Around her, the water was cool and smooth as she moved slowly through the blue; it wrapped about her limbs softly and burnt her half-opened eyes. Floating in the airless space, she watched many legs, seemingly autonomous from bodies, engaged in a senseless slow motion dance. A low humming had overwhelmed all other sounds and she felt insentient and peaceful.
Suddenly, a spasm of suffocation hit her. She couldn't breathe. When she opened her mouth the air felt solid and she could not swallow it. Hermione convulsed and awoke. Orbs of light blinded her eyes and then dimmed, except for a violet glow directly in front of her face. The light cast relief upon a person silhouetted above her, wand hand outstretched in a menacing gesture.
Through a haze of sleep and looming hysteria, she felt fingers clutch at her hair and pull her out of bed and across the room. The light was on in the hall; it jolted her senses and she lurched away, tripping over an upturned chair. Something had got hold of her wrist; it was twisted behind her. She felt herself pushed forward and glanced about in panic. Stark against the quiet design of the wallpaper was a bloody hand print.
Downstairs, the wood paneled television buzzed static. She noticed this first. She had harbored an absurd hatred of the machine ever since she was a little girl, since the first time her parents shushed her for rambling over the televised voices. She was not sad to see it go.
Also, she could not bring herself to focus on the room at large, for her subconscious had already taken stock and decided that the scene was intolerable: three cloaked strangers standing over a mangled corpse and a weeping man.
A voice: " Dumbledore has become too meddlesome for his own good of late; intervening at the ministry, harboring all sorts of scum. Like yourself. Thought we'd make an example of you. Thought we'd put your ilk back in its place."
A response: "Who are...please, we haven't done anything."
"Well, its really more the fact that you exist , if you know what I mean." the voice intoned mockingly, " We're not going to kill you, Granger; we just want you to understand, to really feel that understanding. Crucio."
In a moment, the thought that it wasn't so terrible flashed through her mind. But it was pushed out by a wave of pain, like an electric shock. Her awareness narrowed to the blinding white before her eyes, and she wished she could pass into it. Thoughts slipped through her figurative fingers like flour; she could not remember herself, couldn't remember her name. Suddenly, the light flickered, and the room swam before her. She had hoped that she would go into shock, but the acute awareness of pain did not leave her.
Thick and warm, blood spattered across her face. They had cut her father's arms off with a Slicing Hex. His torso, grotesque and ruddy, flailed helplessly in the air above her head. His screams were inhuman; they reminded her of the dying peal of a spotted horse her grandfather had shot after it broke its hind leg. He had mis-fired into its flank and it had broken free of the ropes, moving frantically forward, a rivulet of brown blood leaving a wide streak on the summer grass.
The body hit the floor with a thud: headless, armless, and distended. She looked beyond it to the corner, seeing her mothers corpse, the skin of the face burned away to reveal gritty bone. She felt herself shifted onto her back. They spoke around her, but the noise came to her as an indistinct polyphony. Her legs felt cold, and she realized that her purple nightdress, a tasteless Christmas present from a great aunt, had been lifted to her waist. The violation stunned her into full awareness. The man had removed his mask as he entered her, and she saw his face twisted into a cruel grimace. She noticed that he had unusually well-grown eyebrows; they were like leeches stretching across his brow to embrace each other in a sanguinous kiss in the middle. He revolted her, and this fact made his violence that much more unbearable. Her face was wet, and she realized that she was crying. He spasmed and leaned over her, and she saw the wooden handle of a wand in a thin pocket in his robe. Instinct overcame panic, and she grasped it tightly. The first spell that occurred to her was Stupefy, and she yelled the word as she pushed him off with her knee. He stumbled back,surprised, and turning frigid and pale fell to the floor. She felt a mild euphoria then, but a streak of red light flew past her arm, and Hermione forced herself to take in the others. There were three other Death Eaters standing in her living room, wands raised in a dueling stance, and pointed at her. A woman's voice screamed the killing curse, and she ducked to the floor. The Green Death flew over her head and hit one cloaked figure in the chest, bathing him in a verdant light that wrapped its tiny mouths around his soul when it exited his body. The woman, enraged by her mistake, ran toward Hermione. Time stretched as she watched the angry face, now unmasked, grow as it approached her. Hermione leveled herself; shocks of pain ran through her body and her brain could not shake a persistent nausea. The vulgarity of the woman's face disturbed her, and she wanted to wipe its image out of her vision, to burn it away, like a badly constructed essay. Without thinking she cast Incendio, half certain that nothing would happen. She was surprised when a blast of heat hit her face as it emanated from the blazing robes of the Death Eater. Hermione petrified her then,so she could not extinguish the fire.
