Luna said vaguely that she
did not know how soon Rita's interview with Harry would appear in The Quibbler,
that her father was expecting a lovely long article on recent sightings of
Crumple-Horned Snorkacks,"- and of course, that'll be a very important story, so
Harry’s might have to wait for the following issue,” said Luna.
Harry had not
found it an easy experience to talk about the night when Voldemort had returned.
Rita had pressed him for every little detail and he had given her everything he
could remember, knowing that this was his one big opportunity to tell the world
the truth. He wondered how people would react to the story. He guessed that it
would confirm a lot of people in the view that he was completely insane, not
least because his story would be appearing alongside utter rubbish about
Crumple-Horned Snorkacks. But the breakout of Bellatrix Lestrange and her fellow
Death Eaters had given Harry a burning desire to do something, whether or not it
worked...
“Can't wait to see what Umbridge thinks of you going public,” said
Dean, sounding awestruck at dinner on Monday night. Seamus was shovelling down
large amounts of chicken and ham pie on Dean's other side, but Harry knew he was
listening.
“It's the right thing to do, Harry,” said Neville, who was sitting
opposite him. He was rather pale, but went on in a low voice, “It must have
been...tough...talking about it...was it?”
“Yeah,” mumbled Harry, “but people
have got to know what Voldemorts capable of, haven't they?”
“That's right,”
said Neville, nodding, “and his Death Eaters, too...people should
know...”
Neville left his sentence hanging and returned to his baked potato.
Seamus looked up, but when he caught Harry’s eye he looked quickly back at his
plate again. After a while, Dean, Seamus and Neville departed for the common
room, leaving Harry and Hermione at the table waiting for Ron, who had not yet
had dinner because of Quidditch practice.
Cho Chang walked into the Hall with
her friend Marietta. Harry's stomach gave an unpleasant lurch, but she did not
look over at the Gryffindor table, and sat down with her back to him.
“Oh, I
forgot to ask you,” said Hermione brightly, glancing over at the Ravenclaw
table, “what happened on your date with Cho? How come you were back so
early?”
“Er...well, it was...” said Harry, pulling a dish of rhubarb crumble
towards him and helping himself to seconds, “a complete fiasco, now you mention
it.”
And he told her what had happened in Madam Puddifoot's
teashop.
“...so then,” he finished several minutes later, as the final bit of
crumble disappeared, “she jumps up, right, and says, "I'll see you around,
Harry," and runs out of the place!” He put down his spoon and looked at
Hermione. “I mean, what was all that about? What was going on?”
Hermione
glanced over at the back of Cho's head and sighed.
“Oh, Harry” she said
sadly. “Well, I'm sorry, but you were a bit tactless.”
“Me, tactless?” said
Harry, outraged. “One minute we were getting on fine, next minute she was
telling me that Roger Davies asked her out and how she used to go and snog
Cedric in that stupid teashop—how was I supposed to feel about that?”
“Well,
you see,” said Hermione, with the patient air of someone explaining that one
plus one equals two to an over-emotional toddler, “you shouldn't have told her
that you wanted to meet me halfway through your date.”
“But, but,” spluttered
Harry, “but—you told me to meet you at twelve and to bring her along, how was I
supposed to do that without telling her?”
“You should have told her
differently,” said Hermione, still with that maddeningly patient air. “You
should have said it was really annoying, but I'd made you promise to come along
to the Three Broomsticks, and you really didn't want to go, you'd much rather
spend the whole day with her, but unfortunately you thought you really ought to
meet me and would she please, please come along with you and hopefully you'd be
able to get away more quickly. And it might have been a good idea to mention how
ugly you think I am, too,” Hermione added as an afterthought.
“But I don't
think you're ugly,” said Harry, bemused.
Hermione laughed.
“Harry you're
worse than Ron...well, no, you're not,” she sighed, as Ron himself came stumping
into the Hall splattered with mud and looking grumpy. “Look—you upset Cho when
you said you were going to meet me, so she tried to make you jealous. It was her
way of trying to find out how much you liked her.”
“Is that what she was
doing?” said Harry, as Ron dropped on to the bench opposite them and pulled
every dish within reach towards him. “Well, wouldn't it have been easier if
she'd just asked me whether I liked her better than you?”
“Girls don't often
ask questions like that,” said Hermione.
“Well, they should!” said Harry
forcefully. “Then I could've just told her I fancy her, and she wouldn't have
had to get herself all worked up again about Cedric dying!”
“I'm not saying
what she did was sensible,” said Hermione, as Ginny joined them, just as muddy
as Ron and looking equally disgruntled. “I'm just trying to make you see how she
was feeling at the time.”
“You should write a book,” Ron told Hermione as he
cut up his potatoes, “translating mad things girls do so boys can understand
them.”
“Yeah,” said Harry fervently, looking over at the Ravenclaw table. Cho
had just got up, and, still not looking at him, she left the Great Hall. Feeling
rather depressed, he looked back at Ron and Ginny. “So, how was Quidditch
practice?”
“It was a nightmare,” said Ron in a surly voice.
“Oh come on,”
said Hermione, looking at Ginny, “I'm sure it wasn't that—”
“Yes, it was,”
said Ginny. “It was appalling. Angelina was nearly in tears by the end of
it.”
Ron and Ginny went off for baths after dinner; Harry and Hermione
returned to the busy Gryffindor common room and their usual pile of homework.
Harry had been struggling with a new star-chart for Astronomy for half an hour
when Fred and George turned up.
“Ron and Ginny not here?” asked Fred, looking
around as he pulled up a chair, and when Harry shook his head, he said, “Good.
