One Honest Heart

There were cold whispers stalking Lucius Malfoy through the dark corridors of Malfoy Manor; the silent suggestion of a madman’s gibbering; the prowling sensation of some strange creature (not a man at all, though madness hung in the air, swinging like a lynched soul’s innocence) tied to him, leech-like, through some invisible snare, slowly strangling all life, all remnants of joy, out of him.

Every loose object lining his path looked deadly, lethal, a potential tool towards the destruction of his mortal flesh. Every ancient battleaxe a swift blow, every knife a quick slice, every small pike a final fall.

Everywhere on the oppressive, looming, towering walls, paintings joined in the screaming silence; ancestors shivered and sneered; fair maidens fluttered to attention, their eyes unfocused but not as vacant as before, pupils dilated, following his shaky progress, small smiles surfaced where scowls had once seemed a fixture; creatures cowering or gone; suns taking refuge in angry, billowing clouds; a once sleeping dragon undulating inside its smoky darkness, eyes on fire, claws tearing at the ancient canvas.

It was as if all the life seeping out of Lucius – his unwinding thread of fate – was flowing into the paintings, weaving itself into their canvases, inspiring a level of sentience, of intent, of willpower never intended. A desire to break free.

Lucius hurried his steps. The icy presence swept along, a shadow of himself, a nagging conscience not quite his own. Outside, the wind refused to howl and the breaking waves were too distant to be heard. Silence ruled supreme, a dictator of evil dreams and living nightmares.

Malfoys did not break into a run over figments of the imagination. Malfoys did not turn around to face invisible foes. But Malfoys did sweat as much as any peasant, however much they wished it was not so.

Malfoys still felt cold. They fought fright, commanded fear, but froze like any mortal prey.

Lucius threw the door open, basking in the warmth billowing into the corridor but frozen to the spot by the cold stare of his guest.

‘Don’t you ever knock, Malfoy?’

‘I apologise, my lord. Force of habit.’

‘You told me to make myself at home,’ the red eyes glowed, ‘and I never share mastery of my home. You would be wise to remember that while I am here, Lucius.’

‘Of course.’ The deposed master of the manor pushed the door closed, jerking further into the room, eyes wide, restless.

‘Something the matter?’ It was not a friendly inquiry.

‘What? No. No! Nothing.’

‘Good.’

‘It’s just all so – silent.’

‘Good.’

‘Apologies, master. I – have what you requested.’ Lucius pulled a small vial from his robes.

‘Of course you do,’ said Voldemort, snatching the vial from Lucius’s trembling fingers, ‘or you would not have dared come here.’ He turned and strode over to a table in the corner of the room. A small potions lab was set up on top. ‘Very wisely so, I might add.’ He sat down.

Silence descended.

Lucius remained standing. For a very long time.

It began as rather an odd story that no one quite believed in – a quirky tale of dubious origin. The kind of thing they usually assign to me. (Sometimes I think they see me as a quirky oddity, out of place at the Prophet, and they try to find stories that fit me. Do they expect me to thank them, I wonder?)

A Dementor had gone missing – or, as the story stood when they dumped it on me, had allegedly disappeared from Azkaban prison. This, I quickly found out, was alleged by an inmate. He did use that exact wording when I interviewed him (breaking into Azkaban, I learnt, was only marginally easier than breaking out of that hell-hole – Lucius Malfoy and Sirius Black were at least spared the paperwork). ‘I allege,’ he said, ‘that one of ‘em ‘as gone jawohl!’

And there went my story, and half my pay check, being part freelance still. But, as always, I stuck to it. There was little else to do but sip vile coffee at the Prophet and fail to speak to everyone.

My source (while The story might have been gone, I hoped - as always - to find A story somewhere in the wreckage of the first) was, they told me, the oldest resident of the Azkaban facility. No one knew what he had been convicted of. No one knew how long he had been there. Some speculated wildly that he had been there since before the actual prison complex was built. They called him the First One and he was both a mascot and a curse.

He claimed he had grown immune to the Dementors. He certainly appeared happy (one of my first notes was: ‘personnel v. disturbed by inmate’s blatant happiness’). If the other prisoners hadn’t been so far gone, they might have looked to him as an inspiration, proof that there was, at least, a merrier kind of madness.

I never did ask him if he knew Black.

‘I can hear them whisper in our mind,’ he said. At the time, I thought he’d taken to talking about himself in the plural - a kingly madness. How wrong I was.

