The Lantern

The Lantern

My face turns a deathly pale

You're talking to me through the veil

Hermione spent Christmas Eve with Harry and Ron at Grimmauld Place and woke the next morning to the delicious smell of a fry-up. A flute of Buck's Fizz stood on her bedside table; she drank it in bed, feeling luxuriously decadent, before padding downstairs to join the boys in opening presents. Their delight at the holiday was palpable and infected her with a long-missed sense of joy. Kreacher darted around them solicitously as they ate breakfast and sent them off to the Burrow with three enormous casseroles to contribute to Mrs Weasley's Christmas dinner.

When she finally returned to Spinner's End in the early evening, Hermione was stuffed full of food, slightly tipsy, and unimaginably tired. The day had had its share of ups and downs: for the Weasleys, it was their first Christmas without Fred; for Harry, it was his first Christmas with Teddy Lupin, his orphaned godson; for Hermione, it was the first anniversary of the most horrible experience of her life. She had managed to keep her mind firmly in the present for most of the afternoon, but now that she was alone, she kept envisioning the darkened, smelly bedroom of Bathilda Bagshot and the sinuous slither of the giant snake.

A knock on the front door drew her out of her reverie. She opened it to reveal Mark standing, bundled up warmly, on the front walk.

'Happy Christmas, Hermione,' he said, scooting inside to escape the cold. His nose was bright red, and he warmed it with his fingers for a moment before shrugging off his coat and dropping into an armchair. 'Brought you a present,' he said, unzipping the big pocket of his rucksack and pulling out a small parcel wrapped in red paper.

She grinned. 'I've got one for you, too,' she said, tugging a box from beneath her tiny Christmas tree and handing it to him.

Mark tore open the package gleefully and exclaimed, 'This is fantastic!' It was a chemistry set. Hermione had deliberately chosen one of the more adult-oriented sets; she knew Mark was mature enough to handle the more dangerous chemicals – and she knew that if he wanted to experiment in her basement, she could ward the lab surreptitiously against accidents.

'Thank you, Hermione,' he said sincerely. 'Now go on, open yours!'

She carefully removed the red paper on the parcel and opened the small box to reveal a bracelet made of elaborately intertwined links in the shape of infinity symbols. She lifted the chain carefully, examining it, and saw with surprise that it was made of stainless steel. 'This is beautiful. Where did you get it?' she asked curiously.

His face turned faintly pink. 'I made it,' he answered. 'I got a spool of steel wire from the ironmonger's and used my father's soldering gun to close the links. Do you really like it?'

'Oh, yes!' she exclaimed, wanting to hug him but aware that he wasn't a demonstrative child. 'It's wonderful.' She slipped the bracelet over her wrist and held out her arm, admiring the play of the steel over her skin. 'Where did you learn to do this?'

'There was a guy in the Shambles once,' he explained, shrugging as if his accomplishment were modest. 'He was making reproduction chain mail. I watched him for ages. Your bracelet was a lot harder, though,' he added suddenly, a touch of pride in his voice. 'The chain mail was just little rings.'

'It's perfect, Mark,' she said with a smile. 'Better even than silver because the steel won't tarnish.'

He grinned with pleasure, then leaned over his rucksack again. 'I have something else for you, too,' he said, 'but it's not a present or anything. It's just something I thought you might want to look at.' He extracted a leather-book and passed it to her.

'What is it?' she asked, turning it over in her hands. There was no title or author's name embossed on its cover; in fact, the book was one of the plainest she'd ever seen.

Mark cleared his throat suddenly, and she looked up to meet his eyes. He said carefully, 'I'm not certain because I've never opened it, but I think it's Professor Snape's journal.'

Colour rushed hectically into Hermione's cheeks; for a moment, she felt uncomfortably hot and short of breath. 'What makes you think so?' she asked in a half-whisper.

Mark seemed to sense her sudden anxiety and excitement; he cleared his throat again nervously and explained in a small voice, 'He gave it to me last summer. He said I could do whatever I wanted with it – he said I could use it as my own journal if I wanted – but I wasn't to hand it over to anybody who might ask for it.'

'You shouldn't give it to me, then,' she said, returning it to him regretfully.

He pushed the book back toward her and shrugged again. 'So?'

'There could be things in it...' Hermione paused. Mark couldn't possibly know what Snape had been involved in, and if she hinted at the dangerous nature of what might be contained in the journal, she might only alarm and upset him. She amended her sentence hastily: 'There could be things in it that a student shouldn't know about her teacher.'

Mark's gaze was level as he said, 'I doubt that will bother Professor Snape where he is now.'

It was such a sensible thing to say that Hermione smiled and hugged the journal to her chest. 'You're right, of course.' Reluctantly, she stood and placed the journal on one of the bookshelves. 'Can I interest you in some cranberry squash and Christmas pudding?' she asked Mark.

He bounded up from the chair and gave her a cheeky grin. 'Is the pope a Catholic?'

