The Private Garden of Neville Longbottom

Gran was in the room again, the one that had been his father's when he was a child. She sat in there sometimes and listened to the ancient, hand-crank Victrola that presided over the small, wooden night table. He had seen it once, a gaudy, brass lily that sprouted from the table and permeated the room with its tiny, wavering notes. To him, the music had sounded diseased, stripped of its vitality and resonance, but his Gran never seemed to notice, or if she did, she didn't care.

The music took her away, away from the moldering draperies and the floors warped and riddled with damp rot and the stale, empty rooms that held neither laughter nor warmth and that no one ever used anymore. Swaddled in their mellifluous, tinkling embrace, she could pretend that everything was all right, that her world was not crumbling around her. In that room, miraculously untouched by time, his father was still alive and sane, and the pestilent, withering shadow of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did not yet stretch forth across the land.

In his more morbid moments, he wondered what she dreamt of as she rocked to the ghostly strains that issued from the blind, idiot mouth of the Victrola like voices of the dead. Were they happy, the times and places to which she traveled? What did she see through the isinglass of memory? Did she see his father when he was a lad, strong and smiling and impervious to the early fall condensation that beaded on the neck of his wool pullover? Did she see herself calling him inside to dinner, her smooth, young-woman hand cupped to a mouth not yet grooved with too much grief and too little joy? Or did she journey even further back, to a time when his father was a wee babe at her breast and all the possibilities in the world for him had still been hers to ponder?

He suspected the latter. She rocked, you see. He couldn't see her, but he could hear the furtive, singsong creak of the rocking chair's runners against the dust-carpeted floor, a mournful, somnolent croak that resonated in the primordial base of his brain. When she rocked, he thought he could remember his own mother rocking him that way, singing in her warbling, tuneless falsetto as she cradled him in her arms. All rot, of course. His mother had been driven to her madness beneath a Death Eater's wand when he was still in soggy, droop-bottomed nappies, and their raw-throated screams had been the last lullaby he'd ever heard. But it was a nice memory to have, and so he clung to it, just as he clung to the useless, stupid gum wrappers his mum gave him at every visit to St. Mungo's.

It's not so bad, pretending, he thought as he stood outside the door and listened to the creak of rattan runners and the washed-out strains of a melody that did not move him, but excavated the hollow places in his soul a little more with every note. Gran knows it, too. That's why she spends so much time in there, putting years and miles between herself and this dingy flat. It doesn't hurt so much when you pretend.

He had been pretending for a long time, and he had gotten quite good at it, even if he did say so himself. When he was little, he used to sit in the parlor and look through old photo albums, his pudgy, toddler's hands turning the pages with exaggerated care. Sprawled on the carpet with dust motes swirling around his head like fairy dust, he had stared into the faces of parents he neither recognized nor remembered, a mother who laughed and twiddled her fingers at the camera in a cheeky, vivacious wave, and a father from whom he had inherited his round, jolly face and who kept stealing surreptitious glances at his mother, as if she were a fanciful sprite that would dance far beyond his reach if he let her.

She did dance out of reach, Dad, he thought bitterly. It just wasn't yours.

There he'd sit, hour after hour, until the sun faded and the darkness fell and the thread of his young life grew longer. Chin propped on hands and crossed feet waving dreamily in the air behind him, he had fashioned wistful memories from the photographs before him. It didn't matter that nearly all of them had been taken before he was even a fire in his father's loins. He painted himself there on the vibrant canvas of his imagination. He was with them in Piccadilly Square, chasing the ducks with his stubby, little-boy legs, damp bread fisted in his chubby hand as they fled from his shrieking laughter and proffered repast in honking indignation.

Wherever the picture was taken, he was there, too, in defiance of laws not even magic could flout. Walking hand in hand with them through Covent Garden, his mouth smeared with the red sweetness of a lolly he'd just finished. Ambling with them through the gaudy, shantytown maze of Chinatown and gazing in openmouthed delight at the colors-phoenix scarlet, electric blue, butterscotch yellow. He was there when the papier-mache dragons roared by and the air was filled with the acrid burnt rubber and chalk dust scent of their breath as they passed. His eyes recalled with painful acuity the dazzling flare of enormous, shimmering Catherine's Wheels, spinning starbursts of crimson against the pristine velvet of the night sky.

Gryffindor colors, he would muse later, but then he had only been a little boy whiling away the lonely hours in his Gran's parlor with all that remained of his parents.

Those snapshots of a life he had never lived save in his fantasies were his panacea when life grew less gentle. He had retreated to them when the teasing of the other wizarding children waxed too fierce, when the fact that he was seven years old and as magical as a paving brick drew its merciless lash across his heart. He would run to the parlor and nurse his wounds in the cold comfort of his celluloid mother. He would snivel and blub and wipe the runners of snot from his nose with the sleeve of his robe, and she would smile at him and twiddle her three-dimensional fingers in silent solace. Looking back on it now, it was sheer madness, but to his feverish mind, it had made perfect sense. He had missed his mum, and looking at the photo album gave her back for a while.

Oh, but it cost just as much as it rendered, didn't it, Neville, my boy? whispered the voice inside his head, a voice that reminded him of Uncle Algie for some reason, though he could not say precisely why. The comfort and peace you found within its pages never lasted. You always had to see it again and again. Just one more time. And one more. Every day, until the pages were smudged with your fingertips. The more you saw, the more you craved, and that was the worst of all, wasn't it? Because no matter what you wished or how hard you wished for it, there would be no more. No more photographs. There just weren't enough stars in the universe to change that.

An uncharacteristically wry snort escaped him. The Uncle Algie-voice was right about that much. Merlin alone knew the number of nights he had squandered in that fruitless endeavor, eyes fixed on the starry firmament with manic intensity, fingers clenched into white-knuckled fists and the salt tang of sweat beading on his upper lip.

I wish I may, I wish I might

Have this wish I wish tonight.

Over and over, a frantic liturgy in the night, murmured in a susurrated breath beneath the bedsheets lest his Gran overhear and spoil the incantation with an unexpected entrance.

Fat lot of good his caution had done. That most sacred invocation of childhood magic had failed him. Each night, he would pray to find another photo in the album, and each afternoon, he would race to the parlor, only to find the exact number of photographs as he had the day before, and the day before that one. Eventually, he had stopped looking in the afternoons, knowing in his heart what he would find when he thumbed the pages, and not long after that, he stopped wishing upon the stars. Even in his most ardent desire, he had proven himself a Squib.

And then one day, he had stopped looking altogether, and it gathered dust, forlorn and forgotten. It wasn't that he had forgotten his parents. He hadn't, nor did he want to. It was just that, well, there didn't seem to be a point in torturing himself with hopeless daydreams. His parents were as good as dead, slack-jawed, dribbling revenants that shambled through corridors permeated with the grease-fat, yellow reek of slow decomposition, possessed only of the primordial survival instinct innate within every living thing. They slept and they voided, and they ate when the disconsolately patient staff at St. Mungo's spooned the gruel into their boneless mouths, but the part of them that had one been Frank and Alice Longbottom, the Divine spark, had long since been extinguished. They lived only because they hadn't the wherewithal to die.

But that wasn't the only reason you stopped looking, the voice of Uncle Algie prodded gently, and he shook his head. You stopped because the pictures began to changee, and though you never said it aloud or indeed, never admitted it yourself-to even think such a thing smacked of the madness that afflicted your parents and rotted their damaged brains from the inside out-you knew, knew deep in your guts that if you could smell the picture, it would have that same high, gassy, rotten pork stink that clung to the walls of St. Mungo's and to the thin, sheer cotton of their hospital robes.

. He grimaced. Unbidden images arose in his mind, and he tried to blot them out by closing his eyes, but in the shadows behind his lids, they only grew more vivid, and he opened them again with a shudder. His heart raced inside his chest, and a sticky sheen of sweat coated his palms. He rubbed them on his robes in a futile effort to dry them, and inside his head, he heard the shrill, hectoring voice of his Gran

Not on your robes, Neville, boy! I just did the wash, and I've neither the time nor the inclination to do it again. I'm not as young as I used to be, and the price of a spell is steeper than it once was. Such a sweet boy, but you never think.

He made one last effort to shut them out, these terrible, beckoning memories, but his mind was as capricious and unwieldy as his clumsy, fumbling hands, and it did what it would. The thin, white crescents of his fingernails dug into the fabric of his robes.

Mind you don't tear the fabric, Neville, love, his Gran scolded him, and then the austere, reassuring solidity of the second-floor corridor was swallowed whole by terrible and complete recall.

Your mum's smile. It was your mum's smile that changed first. In the pictures, she always had the most dazzling smile, all white, straight teeth, freshwater pearls nestled inside her small, pink mouth. She had dimples, too, on either side of her mouth, and you used to trace your fingers over them and wonder what it would be like to touch them. Such a pretty smile, and so reassuring that you held it close when the lightning of a summer thunderstorm flared outside your window and the thunder crashed in its wake. Its radiance kept the bogeys in the closet at bay.

