The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 10: The Restricted Section
With two weeks left in the holiday I return to Hogwarts. It's always been my understanding that everyone is to find somewhere else to be because the school frowns on taking charge of students at a time when all the faculty is off traveling or otherwise taking a break from child-minding.
But it occurs to me in Ireland that now that Hogwarts (or Dumbledore, which amounts to the same thing) has taken charge of a monster, they can't very well get rid of me. It's better for everyone if there's someone to keep an eye on me. And the main thought that occurs to me as I lay in bed, condemned to near-total wakefulness because of all the magic I stole, was that I'm terrified of my unknown capabilities.
This True Face that I cannot see becomes all the worse for having no definite boundaries with the physical face I also cannot see. I memorize the feel of my features with my hands but can make no sense of them. Now I hope they're ugly—it would be terrible if I were actually attractive and easy to get along with. People would be nearly impossible to keep away and they'd tear me to bits, as the group of boys seemed about to do at points.
I stare and stare at the mirror, and thus, Aunt Adele. It seems as though that first dream about her, the one that marked the onset of my delayed puberty, holds some kind of key to who I am. In the dream I felt as though she was everything I ever wanted, but that can't be her True Face, because I hated her at the same time, the way I always have. She made me vomit, and that's not what I made James or any of the other boys feel. Finally I am compelled to run out of the muggle inn to get away from it, from Aunt Adele's accusing eyes.
So I return to the only home I have, and the big stone castle lets me in. With my new sense I can tell there are some magical signatures wandering around, including the great man himself, Dumbledore, but none of their possible objections concerns me right now.
Miss Bundle looks up from her book and then continues reading. We've been existing in each other's orbit for years—or rather, I've existed in hers, as the library is her undisputed Lessmore isn't around, Miss Bundle has been the adult technically looking out for me, but I've mainly benefited from her complete disinterest during my long hours in the library. My time used to be spent doing lessons or looking up the obscure potions treatises that are my real interest.
Until last semester, that is, when I began spending extended periods of time in the Restricted Section. The odd thing about this section is that what is really restricted is others' ability to look in and track your activities, rather than any restrictions upon the reader himself. One's privacy appears to be absolute in this one area of the school. There are no prying paintings, no inquisitive instructors. Just shelf upon shelf of books so dangerous or scandalous that you wouldn't be caught dead looking at them otherwise. And apparently you won't be, because no one said a word about my anguished hours cozied up with Bigham's Book.
On this occasion, my urgent errand does not take me to a Restricted book at all, but to the books in a section that I frequent, though to slightly different volumes. I read for two hours or so, with my traveling satchel still by my side. Finally, I get up and approach the desk where the librarian is holding a book very close to her enormous spectacles that dwarf her face. Her long, yellowed-white hair is in a thick braid down her back, like always, and also as usual, she appears to have to think a moment to place my face.
"What is it?" she says with neither kindliness nor annoyance.
"Do you, er, have another translation of this?"
"What's wrong with this one?"
"Well, I've heard so much about Paracelsus I think of him as a sort of uncle. And I use his science every day. But—"
"But what?"
"But I can't make heads nor tails of this." I slide the volume in front of her and she peers down at the page I've been reading for the last half-hour.
"In nature we find a light that illumines us more than the sun and the moon. For it is so ordered that we see but half of man and all the other creatures, and therefore must explore them further….. And if we follow the light of nature, we learn that there exists another half of man, and that man does not consist of blood and flesh alone . . . but also of a body that cannot be discerned by our crude eyesight…. "
Miss Bundle turns her poor eyesight on me. "There's nothing whatever wrong with this translation." She reads aloud:
"Know that our world and everything we see in its compass and everything we can touch constitute only one half of the cosmos. The world we do not see is equal to ours in weight and measure, in nature and properties. From this it follows that there exists another half of man in which this invisible world operates. If we know of the two worlds, we realize that both halves are needed to constitute the whole man; for they are like two men united in one body…."
