Heroes Return

"I can't believe it," said Hermione, for the fifth time since they'd arrived. "It's--it's Sherlock Holmes, everybody, Sherlock Holmes!"

Harry did not answer; he was too busy staring, goggle-eyed, around at the contents of the shelf-filled room in which they were. Strange artifacts, weapons, portraits of strange looking people adorned the walls where they were not covered with capacious bookshelves, filled to the utmost extent with mysterious, and sometimes ancient-looking tomes. He turned to face the nearest wall.

There was a portrait hanging there, a fine oil depicting a handsome, fair-haired young man, carrying a cane and dressed in the fashion of a dandy of the mid-Nineteenth century. Harry stared up at the smooth, fair face. He seemed to be smiling, the man in the portrait, his laughing eyes seeming to peer out of the canvas at the ephemeral creatures who stood and gazed up at him, while he, ever unchanging, hung there, hung, while the original who'd posed for the portrait had long since passed away, hung there, and would hang yet, while the young man who stood before him, the young man with the wild, dark hair and large green eyes who admired the skill with which the portrait, all those years ago, had been painted; hung still, while that young man too would have long since gone to his eternal reward.

Harry felt a chill. While, on first, glance, the man in the portrait seemed like someone he could have been friends with, had they met, the longer he stared at it, the more he found himself unable to shake the feeling that there was some unnamable evil, something which, though long since gone, had left a subtle psychic echo for all who could feel it to do so, hanging about the canvas, and more particularly, about the figure of the young man thus immortalized upon it.

Harry's eyes fell to the brass plate mounted along the bottom of the frame.

Dorian Grey, he read.

Harry shuddered. The name awakened within him a dim recollection. He'd heard it before--and yet...

Try as he might, he could not place within his memory the recollection of that fell artifact.

"Look, Hermione, I understand you're overwhelmed and all that," Ron was saying. "Whoever this Holmes fellow is, he's got you very impressed. Just snap out of it, will you? It's not like you at all."

Hermione turned on him. "Don't you know anything Ron? Sherlock Holmes isn't supposed to exist! He's not real!"

Ron shrugged. "He looked pretty real to me."

Hermione looked as if she was about to say something sharp. Then, abruptly, she deflated. She sat down in the nearest chair and put her head in her hands.

"I know," she said in a small voice. "I know. It's just that--nothing seems real anymore, does it? It's as if we're all living in a storybook together with Mr. Holmes and all those superheroes and who knows what else?" She shook her head. "I don't know what to think anymore, really, I just don't know."

Ginny went over and put her arms around Hermione's shoulders. Her eyes sent a mute appeal in the direction of the two boys. They looked at each other, neither one knowing exactly what, if anything, he was supposed to do or say.

Finally, Harry stepped forward. "It's...all right, Hermione," he said, awkwardly. "I mean, we've been through worse than this, haven't we? Basilisk attacks, the Triwizard tournament, that incident with John Constantine back in fifth year--it's all been a lot of wild stuff. I mean, you have to admit, this isn't that much more weird than anything else, is it?"

Ron nodded. "Yeah, that's right. What he said."

Hermione smiled a wan smile. "I...I suppose so." She sighed. "I guess you're right. We do seem to lead rather exciting lives don't we?"

Harry smiled. "Oh, we do indeed." He turned and looked round the room they were in. It was part of a secret annex, a hidden complex of rooms and corridors buried deep beneath the British Museum. "A haven for all those aspects of British Intelligence too strange and opposed to common reality for anyone beyond those in the highest corridors of reality to place the slightest credence in their existence," Holmes had called it. It certainly looked like it. He found his gaze drawn to several other pictures mounted upon the wall.

As Ron, to cheer Hermione up and take her overtaxed brain off the almost surreal events that had preceded their arrival in this place, called her and his sister over to examine a strange contraption of fluorescent tubes laid out in a vaguely familiar mystical pattern, Harry stepped up to the wall again, examining closely the set of portraits that had so caught his eye.

The first was an oil painting, a broad canvas lavishly daubed with brilliant colours. Four men, clad in the style of the Jacobean period, stood atop a richly patterned carpet, one that to Harry's eye looked vaguely familiar. He looked down. His shoes sank deeply into the lush pile of a carpet that was, if not the same carpet, very similar. He looked up again.

There was a brass plaque set into the picture frame beneath each man's feet. A name was inscribed into each, presumably identifying the man beneath whose feet the plaque rested. Moving closer, Harry read the names off.

Standing at the extreme left of the painting was a tall, dark-haired man, attired in Puritan costume. A long, slim blade was slung at his left hip. "Solomon Kane," the legend beneath him read. Beside him, nearly as tall, was another man, dressed in travel-stained robes, with a faraway look in his eyes and a traveler's knapsack at his feet and a wide-brimmed hat in his hands. The plaque below this strange individual identified him as "Christian, the Pilgrim".

