Alice and Peter trek across featureless Hell, where sand erases their footprints and the light never brightens. Beneath the Viewing Pavilion, they glimpse an inverted Cambridge and colleagues inspecting their disrupted pentagram; Alice even startles them. They recall that leaving Hell requires Lord Yama’s permission and press deeper.

Climbing a rise, they overlook the Fields of Asphodel, where newly dead Shades wander. Alice’s dowsing anchor—a wooden award plaque—proves imprecise. Peter explains that long-lived objects lose directional force in Hell and proposes a temporally specific offering. He burns cigarettes, Lembas Bread, and port; the smoke clears the area. Archimedes, the department cat, appears, then darts away.

In Archimedes’s wake come four Shades: undergraduates killed decades ago in a Cambridge lab fire under Grimes’s watch. A brief history surfaces of the disaster, the institutional cover story, and Grimes’s unscathed career. The Shades confirm Grimes passed through quickly, asked directions, and headed toward a distant white structure where countless souls queue for the next court.

When Peter invites them to join, the Shades recoil, confessing terror of Lethe and of reincarnating without magick or status. A tense exchange follows as Peter argues for life’s possibilities and they argue the odds of worse fates and the loss of intellect. With quiet reproach, the Shades fade, leaving Alice and Peter with a clear direction: follow the queues toward the next court to continue their pursuit of Grimes.