Chapter 9.
I wrote it even before finishing chap.8, but couldn't post it before finishing the damned thing.
Sorry it took so long
Chapter IX : Dissection
Marianne' s P.O.V.
We were back at Hogwarts, finally! Its not that I didn't enjoy my vacations (I loved them), it's just that it was so good to be back at school, in this holidays. It was great to get back into the old habits with lessons, teachers, students, the corridors with talking paintings and the magical passages to classes. When I walked under the porch I felt like I had not seen Hogwarts in ten years, but when I was inside, I found my my and my habits as if I had only left for a day. It was like being back in another home, with your huge family. The two first weeks were very positive, but it didn't last long, unfortunately.
It all happened on Thursday, right after potions. We had volunteered to help Pr Slughorn to clean the classroom after the class as he was too tired and old. The girls didn't really want to stay, but I made them. I know I'm too nice sometimes but I can't help it, just can't. So we came out of the dungeons, 15 minutes after everyone and started to make our way to the common room. Then, when the corridor spits in two on the east wing of the second floor we heard voices in the right way, both of them I could recognise .
"Hagrid!" I gasped
"Pr Longbottom!" Axelle added
"Shhhhhhhhhhh !" Dominika whispered, "Let's get closer." We tiptoed to were the sound came from and we looked on both sides of the corridors, it was deserted, and put our ears against the small oak door, wandering how Hagrid had got into the room. We heard:
"Are you sure, Hagrid?"
"Yes, I'm sure Neville!"
"So it could be a…" the end of the faint whisper was covered by the ruffling of papers.
"It is one of the possibilities, but could be wrong, so don't tell anyone, I'll check it first. I'll be goin' tonight. It attacks on cloudy nights, like this and at this period of the month."
"Another sign…" Pr Longbottom cut him "Look, go well protected, OK? And I'll tell Luna, I'm sure she'll help, she knows a lot more than I do on this, you don't mind do you?" Hagrid let out a grunt and then said:
"Let's go. Oh and yeh can come for tea once, with your sons." Axelle pulled us both out of our reflections and, realising, we sped towards the stairs. It was a close one, the two adults came out right after us, not noticing anything.
I couldn't concentrate on my homework that evening, I was so worried about Hagrid. In a corner of the common room, my two friends and me were discussing what we should do:
"What do you think Pr Longbottom thought it was?" Axelle asked
"I don't know." I said Shuddering "Dominika, we should tell Rose, she knows him best."
"No!" Dominika stated
"What then? What can we do?" I asked scared and tense.
"We'll follow him into the forest." We stared, blinking, at Axelle who had just pronounced these strange words.
"How can that help?" Dominika questioned astounded.
"We can use magic to help him, just in case. And we'll discover what he thinks it is." Axelle explained. I didn't like that plan since the moment she had said it.
"Isn't that a bit dangerous?" I asked. They stared at me.
"And against-the-rules?" Dominika continued, now we stared at her.
"It won't work." I whispered, "I know it, I feel it, it won't work." But no one heard.
"OK, I have to admit it is the beginning of a good plan."
"Come on guys!" Axe pleaded
"OK we'll do it." Dominika said, " Oh, what do you think, Marianne?" Axelle didn't let me answer and repeat what I thought, she spoke:
"We won't get caught: we'll be under the invisibility cloak, and it won't be dangerous: haven't we just learned a spell to drive wild animals away?"
We were at the Ravenclaw table the evening after eating casually. The girls had convinced me and we had all started being enthusiastic and excited about it. Dominika had made multiple calculations and statistics to find out the right time and the right path to take. I had asked innocently Pr Thomas and Finnigan to know if the doors were locked during the night and had been very happy to learn that they were opened all night on Friday for a strange reason this at Pr Thomas did not explain. We had nominated Axelle to go and ask James about lending us his father's invisibility cloak, which was now his, knowing he wouldn't refuse it for Axelle. After eating, she stood up and, after having cleaned her mouth on a tea towel and finished her glass of pumpkin juice, started to walk towards the Gryffindor table. She saw James and waved at him to come and meet her at the bottom of the stairs. Two seconds later they were in a nice little conversation, Axelle with her would-be-cheery voice and James, happy as he always was. After a while, she stopped, looked down at her apparently very interesting shoes and whispered:
"James? Could you, um… lend us your invisibility cloak ummm… please, if it is possible ?"
"What? My cloak? What for?" he asked surprised. Axelle had thought about this, she had decided to tell half of the truth if he did ask.
"Well, to follow someone." This satisfied James, he shrugged and said
"OK. I'll get it for you in a minute, just remember, even if they can't see you they can still hear you or bump into you, known that right?" Axelle nodded, comprehensively. "You don't wanna get into trouble…"
"Oh stop it James you sound like Rose, or like mum, or like –" It was Albus who had appeared behind them, with Scorpius, Axelle flushed.