And then, that day, it changed. You came inside from your solitary play, and then you went into the parlor and got the photo album. It was your ritual, and it soothed you, and your Gran, lost as she was in her own unceasing, eternally raw grief, never stopped you, and anyway, it was easier to let you sit and wallow in your own bittersweet fantasies than to have you underfoot while she scrubbed the kitchen on her hands and knees. No house elves to do it for her, after all. And how could she scold you for living in your fortress of myth when she spent so much time in your father's old room with her Victrola, that unlikely Time-Turner that bore her away on swift wings to sweeter days with every turn of its crank? She with her Time-Turner, and you with your pensieve of bound red velvet and old photographs, you both settled in for a long winter's nap. That was the deal, and fair was fair, and so you sprawled on the floor, wiped the lingering biscuit crumbs from your lips and the front of your robes, and went in search of your mother.

And so you confided your hurts and your fears, the rug worn and oddly comforting under a belly already snug against the hem of your trousers. You traced your fingers around the edges of the pictures, and as you told her the woeful tale of Domitian Cadwaller and how he trampled all your schoolbooks in the mud in the street outside Florean Fortescue's ice cream parlor, the razor-wire tangle of shame and misery in your chest eased, and your words fell into the dreamy cadence of your fluttering fingers. It was a panacea for all that ailed you, the narcotized catharsis of familiar ritual.

Afternoon passed into twilight, and still the confession continued. Your voice hung like woodsmoke in the dusty corners your Gran could not reach with her spidery, old woman's fingers, light as dust and cobwebs, and it spun its healing threads in glistening, gossamer filaments of false hope. Your fingertips were red and raw from the friction of a thousand circuits around those precious, dog-eared edges. You would have prattled at her smiling face and twiddling fingers until the stars commanded the heavens if Gran had not called you away. But she did, and you went, and in your haste, you left the photo album open on the floor.

Unprotected.

You let the corruption in.

Lost to his reverie, Neville shook his head in a desperate bid to clear his mind of the memories that rippled beneath the surface of his subconscious. They runnelled through the damp, uneasy soil there, and the earth buckled and yawned in their wake, exposing bones he had hoped time and neglect would turn to dust and oblivion. But luck had never walked with him, had not, insofar as he knew, ever passed within a square kilometer of him, and the old nightmares were waiting for him, peeking from the loose soil in perversely jaunty greeting; their sharp, ivory edges reminded him of teeth.

Hello, Neville, they said cheerfully, and it was the voice of crypt doors thrown wide after long years of disuse, grating and full of damp earth. Been a while, but we've turned up at last. No use running; we will follow you. We've been following all your life, waiting to find you in your dreams and in the nebulous, elastic hours between sleep and wakefulness. Our shadow falls over the brightest of days, and no matter how desperately you try, you will never elude us, because we fly on the swiftest of wings.

But you know that, don't you, because even at fifteen, you fear the unlighted places of the world, the pooling darkness in dim corners and the moldering crevices even the hardiest of torches cannot illuminate. You shy away from them as the rabbit recoils from the snare, the stink of iron and copper in its twitching nostrils. You're afraid we'll find you cloistered in the flimsy shelter of your curtained bed and brush you with our charnel-house fingers. And found you we have, because we have been here all the while, waiting for you.

Neville moaned, a glottal, bubbling vibration in his chest and throat, and his tongue tasted of bile, thick and clumsy in his mouth. His stomach roiled, and his bones were heavy and feverish inside his prickling skin. He closed his eyes to dispel the images that were coalescing in his reluctant mind, but he saw the crouching things there in the pitch blackness behind his fluttering lids and opened them again with a cry. His vision was blurred with unshed, scalding tears, and the corridor outside the room where his Gran sat rocking to the strains of the Victrola canted and yawed in the distortion, leading to the bathroom on the edge of nothingness. He blinked to clear his eyes and sank to the floor, ample buttocks sliding down the yellowing wallpaper with a somnolent hiss, the whisper of secrets in a deserted corridor.

The music stopped, and so did the rocking, and for one glorious, delirious moment, he was seized with the frantic hope that Gran had heard the furtive slither of his buttocks over the warble of the music and was coming to scold him for his thoughtless clumsiness. She had done it a thousand times before, a ritual habitual if ever there was one, and he thought that if she were to fling open the door in a billow of stale lavender perfume and the parsimonious indignation of the painfully frugal, he would accept her chastisement as benediction. He licked his lips and pursed them in preparation for the stammered apology, but the words died in his throat. The door remained firmly shut, and from behind it came the patient scratch of the needle and the sibilant, crackling pop of static. A beat, and then another, and the music drifted from beneath the door once more.

No help there, then, he thought bleakly, and tittered weakly.

Is there ever? came the reply.

He gulped in an attempt to slow his triphammering heart and let his head loll bonelessly against the crumbling wallpaper and the cool, mildewed stone beneath. He rested his elbows on his knees and interlaced his fingers. Sweat rilled in his armpits, and he shrugged against the insistent tickle as it trailed lazily down his ribs.

There was nothing he could say to refute the voice. It held the ugliness of undeniable truth. He had feared the skittering, chitinous feet and the leering faces looming out of the unlighted places since before his pudgy toddler's legs had forgotten the feel of cotton nappies, and the episode of the photo album had only exacerbated his childish terror, elevated it to the sublime, a lurid, swooning ecstasy that pinned him to his bed and made him acutely aware of the life in his veins. After that night, he often awoke, screaming, from nightmares he only recalled when he returned to them. The Mediwizards at St. Mungo's had called it "night terrors". His Gran had called it childish nonsense and demanded that he stop.

"Your father never carried on so," she had told him as they had left St. Mungo's, and fixed him with a glare of gelid disapproval and craggy, thin-lipped disappointment. "Your father was a good boy and a brave man."

It was the disappointment that cut him to the quick, the knowledge that he would never be able to live up to his father's greatness. As far as she was concerned, he was a poor trade for the son that sat staring blankly at the walls of the closed ward, a runner of spittle on his papery chin, and he would always be tainted by the blood of his mother, who was no Longbottom, but for whom his brave, noble, world-saving father had settled when perfection to complement his own could not be found. That he was the only legacy his sainted father had been able to leave before the sanity was ripped from his mind in a flash of red was all that kept him from the foundlings' home, or so he had always suspected.

His Gran loved him. Of course she did. She fed him and clothed him, and at Christmas, there were always presents under the tree, even if one of them unfailingly proved to be a Remembrall wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with a scrap of ribbon. When school resumed and he had inevitably forgotten his new treasure in the rush to return to the sanctuary of Hogwarts, she sent them by owl post, along with an admonition to be more thoughtful.

For all that, her love was distant, not the unconditional warmth of a mother, but the diffuse affection of a sculptor for the lump of clay he hopes will be his masterwork. She loved him, not for who he was, but for all he could be if she could but mold him in the image of his father, a man that existed now only in her memories and in the photos he cherished in the fading sunshine of late afternoon and the rosy glow of twilight. Or had, anyway, before he had so foolishly let the shadows in.

Ah, so we come back to the photos at last, purred the voice that sounded so like Uncle Algie and yet somehow was not. I thought we might. Are you ready?

It's what Uncle Algie would sound like if his vocal cords were rotten and clotted with mud, he thought suddenly, and was seized with a vision of Uncle Algie, dead and bloated and with grave worms streaming from his ragged scalp and the sockets where his eyes had been, rising from the mud and silt of the lake bottom where he-Neville-had once nearly drowned. The lipless mouth offered him a rictus grin.

Hullo, Neville, boy, croaked Uncle Algie, and a bubble floated from the open mouth, holding a maggot in its fragile nucleus that spun lazily as it drifted toward the surface, a fetus dreaming its dreams in a transparent, moldering womb. Fancy another go at swimming? Bit old not to have cottoned on to it. I can't promise you'll float this time, but oh, the sights you'll see. Uncle Algie extended a fleshless hand from which tatters of robe still dangled.

He uttered a bark of screamy laughter and clapped a hand to his mouth. "An imagination is a terrible thing," he muttered. "Rather do without, thanks."

Besides, he thought grimly, I've already seen what's at the bottom of the lake, beneath the sucking mud and the centuries-old silt. I saw it on the day you threw me in and left me to sink or swim. They were there, peering from the black mud with runny, yellow eyes and reaching for me with fingers as yielding as rotting rushes. One managed to coil its decaying fingers around my trouser leg before you decided to fish me out. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if your groping fingers had missed the neck of my robes or come just a second too late. Sometimes I wish they had.

