The Scholomance (4 page)

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Mara did not
consider herself an imaginative person. Imagination, after all, is born of
ignorance, and it is a hard thing for a telepath to be ignorant. The Panic Room’s
design was therefore very basic, having evolved from Mara’s very basic need for
some sort of barrier between herself and the barrage of mental noise in which
she lived. She’d always had it, in some form or another. Her earliest memory in
all the world was of drawing off into some dark, interior place one afternoon
because her father was doing the sexthing to Ola, the girl who got paid to walk
Mara to and from preschool. Of course, in those days, she didn’t have a name
for the place, nor had she imbued it with any of its current conveniences. It
was just a place to go to when things got unpleasant or thoughts came in too
loud or too fast.

The earliest
Panic Room in its recognizable form had been built over the course of a single
summer when she was seven and had gone with her mother to the house in New
Hampshire. That house had a basement, and nothing else she saw or experienced
that summer had quite the same impact as Mara had found there in the bottom of
that old house. The walls were poured concrete—cool, grey, solidly built and
impervious to time and weather. Exposed wires and pipes ran across the low
ceiling, connecting the room to the rest of the world, but in such a way that
no part of it could actually intrude. Sound was muffled; light, diffused. The
air had a heavy, musty quality that Mara had never known in her mother’s
immaculate home. And everywhere around her were relics out of time, held away
from the dangers of intrusive Life. It was Stillness and Protection. It was
Peace.

She wanted one
to take home with her, and so, while her mother played tennis and shopped and
had parties, seven year-old Mara built a Basement. It took several weeks,
during which time, the young girl terrified the servants and disturbed her
mother with mysterious fainting spells, nosebleeds, and on one memorable
morning, pitching out of her chair at breakfast for six and one-half minutes of
frothing convulsions.

An examination
by the local doctor was duly performed and Mara pronounced healthy overall,
merely suffering from ‘nervous energy’ caused by her strange surroundings and a
child’s usual vigor. Mara knew her mother believed the doctor was a quack (
condescending quack, makes his living
patronizing the summer people, wouldn’t know real medicine if it bit him on the
ankle
), just like she knew the doctor thought Mara had actually swallowed
something (
probably got hold of one of
the old bitch’s Valiums, kid’s got that too-calm look about her, probably been
stealing them for years
), but they both pretended to be satisfied with this
explanation and Mara went home. If Mara’s mom had pushed a little harder, she
might have gotten an MRI for her little girl and that would have revealed some
truly astonishing developments in little Kimara’s brain, but Caroline Warner
was not a pushy woman even then and the Basement work proceeded.

By the end of
that summer, Mara had succeeded in creating for herself a windowless, doorless,
featureless space inside her own mind where the cast-off jabber of the rest of
the world could not penetrate. The walls were cool and grey, and she could sit
upon the hard floor and just be in the quiet. The only trouble was, when she
was there, she wasn’t in herself and if she happened to be awake when she went
into the Basement, her body tended to drop vapidly on its face and drool, which
scared people. If she went in as she went to sleep, she got up in the morning
feeling heavy, sick, and generally exhausted.

By the time she’d
met Connie, the Basement had already undergone its first transformation, which
included the addition of a big-screen TV like the one in her dad’s game-room. While
she was awake, the television showed her the world through her own open eyes
and kept her from looking quite so spaced out (in time, she was even able to walk
and hold conversations from the Panic Room, which made going to school
infinitely more bearable) and when asleep, the TV played the dreams she had to
watch so that she woke up rested. But it was still cramped quarters and rather
limited in scope.

