The House Built Upon Sand

Part Three: The House Built Upon Sand

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.

Matthew 7:27

---

This old man came undone...

Yvonne floated in what was a dream and was also a memory. She was herself, but she was also someone else –a her that was younger and so deathly frightened.

He swayed Knick-Knack to have fun...

She was in the room where she had first gone to school as a child, but it was also Hogwarts. It was her own apartment, it was Archer's empty office, it was deep in the Ministry of Magic. It was everywhere that ever had four walls.

Bric-a-brac, bivouac, give the dogs Capone...

Someone stood at the end of the room and cast an endless shadow over her. It was Mrs Hamilton, her teacher when she had been only eight or nine, who she was convinced hated her even though that wasn't right – adults didn't hate children – but Mrs Hamilton hated her all the same. It was Professor Moody with his wild electric-blue eye that had given her a nightmare or two her first year at Hogwarts.

This cold man came rolling bones...

The Hamilton-Moody-thing summoned her to the edge of its desk, and she went. Since this was a dream, she couldn't escape. Since this was a memory, it had already happened. A spectral black bird, the size of an aeroplane and covered in feathers made of liquid coal, sat on the figure's shoulder and glared at her.

Itsy-bitsy spider could hear the water shout...

The Moody-Hamilton pulled its insane eye from its head and offered it to her. She saw its other eye was black and featureless. She tried to draw back, but because this was a dream and because this was a memory, she couldn't.

Down came the pain and made the spider doubt...

The eye in its hand was an apple. The apple in its hand was an eye. The bird was a snake, colossal enough to circle the planet and bite into its own obsidian tail.

Out came the moonshine and cried up all the rain...

She bit down into the eye, because it was what she had to do. The bird spread its wings that became the endless nothing sky, and feathers that were scales rained down over her, turning everything, everything, everything black.

The itsy-bitsy sniper was in the tower again...

---

She woke up in the darkness and said a quiet little prayer of thanks when she was able to reach to the side of the bed she was in and find her wand. Lighting up the tip, she saw she was in one of the wards. Spell Damage, most likely. She sat up, swung her feet over the side of the bed and realised two things: one, someone had taken her shoes before putting her in one of the ward beds, and two, she was hungry. Ravenous. It was dark, so had she been here the whole day? ... Longer than a day? She stood up, intending to make her way to the break room to find someone who could tell her what had happened, find some food, and hopefully find her shoes, when she saw something that made her feel as if all the blood in her head was draining out of her, pooling in her bare feet and possibly seeping out onto the cold floor.

Mrs Brightman, who Yvonne had been checking on this morning, had hanged herself. A rope descended from the dark ceiling and coiled around her neck in a noose, cutting at the pallid flesh of her neck. Her eyes, which had been open while she was Stunned but were still essentially human, now had an alien cast about them in the faint light from Yvonne's wand. Her body swayed back and forth slightly, as if Yvonne's waking was the thing that had propelled her to end her life.

"Yvonne, is that you? You awake?" It was Elizabeth. Oh, thank God, Elizabeth could take over, take charge of the situation, because there was no way Yvonne felt she possibly could. Her knees felt like they were in serious danger of buckling.

"Sorry about the lights being off, but... what?" She trailed off. Concern was written on her face. "You look like you've seen a Boggart."

"Her," Yvonne managed. "Bed Three."

Elizabeth turned and regarded the corpse for a second, then asked, "What about her?"

That draining feeling came back worse than before. Had Elizabeth gone mad? "She's... she's dead!"

"What? No." Elizabeth put her hand on the woman's forehead – the woman that was in bed three, Stunned, and not hanged – and said, "She feels warm. Mrs Brightman's fine." Elizabeth's eyebrows knitted together, and she asked in a wary tone, "Do you want something to eat, maybe?"

Yvonne was about to reply, yes, yes I want something to eat, and I want to know what the hell happened to me, when she saw Mrs Brightman's blankets turn from crisp green to dark red in two wicked pools right where her arms would be. She darted past Elizabeth and snatched the sheets away, ready to heal up the massive cuts that she was prepared to see running up the inside of the woman's forearms, but revealed nothing more than unmarked skin. She was whole. The sheets were still their crisp green, not stained with blood.

"Do you want to stop before you wake up the whole goddamn ward and I have to call for the men with butterfly nets?" Elizabeth asked in a tone of such concern that Yvonne failed to register for a moment what she had said.