We were watching their practice. They're going to be slaughtered. They're
complete rubbish without us.”
“Come on, Ginny's not bad,” said George fairly,
sitting down next to Fred. “Actually, I dunno how she got so good, seeing how we
never let her play with us.”
“She's been breaking into your broom she’d in
the garden since the age of six and taking each of your brooms out in turn when
you weren't looking,” said Hermione from behind her tottering pile of Ancient
Rune books.
“Oh,” said George, looking mildly impressed. “Well—that'd explain
it.”
“Has Ron saved a goal yet?” asked Hermione, peering over the top of
Magical Hieroglyphs and Logograms.
“Well, he can do it if he doesn't think
anyone's watching him,” said Fred, rolling his eyes. “So all we have to do is
ask the crowd to turn their backs and talk among themselves every time the
Quaffle goes up his end on Saturday.”
He got up again and moved restlessly to
the window, staring out across the dark grounds.
“You know, Quidditch was
about the only thing in this place worth staying for.”
Hermione cast him a
stern look.
“You've got exams coming!”
“Told you already, we're not fussed
about NEWTs,” said Fred. “The Snackboxes are ready to roll, we found out how to
get rid of those boils, just a couple of drops of Murtlap essence sorts them,
Lee put us on to it.”
George yawned widely and looked out disconsolately at
the cloudy night sky.
“I dunno if I even want to watch this match. If
Zacharias Smith beats us I might have to kill myself.”
“Kill him, more like,”
said Fred firmly.
“That's the trouble with Quidditch,” said Hermione
absent-mindedly, once again bent over her Runes translation, “it creates all
this bad feeling and tension between the houses.”
She looked up to find her
copy of Spellman's Syllabary, and caught Fred, George and Harry all staring at
her with expressions of mingled disgust and incredulity on their
faces.
“Well, it does!” she said impatiently. “It's only a game, isn't
it?”
“Hermione,” said Harry, shaking his head, “you're good on feelings and
stuff, but you just don't understand about Quidditch.”
“Maybe not,” she said
darkly, returning to her translation, “but at least my happiness doesn't depend
on Ron's goalkeeping ability.”
And though Harry would rather have jumped off
the Astronomy Tower than admit it to her, by the time he had watched the game
the following Saturday he would have given any number of Galleons not to care
about Quidditch either.
The very best thing you could say about the match was
that it was short; the Gryffindor spectators had to endure only twenty-two
minutes of agony. It was hard to say what the worst thing was: Harry thought it
was a close-run contest between Ron's fourteenth failed save, Sloper missing the
Bludger but hitting Angelina in the mouth with his bat, and Kirke shrieking and
falling backwards off his broom when Zacharias Smith zoomed at him carrying the
Quaffle. The miracle was that Gryffindor only lost by ten points: Ginny managed
to snatch the Snitch from right under Hufflepuff Seeker Summerby's nose, so that
the final score was two hundred and forty versus two hundred and
thirty.
“Good catch,” Harry told Ginny back in the common room, where the
atmosphere resembled that of a particularly dismal funeral.
“I was lucky,”
she shrugged. “It wasn't a very fast Snitch and Summerby's got a cold, he
sneezed and closed his eyes at exactly the wrong moment. Anyway, once you're
back on the team—”
“Ginny, I've got a lifelong ban.”
“You're banned as
long as Umbridge is in the school,” Ginny corrected him. “There's a difference.
Anyway, once you're back, I think I'll try out for Chaser. Angelina and Alicia
are both leaving next year and I prefer goal-scoring to Seeking
anyway.”
Harry looked over at Ron, who was hunched in a corner, staring at
his knees, a bottle of Butterbeer clutched in his hand.
“Angelina still won't
let him resign,” Ginny said, as though reading Harry's mind. “She says she knows
he's got it in him.”
Harry liked Angelina for the faith she was showing in
Ron, but at the same time thought it would really be kinder to let him leave the
team. Ron had left the pitch to another booming chorus of “Weasley is our King”
sung with great gusto by the Slytherins, who were now favourites to win the
Quidditch Cup.
Fred and George wandered over.
“I haven't even got the
heart to take the mickey out of him,” said Fred, looking over at Ron's crumpled
figure. “Mind you...when he missed the fourteenth—”
He made wild motions with
his arms as though doing an upright doggy-paddle.
“—well, I'll save it for
parties, eh?”
Ron dragged himself up to bed shortly after this. Out of
respect for his feelings, Harry waited a while before going up to the dormitory
himself, so that Ron could pretend to be asleep if he wanted to. Sure enough,
when Harry finally entered the room Ron was snoring a little too loudly to be
entirely plausible.
Harry got into bed, thinking about the match. It had been
immensely frustrating watching from the sidelines. He was quite impressed by
Ginny's performance but he knew if he had been playing he could have caught the
Snitch sooner...there had been a moment when it had been fluttering near Kirke's
ankle; if Ginny hadn't hesitated, she might have been able to scrape a win for
Gryffindor.
Umbridge had been sitting a few rows below Harry and Hermione.
Once or twice she had turned squatly in her seat to look at him, her wide toad's
mouth stretched in what he thought had been a gloating smile. The memory of it
made him feel hot with anger as he lay there in the dark. After a few minutes,
however, he remembered that he was supposed to be emptying his mind of all
emotion before he slept, as Snape kept instructing him at the end of every
Occlumency lesson.
He tried for a moment or two, but the thought of Snape on
top of memories of Umbridge merely increased his sense of grumbling resentment
and he found himself focusing instead on how much he loathed the pair of them.
