by R. Lee Smith
If ever there were to be lies between them, it would have to come now, because that was the unavoidable question. Mara felt at Connie’s familiar rhythms of wistfulness and daydreams, knowing it would all change if she told the truth.
But she had never lied to Connie. Connie was her friend. Her one and only.
She said, “I do.” Said it with all the solemnity of a bride in church. Said it and then had to prove it. And when the shock and fascination faded (children were remarkably resilient to both, Mara had found) the wistfulness remained and the only change was envy. Not fear, not distrust, not even a bright flare of paranoia as she thought back at all the unpleasant things Mara might have overheard, but only envy. In retrospect, that was bad enough, but at the time, Mara had been relieved.
“I wish I had what you have,” Connie had said, coloring her fairy’s hair purple. “I’d give anything to be magic.”
The obsession began there. Mara really thought so. If not for that confession, that stupid hour spent doing card tricks, Connie might have stayed with fairies and dragons for another year or two and then gone on to boys and ponies like a normal kid. Instead, with undeniable proof before her that mystical powers existed, Connie had tried to make herself receive them, and no amount of failure could ever slam the door that Mara had opened. Gone were the sleepovers with coloring books and popcorn. Now it was all meditation and Freemasonry and Zener cards and the books of Charles Fort.
Mara tried. Best friends always try. But in the end, the truth came out: You could teach someone a foreign language with immersion and with enough time, even the accent would come out. You could teach someone with no musical talent to play the piano well, if not with any real passion. But no one could just teach someone to be psychic. It was not perception so much as connection, and somewhere inside Connie, that connection simply wasn’t there.
Long after she recognized the futility in Mara’s compliance, Connie never gave up. From that moment on, her pursuit of finding magic all her own came before everything and everyone. Every week, every day, it was something new: vampirism, mesmerism, levitation, transcendent chants, tantric sex, voodoo, Ouija boards and pendulums, animism, totem quests, and the Scholomance.
Always the Scholomance. That damned Devil’s Scholomance. All the others came and went, debunked, outgrown, or just plain impossible to prove, but the Scholomance hung on.
“It’s a school,” Connie said, that first time she’d ever dragged Mara off to the library to hunch over a book of badly-illustrated European ghost-stories. “A real place—”
“Oh Connie…”
“—deep in the mountains of Transylvania,” Connie stubbornly continued, now gripping her book in both hands, as though she feared it would be snatched away and maybe burnt. “And all kinds of magic is taught there by demons, real demons! And only ten people get in at a time, and listen, listen! ‘There they are trained for ten years, overcoming obstacles and surviving ordeals, and when the course of their learning is expired, nine students are released—” Here, Connie looked up, actually flushed with her excitement, as any girl her age might appear if poring over one of those teen celebrity magazines she’d ought to be obsessing over, if not for Mara and the lies she wouldn’t tell. Breathing hard, making certain that Mara had heard the discrepancy in number and was giving her full attention, she bent back over and hoarsely whispered, “—released to find their homes, but the tenth is given over to the Devil and detained as payment for all the glammar learned there.’ Imagine.”
Mara patiently sat quiet and let Connie do the imagining for both of them. She never expected such a ridiculous story to hold Connie’s attention, not for more than a few weeks, much less all those years, but there it was and there it stayed. All through high school and all through college, the Scholomance remained. Every few months, just when Mara would dare to hope the dream was finally dying, Connie was call her up with some new rumor, some new idle comment thrown away on one page of some obscure book, some new ‘fact’ that absolutely must be explored.
The Scholomance could only be entered once each year, or every ten years, or once a century, or under a solar eclipse, or only after all the present students had passed from its halls. Its magic was taught by demons, or by the half-human sons of King Solomon, or by deathless wizards, or by the Devil Himself. Only ten students at a time could enter its halls, only three, only fifty, only one.
But in all this ever-changing nonsense, one thing remained constant, anchoring the rest of the legend to a seeming of possibility, of truth: The price of tuition was always the tenth graduate.
“You really like those odds?” Mara asked once, only once.