Standing in the very center of the canvas was a bearded, white-haired man. Harry's breath hissed in through his teeth. He recognized this man. Prospero, the Duke of Milan, one of the more famous wizards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, famous for liberating en-masse the trapped sprites of an island in the Mediterranean, imprisoned within the trunks of trees by the dark witch Sycorax. Few outside the wizarding world knew that the duke had, indeed been a real person, the account of his imprisonment and subsequent release being told first-hand to Shakespeare at the latter's house in Stratford. The story was one of the more popular children's anecdotes told to young wizards by their parents. Yet, here, in a place that, in Harry's opinion, would be the last one where magic of any kind could be found, was a picture of this man.

Harry thought a while, then shrugged. True, he was in the middle of Muggle London, yet this was a place where legends out of childhood stories walked. If Sherlock Holmes truly existed, why not other such extraordinary individuals? And why should not such individuals, though they had not the slightest bit of magic, by virtue of their strange and adventurous lives have knowledge of the hidden world in which Harry now spent most of his time?

Harry turned toward the last man in the painting. Like Prospero, he too was old, though unlike the robed wizard, he was clad in a heavy suit of armor. The old warrior had obviously seen many campaigns in his time; his skin was bronzed through long exposure to a burning sun. The hilt of a massive broadsword stuck up over his right shoulder. Below his feet, the plaque identified him simply as: "Don Quixote de La Mancha".

Quickly, Harry moved to examine the other paintings. He knew Don Quixote. Though he had not read the book, he had heard from others of Miguel de Cervantes' comic tale of a brain-addled noble obsessed with resurrecting the days of chivalry and romance in his own body. Yet, judging from this picture, it seemed that the old man had not been so mad after all. To Harry, this group of paintings and photographs hung upon the oak-paneled wall had the feel of team portraits--of the various assemblies of strange and unusual people who, throughout the ages, had made this site a haven for those of their kind who chose to serve the crown. What then, would he find if he looked just a bit further? Which characters, whose adventures he had thrilled to, back when he'd been attending the local primary school with his cousin Dudley and stayed in the classroom during lunchtime in order to avoid his bullying relative, reading the storybooks kept there to keep himself occupied, would he find brought to life here, in this place?

Half a minute later, he stopped, bouncing on the balls of his feet in his excitement. There, standing within a canvas dating from the last years of the eighteenth century, surrounded by a herd of miniature livestock, was an ancient man, seemingly over a hundred years in age, identified by the plaque set into the frame below him as "Lemuel Gulliver". And, standing on the opposite side of the painting from him, leaning upon his trademark weapon, was Nathaniel Bumppo, the Long Rifle, whose adventures had been set down upon the written page by the pen of James Fenimoore Cooper.

Standing beside Gulliver was a stunningly beautiful woman, her shapely shoulders rising like those of a goddess from the lacy waves from a dress that left very little to the imagination. "Fanny Hill," read her plaque. Harry quickly transferred his gaze away from her--the woman's state of...near undress and the coy attitude that she'd assumed in the picture were giving him urges that he'd rather not have at the moment.

A couple stood in the center of the frame. They were, from their dress, obviously wealthy, and, from the way they clung to each other, obviously deeply in love. Their plaque identified them as "Sir Percy and Lady Marguerite Blakeney".

The last figure was a tall man, swathed in a heavy cloak, a wide-brimmed hat casting a deep shadow over a masked face from which two glittering eyes peered out like malevolent flames burning in an awful silent night. Rather incongruously, the plaque below him read "The Reverend Doctor Syn".

Well, well. Lemuel Gulliver and Nathaniel Bumpo. And if he remembered correctly, the man identified as Sir Percy Blakeney was, in fact, the legendary Scarlet Pimpernel. Harry stood back and cast his wondering gaze at the rest of the portraits adorning the walls. There they hung, the memorials of heroes, of men and women who fought the good fight, who, when their times came, passed not into obscurity, but into the legends of the people whom they'd worked so hard to save. It was, he supposed, a strange kind of immortality. He wondered if some day, some boy out there in the world would close a book and dream about living through those very adventures alongside the Boy Who Lived. It sounded a good way to be remembered. He grinned.

"Bloody hell!" Harry turned, his pleasant reverie rudely interrupted by his friend's awed curse. "Harry! Come quick! You have to see this!"

Harry went over to where his friend was bent over the strange apparatus of fluorescent tubes that so uncannily resembled a magical circle of protection. "What is it, Ron?" he asked as he neared the little group surrounding the device.

"It is a protection circle! Look at it! It's powered by electricity!" Ron's voice was a whisper.

Hermione was kneeling beside the now-active device, probing it with her wand. As Harry watched, a bolt of silver shot forth from its tip, only to dissipate without trace as it crossed the glowing blue tubes on the outermost extremity of the electrified circle.

"It makes use of the magnetic forces generated inside the tubes as well as the blue light to keep things out," she said. "It's amazing. Whoever built this--he was absolutely brilliant. He must have known such things about both magic and science." Her voice turned wistful. "I wish I could meet him."

"His name was Thomas Carnacki," said a voice. "And he was a good friend and a comrade of mine."