"But what does that mean?" I burst out, my desperation making my voice crack. She summons another volume, and another.
"Look, they all say the same thing," she says, jabbing at identical places in the German and Latin versions. They all say:
"For man is more than nature; he is nature, but he is also a spirit, he is also an angel, and he has the properties of all three."
"The Great Physick isn't the same charlatan that wrote all this nonsense!" I cry.
"Oh no? He was called worse than that in his day."
"No! He's responsible for half of the magical concepts that make my potions work. My mother called him L'Hermes allemand."
Miss Bundle cackles for the first time in all the years I've known her. "He would've liked that. As a matter of fact Paracelsus probably coined the expression himself."
Latin showed up more often in Aunt Adele's soup of languages, but I have heard German, and I've noticed that as long as I have heard the sound of a language I can sound it out in my head very well. Each of the three books says the same thing:
"He is enclosed in a skin, to the end that his blood, his flesh, and everything he is as a man may not become mixed with that Great World. . . . For one would destroy the other. Therefore man has a skin; it delimits the shape of the human body, and through it he can distinguish the two worlds from each other—the Great World and the Little World, the macrocosm and man—and can keep separate that which must not mingle. Thus the Great World remains completely undisturbed in its husk. . . and similarly man in his house, that is to say, his skin. Nothing can penetrate into him, and nothing that is in him can issue outside of him, but everything remains in its place."
Miss Bundle is looking at me with no expression at all. She puts an ancient French version under my nose and I read with my first language, the one that cannot lie to me:
"How marvelously man is made and formed if one penetrates into his true nature. The outer and the inner are one thing, one constellation, one influence, one concordance, one duration . . . one fruit. For this is the limbus, the primordial matter which contains all creatures in germ, just as man is contained in the limbus of his parents. The limbus of Adam was heaven and earth, water and air; and thus man remains like the limbus, he too contains heaven and earth, water and air; indeed, he is nothing but these."
Her large eyes reflect a terrible sight: a starving man who sees a meal dangling just out of his reach.
"Doubtless you have heard that your 'Great Physick' was responsible for the word bombast because his rather abrasive personality became summed up in one of his names, Bombast. It's apocryphal, of course, the word predates his birth, but scholars did coin a word after another of his names." Her eyes glitter at me through the glass.
"Oh yes?" I say politely, because the words are worrying at me again:
Since nothing is so secret or hidden that it cannot be revealed, everything depends on the discovery of those things which manifest the hidden. . . . The nature of each man's soul accords with the design of his lineaments and arteries. The same is true of the face, which is shaped and formed according to the content of his mind and soul, and the same is again true of the proportions of the human body. For the sculptor of Nature is so artful that he does not mold the soul to fit the form, but the form to fit the soul; in other words, the shape of a man is formed in accordance with the manner of his heart. . . "
"Yes, in learned circles a 'theophrast' is someone who is overly obscure, and perhaps it's not worth it to figure out what he means."
I push the books away. "Theophrastus is my third name," I say stiffly.
A silence.
Miss Bundle is peering at me, and I think it's to ascertain how much she has offended me, but she asks suddenly, "How many names do you have?"
"Six," I reply, not sure what that could possibly matter to her.
"Only six?" She seems disappointed. "I had you for ten or eleven, easy." She looks around and makes a movement with her wand, then she leans closer. "One of my pastimes is to try and guess how many names the pure bloods, or in some cases, the half-bloods, have. The Old Families, at any rate. The most we've ever had in my tenure was a student with 23 names. That's when I instituted the practice of having students design their own name-sigil for tracking their library books and anything else they would have reason to sign here at Hogwarts. Otherwise some of you would do nothing else but write your names."
Is this woman mad? I suddenly think. I've just been outed as a deviant, and as a faculty member she's known me to be a freak of nature for years. All of which should make her realize this is not the moment for little scholarly anecdotes. When I started school at Hogwarts I chose a terse "Snape" as my signature and never thought about it since. "Why are these texts so obscure?" I demand. "There are things I need to know! You knew all along! Tell me about this cursed condition; why am I this way?"