“Ninety percent is better than anyone else could ever give me,” Connie answered. “Even you.”
And so Mara let it go, and that was probably her second mistake, but who could blame her for it? Who would ever believe that the Scholomance was real? How could Mara ever have prepared herself for coming back to the dorm that night and finding no Connie, but only a note with one line on it in Connie’s pink pen.
I think I can find it.
That was all. Not even goodbye. And for all the good it did, Mara tried to find her, but all of Connie’s notes and books and scrounged-up Scholomance nonsense was gone. Asking questions and tapping at minds for three days told her only that Connie had gone to the airport. What little research Mara was able to do on her own placed the Scholomance in the Transylvanian region of Romania, in the mountains, in the center of a lake, or perhaps even floating around in the sky like a dark cloud, invisible without the full moon behind it. Fairy tales.
Romania was not, she supposed, a really huge country and Transylvania narrowed that down even more, but it was still plenty big enough to hide Connie. Mara considered flying out after her, but in the end, she did not. A chase would be very dramatic and noble and all that, and surely it would work in the movies, but life was not the movies. Mara could not pick out her best friend’s most familiar and beloved mind from all these surrounding her right here in this stupid dorm unless she was very close, and so there would be no chase, no heroic flight to Romanian mountains, no rescue and no reunion. Connie was gone and all Mara could do was wish her well and hope she came back on her own and give this damned thing up for good.
She didn’t.
The days passed. One of Connie’s brothers came to get her things and left, baffled and furious with her for not being able to tell him where his little sister had gone (Mara could have at least shown him the note and said the word Scholomance, but she didn’t. Connie was the only one who ever had honesty alone out of her). Mara started playing cards to make up Connie’s half of the rent and learned how to temper big wins with frequent, inexpensive losses so that people wouldn’t realize how good she was. The Panic Room evolved many monitors and lost its chair. Mara’s father had his inconvenient heart attack in the bed of his twenty year-old girlfriend and Mara went home for the funeral, witnessed the first of her mother’s many slumps into depression, and just stayed there. Life went on. There were no phone calls, no postcards. No Connie.
And now, two years later, a letter.
The envelope was thickly padded. Her address on the front of it had been neatly-written, but not in the loopy scrawl she remembered coming out of Connie’s pen. There were a lot of foreign stamps, hence the outrageous postage due. There was no return address under Connie’s name.
Mara got her thumbnail underneath the seal and slit it open. She looked inside, and between the sleeves of bubble-paper, saw another envelope—smaller, pale, rustic-looking. She shook it out into her waiting hand.
A strange urge came over her in that moment. Before she’d even turned this second envelope over, much less opened it, Mara felt a piercing impulse to take it right back to the Post Office and mail it. Not to look at it, not to read it, not even really to get rid of it, but just to…just to send it on. It was the right thing to do.
The urge faded. Mara tried to hold onto it, tried to chase down whatev
er weird, paranoid place inside her had launched it, but it was gone. The envelope, however, the envelope remained.
The letter and envelope were one, made from a single sheet of thick paper, folded together into a clumsy square. The edges looked slightly chewed, as if someone had sealed them by gumming them. When she did finally turn it over, her address was there, looking back at her just as it had been on the outer cover, and yes, it was Connie’s handwriting now, the familiar balloony letters slanted—she’d been in a hurry when she wrote it—but it was definitely Connie’s. Still no return address, but only her name, written large, needing to be seen, pleading with her. No stamps here, either. Just the envelope.
Mail it.
Mara closed her eyes, but the urge was already blowing itself apart, not violently, but in the easy manner of a smoke-ring—inexorably adrift, impossible to snatch back, spreading out to invisibility even as the smell of it lingered. Frowning, she began to work the envelope’s seams open, smoothing it out into its original form.
What the heck kind of paper was this? It wasn’t just thick, but dense and soft, almost more like cloth than paper. And a weird size too, nearly twice the size of a standard sheet. One edge was rough, as if it had been hastily torn away. The other edges were oddly blunt to the touch, slightly curled under, like the pages from a very new book.
