Twelve hours later, as we landed at the airfield outside of Paris, I saw that a Panhard et Levassor Dynamic waited in the distance, a luxurious vehicle with a polished grille and sweeping running boards, an object of wonder among the intense deprivations of the war. I could only guess how we had acquired such a treasure but suspected that it, like the Model 12 and the K-51, had been arranged through foreign patrons. Donations had kept us alive in the past years, and I was grateful to see the car, but how we had managed to keep such a treasure from the Germans was another question altogether, one I dared not ask.
I sat in silence as the car sped through the night. Despite hours of sleep on the plane, I was still exhausted from the trip down the gorge. I closed my eyes. Before I knew it, I had fallen into a deep sleep. The tires bumped over the battered roads, and the others whispered at the edge of my hearing, but all meaning of their words was lost. My dreams were a mélange of images of everything that I had seen in the cave. Dr. Seraphina and Vladimir and the other party members appeared before me; the deep and terrifying cavern opened below; and the legion of luminous angels, their brilliant pallor radiating about them, danced before me.
When I woke, I recognized the deserted cobblestone streets of Montparnasse, an area of resistance and utter poverty during the occupation. We drove past apartment buildings and darkened cafés, barren trees rising on each side, snow frosting their branches. The driver slowed and turned into the Cimetière du Montparnasse, stopping before a great iron gate. He gave a short honk from the horn, and the gate opened, rattling aside as the car crawled forward. The interior of the cemetery was still and frozen, coated in ice that glimmered in the headlights, and I felt for a moment that this one shimmering place had been spared the ugliness and depravity of the war. The driver cut the engine before a statue of an angel perched upon a stone pedestal-Le Cénie du Sommeil Éternel, The Spirit of Eternal Sleep, a bronze guardian gazing over the dead.
I stepped out of the car, still groggy with exhaustion. Although the night was clear, the stars glowing above in the sky, the air hung wet upon the tombstones, giving the faintest aura of fog. A man stepped from behind the statue, clearly assigned to meet the car, but all the same I started with fright. He wore the clothing of a priest. I had never seen the man before, not at any of our meetings or assemblies, and I had been trained to be suspicious of everyone. Only the month before, the Nephilim had tracked down and killed one of our senior council members, a professor of ethereal musicology named Dr. Michael, taking his entire collection of musicological writings. It was one instance of a senior-level scholar’s losing priceless information. The enemy waited for such chances.
Dr. Seraphina appeared to know the priest and followed him readily. Urging the group to come with him, the priest led us to a dilapidated stone structure in a far corner of the cemetery, one of the remaining buildings of a long-abandoned monastery. Years before, the building had served as the Valkos’ lecture hall. Now it remained empty. The priest unlocked a swollen wooden door and led us inside.
None of us, not even Dr. Seraphina, who had close ties to the most senior council members-indeed, Dr. Raphael Valko led the resistance in Paris-knew exactly where we would meet during the war. We had no regular schedule, and all messages were delivered by word of mouth or-like this one-in silence. Assemblies convened in impromptu locations-out-of-the-way cafés, small towns beyond Paris, abandoned churches. Even with these extreme precautions, I knew that we were most likely being monitored every moment.
The priest brought us into a hallway off the sanctuary, stopped before a door, and gave three sharp raps. The door opened, revealing a stone room lit by exposed bulbs-more precious supplies bought on the black market with dollars from America. The narrow windows were covered by heavy black cloth, to block out the light. The meeting appeared to be under way-members of the council sat at a round wooden table. As the priest ushered us inside, the council members stood, examining us with great interest. I was not allowed to attend the council meetings and had no method of gauging their usual proceedings, but clearly the council had been waiting for the expedition party to arrive.
Dr. Raphael Valko, acting chair of the council, sat at the head of the table. The last I had seen him had been as he drove away from my farmhouse in Alsace, leaving me in exile, an abandonment for which I could not forgive him, even though I was aware that it had been for the best. He had changed significantly since then. His hair had grayed about the temples, and his manner had taken on a new level of gravity. I would have taken him for a stranger if I’d met him in the street.
Greeting us tersely, Dr. Raphael gestured to a number of empty chairs and began what I knew would be the first of many rounds of questioning about the expedition. “You have much to report,” he said, folding his hands upon the table. “Begin as you wish.”
Dr. Seraphina gave a detailed description of the gorge: the steep vertical drop, the rock shelves that studded the lower regions of the cavern, and the distinct sound of the waterfall in the distance. She described the body of the angel, giving a list of precise measurements and outlining the characteristics she had recorded in her field notebook, mentioning with obvious pride the distinct genitalia. She reported that the photographs would reveal new truths about the physicality of the angels. The expedition had been a great success.
As the other members of the party spoke, each giving an elaborate account of the journey, I felt myself turn inward. I stared at my hands in the dim light. They were eaten raw from the cold and ice of the gorge and burned from the angel. I wondered at the sense of dislocation that had overtaken me. Had we been in the mountains only hours before? My fingers trembled so severely that I tucked them into the pockets of my thick wool coat, to hide them. In my mind the aquamarine eyes of the angel stared up at me, bright and polished as colored glass. I recalled how Seraphina had lifted the creature’s long arms and legs, weighing each limb as if it were a piece of wood. The creature seemed so vital, so filled with life that I could not help but believe that it had been living only minutes before we’d arrived. I realized that I had never quite believed that the body would be there, that despite all my study I had not expected to actually see it, to touch it, to puncture its skin with needles and draw fluid. Perhaps at the back of my mind I’d hoped that we were wrong. When the skin had been cut from the arm and the sample of flesh held into the light, I had been overcome with horror. I saw it again and again: the razor edging under the white skin, slicing, lifting. The glimmering of the membrane in the weak light. As the youngest among them, I felt that it was imperative I perform well, carrying more than my share. Always I had pushed myself to spend more hours working and studying than the others. The past years were spent proving myself worthy of the expedition-reading texts, attending lectures, equipping myself with information for the journey-and yet this had not helped to prepare me for the gorge. To my chagrin, I had reacted like a neophyte.
“Celestine?” Dr. Raphael said, jarring me from my thoughts. I was startled to see the others looking intently at me, as if expecting me to speak. Apparently Dr. Raphael had asked me a question.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, feeling my face burn. “Did you ask me something?”