A hex from behind caught her off guard. It burned its way through her dress and embedded itself like a piece of scorching coal into her back. The pain clouded her mind as she turned and stumbled. A desire overwhelmed her entirely; the horror that hid in the backwater of her brain surged forward with a frightening force, her mind felt bloody and she wanted to inflict pain. She screamed the words that they had directed at her just seconds ago: Avada Kedavra. She had never uttered them before, had never seen the curse cast on a human before tonight. Little gratification succeeded the curse. Another wave of blind rage overcame her. Half aware of herself, she lurched towards the fireplace, where a cast iron poker lay innocuous and mundane among the carnage. Grabbing the handle, she turned toward her attacker, who lay Stupefied on the carpet. She hit him once, in the stomach, and felt a rib give way with a disgusted satisfaction. She did it again, pummeling his flank and head. The shock of the assault had awoken him, and he screeched in pain as the iron pierced his side. She stabbed him again and again, insensate and brutal, until blood began to pool beneath him and trickle from the side of his mouth. He whimpered pathetically, and Hermione, unable to bear his weakness, his humanity, raised her weapon once more and plunged it into the side of his neck. He spasmed as he vomited blood, and lay still.
The doorbell rang.
Outside, Mrs. Galbraith, wearing a vaguely worried expression, blew hot air into the space between her mittened hands. She considered herself a cautious woman, a careful woman. Better safe than sorry, she used to say to the late Mr. Galbraith, before he got run over by a taxicab in New York City, a fact she could not help but blame on his own lack of carefulness.
Mrs. Galbraith was particularly weary of juvenile delinquents,whom she believed were largely responsible for the moral degradation that plagued modern day British youth. Two nights ago, she had heard on the radio that a series of robberies had been committed in a town not fifty miles from her own, by a gang of dangerous hooligans, who were armed and still on the loose. Consequently, she had unearthed her husband's old Army pistol from a shoe box in the closet, and slept with it hidden beneath her pillow. When she had heard the shouting next door, she had naturally assumed that the thieving criminals had found new victims in the Grangers, whom she had always considered proper and respectable people. She picked up telephone to call the police as she glanced out of the window, and saw, to her relief, that the
Grangers' family car stood in the driveway, catching the light from the hall window. The other robberies had been committed when the families had been out of the house. Everything was fine then, perhaps someone had fallen down or maybe there was an argument in progress. Mrs. Galbraith could not help but feel a slight pang of disappointment at the anticlimax; unwilling to go back to bed just yet, she put on her house coat and yellow leather gardening boots, and went outside. She would reassure herself that all was well, and perhaps even have a chance to complain to Mrs. Granger about the appalling ineptitude of the police, who had been chasing the house robbers for a fortnight now with very little to show for their efforts. A minute later, Mrs. Galbraith stood in front of the oak and glass door of Number 23, shivering and waiting. She pushed the buzzer a second time.
The noise found Hermione Granger, standing in the middle of her living room, bloodied poker in hand, and in a state of blind panic. She stared at a watercolor over the mantelpiece, a muddy rendition of the Notre Dame painted by her mother twenty years ago when she was a student traveling across continental Europe. Hermione tried, in vain, to grapple with the enormity of what had just happened. She was surrounded by dead bodies, the room looked like a particularly gory homicide scene, and there was someone at the door.