Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Eight

It was just past seven-thirty in the morning, and Severus Snape had just stepped into his trousers when there was a loud, impatient rap upon his door. Before he could even think to mutter a desultory invitation to sod off, the door banged open, and Minerva McGonagall barged in, immaculately dressed and brimming with fury. Three guesses as to what this is about, he thought grimly.

"Really, Minerva, though I realize it has been quite a while since you´ve had the pleasure of a gentleman, it´s bad form to storm in uninvited," he greeted her blandly.

"I´m in no mood for crass levity this morning, Severus," she retorted briskly.

"No, indeed." He moved around her and went to his wardrobe in search of a shirt.

"You know very well why I´m here," she seethed, pointing a stiff finger at him. "It´s about Stanhope."

He pulled on his shirt without comment. "It´s really a rather tired subject. May we discuss this another time? I slept badly last night, and there are some things I must see to before class," he said dismissively, buttoning up his crisp white shirt.

"No, it cannot wait," she shouted, and slammed her hands down onto his desk so forcefully that he raised an eyebrow in surprise.

"That desk has been in my family for three generations; I´ll thank you to treat it with care," he spat, irritated at her holier-than-thou presumptuousness. He whipped his robe of its hangar with a snap.

"I don´t give a damn about your desk or anything else you own for that matter," she snarled. "What I do give a damn about is the health and psychological welfare of the students, particularly those in my House." She straightened and stalked to where he stood smoothing his robes before a full-length mirror. "I heard the most amazing story from Potter and his friends this morning. Would you like to hear it?" She stopped and stared at him expectantly, hands fisted on her hips.

He made no reply, appearing for all the world to be absorbed in the contemplation of his reflection, but his mind was busily turning over this latest revelation. Of course it would be Potter. He and his saccharine band of do-gooders couldn´t possibly have resisted such an obvious crusade. Cruel, heartless, ex-Death Eater Professor Snape tormenting the helpless, feeble, gormless cripple. What a golden opportunity. It had probably taken them less than two minutes to make it from the Potions classroom to McGonagall´s quarters with the glad tidings. Damn the meddling little snivelers.

When he showed positively no interest in hearing this riveting saga, McGonagall treated him to it anyway. "They said," she huffed, eyes blazing, "that Miss Stanhope asked you several times to be allowed to use the lavatory. You refused. When she could no longer hold it and urinated all over herself, you publicly humiliated her and forced her to get down on her knees and clean it up." She stepped back and fixed him with a what-do-you-have-to-say-about-that glare, folding her arms across her chest.

"She made a mess, and I made her clean it up," he said calmly, turning to face her.

"She never would have made the mess if you had allowed her to use the lavatory."

"She had more than enough time to use it before the lesson."

"Perhaps she didn´t realize she needed to go."

He snorted, striding over to the desk and sorting through an orderly stack of parchment. "She is crippled, Minerva, not feckless. She knew very well she needed to go. She chose not to, and that is beyond my control. She had to deal with the consequences, unpleasant though they may have been," he murmured, his nose wrinkling at the remembered stink of hot urine.

"You could have let her go. What harm would it have done?"

"I am not indulging those students irresponsible enough to make poor decisions," he snapped.

"Merlin, Severus, not everything is a grand life test," she exclaimed, her cheeks hectic with exasperation.

"Isn´t it?" he said quietly, and something in his gaze made her back up a pace. He fondled a piece of worn parchment in his hands. "People who make poor small decisions often go on to make poor important decisions, and that most assuredly is fatal."

"Don´t be ridiculous. It was nothing more than a trip to the loo."

"Whatever it was, I was within my rights as a teacher to refuse her permission," he said staunchly, tossing the paper nonchalantly onto the desk with a light flick of the wrist.

"Fine," she conceded, looking pained at having to make such an admission. "But you most certainly overstepped your boundaries by insisting she clean it up without the assistance of magic. That was unconscionable."

"You´re assuming I had a conscience in the first place," he said drily. "According to the students-and most of the faculty-Snape and conscience are mutually exclusive terms."

"Don´t play that game with me." She drew herself up. "You knew better. You simply wanted to torment that girl."

"You´re absolutely right, Minerva. I spend every waking moment obsessing over how to degrade Rebecca Stanhope. It haunts my dreams and holds sway over my waking thoughts. I can find no other joy in my life." He rolled his eyes. "I disciplined a student; no more and no less."

"You´ve never asked any other student to clean up a mess like that," she shot back. "It´s appalling."

"No other student has ever urinated on my floor," he said matter-of-factly.

"For Aphrodite´s sake, Severus, she´s different from the others. She needs careful handling." Her voice shook with anger and a note of pleading. "What if she should get hurt?"

He thought for a moment of the dark bruise of his hand emblazoned on her shoulder. Bit late to be worrying about that. He kneaded his hands across his face. He was tired. He´d gotten little over six hours of sleep last night, and it had been troubled by uneasy dreams. In one he had felt Stanhope´s frail shoulder snap and grind beneath his squeezing fingers. He awoke on the crest of her agonized wail. He´d been up berating himself for his loss of control ever since. Now McGonagall was here trying to heap salted guilt into his wounded pride. His own temper, slow to wrath with his colleagues, began to slip.

"No, Minerva, no she isn´t any different from the others. She is, no matter what your bleeding heart would believe, a student like all the rest. When she accepted transfer here, she implicitly agreed to abide by the rules of the institution. She also consented to endure the same risks and foibles faced by the rest, and one of those risks was to fall under my dominion. Every student here runs the risk of injury, humiliation, or death. Fate will not be any more merciful to her because she is at a disadvantage. Why should I be?"

"Because you can be. Because she deserves it," she said vehemently.

"Does she?" he asked, amused.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Look at her."

"Oh, I have. Every day. And do you know what I see?" He was speaking so softly now that McGonagall had to lean in to hear him.

"What?"

