What Is and What Should Never Be

What Is and What Should Never Be

And if I say to you tomorrow

'Take my hand, child, come with me'

Hermione was in her office again for a meeting with Edward Teach. So far, these encounters, which occurred once every ten or so days, had lasted an average of fifteen minutes apiece, a majority of that time taken up by small talk. She'd learned that Teach was educated to university level, not yet thirty, and came from a pureblood line of what had once been Southern aristocracy 'before the war.' She assumed he'd meant the Civil War. He had been fascinated by her completed account of Voldemort's Horcruxes and seemed content to let her get on with things – but his most recent owl had hinted at a wish to see more purpose and direction in her research. Had she yet formulated any questions to answer or hypotheses to test, he wanted to know? Made a list of sources to consult? Spoken to the Minister about contacting other magical governments regarding their knowledge of or experiences with Horcruxes? She'd done the first, made a stab at the second, and shrunk from the thought of doing the third. She remembered Barty Crouch Sr. and the Quidditch World Cup and had, thus, no desire to go anywhere near the Department of International Magical Cooperation.

Lost in these thoughts, she started at the sound of a knock on her door and schooled her features into a welcoming smile as her patron entered the room.

'Good morning, Miss Granger; you're looking well,' Teach said, composing his long limbs in her guest chair and lacing his fingers across his knee.

'Thank you,' she responded. She stacked some parchment together – notes on various texts about Dark magic – and asked, 'Would you like to see what I've been working on this week?'

'Not yet,' he answered, waving the papers away for the time being. 'I want to talk about something else.'

Not altogether surprised, Hermione rested her chin on her hands and waited politely.

'What do you know about Sirius Black?' Teach asked.

This was something Kingsley had mentioned, she recalled; she was struck by an uncharacteristic desire to be circumspect and said merely, 'A little. What particularly do you wish to know?'

Teach leaned back in his chair, into what Hermione's mind classified as the characteristic alpha-male posture, and explained, 'It seems to me that if we're interested in the soul, we ought to examine what happened to him. More than any public figure in recent years other than Voldemort, his history is bound up with the fate of his soul.'

'I'm beginning to see what you mean,' Hermione said thoughtfully. 'Please go on.'

He began to tick points off on his fingers. 'First, his imprisonment in Azkaban. The Dementors, as we know, are one of the few things on earth capable of damaging a soul. What was the state of Sirius Black's by the time he escaped? Second, his encounter with the Dementors by the lake at Hogwarts, from which he was saved by Harry Potter. How close did they come to relieving him of that essential part of himself? Finally, his demise. What is this Veil you all have here? Is that where souls go when their bodies die? If so, what does it mean if the body goes there too?'

Hermione pondered this for a few minutes, watching Teach watch her. She had not given much thought before to this aspect of Sirius's history, and in a way, doing so was distasteful to her. He had been a friend; she did not want to turn him into an object of intellectual curiosity. Eventually, she commented, 'You're very well-informed. Most people don't know what happened to him.'

Teach had the good grace not to grin as he admitted, 'I have contacts all over the place.'

Shrugging, Hermione pulled a fresh piece of parchment in front of her and said, 'All right. What, specifically, do we want to know?'

Teach talked; Hermione wrote. After perhaps half an hour, he paused, and she sat back to look over what she had written.

Questions re: Sirius Black

5. If it is possible to conceive of a soul outwith its living body, is it possible to conceive of a living body outwith its soul?

Hermione repressed her laughter at the first and third questions: Souls go to King's Cross Station, and yes, you can come back. She refrained from saying this aloud, however, considering that Harry's case might have been exceptional, and promised to give this topic priority for the time being.

Teach nodded briefly but made no move to leave. Noticing her questioning glance, he shifted in his chair and said, 'There is one other thing.'

'Yes?'

'We've known for a long time about soul magic in America,' he said, looking slightly uncomfortable. 'It was something the Native Americans had, apparently. Wizards who crossed the ocean hundreds of years ago wrote about the kinds of magic they encountered in the native population. No one knows any more how to perform that kind of magic, but the accounts of it describe spells and potions that can send the soul on a journey outside of the body or summon the spirit of an ancestor to ask it for knowledge or advice.'

Hermione's heart rate sped up. Summon the spirit of an ancestor... A tiny spark ignited in the back of her mind, almost unnoticed by her. Mentally, she turned away from it, hoping it would burn out on its own before she was tempted to feed it with fuel. Resolutely, she focused on Teach and asked, 'You mean like astral projection and trance potions?'

'Something like that,' he confirmed, 'but as I say, the knowledge has been lost. Miss Granger...' here he leaned forward, and his eyes brightened with that same eagerness she had seen before '...what if we could discover it again? Imagine what we could do, the people we could speak to!'

Against her will, the tiny light in her mind grew from a spark to a match flare. Even in her grief, first over Sirius and Dumbledore, and then over her friends fallen in battle, she had distrusted the idea of the Resurrection Stone, with which Harry had been so fascinated. The dead should be left in peace. But what if she could talk to the dead without disturbing them? Would they, like portraits, only know the things they had known in life? Or did death open up new realms of knowledge and understanding?

'Your eyes have glazed over,' Teach said cheerfully, drawing her back to reality. 'What were you thinking about?'

