The Scholomance Read Online Free PDF Page A

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