Wizard's House

Wizard's House - 6

Snape slept heavily that night, behind his warded door and windows. That was unusual for him. He was normally a light sleeper, which he assumed was a survival characteristic. When he did awaken, just as the day was dawning, he could hear the soft trill of a lark somewhere out in the grounds surrounding the keep.

He got up and opened the bedroom casement, both to breathe in the cool morning air and to better hear the birdsong. Snape was not a nature-lover, and had paid little attention to the wild things of the world since he was a boy, collecting magical herbs and fungi, beetles and bugs, around the keep. Now it all seemed to have some sort of importance that he could not pinpoint. The scent of the sea hung on the air, and he could hear the roiling of breakers, stirring up the sea below the bluff.

He washed, dressed, slipped his wand into his sleeve, and went downstairs to the dining room. Predictably, his Aunt Justina was the only one there, dressed in her nondescript clothing and sipping her tea. She looked at him over the rim of the cup.

"I haven't seen you since you arrived," she said, with an accusing tone in her voice.

"Perhaps you should count yourself fortunate," he answered, pouring himself a cup of black coffee and selecting a peach and two slices of bread for breakfast.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Whatever meaning you care to put into it," he said, toasting the bread with two light flicks of his wand before sitting down and spreading the slices lightly with raspberry jam.

He stared at the toast for a moment, holding the knife poised motionless in his hand.

"Is there something wrong with the bread?" his aunt asked impatiently

"No," he said, and bit into the toast, chewing slowly and swallowing before he continued. "I was remembering someone whose favorite flavor of jam was raspberry, that's all."

"You're impossible," she huffed. "Honestly, Severus, I never know what to make of you!"

"Then we are even, Aunt Justina. I seldom know what to make of myself either."

They finished the meal in silence. Afterwards, Snape--restless, and inspired by some sort of strange whim--walked up several flights of stairs to the long portrait gallery and strode along looking at the images of his ancestors. Only the wizarding ones, of course. His Muggle father had vanished as if the man never existed. Prince, Prewett, Black, Peverell, Marchbanks, and a host of other lesser known names. A lineage of wizards who had come and gone, and left their enchanted images to stare and whisper together at this dark saturnine member of the younger generation.

And what did it all come to? Snape asked himself.

Nothing.

He returned to the first floor, and this time he went to the kitchen stairs and down into the depths of the keep. Past the the noisy twitter of the house elves, down the curved stone stairs where his "Lumos!" provided the only light, and past the store rooms to the single aged door at the end of the corridor.

Snape gathered up his robes and sat down in his usual place by the door, with his back against the cold wall and his wand held upright in his hands.

"Gustave?" he asked.

Presently, there was a metallic rattle, as if the being beyond the door was adjusting its fetters, followed by that familiar breathy chuckle.

"Severus..., " the soft rasping whisper said. "I knew you would come here again, before you left."

"Did you?"

"Of course. You have nowhere else to go."

"You seem very sure of that," Snape said, idly turning his wand in his hands, eyes fixed on the illuminated tip.

"Oh yes. You are in a trap of your own making. I warned you about that many years ago. You will never be able to free yourself from it until you decide what it is that you really want."

"That is a tall order," Snape said wryly.

"Is it? You knew once."

"I knew many times. I wanted to know all there was to know in the world, when I was nine. When I was eleven I wanted to be accepted by the other children at my school. When I was sixteen, I wanted a beautiful girl to love me." His head sank onto his chest. "A particular, beautiful, girl. But she loved someone else."

"Go on," the voice behind the door said, with a hint of sly amusement. "When you were seventeen, what did you want?"

"Power," Snape whispered. "Power to change the world."

"And where has that desire for power brought you?"

Snape laughed harshly then, without amusement. "To a draughty hall and a cold stone floor."

"A foretaste of Azkaban, perhaps?"

"You paint a very distasteful picture," Snape said.

"You are the one who paints it," his unseen companion said. "I merely give you the vision to see it more clearly."

"I do not care for the vision."

"Then change the path to it," the soft rasp suggested.

"I would if I could, Gustave. I really would." Snape got to his feet. "Goodbye. I doubt that I will be back."

Behind him, the madman's fetters jangled.

Snape returned the way that he had come, and saw a figure standing at the top of the curving stone stairs.

"I saw you go down there, and I've been waiting for you to come back up." Jovian, dressed in burnt-orange robes, was leaning against the door jamb at the landing.

"What were you doing in the cellars? Playing hide and seek with yourself, or were you stealing treacle like you did when you were a snotty little nine-year old?" he jeered, his lips twisted into a satiric smile.

"Something like that," Snape said mildly, brushing past his cousin.

Jovian followed him. "Listen to me, Severus. I've got a proposition for you."

"I am not interested."

