Doldrums

Overture

"Mum!" A bushy-haired girl cried out in terror at the sight of two armed robbers swinging their guns at the customers.

The entire situation in the bank was extremely chaotic. Huddled at a corner, most of the terrified customers squatted on the floor with their hands over their heads, not daring so much as to catch a glimpse at the robbers directly in the face for fear of their lives. When one of the customers, a fat middle-aged woman tried to dash for the entrance, one of the two robbers speedily shot her in the throat, releasing spurts of blood from the damaged arteries. Clutching at the injured spot in an attempt to stop the flow of the blood and pain, the woman tripped over her worn-out slippers and fell clumsily onto the blood-splattered floor. The bridge of her nose hit the floor first and everyone shuddered in dread as they heard an amplified crack of the bridge of her nose. Those customers squatting nearest her fallen body recoiled in horror and revulsion at the sight of the bone protruding out of her nose. Tributaries of blood were steadily flowing out of the wound and onto the floor. Although she did not die an instantaneous death from the shot, it was evident her death was only a matter of time. And in this case, it was only a matter of about ten minutes or even less.

Hermione stared in shock at the blood as her mother pulled her as close as she could to her body, afraid that her only daughter would meet with a similar fate. Suddenly, Hermione noticed a shadow over them. The next thing she knew, the robber had hauled her mother away from her and was pointing a gun to her head.

"If anybody moves even an inch, that anybody would end up like that fat corpse on the floor," sneered the robber cruelly before turning towards Hermione's mother, "and you will be my ticket to a successful getaway."

"Do not touch my mummy!" yelled Hermione in anger as she lunged herself at the robber.

The mist created by the steaming hot tea hovered uncertainly in the air for some seconds as though contemplating its final moments before the thick, gloomy air engulfed it completely. Without further ado, the seer gulped down the boiling hot tea without demonstrating any signs of scalding her throat or burning her tongue. After that, as if age has finally caught up with her after performing that significantly impossible act, she set the cup down slowly on the table before her.

A blond man, whose face has been etched with fine wrinkles around his eyes, pursed his lips impatiently. "Well, what does it say?"

She did not reply. Instead, she peered intently through her thick glasses, whose surfaces had been compounded with scratches, oily fingerprints and smudges. Her filthy appearance matched her equally grubby shop well. Draco thought as he looked at the cluttered surroundings with distaste. It was nothing like the Malfoy Manor at all. Turning his attention back to the seer sitting before him, he could not, in his mind, imagine how anyone could see clearly through such glasses. Hoping to convey his doubts to his edgy father, he threw a glance in his direction but the older Malfoy ignored him completely.

"Despite these godforsaken glasses, I can see quite clearly, young man."

The seer's eyes pierced through his soul, making the younger Malfoy squirm in his seat. He hated anyone reading his thoughts, be it intentional or not. As if he wanted to throw a retort at the older woman, Draco opened his mouth but his impeccable manners forbade him to say anything rude to the seer. Moreover, his father was glaring furiously at him. If his father continued to be in a bad mood, he would definitely not permit Draco to get the broomstick he so wanted for his birthday next week. Huffed, the younger Malfoy kept his mouth shut while he waited for the much respected seer to continue with her words.

"I also know that your destiny is intertwined with a Muggle-born. A girl..."

"A mudblood?!" Lucius spat and tapped his cane angrily on the floorboards, his disgust for what he considered to be the lower species on the hierarchy evident. He could not believe his firstborn and a Pureblood for that matter would be in any way associated with a foul, soiled mudblood-- a mudblood that would be trampled upon by all the Purebloods in the near future when the Great Lord took over. No way was the older Malfoy going to let a stupid mudblood foil his ambitious plans for his son. He narrowed his eyes in irritation at Draco, causing the younger Malfoy to draw back in dread at what was to erupt from his father.

The seer wiped Lucius' saliva from her face with her dust-coated sleeves, making her face dirtier with that action.

"I would refrain from saying that word in my shop."

"Are you sure..." Lucius started before the seer motioned him to continue no further.

"As I was saying before you interrupted me, that Muggle-born would have a streak of white hair."

"Do not touch my mummy!" yelled Hermione in anger as she lunged herself at the robber.

