From where I stood, I watched the angel. Gently, it lifted its long thin arms and stretched its immense wings. Going to the door of its cell, I unlatched a heavily calcified hook, and in a burst of force that knocked me upon the floor, the angel pushed open the door to its cell and stepped free. I discerned the pleasure the creature took in its liberty. The imprisoned angels roared from their cells, jealous of their brother’s victory, vicious and hungry creatures demanding freedom.
In my fascination with the angels themselves, I had failed to notice the effect the music had upon my brothers. Suddenly, before I could perceive that a spell had been cast upon his mind by this demonic production, Brother Francis rushed to the angelic choir. In what appeared to be a state of insanity, Brother Francis knelt before the creatures in supplication. The angel dropped the lyre, instantly halting the chorus of sublime music, and touched Brother Francis, casting a light so thick over the bewildered man that he appeared to have been dipped in bronze. Gasping, Francis fell to the ground, covering his eyes as the intense light burned his flesh. To my horror, I watched as his garments dissolved from his body and his flesh melted away, leaving charred muscle and bone. Brother Francis, who minutes before had clutched my arm, beseeching me to return to the boat, had died of the angel’s poisoned light.16
XII
The minutes after Brother Francis’ death are all confusion. I recall the sound of the angels hissing from their cells. I remember Francis’ horrid corpse, blackened and misshapen before me. But all else is lost in darkness. Somehow the angel’s lyre, the very treasure that had brought me to the pit, was within my grasp. With all haste, I collected the treasure from the fallen creature, cradling the object in my charred hands and placing it in my satchel, safe from harm.
I found myself sitting at the prow of the wooden boat, my robes ripped and tattered. My entire being pained me. The flesh peeled from my arms, curling away in bloody, blackened sheets. Clumps of hair from my beard had burned to the roots. It was then I realized that I, like Brother Francis, had fallen under the horrid light of the angel.
As had the other brothers. Two stood together in the boat, pushing desperately against the current with the pole, their robes singed, their skin badly burned. The remaining member of our party lay dead at my feet, his hands pressed over his face, as if he had died of terror. As the boat came to the opposite bank of the river, we blessed our martyred brother and disembarked, leaving the boat to spin down the river.
XIII
To our dismay, the murderous angel stood at the riverbank awaiting our arrival. Its beautiful face was serene, as if it had just woken from a restful slumber. Upon seeing the creature, my brothers fell to the earth in prayer and supplication, undone by terror, for the angel was formed of gold. Their fear was justified. The angel turned its poisonous light upon them, killing them just as it had killed Francis. I fell to my knees, praying for their salvation, knowing they had died in worthy service. Looking about me, I saw that there was no hope of assistance. The shepherd had abandoned his post, deserting us in the gorge, leaving only his woven satchel and the ladder, a betrayal I felt bitterly. We had required his assistance.
The angel examined me, its expression one of vapidity, as if it were little more than a medium of the wind. With a voice more lovely than any music, it spoke. Although I could not make out the language, somehow I understood its message clearly. The angel said: Our freedom has come at great cost. For this, your reward will be great in heaven and earth.
The sacrilege of the angel’s words affected me more than I would have imagined. I could not fathom that such a fiend would dare promise a heavenly reward. In a terrible burst of fury, I lurched at the angel, wrestling it to the ground. The celestial creature was taken off guard by my anger, lending me a superiority I used to my advantage. Despite its brilliance, it was a physical being composed of substance not unlike my own, and in an instant I tore at its mighty wings, grasping for the naked, delicate flesh where the appendages met the creature’s back.
Clutching the warm bone at the base of the wings, I threw the luminous creature to the cold, hard rock. Passion overwhelmed me, for I do not recall the exact measures I took to achieve my ends. I know only that in my struggle to keep hold of the creature and my desperation to escape the pit, the Lord blessed me with an unnatural strength against the beast. Wrenching the wings with a ferocity I could scarce believe came from my own aged hands, I felled the creature. I felt a crack under my hands, as if I had broken the thin glass of an ampoule. A sudden exhalation of air escaped the angel’s body, a soft sigh that left the creature helpless at my feet.
