Angelopolis: A Novel (ANGELOLOGY SERIES)

by Danielle Trussoni

  Azov studied Raphael closely. At one hundred years old, his vitality was nothing short of astonishing.

  “Once I felt the effects of the seeds, I mixed them with the extract from the hemlock plant. It is an extremely powerful concoction.”

  “It’s a lethal concoction, Raphael,” Azov said.

  “Not quiet lethal,” Valko replied. “With the right dosage, it is a classic example of the pharmakon.”

  “That’s Greek,” Sveti said, glancing at Vera to make sure she followed. “It refers to a substance that is both a remedy and a poison at once.”

  “Well put, my dear,” Valko said. “The seeds have the power to kill me, but the seeds also have the power to prolong my life. This is the basis of homeopathy: At one dosage a substance may do great good. At a different dosage, it kills you. Certainly most medicines and vaccines work on this principle. It has been the North Star of my work. But enough about me and my fountains of youth. Come inside now and tell me what brings you here.”

  The Sixth Circle

  HERESY

  Surveillance Report, June 9, 1984, submitted by Angela Valko

  This is the first such report I have filed in the history of my time as an angelologist, and I do so with some degree of discomfort. But the horrific nature of my suspicions, and the extent of Dr. Merlin Godwin’s involvement in activities detrimental to our security, require that I report what I have witnessed. I submit this document with the hope that my observations can be of use to the preservation of our work.

  My concerns about Godwin began on the night of April 13, 1984, when I came across Dr. Godwin in the street. My husband, Luca, and I were on our way to dinner in a restaurant on the rue de Rivoli when we recognized Godwin. He was ahead, strolling along alone. He wore a three-piece suit and carried a briefcase. We decided to catch up with him, to say hello and invite him for a glass of wine, but before we reached him he was joined by a tall, female creature with the standard angelic traits.

  My husband, who was as intrigued as I by this pairing, and whose instinct as an angel hunter pushed him to discover their destination, decided it best to follow. We did, keeping our distance behind Godwin until he stopped on the rue de Temple, where he and the creature entered a restaurant. They took a table near the back, away from human beings. We didn’t dare follow them inside. Dr. Godwin knows me well—he began his career as my intern—and would recognize me instantly.

  Luca called a colleague—Vladimir Ivanov, a man who would not have been recognized by Dr. Godwin—and sent him into the restaurant to observe them up close. Vladimir entered the restaurant and sat at the bar, observing, and, within an hour, Godwin and his companion left the restaurant. Vladimir returned to us a short time later, relaying the following surprising information: Godwin had spent the hour in conversation with the woman, whom Vladimir confirmed to be an Emim angel. In his opinion, Godwin was working with the creature. He had spoken of his work at length and, most surprising of all, at the end of their rendezvous, Godwin gave her the briefcase.

  Luca and I discussed this at length, speculating about the contents of the briefcase, and in the end decided that we should continue to watch Godwin before making an official report. Consorting with the enemy is a serious offense, but we reasoned that there might be some explanation for his association with the creature. We decided to simply watch and wait.

  This was not difficult to do. Godwin has recently been given a laboratory next to mine, and so I had the opportunity to observe him with ease over the course of many weeks. I found nothing out of the ordinary. He works seven days a week; he is solitary; he keeps a strict routine. When I checked in on his work during our weekly appointments, I could find no fault in Dr. Godwin’s experiments.

  In the meantime, Luca began to look through profiles of previously hunted and captured creatures. He identified Godwin’s companion as an Emim named Eno. I will not go into further detail about the significance of this name here, but suffice it to say that her identity impressed Luca and me and made us all the more wary of Godwin’s behavior.

