Chapter 50 — Things People Take

Hermione explained that we had called out before coming in. The ghost’s lower lip trembled, and she asked how we expected her to hear while she was crying. Ron looked at me with a response gathering behind his eyes. I shook my head slightly, hoping to prevent a conversation we were unlikely to win.

‘I’m Oswald,’ I said. ‘We were looking for somewhere to work. We didn’t mean to disturb you.’ She gave her name as Myrtle, with the air of supplying something we ought to have known already. Then she drifted closer, her robes passing through the edge of a box, and asked what sort of work required bringing so many things into a bathroom.

I explained about the potions notes and paper spells. Mostly, we were finding ways to get them wrong, although the figures on the stone represented an improvement. Myrtle studied the one which remained stiff from the final trial. She said it looked uncomfortable, and I agreed that this was a good reason to use figures while learning. Hermione freed its joints and put it back in the box.

Myrtle asked questions for several minutes. The attention seemed to interest her until Ron shifted his feet and glanced towards the cubicles. She noticed immediately and began asking whether he found her conversation so tiresome that he needed to escape. He said he would find another lavatory, then left quickly enough to make defending his departure difficult.

By the time he returned, she had drifted away again. We packed the work together, accepting that a room without living students was still capable of having an occupant. Anything we did here would have to allow for Myrtle and for somebody wanting to use the bathroom. Ron looked at the cubicle doors as though one might open to dispute even that modest arrangement.

‘You’ve got a map of the castle,’ he reminded me. ‘Couldn’t we look at that before deciding this is the best we can do?’ I took it from my pouch and moved a box to clear some dry space. We had all seen it before following Quirrell, but that night had offered little opportunity to admire anything beyond the route we needed.

I touched the parchment with my brush and spoke the words that woke it. Corridors appeared, joining staircases and rooms while names began moving between them. Ron shifted another box so I could open the complicated folds without hanging half the castle over a basin. Hermione bent closer as the makers’ names formed above the drawing.

Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs had evidently cared little about sounding respectable. Harry said so, and I suggested it might have damaged their reputation. The names told us nothing useful about who they really were. Their work was more informative: I found our bathroom, with all four of us marked beside Myrtle, whose name moved through a wall.

‘It follows ghosts as well,’ Hermione said. She traced the route without touching the ink, then looked farther across the parchment. Filch was proceeding along a passage, while Dumbledore’s name shifted within the boundaries of his office. Whatever the map detected, a body solid enough to trip over did not appear to be necessary.

Hermione called it a tracking enchantment, then immediately began asking what it tracked. Giving the result a name had not explained how anyone made it work through so many walls and floors. I understood her interest. We could see what the makers had achieved, but looking at the moving labels brought me no closer to reproducing them with a brush.

Seven passages stood out which I would not have recognised from walking the ordinary corridors. Ron wanted to investigate one at once. Hermione pointed out that knowing where a line went did not tell us whether the entrance was locked or whether somebody was watching it. Filch’s position made that objection difficult to dismiss as unnecessary caution.

I was folding a section back when the lower chambers caught my eye. I asked Harry to look beneath the trapdoor, and he leaned beside me. There were rooms drawn where I remembered staring at blank parchment last year. We could follow the spaces now, rather than watching a name disappear and guessing what lay beyond it.

‘Those weren’t there,’ Harry said. I confirmed it, remembering how little the map had told us once Quirrell went below. Ron suggested that the protections had been removed. Hermione held her finger above an outline and said something must have changed, though we did not know what had hidden the chambers in the first place.

‘Or what else it can’t show,’ I said. I was reluctant to turn one changed patch into an explanation for every blank space in Hogwarts. The map had been useful without being complete. Its makers might have missed places, or magic might interfere with it, or both might be true. None of those possibilities marked us a convenient workshop.

We noted several rooms worth checking. For the moment, none promised running water, privacy and freedom from somebody reclaiming it halfway through a brew. The bathroom still had our boxes in it. I closed the map before anyone could wander in and put it back in my pouch, with the sense that we had found more questions than alternative accommodation.

This tale has been pilfered from NovelPhoenix. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

On Sunday morning, Leo carried an order to an ordinary potions supplier. Hermione’s list covered things we needed to replenish, and I had added materials for the next ink trials. The packets from Knockturn Alley did not remove the need for either. Some were still waiting to be checked against their labels before I would use them in anything.

I sent a letter and payment instructions. The supplier could arrange delivery of the goods; Leo did not need to become a flying cart to justify having an owner interested in potions. He left the owlery in a rush of feathers, circled into the wind and headed away over the grounds. I watched until he was difficult to distinguish against the sky, then went downstairs to find lunch.

