A Scent of Memory

A Scent of Memory

He found the parchment wedged into the corner of one of his old school trunks. Water-stained and stiff, it must have been there for years. He prised it out and unfolded it, but found that the ink spread out in a spidery wash. Out of that halo rose the ghost writing: I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death, the words of a ghost-boy who had died by growing up, recording the words of a ghost-man growing nightshade and corruption in some unmarked hole. Harry liked to think that there were brambles too, great forbidding thorny vines that grew brittle and heavy in winter, but white and fragrant flowers in spring. The flowers, he decided, would open only at night. Their pale luminescence would shine in the gloom and they would release the haunted sweet-rot smell of decomposing flesh. Moths would come, attracted by the little moon-flowers and brush the gray powder of their wings upon the vines as they struggled in the tiny jaws of bats, and the bats would glide off into the night, covered in pollen the color of old blood, looking for new moths and new vines.

In summer, the vines would be laden with berries, pendulous and black. They would swim with rainbows like oil-slicked pavements in the rain, but wizard children would see them and think only of soap bubbles and bath time. Their parents would slap their hands away in suspicion, but the children would always return and the berries would be sweet, but with a taste that made you sad... even though it turned out that they weren't poisonous after all.

"Harry? Are you ready yet?" Hermione peered around the door. "Are you alright?"

"Fine."

"Everyone else is all packed, but we need someone to help carry Parvati's trunk: it's too heavy."

"Oh... Alright." He closed his own trunk with a bang and followed Hermione out.

Parvati's trunk was, indeed, too heavy for one person, or even two. Moreover, it could not be lifted with the aid of magic. Magical perfumes, he was told, were highly volatile when exposed to even the mildest charms, hence Parvati had had the foresight to purchase a shielded trunk, but not the foresight to make it a liftable one (the trunk shielded its contents by repelling spells including the efficacious leviosa family). Harry didn't understand how one girl could own so many... well... things, but he remembered the trunk from Christmas Holiday when he had been recruited to carry it. This is the last time I'll be annoyed at Parvati for over-packing, he thought. This is the last time I'll carry this trunk down these stairs. This is the last time I'll bark my shin on the common room table on the way out. Leaving Parvati and her trunk on the front steps, he returned to his dormitory. The room was nearly empty and he imagined that it should have felt small because of how he had grown since he had first inhabited it, or large because everyone had gone, but it neither expanded nor contracted in the funhouse mirror of his memory. Instead, it had begun to fade. Already, he felt it was unreal. These stones had absorbed nothing from the room's inhabitants; the walls would yield back no echo of his time here. And soon, very soon, a new group of first years would come and the room would be theirs. This is the last time it will be my room, thought Harry. He put his last book in his last trunk and took a last look around the dormitory. The summer light swam in through the aging windowpanes where the glass had run like rainwater on its inexorable course towards the earth. "Gravity," Hermione had said and then told him about the viscosity of glass, a liquid so slow that it fooled the human eye. He marveled that wizards had never found a way of halting its progress, but perhaps they had simply never thought of it. He went then, his trunk sweeping before him like a funeral barge gliding out to sea. In it lay the stained potions notes and the detritus of his childhood. The dormitory stood vacant, and outside the window, the ravens were calling.

On the train, he considered the possibilities of the lunch cart. The pasties were greasier than he remembered them, and left a slick feeling in his mouth that no amount of swallowing would dispel. Perhaps they had always been so and he had been too starved or happy to notice. He noticed now. What was a pumpkin pasty, he wondered. It didn't seem to be purely pumpkin this time, but it didn't taste much like mutton or beef either. "Cat," Ron decided, "they're a greasy lot." Hermione sniffed and told him to stop being a baby. Crookshanks looked balefully at the pasties. "No, Sweetums," said Hermione, "you're on a diet."

