All Eyes Elsewhere

All Eyes Elsewhere
by Olive Hornby

Chapter 2

"Mark the date," Helga ordered the older boy. He immediately scrunched over the scrolls to comply, and she turned back to the baby.

She was unconcerned about turning her back on the boys, even with the cage door open.

The younger boy was merely a spare at this point. She had intended to send him through the veil as well, but Marie had borne her child sooner than Helga had expected. Her original intent of putting four people through the archway at different times had to be reduced to three, since with each hour the blood of a new child lost a great deal of its potency. If the younger boy tried to escape, it didn’t matter.

The older boy had been here longer than anyone, and he knew better--he knew quite well that to step through the archway was to completely disappear from the natural world. Gryffindor had pointed him out as a clever student with a fine hand, and that had been exactly what Helga had needed for her initial work. She didn’t even remember his name anymore, and since she’d removed his tongue in part to keep him from warning fellow captives about the archway and in part as punishment for the disrespectful, belligerent tone he had taken with her at first, he couldn’t tell her. She idly thought that he could write it down, but she didn’t care enough to know. It was not important. She kept him only because she didn’t want to trouble herself with taking notes. That would take valuable time away from her primary focus.

Creating the archway and setting up the enchantments to make it serve as a portal had been the easy part. The spell to create the portal was very old magic. She’d seen it used several times with different variations, usually as a means of banishing particularly dangerous criminals.

Her old village had harbored an abundance of those.

People forced through such a portal were never seen again, but Helga felt certain that nothing could simply cease to exist. Living things died, nonliving things could be destroyed, but something was always left behind, somewhere. The dead decayed to earth, iron turned to rust, and burnt wood turned to ash. Matter did not vanish, it simply changed. All of the portals had to lead somewhere; perhaps they didn’t all lead to the same place, but they had to go somewhere.

Attaching the portal spell to the archway had been moderately challenging, but by experimenting with combinations of adhesion charms and permanence spells she was almost certain that she had created the only permanent portal in the world.

Now she wanted to know what happened to people who passed through the portal.

She swiftly drew the dagger down the length of the baby’s arm. The baby’s soft cries became earnest screams, and she muttered a silencing charm over him--his mouth moved and he continued to squirm, but there was no sound. She held the glass vial up to the cut and once it was full, she spelled the wound shut. She might need more, and obtaining another new child would be more difficult than reusing the one she already had.

Quickly cutting a swatch of fabric from the baby’s thin makeshift blanket, she levitated the table with the squirming yet silent infant off to the side, and then knelt before the archway. She drew from her pocket a lock of blond hair held together with twine and a dead rat. She placed the two items and the swatch of fabric in a neat row on archway step.

The hair had belonged to the first person she sent through the portal, a stammering first year student from a Helga’s own village of God’s Hope. She was fairly confident that he had not recognized her as the same witch who was banished from God’s Hope nearly twenty years earlier--he had not even been born then--but she knew that if he went home and mentioned her to his family or fellow villagers, they would almost certainly recognize the name.

The dead rat was the late pet of the second person sent through the portal. The girl had been one of the older students, and she had taken Helga aside one day, concerned about having seen her running into the forest at night. Helga had made certain that the girl, a poor and unattractive loner, had told no one of what she had seen, and had lured her into the forest under the pretense of wanting to assuage the girl’s fears.

She had a small seashell on a length of twine that the younger boy used as a necklace, but she left that in her pocket. Since Marie had gone through the archway instead of the boy, she would need only the fabric scrap.

Helga dipped her right forefinger into the vial of blood.

She drew circles of blood around each item, then dipped her finger in the vial again. She drew a line from the edge of each circle and extended them away from the archway. Positioning her left hand on the edge of the archway step with her palm facing upward, she trailed the line of blood smoothly from the archway to her palm and up her arm.

Her own blood had not worked at all for the spell she had devised, but when she used the blood from the younger boy, she had felt a change occurring--a coldness that gripped her, an intense fear and sorrow that she’d thought she’d driven away, and the veil had fluttered, but nothing had emerged. From this information, she hypothesized that she needed blood with a greater life-force; the greatest life-force in humans was found in a new child. She wasn’t sure what it meant for those sent through a portal, but she did know that the blood of new children was an essential component of many necromancy rites.

She bowed her head.

The younger boy took the opportunity of her inattention toward him. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a quick flutter of dark cloth, and the boy darted through the archway, doubtless with the intent of escaping.

He vanished, leaving only the older boy shivering in the corner.

She did not pause to instruct the older boy; she scarcely even made note of it. It was unimportant. The task ahead of her required her full concentration, and she hastily added the boy’s necklace to the assortment of items before her, carefully dividing her attention so that her concentration was unbroken.

She began her long Latin incantation, a potent blend of powerful summoning spells, portal creating and dispelling curses, life-force anchoring spells that drew partly from her own magical energy and mostly from the magical energy of the infant’s blood, and the reanimation spell that had, in part, resulted in her expulsion from her home village so many years ago. As the words flowed from her lips, she grasped her wand in her right hand and drew the tip along the trail of blood from the fabric scrap up her arm.