He turned his flat black gaze to her. "A victim," he said, and his voice was cold and hard. "Someone to be trampled beneath Voldemort´s feet when he and his armies rise up. She has been coddled and protected for so long that she´s forgotten how to fend for herself. She´s helpless, Minerva. She can´t even scrub a floor without falling into an exhausted heap. Albus did her a disservice by bringing her here, into the middle of the ugly war brewing outside these walls, and you´re doing a greater one by treating her with kid gloves. The world is a hard place, and she needs to learn that fact before Voldemort teaches her most painfully."

McGonagall was staring at him in disgusted incredulity. "You think she doesn´t know that, Severus? I think she is bloody well aware of that fact already. Life has been one indignity after another for her, and I won´t add to it," she said, her face chalky with indignant fury.

"Then the blood is on your hands, not mine."

She was on her feet and looming over him in a second, her spectacles clattering to the floor with the speed of her ascent. "How dare you!" she hissed, her knuckles crackling like bones tossed onto a bonfire. "I have worked all my life to protect the students in this castle. How can you suggest I would ever do anything to harm one of them?"

"The road to Hell was paved with good intentions."

"I suppose if you had your way, you´d have us turn all the students here into numb, ruthless little Death Eaters like you," she said coldly. Then realization of what she had said flooded her face, and her mouth dropped open. "Severus, I´m sorr-,"

But his own temper had slipped its rapidly fraying leash, and he stood up in a single fluid movement. "At least if they became numb, ruthless Death Eaters, they would learn how to survive. It´s the first thing you learn. How to survive. By any means necessary. Even if it means killing. If Voldemort and his armies stormed this castle tomorrow, how many students do you honestly think would survive? A dozen? A half-dozen? Even one? Or would their bones be ground into powder beneath the advancing army´s feet? How many of them would be willing to do what it takes to survive? Not nearly enough. There´s something to be said for being numb; it makes doing what you have to that much easier. A conscience just makes things messy." The velvet whisper of his voice tickled her nose. He reached down and picked up her glasses, holding them out to her with a wry smirk.

She snatched them from his hand as though she feared to be scorched by his touch. "The Headmaster will hear about this," she choked, trembling with outrage. She jammed the spectacles onto her face with a savage stab and spun away from him. She left, slamming the door hard enough to rattle it within the frame.

He stared after her in the silence that followed. Then he stalked into his dining room to fix himself a cup of tea liberally splashed with Anti-Ache powder. His head throbbed like a timpani drum. He jerked his cabinets open, making them shriek on their hinges. He found his tea and kettle in the cupboard above the stove and set them down with a bang, trying in vain to staunch the flood of anger that made his eyes pulse and his chest cramp.

His teakettle rattled while he filled it in the sink. He´d always known McGonagall and the other staff members mistrusted him, and now that mistrust had finally been revealed twice in as many days. He hadn´t been surprised that it was there. He supposed it was only natural for them to be leery of someone who came from the ranks of those they were trying so very hard to destroy. He would have been. What he had been taken aback by, though, was the fact that McGonagall, of all people, had been the first to let that cool, professional mask slip, to let him catch a glimpse of the ugly suspicion in which most of the staff secretly held him. She, like him, was poker-faced, holding her cards close to the robe and never tipping her hand.

Dumbledore would be troubled to learn of the growing rift between him and McGonagall. Their relationship had never been cozy-the natural rivalry between their Houses precluded that-but they had always managed to be stiffly cordial, willing to put up a façade of harmony for the sake of the school and for Dumbledore, who frowned upon such internecine faculty squabbling. Lately, they had been bickering with alarming asperity, and their already fragile working relationship was damaged beyond repair, at least as far as he was concerned. No doubt she would attempt an apology later; her distressingly overblown sense of mawkish Gryffindor honor would demand it. He could give a damn. He would accept, of course, if only to keep the school running smoothly and to placate Dumbledore.

Dumbledore. His Headmaster and superior. So much more than that. The man who had saved his life, who had given him a second chance when so few had been willing to give him a first. The man for whom he was currently risking his life because he had once saved a young man´s soul. Such an odd man he was. Wise and strong and compassionate to a fault. There had been times that he could have sworn the old man´s compassion would be his downfall, and yet, time and time again, his had turned out to be the right path. Have faith in the Light, Severus, he often said, and he had tried. But it was hard to believe, to trust in something that had never given you reason to before. And so he trusted in Dumbledore. It was what got him through the madness.

It was hard to say what he felt for Dumbledore, even after all these years. He loved him, yes, but he hated him, too, especially in the dark and hopeless hours he spent at Voldemort´s feet, screaming and writhing and begging for his life, smelling the sour tang of his own excrement in his nostrils. During those times, hatred blotted out all hope and he cursed his name, longing to reach out his shaking, sweat-slicked hands to snap the brittle bones of his neck. The injustice of it maddened him. That he should suffer while Albus was safe in his impregnable ivory tower. Then it would be over, and he would return to Hogwarts and Albus, and the love he thought surely stamped out forever would return, stronger than before.

The shrewish howl of the teakettle interrupted his thoughts, and he yanked it from the heat with an impatient jerk. He turned off the stove and went in search of his teacup and the vial of Anti-Ache he kept hidden for emergencies. As he rummaged for them in the organized clutter of his kitchen, his mind turned to Stanhope, the strange girl that consumed so much of his time, and to Dumbledore, the man to whom he entrusted his life. Albus had always known what was best before, but even if he was right about what was to come, he still didn´t understand why he had chosen her, of all people. Even if it came to that, they wouldn´t be that bad. They couldn´t. Lost limbs, blindness, grievous wounds, but not such ravaged wrecks of humanity as Rebecca Stanhope. It was a mind-boggling impossibility.

Is it? You know better. He poured his tea without really seeing it. He had seen things during his tenure as a full-fledged Death Eater that he would never forget, no matter how much Dreamless Sleeping Draught he quaffed or how often Voldemort subjected him to the tortures of the Cruciatus Curse. Sometimes, he feared his mind would finally break beneath the strain, and those would be the only things he would see, the blasphemies magic could create.

