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.
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.