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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 Connie 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 29 th , 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.
    He came for the
Scholomance.
    As he made his
grim way towards her, Mara sorted through his mind, locating each