The four young people gathered around the device turned. Standing in one of the doorways was a tall man, dressed in archaic evening attire, a dark cape sewn with the badge of some unknown chivalric order draped about his shoulders. His face was pale and thin, almost wolf-like. As he smiled they noticed his teeth. To each of them, it seemed as if his upper canines were strangely long, almost touching his lower gums. Yet, as Hermione, Ron and Ginny blinked their eyes, it seemed to them almost like an optical illusion. One by one, the three of them dismissed this strange deformity from their minds.

Harry, on the other hand, remained unmoved. He knew this man, had fought beside him on that fateful night when all unawares, he had looked upon that which not even a wizard such as himself was meant to know.

"Mr. Alucard," he greeted the new arrival.

"Young Harry," replied the other, swirling the edge of his cape about him as he bowed. "You look well." He spoke with a slight accent; Hermione frowned as several of the inflexions struck a note within her memory, then shook her head as she failed to place it.

"Harry?" Ginny looked up into his face. "You know this man?"

Harry's lips tightened. He did not want to recall anything about that incident, not now.

Behind him, Ron spoke. "Uh, Harry, I don't think we've met this guy before. You wouldn't care to introduce us would you?"

Harry looked at him. Beneath his serene exterior his mind churned. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. "Ginny," he said. "Ron, Hermione, this is Alucard. Mr. Alucard, these are my friends."

The tall man smiled, revealing his strange teeth once more. "A pleasure to meet you finally. Harry has told me many good things about you." He bowed, then shook Ron's hand.

"Ah, the lovely Virginia," he said, taking Ginny's hand in his own. "I see now how you won and keep the heart of a hero such as our young Mr. Potter. Did my heart not already belong to another, it, too, would be yours."

Ginny blushed. "Oh," she said. "Thank you. Uh, how did you and Harry meet? I'm sure he would have told us about it."

"It was the 13^th of July, this year. I was engaged in tracing the activities of your so-called 'Death-Eaters'. What he was doing there, I do not know. Perhaps--"

He turned. Harry had not heard him, however. He was reliving the events of that horrific night. He saw himself standing on the roof of the Lloyd's building, wand raised, tip to tip with the Dark Lord Voldemort's, saw the triumphant leer on his opponent's face as the magic within their wands' twin cores lashed out, staggering the Death Eaters surrounding the pair--staggering them, and seizing the minds of the two through the bond of blood and death that the both of them shared, laying each open to the gaze of the other. And still he heard Voldemort laugh. And then he was seeing the horrid images again, and, now, he realized that as he had stared into Voldemort's mind, so had the Dark Lord stared into his.

And then he remembered the bats swooping down out of the night, Alucard in their midst, scooping him up and carrying him out of the circle of startled Death Eaters. Voldemort had laughed then. He had swept up his wand to point towards the skies, and his Death Eaters in the circle had done the same.

Alucard was already on his feet, sprinting towards the summoning circle. Shaking off his shock, Harry staggered after him.

Alucard reached the circle of Death Eaters. A mighty swing of one hand, and the nearest of the dark wizards sagged, disemboweled from behind. Voldemort's voice had risen to a shriek, just as Harry stumbled into the ring, and, too groggy to muster a coherent spell, had resorted to grabbing the Dark Lord's arm and attempting to force him off balance.

And then, just as he seemed to have succeeded, and the Dark Lord tottered and fell in a tangle of black robes, the skies opened...and Harry screamed.

He saw...things, amorphous, drooling shapes of impossible geometries formed out of the reeking ichors of a million, million swamps. He saw tentacles reaching out to him, reaching past him, reaching to take the world in their grasp and turn it into a horror-wracked parody of what it had been before. He heard...voices.

At first, he had taken them to be mindless babblings, the sounds created by the squatting slime-things that inhabited this realm outside reality. Now, as he lived through that instant one more time, he realized that they were words--words that no human tongue could have pronounced, it is true, but words nonetheless. They called to him, filling his mind with their evil sibilance.

"Ia!' They cried. "Ia, Yog-Sotthoth! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"

Again and again the horrendous refrain repeated, with each iteration driving Harry's consciousness further and further back as they advanced, tentacles outstretched, to take possession of his living mind. As he screamed, he could here, as if from a distance, the voices of Ginny and Alucard calling his name...

"Harry!" Ginny cried. "Harry!" The girl was hovering on the edge of panic. Was this some new, insidious attack of Voldemort's? Was the Dark Lord so powerful now that he could strike down, at will, the only wizard to have successfully opposed him? These thoughts and more flashed through the frightened girl's mind as she sobbed and attempted to revive the man she loved.

Alucard shouldered her aside. A look of concentration came over his face as he bent over Harry's still body. Then, a few moments later, he turned to Ginny.

"Girl," he said, "link minds with me."

Ginny stared at him. "Link minds with me," he repeated. "Quickly, girl. Your lover's mind lies on the brink of madness as we speak. He loves you. If any one can pull him back from the precipice, it is you."

"How--how am I supposed to help?" she stammered.

He placed his hand upon her shoulder. "Relax," he said. "Look into my eyes; you will feel my mind coming into contact with yours. Good," he breathed as their minds touched one another. "Now, brace yourself. We will enter young Potter's mind. Be ready. When we have entered, call out to him with all your heart and all your will. Now, we go."

