Sanity in Azkaban

I don't belong here. None of us do. By all rights we should be dead, not tossed into Azkaban with Dementors hovering over us day and night. When Harry disappeared from the last battle in a burst of green light, we were all sure that it was a trap that Harry had sprung. We were sure that he would reappear again in moments and strike Voldemort down in a triumphant and powerful attack. He'd been beaten and bloody, but he had been standing on his own two feet with a determined look in his eye, and then Bellatrix had stepped from behind her master and fired a curse at almost the precise moment that Voldemort had done the same. The light from the combined curses was blinding, and once it faded, Harry had just been...gone. Vanished.

Being bound and having my wand taken, there was little I could do but allow myself to be gathered up with the others that hadn't been killed outright. The days that followed are only a blur of dimly remembered pain as we were each questioned and toyed with. By my best estimation, it's been twenty days since Harry disappeared, and I'm pretty sure we've been in here for 17 days. Ron quit answering my calls toward his cell two days ago. McGonagall only makes sounds when she is asleep, and at those times, it's nothing helpful, or even intelligible anymore. I hear the whimpers and screams of the others every so often, and it gets louder in the night. Ginny was the first to fall silent, and then Neville and Seamus, though none of us really sleep, I don't think.

The smell here is indescribable. I don't know if it's any one smell, or just a combination of human decay and waste, the moldy straw that makes up our 'beds', and the Dementors that are ever present. I've been here for over two weeks, and I'm still not used to the stench, and doubt I ever will be. The rats and mice don't seem to mind it, though, and scurry around about their business, what ever that is. If I allow myself to dwell on it, I only get an even worse feeling in my stomach than I thought was possible. The smell of my own body sickens me, the sourness of the sweat and the blood from the 'games' that they played with us before abandoning us here. I sometimes think that I would do almost anything for the opportunity to bathe properly. "MY KINGDOM FOR A HAIRBRUSH!" I hear myself shout, and then there is laughter, tinged with hysteria echoing along the walls and corridor outside of my cell, until I realize that the laughter is coming from my own throat. That sobers me again, and my descent into madness is halted again for a while. I wipe the tears from my cheeks and go back to my bed of straw and begin to rock again.

I seem to be the only one here that is hanging on to sanity. I'm not sure why I've lasted as long as I have, but I find that I can use my remarkable memory to keep my brain occupied. I can close my eyes and see the page of any book I've read, and read it again in my mind. Not the happy ones, of course; that is beyond my abilities here, and so I am left with the bitter remembrances of the huge tomes that I used to devour for advancement in learning, and to keep my mind from stagnating. For some strange reason, the Muggle author Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a story I seem to be able to recall with perfect clarity, even with the Dementors passing my cell door every fifteen minutes. Of course, it's not a cheerful story, is it? I wonder if it is an indication of the horrible guilt I feel for having fallen so easily in the battle in which I was caught.

I have also been keeping a mental journal, and committing to memory all that has happened to me since that fateful spring day, shortly after we had completed our first N.E.W.T. exam. We had been tricked into leaving the safety of the castle, and then were ambushed while searching the Forbidden Forest for signs of Hagrid, who had mysteriously disappeared days before. The first entries of that mental diary were a long and detailed account of it all; the ambush and the slaughter that followed it. Now they are filled with anguish and the pathetic record of how I fill my days in this prison, and hardly long enough to occupy much of the endless time I have been trying to fill. I've long since completed the rest of my exams in my head, composing long essays for Transfiguration or Charms or Arithmancy. How much longer these mental exercises will save me does not bear thinking about.

I spend much of my time here lost in my own thoughts, all of them sad and depressing. Have my parents begun to panic yet? When the Hogwarts Express never arrived to deliver their child back to them for the last time, what did they do? They would have had no way of walking through the barrier at Platform 9 ¾ to find out what had gone wrong. Had it seemed to them that I had simply vanished; absorbed into the magical world that I had so completely embraced over the past seven years? Would they try to find the Leaky Cauldron and the entrance to Diagon Alley, looking for word as to where their child had gone? I can only imagine and pray that they are safe, and that they don't know what has really become of me.

I wonder for the millionth time how Ron is faring. At first he would whisper to me from his cell down the narrow corridor, always saying that Harry would come, and that we would soon be free. He doesn't whisper to me at all now. The only sign I have that he is still alive is the cries at night, and I wonder if it is selfish of me to hope that he continues to cry out, so that I know that he is here and I am not alone. I remember bits and pieces of our time before this at Hogwarts. In my mind I know that there were happy times, and moments of contentment. A picture swims to the surface of the mire that is my mind, of Ron bending to brush his lips to mine for the very first time. I can almost see the nervousness in his eyes, and the sweetness of it all before they come. Two of them appear at my cell door, and the cold intensifies with the sound of their rattling breath, and the thought is gone, as if it never was. The darkness overtakes me until they depart back to their posts as sentries of this cheerless place. When I wake, I wonder what it was that drew their attention to me.... Could I have possibly had a cheerful thought in this God forsaken place? Not likely.

Once again, as the sun begins to set on the horizon, I watch the sky change from gray to orange and reflect off of the water that I can see through the small barred window of my cell. I wonder where Harry is, and if he knows what's happened to all of us. I wonder if he is alive. I wonder if he wishes he were dead. I know I wish I were; I suppose that wish will come true sooner rather than later. It doesn't do to dwell on such things, but it is hard to think of anything else.

As my cell becomes darker with the disappearance of the sun, I prepare to play my little game again. It's amazing to me that this little exercise I've devised for myself can keep me busy for so many hours a night. It's simple really. When it becomes too dark to see, I take the button from my pocket; it's a small black button that came from one of the cuffs of Ron's robes when they tore me from his arms to throw me in here. I wait until the darkness is as deep as it can get, and then I throw the button away from me, against the far wall of my cell, and I hear the quiet clink that it makes as it hits wall and floor. I close my eyes and count to ten, and then my search begins. The simple goal of finding the button is the only thing I focus on as the night begins. A methodical search into every nook and crack, and along every corner and rough stone surface of my cell keeps me occupied until the task is done and my hands and knees are abraded and sore when I finally close my fingers over the button once again. I kiss the tiny treasure when I find it, and then promptly toss it away again, another round of the same game.

I always play three rounds at first. I tick them off of my metal 'to do' list as I complete them, and then I retreat back to the only soft place in this small space. The straw is prickly and coarse, and the only form of protection from the cold that only gets deeper during the night here. I burrow in, and pull the remainder of the stale bread from my pocket. They feed us only once a day here, and the stale bread and mean strip of dried meat, along with a single small flagon of water they provide does little to keep me nourished. I know that soon, if I continue to bother eating, I may start to hallucinate and become ill from that lack of proper sustenance. I take a small bite of the crumbly bread and begin to chew it precisely twenty times before swallowing. Another device to fill the time with some productive chore, no matter how meaningless it may seem. A sip of water, and then I take another bite. When my pitiful meal is done, I move on to the next item on my list, and pull a book out of my mental library. I sigh as I look at the cover of the imaginary book and discover that it is once again the work of Mr. Poe. 'The Pit and the Pendulum' is my subconscious choice this time. I become absorbed in the words on the page before my closed eyes, and wonder if the sound of the rats getting seemingly louder and greater in number is the result of reality or of the story. I open my eyes only when I hear the sound I have been waiting to hear. It is Ron.

"Harry! Harry, come back!" he cries into the darkness.

"Harry will come, Ron," I say aloud, though I know he won't hear me, and I wonder if I've finally lost my mind after all.