Harry Potter & The Other Realm

Chapter One

CLOSETS AND CUPBOARDS

Notes: Here we have my first attempt at a Harry Potter/Sabrina the Teenage Witch crossover (being my first dabble in Sabrina`s style of witchiness). I can´t remember exactly when Sabrina started up, but by my judgement (Harry being born in 1980 and whatnot), she and Harry are about the same age, so this story is set about six months after Sabrina has been informed that she is a witch, which puts Harry in about his sixth year.

Oh, and for the record, I love Salem. You´ll figure this out very quickly.

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"Salem!"

A black streak of fur shot out of Sabrina´s bedroom and down the stairs, before doubling around through one of the windows and up the guttering to scramble into Hilda Spellman´s bedroom.

Squeezing through the elaborate curls of the Fairy-Princess-styled bedstead and onto the floaty pink sheets and pillows that only lacked a sleeping Princess - or in Hilda´s case, a handsome Princess - Salem released his prize.

With a triumphant laugh that had once been used as the laugh of a Warlock bent on world domination, Salem studied the brush he had stolen from the youngest of the three witches that he lived with on the bed of the second-oldest of the trio.

It was the first time he had managed to break up her daily grooming routine, her dull plastic brush nothing of any real interest, but it was worth stealing it, just to hear her yelling in frustration.

Lying down on his belly, ready to relax, he smirked.

In the distance, he could hear Sabrina Spellman calling hopelessly. He could even imagine her flinging her arms about and stamping her feet in frustration. "Salem! Bring it back! I need to brush my hair!"

Like every sixteen-year-old - witch or not - image was everything.

"You´re a witch," he called back. "You have a finger. Do the math!"

"A-ha!" The door opened instantly, revealing the sixteen-year-old witch, her hair looking like a bird´s nest on her head.

Once again, the cat cursed the youngest witch´s ability for moving so rapidly when any of her cosmetic gadgets went missing. He was convinced she had some kind of in-built tracking device for them.

"I knew you´d answer back!" She pointed at the brush, trying to make it fly straight to her hand.

It turned into a pineapple.

Salem looked at the former brush, then at Sabrina, amber eyes glinting with clear amusement. Despite his feline features, she could have sworn he was smirking at her.

"Don´t even say it," she snapped irritably, stomping across the floor and grabbing her brush. With her other hand, she grabbed Salem around the middle and hauled him off the bed. "And Aunt Hilda´ll kill you if you stay in her room."

"She wouldn´t know," Salem grumbled, dangling uselessly under the young witch´s arm. "Unless I remembered to leave a hairball."

Re-entering her bedroom, the witch dropped Salem onto the patchwork quilt on her bed and placed her pineapple on the desk. Usually, the fruity effect wore off after a minute, so she turned her attention to her wardrobe.

On the bed, Salem edged forward, his tail flicking from side-to-side as he studied the homework book lying on the desk. It was easily as dull as the brush, but oh, what an easy target!

The previous night, Sabrina had slaved over her math work for hours in the doodled-on blue book, so surely if it was ruined that would be a...a very bad thing.

Salem grinned.

"Don´t even think about it!" Sabrina cautioned, before sticking her head into her closet. Apparently, despite her newly-revealed witch-genes, she still preferred to get dressed the normal, human way, lest she accidentally don herself in a pineapple.

Salem pulled a face at her back, as she put on a blue sweater and matching pants.

Could this...child, this mere, badly-dressed infant, really tell him - the notorious Salem Saberhagen - what to do? And was he likely to listen to a word she said, seeing as he now had the fickle personality of a cat that he could blame?

Yes, he was a talking black cat now, but once, not so long ago, he had been the most feared Warlock in...well, on the Eastern Seaboard, that was for sure!

Until the blasted Witches Council had foiled his plan for World Domination and turned him into a cat for a couple of centuries for abuse of his powers. Turned him into a cat to teach him the error of his ways and to show him humility.

They wanted him to be humble and they turned him into a cat.

