The Black Canvas

Some time before the start of Harry Potter's sixth year at Hogwarts, a new painting appeared on the wall of the third floor East corridor.

No one knew how the painting came to be there, not even Dumbledore, who knew most of the ancient school's secrets--most, but not all--and least of all its neighbors, who would look upon it with a kind of mystified uneasiness as they went about their own two-dimensional lives.

It wasn't the presence of the portrait itself that disturbed the occupants of the other paintings, but rather its composition. This new picture was disquietingly unique.

For one thing, the painting was quite obviously unfinished. It was if the artist had been interrupted in the middle of his work and had never had the opportunity to get back to it. There were patches in which the canvas showed through and, if one were so inclined to touch it, their fingers would more than likely come away wet with paint.

Also, unlike its colorful and vibrant counterparts, the newcomer was done in a thousand shades of grey, running the spectral gamut from void-like black to nova-bright white. And it was hardly done in what one would call the 'classic style'. No, this one was abstract at best, atrocious at worst. It was all sharp slashes and swirling blurs and it was only when one wasn't looking directly at the painting that one got the vaguest impression that there was, in fact, someone there.

There was, of course, someone there.

It--he?--had the unnerving habit of creeping slowly through the other paintings--an indistinct shadow in the background, a dark smudge in a corner. The residents of the other paintings in the school were so unsettled by the silent spectre paying them wholly unwelcome visits--searching for something, but for what they neither knew nor cared to ask--that many of them began to seal themselves off from one another in the hopes of sparing themselves the burden of his grim presence.

They were incredibly relieved when, weeks after the Fall term started, the Other--as they'd come to call him--began to keep its wanderings limited to the paintings hanging in the Headmaster's office.

And it was there--one afternoon just as a wet, dismal October was shifting into a chilly, desolate November--that Harry Potter saw the Other for the first and last time.

He had been summoned and was waiting for Dumbledore to make an appearance when--

Harry...

--eyes like fractured emeralds caught a slight movement and flicked up to the painting where one Phineas Nigellas had resided until recently. The former Headmaster had been gone from his canvas home since the previous June when he'd left in search of his great-great-grandson. He had yet to return and his painting hung empty, save for a slight discoloration in the paint that Harry hadn't noticed before. Odd that something so inconsequential should make the hair at his nape stand on end, but there was something about it...

Harry...

"Harry."

The Boy Who Lived turned away from the dark spot on the empty painting and towards Dumbledore, his unease traveling from the back of his neck to the pit of his stomach. Watching the wizened Headmaster with too-old eyes, he clung to the few precious moments of ignorance he knew he had left before his world was shattered just a little bit more.

"Harry, I'm so sorry to have to tell you but...Remus Lupin has been killed."

* * *

Some time before the start of Harry Potter's sixth year at Hogwarts, a new painting--unnerving and unfinished--appeared on the wall of the third floor East corridor.

It wasn't until after Halloween that the painting was completed. Shapes became more defined, colors slowly seeped in--still muted because the scene was nocturnal--and paint finally dried depicting a mist-shrouded moor.

While neighboring pictures still eyed the landscape with a degree of wariness on occasion, they liked this version of it far better than its predecessor. The occupants--two of them now--were decent enough. They generally kept to themselves, rarely preferring to dwell in the background rather than speak with passing students, slipping like shadows between the tree as they shared murmured conversation and soft laughter. No, the denizens of the other paintings didn't mind the two pale men with haunted eyes much at all.

And if, from time to time, the two of them would wander--sometimes on two legs, other times on four--through other canvases in a fruitless search for a dark-haired boy with eyes like fractured emeralds, no one was inclined to stop them.

END