Voldemort, in spite of his vanity and greed, was a twisted genius, and at the time he had first joined as a bitter young man with black ideals, the Dark Lord had been experimenting with Transfigurative Magic, melding things that were never meant to be joined. Most of the time, he used unwary, indigent Muggles as the fodder for his dabblings, but occasionally, the child of someone who opposed him fell victim to his work. The results were unspeakable, monstrous things that defied all natural laws, shook the tenuous foundations of his faith in the universe. Most had died shortly after creation, and their carcasses had been burned, but some had survived, proof of Voldemort´s madness. Of his madness come to think of it. He had assisted in some of the experiments. He could only hope that, with no one to tend them after Voldemort´s fall and the scattering of the remaining Death Eaters, they had died of neglect and starvation.

Voldemort had also spent much time concocting and testing new spells, curses and hexes designed to maim, cripple, and destroy. He was fortunate enough to have the services of Agrippina Delerov, the preeminent Russian Transfigurations Master of her day. She still was, actually. Agrippina was alive and well and living in Kiev, one of those Death Eaters who escaped punishment using the Imperious Curse defense. Though her hair had gone from stunning chestnut to silver over the years, she was still as formidable and vicious as ever, and he shuddered silently every time he saw her standing at Voldemort´s side during Circle meetings.

Some of the hexes she had invented had left the test subjects travesties that made Stanhope seem the paragon of earthly perfection. Travesties that had survived and been fully, painfully cognizant of what they had become. Agrippina and Voldemort had laughed while the things that had once been human beings screamed and gibbered with the horrified realization that their arms had contorted in ways unfathomable to any sane mind. Some screamed without mouths, or indeed, without any heads at all.

So, yes, it could be that bad.

He sipped his tea and wandered back to his desk to riffle through the stack of parchments again. Flowing, neat scripts clashed with untidy scrawls, and in the middle of the mass of excreble drek was Stanhope´s homework. He winced when he saw it. It hadn´t gotten any better. He pulled it from the stack and examined it more closely. Well, he took that back. It was still unreadable, but he could make out more letters than he had on previous assignments, even whole words in some places. He held it up to the faint light straggling in through the dusty window by his desk to see if he could make out any more. No. He squinted at it, willing his eyes to make sense of the garbled script in front of them.

What the hell am I doing? he thought. Wasting my time and eyesight on this shameful mess. Disgusted with himself, he threw it onto the desk, sat down, and pulled out his quill to write an uncompromising zero in the top right corner. She needn´t feel bad, though; judging by the cursory glance at the other scrolls, she would not be the only one to receive such marks. He took another sip of tea, grimaced when he found it tepid, and sat the cup in its saucer with an annoyed clatter. He thought again of the dark, almost certain possibility of war.

Albus knew it was coming. So did he. The only people too thick to see it were Fudge and his loyal minions in the Ministry. Even some of the older students here sensed it, smelled it in the air like the earthy, electric scent of an onrushing storm. Were they ready for it? Albus was. He had been a vital part of defeating the Dark wizard Grindewald fifty-four years ago, and he had lost none of his potency. Harry Potter was-he had to be. His friends, ready or not, would go with him to the death. About the others, he could not say.

Did he mean what he had said about the Death Eaters being better prepared than they were? To his dismay, he found that he did. Albus was a great man and a wonderful strategist, but he would never sanction the use of the Unforgivables by the students. He would take the high road until the last of them fell. Better, he would say, to be felled with dignity than to survive in dishonor. Which was all pretty rubbish, of course. All the dignity and honor and valor in the world wouldn´t matter when they were all dead, dying, or enslaved under the Death Eater regime. There would be no one left to remember those things, those lofty conceits, and the few who did would come to rue them under the stinging bite of slavery´s scourge.

Even if Albus could be swayed, few of the other teachers would agree. Moody would likely be his sole ally, prone as the old Auror had been to using the Unforgivables himself on reticent Death Eaters. It would certainly pain him to agree with old prey, though. Flitwick and Sprout were too mild to entertain such thoughts. Vector and Sinestra would see the logic of it, but would not act without Albus´ approval. And staid, stuffy McGonagall, who had never even dreamt of using her knowledge of Transfiguration to fashion a suitable substitute for her lack of male companionship, much less for illegal purposes, would rather be drawn and quartered than teach her students the fine art of rearranging the human form or taking life.

If the teachers, through their stubborn moral rectitude, were reluctant to use the knowledge he knew they possessed, then the students were simply, fatally unprepared. The Unforgivables were not something they would have been taught. Decent, respectable wizards didn´t do such things. And because they didn´t do such things, they assumed no one else did, either, though the headlines in the Daily Prophet had been telling them the opposite for years.

Decent people. He snorted. Death Eaters were not decent people, a fact which most people didn´t truly seem to grasp until they stood face to face with one in their parlors. They were rich, powerful, sometimes respected, always feared, but never decent. Their hearts were as black as the robes on their backs. They would kill and maim and enslave on a whim, and it was a given that they taught their children the use of the Unforgivables as soon as they could grip their wands properly. Slytherin would be well-prepared.

Slytherin. The children caught between the Light and the Dark, pawns in a game too large for their young eyes to see. It was his job to protect them, and yet he couldn´t see how. Most of them were entrenched in the darkness, weaned on it. Those not born into it were tempted by the crushing peer pressure to give in to its thrall. The strong few who resisted would not see adulthood. Loyalty to the Dark Lord was often stronger than the ties of the flesh. One, perhaps two, would be lucky enough to find a savior and embrace the Light, but regardless of the side they chose, most of them would not survive to see a brighter day. They would be mown down by both the darkness and the Light, as traitors and as monsters. To be in Slytherin was to be damned.

Dammit, Severus, stop this maudlin palavering. He scowled and ran his fingers through his uncombed hair. No use lamenting for a future that was not yet come. Like his past, it was out of his hands. He picked up his quill, an anchor to reality and all things normal, and took out his fear on the homework parchment in front of him.

While Severus Snape hid from his pupils and his fears in his quarters, Rebecca sat by the lake. Though half-awake and stiff, she was enjoying the glow of early morning sunlight as it washed over the landscape and dappled the water in a serene, shimmering haze. She pinched pieces of the roll she was holding and tossed them into the lake. She watched in lazy amusement as the giant squid drifted languidly to the surface to capture the scrap in one glistening tentacle before submerging again.