And with that, Ginny felt a rushing sensation, a brief illusion of her flying down, down into Harry's face, and found herself, standing with Alucard, in the middle of a long, high-ceilinged chamber.

Alucard spoke. "This place," he said, "is a representation, a construct created by your mind, of the structure of young Harry's psyche. He should be within here somewhere. Go, call out. Wherever he is, he will hear you. And, perhaps, if he is able, he will respond."

Ginny called, trying her best not to dwell too heavily on the words if he is able. The thought of her beloved Harry lying trapped, held prisoner in his own mind by forces beyond comprehension was almost too much to bear. Again and again she called, letting her heart and all her soul and all her might go out into her cries.

They listened. Then, floating down the corridor, almost too soft to be heard, came the sound of Harry's voice.

"Ginny? Help!"

Ginny spun in the direction from which the voice had come, almost falling in her haste to reach her beleaguered lover. Alucard was already ahead of her, his long legs almost impossibly fast pace. Ginny's lungs began to burn with the effort of trying to keep up with the strange man. She found herself falling further and further behind...

Just as Ginny was beginning to think that, try as she might, she would lose sight of Alucard, and be forced to wander these halls for eternity, her soul trapped within that of her fallen lover's, they found Harry,. As they approached the place, they saw in the distance the corridor they were in ending abruptly, the walls, floor and ceiling all just ceasing to exist, the passage opening into what seemed to Ginny like a yawning abyss. Just beyond, seemingly suspended in empty space, was Harry.

Alucard came to a stop and stood looking across the gulf at his young ally. Almost effortlessly, he stretched out an arm and arrested a breathless Ginny in her headlong charge just moments before, unable to check her momentum, she would have run over the edge and plunged into oblivion.

"This is worse than I thought," he muttered as he steadied the tired girl. He tilted his head, listening to the horrid, chanting voices that somehow echoed about the vast emptiness beyond the end of the corridor. Beside him, Ginny recovered herself sufficiently to be able to steal a glance at the scene before her.

She screamed. Alucard winced as his super-sensitive ears amplified the sound, nearly deafening him.

"Wh-what are they?" Ginny managed to gasp out.

Harry was surrounded in the midst of the blackness by a veritable horde of shambling, amorphous shapes. Tentacles wrapped around his arms and legs, seeming to be pulling him down, down into the infinite darkness.

Alucard cursed. "Yog-Sothoth!" His lips parted as he said this, revealing his long, razor-sharp canines once more. This time Ginny saw them as clear as day. There was no mistake. Alucard was a vampire. Shaking with fear, she took a step back, retreating both from the edge of the pit as well as from the man she now knew to be one of the most dangerous supernatural creatures in existence

Swifter than she thought possible, the strange man seized her hand, holding it tightly in a vice-like grip. "Do not seek to run, girl. You cannot escape me, nor will you help your lover escape the things that have him in their grip. This hole represents the madness that is overtaking his mind. Do you wish him to fall here, to fall irrevocably into the madness of those unfortunates whose misfortune it is to look full in the faces of the Elder Gods?"

Speechless, Ginny shook her head. Alucard's fingers felt as if they were crushing the bones inside her wrist. Try as she might, she could not keep a gasp of pain from her lips.

Alucard's eyes flickered to where his hand was wrapped tight about her wrist. Ginny felt his grip loosen slightly.

"Virginia. I pray that you listen to me. I can do no more for you here. Whether or not we can retrieve young Harry from his present predicament--that is up to you."

Ginny took a deep breath. She was afraid. Deathly afraid. The terrible surreality of the past few hours began to creep in on her. Don't panic...don't panic. Her breaths came increasingly harder and faster. With a tremendous effort of will, she managed to stop herself before she started hyperventilating. Tears sprang out from beneath her closed lids.

Now I know how Harry feels, she thought. She'd always wondered what it was like to be the Hero of the Wizarding World--how, every year, without fail, Harry could go out to face the denouement of whatever hellish plan that Voldemort had thought up, go out and face it, and through skill and determination and sometimes just blind luck, end the horror he faced before yet more death and destruction could be unleashed upon the unsuspecting world.

Now, she faced a similar test. And, for her, the price for failure would be Harry's life. One life. Seemingly, a tiny thing compared to the stakes already being fought for in the secret places of the world. But when that one thing was the life of one of the very individuals whose lot it was to stand between the wolves and the flock; when that one thing was, indeed, the life of the man she loved--she didn't know if she could bear the strain.

Yet--yet, for Harry's sake, she would try.

Suppressing a shudder, she looked full into the vampire's face. "What am I supposed to do?"

"He fights madness, girl. He fights the psychic echo of the horror he saw that night, when he and I defeated the Death Eaters atop the tower of Lloyd's. The more he struggles against it, the more it will consume him. He has not the strength to resist." Alucard pointed a long-nailed finger at her. "Your love for him. It is your strength, yours and his. Reach out your hand towards him. Let him know you are with him. Only that will grant him the strength he needs to break free."