He said one of them was fading, going mad. One of the Dementors, he claimed, was dying. I asked him where it was, why no one else had noticed, why no one even knew it was missing. He told me the ‘human folk’ no longer kept track of Dementors unless they became a bother, that they could come and go as they wished so long as they ‘didn’t make no fuss.’ A quick dig through our archives seemed to me to verify this claim. It was only when the Dementors were angry, when they ‘made a fuss,’ that the story of their Azkaban absence hit the headlines. There was not a single small notice, only headlines.

It was when I widened my research that I caught the scent of a story again, when I realised that what we had all been taught about Dementors, through school and media, were mostly a bunch of canonized theories. No one even knew where they had come from. No one seemed to think it worth mention these days that they were (so the older reports claimed) immortal.

I went back to interview the First One (he never gave me any other name) several times, despite the depression the visits brought me. One time, he stopped his prattling to regard me, almost solemnly, for a long, worrying moment. ‘It’s them,’ he said, and his voice terrified me because it was not the one I had come to know and loath, but the deeper, wiser, articulated tone of a man to whom madness is merely an entertaining pastime. ‘It’s them,’ he said. ‘Not even the solid rock can shield you from them now. This room used to be much too far away for visitors to feel even the slightest whiff of our hellish world. But they are afraid, my dear. They call out. One of theirs has never faded before and they fear that something worse will happen next. The unknown scares them. They are single-minded creatures, animals with an insatiable thirst but innocent as children. They have never known death, nor feared it, for they have never been alive. This terror awakens something in them. Life.’ His eyes as they stared into mine were beyond my simple powers of description and I wanted to flee but couldn’t move a muscle. To this day, I feel I wouldn’t have remembered a word he said if he hadn’t inscribed them on my very mind. (And let me tell you, it hurt like hell.)

The very last thing he told me was this: ‘They are afraid that they will come alive and devour themselves.’ Then his stare shifted, he cackled insanely, and shrieked: ‘Well, aren’t I jus’ th’patron o’ th’place, m’dear? Patron, I! Patron, us! Paterfamilias! Paternoster! Paternal otter! Eek, eek, eek!’

And then I knew I had a story; a difficult, dangerous one, but definitely a story.

That was when the news broke about the other story, the one I would eventually be the only one left to cover.

The only one left alive.

16 June 2001

Harry scowled when I told him I'd been out sampling the men of Redlace Street. I've an idiot boyfriend. What else is new?

18 June 2001

Body v. good. Harry's better. Am disgruntled by this. Though am feeling should not be. As usual, life with boyfriend v. confusing.

Should probably never have bought that Fielding book. Am feeling embarrassingly girly.

Still, Harry loves me.

!!

12 October 2001

I still remember the day when Harry told me I had a stony heart. As clearly as if it was only yesterday. And I'll never forget the day he told me I had great walls of stone around a soft heart.

'You have so many walls, I feel as if I get lost in a maze whenever I try to reach you,' he huffed, face the colour of beetroot, as usual.

I was in quite an agitated state myself. I'd rather I had a heart of stone. You can chip away at solid stone for a long time without breaking it, but walls of stone can crumble, and expose your innermost secrets. And fears.

I'd let him see me naked but he wanted more, much more. Total exposure. I told him my skin was too sensitive for that, but he didn't even seem to notice the jest. Harry can be very intent. Very distracting.

'Well,' I said, 'I hope you brought a ball of yarn, or marked the corners with paint, because you might as well leave.' That was my answer, or some ramble very much like it.

Harry didn't leave. Nor did he tear down my walls, but he found his way inside. And I loved him for it. And I still do. O, but I do.

And now my walls keep both of us safe. Real walls of cunning, ingenuity, opaque transparency, magic, and solid stone. I'll never forget Harry's face when I explained it all to him, at last. That it should take all of that for him to realise that his boyfriend is brilliant as well as dead sexy is quite beyond me.

He is safe here. My heart is safe.

My precious, oh-so-honest Gryffindor heart.

Father would throttle me with ungloved hands, I'm sure.

Harry thinks I should write a novel.

I, of course, turn up my nose at him and snort at such plebeian notions. I have money. I have a home. And I have Harry.

Need I have more?

16 May 2002

Have fortified myself with drink. The idiot idiom obviously has little bearing on reality.

Harry still not home.

