Heroic Perversions

Chapter 5

Sunday

Harry had already turned into the next corridor before he could stop himself after vaguely catching a black smear of dark clothes and hearing voices and shuffling footsteps. He pulled back the sliver of body that had gone past the corner as fast as he could, and an instinct for inquisitive observation which he had nurtured since his first year at Hogwarts compelled him to remain unnoticed, flatten himself against the wall and peer around the corner.

A group of Slytherins were taunting Malfoy as they jostled him rowdily up the corridor. One of them was extremely large. Another Slytherin slapped the back of Malfoy's head hard enough to make his silvery hair flutter, while another stuck his foot in front of Malfoy, amusing his accomplices to no end as Malfoy stumbled and nearly bit the floor. Less shocked by the stupefying picture of Malfoy's wildly different treatment from his House-mates, whom a fortnight ago were revoltingly enchanted short of moving Malfoy around on a throne and fanning him with palm leaves, Harry was most baffled to see Blaise Zabini, whom he knew to be Malfoy's closest friend, among them. Though Harry had encountered similar pictures before, for bullying was not new to Dudley, this scene was distinctly ugly to watch for Harry.

Suddenly the very overweight Slytherin with round, boneless fists and a wide, doughy face took Malfoy by the chest and flung him into the wall behind him. Malfoy stumbled to the floor. After they all burst in cruel laughter again they subsided into quiet, talking lowly amongst each other, exchanging looks and mutters and occasionally contemplating Malfoy at their feet.

Harry wanted to keep his eye particularly on Zabini, marvelling at him, for while the others were glaring and muttering obscenities down at Malfoy, Zabini's lazy sneer managed to look much colder, and it did not give the slightest suggestion of their widely known friendship. Harry was therefore most unprepared to see that so disgusted by Malfoy that Zabini winced, uttered a final insult, raised his wand and - under his fellows' fervent encouragement - muttered a spell. The corridor burned green. The gasp caught in Harry's throat, strangled by shock. The arms that were held up protectively thudded against the floor, eyes shut in the moment of blinking, the body suspended in time just as was Cedric's haunting expression of surprise.

The corridor fell silent as the Slytherins watched Malfoy. It would seem some of them were torn between disbelief that murder had just been committed and that Malfoy could move no longer. Yet some of the Slytherins did not bat an eyelid as the last shafts of green light ebbed from the corridor. They shook themselves out of their torpor and one of them suggested, in a strained, quiet voice, "Let's dump him in this classroom here."

They all murmured in agreement and began shuffling busily. One Slytherin rounded on Malfoy's feet while Zabini gathered the body from under the armpits. They hauled it encumberedly towards a door a few feet away. One of the unoccupied Slytherins slapped another, who shook himself back to life and rushed to open the door. It now seemed the Slytherins had taken careful consideration of where to execute the murder beforehand.

Though Harry could not see them as the two Slytherins disappeared inside the classroom, as far as he stood he could hear the tables scraping the floor as they were bumped aside, the muffled shuffling of feet upon a cushion of dust on the floor of an unused classroom, and a Slytherin tug repeatedly at what sounded to be a stuck door, perhaps of a cupboard, that had not been disturbed for some years, stubborn with age. The boys waiting outside looked about inattentively. Harry receded out of sight and heard some clattering noises of things bumping about in the cupboard, buckets tumbling, and brooms clanking on the floor. There followed an ominous silence. There was a click, at which point Harry leant forward and peaked around the corner, watching the two Slytherins emerge from the classroom.

The boy who had opened the door for them jumped back as though the two Slytherins had blood stains on their hands. Zabini shut the door and beckoned for the others to follow him down the corridor. They gave him hearty pats on the back and snickered quietly.

Harry turned away from the corridor and sank into the wall behind him. He was suddenly breathless. He bent over and propped himself against his knees, panting as hard as if he had just ran several laps around the Great Lake. He peered over the corner again, but the Slytherins had disappeared down the stairs at the other end of the corridor. He reared fully and slinked over the corner, stopped, jerked forward and began walking towards the classroom. He had to make sure. It was just not possible. It was simply not possible that he had witnessed the murder of a fifth-year Hogwarts student by a group of teenagers.

