Authors: R. Lee Smith
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
T
he 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 the 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.”
Mara took out
her newly-changed money and passed over a few bills without looking at them.
The driver took them the same way, thinking, ‘She’s blind,’ with hungry
complacency as he watched her settle herself in the back seat. ‘Poor little
lost lamb, to be blind among wolves.’
Mara looked at
herself in the cracked rear mirror, seeing just the slice of her face that it
had to offer: wisps of blonde hair, so pale and fine it was generally assumed
that she bleached it, the suggestion of high cheekbones, the very top of her
father’s thin, straight nose, and her eyes, of course. Very pale, very clear,
only a few shades darker than the whites around them, the ink-black centers
shocking in contrast, these were Mara’s eyes. Lots of people thought she was
blind, at first. Then they just thought she was freakish.
“Where I take
you?”
“Altenmunster,”
she said, watching him tilt the mirror so that he could look at her breasts,
imagine them without her sweater, think about burying his face between them. Lamb
among wolves, indeed. “Do you know it?”
“Know very well,
miss. My mother, she born there,” he lied. He consulted a much-weathered map of
his own, his heavy brows beetling. “But is long drive. Four hour.” A pause, as
he considered her not-cheap clothing, her clean skin. “Five, if bridge is out.”
A longer pause, as he brooded on his dingy flat above his cousin’s shop, with only
half a bottle of wine awaiting him, and on the endlessly deep pockets of the
Americans. “Is probably out.”
“I see. Well, if
you can’t take me all the way, just take me where you can and I’ll get another—”
“No, no! I take
you. You never find another honest driver, miss, not in Brasov. Den of thieves,
it is. Mountains like fairy tale, full of dark place, full of thieves.” He eyed
her breasts some more as he started the engine and lurched out into traffic. He
thought of good American money and good Romanian drink. “Who you go to in
Altenmunster, eh? Family?”
“A friend, I
hope.”
“Young man?” He
leered, licking at his thick lips. “Young lover?”
“Just a friend.”
She turned to the window, letting him see her watch the scenery. She felt his
flare of surprise and when she turned back, he’d re-adjusted the mirror. “She’s
studying Transylvanian folk tales. Legends.”
“Ah, yes? Vampires,”
he said scornfully. “Always with vampires in Romania, but there are none. This
was Irishman’s story, ha! Vampires.”
“Have you ever
heard of the Scholomance?” Mara asked.
The steady,
cheerful flow of his thoughts did not freeze, exactly, but it did buckle. He
shrugged, outwardly uncaring, but growing distinctly darker on the inside. “You
go to meet this friend, eh? Or to find him?”
“Her,” Mara
corrected, feeling out this change in him with careful hands. “I’m going to
meet her.”
“Ah.”
“Do people go
missing a lot when they come to Romania?” Mara asked, pretending to be teasing
as she studied his mind. “Are you sure there are no vampires?”
“Yes, you laugh,”
he said with great dignity. “But is dangerous country for fools to wander.”
Mara murmured
something properly abashed, listening closely. He thought in Romanian, of
course, but now and then, bursts of meaning came through, like bubbles rising
through tar to pop in the open air. The dark woods were filled with corners
where pretty girls walked in and never walked out. Vampires, no, but there were
wolves, and there were worse than wolves. She could see the memories of a small
boy, an aged woman in the kitchen, telling stories Mara couldn’t understand,
stories that made every creaking branch outside the window into a grasping
hand, stories that came in nightmares again and again, and soaked the sheets
with sweat and piss.
The cabbie
hooked out a small cross from the collar of his shirt and kissed it, thinking
of the old woman and hating her in a dry, distracted way—for the stories and
the nightmares and the beatings that had followed every morning in those damp,
stinking sheets. He said, “Yes, I hear of Scholomance. Children’s tales. Foolishness.”
“Like vampires.”
“Vampires make
fools because they are no true, no there to be found,” the cabbie said, and
kissed the cross again. “Who would look for such a thing as Devil’s School? Who
but fool? Men come, every year come, even after all this time. What for they
hope to find it?”
“What, people
actually look for it?”
“In the mountain,
they say. In the middle of the lake. They look for Devil’s School in Sibiu, in
Paltinisch lake, in waters of Balea.” He shook his head, scowling, then
shrugged again. “You friend wise to stay in Altenmunster, clear of bad places. Just
listen to stories, not chase after. But to listen, ah, that do enough harm.”
He was thinking
of those sheets again. Mara thought of fairies in a coloring book and one dumb
kid’s honest confession that should have been a lie.
“You no go look
for it, eh?”
“I’m here to get
my friend,” Mara said. “And take her home.”
“Away from
nonsense stories,” the cabbie said with a curt nod. “Good.”
Conversation
died after that, which was just as well. Mara turned back to the window and let
the cabbie relax until he was once more in the here and now, once more thinking
blissfully of the soft swells of her breasts against his stubbly cheeks. The
mountains stayed where they were, innocent by morning’s light, while the
forests moved before them. Traffic blew by, bringing strange thoughts in and
out of range like muffled slaps. Mara settled back and closed her eyes,
slipping into the Panic Room to wait out the trip where she couldn’t feel it as
clearly, but she didn’t sleep. She was a lamb among wolves, perhaps, but no
fool.