[Editor: The following was found among the papers of one Frederick William Gertesmore (18), a seventh year student at the United Kingdom's Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, who died after receiving a Dementor's Kiss on 17th August, 1998. The original manuscript, written in Gertesmore's own handwriting and dated the day of his death, was subsequently destroyed by British authorities, but not before a copy was made and smuggled across the Channel to France.]
If you prick us,do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?– Shylock, The Merchant of Venice.
Do We Not Bleed?
They are celebrating, of course. The Dark Lord has been defeated, and Harry Potter is victorious, which all now take as the final triumph of Gryffindor. The serpent of Slytherin, it seems, must crawl on its belly until the very walls of Hogwarts crumble into dust. Even the Hufflepuffs mock us now, so low have we fallen. For our vanquishers have little sympathy for the crushed and toothless snake. They stride around, the little lion cubs, the crimson and gold upon their breasts, and preach to us of the new order: the Way of Gryffindor, which shall lead the wizarding world into a utopian era of acceptance and toleration. Acceptance and toleration, that is, for all but Slytherin. For who cares about our House? We are all ugly bigots, after all: a blight upon the world of magic, and mere Death-eaters in waiting.
I look out from the dirty window. I am kept in a small room in the east wing of Hogwarts, with only my books for company, while the Ministry of Magic processes my papers. I may be here some time: the newly restructured Ministry, Gryffindors to a man, have been very thorough in their pursuit of Voldemort sympathisers. Azkaban is full: something even the Dark Lord himself never managed to achieve, so home detentions, and indeed school-room detentions, have become the norm. I have been here three months already, detained while under investigation. They will not find anything to connect me, or the vast majority of people like me, to Voldemort's followers, but their point is not to find. Their point, like the Death-eaters before them, is to terrorise. For did you think, dear reader, that the period following the Battle of Hogwarts would be a simple case of rounding up the guilty, and duly punishing the Umbridges of this world? That the innocent would have nothing to fear from Gryffindor's wrathful purge? Perhaps that is how the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws console themselves, but, believe me, somewhere I think Lord Voldemort is smiling at the eagerness with which his supposed foes have taken up his methods.
Outside, the rain is starting to fall on the freshly erected statue of Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter's famous mentor. This, my friends, is the man who understood more than any other that the true lesson of history is that it exists to serve current purposes in shaping the way we think. Why else would the history books alloy half-truths and half-lies together in such a way as to paint our entire House charcoal black? Take our very founder, the great Salazar Slytherin, who sought to protect wizards from the cruelty of medieval muggles. Through the manipulation of history Slytherin has been turned into a folk devil: a demonic ape-like madman so eager to purge Hogwarts of its muggle-borns that he bred a basilisk explicitly for the task. But Dumbledore himself? Under the new order, the man whose past crimes exceed anything gossiped about by Rita Skeeter is lorded as the most honourable of wizards. We in Slytherin are accorded ruthless, but let me tell you this: were we half as ruthless as Albus Dumbledore, the man who ruled Hogwarts with an iron fist would have spent the last forty years of his life rotting in a cell in Nurmengard beside his old friend Grindelwald. "Let bygones be bygones" sang the poisonous voice of Gryffindor long ago, and in 1946 Slytherin's sense of compassion meant that we acceded. We were to pay a high price for our compassion.
I remember well the week following the Battle of Hogwarts. An ashen-faced Professor Slughorn ushered us into the Great Hall. Never a particularly healthy man, Slughorn appeared to have aged twenty years in a month: the portly joviality had given way to bleary eyes, jowls, and frown lines. This serpent, I thought, is one who has lost both his teeth and his warm place in the sunlight. Certainly the affable old Potions Master was profoundly disturbed. It was then that I realised that this quivering ruin might have as well been us as a House: broken by events, zombie-like, and submissive. But, I pledged to myself, Slytherin would have a future: the House would go on even if the likes of poor old Slughorn could not.
First clearing his throat, the old man told us that there were some things that we should know. Behind him was the stern countenance of Minerva McGonagall, watching her colleague as a cat watches a mouse. From where I sat, it almost looked as though Slughorn was leaning on her for support. Then came the news: Headmaster Severus Snape was dead. He had been murdered, apparently, by Voldemort himself, though "investigations were continuing". The death of Snape, the first Headmaster from our House in more than a century, was received with stunned silence by most. The man had not been loved, though as any Slytherin will tell you, popularity is no substitute for competence. He had, however, been respected: Snape was no fool, and all knew that behind that scowling face was a shrewd mind. Those of us who secretly detested Voldemort – the vast majority of we Slytherins, I might add – were also grateful to Snape for his quiet, and generally unacknowledged, efforts in limiting the Dark Lord's stranglehold on Hogwarts. Not that the Gryffindors would ever credit him for such a thing.