All of this, Mara noted. All of it seemed important, the way that little things will seem in the face of something bigger, the way that a spilled glass or a loose hair can seem important only in the same room as a murdered body. Because what was written on this very odd sheet of paper was just as jarring in its way as any corpse. It wasn’t long, just a few lines, and it wasn’t in pink ink, but it was Connie’s handwriting and it hit every bit as hard as the last note she got.
South of Altenmunster. West of Lake Teufelsee. Look for the door on Halloween night ONLY.
I was wrong about this place. Please come and get me.
* * *
Mara slept on the plane. It was a good place to sleep, a safe place. Maybe even the only safe place. Surrounded by the drone of the engines, the tinkle of ice on glass, the meaningless babble of businessmen-thoughts and stewardess-thoughts and pilot-thoughts (which were not always relaxing, but usually predictable), Mara surrendered her consciousness and retreated to the cozily controlled part of her mind she’d named the Panic Room to watch her dreams. They were dreams of Connie. She was not surprised.
She didn’t have to watch to wake up rested anymore, but she did most nights anyway. Habits were hard to break, and besides, dreams were almost always more interesting than looking out through the Panic Room’s windows and sorting through the tangle of minds that laid a constant siege to her peace. So she watched, hovering at a comfortable angle over the screens (she used to need a chair in order to lean back like this, but she’d outgrown it around the same time she’d outgrown the need to watch) where her dreams played out. It was her and Connie tonight, sitting up in Connie’s living room, both in their pajamas. She already knew where this one was going. She had this one a lot.
Connie was only eight in the dream, the age she’d been when they met, while Mara was twelve, the age she’d been when they’d actually had the conversation that was about to replay itself in some demented fashion. She was always older than Connie in her dreams, which was funny because in reality, Connie was older than her by about ten months. Still, you didn’t have to be a shrink to understand the symbolism: Connie was always going to be the kid in their strange, doomed relationship—always the one who needed help, who needed comfort, who needed attention and extra love.
She was always going to need to be saved.
“I wish I was what you are,” little Connie was saying, still in that same hot, frustrated, hopeless voice—the one just made for haunting dreams like these. “I wish I could do what you do.”
“No, you don’t,” dream-Mara said, as she always said in these dreams, words she had never said to the real Connie. Maybe if she ever had, things would be different now. Life was full of empty maybes. “It isn’t like you think it is. It isn’t fun at all.”
“I tried to be you and I couldn’t.” Little dream-Connie’s skin was coming in grey around the edges, curling in on itself like burning paper. “I tried to be what you are and I couldn’t. I fell down and skinned my knees and got mud on my new dress. I can’t get up, I can’t go home, I can’t go anywhere without you.” Grey, all grey, Connie’s arms and Connie’s face and Connie’s hand-me-down baby-heart pajamas, but mostly Connie’s voice, turning to ashes right in her throat. “I wish I had what you had,” dream-Connie whispered, just beginning to crumble. “Because look at me look at me look at me now.”
Mara touched the screen as it began to go dark. She didn’t turn it off. She didn’t have to. She’d learned that dreams only lasted a few minutes, but there would be more of them and they’d all probably be about the same.
But she didn’t have to watch anymore. That was something.
