The class at Hogwarts all shuffled into their classroom. The same thought ran through their minds: 'Just one more period, that is all. One more period until Christmas break.'
Unfortunately, that one period happened to be Defense Against the Dark Arts.
Professor Holmes, a tall, skinny man with sharp cheekbones and curly hair that everybody pretended to hate, stepped out to greet the students.
"Mister Albus Potter, you have been skipping classes again. Shame on you. I will tell Professor Watson," he stated, his eyes hardly skimming the room. Of course, Albus had been skipping all the other classes. Many kids did. Very few, however, were stupid enough to try to skip professor Holmes's class, and they only did it once.
"Wands out, class. Today, we are going over shield charms, one that I am disgusted that you have not learned in your first year. If you give me any problems, you will be spending Christmas break scrubbing the stains out of the tables in the kitchen," he warned. Everyone believed him.
The next half hour passed at snail's pace, punctuated with cries of alarm when professor Holmes occasionally 'tested' their shields by sending a spell their way, or Holmes's mutterings of how 'stupid and ignorant' children were. It was not until two thirty when things started getting interesting.
It all started when professor Holmes noticed he was holding a quill pen. Frowning, he walked over to his desk to replace it, when he observed that the inkwell was half empty. He knew that he had just recently replaced it. His frown deepened, and he closed his eyes. His mind filled with a slow motion replay of the previous few minutes. He looked for everything, saw everything, observed everything. Wait, what was that? He rewinded a few frames, and replayed it, slower this time. Looking, looking… THERE! He found what he was looking for: an ink mark on his sleeve.
He opened his eyes, and stood up violently. Reaching down to his robe sleeve, he pulled it back to reveal a set of tally marks. Five of them, he thought. Pulling it back further, he found that his entire arm was filled with tally marks. He counted forty-seven.
"Dammit!" He shouted, a little louder than he intended. "I hate these bloody things."
The whole class looked at him in shock. After a whole semester with him as their teacher, they had seen him angry, bored, despondent, even scared once when professor Watson received a blow to the head from a troll. But they had never seen him look quite like this. He looked happy.
"We are learning about a new type of magical beast, class. It is called the Silence. If you see one, you will recognize it. Kill it before looking away. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to call a Doctor." Doing a little twirl, he trotted off and said under his breath, "oh, this is better than the time with the headless monks!"