Murmuring incredulously, he turned around on the spot and marched back up the corridor back to his corner only to spin around again and gaze at the door handle. Light-headed and hyperventilating, Harry mustered all his will to steel himself. He swallowed hard and stuttered forward until, before he knew it, he was standing in front of the door. When his hand reached for the same handle touched by the Slytherins his limb looked at once ethereal and primitive. He used the strange structure to pull the door handle down and push the door open. He stared at the opposite wall of the classroom, which had an overwhelming stuffy smell of dust and wood.

He crossed the threshold and a fit of sneezes seized him that, by the time he had stalked across the classroom strewn with topless tables and broken chairs, cobwebbed corners and torn books, he was teary-eyed and sniffing profusely. He kicked aside the dislodged back of a chair and a bucket as he approached the cupboard, which seemed to accuse him of something sinister.

And with a cold plunge of his innards, even before he could open the cupboard, the doors of which stood slightly ajar, he spied the sunlight reflecting off the scales of Malfoy's dragon-hide boot. Harry swore, tears now welling liberally. The classroom came alive: the windows were eyes to bear witness. Suddenly the door stretched farther away from and seemed to threaten to trap him inside with this suffocating truth. He bolted for it, knocking aside the table frames in plain panic, skidded in the dust - the pause of speed that allowed him to turn quite torturous - and launched himself out of the room. His only thought as he came round the corner behind which he had been spying was that he had to tell someone.

Gasping wheezily and his stomach heaving and a stitch in his side, Harry ran headlong into the massive oaken doors.

"Come in," said a deep voice when Harry had already stumbled into its owner's office.

"Professor!" whispered Harry. He was holding his side and his face twitched and screwed up against the horror threatening to engulf him. He struggled to keep his gaze open on Dumbledore, who leapt from his side, came around his desk and held him.

"Harry, what is it?" asked the headmaster softly. Dumbledore coerced him into the chair in front of his desk and went down on one knee, staring up at Harry questioningly. "Harry, are you all right?"

"They killed him!" spat Harry, his voice wobbling like a vinyl jumping on a record player. "They killed him, Professor Dumbledore! Malfoy!"

"Harry, please calm down and explain yourself carefully," said Dumbledore quietly as he stood up and frowned at Harry, taking in his heaving chest and reddened eyes. Harry hauled his head up high with seeming effort and looked up at Dumbledore as though he were a distant star.

"They killed Draco."

"Who killed Draco, Harry?" asked Dumbledore, his eyes narrowed and alert.

"The Slytherins! Who else?" shouted Harry. He did not understand why Dumbledore was so calm when a student of his had been murdered minutes ago.

"When did this happen?" asked Dumbledore as he walked around his desk and started tinkering with the various instruments on it.

"On--on--I don't know. The seventh floor, I think... Just like that - in cold blood!"

"Phineas," called Dumbledore as he swept over to a blank portrait with a stretch of muddy canvas. Under all his distress Harry was glad he finally heard a hint of worry in Dumbledore's voice.

"Phineas!" called Dumbledore again. Harry looked around at the office and noticed that indeed many portraits were abandoned. The few people which populated the rest, while watching his face avidly, were fanning themselves and had exposed various parts of their bodies to relieve the heat. Apparently some had opted for cooler surroundings than Dumbledore's office.

"I'd reckon he rented a cool, beautiful igloo in Antarctica," sighed a stout witch in one of the occupied portraits. She went on, her voice raspy and drawling with exhaustion, "That's what I would've done. I've thought about getting one myself before actually, when I was alive of course. Ought we not to rethink introducing that Muggle device we saw in the advert in that magazine you once read, Dumbledore? The one with the knitting patterns too?"

"It seems Phineas is unavailable at the moment, Harry," said Dumbledore, ignoring the woman. "Did you see the faces of the Slytherins who committed the murder? I should rather you answer along the way, I reckon..." Dumbledore was just beginning a long stride towards his door and Harry was jumping to his feet when green flames burst into life from the fireplace and out from it stumbled the Minister of Magic.

"Albus, Albus! By Merlin's name you won't believe!" screaked Cornelius Fudge.

Fudge's face was highly coloured and he seemed even more distressed than Harry. He waddled rapidly towards Dumbledore as he wrung crushingly at his lime-green bowler hat. He jumped from one foot to the other as he stood in front of Dumbledore.

