Bad Moon

Bad Moon

I fear rivers overflowing

I hear the voice of rage and ruin

Hermione found herself at loose ends not long after her dinner with Teach. He sent a terse note to let her know he would be travelling on the Continent for a few weeks – she hoped his flight to sunnier climes was unrelated to the disastrous conclusion to their evening – and Harry and Ron told her they would be away for Auror training for some weeks as well. She wondered what, precisely, such training comprised and where it might take place, but contented herself with imagining something like an American summer camp, complete with obstacle course and teamwork activities.

The school year had begun not long before, so she found herself spending many of her evenings tutoring Mark. It was a fairly lame excuse for her to have company; he didn't need much help, and it was only her luck that his studies hadn't progressed beyond the point she herself had reached in the Muggle curriculum. He would be starting secondary school the next year, and then her formidable brain would be next to useless to him.

One evening found Mark at her house, working on science prep. He sat at her scruffy dining room table, head bent so low over his work that his shaggy hair brushed the book in front of him, a plate of cheese and crackers and a glass of juice near his elbow – 'brain food,' Hermione called it. He had told her that he liked to do his homework at hers; he found it difficult to concentrate at home where the television was usually on.

Hermione was seated at the other side of the table, making some notes on ghosts – her new side project. She hadn't told Mark who their resident spectre was, but he seemed to approve of the project anyway: for him, unexplainable phenomena were things to be figured out, not feared.

'Hermione,' asked Mark abruptly, looking up from his papers, 'what's avocado?'

Startled, she answered automatically, 'It's a tropical fruit. You've probably seen one – it looks like a pear with a knobbly green skin over it.'

Mark wrinkled his nose. 'That doesn't sound right to me. What's a fruit got to do with solutions?'

'Erm... Maybe you'd better explain why you're asking.'

'Okay,' he agreed, pushing his textbook across to her. 'They're making us study solutions and suspensions again, even though we did it all last year. Professor Snape was showing me how to calculate molarity in his lab at Christmastime and said that a mole was something to do with avocado, but I've forgotten what it was.'

'He was... what?' Hermione gasped, gripping the edge of the table with white knuckles. 'You've been in his lab?'

'Yeah...' Mark answered slowly, beginning to look alarmed. 'Why? What's the matter?'

'You...' she stammered speechlessly. She wanted to ask: Why didn't you tell me about it? When we thought there was a man in the house, why didn't you suggest looking downstairs? Why would Snape show you, of all people, something so suspicious? What else do you know about this house that I don't? But, of course, she could ask none of these questions, so she continued to gape at him, aware that her reaction must seem out of all proportion to his remarks.

Seeking to calm her, Mark went on, 'He was pretty uptight about it, you know. I wasn't allowed to touch anything unless he said. But he let me play around with some scales and beakers and stuff so that I could learn how to make different concentrations of sugar-water. He said it would help us improve our lemonade recipe.'

'Improve the lemonade recipe?' she echoed limply.

'We did really well at it,' he said, smiling proudly. 'We made all these different concentrations and then tasted each one. The best one ended up being about half sugar and half water – the others were too sweet. Then we decided how much lemon juice to add. That was different, obviously, because lemon juice doesn't dissolve in water, so it wasn't a solution and the professor couldn't use the same maths. Then he scaled everything up so that we could make a really big pitcher of the stuff.'

'Professor Snape did all this?' she asked doubtfully.

'Yeah. He said we could refine the recipe as I got better at maths. Then we could say we had created the best possible lemonade and prove it scientifically.' Mark's face fell. 'Although I guess we won't ever do that now.'

'Oh, Mark,' Hermione sighed, resting her hand over his comfortingly. 'You can still do it one day yourself. It'll be a memorial to his memory.'

He shrugged. 'Maybe. So, do you know what avocado is, then?'

Hermione shook her head regretfully. 'I'll find out for you, though.'

''Kay.' He leaned back over his work and said indistinctly, 'If you're going to answer a question for me, I should answer one for you. It's only fair.'

Laughing, Hermione said, 'All right. I've got a question for you. Did Professor Snape keep a journal in his lab?'

Mark raised his head slowly and favoured her with that same appraising, adult expression she had seen on his face the night she met him. 'You want to go snooping through his private life?' he asked evenly.

It was on the tip of her tongue to make a heated denial, but something in Mark's eyes changed her mind. 'Yes,' she said simply.

'He might've kept one,' Mark mused. 'That's not a fair question, though. You've got to ask me something I can actually answer.'

Hermione pondered this for a moment before saying, 'Why did you like Professor Snape so much?'

Mark grinned. 'Easy. Because he was clever.'

'Is that why you like me?'

'No,' he said immediately.

'Why, then?' she pressed.

He answered, 'Because you liked Professor Snape, too.'

***

During the weekdays, Hermione was building up quite a complex picture of the nature of ghosts. Using Teach's money and the Ministry's contacts, she was able to acquire passes to most of the major research libraries in the country and quite a few of the privately-owned ones, too, in which she spent long hours reading both wizarding and Muggle accounts of the paranormal. Most of what she learned was rubbish; the information that wasn't, she dutifully noted down and collated at home at the end of each day.