Over the years,
modifications were made, both to the room’s comforts and its usefulness. The
plain, grey walls grew windows which allowed her to see the Mindstorm. Slipping
back into her body before the advent of the windows had been a lot like walking
outside without any idea of the weather, and many was the time she’d fallen
unwittingly into the psychic equivalent of a typhoon, the shock of which
frequently caused her to spontaneously urinate, vomit, or generally embarrass
herself and whoever happened to be with her. Then came the chair, because even
though she knew she didn’t really have a body on the inside, her legs
stubbornly insisted on cramping up after long hours on the Basement’s floor. Now,
of course, she could hover, but the chair had been necessary for many years. The
monitors replaced the television: one to let her look out from her eyes, one
that took in her brain’s spatial readings of what her arms and legs were doing
and therefore made it possible for her to walk around and touch things without
having to go back into the body, and a third, which showed her the dreams she
had at night and any memories she wanted to explore during the day. In other
words, it had ceased to be the Basement of her childhood and transformed itself
into an adult’s paranoid place of refuge. Hence the new name, which was as
close to humor as Mara really got. She was not prone to panic. Neither did she
joke.

At this point in
her life, slipping into the Panic Room, which had once come damned close to
putting Mara in a child-sized coffin, had become as casual and as essential an
act as slipping on a pair of eyeglasses. There, she could look up the memory of
a phone number from a decade past as easily as another woman might glance in a
mirror, or shield herself against a Christmas Sale Mindstorm as if she were
shrugging into an overcoat. Without it, riding in a car on a busy highway was
torture; driving one, impossible. Beyond that, it permitted Mara to make a tidy
living around the poker tables, counting cards and studying her opponents’
hands without the distracting babble of the rest of the casino bleeding in.

A very tidy
living.

It did not
surprise her to discover psychics like herself plying the same trade on her
frequent trips to Nevada’s copious casinos (or employed there), but it astonished
her that they had no Panic Rooms of their own. The human mind was, to Mara’s
unimaginative way of thinking, like a room filled with loose sheets of paper
blowing wildly about. The other telepaths she’d come across could put those
papers in neat stacks or perhaps in labeled filing cabinets, but not one of
them had put those files in a computer like Mara, or locked that computer away
behind walls.

Even as a child,
she had never believed herself to be unique, she’d just assumed that she was
one of a very few. As an adult, her discovery that other telepaths had no Panic
Rooms had been heavily stained by the suspicion that they were just better at
hiding them. And so, not knowing whether she were retaliating or laying in a
pre-emptive strike, Mara had developed an almost schizophrenic way of thinking:
She had surface thoughts, floating around in the Panic Room for those
presumably sneaky psychics to see, and hidden thoughts, hidden even deeper and
shut up even tighter, in the Panic Room’s Basement, so to speak. Likewise, she
could not simply listen to someone talk without also feeling at his thoughts,
and she had become quite adept at stealing in and out again undetected, even
from those minds who believed they were defended.

None of this had
ever seemed important enough for Mara to think about, any more than a person
ordinarily invested thought in the formation of her thumb, although it is
undeniable that a human thumb is absolutely essential to one’s function and
quality of life. As she rode in the Romanian’s cab, safely shut away from the
shrapnel of other motorists’ thoughts, Mara enjoyed the Panic Room’s protection
without dwelling on its origins or the skills its use had allowed her to hone. At
no point in the coming days would it occur to her to marvel at the power of her
Panic Room, although she was certainly grateful for it. It had become a tool—her
eyeglasses, her overcoat, her mirror, her thumb—and tools existed to be used
without wonder.

And it was just
as well, for wonder surely would have been detected and followed to its source,
but Mara’s indifference could only be to her benefit. Being unimaginative did
have its advantages. One could not think of purple-haired fairies, perhaps, but
one was surprisingly well-equipped to deal with them.

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The
town of Altenmunster was ten streets, twelve bars, two churches, and one
fountain. The cabbie let her out at one of the taverns, fancifully named
La
Dansul Capra
, The Dancing Goat. He accepted her generous tip, then began to
drive away, braked, sat idle for nearly two minutes, and finally came back. He
thrust his fist through the open window. His little silver cross dangled,
catching what grey light the sky had to offer and turning it into a hopeful
sort of gleam. “God go with you,” he grumbled when she took it, and then drove
rapidly away. He believed he would not see her again. Coming from a man who
never saw any of his tourist fares again and never thought twice about it, this
was a sinister note to depart on.