Slowly, Ron's snores died away, to be replaced by the sound of deep, slow
breathing. It took Harry much longer to get to sleep; his body was tired, but it
took his brain a long time to close down.
He dreamed that Neville and
Professor Sprout were waltzing around the Room of Requirement while Professor
McGonagall played the bagpipes. He watched them happily for a while, then
decided to go and find the other members of the DA.
But when he left the room
he found himself facing, not the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, but a torch
burning in its bracket on a stone wall. He turned his head slowly to the left.
There, at the far end of the windowless passage, was a plain, black door.
He
walked towards it with a sense of mounting excitement. He had the strangest
feeling that this time he was going to get lucky at last, and find the way to
open it...he was feet from it, and saw with a leap of excitement that there was
a glowing strip of faint blue light down the right-hand side...the door was
ajar...he stretched out his hand to push it wide and—
Ron gave a loud,
rasping, genuine snore and Harry awoke abruptly with his right hand stretched in
front of him in the darkness, to open a door that was hundreds of miles away. He
let it fall with a feeling of mingled disappointment and guilt. He knew he
should not have seen the door, but at the same time felt so consumed with
curiosity about what was behind it that he could not help feeling annoyed with
Ron...if only he could have saved his snore for just another
minute.
***
They entered the Great Hall for breakfast at exactly the same
moment as the post owls on Monday morning. Hermione was not the only person
eagerly awaiting her Daily Prophet: nearly everyone was eager for more news
about the escaped Death Eaters, who, despite many reported sightings, had still
not been caught. She gave the delivery owl a Knut and unfolded the newspaper
eagerly while Harry helped himself to orange juice; as he had only received one
note during the entire year, he was sure, when the first owl landed with a thud
in front of him, that it had made a mistake.
“Who're you after?” he asked it,
languidly removing his orange juice from underneath its beak and leaning
forwards to see the recipient's name and address:
Harry Potter Great Hall
Hogwarts School
Frowning, he made to take the letter from the owl, but before
he could do so, three, four, five more owls had fluttered down beside it and
were jockeying for position, treading in the butter and knocking over the salt
as each one attempted to give him their letter first.
“What's going on?” Ron
asked in amazement, as the whole of Gryffindor table leaned forwards to watch
and another seven owls landed amongst the first ones, screeching, hooting and
flapping their wings.
“Harry!” said Hermione breathlessly, plunging her hands
into the feathery mass and pulling out a screech owl bearing a long, cylindrical
package. “I think I know what this means—open this one first!”
Harry ripped
off the brown packaging. Out rolled a tightly furled copy of the March edition
of The Quibbler. He unrolled it to see his own face grinning sheepishly at him
from the front cover. In large red letters across this picture were the
words:
SPEAKS OUT AT LAST:
THE TRUTH ABOUT HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED
AND
THE NIGHT I SAW HIM RETURN
“It's good, isn't it?” said Luna, who had drifted
over to the Gryffindor table and now squeezed herself on to the bench between
Fred and Ron. “It came out yesterday, I asked Dad to send you a free copy. I
expect all these,” she waved a hand at the assembled owls still scrabbling
around on the table in front of Harry, “are letters from readers.”
“That's
what I thought,” said Hermione eagerly. “Harry, d'you mind if we -?”
“Help
yourself,” said Harry, feeling slightly bemused.
Ron and Hermione both
started ripping open envelopes.
“This one's from a bloke who thinks you're
off your rocker,” said Ron, glancing down his letter. “Ah well...”
“This
woman recommends you try a good course of Shock Spells at St Mungo's,” said
Hermione, looking disappointed and crumpling up a second.
“This one looks OK,
though,” said Harry slowly, scanning a long letter from a witch in Paisley.
“Hey, she says she believes me!”
“This one's in two minds,” said Fred, who
had joined in the letter-opening with enthusiasm. “Says you don't come across as
a mad person, but he really doesn't want to believe You-Know-Who's back so he
doesn't know what to think now. Blimey, what a waste of parchment.”
“Here's
another one you've convinced, Harry!” said Hermione excitedly. “Having read your
side of the story, I am forced to the conclusion that the Daily Prophet has
treated you very unfairly...little though I want to think that He Who Must Not
Be Named has returned, I am forced to accept that you are telling the
truth...Oh, this is wonderful!”
“Another one who thinks you're barking,” said
Ron, throwing a crumpled letter over his shoulder “...but this one says you've
got her converted and she now thinks you're a real hero—she's put in a
photograph, too—wow!”
“What is going on here?” said a falsely sweet, girlish
voice.
Harry looked up with his hands full of envelopes. Professor Umbridge
was standing behind Fred and Luna, her bulging toad's eyes scanning the mess of
owls and letters on the table in front of Harry. Behind her he saw many of the
students watching them avidly.
“Why have you got all these letters, Mr
Potter?” she asked slowly.
“Is that a crime now?” said Fred loudly. “Getting
mail?”
“Be careful, Mr Weasley, or I shall have to put you in detention,”
said Umbridge. “Well, Mr Potter?”
Harry hesitated, but he did not see how he
could keep what he had done quiet; it was surely only a matter of time before a
copy of The Quibbler came to Umbridges attention.
“People have written to me
because I gave an interview,” said Harry. “About what happened to me last
June.”
For some reason he glanced up at the staff table as he said this.
Harry had the strangest teeling that Dumbledore had been watching him a second
before, but when he looked towards the Headmaster he seemed to be absorbed in
conversation with Professor Flitwick.
