After Grigori had left Rockefeller Center, Verlaine joined Bruno and Saitou-san on the main concourse and the three of them fled. Bruno flagged a taxi and soon they were speeding uptown to Gabriella’s brownstone, where they were met by a van of field agents. Bruno took over, opening the rooms at the top of the house to the angelologists. Verlaine watched his gaze stray intermittently to the windows, as if he expected Gabriella to return any moment.
Soon after midnight they learned of Vladimir’s death. Verlaine heard the news—delivered by an angelologist dispatched from Riverside Church—with an eerie feeling of equilibrium, as if he’d lost the ability to be shocked by the Nephilim’s violence. The dual murders of Vladimir and Mr. Gray had been discovered not long after Saitou-san had escaped with the sound chest. The bizarre state of Vladimir’s body, left charred beyond recognition, not unlike Alistair Carroll’s, in what Verlaine was beginning to see as the Nephilim’s signature, would surely be reported everywhere the next morning. With one angelologist dead and two missing, it was clear that their mission had ended in disaster.
Bruno’s determination only increased after learning of Vladimir’s death. He began barking orders at the others while Saitou-san stationed herself at the gilded escritoire and made phone calls, requesting assistance and information from their agents on the street. Bruno hung a map at the center of the room, divided the city into quadrants, and dispatched agents throughout the city, taking every possible approach to finding a clue about Grigori’s whereabouts. Even Verlaine knew that there were hundreds if not thousands of Nephilim in Manhattan. Grigori could be hiding anywhere. Although his Fifth Avenue apartment was already under surveillance, Bruno sent additional agents across the park. When it became clear that he wasn’t there, Bruno went back to the maps and more fruitless searching.
Bruno and Saitou-san each voiced theories, one more unlikely than the next. Though they didn’t let up for a moment, Verlaine sensed that they were getting nowhere. All at once, the angelologists’ efforts to locate Grigori seemed pointless. He knew that the stakes were high and the consequences of not finding the lyre incalculable. The angelologists cared about the lyre; Evangeline hardly registered in their efforts. Only now, sitting on this couch they had shared the previous afternoon, was he struck by the truth of the matter. If he wanted to find Evangeline alive, he would have to do something himself.
Without a word to the others, Verlaine slipped into his overcoat, took the stairs two at a time, and ducked out the front door. He inhaled the freezing night air and checked his watch: It was after two o’clock on Christmas morning. The street was empty; the entire city was asleep. Gloveless, Verlaine shoved his hands in his pockets and began trekking south along Central Park West, too lost in thought to notice the biting cold. Somewhere in this bleak, labyrinthine city, Evangeline waited.
By the time he’d made his way downtown and had begun moving toward the East River, Verlaine had grown increasingly angry. He walked faster, passing blocks of darkened storefronts, turning possible plans over in his mind. Try as he might, he could not reconcile himself to the reality that Evangeline was lost to him. He cycled through every strategy to find them he could imagine but—like Bruno and Saitou-san—he came up with nothing at all. Of course, it was insane to think he might succeed where they had not. In this haze of frustration, the scars woven over Gabriella’s skin rose in his mind and he shuddered in the miserable cold. He could not allow himself to entertain the possibility that Evangeline was in pain.
In the distance, he saw the Brooklyn Bridge illuminated from below by floodlights. He recalled Evangeline’s nostalgic attachment to the bridge. In his mind’s eye, he saw her profile as she drove them from the convent toward the city and shared the memory of childhood walks with her father. The purity of her feelings, and the sadness in her voice, had made his heart ache. He had seen the bridge hundreds of times before, of course, but suddenly it had an undeniable personal resonance.
Verlaine checked his watch. It was now nearly five in the morning and the faintest hint of light colored the sky beyond the bridge. The city seemed eerie and still. Headlights from the occasional taxi flickered over the bridge’s ramparts, breaking the gauzy darkness. Runnels of warm steam coiled in the brittle air. The bridge rose stark and powerful against the buildings beyond. For a moment he simply looked at it, this steel and concrete and granite edifice.
