Realizing that it would only do more harm to allow Celestine to continue such madness, Evangeline pulled at the letter resting under Celestine’s trembling fingers, removing it with deliberation. Folding it into her pocket, she stood. “Forgive me, Sister,” she said. “I did not mean to disturb you in this fashion.”
“Go!” Celestine said, shaking violently. “Go at once and leave me in peace!”
Confused and more than a little afraid, Evangeline closed Celestine’s door and half walked, half ran down the narrow hallway to the stairwell.
Most afternoons Sister Philomena’s naps lasted until she was called to dinner, and so it was little surprise, then, that the library was empty when Evangeline arrived, the fireplace cold and the trolley stacked with volumes waiting to be returned to their shelves. Ignoring the mess of books, Evangeline endeavored to build a fire to warm the frigid room. She stacked two pieces of wood in the grating, packing the underbelly with crumpled newspaper, and struck a match. Once the flames began to catch, she stood and straightened her skirt with her small, cold hands, as if smoothing the fabric might help her gain focus. One thing was certain: She would need all the concentration she could muster to bring herself to sort through Celestine’s story. She removed a piece of folded paper from the pocket of her skirt, unfolded it, and read the letter from Mr. Verlaine:
In the process of conducting research for a private client, it has come to my attention that Mrs. Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller, matriarch of the Rockefeller family and patron of the arts, may have briefly corresponded with the abbess of St. Rose Convent, Mother Innocenta, in the years 1943-1944.
It was nothing more than a harmless note asking to visit St. Rose Convent, the kind of letter institutions with collections of rare books and images received on a regular basis, the kind of letter that Evangeline should have responded to with a swift and efficient refusal and, once posted, should have forgotten forever. Yet this simple request had turned everything upside down. She was both wary and consumed by the intense curiosity she felt about Sister Celestine, Mrs. Abigail Rockefeller, Mother Innocenta, and the practice of angelology. She wished to understand the work her parents had performed, and yet she longed for the luxury of ignorance. Celestine’s words had echoed deeply within her, as if she had come to St. Rose for the very purpose of hearing them. Even so, the possible connection between Celestine’s history and her own caused Evangeline the most profound agitation.
Her one consolation was that the library was utterly still. She sat at a table near the fireplace, placed her pointy elbows upon the wooden surface, and rested her head in her hands, trying to clear her mind. Although the fire had risen, a trickle of freezing air seeped from the fireplace, creating a current of intense heat and biting cold that resulted in a strange mixture of sensations upon her skin. She tried to reconstruct Celestine’s jumbled story as best she could. Taking a piece of paper and a red marker from a drawer in the table, she jotted the words in a list:
Devil’s Throat Cavern
Rhodope Mountains
Genesis 6
Angelologists
When in need of guidance, Evangeline was more like a tortoise than a young woman—she retreated into a cool, dark space inside herself, became completely still, and waited for the confusion to pass. For half an hour, she stared at the words she had written—
“Devil’s Throat, Rhodope Mountains, Genesis 6, Angelologists.”
If anyone had told her the previous day that these words would be written by her, confronting her when she least expected them, she would have laughed. Yet these very words were the pillars of Sister Celestine’s story. With Mrs. Abigail Rockefeller’s role in the mystery—as the letter she’d found implied—Evangeline had no choice but to decipher their relation.
While her impulse was to analyze the list until the connections magically revealed themselves, Evangeline knew better than to wait. She crossed the now-warm library and removed an oversize world atlas from a shelf. Opening it upon a table, she found a listing for the Rhodope Mountains in the index and turned to the appropriate page at the center of the atlas. The Rhodopes turned out to be a minor chain of mountains in southeastern Europe spanning the area from northern Greece into southern Bulgaria. Evangeline examined the map, hoping to find some reference to the Devil’s Throat, but the entire region was a mottle of shaded bumps and triangles on the map, signifying elevated terrain.