  On the night of May 30, at eleven o’clock, I saw him leave his laboratory and hurry down the hallway. Again he was dressed in a suit and again he carried his briefcase. I followed him into the elevator and he held the door. He was deferential, bowing in a gentlemanly fashion. I believe now that Godwin must have known more about me than I suspected. For many years I had assumed his slightly awkward manner toward me grew from an inability to speak to women, and that he was too inexperienced and naïve to assert himself in the presence of an attractive colleague. I believed this trait to be a sign of innocence. I would soon see how very wrong I was in this assessment.

  As we stood together in the elevator, I noticed him slipping a copper key card into the pocket of his jacket, so that a corner of the metal was visible. Perhaps it was Luca’s influence, but I found myself calculating how I could take the key, what diversionary maneuver I could make to steal it, and what I would do with it once I had it. If Godwin had any secrets—if he were giving our secrets to the Nephilim, as I suspected—then there might be proof in his laboratory.

  We walked together through security and left the building. He hailed a taxi and, his gaze never meeting mine, asked if I’d like to share it. Seizing the opportunity, I climbed into the taxi with Godwin. We spoke of office politics, of new policies being implemented for scientists, and of other innocuous subjects, but all the while I was watching the corner of metal poking out of his pocket.

  I told the taxi driver to stop and, as I was getting out of the car, I pretended to trip, falling heavily into Godwin’s arms as he held the door open for me. This feint took him off guard and, in the confusion, I plucked the key from his pocket and slid it up my sleeve. Even as I made my apologies for my clumsiness, Godwin climbed into the taxi and disappeared into the night.

  I returned to the labs at once and entered Godwin’s office with ease, using his key. The layout was identical to mine, only instead of equipment for the experimental work he’d been presenting to me during our meetings, I found masses of files stacked up on every flat surface of the lab. I began to look through them, trying to find something that would help me to understand Godwin’s association with Eno.

  What I discovered shocked me to the core. The folders were stuffed with photographs of angelic creatures in erotic positions, pornographic shots of female and male Nephilim, sadomasochistic couplings between humans and angels, every kind of sexual perversity imaginable. As I moved through the stacks, the photographs became increasingly violent, and soon there were stills of people being tortured and raped and killed by Nephilim. The pleasure the creatures took in human suffering was evident in these photographs, and even now, with some of these images before me, I cannot believe that they exist. Even more unbelievable, however, was a thick book featuring images of the victims after they had been used for pleasure and discarded—the bodies were bruised, bloodied, dismembered, and photographed like trophies. The graphic nature of these images was like nothing I had seen before, and I understood how sheltered I had been from the everyday behavior of the Nephilim, from what horrors they are capable of performing.

  As a fellow scientist, I would like to give Godwin the benefit of believing, if possible, that these images are part of his work. If Godwin were exploring the nature of angelic sexuality, he might bring an academic reserve to his participation in the underworld of angelic sex and violence, a coldness in relation to the events that he has photographed. However, I truly do not believe this to be the case, for reasons that will soon be evident.

  I spent many hours in Dr. Godwin’s lab that night. Aside from this trove of horrors, I found a number of items that were of intense interest to me, both personally and professionally. The first was a document written by my mother, Gabriella Lévi-Franche, that appears to be a collection of her field notes from 1939–43, the years she worked as an undercover agent while attending the academy. The volume is bound in red leather, in the official manner, signifying that
the account was produced and published with the sanction of the council. Until that evening, this period of Gabriella’s life was a mystery to me—she had never told me the details of her wartime work, had never spoken of it to anyone, so far as I had been aware—and so it was with curiosity and trepidation that I opened the red book and looked inside. How Godwin came to possess this book, and what his interest was in my mother’s experiences, is a question I cannot bring myself to answer in this report. I can only record here that the revelations of Gabriella’s report were deeply shocking to me and have repercussions that will seep into every aspect of my life.

  As for the second discovery, I am relieved to say, it had a professional importance that almost obscured the pain of the first discovery. On the shelf, prized in the fingers of a silver holder, was an egg.

