Quicksand

Quicksand

I'm torn between the light and dark

Where others see their target divine symmetry

Despite being constantly in and out of stuffy libraries, Hermione noticed that a beautiful, dry autumn was beginning to set in. The leaves on the trees grew into a deeper green as the days shortened, and the sun seemed to hang at a lower slant in the sky. Her birthday was drawing nearer, too; Ron and Harry had mentioned throwing a party for her in Grimmauld Place. It cheered Hermione that the three of them still spent so much time together, even living hundreds of miles apart, though Hermione admitted this was less of an impediment in the wizarding world than in the Muggle one. She listened to all of their stories about training for the Aurory and enjoyed gossiping with them about their friends from school, though the person she most wanted to hear news of – Draco Malfoy, the heir to Snape's library – seemed to have entirely dropped off the radar of their circle of acquaintances. Neither Harry nor Ron appeared particularly dismayed about this. They were keen to know how her research for the Ministry was progressing, and she kept them satisfied with small tidbits, but she couldn't bring herself to tell them all of it, especially the part about communicating with the souls of the dead. She sensed that Harry, especially, would disapprove, so she kept it to herself. Harry's putative reaction triggered a doubt in her mind – it made her wonder if what she was looking into was ethically dubious – but she reminded herself that communicating with the dead wasn't the same as manipulating them.

Because it was autumn and the weather was invigorating after the sweltering heat of the summer, Hermione decided to take a few days at the end of the second week in September to do some work around Spinner's End. She was able to tidy up the interior with a few swift flicks of her wand, but in this neighbourhood of Muggles, working in the garden would have to be done the traditional way. She had staked out an area of the back garden to grow herbs and vegetables and was hoeing diligently when she heard a shout from somewhere up above.

'Mark?' she called, craning her neck at the house two doors down. She could just see him leaning out of the window of his attic bedroom. 'Come on over!'

A few minutes later, he emerged from her back door, not yet dirty but looking somehow scruffy still, carrying a blue, plastic pail half-filled with loam.

'What have you got there?' she asked curiously.

'It's for worms,' he said shortly. 'Can I have some of yours? I use them for fishing down at the river.'

'Of course,' she said. They set to digging and composting, and by early afternoon, Mark had a good handful of wriggling earthworms rooting happily through his pail of dirt. Noticing the sheen of sweat on his face, and feeling rather uncomfortably warm and sticky herself, Hermione invited him inside to cool off and have some lemonade. She had taken to keeping a pitcher of it in the refrigerator; Snape's recipe seemed designed to make enough for an army, and neither she nor Mark was adept enough at cooking to know how to reduce the measurements without ruining the flavour. They sat together at the little round table by the open kitchen windows, fanning their faces with pieces of the previous day's newspaper.

'How come it's not getting any cooler in here?' Mark complained eventually, echoing Hermione's thoughts.

'Maybe we need a cross-breeze,' she suggested. 'I'll prop open the doors down here; you run upstairs and open the windows in the bedrooms.'

Mark abandoned his lemonade and trotted up the stairs while Hermione wedged pieces of cardboard underneath the bookcase-doors to keep them from closing.

'Hermione, the window in here won't open,' Mark called down.

She followed his voice up to the small bedroom where she discovered that the window, which looked onto the scrubland to the east and the ancient chimney of the textile mill, was stuck fast. The two of them together, pushing with all their strength, were unable to budge it. Curiously, Hermione inspected the casement but didn't find any obstructions.

'Maybe it's painted shut on the outside,' Mark suggested. 'A lot of people do that.'

'Let's go outside, then, and see,' Hermione said. They went out of the front door and around the corner of the house. The windows on the ground floor, she saw, were indeed painted closed, but she had always assumed that was because they couldn't be used anyway, obscured as they were by Snape's bookshelves in the front room. She raised her gaze to the first floor, doubting whether they would be able to tell anything from so far below. At first, she couldn't see anything at all; the sun was hanging just above the ridgepole of her roof, and it blinded her as she glanced upward. Blinking to clear her watering eyes, she shaded them with her hand again and squinted at the casement of the upstairs window. There was no extra paint that she could see...

'Er, Hermione?' Mark asked, pointing straight at the window. 'Is there someone else in your house?'

She shifted her gaze and noticed, with a rush of panic, a figure standing in the very upstairs window whose frame she had been inspecting so narrowly. She blinked, thinking it was a trick of the light. The glare of the sun was too great to make out any details, but there was clearly someone there, black and indistinct, looking right at them.

A chill of fear seized Hermione. She tore around the side of the house, Mark at her heels, wrenched open the front door, and thundered up the stairs. She flung the door of the small bedroom back with a bang and rushed forward, only to find that the room was empty. She and Mark looked at one another, bewildered.

'The other rooms,' Mark exclaimed suddenly and rushed up the hallway into her bedroom. He jerked open the twin wardrobes, revealing her witch's robes, and stopped short, non-plussed. 'What are all these costumes?'

'Never mind that,' she said hastily. 'Come on.'

They searched the entire first floor of the house, then descended the stairs, closing the shelf-door behind them. The ground floor was clearly deserted, as was the back garden and the shed. They returned to the kitchen table, sipping the lemonade that had now grown watery from melted ice.

'He must've run out the front,' Mark opined.

'How could he have had enough time to do that?' Hermione countered.