The wizarding definition of a ghost, she discovered, was frustratingly imprecise: 'the imprint of a departed soul.' To her, this suggested that a ghost was something like a wizard's portrait, imbued with his personality and knowledge, but pearly-white and mobile rather than stationary. A ghost could interact with people, talking and moving about at will; a ghost could be affected by magic (how well she remembered the basilisk and Nearly-Headless Nick!). A ghost, however, like a portrait, was not the actual person – it was an imprint, a facsimile. The soul was elsewhere; what remained behind was more like an interactive recording.

Hermione did not think this sort of ghost was what she had on her hands: if the Snape who kept appearing in her house could speak to her directly, he probably would have done so by now; he was not translucent white, but instead could have passed as a human being, so natural did he look; he was not intimidated by her wand or her spells. She began to revise her terminology: he was not a ghost, at least not in the traditional sense, so in her notes she started to refer to him as a 'manifestation' instead.

From wizarding works on ghosts, she moved on to Muggle accounts and immediately hit upon some very interesting information. For one thing, there was an almost endless list of famous ghosts, from the 'real' to the fictional, and they were said to appear for any number of fascinating reasons. The most usual explanation for the appearance of a ghost was quite similar to what wizarding literature had said: the person's image usually manifested in a place familiar to, or important to, that person in life. The legend that the ghost of Queen Anne Boleyn haunted the Tower of London was familiar to Hermione, although in all of her visits to the Tower, she had never once had the impression that it might be haunted. In fact, it seemed to her to be a bustling, rather cheerful place, for all its dire history.

In other cases, a ghost might appear to request some kind of favour from the living. Pliny the Younger, that great writer of letters, had in one of his missives described a ghost seen by his friend, the philosopher Athenodorus, in a house in Athens. Although the ghost had been unable to communicate, Athenodorus had followed the apparition into the garden and noted the spot where it had dematerialised. Upon digging there the next day, he found the corpse of an old man and was able to give it proper burial, thereby putting the ghost to rest. And in Shakespeare's Hamlet, of course, the ghost of the old king appears to Hamlet and declares himself unable to find peace until his murder is avenged.

But the sort of apparition that really caught her eye, and which she noted down carefully, was what the books referred to as an 'oracular' spirit. Making sure her pen was plentifully supplied with ink, she set to writing:

Example A: King Saul and the Witch of Endor

Fictional. Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly and greedy businessman, is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his business partner, Jacob Marley, who had died seven years before. Marley is doomed to suffer the burden of chains and weights for all eternity as punishment for his avarice and other sins; he warns Scrooge that unless he changes his ways, his own punishment will be even worse. Marley warns Scrooge that he will have one opportunity to change and describes to him the advent of the three spirits of Christmas, who will assist him to take advantage of this opportunity.

Now, Hermione thought, these were not 'ghosts' of the Nearly-Headless Nick sort. They possessed knowledge beyond what they could have known in life and appeared to individuals to warn them of some incipient disaster. Most of the time, those people had an opportunity to avert the disaster, but only in the case of Scrooge – unfortunately a fictional personage – had this actually been done. Unlike her apparition of Snape, the 'ghosts' in her examples could communicate verbally, although this seemed to happen only under certain circumstances: when Samuel appeared to Saul, he had been summoned by a medium; the spirits that appeared to Brutus and Scrooge had come late at night when those men were exhausted and nearing sleep...

She sat up straighter suddenly and banged her knee on the underside of the table. When they were exhausted and nearing sleep... She had first seen Snape in the window that afternoon, true, but it was after a morning's worth of backbreaking labour in her garden. But when she had seen him in her room that night, she had been half-asleep still, and when she had found him standing in her sitting room, she had been drunk. And he had been able to speak to her in her dreams... What was it he had said? 'You must not continue down this path.' What path did he mean?

***

Something she had written about King Saul caught her eye the next day as she was reviewing her notes. Before going to see the Witch of Endor, he had tried to divine what he should do by using the Urim and Thummim. Suspicious though she was about Divination, this did not sound like crystal-gazing or Tarot-reading to Hermione, so she decided to look up what, exactly, were the Urim and Thummim.

What she discovered amazed her. The first reference she came across was again in the first book of Samuel, in which Saul used them to determine who amongst his company had sinned that day. He split the company into two groups and cast the lots, saying, 'If the group containing myself and my son is at fault, respond with Urim; if the group containing the rest of my men is at fault, respond with Thummim.' Urim was the response, and Saul discovered that it was his son who had sinned. This information was not particularly useful to Hermione; it seemed to her no different from flipping a coin. She did not hit pay dirt until she consulted – much to her personal chagrin – some wizarding books on Divination.