Afterwards, I came upon Luna reading beside a corridor window. Her wand was tucked behind her ear, and one foot rested on the sill. She greeted me before I had quite reached her. I stopped, briefly surprised enough to ask how she had known who was approaching.

She pointed to the glass. My reflection stood behind hers, looking like somebody who ought to have noticed it sooner. I admired the sophistication of her method, and she suggested that I could try it too. Before I found a convincing defence, Ginny appeared from the adjoining passage and greeted us both.

Her eyes dropped to Luna’s shoes. One was black; the other was brown, with a different fastening. I had noticed the difference without deciding whether Luna had chosen it. Ginny’s question answered that before I could ask my own: somebody had taken another of her things.

‘They think it’s funny,’ Ginny said. Luna lowered her foot from the sill and looked at the mismatched pair. I asked who was doing it. She said some of the people in her year called her Loony, but she did not know who had taken the shoe this time. Things usually turned up again.

‘They shouldn’t have to,’ Ginny told her. Luna smiled at her friend, accepting the support without becoming visibly angry herself. I looked down at the shoes again. Finding a way to carry on with her day did not mean nobody had made it harder. I said I agreed with Ginny, and Luna’s attention returned to me.

I disliked the familiar shape of it: a group finding a person they could inconvenience and calling the result a joke. I also knew surprisingly little about what had happened beyond a missing shoe and what Luna had told us. Being angry on her behalf would not tell me who had it. It would be easy to make a great deal of noise without finding anything.

Ginny checked the time and remembered something she needed to take to Percy. She left reluctantly, asking Luna to tell her if anything else disappeared. I watched her hurry down the passage, then offered to help look, or to go with Luna if she wanted to tell someone. Luna thanked me and said she had been going outside.

That was not an agreement to let me take charge. I stopped arranging a search she had not asked for and asked whether she would like company instead. She said yes with a smile, gathering The Quibbler beneath her arm. We left the window and headed towards the stairs together.

Outside, she stepped carefully where the different shoes gripped the paving unequally. I shortened my pace without turning it into another discussion about the missing one. After a while she asked whether I had thought about the creature in the train article. I admitted that I had, but had not read the rest of the issue.

‘Daddy would be pleased if you did,’ she said. I asked whether she could lend me a copy, and she told me she had several. I remembered Hermione’s expression at the magazine’s title. There might be plenty inside I would disagree with, but it seemed fairer to discover that by reading it than by borrowing somebody else’s opinion.

Luna described an account of something seen over a field at dusk. I asked whether the observer had returned in daylight, and she considered the question before saying she did not know. She seemed pleased that I had asked. Then she pointed out a strangely shaped cloud, and we spent a little while deciding what it resembled.

I found the conversation easier once I stopped expecting one subject to announce the next. Luna noticed things I had walked past without considering, and sometimes asked questions for which neither of us had an answer. I could disagree with a suggestion without preparing for an argument. It made me want to know what she would say next, which should have helped me listen.

Instead, I caught myself looking at her while the words slipped past. She stopped midway through a sentence and waited until I realised. I apologised, admitting that I had missed the last part. She said she had noticed, smiling in a way which made my ears feel warm.

I asked her to say it again. This time I followed properly, and she carried on without making my embarrassment the subject of the conversation. When we parted, she waved from the path and nearly dropped the magazine. I raised my hand in return, hoping we would meet again soon and find more to discuss than the people taking her things.

Harry and Ron were wrestling on my bed when I reached the dormitory. My pillow lay on the floor, and the blanket had twisted into something more suitable for tying luggage together. I told them both to get off. They stopped with Harry holding Ron’s wrist and neither looking as sorry as the condition of my bedding deserved.

‘It was the nearest bed,’ Harry explained. I reminded him that the school had provided one for each of them deliberately, then waited while they climbed down. Ron’s hair stood up at the back. I would have enjoyed that more if I had not been occupied rescuing my pillow.

I asked where Hermione was. She would want to know what I had added to the order, and I did not feel like repeating the search for a workshop merely to find her. Ron said she had gone looking for Lockhart. When I asked whether it was for a lesson, he clarified that she wanted to ask about one of his books.

Harry made a face and said she still expected him to be brilliant. I remembered the photographs in the shop, along with the effort Lockhart had put into appearing beside me. His taste had given me doubts. It did not prove that he could not teach, and I had been wrong about a Defence professor before, though in a considerably less reassuring direction.

‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ I said. I pulled the blanket straight while Ron removed a final crease with his palm, making an unconvincing effort to help. I wanted Hermione to be right about the useful part. We had enough questions of our own to benefit from a teacher who could answer some of them.