That piece of warlock logic never failed to amuse him.

His eyes went to the homework book again.

Okay, maybe it wasn´t quite World Domination, but it was rebellious!

Leaping from the bed to the desk, he grabbed the thin book in his mouth, bounded off the desk and sped for the bedroom door, Sabrina uttering a furious yell and giving chase immediately.

"Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalem!"

The cat would have laughed aloud, but for the risk of dropping the book. Sabrina raced after him at full pelt, down the flight of stairs that stood outside her room, her footsteps thundering on the carpeted wood of the staircase.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, the cat used the polished front door as a reverse springboard, launching himself back up towards the stairs and towards Sabrina, who uttered a shriek.

Skidding between her feet and shot back up the stairs like a black, furry, long-tailed comet. He heard her yell as she collided with the door, then her feet on the stairs once again, as she continued after him.

He raced straight around the rail at the top of the case, into the open linen closet that stood there.

Unlike most normal people´s linen closets, the linen closet in the Spellman house served as a basic transport device between various areas of the normal and witching world. A witch could step into it and be transported off to anywhere in the galaxy.

Panting, Salem waited for Sabrina to catch up with him, his plan being to have her run in, so he could leap out, slam the door and send her somewhere in the Other Realm, then laugh villainously as Hilda and Zelda berated him for being a bad kitty.

After all, what was the point of being a bad guy bent on world domination if you couldn´t be bad once in a while?

So he waited, with the book.

However, as with all cunning plans, there was a flaw.

Sabrina did dive in after him, but she also shut the door behind them, while yelling about needing to get to school.

"Oh sh..." Salem´s words trailed off in a flash of lightening from beneath the door and a thunderous booming sound, as witch and cat were both sent hurtling off to somewhere in another realm.

***

Coughing and spluttering, Sabrina squinted around in the darkness, a few lines of light forming a rectangle on one wall. "Great," she muttered to the cat, who she had in a secure grip. "Where are we now?"

"If you opened the doors of this closet, maybe I could tell you," Salem´s sarcastic drawl came back to her.

"Oh," Despite being in the dark, Salem could tell that Sabrina was probably bright scarlet. He heard her hands scrabbling along the wood and yawned, watching as she fumbled her way closer to the handle.

He could have told her, but that would be too close to a `kind action´ for his liking.

The door popped open, flooding the closet with light.

Instead of being filled with fluffy white towels and perfectly folded clean bed sheets as the transport closet at the Spellman house was, this one was as different as a closet could be.

Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, the wood dark and looked like it had been burned. A few silvery spider webs shone here and there in the corners, but the worst part was the actual content of the shelves.

Odd-shaped bottles with viscous fluids of various colours gleamed here and there, some streaked with dust and grime. Further up, Sabrina was sure she could see a jar of eyeballs and a little to the left...

It looked like a skinned rat, floating serenely in a yellowish fluid.

"Ew!" Sabrina was out of the closet in a heartbeat and immediately regretted the idea to leap out without checking who, when, what and where she might be hopping out into. "Uh..."

Wherever she was, she had never seen anything like it before.

Several rows of dark, wooden work benches stood in front of her, scant light shining in from tiny arched windows bedded high in the grimy, nearly-black walls that rose into high-arched Gothic ceilings above her.

On the far side of the room, what looked like a small cauldron was bubbling over a purple flame, on the desk. It was unattended and the witch realised why as soon as she looked towards the door of the room, which stood open to her right.

A tall, thin man with a waxy face and hooked nose bore down on her in the darkness of the gloomy room around them. Black eyes glittered ominously as he neared, dark, heavy robes flaring around him, black hair hanging in lank curtains around his face.

"And what," he asked silkily. "Have we here?"

Sabrina blinked up at him, clutching Salem a little tighter. "I...uh...we got lost..."

"You got lost and wandered straight into my private potion stores, did you?" The black eyes were fixed on her face and the blonde witch wondered if it was possible that she had turned into something that this man could step on, because that´s how those eyes were making her feel.

