Using a hammer, Vladimir secured the iron spikes into the rock, pinching the rope under iron clasps. Dr. Seraphina stood over him, watching his movements with great attention. She gave the ladder a hard shake, a test to determine that it would hold. When satisfied with its strength, she instructed the men—who carried the sacks of equipment, heavy burlap bags of twenty kilograms each—to secure their packs and follow us down.
I listened to the depths, trying to determine what lay beyond. In the stomach of the cavern, water pounded against rock. Looking over the ledge, I could not be sure if the earth below me remained stable or if it was I who had begun to tremble. I placed my hand upon Dr. Seraphina’s shoulder, to hold myself steady against the nauseating spell the cavern had cast upon me.
She took me by the hand and, seeing my distress, said, “You must calm yourself before you proceed. Breathe deeply and do not think of how far you have to go. I’ll lead you. Keep one hand on the crossbar and the other on the rope. If you somehow slip, you won’t lose your footing completely, and if you should fall, I will be directly below to catch you.” Then, without another word, she descended.
Gripping the cold metal with my bare hands, I followed. Trying to find comfort, I recalled the joyous account Clematis had written about the ladder. The simplicity of his pleasure had inspired me to memorize the words he’d written:
“One can hardly imagine our delight upon gaining passage into the abyss. Only Jacob in his vision of the mighty procession of Holy Messengers might have beheld a ladder more welcome and majestic. To our divine purpose we proceeded into the terrible blackness of the forsaken pit, filled with expectation of His protection and Grace.”
We formed a line, each angelologist moving slowly down the rock face into the darkness, the sound of crashing water growing louder as we descended. The air became frigid as we moved deeper and deeper into the earth. A startling heaviness began to spread through my limbs, as if a vial of mercury had been released in my blood. It seemed that no matter how often I blinked, my eyes were filled with tears. In my panic I imagined that the narrow walls of the gorge would pinch together and I would be trapped in a granite vise, fixed in a stifling darkness. Clutching the cold, wet iron, the rush of the waterfall in my ears, I felt as if I were moving into the heart of a whirlpool.
Quickly I went, letting gravity take me. As the shaft deepened, the darkness thickened to a cool, opaque soup. I could see no farther than the whites of my knuckles wrapped around the ladder’s rung. The wooden soles of my boots slipped on the metal, knocking me ever so slightly off balance. Clutching the case tightly to my side, so as to regain balance, I slowed my pace. Measuring each step, I positioned my feet carefully, delicately, one after the other. The blood rushed in my ears as I looked up at the dissolving track of the ladder. Poised at the center of the void, I had no choice but to continue into the watery darkness. A biblical passage rushed into my thoughts, and I could not help but whisper it, knowing that the crashing waterfall would wash away my voice the moment I spoke the words: “‘And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.’ ”
As I reached the bottom of the descent, the soles of my boots leaving the last swinging rung of the rope ladder and brushing the solid earth, I knew that Dr. Seraphina had discovered something momentous. The angelologists quickly unpacked the burlap sacks and lit our battery-operated lanterns, placing them at intervals across the flat rock floor of the cavern so that a fitful, oily light opened the darkness. The river, described in Clematis’s account as the boundary of the angels’ prison, coursed by in the distance, a glimmering black ribbon of movement. I could see Dr. Seraphina ahead, shouting orders, but the sound of the waterfall consumed her words.
When I reached her, she stood over the body of the angel. Upon taking my place at her side, I, too, fell under the trance of the creature. It was even more beautiful than I had imagined it to be, and I could do nothing for some time but stare, so overwhelmed was I by its perfection. The creature’s physical properties were identical to the description I had read in the literature at the Athenaeum: elongated torso, gaunt features, massive hands and feet. Its cheeks retained the vivacity of a living being’s. Its robes were pristine white, woven of a metallic material that wrapped about the body in luxurious folds.
“The First Angelological Expedition occurred in the tenth century, and still the body has the appearance of vitality,” Vladimir said. He bent before the creature and lifted the white metallic gown, rubbing the fabric between his fingers.
“Be careful,” Dr. Seraphina said. “The level of radioactivity is very high.”