I assessed the broken body before me. I had torn a wing from its mooring, ripping the pink flesh so that the pure white feathers folded at an asymmetric angle against the body. The angel writhed in agony, and a pale blue fluid poured from the wounds I had opened on its back. A disquieting sound emanated from its chest, as if the humors, once released from their internal vessels, had mixed in a disastrous alchemy. I soon understood that the wretched creature was choking to death, and that its horrid suffocating had resulted from the injury to its wing.17 It is thus that the breath dies. The violence of my actions against a celestial creature tormented me beyond all fathoming, and at last I fell to my knees and begged the Lord’s mercy and forgiveness, for I had laid waste to one of heaven’s most sublime creations.
It was then that I heard a faint cry—the shepherd, crouching against the rocks, called my name. Only after he had made numerous gestures for me to follow him did I understand that he meant to help me up the ladder. Creeping as quickly as my deformed body would allow, I abandoned myself to the shepherd, who, by the grace of God, was strong and able-bodied. He lifted me onto his trembling back and carried me from the pit.18
I closed the pages of Clematis’s account of confusion. I could not fully assess my conflicting feelings upon finishing Dr. Raphael’s translation of the Venerable Clematis’s account of the First Angelological Expedition. My hands trembled with excitement, or fear, or anticipation—I could not identify which emotion took control of me. And yet I knew one thing for certain: The Venerable Clematis had overwhelmed me with the story of his journey. I was both reverent at the audacity of his mission and terrified by the horror of his encounter with the Watchers. That a man had gazed upon these heavenly creatures, that he had touched their luminous flesh and had heard their celestial music was a truth I could not fathom.
Perhaps the oxygen in our school’s quarters below the earth was too thin, because soon after setting the pamphlet aside I began to feel short of breath. The air in the chamber felt heavier, thicker, and more oppressive than it had only minutes before. The small, airless rooms of brick and weeping limestone turned, for a moment, into the depths of the angels’ subterranean prison. I half expected to hear the crashing of the river or strains of the Watchers’ celestial music. Although I knew this to be a morbid fantasy, I could not remain one minute longer belowground. Rather than leave Dr. Raphael’s translation in its original place, I folded the pamphlet into the pocket of my skirt, carrying it with me out of the subterranean storage chambers and into the delicious cool air of the school.
Although it was well after midnight and I knew the school to be deserted, I could not risk being detected. Quickly, I unwedged the stone from its secure place in the archway over the door and, standing on tiptoes, slid the key into the narrow recess. After I had fitted the stone in its place, smoothing its edges to the flat of the wall, I stood back and assessed my work. The door looked like any one of the hundreds of such doors throughout the school. No one would suspect what lay hidden behind the stones.
I left the school and walked into a chill autumnal night, following my usual path from the school to my apartment on the rue Gassendi, hoping to find Gabriella in her bedroom so that I might question her. The apartment was utterly dark. After knocking at Gabriella’s bedroom door and getting no response, I retreated to the privacy of my bedroom, where I might read through the pages of Dr. Raphael
’s translation a second time. The text pulled me into it, and before I knew it, I had read Clematis’s account a third time and then a fourth. With each reading I found that the Venerable Clematis caused me more and more confusion. My unease began as an inchoate feeling, a subtle but persistent sense of discomfort that I could not identify, but as the night progressed, I was driven to a state of terrible anxiety. There was something in the manuscript that did not fit with my preconceptions of the First Angelological Expedition, an element to the tale that grated against the lessons I had absorbed. Although weary from the extraordinary strain of the day, I did not sleep. Instead I dissected each stage of the journey, looking for the precise reason for my anxiety. At last, after reliving Clematis’s ordeal many times over, I understood the thorn of my distress: In all my hours of study, in all the lectures I had attended, in my months of work in the Athenaeum, the Valkos had not once mentioned the role of the musical instrument Clematis had discovered in the cavern. It was the object of our expedition, a source of fear in the face of Nazi advancement, and yet Dr. Seraphina had refused to explain the precise nature of its significance.