Mara looked out the window at the Mindstorm and all that it had for her tonight: Snatches of song, stranger’s faces, blurs of motion, screams, shouts, laughter, sobs—the lunatic babble of the two hundred and six people sharing this flight, surrounding her with their combined insanity. Those closest to her came in clearest. The woman sitting in front of her dreamed of cooking a chicken while a man-not-her-husband stood naked on the kitchen table, stroking his erection, saying, “Choose, Susan. You know you have to choose,” and the woman wept and wept and cut up her chicken. Beside her in the aisle-seat, a man in his forties sat and dozed and thought not seriously about trading in the minivan and getting that Porsche, always wanted one, but May-Dee was going to be driving in another few weeks, and really, if she was going to crash something (and kids always did), it may as well be the minivan than a Porsche. Sitting next to Mara, loudest of all, a wide-awake May-Dee counted days over and over, digging grooves into her brain and Mara’s as she wondered if she was late, was she really late, was she just late or was she caught, oh God, caught pregnant, caught up and why hadn’t she made him wear it? The stewardess walked by, her thoughts blending into bitter focus as she neared—five more years, I swear to God, five more years to retirement and then I never have to see these puling little shitsacks again, five more years and I’m golden, five more and if that bitch in C-3 pukes one more time, I’m going to break the fucking bag open on her fucking head—and then faded out again as she went back into Coach. The pilot spiked briefly—HolyChristwhat wasthat?—but Mara was used to jittery pilot-thoughts and sure enough, he relaxed and drifted away. Nothing much here, just two hundred and six strangers screaming out their strange little lives. Quiet night, compared to the flight back from Tahoe. Lord, she loved to fly.
Another dream was starting: Mara in a dark place and Connie crying somewhere out of sight. Connie, who wasn’t just lost in Dreamland this time. This time, Connie was lost for real.
“And I’m going to find her,” Mara said, watching her dream-self stumble through the dark maze of her own mind. She reached up by habit to touch her throat and saw, through another screen, her real-life fingers twitch towards the real-life locket hanging around her neck. A cheap, childhood birthday present, nothing more, from the only best friend Mara Warner ever had.
Connie kept crying. The dream died away and she let it go, leaning back in empty space to watch the Mindstorm and wait for another one to start.
CHAPTER TWO
The plane touched down in Bucharest and customs was a bitch. There was a bit of a language barrier—even the ones who spoke English didn’t think in it—so she had to make her suggestions more visceral than was her habit. Mara had long ago learned the value of being difficult to notice, and she was glad the officials weren’t rooting through her luggage just for kicks, but it did prolong the process of getting out of the airport.
She used the time she had to its best advantage, changing her money over, checking the map, and making phone calls so she could be sure the lawyers and t
he banks were speaking to one another so her mother wouldn’t be left in the lurch if this trip went long. Rosalie had been willing to stay until the care people could get someone in on a permanent basis, so Mara could rest easy knowing her mother wasn’t lying drunk on a mound of rotting food wrappers while she was away, and if she was, it was someone else’s headache.
If only she’d had more time to make arrangements. ‘Halloween night,’ the letter had said, and that was only a few days away, but finding her way in was only part of the problem and not, she suspected, the thorniest part.
But getting in was the part she concerned herself with now. She took the train to Brasov, and it was there, away from the more cosmopolitan flair of the city, that she really got the feeling of Romania in her surroundings. Interspersed among the blue jeans and business suits, she now saw colorful shawls and embroidered belts livening up workday clothing. There were fewer cars, more bicycles, and a handful of donkeys pulling carts. Dogs and children ran wild through the street, seeming to speak a mad pidgeon of laughing barks and howls at each other. Old men smoked pipes, young men smoked cigars, and boys stood in full view with cigarettes staining their small fingers. The people’s faces began to run together—all craggy brows and hooked noses, frowning mouths and deepset, suspicious stares. When she took her sunglasses off to read a time-table at the train station, three old ladies forked the sign of the Evil Eye at her. She left the glasses off, irritated.
There were cabbies lined up around the station, leaning against the sides of their well-traveled Buicks and vans to eye the tourists as they came into town. Most of them called out to her, claiming to speak English. Only some of them did. She picked the first one who wasn’t overly contemptuous of Americans and thought she’d done all right even though he charged her twelve lei as soon as she slid into the back seat, telling her it was a pick-up fee. “This is law, the way of things,” he lied, holding up his empty hands in mournful supplication to an uncaring legal system. His accent lay thick over every word—Zis is law, ze way of t’ings—and he spoke in the same slow, serious manner that seemed to be the cultural standard here, as if every word were in some intellectual doubt and ought to be pondered first. “These men, they care nothing for the work a man does, only for to pick his pocket. So they fee me, eh? So I must fee you.”