And no, he was not ready to think of the pictures and the day corruption had leached the solace from his bones and stolen the only mother he had ever known. Sitting in the corridor with his back pressed to the faded wallpaper, he doubted what he wanted mattered a whit; the capering imp hunkered at the base of his brain and in the greasy hollow of his stomach was determined to have its say, but he was still the son of Frank and Alice Longbottom, two of the finest Aurors to ever take the oath, and who, even reduced to breathing husks, confounded the Mediwizards with their will to live. So he pushed the inevitable aside and turned his mind to his Gran instead.

Gran was a good woman, and he loved her very much. She never beat him, and despite her starry-eyed delusions of his future grandeur, she had never called him a failure or a waste of skin. That was for the likes of Draco Malfoy, who thrived on malice, a lotus with roots in graveyard soil. She shared her bread and her meager pension with him, and never begrudged him his clothes or his schoolbooks. On rare occasions when he was young-and oh, they were all the rarer the older he grew-she called him a good boy, which, he supposed, was as close as she would ever come to saying the three words he most longed to hear. Her only sin was to ask of him deeds he could never achieve.

He always tried and never succeeded, and with each lapse, he saw her stern face and the weary disappointment that never seemed to leave it.

Except for when she went into his father's old room. The Victrola and the tinny, aged ululations it coughed from its gullet did what he could not; it could ease the burden she carried and make her forget that the boy sitting disconsolately in the parlor or in the bedroom down the corridor was not her golden boy. He envied the Victrola and its power, but he was grateful for it, too, because it relieved him of the unceasing need to wear his father's face. He could sit in his room and read Herbology journals and indulge in fantasies of his own making.

When he was small and lithe from hours of boyhood clambering, he had dreamed of playing Quidditch. He had thought to make his mark on the Wizarding world on the polished, spindly back of a broom, and he had passed many happy hours imagining himself in the uniform of the Chudley Cannons or the Wimbourne Wasps, cleaving through the air in a rush of wind, bent low over the shaft of his broom, a harpy of impending doom for the opposing team. The roar of the crowd was an intoxicant stronger than elderberry wine, and the fresh, clean fingers of the breeze against his cheeks as he defied the bonds of earth were unbearably sweet. He would write his legacy upon the heavens in the flowing, elegant script of the Wronski Feint and the Callaghan Roll, and wide-eyed children would read of his exploits in the pages of Greatest Quidditch Players Through the Ages, hunkered together in jostling bunches and sucking on Sugar Quills with lazy relish.

His first flying lesson at Hogwarts in his first year had put paid to that ambition with the merciless finality of snapping bone, and as Madam Hooch led him to the infirmary, muttering words of sympathy she had doubtless learned by rote over the course of her tenure, he had spared the broomstick a last doleful look, because he had known that he would never mount one again. And he never had. The broken wrist was mended in a careless trice, but for that boyhood fancy, there came no reprieve, and so he had cast about for a more attainable dream.

He had found his calling in the pregnant, pungent heat of the greenhouses and the green things that grew there, in the rich loam and the peaty, black Scottish soil that brought them forth. There, his fingers were deft and sure, and his mind, so lumbering and stupid in the Potions classroom, was agile and miraculously clear. He understood the needs of the Mandrake root and the Bubotuber pods; he never had to consult a book to see how much water was needed, or how much dung from the Thestral paddock. He simply knew, and the plants, which didn't care that he was fat, or that he would never be an Auror like his parents, grew for him.

He had hoped that his discovery of his aptitude would please his Gran. Here was something to which he could point and say, "If nothing else, I can do this." It was proof that she had not raised a useless, bumbling lump of accident. But when he had told her, the excitement he had anticipated had not come.

She had given him a strained, lopsided smile that did not light her eyes. "That's nice, dear, but what can you do with it?" she had said, and when he could he could produce no immediate answer, she had patted him on the head with her thin, gnarled hand and drifted into the kitchen to fix supper, leaving him slump-shouldered and disconsolate in the parlor.

Now, of course, he could think of myriad applications for the art of Herbology. It was knowledge culled from the spicy pages of textbooks and from the practicals and brisk, chirping lectures of Professor Sprout and the gift from a malicious changeling he had once called teacher. There was Medicinal Herbology and Research and the creation and testing of botanical pharmaceuticals. If he chose the latter course, he could conceivably become the preeminent supplier of botanical ingredients in Wizarding Britain and perhaps Europe, and in his giddiest fantasies, he saw Professor Snape forced to swallow his bilious pride and request his precious Potions ingredients from the quivering boy he had once deemed worthless. The thought of such ironic, peaceful vengeance never failed to gladden his heart.

But his Gran would never understand these aspirations, and so he no longer shared them with her, choosing instead to nurture them in the lush and secret garden of his heart and leave her to her music and her rocking chair and the corrosive disappointment that consumed her from the inside out and left her withered and desiccated on her bones, a flower that has seen too much water and too little light.

Nor did he see fit to share them with anyone at Hogwarts. His teachers and his Housemates were content to view him as the woebegone but sweet-natured boob who could be relied upon for nothing save his cack-handedness and leaden feet. Even Professor McGonagall, his Head of House saw him as a misfortune to be borne with patience and prim grace, and his whey-faced, slick-handed incompetence in Potions had earned him Professor Snape's undying antipathy. In his darker moments, he suspected that the man fantasized about dismembering him, pickling the remnants, and keeping him as a trophy and grim reminder as to the penalties for boobery.

Well, that was all right. On the rare occasions when he dared consider his nemesis for longer than it took to shudder, he pictured the fateful day when his "unrepentant and appalling idiocy" tipped the scales of Snape's clench-toothed tolerance and sent him beyond the Veil with the staccato, foot-tapping rhythm of a lethal cerebral hemorrhage, and the thought did not inspire pity, only a dizzy, dry-mouthed relief.

Even if he were so moved as to share his hopes for the future, to whom would he have turned? The teachers were occupied with the dissemination of knowledge and the preservation of a status quo that grew more precarious with each new day, and the boys in his year were absorbed in matters of the flesh. They mooned shamelessly at girls and studied each new pimple with the white-faced trepidation of the condemned. At night, the air in the dormitory was thick with the scent of sweat and furtive urgency, and the cold, grey light of morning revealed tissues hastily crammed under the bed or peering from a bin like cut blossoms.

With such concerns as these weighing heavily upon the minds of his compatriots, the dreams of a boy they all knew but never noticed were so much chaff in the wind. The only soul in the lot who paid any mind to him at all was Harry Potter, and as he was charged with the unenviable task of saving the world from the clutches of a Dark Lord risen from the dead and the forgotten wastelands of Albania, he could not find it in himself to impinge upon his patience with fairy tales of fortunes not yet made. After all, for Harry, there might not be any fortune at all.

And if, perchance, he had found a confidant in Harry, there were still secrets he could not tell, dark and slithering woes he would carry unto the grave and lay at the feet of the Fates.

Like us, whispered the voice in his head, and the glissade was cold as hoarfrost and simmering with rancid glee. It was trying to circle back to the subject of the photos and the end of his sugarplum fancies of a father who taught him how to fly and a mother who soothed away the fevers and nightmares of childhood with the back of a cool, smooth hand and a kiss gentle as breath on his forehead. You would never tell him about us. It would smack of madness, and you know all too well the penalty for that. He would smile and nod and mutter assurances, and they would come for you and bear you away to the stone walls that crush lives from bodies that yet breathe, that totter aimlessly to and fro on a path that never changes. Your much-longed for family reunion at last. You could sit and rock and croon, and perhaps in the diseased and eternal gloom of the Closed Ward, the secret of the gum wrappers would manifest itself.

At the mention of gum wrappers, his lips twitched in a fleeting, wistful smile, and his hand tingled with the memory of wax paper and aluminum grazing his palm. He closed his hand to keep it there, but the sensation slipped through his fingers like fog and made his eyes burn. He scrubbed at them with the sleeve of his robes and scoured the back of his teeth to quell the spiders' legs that danced lightly over them.

Those stupid wrappers. He had so many that he'd lost count. He got one every visit, and he had kept them all. He had tried to throw them out once, determined to purge himself of futile hopes, but in the end, he had returned the wrappers to the night table drawer beside his bed, where they formed a pathetic, shifting hillock that reminded him of a grave. It was his parents' memorial, and because it made his chest cramp with a pleuritic heaviness, he looked at it as seldom as possible.

And they were your epitaph as well, the embodiment of all your failures, all the castle you built upon shifting sand. Empty dreams and wasted potential. When you were young and the phrase irreversible brain damage was as incomprehensible as the sun, you frittered away the precious hours of your life pondering the mysteries in those pieces of wax and aluminum, so sure they were a secret code only you could decipher. You turned them in your palm and held them up to the candlelight, pressed them to your nose and inhaled the faint smells of paper and wax and sugar long gone. You grazed them with your tongue in the hopes of tasting lingering sweetness, but all you found was the yellow, greasy taint of illness and the damp rot of mildew and the rank smell of skin that has forgotten the caress of soap. The spun-sugar smell you had always associated with the mother of the photographs and your fervent, pointless wishes was forever supplanted by that stench. Another myth shattered by the cold hand of ruthless experience.