Greasy, thought Harry. He knew what grease made him think of when it wasn't in pasties. Grease made him think of dungeons fuming with netherworldly smoke and belching sulfur fumes and frightened students, of late nights in the common room writing painful compositions on endless scrolls of paper. Now grease made him think of lunch carts brimming with snacks that dripped their murderous ichor onto innocent paper napkins, staining them translucent. Would it not be fitting, he wondered, to be digested in truth by those who had consumed you in spirit. Was there not some cosmic irony or even rightness in returning to churn the bellies of the same ungrateful children who had tormented and been tormented by you. And we'd never know, he thought. But, of course, he did know that it couldn't be so. He must have been far away, or someone would have found him. Unless they had hidden him... but why would anyone take so futile an action? He imagined the trolley lady returning to her snack-making lair and pouring out her great cauldron where she had rendered the fat, spilling a tiny bundle of bones and dry, black hair upon the flagstoned floor. The bones would go for soup making, but the hair she might keep in a little sachet with lavender in it in the top drawer of her bureau, and for ever afterward, her slips and great, white girdles would smell musty and sour and she would wonder whether the lavender were starting to go bad.

Crookshanks, meanwhile, had tired of watching the inert pasties and was instead pressing himself against the window.

"It's the birds," said Ron. "I'll bet he wants to catch one."

"Mummy's kitty wouldn't do that, would hims?" cooed Hermione. "Besides," she continued, more practically, "they're ravens: They're much too large for him to kill."

Ron sniffed. "I'll bet he wouldn't mind a crack at them though."

The birds dipped and whorled in a great soot stain of a flock.

"I wonder what they're looking for," said Ron, and Hermione lectured at them.

"The Raven," she said, "is the largest of the corvidae, which are in turn the largest of the passeriformae or songbirds." Brilliant, but territorial, the raven mated for life. They were known as gods or messengers of gods in ancient times, which made them feared, and as nuisances to farmers in modern times, which got them shot.

The cadence of her voice soothed him as he stared out at the wheeling birds. He wondered when she'd begun speaking that way to the cat, as if it were a baby, like Aunt Petunia with Dudley maybe. It must be some sort of nesting instinct Ð like birds Ð just one of those things about girls that mystified him utterly. Horrifying to think of Hermione turning into Aunt Petunia, but then it was only a cat, so he supposed it wouldn't be so bad if it got as bloated as Dudley and as bad tempered. Maybe he almost didn't mind Dudley since he'd never be seeing him again, or he didn't imagine that he would be. Hermione was joining some sort of research project, likely with many other promising witches with their own cats with faces that looked as though they'd been sat upon. Ron had a job with Gringotts. Both of them were starting immediately. Harry had other plans.

They passed from the hills into broad, flat, golden-green places. Harry imagined the blast of a shotgun and the plummeting black form like an inky hailstone. What would the other one do, he wondered. Would it hurl itself at the farmer, eating out his eyes and clawing his face beyond recognition? Would it remain in the field, circling, until it too plummeted from exhaustion? What did it mean that they mated for life? Would it just stay by itself? Hermione would know, but she was busy explaining guns to Ron who did not understand.

He gazed out the window. The little squares of field were hypnotically peaceful, and he couldn't imagine anything dead there. Would the second bird even understand? Perhaps it would lift on its great, black wings (Up to four feet in diameter said the Hermione in his brain.) and fly away over the hedgerows and forests and on over the mountains until, at last, it came to the rocky seashore where the land was rent and twisted by an ancient fury: the malignant sea itself. There in a cave, it would perch and imitate the voices of wailing women, and maybe, if a traveler came there, the sound of a crying baby that would lead him in turns and starts to the bluff edge where he would peer over and see nothing but the surf and sharp rocks like teeth that would come up to catch at him as the bluff gave way.

Harry had heard of seagulls eating the same way, picking up clams in their hard little shells and dropping them from a great height upon the rocks. Then diving, they would tear and pluck the soft insides and the shards would be washed round and round until they became soft at the edges, pretty to look at, and safe to the touch.

But the shell of a man is not like the shell of a clam. Dropped from a great height, a man is all soft insides; his shell melts away into the air with his last exhalation. It may hover for a moment in the mind of a witness, but soon he will be convinced that this cannot be the creature that sneered and snapped at him. This is too still, too devoid of spirit. Where did it go, Harry wondered. He'd never been to church when he'd lived on Privet Drive and he'd never asked Ron what wizards thought.

"The raven," said Hermione, "is an omnivore."

"Eats up little babies, does it?" asked Ron.

"Don't be disgusting. It's much more likely to eat carrion Ð that means things that are already dead."

"I know what 'carrion' is."

We're like a lot of blackbirds ourselves, thought Harry. It was the Hogwarts robes, he supposed. They made him think of wings. All sorts of wings.

So useful to have him swooping around like an overgrown bat.