A tingle of magic flowed through her arm to quickly encompass her whole body, and her incantation abruptly ceased as an overwhelming coldness washed over her. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears with such force she felt her skull would shatter. Her body trembled fiercely, but she could not fight it, could not even look up--she could only see with her downcast eyes that she had dropped her wand, though she had neither felt nor heard it. She heard a woman screaming, and distantly realized that it was herself.

The world went pitch black, and she collapsed face first. Her forehead struck the archway step, but she remained conscious, horribly aware of the sickening sensation of her magical energy rapidly draining away and powerless to do anything. Fear and panic unlike anything she had ever felt rose up in her, but this time she couldn’t muster enough wit to scream.

Suddenly the unseen force that had gripped her stopped. She stopped trembling and her head quit pounding, but the terrible cold and fear remained. She looked up.

Marie was back in the cage.

Helga blinked, and squinted to focus on the servant. Marie’s mouth opened and closed, her eyes wide with horror, but she made no noise, though Helga could hear rattly breathing coming from somewhere.

"Marie?" Helga said.

A horrible, bloodcurdling scream erupted from the seemingly placid woman, and Helga flinched in spite of herself. Marie closed her eyes, covered her ears, and curled into a ball on her side, rolling on the filthy straw as she howled incoherently.

"Marie!" Helga rasped, her voice hoarse from her own screams. "Tell me what you saw!"

Then Helga saw that Marie was not alone.

The younger boy was there also, but he didn’t move at all. He lay slumped against the wall, his head lolling to one side and his jaw hanging slack. His eyes stared vacantly outward, unfocussed and glassy. A slight movement to the left of the boy drew Helga’s eyes over, then up.

A pair of pale, skeletal feet hovered above the floor.

Helga drew her eyes upward along the ghastly form. The withered legs disappeared into folds of tattered black fabric, and she abruptly realized that the abused garment was one of the black uniform robes that Slytherin had insisted that Hogwarts students wear. The hood of the robe was up, but Helga could barely make out the face that was nearly hidden beneath it.

It was the female student she’d sent through the archway three weeks earlier. The girl’s once round, youthful face was now gaunt and sickly. Her grayish-white skin hung from her bones, and her eyes...

Helga staggered to her feet, supporting herself on the bars of the cage.

The girl’s eyes were gone. A thin layer of ghastly skin covered the sunken sockets. The girl’s nose was similarly transformed, reduced to a sunken hollow, and her lips had thinned to almost nothing. Her breath rattled softly, but Helga could hear a louder rattling breath and looked deeper into the cage.

Almost hidden in the shadows of the corner of the cage, another form bent over the older boy.

The boy was flailing wildly, trying to ward off the ghastly creature, but to no avail. Helga hurried closer, pressing against the bars to see the creature grasp the boy’s face between its oddly distended pale hands. The boy could not articulate any words since Helga had removed his tongue, and could only produce sharp muffled moans as the creature dragged his face upwards. His mouth opened in a mute scream, and the creature swiftly brought its head down to cover the boy’s mouth with its own in a grotesque parody of a kiss.

The boy’s body went taught and his eyes widened more than Helga would have imagined possible. The creature’s loud, uneven breathing became a single, impossibly extended, smooth inhalation.

The creature drew back slightly, and Helga could see bright blue light streaming out of the boy’s mouth, presumably into the creature’s mouth, which was hidden beneath its tattered Hogwarts hood.

Helga blinked, then glanced at the creature’s hand, which was still locked over the boy’s face. A long, faded pink scar marred the gray skin from the creature’s fingertip to the back of its hand.

Just like the scar that the boy from her village, whom she’d sent through the archway six weeks ago, had on his hand.

The light from the boy’s mouth began to dim, and his eyes and body slowly relaxed. A thin trickle of blood trailed out of the boy’s nose, and he twitched slightly as the creature lowered him almost gently back to the floor.

The creature’s rattly breathing resumed as it turned to the next closest person. It glided above the floor to where Helga stood and wrapped its fingers around hers on the bars.

The intense cold fear and panic welled up again in the creature’s proximity, and Helga fought the darkness that threatened to overwhelm her. She heard the voices of her fellow villagers inside her head, jeering and mocking her as she was dragged out of the village in heavy shackles. She heard screams of terror and moans of pain, and felt to her horror all of the defenses she’d built up over her lifetime sliding away, and her childhood sense of fear and helplessness rose up within her, drowning her in emotion. She groaned and sank to her knees, and the creature held one of her hands tightly against the bars and reached through with its other hand to grip the back of her head.

Through the haze of fear and pain, Helga distantly heard the door hinge creaking.

The sound pulled her out of the overwhelming flood of emotion long enough for her to jerk backwards, tearing herself out of the creature’s grip. She staggered backwards and the creature reached out for her, but was unable to pass the bars. With what little presence of mind she retained, she snatched her wand off the floor.

"Helga?" an incredulous voice said. She turned to the door.

Slytherin stood in the open doorway, pointing his wand at the creature that, only moments before, had stood over her. She scrabbled wildly to stand, and when she finally got to her feet and faced the man, his wand was pointed squarely at her chest.

"What have you done?" he hissed.