The Black Forest or the Secret Diary of Prof. S. Quirrell

September 18

We are in the foothills and will touch the lip of the Padure by tomorrow afternoon. For the first time, the mist has lifted ad the view onto the trees is breath-taking. Somehow I feel more relief than fear at the closeness of its green-blackness.

That does surprise me.

Levin is happier also and Azrael is not. We told her nothing of what she said to me through the wine and she seems to remember nothing of it herself.

Yet a mood lingers on her as if that voice from the grape left a stamp on her soul, a darkness she senses and expresses, but doesn't fully comprehend.

Around the evening's fire, Levin and I chatted giddily, like third years before their first trip to Hogsmeade. We dissected the Padure and the Neagre - What makes a forest a forest? Why is it black? How black is black? What is the meaning of black?

Children's mind games, semantics, but our mood was light as if finally something would be finished.

Azrael watched our brightness and frowned on us, an owl over mice scampering in the grass.

"Do not go into the woods lightly."

We stared at her, which was not the wisest course of action. It encouraged her to chastise us further.

"I mean what I say."

"Do you, witch?"

A strange look settled in Azrael's eyes. "There is a wolf in the story I will tell, but his end was better than yours will be. He was fat with human meat when the woodsman sliced his belly open."

Then the weirdness passed from her and the weary witch looked out at me.

"I once sent a couple into the woods - a baker and his wife, who were cursed with only squibs. Cursed by a relative of mine. Very well, then. By my mother. So I told them some things to bring me if I were to brew a potion to release them from the spell.

It was a very complicated spell to undo a change in the baker's genes so I needed peace and quiet to work. The things I sent them for, they would do nothing, but distract the two fools. So I sent them on the pointless quest. I said to them, 'fetch me a cow as white a milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn and a slipper as pure as gold.'

Would you believe they went? Traipsing like an English country dance!"

The witch chuckled to herself, shaking her head at the remembered foolish of these strangers. "Yes, they went into the woods lightly and she was crushed to death by a giant and he ran away from the village, never to be seen again."

Azrael paused then and sighed heavily, as if with regret. "But before that, they had a child."

I shivered as if she'd told a horror tale. The vampires stirred beyond the fire.

"Are there still bakers? I thought there would be only factories for making bread."

"He might not have been a baker, now that I think of it. He might have been on the line at the Volkswagen plant."

I thought Azrael meant to be sarcastic, but Levin took her at her word.

"A factory hand will never learn the woods. They are too soft with the city. If you had said a homeless -"

"Or a street wolf -"

"Yes. Then I would have believed."

Sometimes Levin is very simple, very accepting. Others, she is hard and impenetrable as glacial ice.

She's soft tonight. She wants to be in the woods - even the black woods. It must be the wolf's instinct.

"Or the call of evil to evil," Azrael said as soon as we were alone. "I'm surprised you yourself aren't more afraid. But you laugh right along with the wolf as if the blackness just beyond us means nothing to you."

"I confess, until I experience it myself, it does mean nothing to me. Why should I be afraid of something I've never seen?"

"And you call yourself a student of the dark arts!"

"Defenses Against."

"A trick of words to make what you do sound innocent," Azrael had got going and she wasn't going to stop until she had spoken her entire mind. "And you thinking because you were mewling and puking in your mother's arms when He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named appeared that you have tasted evil. If so, you would know the sweet, thick honey of it on your tongue and the brutal, pounding rape of it in your mind.

Your sisters know. They know it all too well. But you are just a pup, a wolf's cub who has yet to take his meat."

I was quiet, again at a loss for words. I'm unused to this treatment. I don't always understand it.

"Listen to me, Quirrell, and listen to me well. You have all the immoralities of youth and all the ignorance. I 've said that before and I will say this again. Do not go lightly into the woods."

At the fire, Levin exchanged jokes with the wine merchant, while Jean Baptiste acted them for us. The undead can do positively obscene things with themselves when they have a mind to do it.

Now I admit, sometimes I have cried myself to sleep - in my youth and before I took my place at the high table. But I have never laughed myself to sleep until now.

Merriment in a Quirrell is unbecoming, my mother always said. She's probably right, but laughing felt so good.

Q

September 19

It was not even noon when we reached the edge of the Padure. I expected silence - instead, I had the sound of birds in the trees, the buzzing of insects in the underbrush. The mountains behind us were what I expected of these trees - dark creatures, danger, depression, blackness.

Instead, the black forest seems green and lively.

While Azrael unharnessed our ponies, I prepared my own creature comfort for departure.

Snitch, who had just spent many days cowering in my cloak or in a corner of the caravan, stared at me dubiously as I explained his assignment.

"What? Back over the mountain?" His owlish eyes seemed to ask incredulously. I nodded I wanted Charles to know where I was. It was important. The way Azrael unpacked, we would be spending months on the woods' edge.

After the noon day meal, Snitch left me on his journey, as I instructed. It would take time for him to reach the dragon reservation with my brief note, but we weren't going anywhere soon, were we?