She turned to face Elizabeth and realised Elizabeth's hand was on her shoulder. She shrugged it away and asked, "What did you say?"

Elizabeth looked puzzled, but more than that, she looked a little nervous. "I didn't say anything, Yvonne." Then she screwed up her face in a violent, childish gesture – crossing her eyes, shaking her head from side to side, and winding a finger around her ear – it might have been funny if it wasn't so hurtful. "You're hearing things, Yvonne," taunted Elizabeth. "You should be in one of these beds instead of in those robes. You should be in a padded room." Yvonne took a step away and backed into Bed Three, and a cold but horribly strong hand grabbed her wrist.

"Help me," said Mrs Brightman in the bed. Her voice was everything cheap pulp horror said the voices of the dead were – hoarse, raspy, gravelly. But, it was also more than those things: her words sounded like they were spoken from inside Yvonne's head, inky-black waves that dug through her brain and left stains. "Aren't you a Healer? Aren't you a doctor?" she demanded, her grip intensifying as her voice rose, and Yvonne realised Mrs Brightman couldn't have physically been speaking these words: her lips had been sewn shut with a coarse black thread. "Help me," the dead woman commanded. "Kill me. Help me!"

Yvonne pulled away from her, pulled with whatever reserve of strength she had left, and escaped the corpse-woman's grip. She ran, past Elizabeth and away from Bed Three, from Spell Damage, from St. Mungo's. She ran like hell and never once looked back. It was only when she reached the bus stop and rested against the pole with the barely-readable timetable sealed behind a pane of broken plastic, clung to it like an anchor of reality, that she realized her feet were bare, she had cut them in several places while running, and that what sounded like the breath of some hungry beast stalking her, tongue lolling out of its mouth as it prepared to lunge for the kill, was not a beast at all, but the sound of her own laboured, ragged breathing.

She looked around, telling herself she was checking for people watching but was really making sure no Twilight Zone horror had followed her out of St. Mungo's, before she inspected her feet. She rested her free hand on the bus timetable and found she had been clutching something in it since... since she had looked into the Pensieve, it must have been, since the object in her hand was one of Archer's Pensieve vials. In the grimy light at the bus stop, empty and with marks from her hand all over it, it was almost unrecognisable. She rubbed it down a little on the side of her robes, which brought firmly into focus that she had just bolted through the streets in green robes, was still wearing them, and would probably not be admitted on the last bus out of town if she were wearing robes and no shoes. She shucked the robes, an action she was still able to perform quickly despite her shaking hands, and dropped them in a heap on the ground. One thing solved. She slipped the empty vial into her pocket and found something else in there. A piece of paper. Plastic? She pulled it out. It was her bus pass. Well, thank God for small favours – she must have put it in her pocket instead of in her bag this morning, so now she wouldn't have to go through the rigmarole of Confunding the bus driver.

She glanced about, making sure she was still alone, and readied her wand at the robes, fixing in her mind an image of shoes. Simple as possible – no laces, no straps, just something that would fit on her feet. Shoes. The heap of green robes melted into a pair of simple, pale-green, slipper-looking shoes.

"Little Wizard of Oz, isn't it?" Yvonne said aloud, not meaning to until she was speaking. She started laughing a little, an image in her head of her skipping off towards home (painted on a terribly obvious film-set background) in not ruby slippers but emerald ones, chanting follow-follow-follow-follow. Then several other thoughts invaded her head – the Scarecrow with his cloth mouth stitched shut, the Tin Man with a noose around his neck reaching for the oil can, Oz the Great and Terrible telling her she was crazy, over the rainbow, bars in the window – and she fell silent again.

Taking a deep breath and forcing it not to hitch or shudder or do anything else untoward, Yvonne placed a hand firmly on the timetable to steady herself and lifted one foot up to the light. A couple of nicks and scratches, but mostly it was just dirty, not damaged. She cleaned and repaired her foot with her wand and slipped on one of the green shoes. It felt like her foot was covered in cloth, not like it was inside a shoe at all, but she reasoned that beggars couldn't be choosers, least of all about shoes. She took a look at her other foot, and while this one had a deeper cut along the heel, it too was repaired, cleaned, and in a green cloth shoe before the headlights of the last bus swung around the corner.