***

The hour was quite late when Mark finally went home, having insisted on breaking in his new chemistry set. Wisely unwilling to walk before he could crawl, he had mixed some baking soda and vinegar in a beaker and pronounced himself bored with the endeavour. The next time he came over, he promised her, they would do something more exciting.

Now, after scrupulously cleaning the worktops in Snape's Potions lab – his lessons were wearing off more slowly than she would have believed – Hermione crawled wearily into bed with a mug of tea and Snape's journal. For the first time in many weeks, she could almost sense his presence in the room, but she firmly pushed this imaginative fancy into the back of her mind as she opened the thick, leather-bound book.

The creamy parchment pages were blank – at first. She watched as, not entirely unexpectedly, ink coalesced itself into a brief sentence on the flyleaf.

State your name.

With a wry smile, she said quietly, 'Hermione Granger.'

The ink dissolved back into the page. She waited patiently; less than a minute later, ink began to fill the page again, this time in the narrow, spiky script she knew so well. Words flowed down the parchment like a waterfall. She flipped further into the book and saw the same phenomenon occurring on every page. After perhaps thirty seconds, the lines of writing reached the bottom of the pages, and she turned back to the beginning and settled in to read.

10 August 1993.

In fact, the entire Black affair is hard to credit from start to finish. The man is a worm and always was, and I, naturally, have never had any trouble believing him to be rash, thoughtless, casually cruel, even deliberately cruel. Nor do I think his conscience would be troubled by murdering thirteen innocent people in public. What I cannot believe is this fantasy that he betrayed Potter and Lily to the Dark Lord. Black, for all his ancestry, was a Gryffindor to his marrow; Gryffindors like Black don't possess the subtlety necessary for successful betrayal. He also cannot have been the Secret-Keeper – even if Potter were that stupid, Lily would have known better than to select someone so obvious and so unreliable. She must have known better.

Hermione paused and leaned back against her pillows, gazing blindly at the circle of lamplight on the ceiling of her bedroom. Memories of her third year flooded back to her. Shaking her head to clear it, she read on.

21 August 1993.

In a way, however, I do feel sorry for him because Dumbledore is using him (surprise!). As he put it to me, 'Either the man is innocent of all collusion with Sirius Black and will help us to protect Potter, or he is guilty of it and will unwittingly lead us straight to Black. Lupin will be extremely useful either way; let us be thankful for the convenience of the situation. You, Severus, must act suspicious of Lupin at all times – it will keep him on his toes.' Such pretence will not, I admit, be difficult for me to maintain.

As Hermione read further, it became clear to her that Snape had not written in his journal every day, and when he had, it was usually in order to whinge. Some events he had recorded she recognised, but most of what he wrote about was entirely unfamiliar to her. He had carried on a great deal of correspondence, largely centred around research in Potions and the Dark Arts, and many of his entries consisted solely of rants about fellow academics ('total sods'), the quality of their research ('worse than shite'), complaints about his colleagues at Hogwarts ('complete tits'), and half-angry abuse of Albus Dumbledore ('past-it coffin-dodger').

She made it as far as the summer of 1996 before passing out from exhaustion shortly before dawn.

***

The next morning – Boxing Day, so there was nothing to do and no place open in the city – she immersed herself once again in Snape's journal at the kitchen table over a breakfast of buttered crumpets and sausage.

He had obviously had much more to rant about beginning in her sixth year; Dumbledore came in for a lot of heavy abuse, mostly regarding what Snape considered the headmaster's deficiencies of intellect. There was also a great deal of frankly angsty speculation about Draco Malfoy. Hermione remembered Harry's obsession with Malfoy during that school year and thought that, if anything, Snape's had been even more intense – but then, she supposed, Snape had had a lot to lose if Malfoy messed up.

His frustration with Malfoy after catching him at the Slug Club's Christmas party seemed to leap off the page; Hermione began to feel sorry for Snape and Malfoy simultaneously. Snape had been doing his best in an impossible situation. Malfoy, meanwhile, had been trying to complete a task he loathed the very idea of without revealing to Snape – whom he clearly distrusted – how distasteful he found it.

But before she realised it, she had reached the last few pages of the journal. A sense of impending disaster overtook her. Sliding her empty plate away, she set the journal on the placemat in front of her and focussed all of her concentration on Snape's words.

27 February 1997.

That miserable, conniving, scheming, unempathetic bastard. That cruel, single-minded, son of a bitch. I refer to Dumbledore, of course, who has just told me that Potter will have to destroy himself in order to destroy the Dark Lord. Words cannot describe what this feels like to me, so I will not even try. Lily, my betrayal of you is complete.

2 March 1997.

What to do, then. The bit of foreign soul inside Potter must indeed be destroyed in order for the Dark Lord to be vulnerable, but does it have to mean destroying Potter, too?

9 March 1997.

Horcruxes are, truly, a fascinating bit of magic. Fascinating. Already, I am bombarded by ideas about how to destroy Potter-as-Horcrux while preserving Potter himself. The magic is not overly complex, I don't think, but arranging circumstances will prove fiendishly difficult.

