Angels of Darkness

hour of conversation together all told, but she was the person I liked best in the entire compound.
    I glanced over my shoulder toward the hallway that led to several doors, one of them guarding the root cellar. “Last night. Three times. That door would creak open as if someone was coming upstairs. I kept going over to push it shut, and it would come open again. Then I kept thinking I could feel someone staring at me, but I’d turn around, and no one was there.” I offered a small shudder. “It just—made me uncomfortable.”
    Judith nodded. “That happened to me a couple of times when I worked in the kitchen overnight. I just learned to ignore it.”
    Rhesa, who was scrubbing spills off the great iron stove, glanced over her shoulder uneasily. “That door never swung open while I worked here alone.”
    â€œThere’s plenty of places around this school that give me the shivers,” said a heavyset, vacuous man named Elon. He was middle-aged and wholly devoid of personality; I sometimes wondered if he’d arrived as a student when he was sixteen and never had the energy to leave. “I don’t like the barn at night. Or the library.”
    Deborah snorted. “Not one of them is as peculiar as the Great House,” she said.
    I pretended to frown. “Why? What’s wrong with the Great House?”
    Rhesa grimaced at me. “It’s creepy .”
    â€œWell, it’s old and tumbledown,” I said. “And I know none of us is supposed to go over there.”
    â€œAnd haven’t you ever wondered why?” muttered Elon.
    I shrugged. “I thought Headmistress liked her privacy.”
    Deborah snorted again. “She likes to keep everyone in the school safe ,” she corrected. “That place is haunted.”
    I wasn’t the only worker who exclaimed aloud at this. Haunted! You’re saying there are ghosts at the Great House? Who are they?
    Deborah waved a hand for silence and we all fell quiet. “I’ve been here twenty years, and I’ve never set foot in that building,” she said dramatically. “And I heard tales about it from the day I arrived. People would see lights flashing in the upper windows. They’d see shapes moving on the roof. There would be sounds—terrible, groaning sounds—and the noise of glass breaking and voices shouting. But only at night. In the morning, it would all be peaceful again.”
    She glanced around as if to make sure she had everyone’s attention, but we were all rapt. “Of course, you’d think all those disturbances were caused by a ghost, but that’s not what people believed. They said there was a live man there—sick—hurt—maybe mad—cared for by the woman who used to be headmistress, back when I was a girl. A man everyone would recognize, if they could see his face.” She nodded for emphasis.
    â€œWho was it?” Rhesa demanded.
    Deborah dropped her voice to a whisper and we all leaned in to hear. “The old Archangel.”
    â€œGabriel?” Elon asked.
    Deborah shook her head. “Raphael,” she breathed.
    She met with stares of disbelief. “That can’t be,” Judith said. “Raphael died when Mount Galo came down.”
    â€œAnd he was ancient,” Rhesa added.
    Deborah frowned, clearly not liking our skepticism. “Everyone believed he died when the god threw the thunderbolt against the mountain,” she said in a stronger voice. “But he didn’t. He was disfigured and crippled, but he survived. And he was brought here to this remote place to live out his days in obscurity.”
    â€œBut Rhesa’s right,” Judith objected. “He was fifty or more when the mountain was destroyed, wasn’t he? And that was almost seventy years ago. So even if you came here twenty years ago—”
    I could see her struggling with the math, but I had already done the calculations. Twenty years ago, Raphael would have been roughly a hundred years old. And even if he had survived those legendary events, he would have been mightily bruised and broken. Every schoolchild learned the story of the time Jovah smote Mount Galo and almost destroyed the world. As the god required, all the people of Samaria had gathered in the mountain’s shadow on the Plain of Sharon, prepared to sing the annual Gloria to prove to the god that they were living in harmony. But Raphael had been