"You're probably starting in the right place, but I might be able to get some rarer volumes for you from my contacts," the word glimmers with some unknown import, but what concerns me is her complete lack of surprise.
"Why didn't you tell me this months ago? I go to the library every day. I've practically lived in the Restricted Section at times."
"It was the Headmaster's view that an intelligent boy like you would probably find what little there was about your condition on his own when he was ready, and then probably teach us more besides. And honestly, Mr. Snape, you came out so upset from that section every time I thought that's what you were reading about."
My cheeks burn.
"And there is so little we know about you, so little that has come through the ages, that it won't be any more edifying or uplifting than what you were obviously reading about instead," she says matter-of-factly.
My eyes search her face for judgment and find none. Over time I will learn that Miss Bundle will never make me feel ashamed of the pursuit of any knowledge. All knowledge is sacred to her, and this cosmopolitan attitude is exactly what I need, but what I need more urgently is someone to vent my rage at.
"So you couldn't have dropped a hint, placed some treatise on my study table, dropped a note in my pocket that said, 'By the way, Snape, you're an Alakahest'?"
Now outrage spreads across her face. "I would do no such thing—I've taken an Oath!"
"What sort of Oath?" I scoff. The students all think the librarian is something close to a squib. Other than fetching and stacking books, we never see her use her wand for any spell of note.
She makes a yelp of fury that startles me and I see a furious swishing of her wand. "You see, right here, and here, it says that the Initiates into the Great Quest for Knowledge must always respect the path of another," She summons a whole pile of dusty scrolls and unfurls them right in front of my face. "'And never coerce or attempt to divert the seeker from his or her search for wisdom, which is propelled by a mechanism known only to his inner compass, which—'"
"Hang on," Not bothering with any niceties, I use my hand magic and intone a charm I know. One of the old parchments changes from an unfamiliar alphabet to the Roman characters that signify sounds in my mind. This is one of Aunt Adele's frequent languages, and I sound it out. "That says 'never stand in the way of a wild she-boar and her young, or she'll make you regret it.'"
I'm able to decode enough of some of the other documents to realize that the librarian is wildly misappropriating their true sense for her own purposes. "Does this trick actually work on people?"
"Yes, every time," she snaps, and then her expression changes. "Where did you learn Ancient Chaldean?"
"It doesn't matter. What matters is that you could have helped me all this time and you didn't."
Miss Bundle sighs and summons a house elf for some tea and sandwiches. Until the food is in front of me I didn't realize how ravenous I was. Once two sandwiches are in my belly, my mind can return to other hungers.
"If you'd only asked me, I could have made the same offer as I did tonight—let me ask around to see if there's not better information through other channels. It really is the belief of all scholars that it is wrong to foist any knowledge upon someone until he or she is ready to ask."
"So do you mean if he was standing right here and I asked the Great Man Dumbledore he would have told me what I am and how to fix it?"
"With that one, perhaps not."
"But that's not fair; it's just stupid!" The child that is still left in me and the young man getting an intuition of a life full of injustices stretching ahead both agree on this. "Everything would be better in the world if people would share what they knew instead of hoarding their knowledge."
Miss Bundle sits placidly behind her stacks and stacks of books. "If there were a lotion to make people absorb knowledge through their skin, why not spread it everywhere so people will be wiser?"
"Because that would be madness! They might absorb each other's thoughts, or dangerous ideas without context!"
She fixes me with her brown eyes. "And so there is such a lotion?"
My mind on my own fate, I say offhandedly, "Perhaps." In my experience nearly anything is possible.
"Make it for me!" She's halfway across the table and about to grasp my arm before I propel myself backwards with all my might.
Her eyes are huge, drinking me in, seeing deep into me. "I just want to know, I could read while I sleep! You have to do this for me!"