Yet as Clematis’s account made clear, the lyre had been at the very heart of the first expedition. I recalled the tale of the Archangel Gabriel’s gift of the lyre to the Watchers, mentioned in one of the Valkos’ lectures, but even in that cursory account they had avoided mentioning the significance of the instrument. How they could keep such an important detail a secret filled me with wonder. My frustration only grew when I realized that Gabriella must have read Clematis’s account long before and therefore had been aware of the lyre’s importance. Yet she, like the Valkos, had remained silent on the subject. Why had I been excluded from their confidence? I began to review my time in Montparnasse with suspicion. Clematis had spoken of “an enchanting music that worked upon my senses until I thought I would go mad from bliss,” but what consequences did such celestial music pose? I could not help but wonder why those I had trusted most, those to whom I had given my complete loyalty, had deceived me. If they’d failed to tell me the truth about the lyre, surely there were other pieces of information they’d kept from me as well.
These were the doubts filling my mind when I heard the rumbling of a car below my bedroom window. Drawing aside the curtain, I was astonished to discover that the sky had brightened to a pale gray hue, tinting the street with a hazy presentiment of dawn. The night was gone, and I had not slept at all. But I was not the only one who had endured a sleepless night. Through the murky light, I saw Gabriella emerge from the car, a white Citroën Traction Avant. Although she wore the same dress she had worn in the Athenaeum, its satin still giving off all its liquid luster, Gabriella had changed dramatically in the hours that had passed. Her hair was in disarray, and her shoulders hung heavy with exhaustion. She had removed the black opera gloves, revealing her pale hands. Gabriella turned from the car to the apartment building, as if contemplating what she might do, and then, leaning against the car, buried her head in her arms and began to sob. The car’s driver, a man whose face I could not make out, emerged, and although I could not know his intentions, it appeared to me that he intended to further harm Gabriella.
Despite the anger I had felt toward her, my first instinct was to help my friend. I rushed from the apartment and down the successive flights of stairs, hoping that Gabriella would not leave before I made it to the street. When I arrived at the entrance of our building, however, I saw that I had been wrong. Rather than harm Gabriella, the man had embraced her, holding her in his arms as she cried. I stood at the doorway, watching in confusion. The man stroked her hair with tenderness, speaking to her in what appeared to me to be the manners of a lover, although at fifteen years of age I had never been touched in such a way. Pushing the door open slowly, so that my presence would not be detected, I listened to Gabriella. Through her sobs she repeated, “I can‘t, I can’t, I can’t,” her voice filled with despair. Although I had some idea of what inspired Gabriella’s remorse—perhaps her actions had at last registered upon her conscience—my astonishment was truly great at the words the man spoke. “But you must,” he said, holding her closer. “We have no choice but to continue.”
I recognized the voice. It was then that I saw, in the growing light of dawn, that the man comforting Gabriella was none other than Dr. Raphael Valko. After returning to the apartment, I sat in my room waiting to hear Gabriella’s footsteps upon the stairs. Her keys rattled as she unlocked the door and walked into the hallway. Rather than go to her room, as I would have expected, she went to the kitchen, where a clattering of pans told me that she was making herself coffee. Fighting an urge to join her, I waited in the shadows of my bedroom, listening, as if the noises she made would help me to understand what had happened in the street and what was the nature of her relationship with Dr. Raphael Valko.
Some hours later I knocked upon the door to Dr. Seraphina’s office. It was still early in the morning, not yet seven o’clock, although I knew she would be there working in her usual manner. She sat at her escritoire, her hair tied back in a severe bun, her pen poised above an open notebook as if I had caught her midsentence. Although my visits to her office had become routine—indeed, I had worked upon the vermilion settee each day for many weeks cataloging the Valkos’ papers—my fatigue and anxiety over Clematis’s journal must have been apparent. Dr. Seraphina knew that this was no ordinary visit. She came to the settee in an instant, sat across from me, and demanded to know what had brought me to her at such an early hour.
