The Book of Miranda | gxg | ✔︎

(8) Cultish Benefactors

The door to my secret hideaway has no lock. It's the only flaw of the place, as far as I'm concerned, other than the mildewy dungeon smell and total lack of insulation. I ease the door shut behind me. When I can trust nobody has followed me, I pad over to my window alcove. It's deep enough that I'll have time to hide this book if anyone walks in on me. I spend a good minute arranging myself until I'm able to both see the door and trick myself into thinking this seat is comfortable. Only then do I retrieve the book from the back of my waistband.

It's the same one I saw Exie pretending not to read in the library. The same kind, anyway: this isn't her copy, unless she found a way to stash hers in the school's penitentiary room since yesterday. It gives me a certain thrill to know I'm only a step behind her own investigation. I examine the book's cover first. There's no title. No author name. No attribution at all. The gold-embossed angel is the only decoration, even, and the spine is bare as horse's backside. Its leather is old enough to crackle as I crack the book open. My smile fades.

It's a bible. I should have expected that. I found the thing in the back of a pew, for God's sake, but I was hoping for at least a hymnal. The miniature text runs about the pages like someone's bottled an ants' nest and poured it out for me in some kind of cursed communion. I hate text. I hate reading. It's always been like this, no matter the efforts of the few truly amazing teachers I had through my first experience of boarding school. As a kid back then, I cried when told it was time to head back home for the holidays.

I leaf through wafer-thin pages, not even attempting to read their contents now. There are variations of the bible, I know, but identifying them requires one of two things: preexisting knowledge of where to find the discrepancies, or a great deal of stamina for reading. I have neither. I flip through the rest of the book because the page texture is gratifying, then let it fall shut in my lap. Only then does a different thought occur to me. I open just the cover this time, and am faced with the very obvious title page that almost all bibles still possess. Pressure builds behind my temples as I struggle to parse the words. At least the pages are old enough to provide a pleasant tan background.

The Miranda Bible, it says.

I frown. I don't trust my first pass, so I repeat it, this time tracing out the letters so they don't run away on me. I was right on the first reading. I might not know my Proverbs from my Psalms, but I know enough about bibles to know this isn't one of the variants. Not one in common circulation, anyway. I flip it shut on my finger and inspect the angel on the cover again. In keeping with the atypicality of the bible itself, I've never seen a cathedral so obsessed with angels, either. Maybe the two are connected.

So Melliford Academy occupies the former home of a cult. Delightful.

There's no other annotation on the title page. I check the next few for additional detail, and find a date for this biblical edition. It's properly gothic—a sixty-year-old reprint of an original manuscript more than five times that age. At least something here has a timeline that makes sense. Most cults aren't known for their wealth. If this one originated three hundred years ago and took two hundred and forty to afford a building, its younger cult-spawn might have built this place and populated it with special bibles in honor of their predecessors' legacy. 

The question, then, is where they went. I lower the book again and let my eyes wander the expansive grounds outside the window beside me. How did Melliford Academy come to exist in a cult building? I open the book in my lap for the third time and leaf through its opening pages, but there's no sign of any Massinghams. Maybe headmaster Massingham had a thing for angels and the pocket money to buy a cathedral off a cult that bankrupted itself on all those stained-glass windows. Maybe I'll get to the end of this week and find out in chapel that this place has some rather angelically inclined patrons on its roster. Or maybe our esteemed headmaster is descended from the Massingham that commissioned those angel paintings. I've never heard of nepotism strong enough to land someone a full cathedral for their remedial academy, but there's a first time for everything.