Feeding the enormous squid was a relaxing way to start a day. She´d been up since seven, unable to sleep after a grueling night in Professor Snape´s lair. Winky had wanted her to stay in bed, to skip Care of Magical Creatures in favor of much-needed rest, but she had insisted on getting up. They were grooming the Borgergups today, and she didn´t want to leave Seamus alone with Mischief. It was the least she could do after getting him in trouble, penance of a sort. So, she had convinced Winky to get her up, dress her, and send her to breakfast, which, at that early hour, had been all but deserted.

It was nice, sitting here and feeding the lake-dweller. There was a rythmn to it, a routine-tear, toss, watch, tear, toss... The smell of the dewed grass and the warm caressing, tendrils of sunlight on her face were revivifying, cleansing her of the fetid, dry-rot stench and bone-throbbing chill of the dungeons. She was fascinated by the squid, too. It was such a big, ugly beast, and yet it was beautiful. It moved through the water with such lithesome grace, its meaty pink tentacles trailing behind it like living streamers. On land, it was clumsy, helpless, doomed to die, but in the water it had found its niche. It was regal, sleek, and grand, the lord of its realm.

The stalwart stone walls of Hogwarts shone in the sunlight, and its proud banners flittered and popped in the teasing breeze blowing from the west. Had she found her niche here? She hoped so, hoped with every part of herself, but she felt so out of place. The staff had made all the reasonable concessions, and most of the students, with the notable exception of Draco Malfoy, left her to her own devices. She had even made friends in Neville, the twins, and Seamus, but something still didn´t fit.

You know exactly what the problem is. Stop beating around the bush. Her hand tore another strip of bread from the rapidly dwindling roll. No matter how many changes and concessions they made, they could not change the fact they she was alone. There was no one else like her in the school, maybe not in the entire continent, and that was a scary feeling. Professor Moody was close, and she did gain a little comfort when she saw him limping doggedly down the corridor, but it wasn´t quite the same. Not to her. He´d gotten that way long after he´d proven his worth to those around him. His injuries had not devalued him in the eyes of his peers. In fact, they had venerated him, made him something more, made him legend. He´d gotten them doing something brave, fighting for a cause. All she had ever done was be born too soon.

They had a word for people like Professor Moody at D.A.I.M.S. "New Crips," they were called, a play on the idea of "new rich." They were treated with kindness, but the reservoir of understanding and unity shared by the congenitally infirm did not extend to them. If they demanded sympathy as their right, what they got was hostility and abrupt, ruthless excommunication. What right did people paralyzed for three months have to beg pity from people who had lived their whole lives broken and battered and struggling for each dawn? None. That they had once lived among the blessed, the sound, the ignorant, counted against them. They had to earn their place, suffer as they had suffered, learn to hate, learn to thrive on bitterness and spat prayer before they were accepted into the fold, and even then they were always marked as different. Their opinions were given less weight than those of the veterans when important matters were discussed. They were the other masquerading as one of them.

Still, she almost would have welcomed one of them just to have someone like herself here. It didn´t even have to be a person in a wheelchair. A blind student, a deaf one, it didn´t matter. As long as there was someone on the same playing field. It had gotten to the point now where even a temporarily broken limb was cause for secret jubilation. It meant that someone, for a few minutes anyway, was just as helpless as she was. Last week in Defense Against the Dark Arts, a Gryffindor boy suffered a fractured arm when he came out on the wrong end of a scuffle with a Slytherin. She had nearly clapped at the sharp, wet snap of bone, and then instantly regretted it. She wished him no suffering; she only wished for a companion to help bear the burden of being a pioneer.

"New Crips." It was a terrible thing, she knew, not something with which she wholeheartedly agreed, but she had never stopped it, never stood up to protest it. Because deep in her heart, in the most honest part of herself, she understood it. Sometimes, she felt it, too. When some self-absorbed, whining sixteen-year old former beauty pageant queen sat bitching and moaning about the unfairness of life after she had been the one to get drunk and wrap the Audi Daddy bought her around a utility pole, it was hard to conjure up anything but contempt.

This label was not always leveled fairly. It was a weapon. It was cruelty and malice, power for the powerless. The older students used it to weed out the undesirables. They separated the chaff from the wheat, so to speak. She tossed the last bit of bread into the lake. The squid claimed it with a soft plip. She winced as her should gave a dull twinge. A gift from Professor Snape. Her body had been a constant ache since she had fallen into his grasp.

She thought about her strange, irascible Potions Master. She had never met anyone so hateful, so full of spite. He was a fortress, an island unto himself. It was clear that he wanted nothing to do with life and expected very little from it, and she could understand that. Life was a terrible, ugly, cruel business that took more than it gave and required all of your energy just to keep your head above water. Snape was treading water as hard as he could, but he looked like he was losing ground, like he was encumbered with a terrible weight and falling prey to the undertow.

Nights under his watch were strange affairs. Cold and aloof, he rarely spoke, and when he did, it was in terse monosyllables. He looked at her only when necessary, and when he wasn´t staring her down he was marking parchments. Sometimes, though, when he thought she wasn´t looking, she caught him gazing pensively into the hourglass, as though trying to count the minutes and hours left to his life. In spite of her dislike for him, concern would still her hand for a moment. There was no hope in that gaze, none at all. He was a man waiting for unseen consequences. What gripped him so?

Guilt. Her grandfather spoke with absolute conviction.

She chuffed. You don´t mean to tell me he wishes he wasn´t such an asshole? Somehow, I doubt he´s weeping in his chambers at the end of the day.

No. I don´t think he loses a wink of sleep over the things he does in the classroom. Not one bit. But everyone has their own secret, their own burden to carry. Even you.

She did, at that. A name slithered into her thoughts like an unexpected enemy. Judith Pruitt. Go away, Judith, she thought. I´m too tired for this. Judith´s memory brightened with the sun, and after a brief, half-hearted struggle, Rebecca let it take her.

Judith was twelve when she came to D.A.I.M.S., a thin, mousy girl trying to come to terms with life as a paraplegic. Her father, drunk as lord and twice as arrogant, had smashed into a bridge abutment at eighty miles an hour. He had broken his arms and legs and crushed his sternum-injuries from which he eventually recovered. His daughter was not so lucky. Pinned in the twisted wreckage of the car and unconscious for fourteen hours, she awoke to find herself with a lifelong companion of metal and wheels.