He groaned and put his aching head in his hands. He wanted the voice to stop, to let the weeping wounds of the past alone. He harrowed his hair with his fingers and grimaced at the sweaty, lank mat he found. His cheeks burned, and he wondered if a feverish ague had given rise to the voice. In a way, that was comforting because it meant that sooner or later, it would fall silent, banished by sleep and a liberal dose of beef broth.

The voice only cackled. It is not fever that gives us voice. We have been here since the taint crept in, carried by your clothes and the pores of your skin, incubated by the doubts that scar your mind like lesions. There was no fever on the night we first came to you, perching on the foot of your bed with our scrabbling feet and leering, devil's-imp smile, nor was there fever when we watched you from the musty dark of the wardrobe as you stared at the wand that was your millstone. Your skin was cool that night, almost cold. In fact, the only warmth on your face was the tears that coursed down your face as you turned that stick over and over in your hands and moaned in the back of your throat. Did you know that tears look like blood in the dark?

No, we are not fever, and there exists no fire in this world that can burn us away. You offered us a place when you opened that Pandora's Box of red velvet and went to Dante's bosom. We are for you and of you, and we will never leave.

The pictures. It always came back to the pictures and the day dream had turned to nightmare.

"Fine!" he shrieked. "Fine! Let's talk about the pictures." It emerged as a choked, reedy scream.

The warbling of the Victrola stopped abruptly. "Neville? What are you doing out there? Is everything all right?" His grandmother's voice, shrill and querulous from behind the door, and he could imagine her there, frozen in mid-rock, slippered feet pressed to the floor, skinny shanks poised over the rocking chair, the fragile arm of the Victrola needle pinched between her fingers.

He took a deep breath and willed the hysteria away before he answered. "Nothing, Gran. Just stumbled my own feet."

There was a considering pause. Then, "Merlin's beard, boy. Mind yourself. No need splitting your muddled head open." The words were faded by years of tireless repetition, and he wondered if they had worn a groove in her vocal cords to match the ever-deepening grooves in her beloved records.

"Yes, Gran. Sorry," he murmured absently, and smothered the maddening, inexplicable urge to clap his hand over his mouth and titter like a child caught pulling a mischievous prank.

The music resumed, and he released a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding. As terrible and wrenching as this battle of wills with his demons was, he did not want her to see, to interfere. It was a secret shame, like his first fumbling attempts at masturbation beneath the bedclothes in his third year and Hogwarts, and it was his alone. If he bested them, the victory would be his to savor, and if, as was more likely, they left him a trembling, impotent husk, she would not be there to tut and shake her head and pile one more disappointment on his heart.

"All right," he whispered. "The pictures."

At last, the pictures, crooned the voice, and the curdled anticipation in it made his skin crawl. Good. But not here. It's not enough just to think of them, envision them through the swaddling haze of distance and sepia memory. That would be cheating and hardly Gryffindor. You have to hold them in your hands again, trace their curling edges and follow the movements of your fingers down the brambled path of yesterday. You need to see them again for the first time.

The bloom of defiance that had warmed his chest when he had shrieked his concession died in a rush of sour spittle and a sudden desire to curl in upon himself and sleep. He had not touched the photo album since that fateful day, and the thought of feeling its heft in his hands and its aging nap beneath his fingers filled him with a cramping misery. On the day he had forsaken it in an ecstasy of terror, he had shoved it beneath the couch and left it for the predations of the dust bunnies that lived and multiplied there, forever and ever, amen. Out of sight, and for most of the time, blessedly out of mind.

He swiped his hand across raw lips. "No. Uh-uh." It was a moan. He shook his head vigorously. "I'm not- I'm...,"

Oh, but you must.

"N-," he began, and then a new voice spoke.

Yes, you are. You have to. You have been running in vain for far too long. If you don't, it will pursue you until the end of your days. Do you really want it to be the last thing you see as the blackness draws down and crushes the breath from your chest and Morpheus croons his lullaby for the final time? Purge it while you still have a chance and fear does not lie so heavily on your bones.

"Bit late for that," he croaked to the voice, which reminded him by turns of stalwart Professor McGonagall and the queer, dreamy genius of Luna Lovegood, who drifted through her days in a fugue of her own imaginings and crackpot superstitions.

Barmy as a worm-infested Snorkack she may be, but she was there when it mattered, wading into the fray in the Department of Mysteries with her wand at the ready and unwavering determination in those usually distant blue eyes.

There was that. Have you seen any Horglumps, Luna, dear? he thought with wry affection, but the memory of Luna and her fearless charge into the uncertain had heartened him, and he rose wearily to his feet, brushed the thin layer of dust from the back of his robes and headed for the stairs that led to the first floor and the parlor.

His feet thumped down the first riser and the second, and his already tenuous resolve wavered precariously in its moorings. His hand was slick and hot on the banister as he descended, and each hesitant step weighted his legs. He paused to wipe his hand on the front of his robes to dry it, and no sooner had he renewed his grip on the wood than it dampened again. He tried to roll his eyes in annoyance, but they only succeeded in starting from their sockets, and so he gave it up.

He thought of the wand tucked snugly into the inside pocket of his robes, not the holly and dragon heartstring albatross that had nestled beneath his heart for five interminable years and spent ten years before that in pride of place on the mantel, but the slender ebony and unicorn tail one he had found in Mr. Ollivander's shop after his father's wand had snapped into with the undeniable report of unintended liberation.

Oh, how his Gran had cried when he returned home after the Ministry fracas with his wand in two sad pieces. She had sunk into the nearest chair with a dazed expression on her pinched face, clutching the remnants of the wand in palsied, fumbling hands. She had held them to her chest and moaned, a guttural, broken sound that had reminded him of the lowing of a mortally wounded beast, and rocked to the rhythm of her grief. He had been sorry for the wound he had inflicted, but the furtive, giddy relief had been there, too, tucked and twitching in the corners of his carefully averted mouth, and a few weeks into the summer holiday, she had grudgingly taken him to Ollivander's for a wand exclusively his own. Ding dong, the legacy was dead.

He thought of drawing his wand, but decided against it. In his current state, he was likely to reduce the parlor to smoldering ash and tatters of smoking fabric at the merest stirring of the dust and shadows. He gripped the banister until his knuckles throbbed and concentrated on willing his leaden, reluctant feet down the stairs.

Journeys end in lovers' meeting, he thought for no reason at all, and shivered.

The parlor was situated to the left of the cramped vestibule, and as he drew near, his gaze drifted to the coat rack that stood beside the front door, its denuded, reaching arms stretching toward the milky afternoon light that streamed in through the mullioned window that looked down upon the vestibule and the landing like a leering, cataracted eye. For some reason, they unnerved him, and he found himself wishing for his House scarf. His throat was far too exposed.

The sentry and the Cyclops, he thought, and tittered, even as hard knots of gooseflesh rippled up his arms. I don't want them to see. He was seized with the urge to cover them with coats and curtains, to blind them.

Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. "Get a grip, Neville," he told himself in a voice that was not quite steady. "It's a coat rack and a window, and you've passed them both every day of your life." The absolute truth of this statement did nothing to soothe the primordial stirrings of unease that lodged in his belly like pebbles.

The window and the coat rack merely stared at him.

Soonest begun, soonest done, crooned the Lunagall voice, and that got him moving again.

His feet were too heavy to lift now, paving stones on the ends of his legs, and so he shuffled them across the floor, aged beyond his years by the weight that had settled over his shoulders and around his heart. The air was humid and cloying in his throat, and he coughed to clear it.

But even the reassuring Lunagall voice and his desperate resolve to be rid of the whispering voices and distorted faces that ruled his dreams were not enough to coax him over the threshold and into the parlor. He stopped at the border between the well-traveled vestibule and the lush, nigh-pristine parlor rug; his toes recoiled inside his trainers, lest the merest breach cause him to be jerked into a Neverland from which there would be no return.

There isn't, not really, but you've no choice, whispered the leering voice inside his head. For every good thing, there is a price, and it must be paid.

He rocked forward on his toes with the somnolent creak of leather. The room was the same as it had ever been. The ancient, weather-beaten sofa still squatted before the gaping, empty mouth of the fireplace, which would not breathe fire again until the coming of autumn. The grandfather clock still kept time and its counsel in the far corner. The dust still carpeted the window eaves and danced in languid whorls in the weak sunlight.

And yet...