  I recognized it immediately as one of the eggs created by Fabergé for the Romanovs. I spent many childhood afternoons paging through books about the Romanovs—the family was of intense interest to angelologists—and my mother had a large collection of books about the tsar. The egg in Godwin’s laboratory was one of the eight missing eggs. Instantly, picture-book images of these eggs appeared in my mind, crisp and glistening with bright lithographic colors: the Cherub with Chariot Egg; the Empire Nephrite Egg; the Hen Egg; the Emperial Egg; the Nécessaire Egg; the Mauve Egg; the Danish Jubilee Egg; and the Alexander III Egg. Sitting on the shelf was the Hen Egg, its blue enamel surface alive with sapphires. I took it down and, turning it in my hand, found the mechanism and pressed it.

  The egg sprang apart. Inside was a hen surprise, and inside this precious miniature, wrapped in a muslin cloth, were three glass vials full of liquid, each labeled in Godwin’s thin scrawl. Holding a loupe to the writing, I was able to make out the names ALEXEI and LUCIEN, but the third word was written in such a messy scrawl that I refused to accept the word my eyes deciphered: EVANGELINE. I removed the tiny stopper of this third vessel and brought it to my nose. The smell was distinctly sanguine, sweet and metallic at once, but still I could not believe that Godwin had kept a vial of my daughter’s blood.

  After returning to my own workspace with a number of the most illustrative photographs—as well as Gabriella’s red book and the Hen egg—I phoned Vladimir Ivanov, who aside from working closely with Luca, has aided me in a number of projects relating to Russian Nephilim. I asked him to bring his wife, Nadia, my assistant, who I knew to be an expert on tsarist antiquities, including Fabergé’s eggs. Vladimir and Nadia joined me straightaway. As I began to run tests on the blood, Nadia explained that the egg in Godwin’s possession—with its golden bird hatching from the center—symbolized the hunt for the savior, the new creature that would arrive to liberate our planet. Glancing through the stack of photographs, Vladimir explained that the violence of the images was not at all unusual—the Nephilim reproduced through such extreme practices—but that he had never seen it documented with such attention. I listened as I analyzed the blood, trying to understand how the elements before me fit together.

  The vials made an especially fascinating trio. By far the oldest of the three was the Alexei sample—much of the blood had dried out and crusted black against the glass—but it was also the most straightforward: Nephilistic through and through. The contents of the vial marked LUCIEN, on the other hand, defied categorization. The color was a far richer blue than the Nephilistic cerulean—more like the indigo prized by the elite of Rome—and bore none of the typical traces of human physiognomy. Had I not been so anxious about the sample taken from my daughter, I would have begun to run more complex tests on it. But it was the third and final vessel—the vial labeled EVANGELINE—that commanded my full attention.

  It was clear that the crimson blood was human, and yet, at the same time, there were abnormalities atypical of Nephilistic contamination: The level of iron was extraordinarily high, and there was no potassium present at all, which would be strange under any circumstance—no human being can live without potassium present in the blood. I myself had authorized Merlin Godwin to run tests on Evangeline’s blood—we had been monitoring her for years—but he had never disclosed such obvious abnormalities to me. In fact, he had always claimed that her blood was human, without the slightest taint of Nephil characteristics. The conclusion I am forced to draw from this revelation is particularly shocking to me: Godwin has been taking samples of my daughter’s blood covertly and using the blood for his own perverse purposes.

  Dr. Raphael Valko’s compound, Smolyan, Bulgaria

  Vera followed Valko into a squat stone building at the west end of the courtyard, Azov and Sveti following close behind. Inside, she found a large room illuminated by gas lamps and filled with ropes, boots, and belts with rock hammers. Windbreakers and backpacks had been piled on a couch, and a large map of the Rhodopes hung on the wall, its surface filled with colored pins. From the state of disorder it was clear that visitors were a rare phenomenon. As she looked over the mess, she realized that she was exhausted. The few hours of sleep she’d had on the plane weren’t enough to sustain her. The mission was beginning to wear on her.