"Oh leave us alone, it's none of your business! And did you hear everything?" she asked worriedly
"No! Well Yes! Well, um, no. Was there something I needed to hear, like a secret gossip- "Scorpius said, his eyes gleaming with interest, before-
"I am gonna kill you two!" roared James
"No! No! Sorry!" They shouted, protecting themselves with their arms.
"Don't mess around here children! The noise blocks my internal eye!" said a drowling woman's voice behind them.
"Sorry, um, Professor…" said Axelle not recognising her
"Trelawny." Finished James, before running away to meet us.
It was ten o'clock. The common room was still full but we had to go to leave now. We pretended to go to bed early, one after the other. But a few minutes later we were gliding against the wall, through the room. Getting through the room was difficult, as we were three under that thing, the room was really crowded and pushing our way through, like we would normally have done, was prohibited. Peter Verbeke, who was walking into the wall and bumped into it 'by accident', nearly crashed into us. He tripped on my foot and looked questioningly at his two feet. Once we were out in the corridor, I whispered to the girls:
"Why the heck is he in Ravenclaw? I mean, no offense, but he is a little bit mentally disadvantaged, to say it nicely."
"He's dumb you mean!" Axelle whispered back "Sorry, it's kind of true though…" she added
"I suppose he's intelligent in the inside." Dominika remarqued. Even though I couldn't see her, I stared at the place her head was supposed to be, doubtful of what she had said.
Getting outside was very complicated but about twenty minutes later, we were there after having dodged several teachers and students. The three of us crouched behind a bush and waited, watching Hagrid's door closely. We stayed there for hours, OK, 52 minutes really. After a while my teeth were chattering from the cold, my legs were numb from half sitting and my hands were frozen. We were about to retreat when the door squeaked and Hagrid, followed by Claw, came out, carrying a pink umbrella and a lantern. "That's what he means by 'well armed'?" I thought. We rose and crept behind into the forest. Dominika took the cloak off of us as soon as she thought the trees were making the place dark enough. We had trouble seeing our way and we had to walk carefully to limit the leave/branch crushing noises. At one point, after a few uncountable minutes of walking in the cold and in a terrible silence, Claw started to grunt loudly and pulled hard on the rope Hagrid was holding him with. He reacted and ran after him, raising his pink umbrella as a weapon.
We ran behind him, but much slower: we needed to take three steps when he took only one and the only light we had was the little dancing lantern in a distance, so, as you can imagine, we met a couple of tree trunks and roots and bushes on the way. We reached the place where he was a few minutes after him, it was a relatively small clearing. Hagrid was kneeling down examining a shadowy figure on the ground. When we arrived, panting, after having pulled the cloak over ourselves, he jumped up, looked in our direction raising his lamp and shouted:
"Show yerself, yeh horrible beast show yerself!" We stopped dead and cut any breathing. He checked again in the dark bushes with a glance and then looked back down on the figure.
"It must have been something else, that beast killed poor Neptuni hours ago." He said sadly. At this moment my heart gave a small jolt, there had to be something bad coming.
"Can't believe he talks like that about the centaurs after what they did to him." Dominika whispered. Axelle's mouth and mine drpped. "I'll tell you later! She responded, looking at us with exasperation. "Now, watch!" We moved a little forward.
Hagrid moved slowly to the right, raising his lamp, and the outline precised itself. At first I thought it to be a human, then a horse, but in the end I understood, it was the centaur. Hagrid put his lantern down as we moved a little closer. A horrifying sight met our eyes. I felt like throwing up and I think we would all have fallen down in shock if hadn't all been half supporting each other. The centaur's body had been ripped open and all the guts had been pulled out and half chewed. All the organs were lying around him in a pool of dark blood and bits of shredded skin were splattering the leaves of the clearing. One of its legs had been torn off and carried to the side of the clearing. The worst of all was that large fangs had been dug into his throat ripping the head half off so that it was hanging backwards with its yellow eyes still open, as if looking at us. All of this was without considering the smell! Oh what a nightmare! A smell of blood and rotten body… It was suffocating.
I grabbed hold of Dominika's hand and pressed it so I would hang on. She murmured with a croaky voice:
"Let's go, quiet now." And after a few meters: "Run!" She striped the cloak off us as Hagrid was far and we wanted to run more freely to leave this doomed place. We kind of got lost on the way back to the path and at two in the morning my legs would hardly carry me up to the dorm. Finally, we collapsed on our beds, morally and physically exhausted like I had rarely felt before. Axelle whispered to us:
"Sorry. We didn't really learn what we were meant to."
"Do we want to know any more?" I asked, knowing the answer.