He sat alone on the bed, their voices still ringing in his ears.
"Again!" His father had roared as he crashed through the front door, silhouetted against the false night of a late-autumn storm. The man crackled with long-burning anger. He threw down his dripping overcoat onto one of the many bookshelves that lined the rickety walls, and strode into the dark sitting room.
A pleasant fire lit a boy of ten, sprawled on a worn sofa with his nose deep in a leather-bound volume, and a homely, black-haired woman hunched over the crowd of ancient books spread open in her lap and propped against the dusty armchair. The warmth of the fire did nothing, however, for the sudden chill that had gripped the woman and her son, faces frozen and bodies tense. The man towered above them for a second, then stalked over to the armchair and grabbed the woman by her elbow. In one furious motion he swept the thick books off her lap towards the fire and dragged her to her feet against a bookshelf. The boy shrank back silently into the sofa.
The man's face was livid, but his voice was an icy whisper, "Let me say it once more, then, Eileen. There will be no," and each word fell like a slap onto her dull face, "witchery in my house. There will be no," he pushed her harder against the dusty bookshelves with each accusation, "sparks flying out of my chimney, smoke leaking from my windows, creatures crawling from my fire, cauldrons in my basement! And you will not," his eyes narrowed to slits, "poison my son with your perversions!" The boy flinched at his father's words, but as neither of his parents looked toward him, he remained in the shadows.
His mother's face remained oddly expressionless, though her free hand clenched and unclenched furiously, grasping for something that hadn't been there for a long time. Her voice was as cool as her features. "I have been doing nothing of the sort. The sparks you saw in the chimney were from this fireplace. I have not touched a cauldron for months—how could I?"
"You tell me," his father was shouting now, "You tell me how you get into locked rooms! You tell me what you do every day while I'm working to put food on this table." He dropped his wife with a little shove, and began pacing across the small room.
"Ask anyone," she said loudly, angry at last, "any of those busybodies could tell you…"
"And they have!" the man roared back, "They tell me that they've seen owls swooping in here when I'm gone, that you sneak home with baskets full of god-knows-what…"
The boy knew the rest, and he had no desire to hear it again. He stole up off the couch, unheeded by his screaming parents, and with his book held tight to his chest, vanished through the door that opened behind one wall of bookshelves. He slunk up the creaky stairs, avoiding the unpolished and splintering banister, and made his way towards the dim candlelight leaking from a small room on the landing.
Now he was curled in a nest of blankets in his cheerless room, the same book open in front of him, but his eyes weren't following the words. Rain dripped down the badly-made window over his bed, and the thunder crashing over the poor roofs of Spinner's End almost drowned out the angry noises that came through the floor. Severus stayed awake long enough to hear the front door slam, then the bedroom door across from his, and a long silence, until finally he sank into a lonely, exhausted sleep.