The Library in the Attics
"May your All Hallows Eve be as frightening as you desire!" ~SS
It is generally thought that spirits - those that like to frighten the living - are all down in the dungeons but they are not. The dungeons are damp, cool, and darker than the rest of Hogwarts. However, if you seek the unusual even the terrifying then perhaps you ought to listen to this tale of "The Library in the Attics".
Over two decades I have traversed nearly everywhere there is to be found in Hogwarts. It is not a boast but a simple fact that I know more about Hogwarts than even its ghosts. I know… that at certain times of the year… smart witches and wizards, even if grown, stay away from the attics.
Hogwarts has a labyrinth of attics that are connected to each via a bridge of magic. One is not aware of such magic for the connection tends to appear as a curiously shaped doorway (much like a very large keyhole) that leads into the next room. I know of seventeen attics, the curious student generally learns of eight attics, and the Headmaster knew of twenty-three before he passed.
One of those attics appears as a library of broken, spoiled, and damaged books. It is the one attic everyone must avoid. Within that attic is something that wants the blood of the living. It is an aggressive, yet helpless creature that will likely terrify the hapless wanderer. However, on the night of its demise, the night when the Veil is at its thinnest between here and Beyond, it becomes hungry and deadly.
One night, when I was a student, and most often wandered at night from insomnia, I chose the attics as my place of exploration. I had discovered, over three years as a student, the eight rooms we students usually find. I found old clothing, furniture, weapons, geegaws, knick-knacks, and oddments galore. The attics were a place of refuge for this benighted Slytherin, and a place I rather felt as if they were my own secret.
Thus, to expand upon that secret, I endeavoured to find more attic rooms. So, on a night before the Day of the March of the Dead I left Slytherin House, ascended a secret staircase within the walls until I entered the first attic room.
The first attic was a mundane storage area for broken desks, and benches, once used in the classrooms of Hogwarts. This was the only room to have three doorways into the labyrinth of attics - one doorway in the centre of each wall.
With a determination, and later what I would call Gryffindor curiosity and foolishness, I tempted fate by choosing the doorway to my left. The left - as those in the know might recall - is Exitiabilis latere Obscuritatis - the Sinister side of Darkness.
In my previous explorations I had chosen doorways at random, with no thought as to what I might discover. This time was different.
I discovered an attic scattered with devices of torture, many of which had dark stains upon them I could only believe was blood. I found another attic that chimed with devices of Time that drew the eye with the gleam of silver and gold, or beautiful appearing gemstones. Sadly, none that I could touch. I then came across a room of curious statues of angels that watched every move I made. Before those statues I intrinsically knew I should not blink. I also knew, within every fibre of my being, not to touch any of the angels within this attic!
A third attic held what appeared to be musty, dusty carpets feasted upon by Doxies and likely hiding a Boggart or two. As tempted as I was to examine these curious rugs, some inner sense again warned me not to dare linger in this attic.
By that time each doorway to the left of me that I came to began to call to me as a Siren might to Odysseus. I could no more turn away, and return to the safe confines of my House than a starving man.
That evening my discovery of eight attics became twelve, and then I had the misfortune to step into a thirteenth.
A library. A library of Darkness, of Damage, of Neglect, of Abuse… of books with broken spines, and scrolls with sections torn, eaten by those annoying Doxies, or burned.
The smell in this library was not of furniture oil, dry parchment, and centuries old ink. This library stank with the scent of ash, blood, and rot. A great arched window dominated this attic, and nothing touched or obscured it as though if anything or anyone dared to do so retribution would be swift, and painful. The window was a bloody crimson and although I had begun my adventure in the depths of night… light of some ethereal sort poured through that erythrean glass. The room… was bathed in blood… and felt quite gratified to be so.
I was instantly chilled as the atmosphere of the attic drifted over me. Nauseated, too.
I was terrifyingly fascinated, though. Journal, scrolls, and terrible tomes of Darkness I could not comprehend. I felt the misery of centuries bearing down upon my shoulders, and at one point I felt like weeping for the Souls damned that had known what was in this library.
Oh! How I wanted out of that attic! Yet, at the same… dreadful… time I felt compelled with a sickening turmoil to peruse those books, to unroll those scrolls, to know what was in the handwritten journals; their contents seductively winking as many pages were bent back by age.
And, then I felt the air move. You must know that there are no open windows in any of the attics… so I knew this breeze was not as innocent as it attempted to be. My blood prickled with frost.
"Severus," a deep, dark voice from beyond the Veil tickled my ear, "take a book, my boy. Follow your temptation…"
The nausea drifted away as the breeze danced seductively around me. There was my temptation… like a living, breathing thing it filled my Soul, my heart… it made my blood sing.
I stretched out a hand towards one of the books…
"Ohhh, yes, Severus… that one dear child…"
I hesitated because as much as that voice enwrapped me in desperate flame, I was cold. Not cold from weather, or snow, or any such normal thing as that. I felt a deep cold that threatened to turn my bones into brittle shards, to harden my heart. It was a chill that promised to take me Beyond the Veil, Beyond the Warmth of Death, to the Fear that is Abaddon.
"No," my voice rasped.
"Oh my child, my dear little wanderer…" crooned the voice as the breeze swirled with concupiscence that delved right down to my skin.
I had never felt so suddenly prurient… and at the same time I could not move, physically, from these sensations.
Merlin help me! My Soul wept. I had not even touched a book, and already I was so afflicted by what existed within this attic I was terrified of being changed. Not so much as haunted, for still I must be to so clearly recall this night, but to be molded into something even I would not hunger to recognise.
On that night a Mercy touched my Soul. A benediction of warning I was given (never return!) and She released my feet from the miasma that sought to enwrap my very physical being into every fibre of journal, scroll, and tome in that library. To take of my blood a strength to sustain itself for another century.
I ran!
My heart beating so rapidly in my chest that I was certain it would burst painfully from my ribs. Through the right-hand doorway, and directly down my hidden staircase to the sweet coolness, the dark, torchlit world or my dungeons, of Slytherin House, of all that was my sanctuary.
I ran into the common room and ignored the curious stares of the few that were still studying, and went into my dorm where I leapt into my bed, and burrowed deep beneath my covers.
In sleep that night I was plagued by a figure of ghostly thinness that trapped me by my wrist as it gripped me with skeletal fingers. It wore robes that were delusive in white… as newborn snow… but I knew without any doubt that underneath was a corruption that such feigned innocence could not hide.
All night long I fought to get away until finally when I did I woke as I fell from my bed.
Yea, I was not content to push that night, and the subsequent nightmare far into the tangles of my mind. I wanted to know what that attic was; what existed within it that had wanted my living being.
Until the day I walked out of Hogwarts, no longer a child but as a man doomed for a more present evil, I searched for information on that attic. I found snippets of stories, bits of rumour, a hint of a warning to not seek to explore the attics on the night of All Hallows Eve.
What I learned was no more than what I experienced that night; something within that attic had wanted me… my blood. Had I gone the next night to that attic, the night in which we so blithely celebrate with silly bats, spiders, carved pumpkins, and magic'd fog in the Great Hall… I would have been forgotten to all. I would have been a broken book, a burned scroll, a rotting journal.
And, it would have been your blood that I hungered for… next.
~S. Snape
Written for All Hallows Eve