The Book of Miranda | gxg | ❖

(36) Fear No Evil

I'm not a fan of doing things the hard way.

I grit my teeth and rejoin Barnabas on the balcony outside. We know the books are somewhere up here—at least the one Massingham used for the last cult ritual. Where would I store my most important manuscript if I was a cult leader intent on lobotomizing nosy students for my cause?

My eyes wander over the school's vaulted hall. The angel iconography is particularly stark from here; this place has enough angel art to populate the tenor section of God's heavenly choir. But why the cathedral? The cult could have carried on their activities in the tunnels of their predecessors, or built an actual school if that was always the intention. Even if stained glass and rib vaults were necessary to convince posh parents that their children would be properly reeducated, they didn't need to bathe the place in angels.

The church layout has to be important. It always is, in Gothic architecture. It might even be significant to Massingham himself, a man either committed or brainwashed enough to shell out ten years' tuition money on gold-framed angel paintings for a chapel we don't even worship in. If I'm correct in that hunch, it means Massingham is unlikely to run his cult rituals out of a random spare room somewhere.

What are the most significant places in a church?

I never thought I would thank my father's ramblings on Gothic architecture. Those churches are always built with their crosses aligned in the same direction. This one's transept is at the wrong end, but I guess when you're worshiping a fallen angel, there's no harm in laying out your cross iconography upside down. The chapel end of the building, meanwhile, is typically where relics and holy books are kept, within subliminal distance of worshippers. If these cult books are anywhere, I'd expect to find them there.

The chapel end of this second-floor hallway ends at a wall. I tap every stone, looking for one that presses like the secret stairwell's entrance button, but we're in no such luck. Either the entrance is better hidden, or we're looking in the wrong place. These two far ends of the hallway don't connect beneath the rose window, so we sneak the full length of the second floor to reach the other side of the chapel. A second search here yields no more answers than the first.

I glare down the east wall of the school. It's thick enough to hide the staircase behind the demon's painting, but that was a narrow staircase indeed. If there's a room hidden father up the masonry, it's only big enough for the teachers to stand shoulder to shoulder, which doesn't sound very conducive to reverent activities. They've been doing this for decades. Their base of operations must be somewhere else.

What else do I know about cruciform church architecture?

East. They face east.

This one doesn't.

The secret pattern dawns on me all at once. I'm no early riser, granted, but I've never seen the sun rise through that great rose window. It's early afternoon now, and that light is slanting down at an angle that tells me all I need to know. The cross isn't upside down. Its top points east just like any other Gothic church. It's just the internal layout that's reversed, with the chapel facing away from the holy sunrise, and the entrance towards it. But over that entrance...

Barnabas has to drag my sleeve to keep me from dashing back to the entrance end of the school. There are doors here just like the rest, evenly spaced and made of wood. Only one, though, sits directly above the school's entrance. I test its handle. It's locked.

Barnabas gets to work. Picking the lock takes longer than the ones before it, which I try not to take as a promising sign when Barnabas might just be as nervous as I am. A scream from the lower floor makes me flinch. Our fellow students are succeeding in keeping the teachers distracted. A faint smoke-smell tickles my nose, and sunlight slanting through the school's west-facing windows highlights the pall hanging in the air. Nothing's burned down yet, but unless the flames reach the roof beams, there's not much to burn anyway. Just the contents of a couple rooms, and a whole lot of glass to crack and shatter. Even this balcony is stone.