The other news was that every Slytherin student was to be confined to the dormitories until further notice. Our meals would be taken up to our rooms by House Elves, but we were on no account to leave the designated area. The reason for this soon became all too clear: we were being held for questioning. I will never forget that long wait in the dormitories over the days that followed: the terror on the faces of our first-years, the all-pervading silence, the desperate wondering as to what had befallen our families. It fell to we seventh years to keep up Slytherin morale, but no-one's heart was in it. Eventually it came my turn. A knock on the door, a curt instruction from two strange men, and soon I was being led down corridors and up stairs.
They had commandeered Professor Binns' old history room. The desks had been cleared out, but the mouldering old books still lined the walls. With those books, one could prove a man who was long dead guilty or innocent of anything you liked. I had always liked Professor Binns: naïve, gentle, studious, and completely ignorant of the true power that lay at his ghostly finger-tips. Such a silly, loveable old fool, and a believer in that strange notion that history is somehow about facts. But I had always given him what he wanted in my essays: the tired old god of examinations needs to be ritually appeased by a sacrifice of the truth, lest he become angry.
My questioner was a non-descript brown-haired gentleman who looked to be in his early forties. He held a file of papers in his hand: mine, presumably. I also noted with interest that he was wearing copper cufflinks, crafted into the shape of a rampant lion. Oh, Gryffindor, I thought, you are so subtle.
"Are you Frederick Gertesmore?" he asked, apparently as bored as I was.
"Yes," I said.
"I am here from the Ministry of Magic. We need to ask you some questions. Please note that we do not wish to use you of being a collaborator, but in light of your associations, we feel that an investigation is warranted."
How very thoughtful of them, I thought. "And those associations would be what, precisely?" I asked, knowing the answer full well.
"Your membership of House Slytherin."
"So I take it that the Ministry's implicit assumption is that one quarter of wizarding teenagers in Britain are irredeemably evil, then?"
"Oh, very droll, Gertesmore. As you well know, there is a direct link between the pureblood doctrine so worshipped by you Slytherins and Voldemort's hateful ideology. Are you denying such a link?"
"I am denying that we Slytherins worship the notion of purebloodedness."
"So you deny ever having believed yourself superior to muggle-borns? You are pureblooded yourself, are you not?"
"To answer your second question: yes, I am pureblooded, but not from a particularly prestigious family. By the time I finish my career, one hopes that my family will have become rather more prestigious. As for your first question, I have never considered myself inherently superior to others. It only breeds complacency, and complacency is the great enemy of ambition."
"So you have never been a pureblood supremacist?" The man seemed interested: perhaps, he thought that I was just another rat abandoning the sinking ship. There had, alas, been many such rats during those weeks: Slytherins denouncing other Slytherins in pursuit of an amnesty. I was, however, to disappoint him.
"Let me put it this way, my good sir." I was enjoying this: I felt like a matador at a Spanish bullfight, dealing with a particularly slow and lumbering opponent. "One of the defining attributes of our House is cunning. From the point of view of a true Slytherin, a brainless pureblood is about as much use as a brainless muggle. It is for that reason that I have always despised Crabbe and Goyle: they have all the cunning of a ham sandwich. God knows what the Sorting Hat was thinking when it inflicted those two cretins on us."
"If that was indeed the case, Master Gertesmore, kindly explain the apparent pureblood elitism of the Malfoys and many of the other great wizarding families within Slytherin."
"Malfoy is a snob, not because he is a Slytherin, but because he is an aristocrat. Dare I remind you that the other defining trait of our House is ambition? In order to be truly ambitious, one needs space to move up. Aristocrats such as Malfoy are at the top already, so they have no need for ambition!"
"Yes indeed. They can leave the true social-climbing to ambitious types like Tom Riddle."
"Or Albus Dumbledore, of Gryffindor fame." Make of that what you will, I thought.
The questioner smiled. "Very clever, Gertesmore, you argue like a true serpent. Tell me then, if you and the 'true' Slytherins are so hostile to Voldemort, why did you and your entire House leave en mass prior to the Battle of Hogwarts?"
I had suspected this would come up. Already word had gone out from Potter's cronies about how not even one Slytherin student had bothered to stay and defend Hogwarts in its hour of need. To any casual observer, it appeared as though Slytherin was merely a House of cowards and collaborators, and it now seemed that the Potterized Ministry was going to milk the issue for all that it was worth.
"A number of reasons," I said. "Slytherin is after all, a very diverse House. So many different variations on the theme of being racist, ugly, and evil…"
I received a clip around the ear for that. I was only mildly surprised. The Ministry's own policy explicitly prohibited use of physical force in situations like this, but I was under no illusions as to whose side of the story would be believed.
"Stop being a smart alec, Gertesmore, and answer the question."