I placed Dr. Raphael’s translation between us. Startled, Seraphina picked up the pamphlet and turned the thin pages, taking in the words her husband had translated so long before. As she read, I saw—or imagined that I saw—a glimmer of youth and happiness return to her features, as if time peeled away as she turned each page.
Finally Dr. Seraphina said, “My husband discovered the Venerable Clematis’s notebook nearly twenty-five years ago. We were conducting research in Greece, in a small village at the base of the Rhodope mountain chain, a place Raphael had tracked down after coming across a letter from a monk named Deopus. The letter had been written from a mountain village of only a few thousand people, where Clematis died not long after the expedition, and hinted that Deopus had transcribed Clematis’s last account of his expedition. There was only the vaguest promise of discovery in the letter, and yet Raphael believed his intuition and undertook what many believed to be a quixotic mission to Greece. It was a momentous time in his career—in both of our careers, actually. The discovery had tremendous consequences for us, bringing recognition and invitations to speak at every major institute in Europe. The translation cemented his reputation and secured our place here in Paris. I remember how happy he was to come here, how much optimism we possessed.”
Dr. Seraphina stopped suddenly, as if she had said more than she wished. “I am very curious to know where you found this.”
“In the storage chambers below the school,” I replied, without a moment of hesitation. I would not have been able to lie to my teacher even if I wished to do so.
“Our subterranean storage areas are restricted,” Dr. Seraphina said. “The doors are locked. You must have a key to enter.”
“Gabriella showed me how to find the key,” I said. “I returned it to its hiding place in the keystone.”
“Gabriella?” Dr. Seraphina said, astonished. “But how is Gabriella aware of the hiding place?”
“I thought you might know. Or,” I said, measuring my words, anxious not to reveal more than would be prudent, “perhaps Dr. Raphael knows.”
“I certainly do not know, and I am sure my husband knows nothing about it either,” Dr. Seraphina said. “Tell me, Celestine, have you noticed anything strange about Gabriella’s behavior?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, leaning back into the cool silk of the settee, waiting with great anticipation for Dr. Seraphina to help me understand the puzzle Gabriella presented.
“Let me tell you what
I have observed,” Dr. Seraphina said, standing and walking to the window, where the pale morning light fell over her. “In the past months, Gabriella has become unrecognizable to me. She has fallen behind in her coursework. Her past two essays were written significantly below her abilities-although she is so advanced that only a teacher who knows her as well as I do would notice. She has been spending quite a lot of time outside the school, especially at night. She has changed her appearance to match that of the girls one sees in the quartier Pigalle. And, perhaps worst of all, she has begun to harm herself.”
Dr. Seraphina turned to me as if expecting me to disagree with her assessment. When I did not, she continued.
“Some weeks ago I watched her burn herself during my husband’s lecture. You know the episode I am referring to. It was the most unsettling experience of my career, and believe me, I have had many. Gabriella brought the flame to her bare wrist, impassive as her skin charred. She knew that I was watching her, and as if to defy me she stared at me, daring me to interrupt the class to save her from herself. There was more than desperation in her behavior, more than the usual childish desire for attention. She had lost control of her actions.”
I wanted to object, to tell Dr. Seraphina that she was wrong, that I had not noticed the disturbing characteristics she described. I wanted to tell her that Gabriella had burned herself through some accident, but I could not.
“Needless to say, Gabriella shocked me,” Dr. Seraphina said. “I considered confronting her immediately—the girl needed medical attention, after all—but thought better of it. Her behavior pointed to a number of maladies, all psychological, and if this were the case, I did not want to exacerbate the problem. However, I feared another cause, one that had nothing to do with Gabriella’s mental state but another force entirely.”
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