There was something horribly amiss with the room. The shadow were heavier, imbued with a tangible weight, and they clung to the corners and the mantel like cobwebs; he was sure that if he reached out and touched it, his fingers would come away wet with viscous, black ichor. The ruff at the bottom of the sofa hid the puddling darkness and the dust bunnies from view, but he was sure that when he knelt and lifted it, they would seep out and stain the floor and the knees of his robes, cold and wet and sucking greedily at him with prying fingers.

Journeys end in lovers' meeting.

The thought twined around his consciousness in soporific, tickling tendrils, and he wrangled with the compulsion to lie down and sleep, let the crouching things sweep over him in a painless, consuming wave and leave a neat pile of bones in their wake. Gran could scoop him up and shake him into the bin with the carpet dust, and there would be no more talk about potential never reached and hearts ever broken. There would only be the mystery of Neville Longbottom and the drunken conspiracy theories hatched behind cupped hands in dingy pubs and the opulent salons of the rich and indolent.

Death Eaters, some would opine prosaically, and nod wisely over cups of steaming tea or sloshing tankards of ale or mulled mead. 'Course it was. How could it be anything but, what, with his parents bein' who they were. Poor Frank an' Alice Longbottom, mmm. Had the brains scrambled right out of their heads, they did, poor sots. Right there in front of the boy, as it happens. He wasn't but in nappies at the time, and I heard tell from an Auror mate of mine who worked the scene that he was quiet as a lamb when they found him, just sittin' there in his crib with his fist crammed in his mouth and his eyes wide as pie tins, starin' at his parents like he expected them to sit up and start makin' sense and stop starin' at the ceilin' like a pair of dead carp, eyes all glassy and fixed and mouths slack and dribblin' saliva onto the floor, hands curled into talons against their chests. Never made a sound until they carried him out, and then he starting howlin' fit to rouse the dead. Not his parents, though. They stayed still and silent. Nope. Nothin' ever woke them again. At St. Mungo's, the both of them, and they ain't ever comin' out.

He expected they would take a prodigious sip of ale or tea at that point and deliver their final pronouncement on the subject with a grimace that bordered on theatrical flourish.

Yes, Death Eaters, without question, and this emphatic declaration would be punctuated by a decisive nod, as though that settled the matter, not just for the tea party or the convivial gossip circle of the pub, but for all time. They did in the parents and simply came back to finish off the kit and tie up loose ends. Odd how they managed it, though, and odd how they left the grandmother untouched. Not a scratch on her, and to this day, she claims she never heard a thing. Says she was in her son's room, listening to music on her Victrola. Odd bird, that one. Always thought she was a bit touched. And then the chatter would turn by degrees to other topics and other scandals, and his fate would be consigned to the annals of unsavory wizarding lore.

In his mind's eye, which had grown delirious and more than a little mad with the endless menagerie of horrors he had conjured for himself over the course of these indeterminate hours, the faceless pub lout and the posh tea room toff had assumed the grinning, foppish face of Gilderoy Lockhart, who, when last he had seen him, had been ambling up and down the aisle of the Closed Ward and engaging in a futile endeavor to teach his parents the lost art of joined-up letters.

"I don't want to go in there," he said matter-of-factly to the coat rack behind him.

There was no answer. Only the silence, heavy and curiously predatory on his burning nape, and he was suddenly sure that if he didn't go into the room where all things waited with the doomed patience of forever, he would feel an insistent hand between his shoulder blades or perhaps the fleshless knobs of a coat rack against the hard, narrow rod of his spine.

But go he did. Because he was Gryffindor, and because he would not bring any more dishonor upon the House than he already had simply by virtue of being Neville Longbottom. His leg was trembling when he stepped over the threshold, but it did not buckle, and he did not retreat. He went into the belly of the beast with his head held high.

No monster leapt out to greet him, no ravening, slavering daemon with serrated claws and rotten fangs as old as the foundations of this house and filled with the virulent poison of memories unspoken. There was only the room, silent and full of dust, perfumed with closed age and the stale, dead embers of the hearth. The carpet did not turn to sand beneath his feet, nor did the clock stutter in its inexorable marking of the seconds. The sofa waited for him before the hearth, squat and smug and implacable as judgment.

He went to it on legs he could not feel, registering the progress of his movement only by the dull, anesthetized pressure in the balls and soles of his feet, and knelt reverently beside the tattered ruff of the sofa, a penitent come to long-overdue confession. He shifted uneasily for a moment and gathered up his courage. His heart was a hot, throbbing ball lodged in his throat, and now that the moment of truth had arrived, his bladder was three sizes too small, a small hardened stone beneath too-tight skin.

Loo, loo, skip to my loo; skip to my loo, my darling, he thought with wry amusement. Then, Here goes nothing. He bent, lifted the ruff, and peered into the Kingdom of Underneath.

It was precisely where he had left it all those years before, lying forlornly behind a wall of cobwebs so patiently woven by spiders that had never learned fear of tread or broom. There were tiny hillocks of dust bunnies, too, and bits of rubbish that had found their way there with the passage of years-a scrap of yellowing paper, a tarnished Knut, a cracked Remembrall he could not remember losing, gazing blindly at him with its lightless eye; a sock. There was also a gum wrapper, lolling against the bottommost corner of the photo album, and he wondered if perhaps his Mum had put it there, had reached a withered, sepia hand from between the pages to leave a token of her affection for him to find.

Why not? It's happened before.

The thought was patently absurd, but he believed it utterly, and a long-buried memory stirred beneath the rippling soil of his private garden, a recollection of supplicating hands like sun-dried leather and a voice choked with graveyard earth.

Come home, Neville, darling. Mummy's waiting.

He pushed the thought away and plunged his hand beneath the sofa. His fingers tangled in the thick cobwebs, and the feel of them reminded him of the flax he sometimes tended in Professor Sprout's greenhouses-dry and tenacious and elusive as smoke as it swallowed his groping hand to the wrist. That such a pleasant pastime should be associated with a madness such as this infuriated him, and he hissed between clenched teeth and seized the album's near corner with his thumb and forefinger. The cover was threadbare and dry as sloughed skin, and his hand tried to disengage from it even as he dragged it from its hiding place and into the scant light of the parlor.

Oh, Merlin, don't open it, moaned the voice of prudence inside his head as he stared at it with the morbid, swooning fascination of absolute recall. Don't open it, and for Circe's sake, don't touch it anymore. Let it go. Shove it back under the sofa, or better yet, offer it up to Hades and his dancing tongues of fire. Let it turn to ash and carry its pestilence to the Fates on a whorling plume of smoke. Blot it from your memory by any means necessary. Use a Memory Charm if you have to, lest ridiculous bravado tempt you to this insanity again. The taint has not left it.

The photo album lay on the carpet, still pinched between his thumb and forefinger. The scarlet covered was poxed with piebald patches where the velvet had grown threadbare and mottled. It radiated a sickly, leprous heat that was at once repulsive and alluring as forbidden flesh. He pried his fingers from the corner and trailed his forefinger over the cover as he done so often and with such relish as a little boy, and a convulsive shudder ran through him. It was wonderful and terrible all at once, and strangely vital beneath his fingertips.

I remember this. I loved it once, loved the magical, moving photos of Mum and Dad and what once was and can never be again. It was good magic, safe magic, and I loved to sit and inhale the exotic, spicy scent of must and paper and printer's glue. It was ambrosia and lavender and all that was good and kind. I went to sleep with the smell of it in my nostrils and the reassuring nap of it on my fingers like the fur of a beloved pet. It was home. It was my Victrola, my place of sanctuary. What changed it?

The day you let the taint in, of course. It wasn't entirely your fault; you were seven years old, and you had no inkling of what waited for you behind the door at the end of the corridor on the fourth floor of St. Mungo's, no idea that the simple act of taking your grandmother's hand and going whither she led you could have such dreadful consequences. Education can be a terrible thing.

"The pictures," he croaked, and his tongue darted out to moisten sandpaper lips.

Yes, said the voice. The pictures. It was gentle now, almost tender. Open the album. It is time.

Yes, it was. He took a deep breath and opened the album, mouth closed against the plume of dust that rose in the air like the first warning wisps of smoke. The spine creaked in protest as he stretched it carefully across his knees and settled his back against the edge of the sofa. The faded scents of binder's glue and crumbling parchment brushed his nose like the caress of old lace, and he wrinkled his nose to stifle a sneeze. He gingerly moved the frayed, satin placeholder from the crease and flipped to the first page.

His breath caught in his throat, and he recoiled in anticipation of the horror he expected to greet him from the pages, but when he looked, he found only his parents, smiling at him from the blurred windows of the photographs. The magic that had imbued them with motion had weakened, and so they did not move as spryly as they once had. His mother's genial wave had slowed to a dispirited flap of her hand, and his father's nervous sidling as he stood behind her had become the ponderous, weary shambling of a tin toy whose gears have run down from neglect and careless inattention, but they were not the gaunt, jaundiced, runnelled ghouls he had seen on the day he had run screaming from the room and vomited his lunch on the vestibule floor.