13 March 1997.

Enough contemplation of that; it's making my stomach churn. The rest of the potion is a combination of herbs and oils that encourage relaxation and receptivity in human beings; without the active ingredients, however, the potion is fit for nothing better than seasoning a baked chicken. The obvious objective of the Soulhouse Solution is to make the object component of the Horcrux susceptible to command – it should be possible to modify the solution, therefore, to make the soul susceptible to command while it is still inside the body. Clearly, however, this cannot work as a solution, so I must figure out some way to create a draught.

3 April 1997.

Finally, a bit of a breakthrough. I remembered that useless old book of Malfoy's, the one with all of the Native American trance potions. About as magical as smoking a spliff, but nevertheless food for thought. And I have thought of something.

11 April 1997.

The package I ordered has arrived at last. I'm spending the weekend at Spinner's End to test it out. One of the best things about the acacia is that it becomes more potent as it grows stale; I can store it in a coffee jar and spare myself the worry about its expiry date.

12 April 1997.

At last. I have put in a drop of tincture of wormwood. The draught has turned a delightful shade of gold – I hope it tastes as much like Courvoisier as it looks. Cheers.

13 April 1997.

Success. The draught will certainly remove the Dark Lord's soul-fragment from Potter's body. The only question remaining is: what will happen to it thereafter? I'm not sure we can expect it to emulate Potter's soul. It seems to me, though this is mere conjecture, that once it is outside of Potter's body, one should be able to make a proper Horcrux with it – and then destroy that Horcrux. The disembodied soul would be easy enough to command. Unfortunately, such a plan would mean preparing some object with the Soulhouse Solution, which I'm not certain is possible. Even if I could nerve myself to collect the ingredients, where on earth would I find a willing female?

28 July 1997.

All my effort has been entirely futile. Were it possible to give up, to quit, I would do so now. Potter will never take the draught. His life is forfeit; mine will be, too, when he dies, if I manage to live that long. I have only one task left, and that cannot be done until I am confirmed in the position of headmaster. Today will be the end of this journal, I think; my days are numbered, but I can't bear to count them off myself.

***

Hermione closed the journal and leaned her chair back, balancing it on its back legs. She did not react immediately to what she had read; for once, she allowed the information to marinate in her brain, trickling through her thoughts, meeting up and joining with other information, until she could almost see the web of brightly coloured awareness glowing behind her eyes.

Then she stood up calmly, tucked the journal beneath one arm, and descended the stairs into Snape's Potions lab. She placed the book onto the worktop as she passed it, heading for the cupboard of Potions ingredients, and carefully pulled on a pair of dragon-hide gloves. Deliberately, unhurriedly, she opened the doors to the cupboard and began to sort properly through the bottles and jars she had only ever glanced at previously. Snape's labelling system was meticulous; she couldn't help but grin as she read each one and rested it carefully on the end of the worktop. Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog...

The potion Snape had created, she reasoned, was the most important part of what she had read, and she had assumed that she would find some here, since he had obviously prepared enough to give to Harry but, by his own admission, had never had the opportunity to give it to him. Therefore, the potion must still be here somewhere. Of course, she had assumed the same thing about the Ars Magica, and about the journal, and neither had been in the basement (she still had no idea where the Ars Magica might be), so she was reasonably prepared for disappointment.

When she had emptied the cupboard almost entirely and still found nothing out of the ordinary, Hermione actually began to smile, and then eventually to grin. Snape had done it again! Led her to the answer she wanted, built up her expectations, and let her down in the end by being a secretive, sneaky bastard who hid his important possessions instead of keeping them where they belonged. The book was still missing; he had given the journal to Mark; perhaps he had left the amended draught with his milkman or the elderly neighbour who kept his spare keys!

But then she pulled down the last jar on the top shelf. Unlike the others, it wasn't a carefully-labelled and wax-sealed dedicated Potions storage jar; it was a Nescafe Gold container, yellow lid and all, with a handful of withered, ferny-looking leaves inside. I can store it in a coffee jar... This must be the 'acacia' Snape had mentioned in his journal, the ingredient he had used to make the potion she was unable to find! What else had he said about it? She racked her brain and remembered: the staler the plant was, the more potent its extract would be. Thrilled, she darted to the desk – nearly dropping the Nescafe jar in her excitement – and, ripping off her gloves, groped around in one of the drawers for quill and parchment.

She might not have found the draught itself, but she had found the essential ingredient for the potion: now, all she had to do was recreate it – never mind for the moment that she had no idea what it was actually supposed to do. From what he had written in his journal, he had tested the draught on himself, so it couldn't be fatal (although she didn't quite understand his reference to 'tasting Schumann'). Whatever the potion was, it had something to do with influencing the soul, and as a result, Hermione didn't even make the pretence of trying to control her curiosity. She was going to have a go at making that potion, regardless of the difficulties involved. She had no doubt that if Snape could invent the draught from nothing in a weekend, she could replicate his work in the same amount of time – if not less.

***

'Hermione...'

'You already know, Hermione...'