The Scholomance Read Free Page B

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