"You will be when you hear it. Look, we need to make plans, for when the war is over."

"The Dark Lord will make whatever plans are necessary."

"Oh yes! Yes, of course!" his cousin hastened to assure him. "I was just thinking about the opportunities that there are going to be for a few smart wizards."

There was an echo of Mundungus Fletcher's cheap greed in the man's voice and Snape found the sound sickening. He stopped and whirled to face Jovian, his black robes billowing out around him.

"Make whatever plans you want," he said. "Just be very, very, sure that they do not conflict with the Dark Lord's aims and goals."

He caught his cousin's eyes and held them.

Jovian swallowed hard.

"No. No, of course not," he muttered, and dropped his gaze.

Snape turned away and left him there, standing irresolute in the middle of the hall.

He was opening the door to his chambers when he felt a sensation of heat gathering on his forearm. He did not need to look at the Dark Lord's brand, where it stood out lividly on his sallow skin. He knew the feeling all too well. The time he had been awaiting had arrived.

Snape felt as though he had been standing in the wings of some theatre and now his cue and come and he was about to step onto the stage again, to play his part for the audience; perhaps for the final act. This little interlude at the keep had been a mere moment to catch his breath and reflect, before the action started again.

He tucked his wand into his sleeve and glanced around at the room, lined with full bookshelves as it had been when he was a boy. Here and there some old and tattered books from his childhood, still brightly colored in spite of the years, stood out among the leather-bound volumes of magic lore. It seemed to him, then, to be a chronicle of his life, from boyhood to adult, and he wondered for a fleeting moment if he would ever turn the pages of any of those books again.

Would he see any of the people in the keep again?

Not that it mattered. Neither his grandfather nor his mother cared if he went or if he stayed, or if he ever returned. They were caught up in their own worlds, delimited by narrow interests that kept the rest of the world at bay.

His aunt and his cousin Jovian were negligible; bit players in the drama that had been unfolding since the days of his boyhood. Sabina? They had shared some moments of physical pleasure, that was all. She was a pretty butterfly of a woman, blown here and there by the currents of whim and fancy and he was content to leave her behind.

The burning sensation on his forearm was more insistent now, demanding an answer. He had little time left, and there was something he needed to do before he left the keep, for the peace of his soul.

Snape left his chambers and headed for the cellars again, running lightly down the stairs, across the time-polished stone of the entry hall, and down past the kitchen. This time he took one of the lanterns down off of the wall, as he entered the shadowy depths below the keep, and lit it with a practiced flick of his wand.

The single door at the far end of the corridor was closed, as it always was. Not even a glimmer of light shone through the small square opening where the madman spent his life in perpetual darkness. Snape stood in front of the door listening, with the soft steady flame of the lantern casting a giant shadow of his form onto the stone wall. After a moment, there was a jangle of metal, and the soft rasping whisper that he had known from his childhood breathed his name, "Severus... "

He pointed his wand at the ancient door. There was a flash of white light, and the time-hardened wood fragmented, splintered, and was gone. There was no sound from within.

Snape stepped through the stone doorway. "Gustave?"

He was in a small, barren, stone chamber. It was empty of everything except a little dust. Nonplussed, holding the lantern high, he stared around at the featureless walls, looking for the manacles that he had imagined since his boyhood. There was nothing, only a faint gleam of light from a far corner. He strode rapidly to it, and found that there was a doorway leading to a short hall, which ran parallel to the rear wall. At the end of the hall he could see daylight and the open sky.

Whirling around with his back to the hall, he stared in disbelief at the empty chamber and its ruined door.

It was a delivery entrance to the keep's storage rooms, nothing more.

A temporary storage room, where goods were left while the house-elves sorted them and moved them to their appropriate places, closed off by a charmed and mysterious door which a lonely and imaginative child had turned into a locked cell inhabited by a phantasm. And he, as an adult had carried on the self-deception.

Why?

Perhaps because everyone, no matter how self-sufficient, needs a confidant and an advisor. His had been buried deep within himself.

Head bowed, wand point lowered, Snape recalled the advice he had had from "Gustave" over the years; the sly comments, the warnings, the observations about an ever-changing world which a prisoner in darkness could never have known. Conscience? Subconscious?

What did it matter?

Snape set the lantern down carefully on the stone floor. Its flame danced softly in the currents of air coming from the outside. He turned away and walked out into the open air, where the freshening sea breeze ruffled his ink-black hair. He tilted his head back, eyes closed, feeling the soft caress of the wind on his face.

He was free of one thing, at least. He had faced it, and it was gone.

His eyes opened and, taking a last deep breath of the moist sea air, Severus Snape vanished toward his destiny, with a sharp crack! sound, like the snap of fingers suddenly recalling a long-forgotten memory.

-- end --

Irena Candy Wizard's House 6 6