. She wanted a life with Peter. She wanted to apologise to Belinda for startling her in the Viewing Pavilion; to sit down with her and tell her the truth. It would be easier to get the words out the second time around, wouldn’t it? Especially with her hand in the comforting fur of Dame Antonia. (Should she acquire and support a cat of her own? Would that be disloyal to Archimedes and the nameless wildcat, to whom she owed so much, or a logically transitive gratitude, a penance for Italy?) She wanted to attend Professor Murray’s conference. She wanted to write to Olivia Kincaid. She wanted to build a little shrine for Elspeth and explain to the innocent undergrads what it meant, the good and the bad. She wanted to talk and to listen. Information, she had heard from the personal computer enthusiasts, wanted to be free.
“You’re staring,” Peter observed. “Have I got brown sauce on my nose?”
“I keep thinking,” Alice said, and laughed.
“Good on you,” Peter said. “Keep doing that.”
He set his fork down, repast concluded. Alice was tempted to pick it up and press the tines against her lips. “Tomorrow,” she said. “We have a social obligation to let someone know that we’ve survived. I’m not eager to go back onto campus, but it seems insensitive to leave the explanation to a phone call. Someone might think it was a prank.”
Peter’s face went very still. “I’ve always found it easier to offer no explanation,” he said after a moment.
And, well. His journey was different than hers had been, after all. Just because he had been willing to let her in did not mean that he would suddenly pour out his secrets to all and sundry. They had changed, but they were still themselves. They would continue to change. That was life. “Explanation is too strong a word,” Alice agreed. “It’s too soon to tell people much of anything. We decide on that story together.” She was certainly not going to steal any credit that fairly belonged to Peter. “But I do have to tell them that I’m back. I have a corner office to preserve.” She leaned forward. “You don’t have to come with me for that. But I’d like to go somewhere with you - whenever the weekend turns out to be.” Neither of them was quite clear on the date yet. “Anywhere that isn’t Cambridge, anything you like. An old shop, a park, the Fens, a place you used to dig in the mud as a little boy… London, if you want. I want to see things with you.”
Peter relaxed, shifting into a familiar half-joking smile. “Well. It won’t be London or Venice, but we could take the train over to Ipswich.”
"Trains," Alice said with enthusiasm. “Perfect.”
“I don’t think that’s a word often used to describe British Rail.”
“That’s because most of you have never lived in America,” Alice said. “A network that brings people together is a beautiful thing. You can sit and talk and look out the window and go anywhere you like.”
“Anywhere that the Beeching Axe didn’t fall,” said Peter. “But I think you’ll like Ipswich. There’s some beautiful buildings there, a lot of artists, the port itself with the boats and all, and some gorgeous old pools.”
Alice was happy to look at anything Peter wanted to show her, whether it be Salisbury Cathedral or Sainsbury’s supermarket. All the world was filled with wonders.
Peter cleared his throat. “I…” Fastidiously, he folded up the paper that had wrapped the fish, preparing to throw it away. “I suppose we ought to be moving on.”
They couldn’t sit under the flickering lights of the chip shop forever. It would be a waste. They had to keep moving forward. They stood - and Alice reached out and laid her hand upon the sleeve of his jacket. “Peter,” she said. “Would you like to come back to my place for the night?”
His eyes went wide.
“Just to sleep,” Alice clarified. “We’re both tired, and - I’d rather not be without you.” There had been quite enough of that already.
He tugged at his collar. “Yes, of course, quite. I just wouldn’t want to pressure you into any-”
"Peter," she teased. “We’ve shared blankets before. I don’t think being in the same apartment is going to ruin my virtue any further.” She paused. “And I hope you’ll forgive the mess. I wasn’t exactly preparing for company when I left.”
“I shudder to think what my flat must look like at this point,” he said. “Circulars all across the floor, likely something rotting in the sink.”
“So you’ll come, then?”
His voice softened. “Yes. If you’ll have me.”
She peered up through her lashes at him, smiling almost shyly. “I thought we’d settled that part already.”
“Well, you know.” He held open the door for Alice to step through. “Some axioms are worth restating.”