A Christmas Nightmare

3. THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS

Snape awoke in his own bedroom. He could see the familiar bedposts and the heavy green curtains ... because a warm golden light was shining through the cracks of his bedroom door. He sat up and hugged his knees.

Surely you do not want to go for another midnight exploration. There is nothing in the living room. You were simply too tired to put out the fire. You need your sleep if you want to deal with Longbottoms abysmal essay tomorrow. Snape found that he was shuffling towards the door. He uttered a short, bellowing and unhappy laugh. Alright. It's just another dream. Probably there will be an oversized Christmas cracker in my living room, waiting to ask me whether I'd like to watch Trelawney's attempts to foresee the menu of thisar's Christmas dinner...

It wasn't a cracker. Nor was it Trelawney herself. It was worse.

Somebody had turned his deliberatly undecorated living room into a kind of ... grove. Yes, a grove and a food store. Below curtains of ivy, mistletoe and holly was a large pile of food:

Cheese, roast potatoes, a turkey, various dishes of fruit and vegetables, sausages, pumpkin juice, puddings, a tower of burping chocolate frogs, mince-pies and treacle fudges, and a bathtub filled with butterbeer.

Snape, who, apart from his cold currently suffered from an irritated stomach, closed his eyes. Just another nightmare. Damn Albus and his Christmas obsession.

"HO HO HO!" boomed a deep satisfied voice. "C'mon, shake me hands! Look a' me! I guess yeh've never seen the like o' me before!"

"Actually, I have," replied Snape acidly. "Would you be so kind to get out of my armchair, Hagrid?"

The old chair creaked and sagged even further to the floor as the giant turned around. It was Hagrid ... or was it? He was clad in robes of bright green, in his matted hair stuck bits of twigs and leaves, and appearently he had exchanged his pink umbrella ( which often showed suspicious signs of magical quality... although no one would dare to mention this in front of the game keeper) for a great horn - Plenty's horn it was called, remembered Snape, but to him it seemed more like Pandora's box.

"Hagrid? Never heard o' tha' fellow before," said Hag...the Giant.

Snape was relieved. A Hagrid not knowing that he was Hagrid was a good indication that he himself was indeed still dreaming. Yewhat - or who - caused these dreams? And Regulus - was he, too, only a dream? He didn't want to think about it right now.

"Anyhow, don' matter what yer callin' me, little man. We got some business tonigh', yeh an' me." Rising to his impressive height, Hag...the Giant shook his horn carelessly. Several candy apples and a large pumpkin dropped out of the horn and hit Snape on the head, knocking him to the floor.

Snape struggled to his feet, leaning on something angular to steady himself. The something was a crooked wooden sign reading THE BURROW.

"The Burrow...?"

"I though' we migh' pay a visit ter some o' the people yeh know. As I'm the Spirit o' Christmas Right Here An' Now, yeh see," smiled Hag... the Giant. He shook his horn once more and blessed The Burrow with savoy, red cabbage and a mid-sized barrel of pickled slugs. His smile froze and he squinted into the depths of hi>

"Well...sometimes this isn' workin' like it's supposed ter be," he explained apologetically. "Somethin' musta bin broken when I sat on it the other day...let's get in."

The kitchen of THE BURROW was crowded, crowded with people with bright red hair. Snape managed to stifle a groan when he realized that he was favoured with the joy of a Christmas visit to the Weasley family. And there I thought I'd be spared of that boy's grin for at least two weeks...

While Ron and the twins were busy setting the table, Mrs Weasley was bustling about the last preperations for the Christmas lunch, every now and then glancing anxiously at the clock. At last two hands, one very thin and long, the other pink and pretty short, switched from On The Way to At Home; the kitchen door opened and Mr Weasley and their youngest child, Giddy Ginny, stepped in. Poor Giddy Ginny, she had been prone to fainting ever since the dreadful experience of being posessed by Tom Riddle! Mrs Weasley hugged the girl tightly and sent her to wash her hands.

"Lunch's ready, we've got turkey, Arthur, a small one only but the potatoes and the sauce will do for all, I'm sure, and oh Arthur, what did the healer say?"

Mr Weasley took off his glasses and rubbed at them with his sleeve, trying to clean them up.