'Dunno. Magic.' Mark gave a sardonic little smile that looked completely out of place on his youthful features. Hermione had seen him wear the expression before and could only assume he had picked it up from Snape himself.

'There's no such thing as magic,' she said weakly.

'Maybe it was a ghost, then.'

'There's no such thing as ghosts, either,' she said. 'It must have been a shadow or an illusion from the sun's glare.'

Mark shrugged, then asked, 'How do you know there's no such thing as magic? It could be real. People have all kinds of stories about it. We learned in history lessons in school about witch-burning.'

'Yes, but those women weren't really witches,' Hermione explained. 'They got burned because they were outcasts or because people were afraid of them. People are usually afraid of things they don't understand.'

'Yeah,' Mark agreed sullenly, 'that's what my teacher said, too.'

They worked in the garden for the rest of the afternoon, sometimes in companionable silence, sometimes talking about the other things Mark was studying in school. He was an inquisitive child; Hermione could understand easily why Snape would have enjoyed Mark's company. At dusk, she sent him home for his tea and went inside to shower.

The warm water soothed her, but as she washed her hair, she found herself still shaken by the memory of the mysterious man in her house. She and Mark had searched every inch of Spinner's End – there was definitely no one here now besides her – and she reasoned that whoever it was must have come inside earlier in the day. She had left the front door unlocked while she worked in the garden. Won't catch me doing that ever again. But she felt violated by this invasion of her private space and wondered how on earth she would ever manage to sleep that night.

***

'Hermione...'

'Hermione...'

***

Hermione was dreaming. She knew she was asleep and wanted to return to the dream she had been having before, in which something wonderful had been happening to her, but her mind had shifted into that strange world in which she was floating outside of her body, asleep in bed, dreaming that she was sleeping even as she slept. She could see her thin form curled up under the duvet, the bedside lamp lit, warming the room with its glow. Her vision shifted; she was looking across the room now. Someone was standing, back to the window, between the twin wardrobes. In the dream, she sat up cautiously on one elbow; her heart began to beat faster. It was a young man standing there, clothed in black, with a pale face and pale, long-fingered hands. His hair was black, too, long and thick, and it swept around his shoulders. His eyes were large and dark, deep-set in his face; his nose was long above thin lips. He seemed familiar, but all wrong somehow: too young, too alabaster-smooth. The more she looked, the more striking his eyes became, long-lashed beneath straight, black brows. His expression was guarded as he stared back at her almost defensively.

Suddenly, she remembered that she was dreaming; the picture before her became alarming and incongruous. She struggled to wake up. It was difficult, as it always was to wake deliberately from a dream, to go from REM sleep to consciousness swiftly. She couldn't seem to move or open her eyes. Finally, she began to notice the cotton of the sheets over her body. Slowly, she realised that she had not sat up at all; she was still wrapped around herself in the foetal position. She lifted her eyelids carefully. The room was dark and cold; her lamp was off, the way she had left it, and the only light came from the streetlights outside. Relieved, she heaved a deep sigh and sat up – only to fill instantly with debilitating fear.

The man was still there, across the room, staring at her. She knew she wasn't dreaming now, but the atmosphere of the dream lingered.

Hermione screamed, expelling part of the fear in the sound, and leant over in one fluid motion to snatch her wand from the bedside table. It was pointed at the man before she finished turning back toward him; her non-verbal Incarcerous streaked across the room as she leapt from the bed, sleep-dishevelled and wild-eyed.

The spell slammed into the east window and cracked it, making her jump. When the flash dissipated, she saw, quite clearly, that there was nobody there. The room was empty.

She sank onto the carpet, sobbing in relief. Mark was right – it is a ghost. The thought comforted her much more than she would have expected. If the man was a ghost, he couldn't hurt her. Clutching her wand tightly and trembling, she went down to the kitchen and put the kettle on. While she waited for the water to boil, she wondered who the ghost might be. The obvious choice was Snape, but then the figure hadn't really looked much like Snape. He had been young, probably not much older than she was now, with no hint of lines on his face or emptiness in his black eyes. On the other hand, she reflected, perhaps Snape, in his youth, had looked like that, before the bitterness of his life was etched onto his features and his expression became that of a perpetual frown. Could ghosts appear as a younger version of themselves? Yet another thing for me to look into.

As she drank her tea, the relief leeched away and doubt began to set in. She knew she hadn't dreamed the apparition, but what would Ron and Harry say if she told them about it? 'You were still asleep. It was just a nightmare.' What she was less sure about was whether she had simply imagined the event altogether. Certainly the man had been no pearly-white spectre like Nearly-Headless Nick or the other Hogwarts ghosts. Had her mind created some remnant of Snape, suggested by the fact that she was living in his house? But she remembered the figure at the window, pointed out to her by Mark, and shook her head firmly. She had not imagined it. But was it really Snape? There was an easy way to find out, she supposed. Harry had told her and Ron briefly about the content of the memories Snape had given him; he had definitely mentioned seeing the scene in which Snape agreed to spy on the Death Eaters for Dumbledore. That had been just after the death of the Potters; Snape would have been about twenty-one years old then, she guessed. She resolved to ask Harry, tactfully and circumspectly, without telling him why, if she could see those memories.

I'm becoming rather secretive and sneaky, she thought as she washed her teacup and went back upstairs. Professor Snape would be pleased.