The Scholomance (2 page)

The
next day, Connie didn’t sit with her either, and she was making her tummy cramp
with the indecision of it all. Mara ate her school macaroni and drank her milk
and just listened as Connie agonized. Would she be nice? There were mean kids
on the bus, big kids who kept tugging on her braids and laughing and calling
her names like wop, dirtywop, names she was afraid to ask Mama what they meant.
She thought they would be nice once, too. No one was nice, that was the thing. Mama
said just make friends, everyone wants to be friends with a pretty little girl
like you, but no one wanted to be friends. No one thought she was pretty. No
one was nice.

How
true, Mara would think On the inside, no one was ever really nice. The best
people in the world were ugly if you looked deep enough.

On
the third day, Mara picked up her lunch tray and went over to Connie’s table. “Can
I sit here?” she asked, and as Connie gaped at her with the shiver-wide eyes of
a feral cat on a sidewalk, she added, “I like the way you wear those ribbons in
your hair, all braided in,” because she knew about the mean kids and how Connie
had to sit so still while Mama did the braiding and then cried in the bathroom
because the mean kids would pull on them and it was dirtywop hair. “It’s very
pretty,” Mara said, and that was all she had to say.

That
was the beginning of sixteen years. She liked to think about that day—the way
they’d traded bits of their lunches, those first hesitant Connie-smiles, the
slow gentling of her frantic Connie-thoughts as she decided that maybe, just
maybe, this was real and Mara was her friend—but she never dreamed of it. She
could make herself dream it, she knew, but what was the point of that? She
could have made Connie ask her to sit down, too (even at eight, she was already
beginning to learn how to reach into someone’s head and make them think of
things, although it would be four more years before she could do it every
time), but that would have made everything that followed into a lie. Mara had
been born psychic; she knew all about lies. Connie was the one person she
wanted to be entirely honest with.

That
was probably a mistake.

“Do
you ever wish you were magic?” Connie had asked one night—one fateful night, as
the writers might say. It was a sleepover at Connie’s house and they were in
their pajamas up in the living room, tucked away on the floor in sleeping bags
(Mara’s sky-blue new one, bought for this event earlier that afternoon, and
Connie’s ancient army-surplus one). Connie was coloring. Fairies and dragons. She
did a lot of those. “Like, that you had powers?”

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 whatever 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.