There, in a volume called Necromancy, Divination, and Free Will, she found the following passage:

One of the least distasteful methods of communicating with the souls of the dead is by using the Urim and Thummim. Historical record suggests that this was the method favoured by magicians during the time of the ancient Hebrews, and accounts of it survive even in Muggle lore. The procedure is very simple and requires no incantations or even magic of any kind. Two objects of the same shape and size must be obtained; they must be distinguishable from one another only by sight. The easiest way to do this is by choosing objects with different colors; in the ancient world, a white stone and a black stone were used most commonly. The two objects must then be placed into an opaque bag and shaken thoroughly. The querent should speak his or her question aloud and indicate clearly which object will signify an affirmative response and which a negative response. Having done this, the querent should then remove one of the objects from the bag or box. Its colour will indicate the appropriate answer.

Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that wizards and witches can overcome these limitations in certain ways; many magical querents maintain that when these additional strictures are employed, using the Urim and Thummim is one of the most useful and reliable ways to obtain simple information. Some reports claim that, when the querent is seeking information from the soul of a named individual, choosing as his objects items that once belonged to that individual ensures that the spirit is attentive and responds accurately. Others have concluded that Summoning the soul of a named individual into the objects themselves is an even more certain way to achieve accuracy, though this is usually frowned upon as Dark magic. Still others claim that the phrasing of the questions is the most important aspect of the process: the simpler the question, the less accurate the answer will be. The art, therefore, is to create complex, precise questions that can be satisfied by simple responses. Probably for this reason, the Urim and Thummim is the method of Divination most often employed by the legal profession.

She had to skip back to the introduction to discover that this was not the sort of Divination that was taught at Hogwarts. There, Divination had seemed to consist of looking into some vague, pre-determined future and making nonsense pronouncements about it; necromancy, she learned, was a way of questioning the dead about anything unknown, past, present, or future. The dead were believed to possess special knowledge, even about matters which had been unknown to them in life.

Hermione could believe in this sort of Divination quite easily; it coincided perfectly with what she was learning through her research into the soul. If there was such a thing as a collective soul, then it was entirely possible that any one part of it – any soul which had belonged once to a living individual – might have access to the knowledge possessed by the entity as a whole. This would explain why the souls of the dead were so useful in Divination; it did not, however, explain, as the book had said, the mechanism by which the information was communicated.

Undeterred, Hermione returned to Spinner's End that night determined to perform her first ever willing attempt at Divination. After dinner and a few glasses of wine – to open her mind, she thought to herself – she settled herself comfortably on the sofa in the basement by the light of a few candles and the warm glow of the furnace. She knew she was limited by the fact that she didn't have anything of Snape's to use – quills, she suspected, wouldn't mix up well inside a bag – but she had obtained one red marble and one green marble and hoped that her choice of colours might have some useful effect.

She took a few deep breaths and began, 'I wish to communicate with Severus Snape, the late owner of this house. If your answer is yes, respond with green; if your answer is no, respond with red. Severus Snape, are you here?'

She waited for a few seconds, feeling silly, then reached into the bag and pulled out a marble. Her breath caught.

It was green.

She stared at the tiny sphere of glass in amazement, then dropped it back into the leather sack she was holding and shook vigorously. 'Professor Snape,' she asked, 'can you speak to me in the way a living person might speak to another living person?'

She reached into the bag again. This time the marble she extracted was red.

'Okay...' she murmured. 'Professor Snape, have you to tried to communicate with me through my dreams?'

Green.

'Professor Snape, do I need to continue addressing you by name?'

Red.

'Do you like my choice of colours?'

Green.

'When you appear to me, are you trying to warn me about something?'

Green.

'Can you tell me in a dream what that is?'

Red.

Hermione exhaled a frustrated sigh. 'Can you tell me some other way?'

Green.

Of course, this was the limitation of using the Urim and Thummim – she could not now ask him what that other way was. 'Is this Dark magic, what I'm doing?'

Red.

'Am I speaking to your soul right now?'

Green.

'Could I Summon a soul into these marbles, if I wanted to?'

Red.

'Is a copy of the Ars Magica in this house right now?'

Red.

'Is your journal in this house right now?'

Red.

She had been keeping a tally of how many times she drew green and how many times she drew red; so far she had drawn green six times and red seven times – exactly what she would have expected according to probability. She heaved another deep sigh, and one of the candles guttered out.

'Does your journal contain any notes on the material in the Ars Magica?' she asked.

Green. Now the tally was seven and seven.

'Would those notes be useful to me in my research for Teach?'

Green. Eight and seven.

Another candle guttered out. Hermione glanced at it in alarm. 'Is what I am doing right now, with the marbles, dangerous?'

Red.

'Are you making the candles go out?' She was shivering now with apprehension.

Green.

The final candle flickered; by the light of its wavering flame, Hermione caught sight of a shadow forming in front of her by the armchair. The light was suddenly snuffed out, making her gasp; the dark figure of a man standing before her was illuminated only by the muted glow of the furnace in the corner. The figure moved; fingers, unmistakable in their calloused gentleness, stroked her cheek tenderly.

Hermione screamed.