by R. Lee Smith
Mara didn’t have much to divest herself of: shoes, socks, jeans, sweater, sunglasses, climbing gear, flashlights. The cab driver’s little cross, of course, which the robed woman laughed at. Her wallet and passport, along with a good wad of Romanian cash and traveler’s checks, so that when she got out of here, she’d have the means to get herself and Connie back to the States. She put it all into the box without resistance; she’d deal with the problem of getting it all back when that time came. Soon she stood over it in nothing but her skin and Connie’s heart-shaped locket.
“Everything,” the woman said again.
“I’m not taking this off.”
Heaving a curt sigh, the woman moved to snatch it.
Mara slapped, not with her hand, but with her mind. The woman staggered back violently, both arms flying uselessly up as her head snapped back. She overbalanced and fell, her short cry of alarm cut into a grunt of impact. She sat there, sprawled, looking up at Mara and clearly wondering what had just happened.
“Nobody touches this,” Mara said softly.
“Who do you think you are?” Up came the woman, her hands closing into fists of frustration, but she didn’t raise them. “You don’t make the rules here, little cow! You’re not different! You’re not special! Take it off immediately!”
“No.”
“Leave us,” said a voice. An awful, quiet, scuttling sort of voice. The demon’s voice.
He came in from the darkness of the passageway, gliding through it like ripples over tar. His legs were invisible until he was nearly on top of her, but his upper half seemed almost to glow. The yellow light from the blisters on the wall, Mara saw, did not touch him.
The robed woman bowed in a cringing, angry fashion. She left by backing out around the demon and into the hall, her head down and eyes shut the whole way.
Alone with him, Mara stood naked and waited.
The demon came no nearer. His hands rested comfortably on his shoulders. They were black to the wrists, like badly-painted gloves. One of his fingers twitched off and on, as though keeping time to music only he could hear. He looked at her, all of her, but began and ended with her eyes.
“Are you here to make trouble?” he asked finally, smiling. He spoke English very well, only slightly accented, and not in any way she recognized. His voice had a hissing quality, even without any sibilants.
“I’ve never taken this off,” Mara said. “Never since it was given to me. I won’t start now.”
He raised a hand and brought it around to her face, brushing back her hair to slide the very tip of his finger along her earlobe. His touch was too smooth, too cool. He had no fingernails, no claws, nothing but smoothness. “You think you alone come here with treasure? Do you think no other woman ever hesitated to part with her trinkets? A wedding ring? A child’s birthstone? A bible or…” His eyes drifted to the cabbie’s gift, shining in the top of Mara’s trunk. “…blessed cross?”
“I won’t take it off,” Mara said again.
“Such is the price of admission.”
“Then I’ll leave.”
“That door is closed.”
“Then kill me,” Mara snapped. “But I’m not taking it off!”
The lights of his eyes swam, clustering together for a heartbeat before spinning apart. He lowered his hand from her cheek.
She reached up fast and closed a protective fist around Connie’s locket, glaring at him defiantly.
His smile broadened, but only on one side. “Many things I am, young one, or have been in my time, but never a thief. Open to me.”
“But maybe a liar,” Mara said, tight-lipped. “No.”
“I will see this thing that engenders such unwise devotion.” The demon’s hand closed gently around her wrist. His thumb pressed on her and suddenly it was as if he had punched a spike through the back of her hand and detonated it somehow. The pain was like nothing she’d known in her life. Entirely focused in her hand, it nevertheless took the bones right out of her knees. Mara dropped, hoarsely howling, slapping at his restraining grip, but did not release the locket.
“Stubborn child,” the demon said, almost fondly. “You tempt me to indulge you, and I should never hear the end of that.”
The pain did not increase exactly, but it did spread, eating out her arm from the inside until she screamed on her knees, screamed over and over without the mind or even the ability to make words. Her throat cracked and she kept screaming. If it ruptured and bled, if it burst and killed her, she still couldn’t stop. In that moment, she would have cut her own arm off to get out of that terrible pain, but she did not let go of the locket.
Without conscious thought—there could be none in the thick of that agony—Mara retreated from her body, curling in on herself in the haven of the Panic Room, where sensation could not follow. She looked at the monitor that showed her the body and stared in disbelief at her entirely uninjured arm. The speakers fed her the sounds of her screams. The lights blinked a warning yellow as pain receptors fired and fired without end, but there was nothing wrong here, nothing at all.
Mara made herself shut up then. She stood the body up and stared at him from the Panic Room’s peace. The body still breathed raggedly and too fast, but she managed to slow it down some. It dangled limply from his grip, but it was steady and more to the point, it kept its hand solidly wrapped around the locket.
The demon’s eyebrows rose again. His head tipped the other way. She felt him in the storm outside the Panic Room, felt his alien fingers brushing at the walls she’d built, seeking a crack through which to enter. He didn’t find one. “Most impressive, child,” he said at last. “Shall I huff and I puff?”