A strangled mewl escaped him, and he crammed his knuckles into his mouth to stopper the disbelieving sob that was massed in his throat like a gobstone.

I saw it. It happened, he thought feverishly. They changed. Their faces withered and elongated, and their teeth were yellow as old bone inside blackened, shriveled gums. Their fingers curved into fleshless talons, and they reached for me with burning, pitiless hands and eyes like scoured slate. They wanted me to join them just as I had always wanted to when I was small, only there would be no idyllic strolls through the botanical gardens or along the banks of the Thames while I chased indignant ducks in my rubbered feet, but a sojourn in a curtained cubicle that stank of disease and sour sweat and death but narrowly averted.

Yes, you did, agreed the voice, still in that same gentle tone. You saw it, and now and then, it still haunts your dreams, but now you need to remember what happened before, remember the events that brought the taint into the wonderland.

His brow furrowed in confusion. "I don-,"

But the soil of his private garden wasn't just rippling now. It was heaving and cracking in jagged rifts of earth that swallowed dirt and blossoms and exposed fragments of a childhood he had meticulously buried beneath years of patient denial and the tireless crafting of a happy illusion. The hard scrape of knuckle against tooth and gum was not enough to quash the plaintive whimper that escaped him.

"I-,"

I know you don't, said the voice. But it will be all right. You don't have to tell the story-I'll do you that one kindness, at least-but you have to listen.

He shook his head vehemently. "No."

The voice was implacable. Yes. You have to listen, and you have to see. You cannot look away.

He moaned and shook his head again. He did not want to hear this story, and he most certainly didn't want to see it. He didn't need to see it. His eyes had been blind, but he had felt it all along, a blind child divining the secret language of Braille beneath his groping fingertips. But it was already beginning, and resistance had never been his strong suit. Soon, the singsong voice had ensnared him, and he could only follow where it led.

Just like Gran's hand, he thought dreamily, and then the story swept over him.

Once upon a time, you were seven years old, and one day, not long before Christmas, your grandmother told you that, at long last, you were going to see your parents, who you had not seen for a very long time. In fact, you had not seen them since the night they were spirited away to the faraway land of St. Mungo's by a Curse from Dark knights. You were so small that you hardly remembered them at all.

And so, when your grandmother told you that you were going to visit them, you were overjoyed. After all, you had so many questions to ask them. Did they miss you? Did they love you? When were they coming home? If he came back, did they want him to bring them one of the gingerbread men you and Gran made on Christmas Eve? You were so excited, and your head was so brimming with a thousand and one queries that you drifted through those heady days until the trip in a joyous daze. You scarcely slept, and when you did, it was to dream that you had tumbled headlong into the world of the photo album you kept under the sofa and over which you pored for hours every chance you could.

And so, on that morning when she called you to fetch your mittens and your muffler and come along, you left the parlor without a backward glance. You forgot two things. Your muffler, which Gran retrieved with thin-lipped irritation, and the photo album. You left it open on the floor, its pictures exposed to whatever predation the shadows desired. You didn't mean to leave it there, so forlorn and unprotected, but it was in your nature to forget. Gran always said you had a head like a sieve.

She put the muffler and your head and tightened her scarf around her throat, and then she held out her hand and said the magic words. Give me your hand, Neville. And like a fool, like a child, you listened. You slipped your small, chubby hand into her narrow, weathered one, and the closing of her fingers around your wrist was as the snapping of the iron shackle. There was no escape from that moment onward, but you did not know that then, were blissfully unaware that not all adventures were grand, and not all of them ended in lovers' meeting.

In your ignorance, you left the safety of hearth and home gladly, dancing and squirming as she shut the door against the wintry bite of the wind and the shrewish howl of Jack Frost's imps in the eaves and cornices. You stomped your rubbers in the snow to hear it crunch beneath your feet, and you sent plumes of steaming breath into the air to watch the faces and shapes it made, and told yourself that they were Patronuses, the secret soul magic all wizards know. You didn't even mind when Gran Disapparated with you in her grip and your eyes felt as though they must surely burst from their sockets.

How strange that when you opened your eyes again, you found yourself not at a great medieval fortress with ramparts and royal banners that snapped and popped in the wind, but in a cramped, dirty alley overflowing with garbage and facing a storefront with whitewashed windows. You thought that she had erred, had gone too far or not far enough, and you opened your mouth to ask her what had gone wrong, but before you could speak, she was striding in the direction of that blind, dirty window, pulling you resolutely in her wake.

What are we doing here, Gran? you asked, sure that she was playing a Christmas joke. Surely your brave Mummy and Daddy could not be here, in a ramshackle shoppe that even the bustling Muggles ignored.

But all she said was, Be quiet, Neville, boy, and mind what I tell you.

She tugged you onto the pavement in front of the shop, her fingers hard and biting against your frozen flesh, and you stared at the sad displays through the grimy glass in mute fascination. Drooping hats and tatty purses arranged haphazardly on a teetering table. Gloves yellow with age. A pair of Muggle shoes from which one heel had broken. The corpses of dead mice and the bric a brac of a world with which you coexisted but did not interact.

But it was the mannequins that fascinated you the most, the frozen people with lidless eyes and unsettling gazes that saw nothing and everything all at once. They were alien and terrifying, monsters masquerading in human skin, dispassionate as the plastic from which they were molded, yet possessed of an avid, leering malevolence. Their mouths were fashioned into polite smiles on their blank faces, and you knew they could not move, but you knew, in the place where all the secret truths lie, that when the sun set, mouths gifted neither tongue nor teeth would whisper into the watches of the night, the breath no sane god ever granted them would fog the window glass, and the hands that stretched forth to showcase their gaudy wares in the light of day would beckon to little boys who ventured too near under the abetting veil of night, and ensnare them forevermore in their strangling embrace, tendrils of diseased wisteria around unwary throats.

Come, little boy. If we meant to harm you, would we be standing here, in the darkest part of the forest? they asked slyly as they returned your stare with their smooth-marble eyes, and though their expressions shifted not at all, you felt them smile.

You whimpered and recoiled, but your grandmother's grip was iron, and her patience was thin. Merlin's beard! They're only mannequins. Now stop behaving like a child and come along.

Here there be monsters, you wanted to tell her. You wanted to tell her that there were worse terrors in the world than the crouching bogey in the wardrobe and his ally beneath the bed, but your tongue had cleaved itself to the roof of your mouth, and the warning lodged in your throat, and it was too late, too late, because she was pulling you through the shimmering, syrupy glass of the shoppe and into a drab, grey corridor that reeked of astringent and starch and sour illness.

This was not the St. Mungo's your bright, child's imagination had envisioned, the regal medieval citadel of majesty and might where heroes lived in sweet repose. There were no damsels with garlands in their hair, no lyres or roaring hearths and sagging banquet tables, only white-smocked matrons trundling down the corridors with carts full of porridge that looked like construction paste. No one spoke as you entered, and there was no laughter. Indeed, there was no sound at all except for the discreet squeak of crepe soles on stone and the scrape of hinges as the matrons delivered their cargo to the unseen occupants of the rooms that lined the corridor. None of them acknowledged Gran as she passed, and when you offered one of the matrons a shy wave, she did not return it.

Down the corridor, past the receptionist, who did not look up from her sheaves of parchment, and up the narrow, stone stairs. You passed the Accidental Magic Ward, the Trauma Ward, and the Maternity ward, and all the while, she squeezed your wrist in a vise grip and pulled you inexorably upward through the concentric circles of human misery.

Then she was stepping primly onto the fourth floor and marching toward a door marked Closed Ward. The ominous finality of the phrase rekindled the swooning dread the mannequins had inspired. Whatever walked there, walked alone, and you had no desire to join it.

Like it or not, that was your destination, and there was no hesitation in your grandmother's stride as she approached. She rapped smartly upon the door, and the echoes reverberated throughout the corridor like the tolling of a bell.

Knock, knock, you thought, and the answer came unbidden. Who's there?

Who was a nurse, as it turned out, square-jawed and stern as she peered suspiciously through a crack in the door and repeated the question. Who's there?

The Longbottoms, came the reply, and your grandmother's chin had jutted in unconscious defiance.

The door swung open then to reveal a gloomy, airless room divided into curtained cubicles, a mausoleum of the not yet dead. Most of the curtains were drawn, but a few stood open to your horrified, fascinated gaze. It was a menagerie of horrors untold, a retinue of oddities and shambling travesties that made you want to scream and laugh at the same time. Some bore obvious signs of their affliction-missing limbs and tumorous growths that contorted them into shapes no human form was ever meant to assume; one woman had become a weeping sore that stank of putrescence, her skin an angry, running red. All that remained of her humanity were here eyes, wide and bright with terrible awareness. She mewled as you passed, and perhaps it was a harmless greeting, but the nurse scowled and yanked the curtain closed.