“An interview?” repeated Umbridge, her
voice thinner and higher than ever. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a reporter
asked me questions and I answered them,” said Harry. “Here—”
And he threw the
copy of The Quibbler to her. She caught it and stared down at the cover. Her
pale, doughy face turned an ugly, patchy violet.
“When did you do this?” she
asked, her voice trembling slightly.
“Last Hogsmeade weekend,” said
Harry.
She looked up at him, incandescent with rage, the magazine shaking in
her stubby fingers.
“There will be no more Hogsmeade trips for you, Mr
Potter,” she whispered. “How you dare...how you could...” She took a deep
breath. “I have tried again and again to teach you not to tell lies. The
message, apparently, has still not sunk in. Fifty points from Gryffindor and
another week's worth of detentions.”
She stalked away, clutching The Quibbler
to her chest, the eyes of many students following her.
By mid-morning
enormous signs had been put up all over the school, not just on house
noticeboards, but in the corridors and classrooms too.
BY ORDER OF THE HIGH
INQUISITOR OF HOGWARTS
Any student found in possession of the magazine The
Quibbler will be expelled.
The above is in accordance with Educational Decree
Number Twenty-seven.
Signed: Dolores Jane Umbridge, High Inquisitor
For
some reason, every time Hermione caught sight of one of these signs she beamed
with pleasure.
“What exactly are you so happy about?” Harry asked
her.
“Oh, Harry, don't you see?” Hermione breathed. “If she could have done
one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will
read your interview, it was banning it!”
And it seemed that Hermione was
quite right. By the end of the day, though Harry had not seen so much as a
corner of The Quibbler anywhere in the school, the whole place seemed to be
quoting the interview to each other. Harry heard them whispering about it as
they queued up outside classes, discussing it over lunch and in the back of
lessons, while Hermione even reported that every occupant of the cubicles in the
girls’ toilets had been talking about it when she nipped in there before Ancient
Runes.
“Then they spotted me, and obviously they know I know you, so they
bombarded me with questions,” Hermione told Harry, her eyes shining, “and Harry,
I think they believe you, I really do, I think you've finally got them
convinced!”
Meanwhile, Professor Umbridge was stalking the school, stopping
students at random and demanding that they turn out their books and pockets:
Harry knew she was looking for copies of The Quibbler, but the students were
several steps ahead of her. The pages carrying Harry’s interview had been
bewitched to resemble extracts from textbooks if anyone but themselves read it,
or else wiped magically blank until they wanted to peruse it again. Soon it
seemed that every single person in the school had read it.
The teachers were
of course forbidden from mentioning the interview by Educational Decree Number
Twenty-six, but they found ways to express their feelings about it all the same.
Professor Sprout awarded Gryffindor twenty points when Harry passed her a
watering can; a beaming Professor Flitwick pressed a box of squeaking sugar mice
on him at the end of Charms, said, “Shh!” and hurried away; and Professor
Trelawney broke into hysterical sobs during Divination and announced to the
startled class, and a very disapproving Umbridge, that Harry was not going to
suffer an early death after all, but would live to a ripe old age, become
Minister for Magic and have twelve children.
But what made Harry happiest was
Cho catching up with him as he was hurrying along to Transfiguration the next
day. Before he knew what had happened, her hand was in his and she was breathing
in his ear, “I'm really, really sorry. That interview was so brave...it made me
cry.”
He was sorry to hear she had shed even more tears over it, but very
glad they were on speaking terms again, and even more pleased when she gave him
a swift kiss on the cheek and hurried off again. And unbelievably, no sooner had
he arrived outside Transfiguration than something just as good happened: Seamus
stepped out of the queue to face him.
“I just wanted to say,” he mumbled,
squinting at Harry's left knee, “I believe you. And I've sent a copy of that
magazine to me mam.”
If anything more was needed to complete Harry's
happiness, it was the reaction he got from Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle. He saw them
with their heads together later that afternoon in the library; they were with a
weedy-looking boy Hermione whispered was called Theodore Nott. They looked round
at Harry as he browsed the shelves for the book he needed on Partial Vanishment:
Goyle cracked his knuckles threateningly and Malfoy whispered something
undoubtedly malevolent to Crabbe. Harry knew perfectly well why they were acting
like this: he had named all of their fathers as Death Eaters.
“And the best
bit,” whispered Hermione gleefully, as they left the library, “is they can't
contradict you, because they can't admit they've read the article!”
To cap it
all, Luna told him over dinner that no issue of The Quibbler had ever sold out
faster.
“Dad's reprinting!” she told Harry, her eyes popping excitedly. “He
can't believe it, he says people seem even more interested in this than the
Crumple-Horned Snorkacks!”
Harry was a hero in the Gryffindor common room
that night. Daringly, Fred and George had put an Enlargement Charm on the front
cover of The Quibbler and hung it on the wall, so that Harry's giant head gazed
down upon the proceedings, occasionally saying things like “THE MINISTRY ARE
MORONS” and “EAT DUNG, UMBRIDGE” in a booming voice. Hermione did not find this
very amusing; she said it interfered with her concentration, and she ended up
going to bed early out of irritation. Harry had to admit that the poster was not
quite as funny after an hour or two, especially when the talking spell had
started to wear off, so that it merely shouted disconnected words like “DUNG”
and “UMBRIDGE” at more and more frequent intervals in a progressively higher
voice. In fact, it started to make his head ache and his scar began prickling
uncomfortably again. To disappointed moans from the many people who were sitting
around him, asking him to relive his interview for the umpteenth time, he
announced that he too needed an early night.
