01238 The Reasons

 

"Our business?"

Harry turned the word over slowly and when he looked round at Ron and Neville he found his own astonishment looking back at him from two other faces.

The truth was that Crabbe and Goyle had been, for most of the year, among the quietest creatures in the castle.

Nature had built them like a pair of garden walls, wide and heavy and graceless, and then, by some cruel joke, had given them the souls of anxious rabbits.

Since Malfoy had stopped lending them his confidence, they had crept about Hogwarts with their heads down and their great hands tucked away, as if apologising for taking up so much room.

Apart from the odd first-year cornered behind a tapestry and relieved of his pocket money, no one had heard of either of them doing anything worth a detention in nearly twelve months.

Telling a prefect to mind his business was, from them, practically a declaration of war.

"Pfft!"

The sight of Crabbe, standing with his fat face screwed up rigid as a plaster cast, was too much for Ron, who burst out snorting with laughter.

He strode forward and drove one finger into the soft middle of that big chest.

"Let me jog your memory, Crabbe. Prefect. See the badge? And you, you're out of your dormitory, long after lights-out, on your own, looking like a troll who's mislaid his club."

Harry watched Crabbe's puffy face darken—so fast he could practically see it happen.

"So you can start explaining yourself right now, or I'll march you down to Snape, and he can deal with you himself!"

Ron pushed on, chin high, enjoying the threat.

"Oh, I think we can dispense with the marching, Mr. Weasley."

The voice came out of the dark mouth of the corridor, low and silky and cold as the bottom of the lake, and it fell upon the four of them at the turn of the stairs like a hand upon the nape of the neck.

Ron's finger, still lodged in Crabbe's chest, froze.

All four swung round together. And there, gliding out of the shadows with his sallow face lit sideways by the torch and his black robes wafting behind him like smoke from a snuffed candle, was Snape.

He folded his arms. His eyes went over Harry, and over Neville, and over Ron, one at a time and with great deliberation.

Harry and Neville gave nothing away; their faces were as blank as plates, and only their hearts sank, privately, with identical groans.

But Ron knew exactly how deeply he had stepped in it, and he chewed his lip until it went white, and his hands, suddenly without purpose, wandered up and down the front of his robes.

In the silence, a thin mocking smile curled up at one corner of Snape's mouth.

"So… Potter, Longbottom, you've also awarded yourselves the right to go gallivanting around the castle in the middle of the night?"

Making an enemy of Snape now would be unwise—they had far more important things to do!

It was only by telling himself so, over and over, like an incantation, behind his clenched jaw, that Harry managed to hold his tongue.

"They were helping me, sir. With my patrol."

Ron said it quickly.

"Rubbish!"

Snape snapped it out with chilly contempt. But even as he did, from the corner of his eye, he caught the shadow of a smirk passing over Crabbe's wide mouth, there and gone, and for one second his gaze lingered on it.

"And what, may I ask, is it that you are doing here, Crabbe?"

Snape turned his head slowly, and the light that poured from his jet-black eyes settled upon Crabbe like a lamp upon a lizard. Crabbe, to everyone's surprise, did not seem in the least alarmed.

"I'm not feeling well, Professor Snape—"

Crabbe sniffed hard and when he spoke, his voice did sound thick and clogged, as if his nose were packed with wool.

"I've caught a cold. I was going to the hospital wing for a Pepperup Potion, from Madam Pomfrey."

He said it perfectly steadily, with a dull, unblinking composure.

Something uneasy stirred at the back of Harry's mind and he could not rid himself of the feeling that something about this was wrong.

All four students, watching Snape's gloomy face, caught it: a flicker of hesitation, there and gone, in those eyes like black holes.

"Then be off with you, Crabbe."

After a while, as if he had run out of interest, Snape flipped a limp hand in the air, the way one waves away a fly, and Crabbe lumbered off down the stairs.

"As for the three of you—"

His cold, thin voice dragged the three Gryffindors' eyes back from Crabbe's broad, retreating back.

"Ten points each from Potter and Longbottom, and a week of detention to follow."

Punishing Gryffindors was clearly a pleasure to Snape; he looked easier and fresher with every word.

"And Weasley: twenty points, for shielding two offenders and for impertinence toward a professor. I shall make Professor McGonagall aware of tonight's events. Now—"

Snape's voice caught oddly for a moment, as though a splinter had lodged in it.

"Go back to where you belong."

When Snape had slid back into the dark like a ghost, and the three of them were sure he was beyond hearing, Ron leaped into the air and howled with fury.

"I didn't say anything! Did I? Impertinence toward a professor! He's not even my Potions teacher any more. Who cares what he thinks?"

"Never mind, Ron. We haven't got time for this. We need to get to Filch's office, right now!"

If anyone in Gryffindor had been singled out by Snape for the harshest treatment, it was Harry and Neville, and they had long since grown used to his double standards.