"No! Don't look! Don't look at my True Face!" I shout, throwing up every ward I know with my wand hand while my other hand covers this shameful, dangerous visage.
She's laughing. It's that laugh, it's the way James and Sirius and all the boys laughed when they saw me naked. Now I know it to be the laugh of delusion, the sound a person's desire makes when it fixes on the object it is determined to have. The prospect of what Dumbledore will do to me for having inadvertently shown my Face to a faculty member has me rooted, trembling, to the spot.
Miss Bundle's laugh changes into the much more comfortable laugh of derision I'm accustomed to. "Mr. Snape, there are few things I wouldn't do for knowledge, but I'm afraid you're one of them."
My jaw drops at the baldly sexual statement coming from a woman we'd all thought of as ancient. Then it drops lower when I realize:
The librarian is probably not yet thirty.
The hair I'd taken for granted as a yellowed white is actually a rare and lovely shade of strawberry blond, what had always seemed like age spots are actually freckles, and her poor eyesight is obviously a lifelong condition, and not the result of decades of reading small print, though that probably doesn't help.
Physically speaking, she is actually very attractive, or would be if something in the center of her weren't marring it with a hunger that makes her limbs and skin seem wasted when they are nothing of the sort.
With her strange calm she's watching the ideas come together in my head. "I hide it well, but your attitude isn't exactly come hither, either, is it, Snape?" My head is trying to process how to relate to this new, younger, casual Miss Bundle, at the same time that it seeks to understand what is wrong with her. "But in a certain light we do all right."
That's it. That's her take on my condition, and whatever her situation is. There's no horror, maybe a rueful complicity at the most.
She takes a flask out of one of her paper-stuffed drawers and pours a little in our teacups. Knowing now that such an easy release as alcohol is denied me, I drink my own and watch the knot of hunger in the young woman across from me. It's not diminished in the slightest by the bit of spirit, so her problem can't be with drink.
"Make it for me and I'll get you any book you can think of," she resumes. I suddenly realize I'm making my first illicit deal, though I can't yet understand what rule I'm breaking. The idea of using my potions ability—which is somehow a fruit of my illness, I'm beginning to think—for something unsanctioned seems just right.
And so Miss Bundle and I begin a mutually profitable relationship. That night I go to sleep for more than just a few minutes at a time for the first time since my fall from grace. I dream of the solution to the potion assignment the young woman has given me. The next morning I'm in the library very early but the librarian has beat me to it and has breakfast waiting for me alongside a stack of potions references she thinks might be helpful. While I gather some clues from these books, she's drafting owl posts to her contacts in what I will begin to understand is the book underworld.
It takes me over a week to come up with something that seems a plausible solution. When I finally hand over the jar, Miss Bundle reveals the stack of ancient volumes she's been keeping from me.
"These have been arriving since Thursday, but I didn't want you distracted," she says slyly. "Now give it here or I'll reach over and take it myself."
What on earth could be worth exposing herself to whatever toxin I carry in my skin? We float each other's reward across the table that she spends most of her waking hours attached to, and she bolts off.
Her wand warns her just in time about a pile of books she has left near the Restricted Section.
It's the first time I notice that when she moves, the librarian isn't moving her wand subtly as a way of checking that the volumes are in order, or a method of letting students know that she's ready to smite them for carving into the tables.
She really is that nearsighted. I look around the library. It's always been very orderly, as one would expect a magical library to be. Most of the books know their places and will leap back there when you're done with them. Even her constant search for the perfect indexing system, which means we'll often come in to find a familiar section in a different place, or books ordered by era rather than discipline, never has her leaving books on the floor.
But in recent months, things have been a little less tidy, I realize, and move to where the out-of-place volumes could trip Miss Bundle if she is distracted. Perhaps this carelessness means her condition is progressing in some way—why did I offer to add more fuel to the fire that is eating this young woman into a state that makes her look at least 60? My own short-sightedness knows no bounds. How I could have never noticed her compensating for such a vision impairment, or for her unnatural avidity towards books, I have no idea.
