Conversations With Dead People
Prologue
She heard it before she saw it. Or felt it, maybe. It was a silent shift in pressure, something changing in the air; a brush of something powerful and intangible against her skin – and when Hermione turned around, there was a door there.
She stood there, staring.
It stared back. An ornate thing; an arched, gargantuan dark oak door with intricate wrought brass detailing, swirling and snaking over the panels like branches.
And she remembered, suddenly, violently, that she was on the seventh floor.
And she frowned, shaped eyebrows furrowing, and when she mentally retraced her steps, she realised that in her rare display of absentmindedness she had paced the length of the corridor three times. She had passed the great expanse of blank wall three times, with one permeating thought:
Help me.
She stifled a sob. It was a strange sound, full of both despair and wonder; she remembered a Muggle fairy tale her mother once read her, and she feels like Bluebeard's seventh wife, shaking hands steadily reaching towards a door with some terrible destiny awaiting her inside.
'There she paused for a moment, thinking; but the temptation was so great she could not conquer it.'
The lioness inside her roared as her fingers closed around the cold brass of the door handle – don't be so stupid, it's just a door! – and pulled.
"Hello Hermione!" Fred Weasley bellowed, and the last remaining thread of Hermione Granger's sanity snapped and spiralled endlessly out of her reach.
(A/N: My first ever forage into the Harry Potter fandom, for some reason, despite it being the first series I ever loved. This is just a very short, toe-dipping prologue - I have the story fleshed out and the rest of the chapters will be much longer. I would love to know if a story like this already exists, because I searched high and low before resorting to writing my own. Feel free to review. Cheers!)