Ginny nodded. She stepped to the edge of the truncated floor, her right arm stretched out in front of her. To her surprise, though Harry seemed to be more than a dozen yards away, she found herself able to place a slim hand upon his shoulder. Suddenly, Harry was no more than an arms length in front of her.

Confined as he was by the grasping tentacles, Harry managed to twist himself half around to meet this new threat.

He caught sight Ginny standing not more than three feet behind him. His face changed. The look of despair upon it disappeared, replaced by a mixture of hope and grim determination. First one, then the other of his arms pulled free of the grasping pseudopods. Moving quickly, Ginny grabbed hold of him. With a wrenching lurch, Harry's legs came free. Freed abruptly from the grip of the horrible, amorphous things, they staggered back together along the corridor, away from the reach of those foul tentacles.

Alucard knelt by their side. "Harry!" he whispered urgently into the young wizard's ear. "Quickly, boy! Seal this chamber of your mind against these servants of darkness! The power is yours! Use it! You have only to think the deed, and it will be done."

Harry looked up at him groggily. The vampire hissed in annoyance. "Hurry, boy--or do you wish them to consume the rest of your living soul, and us along with it?"

Slowly, painfully, Harry got to his feet. Leaning upon Alucard, he turned towards the gaping hole where the tentacles thrashed and writhed in search of their escaped prey. His head was pounding, as if all the drums in the world were being beaten in time with each other, right there inside his skull. A wall, he thought. I need a wall.

The effort of concentration almost proved too much for him. Fresh waves of agony swept through his tortured brain as he concentrated all his will upon creating a barrier against the hideous tentacles. Gradually, so slowly as to be almost imperceptible, an ethereal wall flickered into existence across the open end of the corridor and begin to solidify. The tentacles' writhing grew even more frantic as the substance of the wall began to solidify inside of them, cutting them off from whatever thing it was that controlled them.

As the wall finally grew into rock-like solidity, the tentacles convulsed one last time--and fell, lifeless, to the floor.

Harry sagged against Alucard. It seemed as if he'd been trapped within that squamous, noisome pit since forever. Even now, he felt as if his escape were only a dream, that, in fact, he was only hallucinating, and that his real self still struggled, trapped, by those horrid tentacles in the dark space of his mind.

And then, his vision blurred, and he was back in the secret antechamber, deep below the British Museum, with Alucard, Ginny, Ron and Hermione looking anxiously down at him.

"Harry!" Ginny cried, and flung her arms around him. "Oh, Harry...that was...that was...horrible!" She shuddered. "What were those things? Why were they after you?"

"What happened, Harry? You totally wigged out there." Ron knelt at his friends side and helped drag him to a sitting position. "Was it...was it You-Know-Who?"

"Mr. Potter was having an unpleasant flashback to the events of our last encounter," said Alucard. Seeing Ron's eyes narrow with sudden suspicion, he raised his hands, palm out, in a pacifying gesture. "No, no, my young friend, nothing of the sort happened. In fact, he was a willing and able ally in the fight that ensued." Alucard's eyes rose. "He did not tell you of this?"

Ron turned to where Harry was being helped into a chair by Hermione and Ginny. "No," he replied. "All we know is that he came back that night looking like death warmed over and refused outright to tell us a bloody thing." The corner of his mouth twisted in a frustrated, angry grimace. "It's not as if we didn't try, dammit. He just refused. Every time Hermione or Ginny or I tried to bring the damn thing up, he just...clammed up! Bloody Hell!" he swore, slamming his hand down on a nearby table top in frustration. "We tried to give him some room, you know, let him tell us on his own time. But he never did. And now look what's happened!" He set his knuckles on the table and stared into the eyes of the portrait hanging on the wall above it, his jaw set in anger. Then, remembering himself, he turned back to Alucard.

"Mr. Alucard, what really happened out there?"

"Ron," Harry said.

The red-headed young man turned and regarded his friend with a jaundiced eye. "What? Don't tell me you're going to reveal all now? For your information, you just gave us quite a scare, there. Not to mention how worried we all were after you got back that night. A bit too late for that, isn't it?"

Harry looked down. "You don't understand, Ron. I wasn't trying to keep it from you...I was trying to keep it from myself. To forget it." He looked directly into his friend's blue eyes. "What I saw that night was beyond description. You wouldn't have understood the horror of it..." Harry rested his head in his hands; he needed a few moments in order to compose himself.

Then, the whole story came spilling out: how he had left Hogwarts in pursuit of Draco Malfoy, flying behind the young Death Eater through labyrinthine underground caverns that honeycombed the entire country, passing above strange, subterranean cities in pursuit of his foe, until, at long last, they had both emerged out of a sewer in London; how, then, he had met Alucard, the vampire then in pursuit of the supporters of Lord Voldemort through the air. Then he related the battle, and it took all of his self-control to allow himself to finish telling the tale. "What I saw out there wasn't meant for human eyes, Ron. No human mind can see that, and remain sane. Every time I think about it, just for the slightest moment...I slip closer to madness." Harry took off his glasses, running a hand over his face. "We're ants, Ron. There are things out there that are so far beyond us that we're just like ants to them--or even less." He took a ragged, shuddering breath, and let his head fall into his hands.