The dormitory was empty when he
reached it. He rested his forehead for a moment against the cool glass of the
window beside his bed; it felt soothing against his scar. Then he undressed and
got into bed, wishing his headache would go away. He also felt slightly sick. He
rolled over on to his side, closed his eyes, and fell asleep almost at
once...
He was standing in a dark, curtained room lit by a single branch of
candles. His hands were clenched on the back of a chair in front of him. They
were long-fingered and white as though they had not seen sunlight for years and
looked like large, pale spiders against the dark velvet of the chair.
Beyond
the chair, in a pool of light cast upon the floor by the candles, knelt a man in
black robes.
“I have been badly advised, it seems,” said Harry, in a high,
cold voice that pulsed with anger.
“Master, I crave your pardon,” croaked the
man kneeling on the floor. The back of his head glimmered in the candlelight. He
seemed to be trembling.
“I do not blame you, Rookwood,” said Harry in that
cold, cruel voice.
He relinquished his grip on the chair and walked around
it, closer to the man cowering on the floor, until he stood directly over him in
the darkness, looking down from a far greater height than usual.
“You are
sure of your facts, Rookwood?” asked Harry.
“Yes, My Lord, yes...I used to
work in the Department after -after all...”
“Avery told me Bode would be able
to remove it.”
“Bode could never have taken it, Master...Bode would have
known he could not...undoubtedly, that is why he fought so hard against Malfoy's
Imperius Curse...”
“Stand up, Rookwood,” whispered Harry.
The kneeling man
almost fell over in his haste to obey. His face was pockmarked; the scars were
thrown into relief by the candlelight. He remained a little stooped when
standing, as though halfway through a bow, and he darted terrified looks up at
Harry's face.
“You have done well to tell me this,” said Harry. “Very
well...I have wasted months on fruitless schemes, it seems...but no matter...we
begin again, from now. You have Lord Voldemort's gratitude, Rookwood...”
“My
Lord...yes, My Lord,” gasped Rookwood, his voice hoarse with relief.
“I shall
need your help. I shall need all the information you can give me.”
“Of
course, My Lord, of course...anything...”
“Very well...you may go. Send Avery
to me.”
Rookwood scurried backwards, bowing, and disappeared through a
door.
Left alone in the dark room, Harry turned towards the wall. A cracked,
age-spotted mirror hung on the wall in the shadows. Harry moved towards it. His
reflection grew larger and clearer in the darkness...a face whiter than a
skull...red eyes with slits for pupils...
“NOOOOOOOOO!”
“What?” yelled a
voice nearby.
Harry flailed around madly, became entangled in the hangings
and fell out of his bed. For a few seconds he did not know where he was; he was
convinced he was about to see the white, skull-like face looming at him out ol
the dark again, then very near to him Ron's voice spoke. . “Will you stop acting
like a maniac so I can get you out of here!”
Ron wrenched the hangings apart
and Harry stared up at him in the moonlight, flat on his back, his scar searing
with pain. Ron looked as though he had just been getting ready for bed; one arm
was out of his robes.
“Has someone been attacked again?” asked Ron, pulling
Harry roughly to his feet. “Is it Dad? Is it that snake?”
“No—everyone's
fine—” gasped Harry, whose forehead felt as though it were on fire.
“Well...Avery isn't...he's in trouble...he gave him the wrong
information...Voldemort's really angry”
Harry groaned and sank, shaking, on
to his bed, rubbing his scar.
“But Rookwood's going to help him now...he's on
the right track again...”
“What are you talking about?” said Ron, sounding
scared. “D'you mean...did you just see You-Know-Who?”
“I was You-Know-Who,”
said Harry, and he stretched out his hands in the darkness and held them up to
his face, to check that they were no longer deathly white and long-fingered. “He
was with Rookwood, he's one of the Death Eaters who escaped from Azkaban,
remember? Rookwood's just told him Bode couldn't have done it.”
“Done
what?”
“Remove something...he said Bode would have known he couldn't have
done it...Bode was under the Imperius Curse...I think he said Malfoy's dad put
it on him.”
“Bode was bewitched to remove something?” Ron said. “But -Harry,
that's got to be—”
“The weapon,” Harry finished the sentence for him. “I
know”
The dormitory door opened; Dean and Seamus came in. Harry swung his
legs back into bed. He did not want to look as though anything odd had just
happened, seeing as Seamus had only just stopped thinking Harry was a
nutter.
“Did you say,” murmured Ron, putting his head close to Harry's on the
pretence of helping himself to water from the jug on his bedside table, “that
you were You-Know-Who?”
“Yeah,” said Harry quietly.
Ron took an
unnecessarily large gulp of water; Harry saw it spill over his chin on to his
chest.
“Harry,” he said, as Dean and Seamus clattered around noisily, pulling
off their robes and talking, “you've got to tell—”
“I haven't got to tell
anyone,” said Harry shortly. “I wouldn't have seen it at all if I could do
Occlumency. I'm supposed to have learned to shut this stuff out. That's what
they want.”
By “they” he meant Dumbledore. He got back into bed and rolled
over on to his side with his back to Ron and after a while he heard Ron's
mattress creak as he, too, lay back down. Harry's scar began to burn; he bit
hard on his pillow to stop himself making a noise. Somewhere, he knew, Avery was
being punished.
***
Harry and Ron waited until break next morning to tell
Hermione exactly what had happened; they wanted to be absolutely sure they could
not be overheard. Standing in their usual corner of the cool and breezy
courtyard, Harry told her every detail of the dream he could remember. When he
had finished, she said nothing at all for a few moments, but stared with a kind
of painful intensity at Fred and George, who were both headless and selling
their magical hats from under their cloaks on the other side of the yard.