Others were unmarked. They sat in their beds or wandered the narrow aisle between the beds with nary a blemish. Those who walked hummed as they sauntered and shuffled and strutted about their rounds to nowhere and never, and a tall, thin wizard who might have passed for a business wizard had he not been wearing the dull grey hospital tunic greeted you with a touch of three bony fingers to the brim of a non-existent wizard's hat.

Good day, young sir, he had said with brisk jollity, and you smiled at him until you noticed his eyes, distant and far too bright in his gaunt face. May the Devil take you and eat your considerable innards in a pie.

That will be quite enough from you, Mr. Grenadier, the nurse had said sternly, and steered him back to his bed.

And then, in a moment you will remember until the first shovels of earth patter over your coffin, she marched to the back of the room and pulled aside the curtain.

Mr. and Mrs. Longbottom, she had said cheerfully, you have visitors.

And you began to scream.

They could not be your parents, those unspeakable atrocities propped side by side in a bed with threadbare linens pulled up to their emaciated hips. Your parents were heroes. Your Gran had told you so times uncounted, and heroes did not sit in their beds and stare at nothing with eyes like polished marble. They did not have sunken, jaundiced skin pulled too tightly over pikes of brittle bone or sparse wisps of lank, white hair that sat atop their scalps in scabrous patches. It countermanded the immutable laws of the fairy tale. No, these creatures were not your parents. Your parents were young and vital and merry, and they walked in the gardens at Kew. The pictures said so, and the pictures did not lie.

You screamed and screamed in mindless denial of the truth your eyes and the nurse would have you believe. There was rage in your howl, and confusion and defiance, and you closed your eyes to shut out the sight of the figures on the bed. You would go on screaming until the evil curse was broken and the illusion shattered; you would bellow until the masks fell away and your real parents stood before you, whole and unbowed and anxious to gather you in their arms.

The slap was hard and bruising across your cheek, and it sliced through your hysteria with cruel totality. The scream died as though it had never been, and you blinked at her in owlish incomprehension, one hand coming up to touch the bloom of heat on your otherwise numb face.

Stop this foolishness at once, she hissed through gritted teeth. I brought you here today because I thought you were old enough to behave, and here you are, screaming like a toddler. Your father must be appalled, seeing you like this.

On the bed, the thing that wore your father's name like an ill-fitting costume blinked sedately, a thin runner of saliva glistening on its papery chin. If it had noticed your outburst at all, it gave no sign. In fact, it had not changed at all since the nurse had exposed this sad and secret show to the diseased light of the room. You swallowed the suicidal urge to laugh.

Those aren't my parents, you told her matter-of-factly.

Her eyes narrowed, and her nostrils flared. Of course they are. I'm not in the habit of playing games, Neville, and I've no time for this one. Now say hello to your parents, she commanded, and shoved you forward.

It wasn't the bony goad of her hand that compelled you to obey, nor was it the looming threat of punishment for your outburst. You moved because you were unwilling to concede defeat and let the fairy tale die. The seed that would one day convince the Sorting Hat to place you in the pantheon of heroes when all you had ever shown yourself to be was a coward refused to yield in the face of insurmountable truth. You had to know beyond all doubt, to look into those dusty-marble eyes and see the family resemblance no illness could ravage.

You crept to the edge of the metal bedframe on trembling knees and placed your hand on the cold steel. Sweat beaded on your forehead and prickled on your palms, but you gathered your courage, cleared your throat, and whispered, Happy Christmas, Mummy.

The wizened crone on the bed said nothing. She stared at the far wall, and her fingers plucked ineffectually at the coverlet puddled at her hips. The man beside her gave a reedy grunt. That was all. No flicker of recognition kindled in their eyes, no stirring of memory untainted by the searing claws of Cruciatus. They simply sat, withered and stinking of old sweat and long confinement, and as the silence stretched awkwardly into minutes, your childhood illusions crumbled into dust.

I'm glad to see you.

A lie almost worthy of Salazar Slytherin, and oh, how it hurt to tell it for the hot cramp of grief in your chest. It wasn't right, this truth, wasn't fair, and all you wanted was to retreat to the safety of the parlor and the book of yesterday. You shuffled your feet and fixed your gaze on the smooth stone beneath your shoes.

I love you, you muttered in a small, tremulous voice to a russet stain just beyond the tip of one scuffing shoe, and turned to flee.

And that was when your mother, who had heretofore displayed the sentience of potted clay, sprang to malevolent life. One moment she was sitting on the bed, staring into thoughts only she could see, and the next, she scrabbling from beneath the bedclothes with startling, serpentine grace and the speed of the damned. The sheets fell from her scrawny waist, and just before the clammy, kiln-fire grip of her gnarled fingers coiled around your wrists, you glimpsed her wasted thighs, slat-thin and white as the sheets that had once covered them. You were seven years old and ignorant of the secret vices of the flesh-that knowledge was six years away-but it was indecent all the same for a boy to see such a forbidden place, and you tore your gaze away, your cheeks hot with shame.

Her fleshless, burning hand shot out and seized your own, and when you looked into her empty, bulging eyes, reason fled. You threw back your head and howled, keened like an animal caught in a killing snare, because they were devoid of all but the unassailable truth. The thing on the bed was not your mother anymore, if it ever had been.

"It was the mannequin people," Neville moaned to the empty parlor, and hugged the photo album to his chest as though it were a talisman against the crushing tide of memories that washed over him with painful acuity. "It was the mannequin people. They came in the night and stole her away and lived inside her face." His nostrils filled with the remembered stench of unwashed flesh and madness-brine and old cottage cheese.

Yes, resumed the voice, soft as a sigh against the shell of his ear. They did. They put on her face like a Halloween mask and leered at the world from behind the comfortable façade of unfortunate lunacy, but their eyes gave them away. Their eyes they could not change. They were as blank and dead as alabaster statuary, bits of isinglass inside her face.

You saw them and knew that your worst suppositions about the mannequins in the deserted shoppe were true. They did move under the abetting cloak of night and whisper to one another in furtive voices full of sand and clandestine malice. They looked out upon the sleeping world with their wide, covetous eyes and plotted to seize that which had been denied them, the Divine animus that would bid them walk beyond the confines of their glass walls, and at least two of them had found a way to walk in the light of day, diseased as it was by the rank breath of the dying.

You saw all of this and howled in terror and stark comprehension. You would have shouted a warning, but the hand wrapped around your wrist, hot and hard and unnatural as plastic against your flesh, had throttled your tongue, and you could only shriek incoherently as you struggled and flailed at the grinning dybbuk that held you fast.

The nurse rushed to prise her fingers from you, and your Gran shouted at you to stop carrying on so, her voice high and shrill with outrage and panic, and impossibly distant. But you did not stop, could not stop. If you stopped, you would not start again. The grinning fetch crouched on the bed would slither down your unguarded throat in a sour mist and take up residence in your lungs and heart and the base of your brain, a parasite that would leach you of all your memories until you were nothing but a shambling husk of wattled flesh and ruined bone, stripped of all but the primordial will to survive. You screamed to beat the devil and save your soul.

Your grandmother slapped you in an effort to bring you to heel, but you barely felt it in the extremity of your terror. You kept on screaming when she picked you up and carried you bodily from the room. You were still trying to scream even after she placed you in a full Body Bind and floated you down the street as she stomped along behind you, promising reprisals beyond reckoning. No sound emerged from between your locked jaws, but your wails tickled your sinuses like the promise of a sneeze, and they did not stop until you drifted over the threshold and the door slammed behind you and shut the monsters out.

There was no porridge for you that night, but that was fine. You were sure you'd never eat again. You cowered beneath the coverlet and moaned, your belly a hot, shriveled ache under your cupping hand. You buried your head beneath the pillow and listened to the tinny strains of the Victrola and the popping creak of the rocker's runners through the wall. They were familiar sounds, comfortable, and on any other night, they would have lulled you to sleep, but on that night, sleep never came. You lay in your bed and strained your ears for the stealthy scrape of approaching feet or the chitinous clitter of nails on the frozen pane of your bedroom window. You went on listening long after the Victrola had closed its petals for the night and your grandmother had grudgingly surrendered to her own bitter dreams. You held your breath, the better to hear the surreptitious snick of a latch being eased from its casement.

But if they crept beneath the window eaves or skulked in the dark corners of the lavatory, they never came for you, and the terrors of childhood are fleeting, and so when the hours passed with no demon's breath on your face, you slipped from your bed and padded down the stairs to the parlor in search of the album. Your grandmother had found her solace, and now you wanted yours. It was only fair, and even after all that you had seen in the dirty halls of St. Mungo's, you still believed in fairness. You still do.

