Angels of Darkness

Not only was it situated between sands to the south, mountains to the west, and ocean to the east, it was served by a single infrequently traveled road. In other words, it offered little chance for anyone who lived there to escape somewhere else.
    That choice had been deliberate, I assumed, since most of our students had some experience with crime, and many had not come here of their own free will. The theory was that, if they were forced to stay at the Gabriel School long enough to learn a trade, they would eventually become skilled craftspeople who could be gainfully employed, and everyone would benefit.
    The problem was, a small school in an inaccessible location wasn’t an easy place for teachers and cooks and housekeepers to leave, either, if they got tired of the hard work, the cramped accommodations, or the lack of excitement. But I didn’t mind. I didn’t feel trapped. I planned on staying at the Gabriel School for a good long time. For one thing, I was tired of running. For another, I had nowhere else to go.
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    B y the time I had been at the Gabriel School for a month, I had pretty well established a routine. I would go to bed in the morning and rise early in the afternoon to enjoy a few daylight hours to myself. I joined the cooks in the kitchen just as they finished serving dinner, and I completed the cleaning by myself after they drifted back to their rooms. Then I had a couple hours of freedom before it was time to begin assembling ingredients for the morning bread.
    I spent those hours exploring the school. The first few weeks were chilly enough to keep me indoors, investigating locked storerooms (easy enough to break into), musty closets, and stairwells that led to underground rooms that everyone else had forgotten. I found a hidden cache of fine wine, a strongbox of gold, and historical documents about the school that were more interesting than you would have supposed. More than once I happened upon romantic liaisons between workers or a pair of students, though I was stealthy enough that none of these trysting couples ever realized I was there. I only watched long enough to be sure that no one was unwilling, and then I quietly backed away.
    The fourth week I was there, the weather decidedly improved, and I ventured outside to look around. The Gabriel School owned about ten acres enclosed by a high wrought-iron fence whose narrow metal bars were so rusted through in spots that they would hardly keep an intruder out or a fugitive in. Of the six main buildings, one housed the workers, two housed the students, and two served as classrooms, kitchen, dining hall, library, and other public spaces. The last one was a barn/stable/storage facility where we kept barrels of dried fruit, shelves of canned vegetables, three cows, five horses, and two ancient carts. There were all sorts of interesting cubbyholes and bins and haylofts in the barn, and I planned to investigate them all.
    But the very first night I spent ghosting around the grounds, it wasn’t the barn that captured my attention. It was the tall, narrow building at the top of a small hill on the other side of the fence. The house where the headmistress lived. By day it appeared drab and dispirited, with lugubrious gray drapes visible in the ground-floor windows, black ones on the second story, and weathered old boards covering up the openings on the attic level. By night—especially a night such as this one, with a full moon intermittently obscured by flat, listless clouds—it had a sort of wild, sinister allure. I found myself standing with my back to the workers’ dorm, my hands wrapped around two of those iron bars, staring up at its eerie silhouette.
    It appeared as if everyone in the place was asleep, for no lights showed on any level. Not that too many people inhabited the Great House, as it was called. The headmistress lived there alone except for a housekeeper and a footman, who rarely mingled with staff at the school. And none of us—not student, not teacher, not cook—was permitted to enter the Great House. If an emergency arose and we needed to summon the headmistress, we would ring a brass bell that hung inside the compound. No such emergency had occurred since I had been on the campus.
    The instant I had been told of the prohibition against entering the Great House, I had been seized with a desire to do just that. I knew that the day would come when the headmistress fell sick or had to travel,