Summoning up the books, which lie in pairs or in larger stacks in a path to the Restricted Section, I direct them to a table and then look them over while my mind returns to the mystery of my nature. Then something catches my eye.
These books are all biographies, to a one. That's a coincidence. It's not a genre favored by most students, so they'd not be likely waiting for shelving. After flipping through each of them I realize what they have in common:
They're the life stories of same-sex loving wizards and witches, portrayed in a positive light. She's been leaving these right in my path for months, at hazard to herself and in defiance of her oath. But I've been making a beeline for Bigham's Book and all that associated filth every time, so I didn't see what this not-unkind woman was trying to show me about myself.
This sends me right over to the pile of books the librarian ordered for me.
I read all through the night. At one point it strikes me that Dumbledore and I are the only ones awake. He's surely known since I was at the castle gates that I was back early, and I know enough now to be sure that if he hasn't taken me to task for coming back early, it's not because I'm especially welcome.
He knows what I'm doing right now. He's going to make it his business to know every breath I take for the rest of the time I'm at Hogwarts.
At least here I know I won't drain anyone to death.
When Miss Bundle appears in the morning she practically floats over to me.
"You're a genius!" she says, pinching the air a few inches from my cheek. "And now maybe I will be too."
"You slept well," I ask cautiously. This compound I gave her is purely experimental, but it does contain something to encourage sleep, an activity I expect she engages in all too little.
"Oh, yes," she stretches sensually and then rubs a shoulder. She retrieves a stack of volumes from her pocket and resizes them. "This one is a bit sharp, but I suppose some of the most interesting ones will be," she says, fingering the edge on a thick tome devoted to human-friendly recipes from the goblin hordes. "Perhaps I should make an effort to sleep on books that are roughly the same thickness next time."
Humming, she sends the books back to the shelves for some unsuspecting student to clasp, unaware that they once served as the librarian's bedthings. I stare at her but she has absolutely no shame about this activity I am coming to realize is somehow shameful. Then I put my finger on it: her hunger is much calmer.
That's what I try to tell myself in the coming months as she tells me about her new double-layer method (she opens books on top of her as well as the ones below her). The whole thing was just a lark for me, but when Miss Bundle starts to scare me with her ever-expanding selections of reading (by her own admission she only read seven or eight languages fluently without some sort of charm before, and now I regularly see languages I don't recognize on her desk.) She also recommends some texts that she thinks might be of some use in my research, and I take them gingerly, feeling them to be thick with her magic, which is a lavender color.
It's easy for me to trace either her magic or my lotion throughout the library, but for some reason my abilities can't trace anything that goes on in the Restricted Section. It's completely off the grid.
During our long hours in the library together over break, Miss Bundle admits that it was she who created this private section where almost all the books worth reading, in my opinion, are kept.
Before her tenure, all the library's assets were on the main indexing system and those who checked them out were monitored. Since Hogwarts owns many priceless antiquities, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they'd want to know who to blame if one were to go missing.
"So what happens if someone steals or defaces a book in the Restricted Section? It just seems very un-Hogwarts to allow such an anarchic place to exist."
Miss Bundle says with great dignity, "I told the headmaster that only a barbarous people would police intellectual activity."
"You called Dumbledore a barbarous people?" I gape at her.
She bites her lip. "He didn't say he felt so alluded, but you see the result."
As I get to know Miss Bundle better, however, I wonder if the great man's meddling hasn't gotten the last word after all. Because Miss Bundle is a driven woman, and I suspect she is not the first person kept at Hogwarts because they need someone keeping an eye on them.
She just wants to know.
Everything.
At any cost.
