Katabasis

Alice reflects on how she scorned the feminist movement, refusing to be an ally to female classmates and wondering why women spent time proving they weren’t inferior rather than simply not being inferior. She was shocked at the treatment she received after entering Cambridge but was convinced she could find the line between “femininity and subjugation” (303).

Alice fantasized about a romantic relationship with Grimes and knew he found her attractive. One day, when Alice was working late in the office at Grimes’s request, Grimes entered with the new office assistant, a woman named Charlotte. They began having sex even though Grimes knew Alice was there. When Grimes made eye contact with her, she left. Alice thinks about the memory so much that she begins to blame herself for being there.

After a prize dinner, Grimes and Alice were both “drunk on the attention they’d received all evening” (308), and Grimes insisted they go to his office to lesson plan. Grimes grabbed her face, and rather than feeling romantic, Alice felt trapped. She contemplated saying yes to make him happy with her but was overwhelmed with disgust. She said she did not want to proceed, and over Grimes’s shoulder, she saw Peter before he rushed away. She screamed “no” at Grimes and left (311). After that, he withdrew his support. Everyone could tell he was mad at her. Peter rose in Grimes’s estimation again.

Her cohort sensed that something had happened between Alice and Grimes and had different reactions. Rumors spread about Alice, but Peter’s distance hurt the most. Alice wanted to tell him the truth, but didn’t want his pity. Her peer, Belinda, asked Alice outright if she was intimate with Grimes, and Alice couldn’t answer.

Alice tried to seduce Grimes to get back into his good graces but failed. She went to another professor, Helen Murray, to explain what had happened. Helen said Alice should have known better; she blamed Alice for taking her liberties for granted until she wanted to “take refuge in feminism when it suit[ed her]” (319). Helen gave Alice options: Change advisors; go to the police; file a complaint; report Grimes to the university. Alice didn’t want any of those things; she wanted to be treated as a student rather than a tool. Helen told her to forget about it and finish the program.

After that, Alice began having suicidal ideations. She was most disturbed by her reduction to “a thing” (323). She perceives this as a cliche. She ultimately didn’t want to die by suicide because she doesn’t want people to “think she had failed” (323). She began physically ailing. When Grimes died, she was elated at finding a “way out” (324) in her plan to retrieve him.

Peter listens to Alice’s story without questioning her. Peter asks what her plan was to release Grimes from Hell. Alice tells the story of an ancient magician called Erichtho, who was mentioned briefly in Inferno but is often elided in myths. She brought an enemy corpse’s soul back from the underworld into their remains on a battlefield to tell a prophecy. Alice wanted to do the same thing to Grimes: To bond his hollow soul to his corpse, to get power over him, and to make him “beg for release” (329). Peter listens and asks a few clarifying questions without judging. Alice confesses that she liked the plan because it was what Grimes would do. Peter holds her hand, and she feels safe for the first time.

Still trapped, Alice and Peter have a philosophical conversation about whether they have been actively seeking death or are caught up in bad circumstances. They grow weak and thirsty. Peter confesses that he was going to save Grimes with the spell Alice found, but was going to try to convince her to use it on him. He says he is the one who killed Grimes.

Peter’s privilege growing up taught him to expect success and made him careless. When he was a child, a tutor identified his intelligence, but he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and was chronically ill. As a result, he didn’t interact with peers until he passed his A-levels, got on effective medication, and went to Oxford. He was already good at math, but also fell in love with magick. He never told anyone what caused the long absences he spent in the hospital with flare-ups, and they decided he was an “absent, erratic genius” (342). When Peter heard about the challenges Grimes put his students through, he wanted to prove he could thrive in that environment.

He immediately liked Cambridge, and he immediately liked Alice. Halfway through their first year, his worst Crohn’s flare-up since his childhood started. His old medicine stopped working, he was constantly in the hospital, and he became very ill. Even though people grew frustrated with his absence, he didn’t tell the truth to his friends. To keep from failing, he had to tell Grimes, who was not sympathetic. Grimes didn’t seem to understand invisible illness and told Peter not to feel sorry for himself.