The transition was not easy for her. She cried too much, almost constantly, and in the first weeks and months, she urinated and defecated on herself with alarming frequency. Unable to accept the loss of feeling in her lower extremities, she also refused to accept the catheter or adult diapers the nurses offered to help combat the problem. After all, what twelve-year with a single tatter of self-respect would consent to them?

The students tried to be understanding at first, especially her long-suffering roommate, who awoke night after night to the pungent reek of urine or the sweet, sickly stench of feces, but as the accidents and weeping fits continued, the goodwill waned. The nurses stopped offering even disingenuous reassurance after her nocturnal mishaps, and the students began to avoid her. They began crossing the hall when they saw her pushing herself towards them. Soon, she was eating alone at the school table, cast off to the side as the cleaner, saner students huddled together and wrinkled their noses at the faint, persistent odor of old urine.

Things truly began their downward spiral for Judith on the night she tried to approach Deidre Clapham in the Common Lounge. Deidre was the self-appointed matriarch of the girls at D.A.I.M.S, seventeen and beautiful in spite of the Muscular Dystrophy that sapped her strength. Vain as the queen peacock, she spent hours primping and preening before the mirror, combing her hair with a tortoiseshell comb she strapped around her stronger hand with Velcro. A cloud of rose oil perfume followed her wherever she went. She liked things clean and neat and pretty. She did not like Judith Pruitt.

Rebecca was tucked away in the corner of the Common Lounge, her nose buried in a book, when it happened. The smell was overpowering, a swampy, gassy, rotten fruit smell that made her shut the book with a slam and cover her nose. Jerold Hawkins, known as Hawk to the students, froze in the process of setting up a game of solitaire. His deafness did nothing to shield him from the stupefying reek, and he clapped both hands over his nose, looking like a grotesque parody of a Hollywood scream queen. Every head turned to look for the source.

She thought she was hallucinating when she first saw Judith. She prayed that she was, but her nose could not lie. Numb horror was what she felt, numb horror and a revulsion so deep it made her veins contract. Judith had had an accident. That was the smell. She could only surmise that she was sick, that the flu had gripped her insides and turned them inside out. Her white slacks were a deepening brown, and they clung to her in wet, gelid hanks. Waste dribbled from the pantlegs and onto the floor, leaving a murky brown trail.

"Help me," she quavered, tears streaming down her face, and a thick runner of snot hanging from the end of her nose. She shifted in her chair, and there was an awful, bubbling squelch. Someone-Rebecca couldn´t see who because she was transfixed by the calamity in front of her-laughed, a shrill, hysterical sound. Silence. Complete silence.

No one moved. They couldn´t, at least Rebecca knew she couldn´t. It was as if the wreck that was Judith Pruitt had become a Medusa and turned them all into stone. The hand of the clock lurched forward another pace, and Judith sat in her filth, weeping, animal sounds of shame and bewilderment slipping past her lips. They blinked, but that was all they did. No one stepped forward to help her, no one called out for the nurse. They just stared.

To Judith Pruitt, it must have seemed like the walls were closing in, like she was the star exhibit in God´s cosmic carnival, but Rebecca, even now, couldn´t fault herself or the others for their reactions. She had known what they were feeling, what they were thinking. Doesn´t she know better? The thought was palpable. It was etched on each amazed face. Doesn´t she know better?

They all did. Not one of them had been spared the embarrassment of losing control of bowel or bladder. New students in particular were prone to upset stomachs or irregular bladders while they adjusted to the bland cardboard that the overweight pensioners on the kitchen staff called food. Others were caught unawares in class. You could see them hobbling or rolling down the hallway as fast as they could, desperate to make the safe haven of the bathroom before disaster struck. If it were too late, they still moved as quickly as possible so no one else would see them. No matter what, they always took care of it themselves, or if they couldn´t, discreetly summoned a house elf via the intercom in each room. They never went to each other for help, not with that. They may have been crippled, blind, deaf, and incarcerated, but they still had dignity.

"Help me," Judith wailed again, and this time, she reached out a hand to Deidre Clapham, who sat in petrified horror, the Divination book she had been reading perilously close to sliding off her knees and onto the floor.

Rebecca was so disgusted that she recoiled even though she was twenty paces out of harm´s way. She was not the only one. The room pulled back en masse. Hattie Turkle, a second year with Tourette´s Syndrome, wrung her hands and shrieked, "GODDAMN FUCKERFUCKER SHIIIT!" Quite apropos, considering the situation.

"Right on, Hattie," muttered Jackson Decklan, a black, double-amputee who made his way through life on a pair of pneumatic artificial legs with rectangular feet. Hattie dissolved into helpless giggles. Rebecca fought to keep from laughing and screaming at the same time.

Deidre Clapham did what most people would have when faced with an excrement-smeared hand hovering less than three inches from her face. Her lips drew back from her teeth in a snarl, and she looked from the hand to Judith´s blotched, snot-slicked face. Then her own hand drew back, and she slapped her across the face. "Get away from me, you freak!" she screamed, and pulled her chair as far away from Judith as she could.

A lot happened after that. Freddie Kington, an epileptic who suffered at least four petit mal seizures a week and one grand mal seizure a month, promptly vomited down the front of his shirt and collapsed in a fit. Hattie Turkle went into a flood of swearing, most of it dealing with the things a drunken cattle rancher could do with a heifer. She was jumping up and down. Jackson went clumping down the hall on his titanium legs, bellowing for a nurse to come help Freddie before he swallowed his tongue. No one paid any mind to Judith Pruitt.

She had watched the unfolding chaos with dim dismay, wondering if a covert government agency had secretly slipped LSD into their dinners and was now watching the results from the cover of false walls. Everything was happening in slow motion. Even the laughter sounded warped somehow, like an audio tape dragging along the dusty, bent wheels of an abused tape recorder. She looked to her left and saw Jerold grinning crazily at her, stringers of vomit hanging from his lips. His playing cards were a total loss. She opened her mouth to ask him what was so funny and realized that she was laughing. Cackling. Howling. She bent double and let the tears stream down her face.