As if he’d reached an unintended but final destination, Verlaine was about to turn away and head back to the brownstone when a movement high above caught his eye. He looked up. Perched on the west tower, its wings extended, stood one of the creatures. Raised in the half-light of dawn, he could just make out the tapering elegance of the wings. The creature was standing upon the edge of a tower as if examining the city. As he strained to examine its otherworldy magnificence more closely, he detected something unusual in its appearance. Whereas the other creatures had been enormous—much taller and stronger than human beings—this one was tiny. Indeed, the creature seemed almost fragile under its great wings. He watched in awe as it extended them, as if in preparation for flight. As it stepped to the edge of the tower, he caught his breath. The monstrous angel was his Evangeline.
Verlaine’s first impulse was to call out to her, but he could not find his voice. He was overwhelmed by horror and a poisonous sense of betrayal. Evangeline had deceived him and worse, she had lied to all of them. Repulsed, he turned and ran, blood thrumming in his ears, his heart pounding with the effort. The freezing air filled his lungs, singeing them as he breathed. He could not tell if the pain in his chest was from the chill or from losing Evangeline.
Whatever his feelings, he knew he must warn the angelologists. Gabriella had told him once—was it only the previous morning?—that if he became one of them, he could never go back. He understood now that she had been right.
West tower, Brooklyn Bridge, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York City
E
vangeline woke before the sun rose, her head nestled upon the soft cushion of her wings. The disorientation of sleep clouded her thoughts, and she half expected to see the familiar objects of her room at St. Rose—her starched white sheets, the small wooden dresser, and, from the corner of her window, the Hudson River flowing by beyond the glass. But as she stood and gazed over the darkened city, her wings unfolding around her like a great purple cloak, the reality of everything that had happened hit her. She understood what she was and that she could never go back. All that she had been, and all that she had thought she would become, had disappeared forever.
Looking below, to be sure that there was no one to witness her descent, Evangeline climbed up on the granite edge of the tower. The wind lifted her wings, whistling through them, filling them with buoyancy. At such tremendous height, all the world at her feet, a moment of trepidation took hold of her. Flight was new to her, and the fall appeared endless. But as she took a deep breath and stepped off the tower, her heart rising to her throat at the depths before her, she knew that her wings could not fail her. In a sweep of weightlessness, she rose into the currents of icy air.
1
While the original manuscript of the Venerable Clematis’ expedition was not organized in discrete sections, the translator has imposed a system of numbered entries for this edition. Such divisions have been created for the purpose of clarity. The original fragments—for the recovered notebook cannot be designated anything other than the roughest of personal writings, scraps of thoughts and reflections jotted down during the course of the journey perhaps intended as a mnemonic device for the eventual composition of a book about the first quest to locate the fallen angels—were without system. The imposed divisions attempt to divide the notebook chronologically and offer a semblance of cohesion to the manuscript.—R.V.
2
The incident at the pass at Roncesvalles occurred during an exploratory mission to the Pyrenees in A.D. 778. Little is known about the journey, except that the mission lost the majority of its men due to an ambush. Witnesses described the attackers as giants with extrahuman strength, superior weaponry and astonishing physical beauty—descriptions perfectly in line with contemporary portraits of the Nephilim. One testimony claims that winged figures descended upon the giants in a blaze of fire, suggesting a counterattack by archangels, a claim that scholars have studied with some fascination, as this would signal only the third angelophony for the purpose of battle. An alternate version is recorded in
La Chanson de Roland,
an account that differs significantly from angelological records.
3
The Venerable Fathers’ search for artifacts and relics throughout Europe is well documented in Frederic Bonn’s
TheSacred Missions of the Venerable Fathers:
A
.
D
. 925-954,
which includes copies of the maps, omens, and oracles used in such journeys.
4
modern place-names have been substituted for those of the tenth century wherever applicable.