As if on cue, the customers reacted instantly. Irrational fear had given way to an equally irrational behaviour, with absolutely no regards to anyone's safety, save for their own. All they could think of that moment in time was to head for the entrance. The entrance was their gateway to survival. At the unexpected turnabout of events, the two robbers stood rooted on the floor and were at a loss of ideas to deal with the unruly situation. However, one of the robbers recovered his composure immediately and began shooting at the running customers. It did not matter to him whether anyone got shot; he merely wanted the situation under control. Yet, once the enormous wheels of action had been put into motion, it would be an extremely arduous task to stop them. And this was what happened with the stampede. More shots rang out in the air but to no avail.

The law enforcers did not rest on their feet either. The minute the first customer stepped out of the bank in hysteria, they stormed into the place without much ado. All they found was three dead people: a fat lady and two masked men with bullet holes all over them. In the centre of the bank, a dazed woman was cradling an unmoving figure in her arms, crying and calling out her name in despair.

"Hermione... oh Hermione... my poor child..."

The unconscious girl was barely breathing when the nurses wheeled her into the emergency room. Despite delivering electrical shocks to the heart using the defibrillator, her heart failed to respond. The monitor displayed a straight line throughout the procedure in addition to the production of the ever annoying sound the surgeons hated very much. Not only did it sound like a siren to their ears, it also appeared to proclaim the surgeons' incapability for the world to mock. They could not allow a death to taint their clean slate of a hundred percent success rate in surgeries. That would be a felony in itself. With those thoughts in mind, the surgeons did everything possible to bring her back to life again.

However, little did the surgeons realise a strange phenomenon was taking place in the still body lying on the surgical table.

"A streak of white hair?" Crabbe uttered stupidly between bites of the tuna croissant he had bought at the corner of the street prior to meeting Draco and Goyle, "How bizarre can a prophecy get?"

Draco ran his hand through his blond hair. "Can you imagine my destiny entwined with a mudblood? Now what would my father think of me?!"

"On the bright side, at least we can be mindful of any Muggle-borns with a streak of white hair?" Goyle glanced in Draco's direction, his chubby lips curving into a wide grin, displaying a set of white teeth stained with the residues of his chocolate bun. "This is a delicious bun. You want one, Draco?"

Realising the impossibility to revive the girl, the exhausted surgeons finally decided to resign to the outcome and pronounced the patient dead. With that, they excused themselves from the room, leaving the nurses to clear up the operating theatre and wheel the corpse to the morgue in the hospital. A petite nurse draped a white sheet over the body while another sterilised the surgical instruments at the other end of the room.

In the motionless body on the surgical table, a strange phenomenon was occurring. Tiny wisps of white hair could be seen sprouting at the periphery of the scalp near the top of the forehead. At the hair fringe area, the process of melanogenesis* had mysteriously stopped its operation as opposed to the rest of the hair sections which did not experience a similar fate. The vulnerable melanocytes at the hair fringe area fretted at their inability to produce their offspring- melanin, needed to maintain the brown colour of Hermione's hair. In the absence of melanin, Hermione's hair would lose their brown colour and change into a white colour. However, a stronger force, much more powerful than them was slowly destroying the melanocytes in the hair bulbs. The melanocytes could not understand how this could happen. Although the body hosting them had died, it did not mean that they had to stop working like the rest of the body mechanisms did. It had always been their practice to continue serving the host until the body started to age. Yet, the melanocytes were more than convinced that they were in a young body which had not reached the phase of ageing. As a result, the melanocytes at the hair fringe area found themselves at a loss as to the solutions to the inexplicable force that threatened to destroy them alive. The rest of the melanocytes in the other hair sections could only look on in helpless horror at their counterparts' slow death.

When one of the nurses came around to Hermione to move the cardiac monitor from the surgery theatre, she noticed a tuft of white hair jutting out from under the white sheet. Priding herself for having one of the best memories amongst the nurses, she distinctly recalled noticing the patient's bushy brown hair during the operation. Where did the white hair come from? Unable to quench the thirst of curiosity at that point in time, she pulled up the sheet only to break the silence in the room with her horrified screams.

"What's the problem, Beth?"

Beth's colleague, Mary quickly moved towards her, who stood rooted to the ground and pointed to the uncovered body of the corpse. Or what used to be a corpse for the girl's eyes was now wide open. Mary's equally aghast eyes took in the weak smile adorned on her pale face and... the white fringe that fell across her face.

*Melanogenesis is a process in which melanin, a hair pigment is produced.

Thank you for reading this little work of mine!