"He--I--Potter? What's Potter doing in your office? This relationship you have with the boy, Albus, has simply got to stop, I tell you. It's quite unheal--"

"An urgent matter has arisen, Cornelius--" interrupted Dumbledore rather brusquely. But Fudge repaid him in kind even more brusquely.

"Never mind that! It can wait!" shrieked the Minister. And before Harry could open his mouth in contestation the Minister spluttered on, "Albus, Azkaban prison! A humungous hole in the side--Dementors all in a tenzy! It's the worst disaster I've ever seen since the Bloodbaths of Bath and Bristol!"

"I'm afraid I don't understand, Cornelius," said Dumbledore. But it was clear that he did and merely wished to garner details with which to flesh out the Minister's story.

The words seemed to be wrenched from Fudge against his will.

"There's been a mass breakout at Azkaban!"

The wooden silence that followed was swiftly broken with the shuffling footsteps of people returning to their portraits. Various occupants, after seeing Fudge, squealed in rapture, pushed their seats into the foreground and sat and listened to yet another entertaining relay of some crisis so often heard in this office. The last one they had enjoyed was the saga with the Mad-Eye Moody imposter. Last to arrive, Phineas Nigellus Black strutted back into his frame muttering something about uncouthly monsters overrunning basements, caught sight of the Minister of Magic and hurried to the fore of his portrait too.

"Minister, what a delightful surprise!" he trilled even as he peppered the room with questioning glances as to why the Minister had called, and had done so looking so fretful.

Fudge threw his bowler hat at Phineas and made an ugly expression. Phineas ducked and saw the hat off as it landed on the floor. He looked back up at the Minister, scandalized. Fudge's face had grown purpler and Harry would have felt an ounce of pity for him were he not in competition with him for Dumbledore's attention.

"Albus, you must accompany me at once!" Fudge gasped, and he slung toward the fireplace, a grubby hand clamped around Dumbledore's wrist, his sweating bald crown blazing as brightly as the fireplace.

Dumbledore allowed himself to be led without delay. But then he turned around to look at Harry and said, "Harry, I must attend to this immediately. I will--"

But Harry did not hear the rest of his words, for something had surged in his chest, a stinging, roaring flame of betrayal, and he found himself leaping for the doors. As they slammed shut behind him he heard the rush of the green flames engulfing the two figures. Stepping off the spiralling stairs into the corridor outside Dumbledore's office, it occurred to Harry quite acutely how alone he was. The fact that he was not accompanying Dumbledore to the crime scene right now had thwarted any attempt of his to externalize the memory of the murder he had just witnessed and make it extent to someone beyond him. In effect, as it stood, he had done nothing constructive for the situation. He may as well have returned to his dormitory and tucked himself under the covers. That, incidentally, sounded strongly inviting.

But as he stood there in the middle of the corridor looking for all the world like a sleepwalker undecided as to which route to follow, he felt a pang of disgust at himself for that whisper of cowardice. Yet he could not imagine his next action - Dumbledore was not in the school. And would anyone else believe him?

"Wish I was there to see it," yawned Ron when Harry told him and Hermione about the murder after hurtling through the portrait hole. "That would sure beat those ghastly sweaters from mum for an early Christmas present."

The fact that it was a Sunday did not help matters. The guiltless lethargy that came with it meant a virtually empty common room as many students sought out the outdoors to relish their last moments of freedom before a fresh week of academics. Only two first-years played noughts and crosses at a cosy corner. A murder, on a Sunday, of all days... But were Slytherins religious...?

"Harry, I know you hate him beyond measure," said Hermione, "but really now. McGonagall's essay is a mother of a pain. I don't even know what I'm arguing, let alone my conclusion! There's simply no time to wander about the castle looking for dead ferrets."

Ron chortled. "I swear... We need a Hermione more like that! We could just follow its scent, though; dead things always smell something wretched, don't they?"

"True. Maybe the eviller it was, the smellier it is," Hermione contemplated idly as she frowned at an incomplete sentence on her parchment, scratched an entire paragraph out and began afresh on a clean sheet with a cluck of frustration.

Ron seemed to be falling in love with Hermione.

"Guys," said Harry quietly. This was the part where he normally would have shouted to get their full attention, but he found he did not have the strength - he felt completely drained. "Can we please just go and see it? Dumbledore won't do anything about it." He could not describe how important it was that anybody else besides him - and Dumbledore, whose absence was momentarily useless - know about what happened: maybe it could provide him with some comfort in knowing that he was not in this all alone, that he could share and therefore lessen his dread with someone else.