---

She flashed her pass at the driver without looking at him and moved quickly to sit as close as possible to the side door. The only other person on the bus was a teenage girl: rail-thin and hiding half her face behind her hair, she was engrossed in chewing on her nails. No Serious Commuters here. Yvonne closed her eyes and took several long breaths to centre herself. She was getting the hell home, away from people, and then she would figure out what to do next.

I'm not going crazy. Crazy people don't know they're going crazy. I know that wasn't real.

But that was a complete Catch-22, wasn't it? If what she saw at St. Mungo's wasn't real, then she was seeing things nobody else could, and that was a pretty good definition of going crazy.

It was that memory. Whatever Archer – Jean Paul took out of the John Doe's mind. I need to find Jean Paul.

Could she contact him from her apartment? Yvonne briefly considered a message with her Patronus, but couldn't imagine a thought happy enough to get it to materialise for more than a few brief seconds. Maybe there was a charm for sending a letter to someone... no, that's what owls were for. Owls! An owl would be by in the morning to deliver her paper; she'd just pay it extra to get a letter to Jean Paul. Then he could fix her. Undo whatever it was that had happened. That was mildly reassuring.

I'm okay. It's okay. I'm okay.

She opened her eyes back up, half-expecting to see the featureless, white blankness when she did, and felt the winding coil of fear start to loosen inside her head. The bus was slowing to take on a new passenger, an old man in a scruffy jacket and tweed cap, and nothing was unusual about him except the impressive tufts of hair protruding from his ears. He moved past the young girl and past Yvonne to somewhere up the back of the bus. The girl was still biting her nails – she had moved on to the last finger on one hand, and as Yvonne watched her indulge her bad habit, she very clearly saw the girl put the tip of her finger well past the nail into her mouth and bite down, hard. She drew her hand away, and there was a brief flash of red where the tip of the finger should have been. The girl's jaw began to work as if she was chewing a piece of gum.

This isn't real. I'm not seeing this.

But the blood coming from the girl's hand seemed to say otherwise. It was perfectly visible under the lights inside the bus. It flowed freely onto the leg of her jeans, rapidly pooling in a dark blot and then dripping to the floor. Yvonne could hear each droplet as it hit, and that was the thing making this hallucination seem hellishly real.

It's not real.

The girl noticed Yvonne staring at her and gave her a look understandable to anyone, but only truly mastered by sullen teenagers: What the hell are you looking at? She then bit into the fleshy part of her palm, her teeth sinking in just at the base of her thumb. The teeth in that mouth were not human: they were jagged, yellowing fangs that looked both rotten and vital at the same time. They were the teeth of an animal that would kill you not with its own poison, but rather some insidious bacteria thriving in its mouth. They were teeth that only the soulless victims of a Dementor's Kiss could recognise.

Yvonne forced herself to stare at a piece of gum on the floor. It was a pale-green colour – almost the same as her Healer robes – and had an intricate lined pattern running across it that could have only come from a sneaker pressing down on it. The lines made Yvonne think of those gardens of sand the Chinese ran rakes through to mediate. Zen meditation. You were meant to shut out the world and become nothing. Or everything. Something like that. Yvonne's form of Zen meditation – of shutting out the world – involved a pair of ear-buds and an iPod Shuffle, but that was in her bag, left somewhere at St. Mungo's.

A sound was coming from the other side of the bus – a liquid squelching punctuated by sharp cracks. It was oddly clear over the sound of the engine. It sounded a little like what you heard in your head while eating a piece of fruit – perhaps a peach that was still a bit too stiff and crunched when you bit into it.

Yvonne started singing to herself under her breath, trying to imagine herself as a Serious Commuter again, someone just riding the bus home trying not to look bored. She kept her attention focused on the piece of pale-green gum on the floor and tried to imagine the exact sequence of what she was going to do when she reached her apartment: look left, look right, Alohamora the door, make sure to lock it again from the inside, cast a silencing charm, drop Rumours into the CD player and turn the volume to eleven, sit in the armchair, summon a bottle of wine from the kitchen and think for a moment about summoning a glass to go with it.

"And if you don't love me now, you will never love me again..." she whispered, trying to picture those Chinese men with their shaved heads.

The bus came to a stop. She saw the girl's feet exit the bus and chanced a glance back up, noticing the button nearest to the girl's seat, the one to press to make the bus wait at the next stop. It was smeared with blood. Yvonne went back to staring at the gum.

"I can still hear you sayin' we would never break the chain, never break the chain..."