When the pandemonium died down, Judith Pruitt was a pariah, a leper in a colony of one. The students shunned her, and the school administrators and staff had no more mercy. The morning after the fracas in the Common Lounge, the halls rang with frustrated howls and tearful begging. Whether she wanted them or not, Judith got her diapers. No one complained. Not the staff, who had grown tired of cleaning up her messes. Not the students, who could once again travel the halls and breathe fresh air. Certainly not her parents. Her father, stricken with guilt over what he had done, now lived in the bottle that had brought them to this in the first place. Her mother, well, a crippled daughter might have been good for the sympathy vote, but was a definite liability on the middle-class social circuit. For all intents and purposes, she was alone.

The teasing was relentless. Accidents were henceforth christened "Judiths," and the social elite delighted in tormenting her, pointing at her and laughing as they passed. Deidre Clapham was the ringleader, naturally. She rolled through the halls with her gaggle of sycophants and hangers-on like an untouchable queen, her wheelchair a royal carriage instead of eternal shackles. Every morning at breakfast, she would trumpet, "No accidents today, Judith," and every evening the shrill call of, "Any accidents today, Judith?" would travel across the Common Lounge. Watches and hourglasses could be set by them.

Judith never fought back, never stood up for herself. She withdrew into her own world, and with each submission, the attacks grew fiercer, crueler, more savage. Deidre and the other girls sensed the weakness, the pathetic vulnerability, and they were drawn to it like sharks to the taint of blood. Tighter and tighter they circled, and those who were not sharks waited and watched.

Rebecca had been one of the latter. She had not harmed, but neither had she hindered. She observed from over the tops of Arithmancy books and beneath half-closed lids. She saw Judith quail and wither and never said a word. It wasn´t her business. Over the years, she told herself that she had been too busy coping with the interminable suffering of her best friend to interfere, but truthfully, she hadn´t stepped in because she hadn´t cared. She had her own life to live and her own burdens to bear.

Judith survived that year and the next, but it was clear that the effort of keeping her head down and her mouth shut was exacting a cruel price. She grew fat, corpulent. The chair creaked and groaned beneath her weight. She ate constantly. Rebecca watched her surreptitiously in the Dining Hall as she shoveled forkful after forkful of food into her mouth. Often, she tried to cadge the desserts from other people´s plates. All the sugar and grease destroyed her complexion; pimples erupted on her cheeks and the bridge of her fleshy nose. Celeste, Deidre´s successor in the line of self-appointed queens, in one of her most creatively cruel moments, had pointed at her and laughed, saying, "Nurse! Nurse! I think Judith has typhoid! You better come check!" The Hall had howled with laughter.

If Judith had hoped that the layer of fat and the mask of acne would insulate her from the cruel jibes, she was mistaken. It only gave her tormentors more incentive. Now, instead of one incident, they had a whole litany of sins from which to choose. She was fat. She was ugly. Most shamefully of all, she was weak. Even the silent non-combatants knew it and reviled her for it. As the months passed, the feeling of watchful waiting increased. The air grew thick with anticipation, and the more sensitive of the watchers turned their heads away. Everyone sensed that the sharks were about to move in for the kill.

It happened the following fall. Beyond all expectation, Judith had survived the summer. This disturbed no one more than Celeste, who seemed to take her continued existence as a personal insult. She was downright vicious, seeking her out for ridicule. She deliberately spilled things on her, gossiped loudly about her offensive body odor(about that she was right; Judith smelled like overripe cheese), and generally did everything in her power to crush what little was left of her spirit. The sands of the hourglass grew painfully few.

The Common Lounge was painfully quiet that night. Everyone was on edge. Hattie Turkle, always the first to sense disquiet and confusion, had been fidgeting and screaming profanities all night. Even a dose of Ritalin hadn´t managed to calm her. Jerold was trying to play solitaire, but his fingers were trembling so badly that he kept knocking them onto the floor. The nervous flutter of turning pages was the only thing to disturb the quiet. The watchers were waiting.

Celeste had been especially vengeful that day, sniping and bitching at Judith with unusual verve. By dinner, she had reduced her to spineless, shivering sobs, snot dripping down her nose into her mashed potatoes. Everyone else had studied the fascinating spatial patterns in their food arrangements until, at long last, Judith had fled from the room. With her had gone the tension and unease, following her like her own twisted pheromones, and the room had broken into to relieved chatter almost at once. Celeste had flashed everyone a my-aren´t-I-grand-smile, her rule unchallenged. After that, she had been almost pleasant.

Around seven-thirty, though, the tension was back, seeping into their muscles like cold mist drifting beneath a door. Some of the more spastic students had been having attacks all night; their grunts and barks of discomfort floated from their rooms. The muscles in Rebecca´s shoulders had been jumping and twanging, and a heavy mallet was thudding against the small of her back.

Hattie Turkle put down her book, cleared her throat, and shouted, "Cocksucker!" Then she calmly picked up her book and resumed reading.

No one had seen Judith in several hours. Not that they had been looking terribly hard. The last person to see her had been her roommate, Janice. According to her, Judith had asked her personal house elf, Bobs, to help her take a shower. The house elf had been only too happy to oblige; bathing was not something she did regularly. That had been forty-five minutes ago. The house elf had returned to the attendant dormitory twenty minutes ago, but Judith was nowhere to be seen.

At eight twenty-two, Janice retired for the night, bidding the few uneasy inhabitants of the Common Lounge goodnight. The sound of her cane tapping down the hall as she felt her way to her room faded. The page-turning continued. Rebecca was surprised to feel sweat trickling down her forehead. For reasons she could not understand, her heart was thudding in her chest and her palms were slick.

What´s happening? she thought dizzily, and her stomach gave a nervous lurch. The sound of an inhaler firing off caught her attention. A wiry seventh-year was sitting in an easy chair with his head between his knees, trying to draw deep, even breath. He feels it. We all feel it.