It was on the floor where you had left it in your haste, and you nearly stepped on it with your slippered feet. You picked it up and carried it to the divan, and under the green glow that heralds both death and knowledge, you groped for bedrock amid the madness.

There she was, your fair mother, smiling at a son she had never seen and but scarcely held. Her fingers still twiddled in merry greeting, and though you could not see them, her eyes still twinkled with secret delight, but the darkness had turned her fingers to the scuttling legs of a spider, and her eyes had become inscrutable, black pits that had no end. The skin you so often imagined to be soft as cream was suddenly thin as parchment paper and tinged the sickly green of decay. You smothered a scream with the back of one disbelieving hand and tried to push the album away, but you could not close it. You could only stare at the picture gone horribly amok.

The present had subsumed the past, and the mother-creature gazing out at you from behind the sepia patina of old photographs was not the cherubic, rosy-cheeked young woman of 1980, but the wasted, scrabbling, mad travesty that spent its days sloughing skin and hours in a bed on the Closed Ward. It smiled a vulpine smile, all yellow teeth and cracked, pitted lips, and you recoiled, pressed your buttocks against the far arm of the divan and drew your knees to your chest.

Hello, Neville, the mother creature said, its voice a high, insectile buzz from behind the thin sheet of plastic that held the photographs in place. Don't be afraid, Neville. It's Mummy. Come to Mummy, darling. It's what you've always wanted, isn't it? it crooned.

It reached out a long, skinny arm in invitation, and if a member of the Wizengamot were to ask you under penalty of death, you would swear upon Merlin's grimoire that the plastic bulged outward at the weight of those fleshless fingers. It creaked at the pressure from dirty, ragged nails that protruded from the ends of stiff, eager fingers.

For the third time that night, you screamed, because you knew how its touch would feel, a feverish, simmering grip that festered with disease and lunacy. If it touched you, sanity would be reduced to smoldering cinders and when your Gran found you, your hair would be white as the Christmas Day snow. You seized the album in your hands and slammed it shut, screaming all the while, and in a blind panic, you shoved it beneath the divan.

Your grandmother found you huddled on the stairs, shivering with terror, a puddle of vomit at your feet. Shock had rendered you inarticulate, and when she demanded to know what had prompted this latest round of the screaming memes, you could only shudder and babble about the mannequins in your mother's skin.

You spent the rest of the night curled in a ball beneath your bed, eyes fixed on the baseboard and the balls of lint that nested there in a cheerful colony, and counted the fly specks on the plaster. And that was where I found you. You were so small and so pitiful that I was almost sorry to set down roots in your private garden, but I had no choice, and I still don't. I am not kind, and I am not fair, but I am yours.

Neville was distantly aware that there was a slippery warmth on his cheeks. He touched his fingers to his cheeks and was surprised to discover tears beading on his fingertips like dew. He was crying, and that realization undid him completely. He covered his face with his hands and wept.

He could not remember the last time he had cried. The visits to St. Mungo's had long since ceased to inspire anything but the dull resignation of growing up and accepting the irrefutable. Even the once poignant communion of the wrappers now produced only the briefest twinge of grief and longing. He wondered briefly how much of an ungrateful bastard that made him.

"Moody," he said thickly through a hitching sob. "It was Professor Moody. In his office. The last time I cried."

The irony that he had done his last bit of real grieving in front of one of the sadists who had caused it was not lost on him, and he laughed, a gagging, bubbling guffaw that dissolved into more harsh weeping, and he did nothing to stem the tide. Absurd as it seemed, the tears soothed him, loosened the knot in his chest one drop at a time.

Catharsis, he thought nonsensically, and vomited soundlessly over the edge of the divan, a wrenching spasm that made his stomach throb and his eyes water.

He cried for it all there in the parlor, all the dreams that he had lost in the bright, red glare of unbridled rage, and all the dreams that his parents would never see him fulfill. He cried for his mother's wave and her beautiful smile, gone to tartar and rot in St. Mungo's. He cried for his father, who had once faced down four Death Eaters in a standoff in Derbyshire, and who had gone to ignominious retirement from Aurory in his bedroom slippers and his nightcap. He cried for Uncle Algie, who meant well, but who had the sense of driftwood, and who still drank too much on his sister's birthday.

But mostly he cried for his Gran, whose life had come to an end on the night her son forgot his. She lived and breathed, and the merchants in Diagon Alley still sold her their wares, but time had frozen for her and would never start again. She would always look at him and see in his face the son of whom she had been so unceremoniously robbed, and she would wonder why and how the man she had so lovingly and assiduously reared had so suddenly tumbled into childhood again. To her tongue, his name would always have a single syllable, and there would always be the music and the room at the top of the stairs to keep the truth at a comfortable distance.

"Oh, bugger," he managed weakly when he had regained his composure. The strains from the Victrola drifted to his ears. "Oh, bugger."

What are you going to do now? asked the Lunagall voice.

He looked at the album still in his hands and up the stairs at the closed door of his father's room, where his grandmother rocked away the heartbeats of her life, cushioned by the sweetness of the past. He knew what the voice was asking, and he was not sure he could. They were all he had left of his parents, and though he was afraid of them, he was also afraid to let them go.

It does not do to dwell on dreams, Mr. Longbottom, said the Lunagall voice. Particularly those from which you have long been awakened. Do you want to spend the rest of your days clinging to a dead past and mooning over photographs while the walls molder around you and this house becomes a tomb? When your grandmother dies, will you take her place in the rocking chair and hold vigil over a life no one-not even you-can recall? Let it go. Build a life of your own and let your mother and father rest. You have all been tortured enough.

Such sensible advice, but it was traitorous to cast them aside after all these years, to leave them for the flames and pretend they had never been. It was not what a good son did. A good son kept his parents' memories and the useless bits of paper the ghost of his mother thrust into his hand; he tended them as he tended his private garden, with love and care. That was a fact even the Hufflepuffs knew.

Not forgetting, Mr. Longbottom. Never forgetting. Just...love without expectation.

He blinked and looked at the picture in his lap. His mother was smiling at him, but through the blur of tears, it was a monstrous rictus, the leering, rubber face of the storefront mannequin that lived in St. Mungo's in the cubicle marked "Longbottom".

That decided him, and he closed the album with a snap and drew the wand from the inside pocket of his robes.

My wand, he corrected himself. Mine. No strings attached. He pointed it at the empty fire grate and whispered, "Incendio!" It sounded like a prayer in the silence of the room.

For once, his magic did not fail him, and fire kindled in the hearth. He stood for a moment and let the sudden warmth wash over his face, eyes closed and chin upturned, a flower seeking the sun's caress. The photo album was heavy on his lap, and the velvet beneath his palm was an exquisite roughness against his palm. He was seized by a sweet pang of nostalgia, and his grip tightened convulsively.

My Mum and Dad are in here. If I throw it into the fire, there is no going back. The pictures will be reduced to cinders, and all the king's horses and all the king's men will never be able to mend them again. I'll lose them forever.

You never had them.

The warbling from the Victrola reached a crescendo, and with a breathless cry, he threw the photo album into the flames. It landed with a soft, decisive thump, and in the space of seconds, the edges had curled and blackened. The cover fell away in a shower of sparks, and his mother's face greeted him. It wavered and shimmered, miraculously untouched by the voracious fingers of the fire, and in the brief instant before her face ran and dripped in the blast-furnace heat, he saw her brilliant, lovely smile and her twiddling fingers.

Hello, Neville, and goodbye. Mummy loves you.

"I love you, too, Mum," he murmured.

He watched the flames until there was no trace of the album and the ashes had ceased to flutter and skirl in the grate, and then he closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of smoke and benediction. His eyes stung, and there was a lump in his throat, but his shoulders were no longer burdened with the weight of a responsibility he could not name, and the breath came easily to his lungs. When he stepped forward to bank the dying embers with the fire poker, his tread was curiously light.

Gran would be furious if she ever found out what he had done, but that was all right. The deed was done, and he found he was not sorry for it. Whatever charm the pictures had once held for him, it had curdled, soured into poison, and the fire had burned it away. He was alive, and he was free, and he had a chance now to make his own path. His name would never grace the fabled halls of Aurory, and he would never be the smiling face on the Quidditch poster, but he would find his niche, and when he did, he would make sure that when his name was spoken, it was spoken with dignity, not because of who his father had been, but because of who he had become.

The music still wafted from the room at the top of the stairs, and he thought about asking his Gran if she wanted to go for a walk with him to see the perennials in bloom, but he dismissed the idea. She had long since lost her love of bright things, and he suspected that for her, it was already too late. She had made her choice, and he had made his, and he could not save her.

He left the parlor, and with a last look at the narrow mouth of the stairs and the door to the room that time forgot, he wished her well and opened the front door. The sun was bright and hot and welcoming against his cheeks, and when he closed the door, he was humming. It was a beautiful day, and he had a garden to tend.