What concerned them more, just now, was whether, in Filch's office, hidden among the confiscated rubbish, lay the staff that Professor Watson had lost.

The ceiling of the Great Hall, as always, showed the true sky beyond the castle: a vast black dome pricked all over with stars.

Round the moon in it hung a ring of red, and under that faint, bloody light even the enormous, empty hall seemed to glow, its tables and stacked benches washed in crimson, as though the whole room were holding a hot coal in its mouth.

But Harry and the others had no eyes to spare for the Hall's eerie mood. They pounded across the slabs with their boots slapping, swung into the passage on the right of the entrance hall, took the bend at a run, and skidded to a stop in front of the office door with heaving chests.

"We're really going in there, are we?"

Now that they were standing in front of it, Ron's courage had rather leaked out of him. He stared at the door, under which not a crack of light showed, and turned a doubtful face to Harry.

"You've not noticed, Ron?"

Harry's expression was every bit as dark as Snape's had been when he'd caught them out of bed.

"Filch isn't out patrolling the corridors tonight. And Mrs. Norris isn't prowling about looking for students, either!"

"Step aside."

Neville spoke quietly and firmly, and for a moment he did not seem like Neville at all. From somewhere, he had produced that gleaming, dashing sword of his, the one every young witch and wizard in the school coveted, and now he held it ready.

The blade whirled up and drew a bright light on the dim air.

Crack!

One clean stroke, and the old wooden door sprang open, and with a long, drawn-out creak, the gap between door and frame grew wider.

"Is he dead?"

In that airless, breathless hush, Ron's voice quivered, and so did his knees.

Torchlight slipped through the gap of the open door and fell across the office's cold, hard grey floor in a fan-shaped patch of light.

Every breath he drew seemed to cut his throat like ice and settle in his chest as a lump of frost, as if the cold might spread through him and set him solid from the inside.

Filch lay on the floor, with his face a deep purplish red and his eyes screwed shut, and Mrs. Norris lay beside him, stretched out and still.

There was no way to tell from his chest whether he was breathing, because a huge cabinet lay across it.

Harry knew that cabinet well. It held every piece of contraband that Filch had ever wrenched out of a student's hands, and a label was pasted across its front in blunt capitals: DANGEROUS ITEMS. DO NOT TOUCH.

Neville brought his sword up level with his chest and, turning sideways, narrowing his eyes, edged his head slowly round the door frame. Several seconds passed in silence. Then he let out a soft, long breath.

"You'd better come and look at this."

Neville eased the door wider and went in first, his gaze fixed on one particular wall of the office.

Harry followed into the cramped little room and looked where Neville was looking.

The cabinet had been toppled from where it stood, and behind it, in the bare plaster of the wall, was a long, narrow niche with ragged edges. It must have held something once. Now it held nothing, and the dark hollow stared out at them like an empty eye socket.

"Oh, thank goodness! He's alive!"

Ron, who had stayed on the threshold, studying Filch, had noticed that the thin film of dust by Filch's nostrils was stirring with each small breath. He let out a great gust of relief, and his cry rang with delighted surprise.

His discovery relaxed the knots in Harry's and Neville's stomachs a little too.

Filch was, beyond all question, a man whom every young wizard in the castle detested, and neither Harry nor Neville would have pretended otherwise just to be kind. But whatever else he was, Filch was a part of Hogwarts after all, and they wanted him alive and well.

"Wingardium Leviosa!"

Ron pulled out his wand and cried the words, and the immense cabinet groaned up off Filch's chest and hung wobbling in the air. Neville and Harry took an arm each and dragged Filch clear, and propped him up, limp and heavy, against the leg of a chair.

"That's a Stunning Spell."

Harry had spent hours in Professor Watson's duelling lessons, and these simple spells were as familiar to him as his own handwriting. He pushed back both of Filch's eyelids with his thumbs and studied the slow, clouded pupils beneath, and from their sluggish response he knew for certain.

"And that isn't all."

Neville's face was as still and smooth as a pond. His eyes were on Filch's chest, which looked wrong, lopsided, as if something under the shirt had slipped from its place.

"He's broken at least two ribs. It'll have been the cabinet. The poor old man, he's so frail already."

"Then we—"

Ron had gone quite white. He was breathing in short, quick gulps and looking from one of them to the other like a lost child.

"What on earth do we do now?"

Neville hesitated and said nothing, but he looked to Harry anyway.

"We split up."

A keen light had kindled in Harry's green eyes. He drew a deep breath and began to speak rapidly.

"Ron, you carry Filch up to the hospital wing. Neville, find Professor McGonagall and tell her what's happened to Filch, and ask her to let Professor Dumbledore know."

"What about you?"

"I'm going to find Hermione."

Harry's voice was low, and his eyes were already on the doorway.

"If there was ever a night we needed her, it's this one!"

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