The Scholomance Read Online Free PDF

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 ( probably 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