"Harry, you're not being funny anymore," said Hermione soberly. Her quill was skating frantically across her parchment, the white knuckles holding it rigidly betraying her urgency.

"Yeah, Harry," agreed Ron as he crushed a parchment on which he had been doodling and threw it into the fire. Hermione slapped his arm when Crookshanks ran full tilt for the resultant golden embers. She grabbed his tail just in time and shooed her away. "As much as I enjoy imagining Malfoy getting offed - many times by yours truly - I think you're bordering on clinical obs--"

"Dean, Seamus, guys," said Harry as the boys tumbled into the portrait hole, wind-chapped and pinked-cheeked. "Can you come up with me to the seventh floor?"

"Er, yeah--sure, Harry," replied Seamus awkwardly, readily throwing Dean a frown as an excuse to look at him.

"What's up, Harry?" asked Dean, looking worried. He and Seamus licked their lips simultaneously to moisten them. They both had the look of someone inconvenienced by a surprise guest interrupting a perfect, prolonged Saturday-morning nap. Harry had no doubt they were both at least thirsty - the wind had a way of drying your throat out. But they simply had no time, he felt. He still could not believe how sedately the day was progressing, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened: a normal Sunday afternoon...

"Come on, you two--" began Harry but Ron sprung to his feet.

"Whoa, hold on, Harry," he said, looking slightly shocked that Harry had been so ready to replace his and Hermione's company for Dean and Seamus'. Hermione was also having none of it; she had only just recognized the change in Harry's tone and disposition. She frowned up at him before she rapidly jotted down her final sentence, put down her quill and rose to her feet. She suddenly seemed frightened, whether of him or the possibility that he had been telling the truth all along.

"You can't be serious," Hermione charged at Harry, glaring at him piercingly as the three of them trooped out of the portrait and trotted briskly up the corridor. Harry did not answer her but obliged the question plain in her face with a quiet expression. Their pace quickened.

"Um, I think I missed something here," Ron said. "Oh yes, the part, Harry, where you say, 'Just kidding!' Remember that part?" Ron waited for this part to materialize. But when Harry failed to comply he bleated, "Malfoy can't be dead!"

"I'll show you," promised Harry. "There's simply no other way I could've mistaken it. It was green and he stopped moving..." He tried to convince himself - as though he were back to square one trying to belief it was all true, walking back into that classroom and catching that strip of light falling through the cupboard doors onto a boot - that it was still true. "I'll never forgive Dumbledore."

"What did he do?" panted Hermione, her hair bouncing up and down behind her as they made quick work of the route to the seventh floor.

"Ignore me," spat Harry with more bitterness than he expected of himself. "He just rushed away with Fudge to Azkaban or wherever they were going. Apparently there's been a mass breakout."

It was several seconds before Harry realized he had left both his friends behind. When he looked behind him he saw that they were several metres down the hall, staring back at him, frozen.

"Come on!" shouted Harry. He turned back and loped down the corridor. The other two hastened to catch up, the size of their eyes growing beyond their facial planes.

"When did this breakout happen? I never read anything about in the Sunday Prophet or anything," Hermione said.

Harry failed to reply but led the way to the seventh floor. When they got there Hermione's fifty-ninth question fell dead as soon as they reached the door: Hermione was plainly bearing more than a few misgivings.

"I don't know, Harry," she murmured, flexing her hands nervously.

"You have to see it," Harry urged as he grabbed the doorknob. "You have to believe me. Come on."

"Okay we believe you!" Hermione yelled wildly in a shaky voice. "Ron, please tell him we believe him!"

"We believe you, mate - one hundred percent," declared Ron, gulping thickly. He too looked slightly green and sounded far from excited to see a dead body.

"Let's just go to Dumbledore's office and wait for him to come back to tell him," proposed Hermione. "We already know the--the situation. We don't have to see it with our own eyes - we know you'd never lie to us about something so serious, Harry." She took a handful of mousy-brown hair and bit on it anxiously. Both she and Ron were staring at him avidly as though expecting his expression to loosen and for him to burst out laughing as he revealed his punch line and pointed them to the cameras.

"Guys, just--please..." began Harry, but his voice fell as a mere whisper. He looked at them with a silent plea in his eyes. He wanted so much to show them just so that it could be known to someone else, be part in someone's else mind for his own consolation, for his own peace of mind, so that he would not have to feel as though he were fighting a battle as a single infantryman.