At first, I took Levin's quite and grimly set mouth as a sign that things had changed with her yet again. But the moment the witch disappeared to take an uncharacteristic afternoon nap, the grin was back on Levin's face and the suggestive gleam was in her eyes.

"Let us go in."

"I don't suppose we should."

"Because the witch says so?" Levin said. "Did you listen to everything your mother told you?"

I thought of Mother. "Yes."

"What a good little boy."

She didn't wait for me to reply, but bolted into the forest, daring me to follow her. I did, our childish laughter echoing in my head.

The whole world altered as I passed from the grassy foothills into the trees. In an instant, the air was cooler, then sweeter and a pleasure to taste in its purity.

I followed Levin as best I could, but we had entered her terrain. When I lost hope of ever tracking her through the trees, I stopped to listen to the forest.

It almost spoke and I strained to hear the words lingering beneath the call of the wild creatures.

There was a voice in them - a man's timbre, though high-pitched - and pitched to my ear. I thought I heard my name.

But then it was only Levin, who found my blundering city-boy trail easily enough.

"Well. What do you think?"

"It's beautiful. Peaceful. Yet...I don't feel alone here."

"Of course not! I am here."

"That's not what I meant."

"You have been too much with the witch." Levin grabbed hold of my hand. "Follow me. I have found a surprise."

Her was a circle of stones, half natural, half suspiciously man-set and covered in a thick green moss. A trickle of cold water slipped down the largest rock and collected in a little puddle at its base.

"See?" Levin bent down and, like a dog, lapped from the puddle. "It's good."

Something about the place pricked my memory. There was something like home in this ancient spot. I could have been in Britain for the feel of it.

"I've been here before," I said aloud, but, of course, I hadn't.

Levin wasn't listening to me. She had perched on a medium-sized stone, testing the air.

"Smell something?"

"Yes. And no." She seemed puzzled. "Thirteen."

"What?"

"Thirteen vampires. I smell thirteen again." She wrinkled her nose. "I have not smelled that many in many days. I did not miss that one."

"Do you think it's - with the unicorn?"

A sudden chill - as if something cold and dead had breathed across my neck - set my teeth on edge. I shivered and Levin laughed at me.

"A goose walked over your grave."

"What?"

She shrugged, still amused. "A goose. That's what they say. Walking over your grave."

"This would be a fine place."

"For a goose?"

"Or a grave."

There was a pause in the air then, as if the rocks and trees and stream were laughing. The trickle of water had a giggle in it, anyway. That sound I knew.

"Do you believe in ghosts, Levin?" Of course, I know ghouls, ghosts, spirits and spectres are very real, but she may not have crossed that divide. She lives in my world, but is not fully part of it. Does she believe fully in it?

"No. Ghosts, no, I do not. In haunting, yes." She looked at me as if to make a point.

"Yes." It was true, in a way, that I was haunted. But by something that had no ability to haunt, something dead and rotted and gone.

"Let me say something to you as a wolf would tell it, if you will let me. It is different, maybe, with the sang solut, but maybe not."

"In my pack, there were many wolves - all kinds - stupid ones, brave ones, foolish boys and intelligent men - all kinds. But there was only leader - my brother. He was all things all wolves were - and the best. He could kill."

"The pack loves a leader. Sometimes they worship him, as they did my brother - sometimes not, but as long as there is the alpha wolf, all is well."

"Then there was Vadim. Vadim was not a leader, you should know, and he was not the strongest or the bravest or the best at bringing death. He was one thing - he was the smartest."

"But smartest is never best. Vadim began to change as soon as he joined us. He studied literature, he sang English songs and spoke French, he fell in love. But even as he changed, he changed the other wolves and there was soon trouble."

"My brother felt Vadim's difference right away. It is a good leader who senses this. But he also knew to wait and see if this difference was good or bad for the pack - this is also the leader's duty. When he smelled the bad change - the unrest in his wolves - he did not wait long to act."

"On the first moon after, he arranged that I would take Vadim out alone to hunt. He preferred the woods to the streets as I did. The farmer or hunter makes the better meal than the beggar and bum, Vadim would say and he was right."

"In the woods away from the city, my brothers and the other wolves attacked. They did not mean to kill - only the very darkest of our kind will kill our own. But they would teach Vadim a lesson, then drive him out."

"I did not see Vadim as a man after that, but I would know him by the bite marks on his ears and the claws in his chest and the left eye no longer there. My brother ate that as a sign of the vanquished . Then they made piss on the wolf Vadim and we left him there."

Levin closed her eyes - just for a moment, but it was enough.

"Did you love him very much?"

"I called him Itzak as in the song of the foolish tailor. That always made him laugh." She didn't allow emotion of any kind into her statement. "Remember, sang 'solut, smartest is not always best."

"Well, then, let me tell you something, as the sang 'solut would tell it."

Levin smiled a little and feigned a yawn. "What can the sang 'solut teach me?"