She recalled that Celestine had mentioned entering the Rhodopes through Greece, and so, running her finger south, to the sea-locked Grecian mainland, Evangeline found the point where the Rhodopes rose from the plains. Green and gray covered the areas near the mountains, pointing to a depressed level of population. The only major roads seemed to emerge from Kavala, a port city on the Thracian Sea where a network of highways extended to the smaller towns and villages in the north. Moving her eye to the south of the mountain chain and down into the peninsula, she saw the more familiar names of Athens and Sparta, places she’d read of in her study of classical literature. Here were the ancient cities she had always associated with Greece. She’d never heard of the remote sliver of mountain that fell over its northernmost border with Bulgaria.
Realizing that she could learn only so much about the region from a map, Evangeline turned to a set of careworn 1960s encyclopedias and located an entry on the Rhodope Mountains. At the center of the page, she found a black-and-white photograph of a gaping cave. Below the photo she read:
The Devil’s Throat is a cavern cut deep into the core of the Rhodope mountain chain. A narrow gap sliced into the immense rock of the mountainside, the cavern descends deep below the earth, forming a breathtaking shaft of air in the solid granite. The passageway is marked by a massive internal waterfall that cascades over the rock, leveling to form a subterranean river. A series of natural enclosures at the bottom of the gorge have long been the source of legend. Early explorers reported strange lights and feelings of euphoria upon entering these discrete caves, a phenomenon that may be explained by pockets of natural gases.
Evangeline went on to find that the Devil’s Throat had been declared a UNESCO landmark in the 1950s and was considered an international treasure for its vertiginous beauty and its historical and mythological importance to the Thracians, who lived in the area in the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. While the physical descriptions of the cave were interesting enough, Evangeline was curious to know more about its historical and mythological importance. She opened a book of Greek and Thracian mythology, and after a number of chapters describing recent archaeological digs into Thracian ruins, Evangeline read:
The ancient Greeks believed that the Devil’s Throat was the opening to the mythological underworld through which Orpheus, king of the Thracian tribe of the Cicones, traveled to save his lover, Eurydice, from the oblivion of Hades. In Greek mythology Orpheus was reputed to have given humanity music, writing, and medicine and is often thought to have promoted the cult of Dionysus. Apollo gave Orpheus a golden lyre and taught him to play music that had the power to tame animals, make inanimate objects come to life, and soothe all of creation, including the dwellers of the underworld. Many archaeologists and historians claim that he promoted ecstatic and mystical practices to the common people. Indeed, it is speculated that the Thracians performed human sacrifices during ecstatic Dionysian rituals, leaving dismembered bodies to decompose in the karst-filled gorge of the Devil’s Throat.
Evangeline had become engrossed in reading about the history of Orpheus and his place in ancient mythology, yet the information was not in keeping with Celestine’s account. She had made no mention of Orpheus or the Dionysian cultists he had allegedly inspired. Therefore it came as quite a surprise to find her attention completely diverted upon reading the next paragraph:
In the Christian era, the Devil’s Throat cavern was believed to be the location where the rebel angels fell after their expulsion from heaven. Christians living in the area believed that the sharp vertical descent at the cave’s opening was carved by Lucifer’s fiery body as it plummeted through the earth to hell—hence the cavern’s name. In addition, the cave was long believed to be the prison not only of the original contingent of fallen angels but also the prison of the “Sons of God,” the oft-contested creatures of the pseudoepigraphical Book of Enoch. Known as the “Watchers” by Enoch and the “Sons of Heaven” in the Bible, this group of disobedient angels earned God’s disfavor after consorting with human women and producing the species of angelic-human hybrids called the Nephilim (see Genesis 6). The Watchers were imprisoned below the earth after their crime. Their underground prison is referenced throughout the Bible. See Jude 1:6.
Leaving the book open, she stood and walked to the New American Bible lying on an oak pedestal table at the center of the library. Paging through, she skimmed past the Creation, the Fall, and the murder of Abel by Cain. Stopping at Genesis 6, she read:
I When men began to multiply on earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of heaven saw how beautiful the daughters of man were, and so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose. 3 Then the LORD said: “My spirit shall not remain in man forever, since he is but flesh. His days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years.” 4 At that time the Nephilim appeared on earth (as well as later), after the sons of heaven had intercourse with the daughters of man, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown. 5 When the LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how no desire that his heart conceived was ever anything but evil, 6 he regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was grieved. So the LORD said: “I will wipe out from the earth the men whom I have created, and not only the men, but also the beasts and the creeping things and the birds of the air, for I am sorry that I made them.”