"I...uh..." Her grip on the cat was starting to make Salem feel dizzy.

"We´ll just be going now. No harm done," he wheezed, the man´s dark eyes flicking down to the cat in surprise.

"You are not a pupil here, are you?" His attention still on the cat, the man directed his question to Sabrina. "I´m afraid that will never do..." A thin stick of wood came up in his bony hand.

"Wha...?"

Salem, however, recognised the stick as a wand, used by less advanced magic people. "Finger!" he yelled frantically. "Finger! FINGER!"

On reflex alone, Sabrina´s finger pointed, her eyes pressing shut as blue and white sparkles shot at the black-clad man, who immediately froze in, then efficiently turned into a large pineapple on the stone floor.

Salem groaned. "What is it with you and pineapples?" he demanded, making the witch open her eyes to see what she had done.

"Oh!" Sabrina winced at the sight.

"You turned the man into a pineapple!" the cat yowled. "Don´t just wait there until he turns back!" He leapt free from her arms and started across the floor towards a door on the other side of the dark, gothic room. "Run!"

Seeing the wisdom in her feline companion´s words, the blonde witch took off at full speed towards the door, leaving the black-clad man as a pineapple on the floor of the dark dungeon-like room.

With his head start, Salem rapidly vanished out of sight, Sabrina running after him in her bare feet. She hadn´t even had time to put on a pair of shoes and the stone floors were icy against her soles.

The passages seemed endless, grim and deserted, which made her wonder what she had said to end up here. Arches and pillars seemed the theme and she had a horrible image of Dracula popping up at any minute.

Spotting a square of what looked like daylight ahead, she hurried her pace, her feet almost numb with cold, but she didn´t want to risk turning them into pineapples by pointing heat into them, especially if the man had returned from his fruity condition.

Reaching the light spread on the floor, a cry of relief escaped her. She had reached a stairwell that led up towards daylight and away from the oppressive gloom that pervaded the halls she was in.

Eagerly, she started to run towards the light.

Coming up the long flight of stairs into sunlight, panting and with a painful stitch in her side, she collided squarely with two boys, who looked like they were about the same age as she was, knocking books from their hands.

"Sorry!" she apologised hastily, kneeling to help pick the scattered books up, her flight from pineapple-man briefly forgotten. "I guess I should have been watching where I was going."

The boys stared at her.

"Who are you?" the shorter of the two asked. He had black hair, piercing green eyes and glasses. He was also wearing robes very similar to the dark man that she had turned into a pineapple.

"S-Sabrina," Still breathless, she shoved the books back into his arms. "Have either of you guys seen a black cat?"

"Um...no..." the other boy answered. He was tall, gangly and had a shock of bright red hair. He was studying her and, more particularly, her clothes. "You...you aren´t from here are you?"

"I don´t even know where here is," she said, getting back to her feet. "All I know is that I ran into the linen closet to get my homework from Salem and ended up in a potions closet here..." An embarrassed look crossed her face. "And I just realised how crazy that sounds..."

"Closet?" the red-haired boy asked.

"Cupboard," his friend explained.

"Oh!" Pointing from one to the other, Sabrina laughed. "You´re English!"

The two boys exchanged looks that seemed to say `I wonder if she´s always this observant´ and the dark one nodded. "Yeah," he said slowly. "We´re English, which just happens to be because we´re in England."

"Oh great," Sabrina moaned, throwing her head back. "This is just perfect."

"Sabrina!" A familiar voice yelled from further down the long, arched hallway. At the far end, her black cat companion was standing, frantically pointing at something behind her.

Whipping around, she found the pineapple who had turned back into a man storming towards her. The expression in his black eyes even made the two boys back away, which suggested that it wasn´t a good thing to be standing where she was.

"Gotta go!" Pushing past the two boys, the blonde witch broke into a run, following her black-furred friend´s tail as he shot around the corner just ahead of her, the black-clad man´s footsteps thundering closer behind her.