'Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished?' - Victor Hugo
When I was a little girl, there was an alleyway leading off the street where our school stood. A lot of kids passed through it to get home at the end of the day. It wasn't very long, or especially spooky but at the age of ten, it was long enough to feel the need to speed up as you reached the end. You know that feeling when you climb the stairs at night, when you're on your own? When you feel like something's following you, about to grab your ankles? That's what we felt as we made our way through it, no matter how many of us were walking together.
The alley was lined by hedges and trees. In winter it was damp and chilly and in summer the leaves burst into green and we had to swat away flies from our ice creams.
One summer, the bushes in the alley started buzzing. It was a threatening noise, like a warning to all the little boys and girls that passed through it. One day we found out that it was a wasp's nest, settled amongst the overgrowth in the shadows of the trees. We couldn't see it; it was invisible to us except for the sudden onslaught of hovering wasps swarming the dark passage.
A girl in my class, Rose, had been stung once before and I think in an act of bravado, trying to earn favour with the boys, told us it didn't really hurt at all. She said it was like being pinched. One of the boys, Jack, pinched her arm hard in Geography when she wasn't looking and she screamed and then started crying. I asked my mum what it felt like to be stung and she said it was like being pricked with a red-hot needle. I stayed well away from the alley after that.
Gradually, kids began to find a different way home: through the housing estate in the bright sunlight. There was a park and an ice-cream van that way and the alleyway was soon forgotten. Yet it remained in the back of our minds, menacing yet still with that aura of mystery, like the dark stairway at bedtime.
Five years later, when I returned home from Hogwarts for the summer holidays, before departing for Ron's, I read an article in the local paper. A young girl, about the same age as me, had been raped walking home from her friend's house one night. I didn't know her. The town where we lived wasn't large, but I had few friends left there after going to Hogwarts. In the Muggle world, there were stories like this all the time, stories that made my mother sigh and ask, 'What's happening to the world?'. I bet the story hadn't even reached the national news. The thing that caught my attention was that the incident had taken place close to my house. The girl had been walking down the alleyway where years ago, so many children had been scared off by a wasp's nest.
Some might have said that the incident put the wasp's nest into perspective. Why should anyone be afraid of something so simple when much scarier things lay ahead? But I thought that the wasp's nest was as scary to us children back then as strange men on dark nights are today. The alleyway served to unite them as universal threats. At the age of ten, we were innocent to more serious matters but that did not make the wasps any less of a peril.
I cannot help but feel my world has become that alleyway now. I must face up to my fears however, instead of finding another route home. All other paths are closed and I must walk through the dark and the wasps, towards the bright light at the end of the alley. But first I suppose I'll have to adjust my eyes to the dark, because at the moment, I cannot see any light at the end of my journey; I can only see the old man in front of me and the hall full of people and Draco Malfoy placing a wedding band on my third finger.
A/N: Future chapters will be much longer. Think of this as a sort of prologue. Even if it really isn't. Oh, and the title of this story is taken from an Emily Dickinson poem. The full quote will appear later in the story.