Vladimir considered the angel. “I’ve always believed that they could not die.”
“Immortality is a gift that can be taken as easily as it is bequeathed,” Dr. Seraphina said. “Clematis believed that the Lord struck the angel down as vengeance.”
“Is that what you believe?” I asked.
“After its role in bringing the Nephilim into the world, killing this devilish creature seems perfectly justified,” Dr. Seraphina said.
“Its beauty is incomprehensible,” I said, struggling to reconcile the fact that beauty and evil could be so intertwined in one body.
“What remains a mystery to me,” Vladimir said, looking beyond the body of the angel to the far side of the cavern, “is that the others were allowed to live.”
The party split into groups. Half stayed to document the body—extracting cameras and lenses and the aluminum case filled with biological testing apparatus from the heavy burlap bags holding them—and the other half set off to search for the lyre. Vladimir led the latter group, while Dr. Seraphina and I stayed with the angel. At our side, the remaining members of our party examined the half-buried bones of two human skeletons. The bodies of Clematis’s brothers had remained exactly as they fell one thousand years before.
At Dr. Seraphina’s orders, I put on protective gloves and lifted the angel’s head in my hands. Running my fingers through the creature’s glossy hair, I brushed the forehead, as if comforting a sick child. My touch was blunted by the gloves, but it seemed to me that the angel was warm with life. Smoothing the metallic gown, I unfastened two brass buttons at the clavicle and tugged at the fabric. It fell away, revealing a flat chest, smooth, without nipples. A clutch of ribs pressed against taut, translucent skin.
From head to foot, the creature looked to be over two meters tall, a length that, in the ancient system of measurement the founding fathers had used, translated to 4.8 Roman cubits. Other than the golden ringlets falling about the shoulders, the body was completely hairless, and, to Dr. Seraphina’s delight—she had staked her professional reputation upon the very question—the creature had distinct sexual organs. The angel was male, as all the imprisoned Watchers had been. As Clematis’s account attested, one of the wings had been torn away and hung at an odd angle to the body. There could be no doubt that this was the very creature the Venerable Clematis had killed.
Together we lifted the creature and turned it on its side. We removed the robe entirely, exposing the skin to the harsh light of the lantern. The body was pliable, the joints limber. Under Dr. Seraphina’s direction, we began photographing it with care. It was important to capture small details. Developments in photographic technology, especially multilayered color film, gave us hope that we would achieve great accuracy, perhaps even capture the color of the eyes—too blue to be real, as if someone had ground lapis in oil and brushed it over a sun-filled windowpane. These attributes would be documented in our field notes and duly added to the appropriate accounts of the journey, but photographic evidence was essential.
After we had completed the first series of photographs, Dr. Seraphina removed a measuring tape from a burlap camera bag and squatted at the creature’s side. Placing the tape along the body, she took its measurements and converted the results to cubits, to better compare them with ancient documentation of the giants. As she calculated the measurement into cubits, she shouted the numbers aloud so that I might record them. The measurements were as follows:
Arms = 2.01 cubits
Legs = 2.88 cubits
Head Circumference = 1.85 cubits
Chest Circumference = 2.81 cubits
Feet = 0.76 cubits
Hands = 0.68 cubits
My own hands shook as I jotted the findings in a notebook, leaving a track of nearly illegible markings that I retraced, reading the numbers back to Dr. Seraphina to make certain each measurement was correct. From the numbers, I estimated the creature to be 30 percent larger than the average human being. Seven feet was an impressive height, awe-inspiring even in our modern era, but in ancient times such height would have seemed nothing short of miraculous. Such extreme height explained the terror that ancient cultures associated with the Giants and the dread that had surrounded such Nephilim as Goliath, one of the most famous of their race.
A sound rose from the cavern, but when I turned to Dr. Seraphina, she didn’t seem to notice anything except me. She was observing me as I executed the field notes, perhaps worried that the task had overwhelmed me. My distress had grown more visible. I had started to shake and could only imagine how I must appear to her. I began to wonder if perhaps I had taken ill on the journey through the mountains—the ride had been cold and damp, and none of us were dressed well enough to protect us from the mountain winds. My pencil trembled in my hand, and my teeth chattered. Occasionally I stopped writing and turned to the darkness that stretched in a seemingly endless cavity beyond. Again I heard something in the distance. A terrifying sound echoed from the depths.