Hermione shook her head, stopping her train of thought in its tracks, and grinned at him. 'I'm sorry – I'm distracted.'

'Is it anything I can help with?' he asked generously.

She started to shake her head again, then stopped, thinking of a way to dodge his enquiry. Maybe he can... Opening her bag, she pulled out the letter Harry had sent the day before and smoothed it on the desk in front of her. 'I've just moved into a new house,' she said carefully, 'that used to belong to a wizard. We think there's a basement and a place where there might be a door to it, but...' She trailed off. Leaning across the desk, she handed him the letter. 'My friend Harry says it reminds him of the entrance to this room in Hogwarts called the Room of Requirement. In order to get in, you walk past the blank wall three times, thinking of what it is you require, and then the door appears.'

Teach skimmed through the letter. 'I see. And you've tried this in your house?'

'All night!' she said, frustrated. 'And nothing happened. Either I'm not thinking the right things, or the door doesn't work that way.' She shrugged and took the letter back, folding it into her pocket. 'What do you think?'

'Are there wards on it, maybe?' he asked.

'None that I can find,' she answered.

'In that case,' he said decisively, 'it sounds like something I've seen before in the houses of, well, really well-known people who like their privacy. The charm is similar to the Fidelius – it hides an entrance or a doorway unless the caster reveals it. But instead of telling you where it is, like with the Fidelius Charm, the caster has to open the entrance in front of you.'

Hermione groaned involuntarily. 'I hope you're wrong!'

'Why is that?' Teach asked, looking insulted.

'Because the caster of this particular charm is dead.'

'Oh,' he said, taken aback. 'That would certainly be a problem.'

Her blunt statement seemed to have killed the conversation; after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Teach said his good-byes and departed, leaving her to contemplate the questions they had devised. Something was niggling in her memory, something she had thought of weeks and weeks ago in Oxford, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. The more she strained at it, the more elusive the memory seemed, so she focussed on something else and left the room, travelling in the lift to the lowest floor and following the narrow stone stairway to the Department of Mysteries.

In the circular, revolving entrance, she went through the motions of eliminating doors until one opened onto the amphitheatre-like room at the bottom of which stood the crumbling stone archway and the tattered Veil itself. Cautiously, she climbed down the carven tiers, keeping her eyes firmly on the placement of her feet until she reached the floor in the centre of the room. There, she sat on the lowest tier and stared at the Veil in front of her, remembering what Harry had told her of Sirius's death: the look of surprise, the laugh, the graceful sideways tilt until his body had passed behind the curtain, Harry's lunge after him, Lupin's restraint. It seemed to her a very strange way to die. Even as she sat there, she could hear the faint whispers that appeared to twist the ragged curtain as if in a gentle breeze. Is Sirius the owner of one of those voices? Are the souls of all the world's dead making those sounds?

And suddenly, as always happens, her elusive memory coalesced into clarity. Hurriedly, she left the Department of Mysteries and grabbed her bag from her office before rushing into the streets of Muggle London. She walked quickly through the late-afternoon sunshine until she reached Charing Cross Road where she slowed down and began to scan the shop fronts of the bookstores around her. Eventually, she reached one that looked likely and went inside, following the twists and corners and handmade signs so ubiquitous in used-book stores, until she found the psychology section. Running her fingers over the spines, she selected the book she wanted and flipped through it calmly, recognising instantly the term she had been trying to think of: collective unconscious. Jung's work had had nothing to do with the soul, but when she combined his idea with what she had read of Plato's description of the soul in Oxford, a novel theory occurred to her: what if there were such a thing as a collective soul?

Leaning against the bookshelves, she allowed her imagination to follow the thread. Plato had written that souls were incorporeal and eternal; like believers in reincarnation, he had also suggested that souls were reborn into subsequent bodies. Maybe there is no such thing as a soul-plane – maybe there is a collective soul here on earth, to which our individual souls return when they die! She pictured something like the Oort Cloud, hovering invisibly everywhere on earth with souls zooming in and out of it as some people died and others were born. Could it be that passing through the Veil simply returned one's consciousness to the collective soul? If that were the case, what had happened to Sirius's body? Would a collective soul explain the ability to speak to the dead?

Reeling with questions, Hermione staggered from the bookstore and into the street, narrowly dodging out of the way of a passing taxi. Finding a shadowy alleyway, she Apparated to York and strolled to a teashop in the Shambles. Within minutes, she was writing furiously, determined to record every piece of speculation that entered her brain. This work was far beyond her Ministry remit, but for the moment, she didn't care. There was always some possibility that she could link the research to Horcruxes – perhaps damaging one's soul prevented it from returning to the collective – but she would worry about that later. For now, she was seduced by the idea that the souls of the dead were here, on earth, and could communicate with the living. There were ways of achieving this, Teach had said, and they must be written down somewhere! Spells to summon souls, potions to send your own soul wandering from its body – if they existed, she would find them.

And far in the back of her mind, as the weeks passed and she travelled to library after library, searching out texts and rare manuscripts and correspondence, that tiny flame continued to flicker, ignored, but burning all the same. It represented the temptation she would not be able to resist if she allowed herself to acknowledge it, the desire that had burst into being without warning at Edward Teach's words, the name of the person whose soul she would summon if only she knew how...