"Some of us went for reinforcements." That was true so far as it went, though I was hardly going to admit that the reinforcement seekers had been from both sides.
"You expect me to believe that every last one of you was going for reinforcements? I wasn't born yesterday, Gertesmore."
"Others had family members whom Voldemort's followers would have punished severely." This was actually true of a sizeable majority of Slytherin students. Lord Voldemort had many connections, and one did not want to risk one's family or, dare I say it, future career prospects, by coming out too openly against him.
"Gertesmore, according to your file," the questioner replied, waving the paperwork for emphasis, "your sisters are currently in America, and your father is in Germany working as a substitute arithmancy teacher in Dusseldorf. Somehow I think that Lord Voldemort's reach does not extend quite that far. Even if it did, your obligation was to stand and fight: all the other Houses did so, and they had just as much to lose."
No they didn't, I thought. Gryffindors had nothing to lose by fighting Voldemort, but Slytherins had everything to lose. Trying to make a Gryffindor understand Slytherin reasoning, however, is like trying to teach tennis to a chicken. Even a Hufflepuff has a better understanding.
"Now," the questioner said, clearly going in for the kill, "tell me why you deserted."
"You want the reason I got up and left, master questioner?" My patience was wearing thin. There is only so much demonization one can take. It was time to throw it right back at him. "I shall tell you. Because you Gryffindors are just like Voldemort. Your apparent belief that my House is an all-purpose dumping ground for villains - that children of eleven are seemingly predestined for evil - makes about as much sense as the Dark Lord's own babbling nonsense about blood purity."
The questioner had suddenly become very grim. "You could get in a lot of trouble for that, Gertesmore."
I knew full well that there would be trouble. That is why I had said it. But tired and stressed as I was, I no longer cared. My dreams of further advancement would never come to fruition while these cretins held the reins of power anyway. If I were more heroically-minded, I would say that I was fighting a battle without hope, and was fighting it because ultimately I was right and they were wrong. Something that Gryffindors would understand, were they not so irony-challenged.
"Trouble?" I snapped, giving genuine release to my anger. "Trouble? You ape Voldemort's methods. You fill Azkaban with suspected traitors, you interrogate and persecute an entire cross-section of people who have committed no crime. You have idolised that war criminal Albus Dumbledore…"
"I would advise you to stop digging, Gertesmore."
"The same Dumbledore who robbed Slytherin of the House Cup in my first year, the same Dumbledore after whom Harry Potter named his vigilante forces – forces, incidentally, that Potter claims Slytherins had no part in. That he never invited us seems to have slipped Potter's mind. "
The questioner had reached for his wand. "Shut it, Gertesmore."
"You want my reasons for walking out on Hogwarts? Have you Gryffindors ever listened to yourselves? Replace the word 'Slytherin' with 'muggle-born' in your speeches, and most of you would start sounding like mad old Tom Riddle himself. I got up and left, my dear sir, because I could not in good conscience defend bigotry against bigotry."
"Crucio!"
I was later told – by a different Ministry official – that I had passed out almost immediately. I can hardly remember anything about the moments when the cruciatus curse hit. Perhaps my mind refuses to remember: if so, I do not blame it. The Ministry for its part insists that I cannot possibly have been attacked with the curse, and claims that stress had caused me to misremember. That is their official line: privately, I suspect that they regard it as nothing more than a mean-spirited Slytherin attempt to frame an innocent and "gallant" official. Soon after I had recovered, I was moved into the isolated little room I now occupy. I was allowed my books, and House Elves bring me my food. I spend my time reading and writing: there is little else to do. I am forbidden to write or receive letters, however, so my father in Germany likely knows nothing of this. I increasingly wonder if I will ever be let out of here, or whether the Gryffindors have simply left me to rot.
I can only hope that somehow this account of my thoughts and experiences will survive. No doubt the Potterites will seek to destroy it the moment they become aware of its existence: one cannot dare criticise the great and good Albus Dumbledore, nor the reconstructed Ministry. After all, we have supposedly moved on from the dark era of cruciatus curses: the Ministry has even, it is said, abandoned the use of Dementors. All lies, of course, all lies. But it makes everyone feel good, and that is all your average wizard really cares about. Sitting here now, it feels strange, but I can barely remember what it is like to be even remotely happy. Stranded here in this quaint little prison, for prison it is, I feel like I have been reliving the same horrible nightmares over and over again. On the other hand, the sort of mind-numbing isolation I have experienced in the last three months would addle the brain of anyone. Despite it still being summer-time, the air has also been increasingly chill in here at nights, which has not helped matters.
I hear a knock on my door. This is puzzling, for it is not yet dinnertime, and the House Elves would not dare annoy me at any other hour. I shall hide this parchment, then see who it is. Perhaps the Ministry have remembered that I am here after all.