by R. Lee Smith
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.
* * *
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 (pro
bably 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.
* * *
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 Conn
ie 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 29th, 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.