This was the passage from which Celestine had quoted earlier that afternoon. Although Evangeline had read through that section of Genesis hundreds of times before—as a girl, when her mother read Genesis aloud to her, it had been her first great narrative infatuation, the most dramatic, cataclysmic, awe-inspiring story she’d ever heard—she had never paused to think about these odd details: the birth of strange creatures called Nephilim, the condemnation of men to live only 120 years, the disappointment the Creator felt in his creation, the maliciousness of the Deluge. In all her studies, in all her preparations as a novice, in all the hours of biblical discussion she had participated in with the other sisters at St. Rose, this passage had never once been analyzed. She read the passage again, pausing to consider the phrase
At that time the Nephilim appeared on earth (as well as later), after the sons of heaven had intercourse with the daughters of man, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
Then she turned to Jude and read:
The angels too, who did not keep to their own domain but deserted their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains, in gloom, for the judgment of the great day.
Feeling the onset of a headache, Evangeline closed the Bible. Her father’s voice filled her mind, and once again she climbed the stairs of a cold, dusty warehouse, her Mary Janes soft upon the metal steps. The sharp shearing of a wing, the luminosity of a body, the strange and beautiful presence of the caged creatures looming overhead—these were visions she had long suspected were the inventions of her own imagination. The thought that these beasts were real—and that they were the reason her father had brought her to St. Rose—was more than she could bear to think about.
Standing, Evangeline went to the back of the room, where a row of nineteenth-century books lined the shelves of a locked glass case. Although the books were the oldest in their library, brought to St. Rose Convent the year it was founded, they were modern compared to the texts analyzed and discussed in their pages. Taking the key from a hook on the wall, she opened the case and removed one, cradling it in her arms carefully as she walked to the wide oak table near the fireplace. She examined the book—
Anatomy of the Dark Angels
—and ran her fingers over the soft leather binding with great tenderness, afraid she might, in her haste to open it, damage the spine.
After slipping on a pair of thin cotton gloves, she delicately opened the cover and looked inside, finding hundreds of pages of facts about the shadow side of angels at her disposal. Each page, each diagram, each etching related in some way to the transgressions of angelic creatures who had defied the natural order. The book brought together everything from biblical exegesis to the Franciscan position on exorcism. Evangeline flipped through the pages, pausing at an examination of demons in church history. Although never discussed among the sisters, and an enigma to Evangeline, the demonic had once been a source of much theological discussion in the church. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, had asserted that it was a dogma of faith that demons had the power to produce wind, storms, and a rain of fire from heaven. The demonic population—7,405,926 divided into seventy-two companies, according to Talmudic accounts—was not directly accounted for in Christian works, and she doubted that this number could be anything more than numeric speculation, but the figure struck Evangeline as astonishing. The first chapters of the book contained historical information about angelic rebellion. Christians, Jews, and Muslims had been arguing over the existence of the dark angels for thousands of years. The most concrete reference to the disobedient angels could be found in Genesis, but there were apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts circulated throughout the centuries after Christ that had shaped the Judeo-Christian conception of angels. Stories of angelic visitation abounded, and misinformation about the nature of angels was as prevalent in the ancient world as it was in the present era. It was a common mistake, for example, to confuse the Watchers—who were thought to have been sent to earth by God for the specific purpose of spying on humanity—with the rebel angels, those angelic beings rendered popular by
Paradise Lost
who followed Lucifer and were banished from heaven. The Watchers were of the tenth order of bene Elohim, whereas Lucifer and the rebel angels—the devil and his demons—were from the Malakim, which included the more perfect orders of angels. Whereas the devil had been condemned to eternal fire, the Watchers were merely imprisoned for an indeterminate period of time. Contained in what was variously translated as a pit, a hole, a cave, and hell, they awaited freedom.