At eight thirty-one, Janice staggered up the hall, and Rebecca saw immediately that something was horribly wrong. She wasn´t walking with the usual cautious, delicate grace of the blind. She was stumbling, scissoring, the cane pointed impotently to the wall. Her shades were off, and her eyes were bugged and terror-glazed.

"Janice?" Rebecca asked. Her chest joined her back and shoulders in their warning flares of pain.

At the sound of her voice, Janice´s head snapped in her direction. Her nostrils flared as though she scented danger on the wind. "Rebecca?" The cane slipped noiselessly from her hand, and she gave a strangled sob. She raised her hands before her face. Hands that glistened dark red in the fluorescent light.

"Wha-," That was as far as she got before Janice threw back her head and howled into the darkness behind her eyes.

The next few hours were complete pandemonium. Janice´s shriek summoned the night nurse, a gargantuan Samoan woman with a face like a shovel. At the sight of Janice´s bloody, dripping hands, she paled and sprinted toward the room she shared with Judith. Rebecca had watched her thundering thighs and giggling buttocks with hysterical intensity. Like receding clouds, she thought dreamily. The clouds disappeared around the corner, and a moment later the nurse reappeared, spittle drying on her chin. Then she fainted, toppling like a hewn redwood. The students were promptly ushered to their rooms.

It didn´t take long for word to spread, though. Like prison, D.A.I.M.S. had an underground information network second to none. The nurses and administration knew about it, of course, but they were helpless to stop it. It was a river that ran its own course. By dawn the next morning, it had reached every tributary, and rippling beneath the morose silence that prevailed over the next week, the tempestuous eddies of speculation were at full strength.

Judith Pruitt had taken a shower, gotten out, and been placed into bed by Bobs. Shortly after his departure, she had broken a handmirror she kept on the bedside table and used one of the shards to slit her own throat. The mess had been appalling. Some of the gorier rumors held that the nurse had slipped in the cooling, congealing puddles of blood, but Rebecca knew this to be untrue. The nurse had been impeccably clean when she staggered out of the room-dazed, but clean.

Eventually, a version closest to the truth had emerged. Judith had slit her throat with a shard of handmirror. Then Janice, coming in to retire for the night, had arrived. She called out for Judith, but got no answer. She had heard the steady plip plip of dripping moisture, though. Soft and furtive. Thinking Judith had left the tap slightly open, she had gone into the bathroom to turn it off. The faucet knob had been unyielding beneath her hand. Then the smell hit her ultra-sensitive nose. Hot, coppery blood. She had groped her way over to her roommate´s bed, hoping that maybe she´d only fallen and cut herself but knowing by the overpowering, salty stink that it was something so much worse. Then her hand had settled in a warm, viscous pool. She fled, choking on her own breath.

The grief counselors came, psychiatrists bent on prying open the secrets of their minds. They got nothing. The stone walls came up; the code of silence was unbreakable. The watchers dealt with things in their own way, and the well-meaning interlopers did not understand. They wanted her and the rest to "express their feelings," to "verbalize." They wanted them to stop the business of their lives and expose the intricate mechanism that let them thrive in that self-contained, incestuous world.

They couldn´t. They wouldn´t. If some of them took that dangerous luxury, they might not get moving again. They might uncover hidden feelings they´d buried deep within themselves, stumble across losses they´d hoped to leave behind. Regret and uncertainty would mire them down, and they would torture themselves on the rack of self-pity instead of struggle through another day. Those strong enough would leave them behind, abandon them out of necessity. They would regret it, but it would not stop them. Above all, they were survivors.

They spent a lot of time with her, reasoning, she guessed, that since she had been the first to see bloody Janice, she must be the most affected. The sight of dripping scarlet gloves must have warped her impressionable mind. It was laughable. After watching her best friend slowly succumb to the patient malice of leukemia, after years of nightmares and carefully hidden, seething anger, Janice´s bloody hands were of no account. They were just another drop in an already-full bucket.

Still, they insisted. They wheedled and prodded. They asked leading questions. They showed her pictures, inkblots. As if seeing a caterpillar or a dog emerge from the shapeless blob would truly tell them what she held in her mind and heart. She smiled at their self-important presumptuousness, and they took this as a positive sign, mistaking the upward curve of her lips for "making an emotional connection." They scribbled their findings on their bloodless forms. They dedicated entire pages to the fact that she was polite or that she acknowledged being frightened by Janice´s scream. They wrote, typed, and filed thousands of pages. They might as well have been blank, for all they really said.

What would they have said, she wondered as she wiped crumbs from her robes, if she had granted them their wish? If she had revealed to them the truth about that place and the society it bred between its walls? Would they have understood? Likely not. Only they understood, the watchers. They were clannish, a primitive tribe bent on surviving, no matter how many members they had to sacrifice to do it. Judith had been a sacrifice.

There was no grief. There was bewilderment and horror, but no sadness. Judith had simply been too weak to make it. She had neither the skill nor the desire to fight for herself. It was a simple as that. Cased closed. Clean up the body and carry on. They had neither time nor energy to waste on someone who had not given a damn about herself, not if they gave a damn about themselves, and most of them did.

On a personal level, Rebecca had been disgusted by Judith´s suicide. Not because it had represented the tragic, pointless loss of human life, but because it had been such a cowardly act. She had watched her friend suffer for nearly a year, and for every last second of that time, he had fought tooth and nail for his life. Even stoned on near-lethal doses of morphine, he had struggled; the last week of his life, his heartrate would plummet only to rally again. Judith had chosen to die, voluntarily squandered what had been torn from between her friend´s tenacious fingers. She wasn´t going to waste undeserved sympathy on a gutless waste of divine love. Not when she had so little of it left.

After Judith´s dry-eyed memorial service, the administration decreed that house elves, previously auxiliary attendants summoned on demand, would now be constant companions. Tiny beds were moved into the students´ rooms, and the tiny wardens accompanied them everywhere. Rebecca didn´t mind. She was quite fond of the cheerful little creatures. Dinks was the name of her companion, and his passive, content nature provided a welcome contrast to the stoic, militaristic demeanor of the nurses. After a time, they became de facto confidantes, privy to information the bumbling school psychiatrists would have killed for.