Mara gathered in a little of her own strength and sent it out like a stomping foot, shoving him back from her secret place with more ease than she’d expected.
The demon’s grip on her wrist tightened until the monitors lit up on behalf of the tendons strained to snapping point, the bones that ground together, but his voice remained low and musing as he said, “You are a better cut than our usual haunch of meat, yet you can be as easily devoured, I promise you. Indeed, the danger is greater for that which tastes most sweet.”
“I won’t take it off,” she said again. Her voice was rough, worn almost to a whisper by screaming. It made her sound weak and frightened. Mara was neither.
The demon leaned toward her, close enough that she could feel the touch of the light that came from his eyes—feel it like ants across her skin. Then he closed them and drew in a savoring breath. His hair rippled and stilled. He sighed and looked at her again. “Think well how you begin here, child.”
Mara said nothing.
“Hm.” Time did not stop while the demon looked at her, but it crawled. She could feel its tiny, hooked feet moving down her spine. But at last, the demon’s smile returned. “The Scholomance is filled with tests. This one, you have passed.” He opened his hand one finger at a time, gracefully, and used it to stroke her hair back, smiling wider when she shivered. “But only because you cheated. Keep your toy. Come with me.”
The demon turned away, letting his freakishly long arm drop to close the wooden box that held Mara’s things before moving out through another doorway into another passage. His hand drifted along the top of the box as he walked. It made a rasping sound, too quiet to be abrasive but which raised the gooseflesh on her arms anyway. He didn’t look back to see if she followed him.
Mara hesitated, shivering once in the chill of the room. Her box had no marker, no number, nothing to distinguish it from the roomful of others supposedly awaiting the return of their owners.
It didn’t matter. None of it did. Only Connie.
Mara left it and went after the demon.
She could see him easily, glowing like a ghost in the blackness ahead of her. More of those chitinous plates grew partway up his spine, bisecting the alabaster perfection of his back, making him easy to follow even though he made no sound.
“Who are you?” she called. Her vo
ice did not echo. The rock surrounding them caught her words, ate them.
But he heard. He smiled at her over his shoulder. “You are ambitious indeed to think you can trap me so easily as that. You’ll find no true names here, young one. That book is written. I am Horuseps, Master of Sight, at your service.” He twisted to bow as he walked, a gesture every bit as mocking as his words. “You will see much of me, if you pass your next test. One can do little if one cannot see.”
She wanted to ask him about the others here, the other students as well as teachers, but his smile was unpleasant, daunting. “Does it mean something?” she asked instead. “Your name?”
“Yes,” said Horuseps. “It means me.”
There was a door ahead of them. She didn’t see it until he opened it, and then only because his eyes flashed and illuminated a bit of the jamb. It had been deeply and elaborately carved, the jamb, so that it outlined the rather plain face of the door in a knot of writhing serpents.
“Within, expect an exam,” he told her, gesturing in that elegant way he had. “For some, the first. For others, final. And for you, only one of many, I should think.”
“What’s inside?” Mara asked, knowing perfectly well he wouldn’t answer.
Horuseps tsked, put his long hand on her back and pushed her gently across the threshold into the lightless room beyond.
“I’ll see you on the other side then,” she said, taking her first cautious step into shadows.
“I’ve no doubt. And I await you, child, with bated breath.” He bowed, smiling, and then closed the door on her.
CHAPTER FOUR
Silence. Blackness.
Mara shivered, waiting. After a while, she reached out and found the door again. The stone was flat, but rough as sandpaper. There were no carvings on this side. She followed it to the floor and touched wetness, but not a lot. She followed it up and could just brush her fingertips across the low ceiling. Slowly, testing each step with a toe, she walked the perimeter of the room. Twelve paces by seventeen by fourteen by twenty. Not quite square, then. The floor, not quite level. But there was a set of double doors, uncarved but still impressive, on the widest wall. Apart from those two exits, the room seemed featureless.
But not empty. In one of the canted corners, Mara’s questing toe knocked into a mass of jumbled objects, all sort of heaped together and tangled up in cloth. She knelt down carefully to feel them out, thinking it must be part of the test, and perhaps it was. Or perhaps just one of the people who failed it.
Because it was a person lying there, or had been once. Bones, wet and slimy, still wrapped in leathery folds of skin and hair, were all that remained now. The whole mess of it had a waxy feel, as if it had been here long enough to become partially calcified by the constant dripping of mineral-rich water. The skull had been crushed, but fairly recently. The broken edges were rough, not waxy. Maybe someone had stepped on it.
Mara sat down beside the remains, a piece of skull still in her hand. She tapped it thoughtfully against the floor as she considered her options. The demon, Horuseps, had told her there would be a test. At a guess, she’d have to say that test was getting out of the examination room. The doors had to open.
She got up again and found her way to the double doors. Pushing accomplished nothing apart from sore arms and shoulders. She found no latch, no seam wide enough to sink her fingers in and pull. She went around the room a second time, now feeling floor to ceiling every inch of the way, but found no panel or lever or anything at all that could be connected to either exit, only a couple of fingernails and they came right out when she pulled on them. In the ceiling, chill drops of bitter water seeped through hairline cracks. On the floor, more cracks carried them away before they could form puddles.
