Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

Outside the bathroom, Ron asked whether the book contained anything useful. I told him there was a name and nothing else on the pages I had examined. He suggested that being blank might explain why somebody had thrown it away. It was possible, though it did little to explain choosing Myrtle as the place to throw it.

We had gone only a short distance when I saw the spiders. They moved along the wall in a narrow line, with more appearing from the passage beyond the corner. I stopped, making Ron check his stride behind me. The sight recalled the wet corridor beside Mrs. Norris too clearly for me to continue as though we had found something ordinary.

I asked him to wait where we could still see each other and moved far enough to look round the corner. Nick hung motionless in the air. At first I thought he was looking down, then I noticed the angle of his head and the stillness of the rest of him. A boy lay beyond him, with another standing against the wall.

The standing boy was Harry. I called his name, and he turned sharply towards me, beginning a denial before I had asked anything. I told him to stay where he was and came nearer without walking through Nick. The figure on the floor was Justin, his eyes open and his body terribly still.

I wanted to kneel beside him and do something useful. Instead I stopped short of touching him. We did not know what had hurt the others, and moving him without understanding what had happened seemed a poor beginning. Ron reached the corner, saw enough to understand and ran for a teacher when I asked him, calling as he went.

I could still hear him while Harry explained. He had found them like this on his way to look for us. I asked whether he had been alone, and he nodded. Nothing in the corridor moved except the spiders. When I asked whether he had seen anybody leave, he said no and began telling me what he had heard.

Filch interrupted from the other end of the passage. He looked at Nick, then at Justin and Harry, announcing that he had caught us at last. Harry stepped back. I stayed beside him and said Ron had gone for a teacher; people needed to be kept out of the corridor until help arrived.

‘Don’t give me orders, Mercer,’ Filch said. ‘You were here last time too.’ I reminded him that we had found Mrs. Norris and she was now being cared for. Justin needed the same thing. He came closer, but did not reach for either of us, and I kept Nick between us and the boy on the floor while we waited.

McGonagall arrived with Ron behind her before Filch finished describing what Dumbledore would do. She sent Ron to the corner to keep approaching students back, then examined Justin. Another teacher followed and took charge of the passage. McGonagall spoke quietly about moving the victims without allowing people to press close.

Nick had been dead when I met him. Knowing that did not make the sight of something happening to him now easier to understand. I watched his motionless outline while McGonagall stood and asked Harry and me to come with her. Harry opened his mouth, but she explained that she needed our accounts somewhere quiet.

Ron had already told her where he had been with me and when we separated. She instructed him to return with the next group and tell Hermione where we were. I handed him the wet book, which was becoming awkward to hold and could not go beside the prepared paper in my pouch. I asked him to put it with the found things until I returned to write a label.

He agreed, and I followed McGonagall. The journey to Dumbledore’s office felt longer than it had before. Harry stayed close beside me, then whispered an apology when the professor paused to speak with a prefect. He said he had got me mixed up in it again.

‘I walked round a corner,’ I told him. ‘Justin needs help. Neither of those things is your fault.’ He admitted that he should not have left on his own, and I agreed. That needed explaining, I added, but it was not the same as attacking somebody. He looked down at his shoes while we waited to continue.

At the office, McGonagall told us Dumbledore would be with us shortly. She had information from the corridor to pass on first. We went upstairs and stood among the instruments, portraits and books, finding no place which seemed a sensible one for two boys who had been summoned to describe another attack. A bird shifted on a golden perch, and Harry turned towards it.

He asked whether it was the headmaster’s phoenix. I had never seen a living one and went closer, stopping well beyond its beak. Gaps showed in its plumage, and the remaining feathers hung loosely. It turned its head with enough apparent effort that I lowered my voice when suggesting we tell Dumbledore it looked unwell.

Flame ran through the feathers. I stepped back, reaching towards my pouch, but the bird collapsed into the basin below before I selected a preparation. Ash rose in a little rush. Harry stared beside me, and Dumbledore’s voice came from behind us, telling me not to cast anything.

I took my hand away. The headmaster explained that Fawkes had been approaching his Burning Day for some time, and we had arrived for it. Something moved in the basin as he spoke. A small head pushed through the ash, followed by bare skin and the beginnings of new feathers.

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I leant forward despite myself and asked whether that was still the same bird. Dumbledore confirmed it. Phoenixes were reborn from their ashes, he explained, and Fawkes would soon look more like himself. The little creature opened its beak, producing a sound small enough to make me forget the fire for a moment.