The flare-up interfered with his completion of an important, innovative pentagram. He decided to stop getting help and deteriorated quickly, but someone found him and called an ambulance before he died. He underwent an emergency colectomy. He was out of school for six weeks, and when he returned, Grimes had published Peter’s work under his own name. Grimes convinced Peter that it was his fault for leaving for six weeks without checking in. 

Grimes forced Peter to proof the pentagrams of his own stolen work for Grimes to use, so Peter did so quickly and sloppily. The next day, he learned of Grimes’s death. A while later, he saw the equations Alice left on the chalkboard and realized she wanted to go to Hell. He decided to go with her.

Alice believes Peter but is shocked that Grimes would steal work. Peter wants her to stop valorizing Grimes. They realize they’ve been pitted against each other for years. The Escher trap drains their energy quickly. Peter starts working on new mathematical theorems. Alice tries to convince him that death will be a relief, until she falls unconscious.

When she wakes, Peter’s figured out how to escape. He’s created an equation for the Hangman’s Paradox, a recursive paradox about the impossibility of an event happening on an unexpected day within a set quantity of days. He writes it for only one person, believing it won’t work on him, but Alice declares they leave together or not at all. She comes close to admitting she has feelings for Peter, but doesn’t. He closes the pentagram, expelling her from the trap and closing it behind her.

A section titled “On Paradoxes” explains that paradoxes trouble people not because they are true, but because they make people question their ingrained beliefs.

Alice thinks back to her first meeting with Grimes. He said her application was the strongest he had ever read and urged her not to let anyone make her feel like she didn’t belong at Cambridge. She learned that Grimes also rose into academia from unlikely circumstances. He joined the army in World War II and supplied the army with magical goods. As science and technology boomed after the war, magicians’ research into paradoxes flourished, and Grimes cemented his place in the field. Mere association with Grimes opened doors for all his students. Alice still sees him as the first person to believe in her.

Alice tries and fails to free Peter, but flees when she hears the Kripkes. She sees them descend into the trap and hears Peter scream. She cries until she hears Peter stop screaming, then leaves. She passes into Cruelty and sees Shades trapped in bone cages they could easily escape from if they wished. She can’t stop thinking about Peter. The desert turns into deadlands as she moves into Tyranny. She feels more malice from the Shades than in any previous Court.

When she stops for food, she tries to think up reasons to stay alive, now that she knows what death looks like. While she doesn’t care about rescuing Grimes anymore, she wants to honor Peter’s sacrifice, so she continues on with her plan.

A day later, she arrives at a tower, similar to a campus clock tower but made from stacked bodies. The Erinyes sit atop the tower. They peer into her soul, and she tries to solve the paradox of how she ended up there. When she admits she was just trying her best, they let her pass into the final Court.

Across the border, she is alone. Paper begins to fall like snow. On them are pieces of a dissertation’s table of contents. She realizes they have various authors, all trying to justify their sins. She stops for the night, and Archimedes finds her. He has been in a fight with the bone-things. Alice is comforted by him. They fall asleep.

When Alice wakes, a Shade is watching her. Archimedes is gone again. The Shade knows she’s alive and a magician, and wants to talk. She admits her quest to the Shade, who says he’ll show her to the gates of Dis. In return, he wants information on the world of the living. He introduces himself as John Gradus. He doesn’t care about politics and history, but wants to know what the London skyline looks like or what music people listen to. His form is too intangible for Alice to tell what he looks like or where he is from. She tests him, thinking he might be Grimes, but decides he cares too much about material things.

Gradus tells her about the falling dissertations and the theory that people don’t get out until they understand their crimes. He says the only thing people know is that they have to “tell the truth to get out” (402), which he has never seen anyone do. Alice accidentally admits she used to have a companion. Gradus seems to find it exciting that she’s being pursued by the Kripkes, but he is frustrated when she implies she’s following a script. 

Several hours later, they arrive at Dis, which Alice has read about in many stories. Alice thinks the city looks beautiful and vicious. Gradus says the Shades there won’t hurt her, but when she asks him what he did to end up in the final Court, he says if she wants to survive, she can never ask that question.