But the man that had said that was long gone, a casualty of a war that had taken his childhood to win.

He was surprised he had graduated at all, but with the rather dull Philomela Plimpsoll teaching Potions, it hadn't been so difficult after all. He didn't think it had been anyway. The time after Voldemort's fall had passed in a white haze that lifted only gradually to reveal an end of the year feast and passing marks. It wasn't that he couldn't remember exactly, more that everything was pale and thin next to the rich colors of the graveyard, the black and brown and so much red. He'd been covered in it when they'd brought him back, slimed all over with clods of grave-dirt stuck on with blood and heavy sliding things. In the end, it had been a matter of flying. A man is not a bird and a wizard without his broomstick is just a man.

They had met for a final duel, just the two of them... the two of them and another circle of the Dark Lord's own. It was meant to be symbolic, he supposed, meeting in the same place where Voldemort had created his new body out of blood and bones and pain.

It hadn't been a duel. It had been a lesson, an evening's entertainment for them, Voldemort's scald crows. Hooded and robed, they loomed at him out of the darkness and cackled with Voldemort's sibilated crucio.

And so he'd blurted the only spell that came to him through the red haze, wingardium leviosa, and the Dark Lord's robes had filled with wind, like thousands of beating wings and he had soared up and up and up. And then the wind had failed and he had dropped like a stone through water, like rainwater seeking the earth.

He had lain on his back while the death eaters flapped away in confusion and the blood ran away in little rivulets, seeping into the ground, down and down into subterranean aquifers that drained somewhere far away into the sea.

The night had been cold and clear and he'd reflected that it was the first time in ages that he'd seen the stars. Their chill fire was comforting and distant, untouched by Dark Lords and blood and oozing, heavy things that clotted his robes and made his skin shudder and itch.

They'd cut his clothing off of him, had had to peel it in places like the shell of an egg, brittle and cracking, and the skin had been blistered underneath wherever the blood had soaked through. Harry scratched absently at his stomach. He could still feel the memories of the rash ghosting over his skin.

The shell of a man wasn't like the shell of an egg either. The shell of an egg protected physical things, but the shell of a man, once cracked, let slip a sea of ephemeral vapors and vulnerabilities best kept in cover of darkness. Ravens, he thought, had no shells, but kept their secrets covered in a cloak of feathers with a sheen like oil spills on water that coated the beaches in a black grime and killed the shore birds and had the Muggles cleaning for months what could have been fixed with a wand swish.

But at least the birds could be cleaned, he thought. Not like moths that, once touched, were unable to fly, wings like ruffling parchment ripped beyond repair by clumsy human hands.

He thought then of all the things that flap and creep at night, from white and furry moths to bats to owls to great black dogs with eyes like lamps. And he thought that it was not the first time that there had been no body. With Sirius, there had been no time, with Snape, no inclination, but somehow he felt that they should have at least tried. No funeral, certainly, with no body, but a service? A memorial? Something at least. But there had been nothing. Later, he had told himself, when we've won. But what would have been the point? Two years, of nothingness and space where there had been at last something and he had lost the taste for public ceremony. The stars had beckoned to him from where he lay and he thought that they whispered like the curtain in the doorway of death, to which he had never been able to put a proper name. Hermione had looked for it in books, as though that or anything would make it better, but there was nothing. Even Luna hadn't known what to call it, even if she did, like Harry, see it for what it was. Not even a doorway, really, more of an arch with a ragged curtain where its door ought to be and Harry wondered why every true and powerful thing was shabby and tattered, as though clean edges made a thing weak. He would have felt stronger for cleaner edges, but he didn't suppose you could find the edge of a man any more than his shell. It was a thing ephemeral.

Ephemeral as fame, evanescent as reputation, but did physicality make a thing better? What survives a person, he had wondered. Would Sirius care that he was still wanted, when Sirius no longer cared at all. What mattered to the dead? He had asked, once, in the infirmary and Dumbledore had hemmed and hawed, but told him a sort of truth: The cares of the dead are beyond ken and grasp. Only in living can memories last. Harry had asked him what he meant by setting him riddles and Dumbledore had looked at him sadly and said that it was a poem and a very old one, but that it was no riddle and Harry heard an echo from his first year, It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that. And so, it was in the spirit of memory, that he was going now, in his first year of freedom, to dwell in a place of memories: He was going, by himself, to Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, the ancestral home of Sirius Black.