5
The recent recovery and systemization of the work of Gregor Mendel, Augustinian monk and member of the Angelological Scholars of Vienna from 1857 to 1866, has done much to shed light upon what had been a millennial mystery to historians of Nephilistic and human growth in Europe. One can see that, according to the Mendelian chromosome theory of heredity, recessive human traits from the Daughters of Men were carried through Japheth’s Nephilistic line, waiting to reemerge in future generations. Although the chromosomal repercussions of the human-Nephilistic cross strike modern investigators as an obvious result of such breeding, the emergence of human beings into the pool of Nephilim most surely came as a great shock to the population and was considered to be the work of God. In earlier writings, the Venerable Clematis himself had written that human children were insinuated into the Nephilistic line of Japheth by God Himself. The Nephilim, of course, had quite a different interpretation of such genetic calamity.
6
There are various documents pertaining to the superior physical strength of Nephilistic offspring and the genetic inevitability of the emergence of humans in the children of Watchers and women, particularly Dr. G. D. Holland’s survey of Nephilistic demographics in
Human and
Angelic
Bodies: A Medical Inquiry
(Gallimard, 1926).
7
Among certain tribes of Nephilim, the practice of sacrificing human children became popular. It is speculated that this was both a means of controlling the growing human population—which was a threat to Nephilistic society—and an appeal to God to forgive the sins of the Watchers, still imprisoned deep below the earth.
8
Although this is not the first appearance of the term “master race” in discussion of the Nephilim, as there are numerous instances of Nephilistic creatures labeled as belonging to a “master race” or “super race,” it was certainly the most famous and oft-quoted source. Ironically, Clematis’ notion of a super race or superman—held by angelologists to be the mark of Nephilistic self-mythology—was appropriated and reinvented in more modern times by scholars such as Count Arthur de Gobineau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer as a component of human philosophical thought, which in turn was used in Nephilistic circles to support the racial theory of die Herrenrasse, a notion that has grown in popularity in contemporary Europe.
9
It is at this juncture that Clematis’ handwriting gives way to a faltering scribble. This corruption is due, no doubt, to the extreme pressure of the mission at hand, but also, perhaps, to a growing fatigue. The Venerable Father was nearly sixty years old in the year A.D. 925, and his strength must surely have been compromised by the journey up the mountain. The translator has taken great care in his attempt to decipher the text and render it accessible to the modern reader.
10
Here Clematis refers to the famous line of
TheConsolation of Philosophy,
3.55, associated with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice:
For he who overcomes should turn back his gaze toward the Tartarean cave, Whatever excellence he takes with him he loses when he looks below.
11
Hereafter, the remaining sections of Clematis’ account are written in the hand of a monk, Father Deopus, who was assigned to care for Clematis in the immediate aftermath of the expedition. At Clematis’ request, Deopus sat at his side for the purpose of dictation. According to Deopus’ personal account of the days he spent at Clematis’ deathbed, when he was not occupied as a scribe, he made tinctures and compresses he placed over Clematis’ body, to ease the pain of his charred skin. That Deopus was able to capture so thorough an account of the disastrous First Angelological Expedition under such conditions, when the Venerable Father’s injuries surely prevented communication, is a great benefit to scholars. The discovery of Father Deopus’ transcription in 1919 opened the door to further scholarly inquiry into the First Angelological Expedition.
12
According to an account by Father Deopus, Clematis spent a number of agonized hours raving these words before, in a fit of madness, he tore at his burned flesh, ripping the bandages and compresses from his charred skin. Clematis’ act of self-mutilation left flecks of blood upon the pages of the notebook, stains that are clearly visible even now, at the time of translation.
13
The narrative leap one encounters in this section may be the result of a gap in Father Deopus’ transcription but is more likely an accurate reflection of Clematis’ incoherent state of mind. One must remember that the Venerable Father was in no condition to relate his experiences in the cavern with clarity. That Father Deopus went to such lengths to fashion a narrative from Clematis’ desperate ranting is a testament to his resourcefulness.