Dumbledore watched him with quiet affection. Phoenixes could carry far more than their size suggested, he told us, and their tears healed wounds. Then he indicated two chairs, acknowledging that we had more urgent questions that evening. Harry spoke before sitting, insisting that I had arrived after he found Nick and Justin.

McGonagall had already explained that, Dumbledore replied. We needed to establish what happened to the victims. I gave my account first, describing the bathroom, the spiders and looking round the corner. I explained where Nick floated and where Justin lay beyond him. I had seen neither the attack nor Harry casting any spell.

Dumbledore asked me to draw the positions. It took longer than pointing would have done. I turned the parchment until I was looking from the same direction as in the corridor, then marked where Harry had stood. He watched the quill and said he had heard the voice before finding them.

He had already been going to look for us when it began, he explained. Dumbledore asked whether he followed it. Harry hesitated before admitting that he had, a little. He wanted to see where it came from, and stopped midway through trying to explain what that might have changed.

‘You hoped to understand why nobody else could hear it,’ Dumbledore said. Harry agreed. The headmaster acknowledged the temptation, then reminded him that he still had to report it before following. Something had already injured people. Harry nodded without trying to find a better explanation for going alone.

I remembered the empty spaces beside him at meals. Finding the source must have seemed a way to end the whispers, though I could only guess how much that mattered while he was listening. What it had brought him to was another boy on the floor. I looked at the diagram, wishing it gave us a direction in which to do something useful now.

Harry added that he had heard the voice in the hospital wing on the night Colin was brought in. He had told Pomfrey when describing Dobby. Dumbledore said she had included it in her message; this evening supplied another position and time. That part was new to me, and I asked Harry whether he had been in bed while it passed.

He had. He could not place it exactly, but it had been somewhere outside. I wrote that beside the diagram. He had not been led to every victim, whatever people might decide from finding him beside Justin. I also mentioned him believing that we had heard ordinary words when he spoke to the snake at the Club.

McGonagall had given Dumbledore our conversation. The possibility was being taken seriously, he said. Searching an ordinary corridor could tell the teachers only so much about spaces beyond it, but that was a difficulty to address, not a reason to use Harry to find the source for them. I nodded and left room for the times beside each position.

Dumbledore asked for the words Harry could remember and more detail about his route from Gryffindor. He did not improve uncertain answers for him or treat being frightened as evidence of guilt. When he finished, I asked whether he thought Harry had attacked the others. His answer was a direct no, and Harry’s hands loosened on the chair.

Other students would think so, I said, especially because it was Justin. Dumbledore promised to make clear that discovering a victim differed from attacking one. The staff would address threats and harassment, though he could not promise that every frightened child would stop being afraid immediately. I found that easier to believe than an assurance that the common room would welcome us back without a glance.

The door opened hard enough to make all three of us turn. Hagrid came in still holding the cockerel, saying he would swear before the Ministry that we had not done it. Dumbledore tried to interrupt, but Hagrid continued defending Harry and me until the headmaster said plainly that neither of us had been accused by him.

Hagrid stopped. He looked at us in our chairs and at the notes on the desk, then gave a small, embarrassed acknowledgement. Dumbledore said he knew Hagrid wanted to speak with him and would be available shortly. Hagrid gave us a relieved look before returning outside with the bird still hanging from his hand.

I watched it disappear through the doorway. He had told us it was the third that month, I said. Dumbledore replied that they would discuss all three. There was nothing more I could contribute from what I had actually seen, so I left the diagram and the times with him when McGonagall returned to escort us back.

The common room quietened at our arrival. Ron and Hermione came straight towards us, and Neville moved his books to make room. Some people went upstairs, while others stayed and watched. I sat between Harry and the most interested faces before we began telling our friends what had happened.

We kept the conversation low. By the time I described Nick’s position again, I was tired of hearing my own account, but Hermione drew another diagram and asked me to correct the distance to Justin. I did so, aware of how easy it would be to remember the space differently after looking at a drawing instead of the corridor.

She asked whether somebody might be arranging for Harry to find the victims. I admitted it was possible, then added what he had told Dumbledore about being in bed when Colin arrived. Hearing the voice did not mean he had been taken to every attack. Harry nodded, looking too tired to argue even with an explanation intended to help him.

I examined the new drawing and asked why they were alive. Ron began saying my name as though he disliked the question. I assured him I was glad they were, but Myrtle had died and the voice spoke about killing. If the same danger was responsible, something differed between the results.

Hermione suggested that somebody might want to frighten us this time. That was possible too, I said. Or something had prevented the attacks from ending as the first one had. I could not explain how water, a camera and a ghost fitted together, but I put the accounts beside one another rather than leaving each on a separate page. The space between the details was beginning to bother me more than any one of them alone.