Ron stared at him, uncomprehending. "I don't understand."

"It was the summoning, boy," said Alucard. "Lord Voldemort did not visit that skyscraper and slaughter every person in it to call up some minor minion." The vampire's voice was grim. "No," he continued, "what he intended to call was nothing less than a servant of Yog-Sothoth itself."

Hermione gasped. Everybody turned to look at her.

"Yog-Sothoth? But that...that's madness! I can't believe it--I mean, not even Voldemort would be mad enough to do that." She paused. "Would he?"

"Uh, Hermione, mind speaking English for those of us who don't know what's going on here?"

It was Alucard who answered him. "Yog-Sothoth is the chief of the Elder Gods, the parasentient manifestation of all levels of existence. It is vast beyond human comprehension, so vast that to look upon it will plant the seeds of madness within any mortal mind. It lurks beyond the border between this plane of existence and the next." The vampire took a deep breath. "There are some who say that as the sum of human knowledge grows greater--as your scientists delve ever deeper into the secrets of quantum physics and the very structure of reality, they will find him, and that when he awakes, no power on earth or in the skies will be able to stop him..."

The four from Hogwarts felt a chill down their spines as he said this. Whoever he was, the vampire was obviously afraid--afraid of this mysterious extraplanar deity whose power seemed overwhelming and whose advent seemed inevitable.

"Yes," whispered Hermione. "That's what he is, except...I knew about him only from what I read about his servants here on Earth. Dagon...and Cthulu."

"Cthulu, yes," mused the vampire. "I would not be surprised if it was indeed him who inspired Lord Voldemort to such a mad endeavor. I fear...I fear the Dark Lord has lost what little sanity, if any, he ever possessed."

Ron was staring suspiciously at Alucard. "Super-strong...flying...telepathy ...control over the creatures of the night...you're a vampire aren't you?"

The tall man turned to face him, cape swirling about his body as he did so. "So, you know. I was wondering when you would work it out. Your little sister here has known for some time now. So has young Harry."

Ron rounded on his sister. "Ginny! You've known all this while we've been sitting with a vampire and you've never told us? How could you? What if...uh..." He trailed of as he realized Alucard was standing right next to him. "I mean, what if something happened?"

"You mean what if I had, all of a sudden, decided to attack you? I assure you, Mr. Weasley, had I wished to take you, I could have done so to all of you by now. You would already have become creatures of the night, bound to my service. Such is not my intention. Not all vampires harbor love for the Dark Lord Voldemort--as your friend Harry can attest."

"Alucard!" Hermione suddenly straightened, as if struck by a sudden thought. "That...that's not your real name at all, is it?" she asked, staring straight into the vampire's face.

The vampire stared back. Then, suddenly, he threw his head back and laughed, the rich, terrible sound echoing off the far ends of the corridor. "Well done!" he roared. "Very well done indeed, young Granger! Yes, indeed, Alucard is not my true name. Very well. Allow me to introduce myself."

He bowed low, sweeping his cape about him in an impressive flourish. "I am Count Dracula, and I welcome you to this place."

"I don't suppose you're that Dracula?" asked Harry. "You know, the guy Bram Stoker wrote about?"

"The same," replied the vampire, his eyes shining. The fangs were in full evidence now. The sight, to the four friends, was rather more than a little intimidating. This was a vampire lord of the greatest power, a legend among wizards and Muggles both, and there they were, sitting in the same room as he was, chatting as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

"It figures," said Harry, smiling faintly. "I mean, we've already met superheroes as well as Sherlock Holmes. Why not you while we're at it?"

"Why not indeed?" laughed the vampire. "I say to you, young Potter, whatever you have seen here, and elsewhere is as nothing compared to the unseen wonders that walk this world, out of sight of the teeming masses." His voice grew soft, and his eyes took on a distant look. "Making it strange. Making it beautiful..." He trailed off.

Harry, Hermione, Ron and Ginny fell silent, watching as this deadly, ancient, legendary being drifted off into memory, a smile upon his lips.

After a few moments, the vampire's eyes swiveled back to look full upon them. "My apologies," he said, smiling deprecatingly, "I grow nostalgic as time goes by. It has been a full life, and one filled with wonder. Occasionally the urge takes me to revisit those times in my mind." Slowly, he advanced, until he stood not three feet from Harry and his friends. "Soon you too, young Potter, will come to know these things. It is our burden, and our joy."

"W-wait a minute," said Ron. "What do you mean 'we'? You're not going to..."

Dracula laughed. "No, no, young Ron! I intend nothing of the sort!" He swept his arm about, taking in the entirety of the room in one graceful motion. "This place is the meeting house of a League of Extraordinary Individuals, an alliance of the greatest heroes of the British Isles, an order of protectors whose origins go back to before the time of Christ. Extraordinary individuals, my young friends. Individuals like Holmes, or your Professor Dumbledore, or even those superheroes you saw defending the train station from the Death Eaters' attacks. Individuals, my young friends, like yourselves."