“Are you all right?” she asked, her gaze falling upon my shaking hands.
“Don’t you hear it?” I asked.
Dr. Seraphina halted her work and walked away from the body, to the edge of the river. After listening for some minutes, she returned to me and said, “It’s nothing but the sound of water.”
“There is something else,” I said. “They are here, waiting. They expect us to free them.”
“They have been waiting for thousands of years, Celestine,” she said. “And if we are successful, they will wait for thousands more.”
Dr. Seraphina turned back to the angel and commanded me to do the same. Despite my fear I was drawn in by the angel’s strange beauty—its translucent skin, its soft and continual light, the sculptural poise of its repose. There was much speculation about angelic luminosity, the predominant theory being that angelic bodies contained a radioactive material that accounted for their endless brightness. Our protective clothing only minimized exposure. Radioactivity also explained the horrid death suffered by Brother Francis during the First Angelological Expedition and the sickness that claimed Clematis.
I knew that I should have as little contact with the body as possible—it was one of the first things one learned when preparing for the expedition—and yet I could not restrain myself from drawing nearer to the creature’s body. I peeled away my gloves and knelt at its side, placing my hands upon its forehead. I felt the skin, cold and wet against my palm, retaining the elasticity of living cells. It was like touching the smooth, iridescent skin of a serpent. Although it had been submerged in the depths of the cavern for over a thousand years, the white-blond hair shone. The shocking blue eyes, so disconcerting at first glace, now had the opposite effect upon me. Looking into them, I felt that the angel sat by my side, calming me with its presence, lifting all my fears away, and granting me an eerie opiate comfort.
“Come here,” I said to Dr. Seraphina. “Quickly.”
My teacher’s eyes widened at the sight of my hands on the creature—even an angelologist as young and inexperienced as I should have known that physical contact broke our safety protocol. Yet, perhaps she was drawn to the angel as I had been. Dr. Seraphina sat next to me and placed her palms upon the forehead, resting her fingertips in the roots of its hair. I saw the change in Dr. Seraphina in an instant. She closed her eyes, and a sensation of bliss appeared to wash over her. The tension in her body eased into pure serenity.
Suddenly a hot, sticky substance seeped over the skin of my palms. Lifting my hands, I squinted, trying to determine what had happened. A gummy golden film, transparent and glistening as honey, coated my hands, and when I held them in the light of the angel’s skin, the substance refracted, scattering a reflective dust over the cavern floor, as if my palms were coated in millions of microscopic crystals.
Quickly, before the other angelologists saw what we had done, we wiped our hands against the rocky surface of the cavern wall and slipped them back into our gloves. “Come, Celestine,” Dr. Seraphina said. “Let’s finish with the body.”
I opened the medical kit and placed it at her side. Everything—scalpels, swabs, a packet of straight blades, tiny glass vials with screw caps—had been strapped inside with elastic bands. I lifted the creature’s arm over my lap, steadying it at the elbow and wrist as Dr. Seraphina scraped the grain of a fingernail with the edge of the razor blade. Flakes broke from the nails, collecting at the bottom of a glass vial, chunky and mineral as sea salt. Turning the blade at an angle, Dr. Seraphina made two parallel incisions along the inner surface of the forearm and, careful not to rip the skin, pulled. A layer of skin peeled away, leaving exposed musculature. Pressed between plates of glass, the swath of skin glittered golden, brilliant and reflective in the weak light.
A wave of nausea passed over me at the sight of the exposed muscle. Afraid that I might be sick, I excused myself, apologizing as I left. At some distance from the expedition party, I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. The air was bitter cold, filled with a thick moisture that hung in my chest. The cavern opened before me, a series of endless, dark concavities that pulled me into them. As the feeling of nausea dissipated, a sense of wonder took its place. What lay beyond, hidden in darkness?