She
watched him go, and when his coarse, brooding mind was entirely out of range,
she turned and gave her new surroundings a hard stare. To Mara, the mountains
of Romania bore a striking resemblance to those she’d hiked at home in
Washington State. The Cascades may never appear in one of Universal’s grainy
horror movies, but they had no doubt made good practice for climbing the
crumbling, ice-covered cliffs she saw before her now. She did not anticipate
trouble on the ascent, an attitude not due so much to confidence in her own
skill as to the knowledge that Connie would have had to have gone before her,
and Connie’s idea of roughing it was camping without an electrical hookup and a
flushing toilet.

The
thought brought a faint curve to her lips. Mara let her eyes drop, unfocused,
to touch the smile with careful fingers before it could die away. Her heart
ached briefly; she touched that, too. ‘I should have gone after her when this
whole thing started,’ she thought. ‘I could have caught her.’ And she listened,
but no answering knell of grief or regret sounded. Oh well.

Altenmunster
did not see many tourists, clearly, but they were able to provide surprisingly
well for a camping trip. In a very short while, Mara had solidly rigged herself
with a sleeping bag, backpack, climbing gear, food, and a good hunting knife. The
rough men in the store watched her shop and laughed at the free way in which
she spent her money, thinking Romanian thoughts in sneering tones, but the
laughter stopped when she got close enough for them to see her eyes.

She
showed Connie’s picture around, reasoning that if Connie had known the town’s
name, she’d probably been there, and indeed she found half a dozen folk who did
remember her, although they all solemnly denied it. She saw the Evil Eye forked
at her quite a few times. She put on the cross, but it didn’t stop them. The
town priest came out of one church, following at a discreet distance and
splashing holy water on the ground where she walked. Not to be outdone, the other
church soon spat out a second priest, who dogged her from the other side of the
street, swinging a censer. She did her best to ignore them both and they didn’t
follow her very far out of town.

Lake
Teufelsee was seventeen miles out from Altenmunster. Between the weather and
the wilderness, it made two days’ hike. There was a compass in the pommel of
her new knife. She used it to orient herself south of the one and west of the
other and then she began to search. Halloween night only, the letter had said. Emphasis
on ‘only’. She wasn’t sure what to look for and so, in her unimaginative way,
she looked for everything.

And
found nothing.

For
three days, Mara scoured the foot of frozen, crumbling cliffs for some sign of
a cave, an encampment, a road, anything. Now and then, she stumbled across the
detritus of human life—the charred remains of bygone fires, rusted cans, broken
bottles of foreign beer—but that was all.

On
the fourth day, October 29
^th
, something touched at her mind. Immediately,
she pulled back into the Panic Room and looked at the Mindstorm, where the
muted, smoggy haze of the empty landscape now flickered with someone’s
approach. She thought of Altenmunster’s roughs first, but when she snuck out a
stealthy hand to test it, realized that whoever he was, he wasn’t Romanian. She
thought he might be Italian. The language was similar to the boisterous babble
she recalled from visits to Connie’s house, and the architecture she saw in his
memory was certainly reminiscent of Rome, although a lot of those European
countries looked the same to her uneducated eye. But he was coming towards her
and not by accident. This was no holiday for him. He had come here three times
before. He meant to get inside this time.

He came for the
Scholomance.

As he made his
grim way towards her, Mara sorted through his mind, locating each image he had
of this place. Using them, she studied the mountains around her and identified
one of them from the Halloweens of his past. In this man’s mind, in the black
of some remembered night, there was an opening in the cliff-side, midway
between the peak and the lake. She looked now and saw nothing, not even a
shadow in the place he believed he had seen some tunnel’s vast mouth open and
throbbing with torchlight. She headed over anyway. People could lie and eyes
could be deceived, but thoughts were impossible to fake.