Morning Has Broken

morning has broken

by dubious_volute

Sometimes he feels like he's the only one in the house, but really those are the good days and anyway it only lasts a half-hour or so.

The ghosts in the Riddle House are unwholesome, to his experience. There is no jocular Friar to congratulate you near the kitchens after your successful biscuit-snitching mission, no indignant Nick waving his Hunt rejection letters in front of any unsuspecting diner. His Master's festering shipwreck of a house has none of the friendly spectral security of his old school. He is afraid of the floors and the windows. None of the ghosts here seem to have proper bodies.

Most keep to a single room, but he learns them all, eventually, as he navigates the house. One makes a breathy drone like the sagging belly of a bagpipe and will follow him relentlessly on a quiet morning, even if he runs full-out. One hides silently in the kitchen but gives off the distinct smell of soured milk, so that he never knows if the setting for tea is really safe. The one under his bed cries every rainy afternoon, sobbing until its voice runs hoarse and then ripping violently at the carpet instead. He's never worked himself up to asking why.

The rat is no longer a refuge. He doesn't like being that close to the floor.

One of the most persistent keeps to the South Hall. When he carries trays to his Master, as often he must, he hears it pattering merrily after him in a mocking parody of lap-dog devotion. When he reaches the end of the hall he doesn't want to look down, but finds that he must, rather than go on. Glistening dark-red spots trail in a wake on the floorboards behind him, and from his diminutive height ("God," James used to fuss, "aren't you ever going to get any bigger? Maybe you should have a second pudding or something. Would that build bones, Moony?"), he can see the whorls of a fingertip in every one. He wonders, not for the first time, if this is the ghost of his own hand, and that thought alone makes him thumb the doorlatch that gives onto Tom Riddle's old sitting room. By the time he exits the parlour, shaking and drooling with Cruciatus, half-blind, he will be too distracted to note that the red carpet of fingerprints has gone.

Sometimes he is so glad to see the poisonous muscular coil of Nagini flexing her way through the dust, just because he knows that something alive made the marks on the floor behind her.

There are rather too many stained glass windows. This isn't a sticking point for most residents of and visitors to the Riddle House, because the Dark Lord's court is held, fittingly, obviously, at night. But Wormtail is awake in the day, and some mornings find him gagging on the dyed air of the Myrtle Room or the Dove Parlour. He has tried slipping from shadow to shadow, but there are already things in the shadows. Too many times, he has been pinned down by a searchlight of malicious coloured syrup cast from a high-set transom pane and must stand there, convicted, crushing his flesh hand in his metal one, until the hour chimes and the light passes on.

Sometimes he begs the sun to go down, and who would have ever imagined he'd be doing that?

In May, fleeing a particularly fast-moving saffron beam, he thoughtlessly catches at a random door and flings himself inside. He has just enough time to register that every window (down to the foolish anachronistic arrow loupes) is made of stained glass, all in tones of green, before he hears the click of the lock behind him. It comes to him--working his mouth silently, a fat corpse-white koi fish choking in an untended pond--that it is midday, that there should not have been a slanting sunray in the North Hall, and furthermore, there is no key for this door on the ring at his belt (Alohamora never works in this place), but it is too late for any of that, now.

The room ticks and sighs in the smoulder of an airless noon, and he tries not to look at the unsettling scenes bleeding verdantly in the windows, scenes with no association to the world outside, if there is one. In the far corner, something is rummaging around inside a wastepaper basket by the tiny black-lacquer letter desk. From the thoughtful ruminant sounds emerging, it must be eating old correspondence.

Sometimes he fantasises about writing for help, but he has no friends left to answer.

A whispery humming scrabbling noise begins to emanate from the base of the door, and he realises with a sense of inevitability that the beam of light is still in pursuit. He imagines it, a piss-yellow writhing column, burrowing under the doorframe and leaping for his mouth.

He suspects that it will be like breathing crushed glass, and is surprised to feel something very like relief. Wormtail leans both hands and his sweaty cold face against the sweaty cold cheek of the pale-green plaster wall and waits, and tries to think of somewhere else, a crowded kitchen, light that falls unpolluted though healthy open windowcases onto a clean-scrubbed floor. A sagging flannel pocket in an old magenta pajama top.

Molly's fresh warm lemon curd, straight from the saucepan, that always tastes of sanctuary.