Black

A House

If haunted houses ever existed, theirs was one.

There were ghosts, yes. Here and there, drifting through rooms, pearly shadows that never spoke. But the house was big enough that you didn´t meet ghosts very often, and when you did, they simply passed through you without a word, and you shivered and kept walking. Ghosts were cold, like the rain, and the windows, and the sheets on the beds. Like the house.

When the rest of London basked in the warm rain and fresh breezes of spring, the water fell icy from the eaves of their house, and battered the flowers. The children pressed their faces to the cold glass of the windows that were grimy in the corners, and watched the rain flatten the peonies and the camellias and the white roses. The narcissi were sheltered, though, protected from the weather, and Narcissa gave a smug smile as she looked down at her namesake, safe and dry beneath the eaves. Her mother´s favorite flower.

There were nine of them, in that house, and there was plenty of room to spare. It was big, big enough for two families. Procyon and Aldebaran, the twin sons of Orion and Capella Black, had chosen to share the ancient house when their parents were gone. Each now had a wife and children, but the house had more than enough space for them all. They didn´t use much of the house -- it had a presence of its own, far greater than anything they could comprehend, and they did not intrude too far into its world. The families were compressed, using far less space than they could. Aldebaran´s three girls shared a room, where they could all move to Andromeda´s bed in the night, curled up together for the warmth the sheets did not give. Bellatrix, Narcissa, Andromeda -- the Black girls. Regulus and Sirius -- the Black boys. Five small children in a big, cold house.

There was magic in the house -- powerful, Dark magic that hid and concealed and protected it. Procyon made sure of that, after a Muggle salesman strayed in their door. The house came away with dozens of protective spells. The Muggle wasn´t quite as lucky.

But there was other magic in the house, as well, magic that none of them understood, magic that stretched back ages. Magic that made the house what it was. There was magic in the wood of the dark, sweeping staircases, and magic in the silver chandeliers that glimmered above. There was magic in the darkness that pressed around each solitary candle flame, magic that never allowed light to penetrate far into the gloom of the house. It was a dark place, a Black place, where silver serpents twisted through every aspect of the residents´ tainted lives.

Everything about the house was tainted. The silver was tarnished, the carpets were dusty, and grime always accumulated in the corners of the windows. There were house-elves, of course, all with the same snout-like nose, but the house was big and they were busy, scuttling up and down their secret passageways, cleaning clothes, preparing meals, lighting fires that gave what warmth they could before the house drew it away. The house-elves had no time to take care of the windows and the carpets and the silver chandeliers, except for the occasional dusting, and much of the house was left untouched and unexplored.

The children liked to wander, to investigate the miscellaneous artifacts of untold age scattered through the house. They knew to look and not to touch -- one never could tell what would be inside this tarnished silver snuffbox, or that heavy gold locket. The children had the sense not to open a bottle of blood or play with a rusty old dagger, but they loved to look through the mysterious items that could be found everywhere in the house. Mystery was abundant, from the drawing room to the kitchen to the attic, and the children went everywhere they could find, but they knew that they could never explore the entire house, and accepted it. The house wasn´t a place you could know, or map. The house was its own world -- a bridge between planes, almost, a bridge from London into somewhere much darker -- existing in both and yet in neither. The house was a place of seeping darkness and whispers in the night, of creaking floorboards and ceilings that recede into the gloom. The house was haunted -- haunted by age and dirt and pain and darkness and magic and fear and blood and even ghosts. But most of all, the house was Black.