"Hush. You know, my family's summer home is in a forest like this one, the in Wales."

"Summer home?"

Perhaps hat was a bit heavy for a girl who once lived with a gang on the street. "An...estate my family has owned for a thousand years. We would go there in the summer to escape the working pressures of London."

Or so my mother always said.

"Oh, yes. I have killed on such grounds before. Very big with many trees and deers."

"Exactly. Occasionally we had some troubles with the neighbors - they were non-magic druids, folk who sought to work spells through nature, although sadly, these lacked the talent. Every summer, my father would let them have some sign that some of their magic had worked and they believed in the place. After my father gave them signs for a few years, they left us completely alone."

"The summer of my fifteenth year, however, we obtained some new neighbors, religious people seeking to work their own kind of magic with their god. I was forbidden to communicate with them and I obeyed. The non-magic held little interest for me. I was proud of my heritage and my rapidly growing knowledge and I disdained those too stupid to understand me."

"You were a teenager."

I smiled at Levin's understanding. "Exactly."

Not that I spoke out loud about my pride in myself. Such an expression would have been beaten out of me by Mother, mocked by my sister and her husband and certainly discouraged by my father. It was best to keep my understanding quiet.

I said, "It was a sulky time. I spent what I could of it alone, sometimes practicing, sometimes reading, sometimes running the names of the dark mysteries in my head."

"The third mystery had gripped my imagination when I realized I was not alone."

"Did you fall over her?" Levin asked.

"What?"

Her eyes gleamed mischievously. "The girl. Did you fall over her? You did not sense her presence?"

"I did!" I wanted to be insulted, but I wasn't. "I knew she had invaded my private space, my forest, and I wished to challenge her claim."

"It's like a fairy tale." Levin rolled her eyes.

"Be quiet. Let me finish. There was a girl, as you guess, sitting cross-legged on the ground. She was dressed in a long blue dress with a little hat perched on her close-cropped hair and there was a black, leather-bound book in her lap. It was covered in runes I didn't recognize."

She raised her eyes to me - they were very black - and giggled. She laughed right in my face and then ran, as if she were a sprite or a nymph. Yet she was human."

The sun had sunk below the forest and the world was becoming black around us, the Neagre teasing itself out of the trees in the fading light. It seemed to caress Levin and she was - if not quite beautiful - at least pretty.

My heart raced at the sudden juxtaposition of Rebekah's memory and Levin's presence, a trick of the moon - if there had been one rising.

"Let us not go back."

"I would rather stay here."

Levin edged closer to me, then asked after the girl in my tale. "When you finish, we will maybe bring her and Vadim together, so they may love."

Only if Vadim is dead, I thought, but I continued where I had left off.

"I admit I was intrigued. Surely, she had magic. She must have, for her to be so interesting to me. Unfortunately, I saw her only twice more that summer and then only through the trees and she was with the mystical men of her kind. She was never again alone."

As you are not and will never be, a voice whispered in my ear. That man's voice, but high-pitched, perhaps my own, afraid and nervous. Take her, it said. If you can.

Can? That was a strange way to seek encouragement.

"You thought about her all year long at school," Levin made a certain, explicit motion with her hand and wrist.

"How romantic." I blushed like a stupid schoolboy, but she couldn't see it for the lack of moon. "And, actually, no. I was dedicated to my studies when I was away at Hogwart's. That was my duty."

"You were very dull at school."

"I was dedicated."

Levin frowned at me from under her black brows. "If my school had been more than Vadim and the Young Communist's library, I would have killed and eaten you."

"Of that I have no doubt."

Did you see her again?"

I was distracted by the moon - the lack of one - and the voice in my ear. She's yours. Take her.

It was hard to answer, but I finally managed to speak. "I did."

"What?" Levin suddenly seemed to not know of what I spoke, her eyes gone grayish and glazed in the darkness.

"See her again?"

"Oh, yes. Good." Her right hip settled against my left one. "Quirrell, tonight - tonight, everything is different, yes? Tonight, there is no moon to see. Tonight. Take me."

At the instant the words left her throat, low and growling, the voice, high and grating, echoed in my skull. I put a hand to my forehead and the other to her lips.

They were dead, ice under my fingertips, but her cheeks were as campfire embers, black and spent to the eyes, but searing to the touch.

"You are very cold," Levin said, her voice halting, a frightened child's.

"So are you."

"Perhaps we should go." Levin was frightened and, like a beast, she sought to flee the forest.

"Perhaps." I wasn't sure at that moment that I wanted to go, but something said I should follow the woman. That such a path would be to my advantage.

To my advantage! When was I ever so callous.

Azrael had retired for the night when we arrived back in camp. The vampires were scattered to the wind, searching the countryside for small - and large - prey. Only Lederhosen remained.

He refused to greet me or Levin and I felt a sudden shiver as if the last goodness in my life were snuffed out.

Foolishness. I have gone into the woods lightly and lived to tell the tale. So I have.

Q