But it was selfish to yearn for this over the wellbeing of his friends, for clearly Ron and Hermione were in no condition to view a body - they were breaking apart at the seams even before they had seen it, shaken by the mere idea of it, while it was not the first time he had seen a body.

"Harry, please. Don't make us see it. We believe you! We swear we do!" begged Hermione to the accompaniment of more vigorous nods from Ron.

After a moment Harry relented and said quietly, "Fine. But do you really believe me--?"

"We believe you, Harry," Hermione assured him, her voice strengthened slightly by her horror.

"--I mean, I swear I saw it. They were just standing there all over him and they were shoving and kicking him and--and Zabini - of all people - just--he just--" He made rather exaggerated zigzagging wand movements but he was understandably not in possession of all his faculties.

"We believe you, Harry," declared Ron, cutting across Harry deliberately, making a plain statement that they did not wish to learn the details of Malfoy's murder, the consequence of which was an intimacy with the horror, something in which Harry was immersed inextricably.

"So--I mean, what do you we do?" asked Hermione, her words breathy and rushed, eyes over-bright, the horror still sinking in. "Do we tell everyone? Did you see any of the Slytherins' faces? Or--?"

"We tell Dumbledore, don't we?" suggested Ron.

"I already did that and I told you he just ignored me!" shouted Harry. He kicked the door behind him and shoved through Ron and Hermione. The tap had opened, the result, a rush of heated emotions.

"But, Harry, Dumbledore can't have just ignored you," reasoned Hermione, staring at Harry with the same frightened look she had worn when she realized he might have been serious about the murder. "You're his favourite--I mean, his - you know... Argh, well it is common knowledge he likes you best out of all of us in the entire school."

"That might've helped in first through four year but it isn't now, is it?" Harry replied hotly. "Where's he now? Where is he?"

"But didn't you say he was rushing off to Azkaban or something--?" began Hermione, but she jumped back when Harry made sudden, wild movements with his arms.

"He's going to sort out the Dementors miles away and people we've hardly met before while his own student--!"

"D--Dementors?" interrupted Hermione in a high voice. "Dementors have left Azkaban? Harry, you can't honestly tell me you're mad at him because he was going to sort out what sounds like probably the biggest disaster since the Bloodbaths of--!"

The reference to the Bloodbaths of Bath and Bristol, which reminded Harry of Fudge, sparked a noise of fury from him and he stomped off.

Back in the common room Harry tried a different tactic: if his closest friends were not going to believe him, he would simply have to try his entire House, starting with the common room.

"I reckon I should tell the rest. At least maybe Dean and Seamus," he muttered wonderingly. He had long ago abandoned any attempts to hide his worry. It was a human life, even if it was Malfoy's. There was simply nothing else more to it.

"Harry, you can't be spreading a rumour like that around!" hissed Hermione, throwing a few cautious glances around. "People will think you've gone around the bend! Let's just... let's just see..."

Ron, in one of those brotherly moments where he and Harry stood united against the feminine forces that be, furtively pointed at Hermione, then at him, made a loony gesture and then mouthed, "Cedric." Harry read this as saying, 'Hermione thinks you're seeing dead bodies because of Cedric.'

Harry understood. He fully understood why he had such a fierce desire to make everyone aware of what had happened. On top of that, he felt he simply could not take one more portion of helpings onto his plate; the single burden of his scar was quite enough. And he also understood what Hermione meant by letting them "just see" first before he did anything brash. Ron's message only confirmed that Hermione and even Ron himself partly did not believe him. And even by the end of the day, when they were packing their quills and arranging their rucksacks according to Monday's timetable, it still appeared to have sunken in neither of them that Malfoy had been murdered eight hours prior.

Harry went to sleep with a burning wish - one which kept him tossing all night, not to mention replays of that familiar flash of green - that they would finally believe him when they missed Malfoy's presence in the Great Hall and Potions the next day. And then, indeed, they will 'just see'. For now, there was no higher mission than that for Harry. If he was not going to publicize a murder, at least his closest friends should know. It was already a crime the entire school did not know when there was a witness - the most reliable witness; Harry was only too aware of the gleaming pedestal on which the Wizarding world - excepting the Daily Prophet - posited him.