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“Anyhow, since Hecate could not have predicted the innovations of Lembas Bread or Perpetual Flasks, we know we can survive for far longer than she supposed,” said Alice. “You shouldn’t take seriously anyone who’s expressed an opinion on food before the twentieth century.”
“No, you’re right.” Peter nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve never thought about texts like this before.”
“What, in terms of close reading?”
“I just mean—I don’t know, taking into account when they were written, and the author’s social context, and such.”
“Historicization, Murdoch. That’s what we call it. What, do you just take everything you read at face value?”
“I mean, if the math checks out.”
“Unbelievable,” said Alice. “This is why everyone hates logicians.”
The recently deceased soul was disoriented by his tearing from life. Hell had to resemble the familiar, otherwise he could never move on.
This theory, though not universally accepted, did explain why Dante’s Hell involved all the poets and artists and politicians he was personally familiar with over his lifetime. And why paintings of the Buddhist hells displayed all the ritual trappings of Chinese palaces: gardens and pools and harems of concubines. And why both Greek and Mesopotamian visions of the afterlife involved neat, orderly systems of justices, gatekeepers, and accountants armed with records and scales, processing lines of the dead the same way passport offices process citizens. At the end of the day, human beings preferred the predictable order of their known bureaucracies. One’s sins took on meaning in the context of their moral universe, comprised of their loved ones, their idols, their rivals, their victims. Dante saw philosophers and politicians. Aeneas saw ghosts of warriors past. One was hurt most by what one knew. If Alice had to guess, Professor Grimes’s moral universe—the full accounting of things that delighted him, the things that brought him pain, and the people by whom he could do wrong—did not stretch beyond the Cambridge station.
So perhaps they should have expected, then, for Hell to take on a most familiar landscape: Gothic towers, courtyard walls, and winding between them, a single paved path—just wide enough for pedestrians and cyclists, not wide enough for cars. You always knew, stepping into such places, what they were for. You knew precisely where you were from the uniformity of design; the same shades of brick and stone across buildings. You knew from the lack of wide streets and shop signs; from the quiet absence of children. You knew from the arched gates that marked the boundary. Fairy gates, signaling departure. The mundane world ended here. These were not places of leisure or business. These were places to be still, to think, and to step out of time.
“Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”
fuck it, nothing matters, everything’s gone to shit, so let’s go to Hell
Reasons and Persons argues for a reductionist account of personal identity: that is to say, no special essence of personhood that remains stable across one’s lifetime. Using a number of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain divisions, and tele-transportation, Parfit argued that the qualities which we think define essential personhood—psychological connectedness, for instance—do not actually ground any deeper fact. We might share the same cells, bodily continuity, and memories as previous iterations of ourselves. But that is all. There is no further fact of the matter—no essential us hovering like a specter. We bear the same relationship to the version of ourselves from ten years ago as we might to a sibling.
“And I keep fantasizing he might actually look around and tell me good job.”
“You know,” said Peter, “I do think he would.”
“He’s stamped on our minds,” said Alice.
“Oh, yes.” Peter cast her a sad sideways smile. “Can’t get him out.”
They both stared down at the notebook.
Shared trauma
Oh, why was this so hard? Alice wondered desperately. Why couldn’t she ever tell Peter what she thought? Always they had been bodies hurtling just out of one another’s orbit, when all it would have ever taken was an honest word. But that was precisely what magicians lacked; there were no honest words, only puns and illusions and constructions of reality so convoluted that you couldn’t keep track anymore of what was real and what wasn’t. Everyone was always trying so hard to pretend they were somebody else.
If only they had caught one another, looked at each other, forced their ways across the gap.
But it was too late now, too late for everything.
The Kripkes paid her no heed. Several moments later the skittering ceased, and a victorious howl echoed over the sands. Alice paused, horribly compelled to turn around. She saw them stalking in a straight line across the sand. She could not see their faces clearly from where she stood: only their frames, two large figures and a smaller one. Like Elspeth they dressed head to toe in armor, but where hers was of chain-link debris, theirs was of white bone. Sharp fangs arced past their jaws. Something else’s ribs caged their torsos. Bulbous round things hung at all their waists, bobbing at they moved. Pouches for blood, Elspeth had told her. They made them with bladders.
The horror of human hunting las vegas mgicians
My arm, Cerberus—rip it off!”
“My head—”
“My juicy guts!”
Was this the end point of existence? Alice could have wept with the ridiculousness of it. Now she understood Hell in full. She saw its intricate design; could understand that it was no random imitation of living rituals but a cruel mirror; that all its karmic reflection just was to show life’s worthlessness to begin with. The point was not rehabilitation but a stripping down to form, to show that humans were blindly writhing worms, rooting about to feel anything at all. Oh, God, she thought frantically, why did you create us, why foul the universe with our failing, why not rest after the fourth day, and be content with the silent stars …
It took a bit of experimenting but she did manage by alternating the dull and sharp sides to cut the chalk into pieces that wouldn’t choke her. When it seemed sufficiently pulverized, she gathered it into a neat little pile in her palm. Then she leaned over and huffed.
The effect was immediate. She felt like she’d stuffed wasabi up her nostrils. Sharp stabs of pain spread through her nose into her skull. Tears welled at her eyes. She reeled back, clutching her temples, just as spots of color exploded in her mind. A cacophony of memories, memories she didn’t even know she had—memories she still couldn’t place, entirely foreign except for their intensity. A woman laughing. A deer startling. A giant’s stride. A midnight streak into the lake, and the plunging cold. All the axioms in the world swirling and dancing above her. Here was the hidden world revealed and written clear; no shadows, no veils. She stretched her arms above her head in some primal bearlike stance, and in that moment Alice felt capable of devouring the universe.
“Jesus.” An icy burn spread through her limbs. I’m burning, she thought; I’m on a pyre, and it feels delicious. “Jesus Christ.”
Gradus howled with laughter. “I told you.”
She took a step and reeled. Each movement sent the universe spinning sideways on its axis, sent ripples across Hell. She was afraid to breathe, for she did not want to cause the apocalypse.
The bone-thing yipped and sprang.
Alice smashed her blade against its side. It fell, and before it could get up Alice slammed the knife down again and again until its ribs cracked open and its limbs splayed at its sides.
Alice rose. “Anyone else?”
They all sprang at once.
But they were so slow! Alice could not believe how easy this was. Snorting chalk had done something to her vision, had altered her perception of time and space. Her sight broadened and sharpened both at once. She could see every little bit of them, all the chalk that animated their joints, every stroke of the Kripkes’ meticulous handwriting. And she knew precisely where to hit them, so that the rest would fall apart. She knew when they would spring, where they were aiming, and where they would be. She knew to get there first.
The Kripkes’ armor was flawless, tailored to indecipherable purpose. They are aliens now, thought Alice. They did not move like humans; they did not think like humans. They had evolved and adapted to their terrain, become the apex predators the underworld lacked.
You,” Alice panted, “are a very bad parent.”
She wondered why Magnolia did not attack. Then it occurred to her she might use Theophrastus as a hostage. The child stood between them—perhaps Magnolia was afraid Alice would hurt the child. Alice was pondering how best to make this threat when Magnolia grasped for her own left shoulder and popped the arm clean off.
Alice gawped.
Magnolia whipped her skeletal arm at Alice’s face. Cold bone smacked Alice across the cheek and jaw, rattling her teeth. Magnolia struck again, and this time the force of it sent Alice sprawling. Theophrastus wriggled free, shrieking and clapping.
All timer. Very funny
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