An untold time later, exhausted and frustrated, Mara and her bit of skull got cozy in the corner again. A thought struck. “Hello?” she called, thinking that if this was it, if all she had to do was ask, she was going to be pissed.
But no, nothing.
“Open the door.”
More nothing.
“Open the door…please.” Just in case manners counted for something in this stupid test, like penmanship back in school.
Still nothing.
Okay, back to the facts. Even if she got the little door to open, she’d only be back in the hallway with Horuseps, so the answer had to be opening the big ones.
Mara got up, carrying her skull-fragment with her, and felt her way to her destination. She rested her palm flat on the rough face of the unmoving doors and scowled.
They were out there, somewhere. People. Minds. Moving about in their little lives and completely unconcerned with what was going on in here, and every goddamned one of them had gone through this test and therefore knew how to open the doors. If only it weren’t for the rock…
Mara had known about the muffling properties of minerals for many years. It had been the mental quiet inside the summer house’s concrete basement, after all, which had inspired her Panic Room. Her own personal theory, when she bothered to think about it at all, was that brain waves had to be a lot like the signal from a cellular phone, because the same sorts of things were likely to hamper them: long distances, great depths, and of course, layers of solid rock.
Mara tapped her piece of skull on the door, trying to think.
Over the years, she’d managed to improve her telepathic powers quite a bit. She no longer had to look at the person she was trying to read, for example, although it still helped her sense of focus. Her range of clarity, particularly for a mind she knew very well, was about a mile. The Mindstorm reached much further, inarticulately eating up her inner senses, but useless to her in any search.
She had to try. There were no other alternatives. She had to reach through the rock and snag someone. She had to, or she’d be here forever.
Mara tossed the skull away and put her hands on the doors. Touching someone always helped, particularly if she was doing something sneaky or difficult. As futile as this whole exercise was apt to be, she had to at least say she’d made the attempt and done it right, so she put her hands firmly on the door and aimed her mind out like a searchlight.
What she struck in that next instant sent her leaping back in exactly the same skittish alarm she’d always despised seeing in other people. Such a rabbity response, the sort of thing that made someone…well, someone like her, want to validate it with a good slap. Now she was doing it. She may have even let out a yelp of some sort. In the perfect blackness of the little room, it would have been very easy to lose her balance and smash her own head open on the stone floor, but luck alone kept her upright. Upright and staring without sight into the living doors.
The doors were alive. They were alive and they were listening. It was not a person, it was a set of doors. It was solid rock, the same as the floor or the ceiling or the walls around her, but it was alive. Someone had made it be alive. Someone had poured some kind of mind into it and brought it to life and given it a job. The door.
‘And this is how you get out,’ Mara heard herself think. She shuddered, then bared her teeth in the blackness because she hated the thought of cringing in front of a damned door. Nothing had happened, after all. Nothing had changed. She could still die here if she decided it was more fun to wring her hands and get all girly about this. She was in the Scholomance, for God’s sake! There was bound to be worse than this out there!
“True,” Mara whispered. Her voice sounded surprisingly firm, even as quiet as it was. It helped her focus, helped her center. Ignoring the rapid beating of her heart, Mara put one foot in front of the other, reached out her arms, and slowly forced herself back before the living door.
Its thoughts were not human thoughts, but they were there, impregnating the dead stone with awful, unnatural life. It did not see her standing before it, did not feel her small hands on its cold body, and did not respond until she reached out and gave it a queasy mental tap, and then, only by writhing psychically around inside her mind.
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Alive. The doors were alive. That huddle of miserable bones that used to be a human was wholly dead, but the doors were alive.
‘Let me out,’ Mara thought at them.
The doors twisted in her mind, reacting to her command as a severed tentacle reacts to little jolts of electricity, writhing and clutching at itself, but unaware of her.
Mara focused, crushing her own unease to lock her mental hands around the dull intelligence before her and squeeze. **Open up,** she thought at them, thought into them, drilling her will down deep where it would have to hear her.
The doors moaned, a terrible and silent groan that resounded in her every psychic pore. She shuddered again, snarled again, and kept her hands where they were.
**Open!** Mara ordered, not just thinking but shoving at them, beating at them. She heard a faint pop somewhere, felt warmth pouring down her face, tasted blood in her open, panting mouth. She ignored it, sank her psychic grip in tighter, and bellowed, **Open, doors! Open to me! Open now!**
The doors screamed inside her mind, vibrated beneath her hands, and suddenly heaved apart, giving way before her as flesh gives before a knife. Mara hurt the doors, had to feel that dumb, insane agony throbbing through their horrible consciousness, and then had to hurt them again to keep them open as she staggered through into light. She couldn’t yank her mind back fast enough, but retreat could not unmake that memory or the sick and stunted feel of the doors quivering under her hands.