The Book of Miranda | gxg | ✔︎

(9) Sidewise Angel Eyes

Curiosity is a euphemism. It works on Clarice as well as it does on any of the adults in my life, and endears her to me just a little further. She's in bed before curfew and slumbering untroubled by the time the last shoe-heels scuttle up the hall like so many roughshod cockroaches. Melliford Academy goes graveyard with the onset of night. I lie in bed letting half-breaths whisper through my lips as I listen for the distinctive pace of hall monitors. I hear none.

This, then, must be one more extension of this school's affable demeanor towards its student-passing inmates. I trace a hand over the bible hidden somewhere beneath my mattress. I want to take it out—light a candle and pore over its pages—but I've got places to be that aren't beneath my covers, inviting as their warmth may be. When it's late enough that the last homesick student has likely stopped sniffling, I drop my corpse imitation and sit up. Clarice doesn't stir. I contemplate my uniform. It's black with white piping along the seams, the kind of pattern a bug wears if it's asking to get eaten by a robin. I dig my suitcase key from its pocket and open my luggage instead.

Clothing is one area where I've never fought my parents. Our local tailor knows how to fit a blouse to someone who isn't made of matchsticks, and skirts have always been my choice of bottomwear. Boys ask me if they snag on twigs. They do, but that's rarely what I'm sneaking through. And when it comes to scaling fences, racing up stairs, or secreting myself behind long, velvet curtains, I'd take a skirt's freedom of movement any day.

The darkest skirt among my luggage is a silky thing, knee-length and more willing to absorb the window's moonlight than a businessman embezzling funds. I slip it on. Shirts are a harder call, until I linger long enough for my indecision to unveil the room's true temperature. I'll want a sweater anyway. Knee-length black stockings mask my remaining pallor. I keep my hair down. It falls just below my shoulders like a shadowy veil.

By now, the floor's chill has seeped up through my stockings like I've stepped in a puddle inadvertently. I contemplate my shoes. For comfort's sake, I'd submit to jailing my feet in those for tonight's exploration. For stealth's sake, I'd rather not. Stealth wins. I grab another pair of stockings even warmer than the first and double-sock myself. It won't block the cold's assault, but at least I won't walk about sounding like a nutcracker's army in the midnight silence of the school. Only then do I leave my room.

Melliford Academy is a different place at night. I can see now what my father has against rib vaults on second-story ceilings. In the gloom, this feels less like a building and more akin to walking through the ribcage of some monstrous animal. The femur-like shapes of the pillars intensify, and lancet windows become finger-bones of their own accord. I shudder. I have nothing against night-struck buildings in a normal world. A ghost or two, I can handle. But there's something different about the moonlight through the windows at the hallway's end.

A waxing gibbous moon glows eye-bright in the sky outside. Its light casts opalescent angel silhouettes across the floor, but they're distorted. Elongated, gargoyle-esque. Praying hands spear across the stones, and wings meant to be feathered become jagged pantomimes more akin to bats' appendages. Eyes melt and bleed on angelic faces. Open mouths howl. Their darkness is a horror of its own, drawn down and down into screams of agony frozen soundless and eternal in their panes of mounted glass. One angel carries a book in its hands. In the floor's rendition, this too stretches scroll-like, bright with the moon's glow, long enough to record the sins of all humanity.

I fight to turn my back on the ghastly scene. It's just moonlight through the stained-glass windows. But that doesn't stop my hand from rising like I want to cross myself, a superstitious gesture even my mother hid back home for its Catholic connotations. It's not religious anymore. Catholicism fled southern Englemark with the banishment of the Sectants two hundred years ago, leaving only their gothic trace behind. This whole cathedral is a cross, but I don't feel protected. Not with the silent screams of angels painted on the floor.