"He..well, Molly dear, he didn't exactly say anything specific, he's only a starter after all, but he did offer some interesting theories about curpession drills...maybe we could in - "

"Arthur! I didn't mean your muggle technology," said Mrs Weasley in a high voice, "I want to know about Ginny! What's wrong with her? What, in Merlin's beard, are they doing to help my little girl?"

Her husband avoided her look. "There...there is, actually, not much they can do...and...and they said her ...weakness might get worse...and..."

"Worse?" she whispered.

Snape clenched his fist. Of course he had known - or at least noticed - that Ginny had often been pale and sickly during the last years, had even fainted once in his class. But I always assumed it be a simple growth problem. Wait. It is a growth problem, I am still dreaming about Christmas, minor nightmares about Christmas. I only have to look at Hag...at the Giant at my side to realize that this is still a dream.

When he looked back to the Weasley family, they had already sat down and were raising their glasses for a toast.

"A Merry Christmas!" said Mr Weasley.

"And may we live to see the downfall of You-Know-Who! May he rot in hell!" added Giddy Ginny with surprising force. She sat close to her mother, who clasped the girl's hand tightly, as if she were afraid someone might snatch her only daughter from her loving touch

Mr Weasley raised his glass once more. "To the Order! To the Order of the Phoenix, and may every member be blessed!"

"Yeah," said Fred, "but let's exclude Snape, he hasn't been very nice to our little bro, has he?" Ron muttered something inaudible and glared into his butterbeer. Mrs Weasley reddened. Usually she wouldn't dare critizising a teacher, and a member of the Order too, but while she supposed that a boy disrupting the lesson deserved a detention she couldn't get over the fact that her Ronny had to spend ten evenings with the Potions master, ten evenings, think of it! When he had to use the time and study for the OWLs!

"To give our children such a hard time in school, and poor Harry who's got enough on his mind already, and to threaten to put our Ronny into detention over Christmas, and anyway!"

"Molly, dear, it's Christmas!" Mr Weasley protested weakly.

dquo;Exactly what I'm saying! Now please, could we talk about something else? Bill, are you absolutely sure that you won't need the coupon for the barber's shop?"...

The scene slowly faded into a silvery whirl of lametta, but Snape still could hear someone speaking...laughing...

"He really said that Christmas was nonsense?!" cried Black. "He really believes that?"

"Well, his problem, isn't it?" said Tonks. Today she wore her hair waist-long in festive colours of green and glittering gold.

"He has got an unusual opinion," said Dumbledore peacefully, "that's true; and he is not as pleasant as he might be. However, his offences carry their own punishmend I have nothing to say against him. Who suffers by his ill whims? He himself, always. Here he takes it into his head to dislike almost everyone else, and he will not come to neither the staff's Christmas dinner nor the Order's little feast. What is the consequence? He loses two excellent dinners and the opportunity to improve his, as I am sorry to say, rather underdeveloped social skills."

"I didn't know he had any," mumbled Black, grinning at Tonks, and Snape, although pre-tending not to know who they were talking about, blanched with anger.

Soon Dumbledore and McGonagall excused themselves and said they would leave the "younger ones" - at which Moody swallowed the wrong way and spat into his hip flask - "to their merriment".

"Listening to Albus one could believe we still were children!" complained Tonks.

Snape knew what she meant - hadn't he been teaching for fourteears now and still felt like pupil whenever he spoke to the headmaster? He almost said something in response, then remembered that no one would hear him.

"Well, he's about four times as old as you, kid," said Moody. " And being the inexhaustible fountain of wisdom that he is, he'd probably tell you that 'it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty founder was a child himself'." His voice was an exact imitation of Dumbledore's, deep and jovial, and he even put on a stare as intent as the headmaster's. Black roared with laughter (he'd had a good drink of firewhiskey by then). "So why don't we follow his profound instructions? Who's up for a game?"

"But not blind man's buff, Sirius," giggled Tonks. "Not unless Mad-Eye takes out his eye. I'm pretty positive it could look through the fold, it's only a piece of cloth after all, that's not much of a problem, is it?"

Moody let his magical eyeball roll in Tonks'direction and observed her from head to toes.

"No, no problem," he said finally, his gaze resting on her upperbody, "only a piece of cloth."

Tonks blushed furiously, then burst into laughter like everybody else.