"Wait! Did your friends ever touch the Shrieking Shack?" Sirius asked.
I snorted. "Nope. They both chickened out. Each blamed the other, of course."
That got a laugh out of both of them.
"It would have probably fallen down at a touch," Remus said. "When I was teaching at Hogwarts it was extremely derelict.
"It's probably held up magically, some way," Sirius dismissed, then turned to look at me. "So, you confused Andy and Ted when you got home?"
I nodded, "Oh, yes. They had no idea what I was talking about."
"- and then, of course, we all went up to the Shrieking Shack..." Tonks was regaling her parents with the tale of her first Hogsmeade trip.
The whole drama around the Shrieking Shack had been quite funny.
"Excuse me, the what?" Andromeda interrupted, a look of bewilderment on her face.
"The Shrieking Shack," Tonks repeated.
Had she spoken too fast? She knew her parents hated when she did that but, honestly, sometimes at school of you didn't say things fast you never got to say anything.
"And what, pray tell, is a 'Shrieking Shack' when it's at home?"
Ah. Okay, they had heard her clearly then. She looked at Ted who looked equally as confused. They just didn't know what she was talking about.
Tonks shrugged. "A haunted one? I don't actually know..."
"What do you mean, you don't know? Surely something called the Shrieking Shack would shriek?"
"It's just whatever everyone calls it at school and in Hogsmeade," Tonks replied defensively. "It's supposed to be haunted with this creature that makes these awful noises."
Not that they had heard anything of the sort when they were there. Not even one crash or flash of light. Which was rather disappointed but then an older student had said that it only ever happened at night, so there was that. Like she said, at least they gone and now there was no reason to go up that hill again.
Andromeda and Ted exchanged dubious and concerned looks with each other. A thought suddenly struck Tonks as she eyed her parents.
"Wait, wasn't the Shrieking Shack there when you were at Hogwarts?"
Sure, she knew that her parents went to school ages ago but the Shrieking Shack had to be at least that old. Come on, it was literally about to fall apart.
Ted shook his head. "Definitely not."
Huh. That was kind of weird. It looked like the Shrieking Shack had been there forever. Like it had grown out of its surroundings.
"Are you sure?"
Andromeda gave her daughter an amused look.
"As old as you think we are, no, there was no such thing as a "Shrieking Shack" when we were at Hogwarts. All shacks were firmly of the non-shrieking variety."
"How boring," Tonks managed to say with a straight face.
That earned her a cuff around the back of the head- which she dodged.
"So, if Hogsmeade was to have a Shrieking Shack-" Ted began.
"Which it does!"
"- whereabouts is it?" He turned to his wife. "Maybe we never went to that part of Hogsmeade."
"Ted. We spent more time on the outskirts of Hogsmeade avoiding being seen together than we did in the village. There's not a bit of that village we haven't seen."
"True. Those were fun," Ted wriggled his eyebrows.
"Gross!" Tonks complained, putting her hands over her ears.
She didn't need to hear that! No matter how old she got, she was never, ever going to want to hear about her parent's "exploits". Ew.
"Distract us then before we start regaling you with how we managed to find interesting places to make out," Andromeda teased.
Tonks gave her mother a suspicious look, not sure whether she would actually follow through with that threat. She probably would.
Apparently, she was taking too long to talk because Andromeda opened her mouth and began to say, "Well, you see, we had to always make sure that there was enough space to-"
"La la la LAAA!" Tonks sang. She didn't want to hear this! "Okay, I'll tell you more!"
Before her parents could reply, Tonks explained how they got the shack and what it looked like.
"Oh, are you talking about that abandoned little house at the top of that hill?" Ted asked, a look of realisation coming over his face.
"Yes?"
There couldn't be that many abandoned houses in Hogsmeade, could there? There were definitely no other houses (never mind abandoned ones) around it.
"Andy, do you remember that old, wooden house?" Ted turned to his wife. "I think it had someone living in it in third year or something but they left soon after."
"It just got boarded up instead of sold, didn't it?" Andromeda remembered.
"I think so."
"Was it because it was haunted?" Tonks asked curiously.
No one at school seemed to know why the Shrieking Shack was the way it was. Just that it was haunted and nothing else.
Andromeda shook her head. "Not as far as I know. No one must have bought it."
"That sort of thing would have quickly gone around the school anyway," Ted added.
"Well, it's definite haunted now. The residents complained and everything." Tonks told them.
"Huh, I wonder what happened to it?" Ted asked.
"It got a resident ghost?" Tonks suggested.
That's what usually did hauntings, right? It wasn't like there was some other creepy kind of spirit that did that sort of thing? Was there?
"What kind of ghost haunts an empty shack?" Andromeda asked sceptically.
"Ghosts usually stay because they have unfinished business of some sort," Ted agrees.
"Maybe it meant something to it?" Tonks suggested.
It wasn't like she knew anything about this! She was just passing on some vital information.
"It's just odd," Andromeda proclaimed. "Something must have happened between your father and I leaving school and now to make it become haunted."
"Before now," Ted corrected. "Because it already seems to be an accepted fact. But yes."
"It would have to have been something big, right?" Tonks asked.
Surely this sort of thing would have got reported.
"Not necessarily. If nothing gruesome happened it wouldn't exactly be news. Ghosts by themselves aren't newsworthy," Ted pointed out.
"Something had to have happened, though," Andromeda argued.
"Yes. Of course. I'm just saying that it may not have been reported."
"But everyone knows about it," Tonks said.
"Even less of a reason for it to be reported. If everyone knows about it, it's hardly news."
"Either way, it wasn't very impressive," Tonks told them.
Seriously, would it have hurt for whatever was haunting it to make even a little bit of noise for them?
"It's so weird to think that Andromeda and Ted never knew that as the Shrieking Shack," Sirius mused.
"I'm still not convinced they thought it was a thing and not something Hogwarts made up."
Sirius smirked. "Technically it is something Hogwarts made up. Dumbledore, anyway."
I gave him a shove. "Oh, you know what I mean."
"Just be glad it's not actually haunted," Remus said
"Pretty sure it being haunted rather than you being in pain every full moon would have been better, Moony."
"Padfoot!"
"What? It's the truth!"
"It would have been cooler if it actually was haunted," I broke in before the atmosphere got uncomfortable. "Then we wouldn't have walked all that way just to look at a derelict shack."