Worse, I had begun to believe that Gabriella examined my papers in my absence, reading my notebooks and checking my place in various books we’d been assigned, as if gauging my advancement and measuring it against her own. She was too cunning to leave evidence of her intrusions, and I had never found proof of her presence in my room, so I took extra care of what I left lying about my desk. I had no doubt that she would steal anything she found useful, even as she maintained her disposition of blithe apathy toward our shared work at the Athenaeum.
As the days went by, I began to lose myself in daily routine. Our tasks were tedious in the beginning, consisting of little more than reading notebooks and making reports of potentially useful information. Gabriella had been given work that suited her interest in the mythological and historical aspects of angelology, while I had been assigned the more mathematical task of categorizing caves and gorges, working to isolate the location of the lyre.
One afternoon in October, as Gabriella sat across from me, her black hair curling at her chin, I drew a notebook from one of the many boxes before us and examined it with care. It was an unusual notebook, short and rather thick, with a hard, scuffed binding. A leather strap-fastened by a golden clasp-bound the covers together. Examining the clasp more closely, I saw that it had been fashioned into the likeness of a golden angel no bigger in size than my smallest finger. It was long and narrow, with a stylized face containing two inlaid blue sapphire eyes, a flowing tunic, and a pair of sickle-shaped wings. I ran my fingers over the cold metal. Pressing the wings between my fingers, I felt resistance and then a satisfying pop as the mechanism gave. The notebook fell open, and I placed it flat upon my lap, straightening the pages under my fingers. I glanced at Gabriella to see if she had noticed my discovery, but she was engrossed in her reading and did not, to my relief, see the beautiful notebook in my hands.
I understood at once that this was one of the journals Seraphina had mentioned having kept in her later years of study, her observations consolidated and distilled into a succinct primer. Indeed, the journal contained much more than simple lecture notes. Flipping to the beginning of the book, I found the word ANGELOLOGY stamped into the first page in golden ink. The pages had been cluttered with consolidated notes, speculations, questions jotted down during lectures or in preparation for an exam. As I read, I detected Dr. Seraphina’s burgeoning love for antediluvian geology: Maps of Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Turkey had been drawn meticulously over the pages, as if she had traced the exact contours of each country’s border, sketching every mountain range and lake. The names of caves and mountain passes and gorges appeared in Greek, Latin, or Cyrillic, depending upon the alphabet native to the region. Tiny notations appeared in the margins, and it soon became apparent that these drawings had been created in preparation for an expedition. Dr. Seraphina had had her heart set on a second expedition since she was a student. I realize that by resuming Dr. Seraphina’s work with these maps, there was a chance that I myself could uncover the geographical mystery of Clematis’s expedition.
Reading further, I found Dr. Seraphina’s sketches scattered like treasures among the narrow columns of words. There were halos, trumpets, wings, harps, and lyres-the thirty-year-old doodlings of a dreamy student distracted during lectures. There were pages filled with drawings and quotations excerpted from early works of angelology. At the center of the notebook, I came across some pages of numerical squares, or magic squares as they were commonly known. The squares consisted of a series of numbers that equaled a constant sum in each row, diagonal, and column: a magic constant. Of course, I knew the history of magic squares-their presence in Persia, India, and China and their earliest advent in Europe in the engravings of Albrecht Dürer, an artist whose work I admired-but I had never had the opportunity to examine one.
Dr. Seraphina’s words were written across the page in faded red ink:
One of the most famous squares-and the most commonly used for our purposes-is the Sator-Rotas Square, the oldest example of which was discovered in Herculaneum, or Ercolano as it is called today, an Italian city partially destroyed by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in year 79 of the present era. The Sator-Rotas is a Latin palindrome, an acrostic that can be read in a number of ways. Traditionally, the square has been used in angelology to signify that a pattern is present. The square is not a code, as it is often mistaken to be, but a symbol to alert the angelologist that a larger schematic importance is at hand. In certain cases the square alerts us that something is hidden nearby-a missive or communication, perhaps. Magical squares have always played a part in religious ceremonies, and this square is no exception. The use of such squares is ancient, and our group does not take credit for their development in this regard. Indeed, the squares have been found in China, Arabia, India, and Europe and were even constructed by Benjamin Franklin in the United States in the eighteenth century.
The next page contained the Square of Mars, the numbers of which drew my eye into it with an almost magnetic pull.
Below the square Seraphina had written:
The Sigil of Michael. Sigil derives from the Latin sigilum, which means “seal,” or the Hebrew segulah meaning “word of spiritual effect.” In ceremony each sigil represents a spiritual being-either white or black-whose presence can be summoned by the angelologist, most prominently the higher orders of angels and demons. Summoning occurs through incantations, sigils, and a series of sympathetic interchanges between spirit and summoning agent. Nota bene: Incantatory summoning is an extraordinarily dangerous undertaking, often proving fatal to the medium, and must be used only as a last and final effort to bring forth angelic beings.
Turning to another page, I found numerous sketches of musical instruments-a lute and a lyre and a beautifully rendered harp, similar to the drawings that filled earlier pages of the notebook. Such instruments meant little to me. I could not imagine the sounds the instruments would make when played, nor did I know how to read musical notation. My strengths had always been numerical, and as a result I had studied mathematics and the sciences and knew next to nothing about music. Ethereal musicology-which Vladimir, the angelologist from Russia, knew so well-had thus far completely baffled me, the modes and scales clouding my mind.
Occupied with these thoughts for some time, I at last looked up from my reading. Gabriella had moved next to me on the settee, her chin resting in her hand, her eyes moving languidly over the pages of a bound text. She wore clothing I had not noticed before, a silk twill blouse and wide-legged trousers that appeared custom-tailored to her figure. The hint of a bandage could be seen under the diaphanous silk sleeve of her left arm, the only remaining evidence of the trauma I had witnessed after Dr. Raphael’s lecture weeks earlier. She seemed to be another person entirely from the frightened girl who had burned her arm.
Examining the book in her hands, I discerned the title The Book of Enoch stamped upon the spine. Much as I wanted to share my discovery with Gabriella, I knew better than to interrupt her reading, and so instead I refastened the golden clasp of the journal, pressing the delicate sickle-shaped wings together until they caught and clicked. Then, resolving to forge ahead in our cataloging duties, I braided my hair-long, unruly blond hair that I wished to cut into a severe bob, as Gabriella had done-and began the tedious task of sorting through the Valkos’ papers alone.