“So
that's why they killed him,” she said quietly, withdrawing her gaze from Fred
and George at last. “When Bode tried to steal this weapon, something funny
happened to him. I think there must be defensive spells on it, or around it, to
stop people touching it. That's why he was in St Mungo's, his brain had gone all
funny and he couldn't talk. But remember what the Healer told us? He was
recovering. And they couldn't risk him getting better, could they? I mean, the
shock of whatever happened when he touched that weapon probably made the
Imperius Curse lift. Once he'd got his voice back, he'd explain what he'd been
doing, wouldn't he? They would have known he'd been sent to steal the weapon. Of
course, it would have been easy for Lucius Malfoy to put the curse on him. Never
out of the Ministry, is he?”
“He was even hanging around that day I had my
hearing,” said Harry. “In the—hang on...” he said slowly. “He was in the
Department of Mysteries corridor that day! Your dad said he was probably trying
to sneak down and find out what happened in my hearing, but what
if—”
“Sturgis!” gasped Hermione, looking thunderstruck.
“Sorry?” said Ron,
looking bewildered.
“Sturgis Podmore—” said Hermione breathlessly, “arrested
for trying to get through a door! Lucius Malfoy must have got him too! I bet he
did it the day you saw him there, Harry. Sturgis had Moody's Invisibility Cloak,
right? So, what if he was standing guard by the door, invisible, and Malfoy
heard him move—or guessed someone was there—or just did the Imperius Curse on
the off-chance there'd be a guard there? So, when Sturgis next had an
opportunity—probably when it was his turn on guard duty again—he tried to get
into the Department to steal the weapon for Voldemort—Ron, be quiet—but he got
caught and sent to Azkaban...”
She gazed at Harry.
“And now Rookwood's
told Voldemort how to get the weapon?”
“I didn't hear all the conversation,
but that's what it sounded like,” said Harry. “Rookwood used to work
there...maybe Voldemort'll send Rookwood to do it?”
Hermione nodded,
apparently still lost in thought. Then, quite abruptly, she said, “But you
shouldn't have seen this at all, Harry.”
“What?” he said, taken
aback.
“You're supposed to be learning how to close your mind to this sort of
thing,” said Hermione, suddenly stern.
“I know I am,” said Harry.
“But—”
“Well, I think we should just try and forget what you saw,” said
Hermione firmly. “And you ought to put in a bit more effort on your Occlumency
from now on.”
Harry was so angry with her he did not talk to her for the rest
of the day, which proved to be another bad one. When people were not discussing
the escaped Death Eaters in the corridors, they were laughing at Gryffindor's
abysmal performance in their match against Hufflepuff; the Slytherins were
singing “Weasley is our King” so loudly and frequently that by sundown Filch had
banned it from the corridors out of sheer irritation.
The week did not
improve as it progressed. Harry received two more “D”'s in Potions; he was still
on tenterhooks that Hagrid might get the sack; and he couldn't stop himself
dwelling on the dream in which he had been Voldemort—though he didn't bring it
up with Ron and Hermione again; he didn't want another telling-off from
Hermione. He wished very much that he could have talked to Sirius about it, but
that was out of the question, so he tried to push the matter to the back of his
mind.
Unfortunately, the back of his mind was no longer the secure place it
had once been.
“Get up, Potter.”
A couple of weeks after his dream of
Rookwood, Harry was to be found, yet again, kneeling on the floor of Snape's
office, trying to clear his head. He had just been forced, yet again, to relive
a stream of very early memories he had not even realised he still had, most of
them concerning humiliations Dudley and his gang had inflicted upon him in
primary school.
“That last memory,” said Snape. “What was it?”
“I don't
know,” said Harry, getting wearily to his feet. He was finding it increasingly
difficult to disentangle separate memories from the rush of images and sound
that Snape kept calling forth. “You mean the one where my cousin tried to make
me stand in the toilet?”
“No,” said Snape softly. “I mean the one with a man
kneeling in the middle of a darkened room...”
“It's...nothing,” said
Harry.
Snape's dark eyes bored into Harry's. Remembering what Snape had said
about eye contact being crucial to Legilimency, Harry blinked and looked
away.
“How do that man and that room come to be inside your head, Potter?”
said Snape.
“It—” said Harry, looking everywhere but at Snape, “it was -just
a dream I had.”
“A dream?” repeated Snape.
There was a pause during which
Harry stared fixedly at a large dead frog suspended in a jar of purple
liquid.
“You do know why we are here, don't you, Potter?” said Snape, in a
low, dangerous voice. “You do know why I am giving up my evenings to this
tedious job?”
“Yes,” said Harry stiffly.
“Remind me why we are here,
Potter.”
“So I can learn Occlumency,” said Harry, now glaring at a dead
eel.
“Correct, Potter. And dim though you may be—” Harry looked back at
Snape, hating him “—I would have thought that after over two months of lessons
you might have made some progress. How many other dreams about the Dark Lord
have you had?”
“Just that one,” lied Harry.
“Perhaps,” said Snape, his
dark, cold eyes narrowing slightly, “perhaps you actually enjoy having these
visions and dreams, Potter. Maybe they make you feel special—important?”
“No,
they don't,” said Harry, his jaw set and his fingers clenched tightly around the
handle of his wand.
“That is just as well, Potter,” said Snape coldly,
“because you are neither special nor important, and it is not up to you to find
out what the Dark Lord is saying to his Death Eaters.”