Anyone who will do anything at any cost is a potential danger to society. And certainly to herself. This is my first introduction to addicts but the books about addiction I read in the Restricted Section help me recognize the signs in Miss Bundle. The same signs I find in later years as I come into contact with those wishing to benefit from my unsurpassed ability with making marginally legal substances that have purely illegal effects on the system.
These books about rare paraphilias show me that there are many ways for a witch or wizard to go wrong, not just my own anomalies. Morbid bibliophilia is the name for Miss Bundle's problem, and people of her bent have been known to perish in the search for long-vanished texts about which some unscrupulous person has ignited the hope that they might still exist, the secret to which they will share—always for a fee. They've been apprehended robbing private libraries and gotten buried alive trying to dig into an unexcavated Egyptian tomb, hungering to be the first eyes in a thousand years to alight on the hieroglyphs.
They're not unlike gamblers in the sense that they'll sell their first-born for the sake of indulging their habits, and more than one bibliophile has been found naked, happy and nearly starved in a house stuffed to the brim with books, with only the strongest spells serving to unclasp their hands from the treasures they want to take with them to the asylum, a fate to which they are otherwise indifferent.
I start observing Miss Bundle more closely, taking advantage of the odd frankness about this woman who is completely unintimidated by my own problems. Her attitude is strange. At once, she'll do anything for me, call on any resource, magical or muggle, to find obscure treatises. Sometimes she hints at knowing where the lost library of Alexandria is. This young woman who is aged beyond her years by something feels more relaxed by my collusion with her tastes, and begins to tell me about the vast network of learned people without scruples who plunder, steal, and will kill each other for an unblemished copy of a manuscript from Demosthenes. And they will do worse if sold a forgery as the real thing.
The idea of sharing their great knowledge beyond their small circle doesn't seem to matter to these people at all. Miss Bundle, I begin to grasp, knows more than anyone at Hogwarts put together, more than most people in the wizarding society, but she probably wouldn't lift her nose out of a book to use any of this knowledge, though it might do a great deal of good.
Perhaps it's a lack of imagination. More likely it's that she's addicted to the chase of the next new idea. I'm lucky I can do something for her, or she might not be taking such great pains to help me.
Also, I suspect this youngest member of Hogwarts' faculty feels a strange affinity for the young monster, Snape. In my case, the need to know everything the obscure sciences can teach me about myself is extremely practical, but perhaps the eyedrops we share while we read late into the night remind her of what she needs, and we spend companionable hours lost in the stacks, lost to each other in the forbidden section where one person can't see the other's actions.
In the two weeks until school starts again, the only thing I'm able to work out is that without warning I can turn into a little slice of heaven where there ought to be none.
And this stray bit of heaven damns me to a life without love or touch.
As frustratingly vague as Paracelsus' writing is he's the only one who claims to have cured the dreaded "noli-mi-tangere":
The touch-me-not disease.
"How marvelously man is made and formed if one penetrates into his true nature," is one of the bits from the Great Philosopher's works that floats around in my mind, where, unable to settle on any real sense, it confirms whatever my worst fear happens to be at the moment.
The muggle books Miss Bundle obtains for me say the same thing as the magical texts: whether you call them saints or wizards, the usual way is for someone to have earned the fragment of heaven or purity or whatever you wish to call that precious thing that they drag around through the muck of the earth. These are necessarily more advanced humans because a frustrating, somewhat circular reasoning holds true in both societies: you must be good to be possess good. You must not seek after power to have power. To know something you must know what you need to know.
In my case, however, I provide a certain kind of bliss that everyone wants—the feeling of losing themselves in union with another. And I have none of the wisdom that the great adepts and holy men and women had to have possessed in order to discover the "other half" of themselves, part angel, that lies inside, safely tucked away from the regular person's "crude eyesight."
My cursed solubility means that I lack the "skin" that keeps people safely one thing and not another:
Therefore man has a skin; it delimits the shape of the human body, and through it he can distinguish the two worlds from each other-the Great World and the Little World, the macrocosm and man-and can keep separate that which must not mingle. Thus the Great World remains completely undisturbed in its husk. . . and similarly man in his house, that is to say, his skin. Nothing can penetrate into him, and nothing that is in him can issue outside of him, but everything remains in its place.
