14
Al's fourth year arrived.
He came by to see Snape about a half dozen times between his return from Spain at the end of July 2031 and the beginning of July 2032, when James was due to come home. These visits were low-key and in no way unpleasant; the two of them found they could pass the time civilly enough. They spoke more in silences than in words, and their actual conversations would've put a Scotland Yard agent to sleep.
Al told Snape he was seeing a girl named Ariadne Greengrass off and on. He wasn't all that into her, but her mother Daphne was one of his mother's friends. The old man told Al that he had taken up latch hook rug making; it was supposed to be good for the arthritis. He showed him several pieces and Al dutifully admired them.
The boy had grown quite a bit, had he not? Well, two inches. Had Snape given up smoking? No, but he had cut down; they made him cough too much. How had his school work been? Very difficult and somewhat exciting; he had gotten all O's and E's and he had been designing a way to convert solar power into magical energy as an Arithmancy project, and was now thinking of majoring in anthropology instead of history once he got to university. Who was mowing Snape's lawn this year? Henry Sitchens from down the street. A good boy, but rather fat and slow.
During that year, Snape had put an end to three vagrants in his kitchen. He had been approached at the bus stop around the three towns fifteen or so times, and had made the bed/drink/meal offer a dozen times. He had been turned down twice, and three times the vagrant had absconded with his bus coupons to go somewhere else.
On warm days lately there had been a rather unpleasant smell drifting up from the cellar. Snape kept his doors and windows firmly shut on those days.
Al Potter had found a vagrant in a vacant lot not far from the train yard. This was in December, during the Christmas vacation. He had stood there, hands in pockets, looking at this dirty speck of humanity and trembling. He had returned to this lot five or six times over the next few weeks, always wearing the light jacket (or a heavier one if it threatened snow) to conceal the hammer in his belt. At last he had come upon the hobo again—that one or another, and who really gave a fuck—on the first day of March. He had started with the hammer end and at some point (he couldn't remember when; everything had been swimming in a red haze) he had switched to the claw end, obliterating the tramp's face.
For Severus Snape, the tramps were a half-cynical propitiation of gods which he finally recognised, or re-recognised, if you liked that better. And the tramps were fun; they made him feel young and alive. He began to feel like the years he had spent in Greaves before the boy had turned up on his doorstep with his wide green eyes and disarming, sunny grin were years in which he was growing old before his time. He had been just passed his mid-sixties when he finally moved permanently into this house. He felt much younger than that now.
The idea of propitiating gods would've surprised Al, but would probably have gained acceptance. After doing away with the first tramp under the train platform, Al had expected his nightmares to intensify—to perhaps drive him crazy. He had expected waves of terrible guilt, leading to either a tearful confession or the taking of his own life.
Instead, he had gone to Spain and enjoyed the best vacation of his life. His mother and father were almost back to normal and his sister had come out of her shell.
He had begun his fourth year last September feeling oddly renewed, as though a different person, one with a fresher outlook, had climbed into his Al Potter skin. Things that had not made much of an impression on him since earliest childhood—the quality of sunlight just after dawn; the sight of fish jumping in the river; watching people hurrying on a downtown street; or that moment just after sunset when the streetlights first come on—these things imprinted upon his memory in a series of bright cameos, in images so bright they seemed almost electroplated. He tasted life on his tongue, like the world's strongest Pepperup Potion.
After he had seen the tramp in the vacant lot, but before he killed him, the nightmares had begun again.
The most common one involved the hobo in the abandoned train yard. He would come home from school, a cheerful Hi, Minny-Ginny! on his lips. It died there as he advanced into the kitchen because there, in the raised breakfast nook would be the tramp in his puke-smelling shirt and pants. Blood ran across the shiny tile floor in dried rivulets; bloody handprints splattered across the natural mahogany cupboards.
Pinned to the notice board by the refrigerator was a note: Al, gone to the shops, be back by five. The hands on the clock over the stove read four-fifty, and the drunk still sprawled there like an oozing relic from a junk shop sub-cellar. There was blood everywhere, and Al would begin frantically trying to clean it up, scrubbing at every exposed surface and screaming at the tramp that he had to go, had to leave him the hell alone, and the tramp just lolled there and stayed dead, grinning his horrible bloody grin at the ceiling, and freshets of blood kept pouring out of the stab wounds in his dirty skin. Al would grab frantically for his wand, only for it to come crumbling apart in his fingers like a relic that was a million years old, until it was a useless fall of powder running through his fingers. So he would go to the little closet where regular cleaning implements were and grab the old mop, its head hanging off the handle like a clot of dead spider-web. He ran it over the floor, aware that he wasn't really getting the blood up but only diluting it, spreading it around, but unable to stop. And just as he heard the crack of his mother's returning Apparition in the back garden, he realised the tramp was Snape. He woke from these dreams gasping, heart racing, clutching double handfuls of the bedclothes.
After doing the tramp in the vacant lot, though, these dreams went away. He supposed that he might have to kill again and possibly more than once. But that was okay. Their usefulness as human creatures was almost gone, anyway, except for their usefulness to Al. And Al, like anybody, was just catering his own lifestyle to meet his needs as he got older. Really, he was like everybody else. If you wanted to make your way in the world, you had to do it by yourself.