was robed in black with a cowl that nearly covered his face. The third looked straight ahead with a frightening intensity, strikingly handsome, like a movie star hired to play a psychopath with the flat, dead eyes of a remorseless killer. I shivered, having seen that same look in Coffee Guy’s eyes. Whoever had painted these Nephilim had first-hand knowledge.
“I can’t imagine anyone getting a sense of comfort from these angels,” I said. There was a horrible beauty to them that made it difficult to look away, and a disquieting sense that it might be best to keep an eye on them. Near the painting, the resonance was disquieting and dangerous, as if the room itself was screaming a warning to stay back.
“Unfortunately, you’re right,” Mrs. Morrissey said. “They were painted by Gerard Astor, an artist from Charleston who gained national – and international – prominence. But Gerard battled some demons of his own, like depression and drugs. This was the last painting he finished before he vanished. Most art historians believe he committed suicide.”
I remembered what Father Anne had said, “Poor, doomed Gerard Astor”… If he had enough contact with the Nephilim to paint their portraits, it didn’t surprise me he killed himself. Especially if the Nephilim came with the same dose of overwhelming guilt that I felt around Coffee Guy.
I let Mrs. Morrissey lead me around the rest of the exhibition, although I did not turn my back on the fallen angel painting. The other pieces were light-hearted, inspirational, and gorgeous, and I tried to push the darker images from my mind.
“I think your display is fabulous,” I said, surprised at how many different ways there were to fashion angels. I let my hand gently touch one of the carved and painted wooden angels, and felt a warm, protective power resonating from the sculpture. I was willing to bet the same would be true for most, if not all, of the figures. Whether the artists knew it or not, the angels they felt moved to carve carried their own flicker of magic, bound up in the emotional imprint of the artists that made the figures.
Reluctantly, I left the ballroom and followed Mrs. Morrissey to the Archive’s library. “Here we go,” she said, bringing a large, canvas-bound book down to one of the reading tables. Not everything had been scanned into computers yet, and while doing so was an ongoing project, such things take time and money. Hence the ‘stacks’, dozens of shelves filled with old volumes organized by the Dewey Decimal System with Mrs. Morrissey’s brain as the search engine.
“The Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1854,” I read, looking down at the embossed cover of the large book. Yellow Fever had scourged Charleston from its founding until the creation of modern medicine. A hot, wet climate, mosquitoes and the constant coming and going of strangers in a port city was a recipe for epidemics. But even by those standards, the outbreak in 1854 had been a doozie.
Gingerly, I touched the cover of the book, but no vision appeared to me. Just a persistent sadness, perhaps from others who had looked for clues to the fate of ancestors in these pages.
“I can’t imagine wandering around the city with a sketch book in the middle of an epidemic,” Mrs. Morrissey said as I flipped the pages in the oversized book. Black-and-white charcoal sketches caught images of funeral processions, corpses littering the streets, carts filled with dead bodies and mourners of every age and social class. A few old daguerreotype photographs were sprinkled among the sketches, faded with the years.
“They must have realized that the epidemic would go down in history,” I mused. The sketches looked like they had been drawn quickly, but with an eye for detail. I turned one more page, and drew in a sharp breath.
“Did you find what you needed?” Mrs. Morrissey asked as she busied herself with another book.
Oh yeah. The next sketch looked like the cover for a fantasy novel. A man in a long duster coat was shooting at five dark, cloaked figures. Bodies lay heaped around the feet of the creatures, and one of the beings gnawed on a human leg bone. Streaks of lightning fell from the sky, and the gunslinger’s weapon shot fire.
Most people would have taken the sketch for allegory, mankind versus the plague. I was certain the sketch’s artist had witnessed a battle between Winfield and the Nephilim. I took a picture of the page with my phone, and