  “My explorations have taken me to nearly every part of these mountains,” Valko said, seeing Vera’s interest in the map. “I left the Paris academy after Angela’s death because, quite frankly, I couldn’t bear to be reminded of her. But I’ve come to realize that there was another reason I left: I needed to go back to the source of my work, the inspiration for all of my efforts.”

  Running his finger over the map, he stopped at the Devil’s Throat Cavern.

  “My major discoveries have always occurred when I returned to the original dwelling places of the Nephilim—the Alps, or the Pyrenees, or the Himalayas.”

  “Or the Rhodopes,” Azov said.

  “Correct. The places most important to the creatures are always located in the remotest regions of the earth, away from human eyes.”

  A door opened and a girl walked into the room. She appeared to be between ten and twelve years old and wore jeans, tennis shoes, and a pale yellow sweater that matched her bobbed blond hair. She had blue eyes and the distinct patrician features of Dr. Raphael Valko. Vera guessed her to be the daughter Azov had mentioned. Looking her over more carefully, she detected a scar running along the side of the girl’s face, a wide pale track of healed stitches crawling along the line of her jaw, past her ear and into her hairline. The girl set a cup of tea on her father’s desk and looked at the others, as if curious to see so many visitors.

  “Thank you, Pandora,” Valko said.

  Vera wondered if this was a tea made from the plants Valko had grown from Azov’s Black Sea seeds. Not that Valko seemed the sort to acknowledge others’ contributions. He had invited them inside to hear their reasons for coming to Smolyan, but not even Azov had managed to get a word in edgewise.

  Sensing a gap in Valko’s monologue, Vera cleared her throat and said, “There is something I am hoping you can help me with, Dr. Valko.”

  “I gathered as much,” he said, taking the cup and drinking. “You’ve come a long way to speak with me. I hope that I can help.”

  “Vera has found documents pertaining to the medicines of Noah,” Azov said.

  Valko seemed unnaturally calm, as if he were in a trance. “My daughter would have been very interested to speak with you about this matter, if she were alive.”

  “So Angela did have an interest in this concoction?” Vera asked, standing and walking to the door, where she gazed out over the garden. The first light of dawn suffused the sky above the courtyard. She reached into her satchel for the Book of Flowers—which overnight had come to seem more her own than Rasputin’s or the Romanovs’—and stepped back into the room.

  “Interest?” Valko said, smiling slightly, his gaze resting on the book. “I should say it was more than that. My daughter’s connection wasn’t theoretical. Her involvement brought her deep into the secrets of the nature of angelic life on this planet. In the end she succeeded in learning things that put her in danger.�
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  “You think that this information led to her death?” Azov asked.

  “Most probably,” Valko said, an air of sadness in his manner. “But in the beginning it was an exhilarating, if highly doubtful, quest. Rasputin’s journal came to Angela almost out of the sky.”

  “Nadia mentioned that Vladimir simply presented it to her one day,” Vera said.

  “Of course, the ease with which it arrived in her life made her suspicious—it could have been a fake; it could have been created to trick her—but in the end she believed that Rasputin’s work was authentic, that he was one more magus seeking the formula cited so cryptically in the Book of Jubilees—Noah, Nicolas Flamel, Newton, John Dee. The chain of seekers is long.”

  “And so she came to believe in the quest,” Sveti said.

  “Perhaps more pertinent is the question of why Rasputin would attempt to create a potion so universally believed to be of harm to the Nephilim—to the very family he served,” Azov said.

  “Ah, you’ve hit at the very root of Angela’s skepticism,” Valko replied. “But her doubts were quickly assuaged by consulting the Nephil family tree.”

  “The Book of Generations,” Vera said. She’d seen the society’s copy of the infamous collection of genealogies just once, during the same conference in Paris that had exposed her to Seraphina Valko’s powerful photographs of the dead Watcher, the very conference where she had met Verlaine. The Nephilim genealogies were considered to be rare and precious resources.