Brushing by me in the corridor can mean a brush with the angelic at class change. To the unprepared person this kind of purity is so overwhelming he or she is ready to do anything to hold on to it, including harming the "angel," or each other.
And I know better now than to think that any of it has anything to do with unlovely Snape. James and Sirius fell in love or lust or delusion with something, but it had nothing to do with me.
This True Face business is a misnomer. Or maybe it isn't; maybe half the boys at school got a glimpse of the divine during their crude batterings against me, its keeper. But it's not anything of mine they ever wanted or saw. Probably most of them didn't really grasp they were with another boy at the time.
Lost in these dark musings the night before school is to resume, Miss Bundle makes one of her paranoid gestures with her wand and whispers fiercely, "Haven't I kept up with my end of the bargain?" She gestures at the books littering the table along with my notes.
"Yes, yes of course. Thank you Miss Bundle," I say, my eyes reverting to the Book of Lambspring, which seems marginally more comprehensible than the works of Paracelsus. How was I to know that the people quoting the Great Physick to me all these years were putting the man's thoughts into a sensible context they entirely lacked on their own!
The book disappears.
They all do.
"Then why have you given me this garbage to slather myself with?" Miss Bundle is advancing on me, dangerously close, both for her, and I fear, for myself.
After I made the first batch of Liber Lactima Lotion, as the librarian baptized it for its supposed ability to squeeze out the "tears" of knowledge contained in books and funnel them into her pores, I was convinced that the whole thing must be some type of unhealthy exercise in auto-suggestion I wanted no part of. The strange exaltation that now seemed to grip the young woman most of the time had her walking into things because she didn't take enough care with her wand, and I had to ask her to show me some of the basic charms for finding and filing books so that I could do my own research while she sat with a pile of books on her lap and "read" with her two hands on different volumes and her eyes practically rolled back in her head in ecstasy.
There is no way one of my more desultory efforts in the laboratory produced something that complex and effective, I reason, and so the next lotion I give her is an Ask Me Not, a flawlessly executed placebo designed to turn her mind from imagining she could possibly read through her skin.
"Dumbledore put you up to this, didn't he? After I told you all about my confreres and sent owls halfway around the world in the service of your little existential crisis, you repay me with this excrement?" She flings the little pot of lotion on the table. "Last night I rubbed myself with it and lay down with Pliny the Younger and all I got was a stiff neck. You, of all of them, I thought I could count on not to go all moral on me."
"Calm down, Miss Bundle, I'm sure I must have gotten distracted by all the fine volumes you obtained for me and neglected some crucial calculation in my potion," I say in a soothing voice, trying not to be hurt at her estimation of my morals. "Let me see if I can figure out what I did wrong."
In the laboratory I spend a few hours trying to remember what I did the first time, and then test it on myself. Perhaps it's because my system is so fatally different, but coating my wand-hand with it has me listening to Dumbledore speaking in a far-off wing of the castle.
"As I hoped, Severus has been spending a great deal of time in the library trying to understand what he is. I fear there aren't many books in existence that will help him, but at the very least he's enlisting Miss Bundle's many talents for something other than her usual pursuits. He may do that poor woman some good even if he finds none for himself."
Hastily, I wash my hand off in the sink. I don't want to hear that man dissecting me like one of the worms whose carcasses litter my worktable. At around midnight I return to the library where the hungry, hunted Miss Bundle sits drumming her fingers on her desk. "Let's see if this is better."
Though no one would believe that the slut for half the school could have such scruples, I am actually a prudish person, especially at this time in my life. I have to turn away from the sight of the librarian with several buttons of her high-necked blouse undone, rubbing herself with lotion and then pressing a book to her chest so that she may drink a book into her pores with a look of ecstasy on her face.