There were drawbacks, of course. The elves even accompanied them to the showers. If showers were all they were doing in there, it wouldn´t have mattered, but it wasn´t. The showers were a haven, a place of privacy, ideal for sexual exploration. Or at least they had been. With the goggling, solicitous eyes of a house elf peeking around the shower curtain, it was all but impossible to conjure the necessary ambience for successful gratification. Their already anemic sex lives all but disappeared, and the ever-present bitterness that skirled through the air like noxious dust motes deepened. On top of all else, Judith had managed to stifle their sexuality as well.

Thinking ill of the dead. Add that to her list of sins. God, she was such a bitch. The guilt she pretended not to feel welled up, and she closed her eyes against it. Damn Judith. It wasn´t like she had been the only to leave her to her fate. She wondered if this particular specter of the past haunted the others. Did Celeste awake in the night with Judith´s sad face looming out of the dark? Did Janice suddenly feel the slick sheen of blood beneath her palm? Did Deidre, in the months before she suffocated beneath her own body weight, hear Judith´s plaintive wail? She found herself wishing desperately for more bread with which to busy her hands.

"Go away," she said aloud.

"Didn´t mean t´ disturb ya," said a rumbling voice from behind her,

She twisted around to see Hagrid standing behind her, an uncertain smile on his face.

"Oh...hello, Hagrid. I certainly didn´t mean you. Just talking to myself." She flashed him a smile.

He lumbered over beside her. "Surprised to see you up so early. Most students like their shuteye."

"Sometimes I can´t sleep. Decided to come feed the squid."

Hagrid beamed. "He´s beautiful, isn´ `e."

She nodded. "He looks so happy in the water. Doesn´t have a care in the world, I guess."

"Gen´l, too. Would you like to touch him?"

"Could I? I mean, he wouldn´t pull me in?"

"Accourse not. He likes bread and pumpkin pasties, not young lasses like yerself," Hagrid boomed jovially.

She looked up at Hagrid, who was grinning down at her through his big, bushy beard, then back at the placid surface of the lake. There was now way to tell exactly how deep the lake was, but it was at least deeper than the top of her head. She could drown in there. Then again, Hagrid would be there to fish her out. A Hogwarts professor wasn´t going to let her sink to the bottom on their watch. It would be fun. It certainly was a treat. Nothing like this had ever been offered to her at D.A.I.M.S. Their idea of derring-do was an extra cookie at supper. That alone was incentive enough to ignore the possible danger.

"OK."

"All right, then. Let´s get these shoes off." He squatted down and tugged gently at her sneakers.

"Might want to loosen the Velcro first," she said mildly.

"Oh." He pulled back on the Velcro with his massive fingers, and her shoe slipped off easily, engulfed in the massive palm of his hand. He put it down in the wet grass and pulled off the other one. He did this daintily, as though he feared he might break her. "Pull up the hem of yer robe, Rebecca. Wouldn´t want to get it wet."

She did as she was told, and a moment later, she was nestled in his mammoth arms. She was sure they made an odd sight, a Herculean Jack Sprat and his miniscule wife. There was a slosh-water being displaced by a pair of steamshovel feet-and then he was calf-deep in the murky water.

"Here `e comes," he crowed, and she turned her head to look.

The squid scudded toward them, tentacles undulating softly behind it. It came leisurely, sedately. It was taking its time, and that was fine by her. She was happy where she was, almost blissful. Hagrid´s strong arms were supporting her, and the musty, dusty smell of his patch-riddled moleskin coat was reassuring. The sun was warm on her scalp, and D.AI.M.S. was a million miles away. Right here was just fine.

The water rippled, and Hagrid shifted a bit as the squid nudged his leg. "We have a visitor, Rebecca."

She looked down and saw the great yellow eye of the squid appraising her from the depths, its black iris like a sunspot. It was easily as big as a fist. She smiled at it, and it watched her sedately.

You´re a wise old thing, aren´t you, she thought for no reason at all. The squid reached out and curled a lazy tentacle around Hagrid´s leg.

"Ready?" he asked.

She nodded, and he squatted down, his haunches grazing the surface of the water. The squid waited patiently. She winced when her fingers plunged into the water. It was cold, like liquid ice.

"All right there?"

"Yes, just a bit colder than I expected."

He grunted companionably and shifted to allow her to reach farther. "Come December, it´ll be frozen solid. Pretty, but no´ pleasant to land on."

She ran her fingers along the smooth skin of the squid, amazed at its suppleness. It was like wet velvet. The squid hovered obediently beneath her hand, seeming to enjoy the contact. She trailed her curious fingers down his body and brushed her fingertips against the pale pink flesh of a tentacle. It was surprisingly warm. Suddenly, it twined limply around her wrist, and she started at the light pressure of its puckers against her skin.

"He´s fantastic." She giggled, feeling lighter than she had in days.

Hagrid held her there for a few more minutes before the chill of the water drove him out. "Sorry, Rebecca. If I´d stayed a minut´ longer, I´d be a bloomin´ ice sculpture. Can´t be good for your hand, either." He tucked her into her chair.

"It´s all right," she said, though she was disappointed. She hadn´t wanted it to end. "Thanks, Hagrid, that was fun."

His face broke into a sunny smile. "You´re welcome." He pulled a pocketwatch from his pocket and checked it. "Heavens! They´ll be here any minute! I´ve got t´ run an´ change my trousers. Can´t teach class wi´ a frozen bum." He saluted cheerily, and headed for his hut and dry clothes.

She smiled after him a moment. Would he smile at you like that if they knew what you´ve done, what you let happen? The ghost of Judith was back again. Will any of them? The smile faded, replaced by a grim line.

Screw you, Judith. You chose to die. There was no reason they had to know what happened. That was a different life, light years away from where she was now. She could make a fresh start here, and she meant to. Judith had no place here.

You thought I didn´t have a place there, either, Judith pointed out.

A flash of scarlet. Gryffindor scarves. Her classmates were coming across the field. Someone raised their arm in greeting. She squinted. Seamus. Shut up, Judith.

She squared her shoulders and did what she had always done. She joined her classmates and got on with her life.