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.

I fix my eyes ahead and stride purposefully towards the opposite wing of the school. The windows there are dark, their angels tame and self-contained two stories above me. I keep my eyes from them by counting doors. All too soon, I stand before the one headmaster Massingham disappeared through earlier today. I test the handle. It doesn't open. A few more tugs confirm this isn't just a matter of mass against my mashed-potato arm muscles. The door is secured somehow, and it's not by key. Massingham and Mrs. Hardwork both opened it from the outside, and it doesn't have a keyhole.

I check that the shadows continue to hide me, then begin a different course of action. I jerk the handle sideways, up, down, out, in. Twist and push. Yank and turn. When I'm sure it's not the handle, I prod the door itself instead. There's a mechanism somewhere, puzzled into here no doubt with the intent to frustrate interlopers. I work my way over every inch of wood, then kick the door and regret it. I'm not wearing shoes. My toes smart as I hop around one-footed in an attempt not to swear out loud. Only then does my shoulder hit the wall, which makes a very un-wall-like sound in reply.

I freeze. Intrigue dulls the pain as I return my foot to service and—in a stunning demonstration of the self-preservation I do not have—poke the strange stone beside the doorway. It depresses. I push it harder, and in the absence of all other sound, I hear the faintest suggestion of a click.

This time, the door opens when I turn the handle.

I slip through before anyone can see me, as though my trespass will rouse hall monitors from their nonexistent beds. The door falls shut behind me. With that, my first folly becomes evident. There are no windows in this passageway. I didn't bring a candle. I ache to press back through the door as darkness settles in around me. It's the kind of darkness that makes you feel like you've got cloth over your face, except when you scrabble at your eye sockets, there's nothing there. I swat at it. That does about what you'd expect: about as much as throwing a fistful of air at the Dervin Channel. It doesn't part like Moses made it. God is not on my side.

I retreat to the door and find the closest wall to feel my way along. My toes promptly take one for the team and inform me when I reach a stair. I never thought I'd miss shoes. The one upshot of darkness, at least, is that there's no view for my watering eyes to struggle with. I hobble up the staircase. It's not my toes that warn me this time when I reach the top. I run face-first into another door.

I'm so glad I'm alone.

This door opens without a secret mechanism, a relief proportional to my mounting claustrophobia. Moonlight floods the hallway on the other side. I've reached that secret balcony on the school's second floor. Even my body's sacrifices can't repress the thrill of misdemeanor my presence no doubt represents. Doors brood at intervals along this mezzanine, concealed from the floor below. There's no sign of life from most of them. But only most. As my eyes adjust, a different light source flickers in the corner of my vision. Only halfway down this hallway, the faintest glow of candlelight lurks through the crack beneath a heavy wooden door.

This is the point at which a normal person would retreat. But I've got about as much to lose as an ocean castaway, so the most I do is mourn the lack of angel statues to conceal me. I skulk sock-footed towards the door. When I'm close enough, I catch a sound inside. Paper crackles. There's a long pause, then it repeats: someone's leafing through a book, and even as I listen, they give up and thump the cover shut again. Another one groans open.

I'm so caught up in my eavesdropping that it takes a moment to realize the clicking at the back of my mind is neither my heartbeat nor a product of this room's midnight inhabitant. I press against the wall. Someone's walking up the hallway one floor down. A peek reveals another student, and they're a lot less practiced in the art of subtlety than me. Even I can appreciate that irony.

When I glance back at the door beside me, the candle-glow is gone.

The footsteps stop. They've reached the end of this school-wing, not far from where my "secret" hideout room nestles among the others of its kind. There's a pause long enough to sing the Doxology. Then the footsteps start towards us again. They're softer than before. I'm sure only I hear them stop this time, right below us. Right beside the secret door. There's a doorknob's click. Then a thump I recognize. Someone just entered the staircase I came up along.

Very, very slowly, the door beside me begins to open.

My heart lodges in my larynx. I've got nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. I could make it to the nearest corner if I sprinted, but the silence of the school means even my wooly-padded stomping will be audible to anyone emerging from this door. I suck a breath and brace for capture. I'll take expulsion. Investigation tempts me, but I can fall back on plan Botch My Semester And Humiliate My Parents if need be.

The silhouette that leaves the room stops those thoughts faster than a downtown traffic jam. I'd know that fluffed hair anywhere.

"Hey," I hiss.

Exie jumps as though shot. The open door behind her sends my instincts into overdrive. I lunge. Exie gasps and leaps back, but I'm faster. I seize her wrist and drag her back into the room she just vacated. The door falls shut behind us, and I fall against it. Like something will try to bust through on the other side.

"What are you doing here?" demands Exie in a whisper fierce enough to papercut. Moonlight from the windows casts her in silhouette beside me. The room we're in is definitely an office, its walls lined with books, maps, and ancient paintings.

"Someone's coming," I say. 

"Did you lead them here?"

"No," I snap. "Shut up!"

"Tell me why you're here."

"Why I'm here?"

She grits her teeth. "You're going to get us both caught, you ninny."

A voice outside slams silence over both of us. Frozen against the door, I'm perfectly placed to hear what happens next.

"Oh!" says a young man's voice. I know that voice. He's a student, and he's in the secret stairwell.

Then he screams. 

Like this chapter if you think Des should have stuck with plan Botch My Semester

Comment who you think just screamed the first scream  👼