There was silence for a few moments. Then, Ron spoke. "Right," he said, his voice disbelieving. "So, out of the blue some secret society of funny Muggles and at least one vampire ups and decides that we're suddenly prime candidates to become members? And that these Muggles have been doing things behind everybody's backs that not even the most addled, muck-raking reporter from the Daily Prophet would even dare try to pass of as a real story? Excuse me if I say that, for sheer bloody unbelievability, this story takes the cake!"

Dracula only smiled and spread his arms, indicating, once more, the room they were in. "The evidence, my friend, is all around you." His voice was deathly soft. "You have only to look, and you will find. Go on...look around. You can come and tell me that I lie then."

Hermione went, slowly, hesitantly, to look at one of the photographs hanging on the walls. From where they were, Harry and Ron saw her place her hand against the wall for support. Concerned, Ginny made her way over to her friend to offer her help. Hermione waved her off.

"It's all right, Ginny. I was just...a little surprised, that's all." She moved on to look at the photograph on the wall next to the one she had first examined, then turned to examine a display case that contained what looked to Ron and Harry like miniscule skeletons of both humans and cattle.

Hermione finished her examination and turned towards the boys, her face pale. "Ron, Harry," she said, her voice faint, "He's--" She paused a moment, lost for words. "I think he's telling the truth." She sighed and leaned against the wall, her eyes distant.

"So," said, Ron, after a few moments. "I think I ought to tell you that I still find this story bloody unconvincing."

"I don't see why it should be," replied Harry. "After all, if we could have tamed Hippogriffs, spoken with giants and fought off Dementors, I don't see why other kinds of weird stuff would have cropped up around the world. And face it, Ron, not every funny occurrence happens where there's a convenient Auror handy to investigate it. I dare suppose that there are Muggles capable enough of dealing with this sort of stuff when it appears."

Ron still looked skeptical; the look on his face clearly said, 'I'll believe it when I see it.' It was plain he was not expecting to see anything relatively soon.

It was Ginny who voiced the thought all of them were trying to avoid. "But, what about that...thing in Harry's head? Mr. Aluc--I mean, uh..."

"Call me Dracula," said the vampire. "It is, after all, my name."

"Dracula, will the wall that Harry put up inside his mind be able to hold those--those things out forever? You said it would drive him mad. He--he won't be able to hold them out will he?"

The vampire shook his head. "No. I am sorry. The tendrils of the dark god will worm their way into every corner of his mind, eventually. The only unknown is how long he will hold out." He exhaled. "But he will succumb. I imagine that for a...strong spirit such as his, it may be a long time indeed. And far better for one such as he to strike back at the powers that laid him low, to ensure that no one--no one again falls victim to the evil of the Elder Gods."

The four looked at him in shock. Following his revelation of the nature of Harry's curse, the vampire's words seemed extraordinarily callous.

Harry cleared his throat. "It's...all right, guys." He sighed. "Dracula's right. With so much riding on me right now, I can't just up and leave it hanging like that because I happen to have this unpleasant visitor in my mind. These people--these people have resources, abilities even we could never even dream of possessing. And--and if we join them, we'll be able to face Voldemort on even terms. It's not just our fight, now, it's the entire world's. And if all of us, wizards and Muggles both can just hold together, maybe we can defeat him after all." He looked down at his hands. "But it was my fight right from the beginning, when Voldemort came to Godric's Hollow and killed my parents, and, Elder Gods in my brain or not, I'm going to see it through to the end." He looked around at them, his face fierce and hard as granite.

Ron, Hermione and Ginny stared back, their expressions containing equal portions grief, uncertainty and shock at the sudden change in their friend. There was a sudden uncomfortable silence.

Then, Ginny, unable to withstand the stresses of the day, as well as the horrendous threat looming over her lover's head, uttered a sob.

Instantly, Harry was at her side. He put his arms around her, letting her lean into his chest as she sobbed her grief out.

"There," he said. "I know, I probably don't have much time left. Much of that will be taken up fighting this bloody war. That can't be helped. What matters now is that we make the most of what time we do have, that we create for ourselves, even if only for just a few precious moments, a tiny bit of everything we're fighting for." He shook his head. "Bloody hell--I'm not saying this very well, aren't I." He took hold of Ginny's arms and held her out at arm's length. "Virginia Weasley," he said, looking into her eyes, "I love you. I want to spend my entire life with you. But I can't. There's a war going on, and I am a soldier. But I will give you everything I have left--all I have to give, for all the rest of my life." He took a deep breath. He had faced dark sorcerers, destroyed basilisks, been a witness at the hideous blood ceremony that returned his dreaded arch-enemy to life--and yet, this moment, this decision he had so abruptly made, utterly terrified him. Deep down, he knew he was right, that this was, indeed, the best decision he could make. "Virginia Weasley," he said, kneeling, "will you marry me?"

Ginny threw her arms about him, weeping.

"WHAT?" An outraged Ron rounded on him, laying a strong hand upon his friend's shoulder and jerking him to his feet. "What the hell do you think you're trying to do, you prat? That--that's my sister! This--this--" he spluttered, utterly at a loss for words in the face of this unexpected development.