“No—that's your job,
isn't it?” Harry shot at him.
He had not meant to say it; it had burst out of
him in temper. For a long moment they stared at each other, Harry convinced he
had gone too far. But there was a curious, almost satisfied expression on
Snape's face when he answered.
“Yes, Potter,” he said, his eyes glinting.
“That is my job. Now, if you are ready, we will start again.”
He raised his
wand: “One—two—three—Legilimensl”
A hundred Dementors were swooping towards
Harry across the lake in the grounds...he screwed up his face in
concentration...they were coming closer...he could see the dark holes beneath
their hoods...yet he could also see Snape standing in front of him, his eyes
fixed on Harry's face, muttering under his breath...and somehow, Snape was
growing clearer, and the Dementors were growing fainter...
Harry raised his
own wand.
“Protego!”
Snape staggered—his wand flew upwards, away from
Harry -and suddenly Harry's mind was teeming with memories that were not his: a
hook-nosed man was shouting at a cowering woman, while a small dark-haired boy
cried in a corner...a greasy-haired teenager sat alone in a dark bedroom,
pointing his wand at the ceiling, shooting down flies...a girl was laughing as a
scrawny boy tried to mount a bucking broomstick—
“ENOUGH!”
Harry felt as
though he had been pushed hard in the chest; he staggered several steps
backwards, hit some of the shelves covering Snape's walls and heard something
crack. Snape was shaking slightly, and was very white in the face.
The back
of Harry's robes was damp. One of the jars behind him had broken when he fell
against it; the pickled slimy thing within was swirling in its draining
potion.
“Reparo,” hissed Snape, and the jar sealed itself at once. “Well,
Potter...that was certainly an improvement...” Panting slightly, Snape
straightened the Pensieve in which he had again stored some of his thoughts
before starting the lesson, almost as though he was checking they were still
there. “I don't remember telling you to use a Shield Charm...but there is no
doubt that it was effective...”
Harry did not speak; he felt that to say
anything might be dangerous. He was sure he had just broken into Snape's
memories, that he had just seen scenes from Snape's childhood. It was unnerving
to think that the little boy who had been crying as he watched his parents
shouting was actually standing in front of him with such loathing in his
eyes.
“Let's try again, shall we?” said Snape.
Harry felt a thrill of
dread; he was about to pay for what had just happened, he was sure of it. They
moved back into position with the desk between them, Harry feeling he was going
to find it much harder to empty his mind this time.
“On the count of three,
then,” said Snape, raising his wand once more. “One—two—”
Harry did not have
time to gather himself together and attempt to clear his mind before Snape
cried, “Legilimens!”
He was hurtling along the corridor towards the
Department of Mysteries, past the blank stone walls, past the torches—the plain
black door was growing ever larger; he was moving so fast he was going to
collide with it, he was feet from it and again he could see that chink of faint
blue light—
The door had flown open! He was through it at last, inside a
black-walled, black-floored circular room lit with blue-flamed candles, and
there were more doors all around him—he needed to go on—but which door ought he
to take -?
“POTTER!”
Harry opened his eyes. He was flat on his back again
with no memory of having got there; he was also panting as though he really had
run the length of the Department of Mysteries corridor, really had sprinted
through the black door and found the circular room.
“Explain yourself!” said
Snape, who was standing over him, looking furious.
“I...dunno what happened,”
said Harry truthfully, standing up. There was a lump on the back of his head
from where he had hit the ground and he felt feverish. “I've never seen that
before. I mean, I told you, I've dreamed about the door...but it's never opened
before”
“You are not working hard enough!”
For some reason, Snape seemed
even angrier than he had done two minutes before, when Harry had seen into his
teacher's memories.
“You are lazy and sloppy, Potter, it is small wonder that
the Dark Lord—”
“Can you tell me something, sir?” said Harry, firing up
again. “Why do you call Voldemort the Dark Lord? I've only ever heard Death
Eaters call him that.”
Snape opened his mouth in a snarl—and a woman screamed
from somewhere outside the room.
Snapes head jerked upwards; he was gazing at
the ceiling.
“What the -?” he muttered.
Harry could hear a muffled
commotion coming from what he thought might be the Entrance Hall. Snape looked
round at him, frowning.
“Did you see anything unusual on your way down here,
Potter?”
Harry shook his head. Somewhere above them, the woman screamed
again. Snape strode to his office door, his wand still held at the ready, and
swept out of sight. Harry hesitated for a moment, then followed.
The screams
were indeed coming from the Entrance Hall; they grew louder as Harry ran towards
the stone steps leading up from the dungeons. When he reached the top he found
the Entrance Hall packed; students had come flooding out of the Great Hall,
where dinner was still in progress, to see what was going on; others had crammed
themselves on to the marble staircase. Harry pushed forwards through a knot of
tall Slytherins and saw that the onlookers had formed a great ring, some of them
looking shocked, others even frightened. Professor McGonagall was directly
opposite Harry on the other side of the Hall; she looked as though what she was
watching made her feel faintly sick.
Professor Trelawney was standing in the
middle of the Entrance Hall with her wand in one hand and an empty sherry bottle
in the other, looking utterly mad. Her hair was sticking up on end, her glasses
were lopsided so that one eye was magnified more than the other; her innumerable
shawls and scarves were trailing haphazardly from her shoulders, giving the
impression that she was falling apart at the seams. Two large trunks lay on the
floor beside her, one of them upside-down; it looked very much as though it had
been thrown down the stairs after her. Professor Trelawney was staring,
apparently terrified, at something Harry could not see but which seemed to be
standing at the foot of the stairs.