17 May 2002

blood everywhere. dark ugly dishonest   death has a curious smell

my voice is gone think the same is true of my throat

that explains part of the smell in any case

why do I [bloodstain]

I am a dead man writing

    my dishonest heart is gone [impossible to transcribe]

The news of Harry Potter’s prolonged absence from his work as Auror and his position as Muggle Liaison Officer made for big headlines and a sudden interest in my odd and obscure little story of the Missing Dementor. In the absence of any real news concerning the disappearance of the Boy Who Lived, both readers and my colleagues seized upon anything that could possibly be said to have even the slightest connection to the Potter story. And everyone knew of Potter’s history with Dementors; his strong reactions to their power when just a child at Hogwarts, his now famous Patronus that had graced every front-page from here to Timbuktu, and, of course, the connection between his infamous adversary (that my conservative editor still insists must not be named) and the Dementors. In short, my story got interesting by association, got a sprinkling of Boy Who Lived stardust, got pulled from a late notice to an early full-blown article.

So now I faced another problem: creatively filling that big empty space the layouter wanted to devote to ‘Potter and Dementor related material’. I was forced to dig up any obscure bit of Dementor lore I could possibly locate, figure out at least ten different ways to express the same basic fact over four allegedly different pieces (‘M’dear, ‘s called journalism,’ my editor leered at me), wallow in conjecture, and make at least three arbitrary mentions of Harry Potter in every article I wrote (if I didn’t, my editor cut and pasted some of my previous mentions wherever they didn’t fit; no one but I seemed to notice in any case).

Gradually, and with ample assistance from my commercialist editor, my stories on Dementor activity morphed into wild, vaguely gothic speculations about Dementors attacking and abducting Harry Potter; stories that had quite a few of our readers inquiring as to why the Prophet had started publishing fiction all of a sudden. And at the very same time, I morphed back into the drunkard I had thought so firmly behind me. People were sniggering behind my back. Still, I couldn’t drop the story. It was my first big one and I needed both the money and the goodwill of my, in those days, ever-present editor.

After two weeks of writing speculative horror stories, I stopped sleeping in my search for some new angle, some real and unimagined connection to the Potter story. As I look back on those sleepless nights, what I see is a woman lost in a drunken dream, a nightmare of my own making, trying desperately to regain some sort of hold on reality, trying to find something real amongst all the rumours and borderline lies. It quite surprised me (as much as anything could in my drunken stupor) that I found my breakthrough by delving even deeper into the fictitious.

Having stared at an unhelpful wall for I don’t know how many hours, I picked up a crime novel (Walters, I believe) and read it in one sobering sitting. When I resumed work on my story, it was with the clear intent of solving the case of the missing Dementor. It had suddenly become clear to me that the reason I had so little to write about was that the case wasn’t even acknowledged as a case by the Aurors and therefore no progress could be made. Spurred by the fictive success of the novel’s heroine, I set out to find myself a missing Dementor.

Yes, I really felt that way. Like a struggling heroine.

I was, after all, quite drunk.

The sounds of potion-making seemed loud but distant – clear arrows of noise pecking at a mind muffled by fear. Lucius kept his balance on a floor that was at once his own yet foreign, still as the stone beneath the rich carpeting yet rattling his legs as an unsettled heap of his ancestor’s bones. Perhaps even a ghostly image of his own whitened bones could be glimpsed through the carpet’s complex patterns, coiling before his fear-addled eyes.

Determined to avoid his morbid reflection on the floor, Lucius let his gaze sweep the room, back and forth, back and forth. He stood perfectly still save for the swivelling of his head, like a sentinel keeping the silence at bay by giving it the very coldest of Malfoy stares.

Looking at those walls, his own that now seemed so alien to him, Lucius found himself wondering if perhaps they marked the end of the world, a thin shield against a nothingness that had consumed all else. It seemed to him that the room existed now in a vacuum, adrift in limbo. Not a sound was heard, the subtle presence of the world around him became clear to him now only by its omission. To his mind, there existed only the room, and the strange presence haunting it, freezing his limbs and agitating his heart.

‘Lucius!’ exclaimed Voldemort. ‘How, exactly, did you come by this sample?’

Lucius startled out of his frozen vigilance and turned an apologetic face towards his master’s scaly back. ‘My lord?’

Voldemort did not turn away from the metallic liquid rippling softly in the small stone basin before him. ‘The sample, Lucius! How did you acquire it?’

‘I assure you, my lord,’ faltered Lucius, ‘it’s – it is what I have said it is. Surely, it is enough that you have a gentleman’s word—’

‘NO, it is NOT!’ roared Voldemort. ‘That would imply trust, and trust is a weakness I do not allow myself. You should know this, Malfoy. Now, tell me exactly what you did to get the sample.’ His voice was measured and cool. It was a voice his followers either learned to obey the first time they heard it or not at all.

And so, Lucius told his lord, told him all but the most intimate of details.

In the hearth, the fire fought a losing battle against a harsh, cold wind.

The room had no windows.