"Ron, I--" Harry began, but his friend cut him off in mid-sentence.

"Don't you try to 'Ron' me you idiot," he replied. "What the fuck were you thinking? You're fighting a war, for cripes' sake, you're--you're going insane, and the both of you haven't even gotten out of Hogwarts yet! You're seventeen, she's sixteen--and you want her to marry you? Now?"

Harry stared back, coolly. "Ron," he said placatingly, "Do you honestly think that each and every one of these objections hasn't run itself through my head within the last few minutes? I swore to do this the moment I saw her reaching out across that empty space inside my mind. I tell you, Ron, you have no idea what it was like to be in my head then. She came through for me, faced those things from God knows what Hell for my sake, dragged me back from the abyss--she fought them off! She did it all for me, Ron! Tell me, Ron, what did I do to deserve this? I owe her, Ron. I owe her my life. So, tell me, what else do you think I have to give to her besides my life?"

Ron sneered. "Right. That's why you're leaving her to go fight a war."

Harry's voice grew deadly quiet. "Damn you, Ron, what the hell do you think I'm fighting for?" He held Ron's gaze, as if daring the taller man to prove him wrong.

Ron stared back. There was an awkward silence as the two men locked gazes. Dracula stirred, ready to intervene should the confrontation between the friends turn ugly. He had seen many scenes like this one in his centuries-long existence: two young men, their blood hot in their bodies, heads full of hormones and easily-injured pride, coming to blows over a woman. The vampire's lips twitched upwards. True, Virginia was indeed Ron's sister, but it had been his experience that brothers in general could prove to be more protective--no, the word was possessive, rather--of their sisters even than of their brides.

Harry's voice was a whisper. "You'd do the same thing if it was Hermione, wouldn't you?"

"Don't bring Hermione into this you--you..." Suddenly, Ron broke away, and slammed his fist into the wall. "Damn you!" he yelled. "You think it doesn't hurt, seeing my sister like this, and you, headed on some death-trip. Don't you think I'd want her to be happy, not pining for some dead hero?"

"Will being insane and possessed be better for her than a dead man? At least this way I'll be able to make sure no one--no one--will ever have to face one of those things again!" retorted Harry.

Dracula interposed himself between the two. "Mr. Weasley. I fear young Potter speaks the truth. Consider this: would you prefer your friend's legacy to be the legacy of a hero? Or will it be the legacy of a coward, a whipped cur slinking away into the shadows to die? Consider, Mr. Weasley. You, too, are a hero. Do not make it any more difficult for your friend than it already is. As for your sister..." He cast a sidelong glance in Ginny's direction. Bending close to Ron's ear, he spoke, the words quiet and swift.

"He is a hero, your friend. A hero. Just as you are. And just as is your sister. Allow me to tell you something about heroes," he said, placing an arm around Ron's shoulder and leading him aside. "It is a dangerous life, the hero's life. You will never know where the next threat comes from, the next world-destroying villain against whose deranged plan you must stand. It is an uncertain life, and even those of us who have survived, triumphed over a hundred years and more worth of foes--we are still uncertain as to whether our next day will be our last. This is especially so, young Ron, in times such as these, when the hidden demons of a hundred years of secret history come howling out of the darkness to tear down the fortresses of light. Oh, yes, my friend," he added, seeing Ron's confused look. "There are greater evils abroad in the world today than the Dark Lord Voldemort."

The vampire's face was grim--grim, and not a little sad. "You should treasure your happiness while you may, Ron Weasley--treasure it, and at the same time do not deny your friend the same. For we all of us need something to fight for. And happiness is a very precious thing indeed."

Ron looked at him, the anguish in his expression clear for all to see. He slumped against the wall, defeat evident in every line of his long, lanky frame.

"No," he said, finally. A single tear trickled from the corner of his left eye and down his face. He scrubbed at it with his left hand, then covered his eyes with that hand as he slid down the wall to sit on the carpet.

When he looked up, he was composed again, though Harry thought he detected a slight quaver in his voice as he spoke. "For what it's worth Harry, I'm sorry. You do have a right to go out and face Voldemort for what he's done. And you and Ginny do deserve what happiness you can find with each other." He turned to face Ginny. "Sis, I'm sorry. Go on. You and Harry go build what life you can. Build the best you can. And when the time comes for you to part, remember the fact that you had the good times. No matter what happens, you'll always have that."

Ginny smiled, palely, and kissed him on the forehead. "Don't be silly. You sound as if you're the one who's about to die."

Ron chuckled. "Yeah, I suppose so." He gathered his feet under him and stood up.

The vampire count stood erect, his head tilted to one side, as if listening. As they watched, he removed a tiny device from his ear. "One of the several marvels our little...alliance has produced," he said. "The others are in readiness, my friends. Come. Your destiny awaits." So saying, he led them to the door through which Holmes had gone and flung it open. Within, several men and women waited. "Come, my friends," said the count once more, "come, and join the strange and beautiful choir of heroes immortal!" And he gestured, imperiously, with his cape.

And so they went.