“No!” she shrieked. “NO! This cannot be
happening...it cannot...I refuse to accept it!”
“You didn't realise this was
coming?” said a high girlish voice, sounding callously amused, and Harry, moving
slightly to his right, saw that Trelawney's terrifying vision was nothing other
than Professor Umbridge. “Incapable though you are of predicting even tomorrow's
weather, you must surely have realised that your pitiful performance during my
inspections, and lack of any improvement, would make it inevitable that you
would be sacked?”
“You c—can't!” howled Professor Trelawney, tears streaming
down her face from behind her enormous lenses, “you c—can't sack me! I've b—been
here sixteen years! H—Hogwarts is in—my h—home!”
“It was your home,” said
Professor Umbridge, and Harry was revolted to see the enjoyment stretching her
toadlike face as she watched Professor Trelawney sink, sobbing uncontrollably,
on to one of her trunks, “until an hour ago, when the Minister for Magic
countersigned your Order of Dismissal. Now kindly remove yourself from this
Hall. You are embarrassing us.”
But she stood and watched, with an expression
of gloating enjoyment, as Professor Trelawney shuddered and moaned, rocking
backwards and forwards on her trunk in paroxysms of grief. Harry heard a muffled
sob to his left and looked around. Lavender and Parvati were both crying
quietly, their arms round each other. Then he heard footsteps. Professor
McGonagall had broken away from the spectators, marched straight up to Professor
Trelawney and was patting her firmly on the back while withdrawing a large
handkerchief from within her robes.
There, there, Sybill...calm down...blow
your nose on this...it's not as bad as you think, now...you are not going to
have to leave Hogwarts...”
“Oh really, Professor McGonagall?” said Umbridge
in a deadly voice, taking a few steps forward. “And your authority for that
statement is...?”
“That would be mine,” said a deep voice.
The oaken front
doors had swung open. Students beside them scuttled out of the way as Dumbledore
appeared in the entrance. What he had been doing out in the grounds Harry could
not imagine, but there was something impressive about the sight of him framed in
the doorway against an oddly misty night. Leaving the doors wide open behind him
he strode forwards through the circle of onlookers towards Professor Trelawney,
tear-stained and trembling, on her trunk, Professor McGonagall alongside
her.
“Yours, Professor Dumbledore?” said Umbridge, with a singularly
unpleasant little laugh. “I'm afraid you do not understand the position. I have
here—” she pulled a parchment scroll from within her robes- an Order of
Dismissal signed by myself and the Minister for Magic. Under the terms of
Educational Decree Number Twenty-three, the High Inquisitor of Hogwarts has the
power to inspect, place upon probation and sack any teacher she—that is to say,
I—feel is not performing to the standards required by the Ministry of Magic. I
have decided that Professor Trelawney is not up to scratch. I have dismissed
her.”
To Harry's very great surprise, Dumbledore continued to smile. He
looked down at Professor Trelawney, who was still sobbing and choking on her
trunk, and said, “You are quite right, of course, Professor Umbridge. As High
Inquisitor you have every right to dismiss my teachers. You do not, however,
have the authority to send them away from the castle. I am afraid,” he went on,
with a courteous little bow, that the power to do that still resides with the
Headmaster, and it is my wish that Professor Trelawney continue to live at
Hogwarts.”
At this, Professor Trelawney gave a wild little laugh in which a
hiccough was barely hidden.
“No—no, I'll g—go, Dumbledore! I sh—shall—leave
Hogwarts and's—seek my fortune elsewhere—”
“No,” said Dumbledore sharply. “It
is my wish that you remain, Sybill.”
He turned to Professor
McGonagall.
“Might I ask you to escort Sybill back upstairs, Professor
McGonagall?”
“Of course,” said McGonagall. “Up you get,
Sybill...”
Professor Sprout came hurrying forwards out of the crowd and
grabbed Professor Trelawney's other arm. Together, they guided her past Umbridge
and up the marble stairs. Professor Flitwick went scurrying after them, his wand
held out before him; he squeaked “Locomotor trunks!” and Professor Trelawney's
luggage rose into the air and proceeded up the staircase after her, Professor
Flitwick bringing up the rear.
Professor Umbridge was standing stock still,
staring at Dumbledore, who continued to smile benignly.
“And what,” she said,
in a whisper that carried all around the Entrance Hall, “are you going to do
with her once I appoint a new Divination teacher who needs her
lodgings?”
“Oh, that won't be a problem,” said Dumbledore pleasantly. “You
see, I have already found us a new Divination teacher, and he will prefer
lodgings on the ground floor.”
“You've found -?” said Umbridge shrilly.
“You've found? Might I remind you, Dumbledore, that under Educational Decree
Number Twenty-two—”
“The Ministry has the right to appoint a suitable
candidate if -and only if- the Headmaster is unable to find one,” said
Dumbledore. “And I am happy to say that on this occasion I have succeeded. May I
introduce you?”
He turned to face the open front doors, through which night
mist was now drifting. Harry heard hooves. There was a shocked murmur around the
Hall and those nearest the doors hastily moved even further backwards, some of
them tripping over in their haste to clear a path for the newcomer.
Through
the mist came a face Harry had seen once before on a dark, dangerous night in
the Forbidden Forest: white-blond hair and astonishingly blue eyes; the head and
torso of a man joined to the palomino body of a horse.
“This is Firenze,”
said Dumbledore happily to a thunderstruck Umbridge. “I think you'll find him
suitable.”