1. The Headmaster's footsteps
The castle stood in a pathless wilderness of moorland and forest, its battlements and turrets mute beneath a heavy, ashen sky. Lights were on at the lower levels, but the towers were dark and vacant. No pupil or teacher could be seen in the grounds or in the school's great courtyard: from time to time, an indistinct figure could be seen crossing the courtyard, or a vague outline seemed to move against a lit window.
The front doors were closed. A sentry stood beside them, wand in hand. He was smartly dressed, but wore no uniform and didn't look like a policeman or private security guard. More slouching than standing, he had the look of a man who had been given the task of enforcing security against little more than the wind and the occasional stray bird or animal.
One of the doors swung open slightly and stood ajar for a moment before the wind blew it shut again. The sentry pulled himself upright, opened the door and peered inside. No footsteps could be heard in the stone entrance hall. The sentry stretched out his wand and muttered an incantation under his breath. The wand gleamed green for an instant then went out. Sighing, the sentry closed the door and returned to his post, glancing around once more for any sign of movement. After a few moments, he resumed his previous slouching position.
The entrance hall was as quiet as the grounds had been, but the door to the great hall was open. Low, clipped voices and echoing footsteps could be heard coming from inside. At the far end of the entrance hall was an archway, which led away into a corridor in darkness. Under the archway, the ancient walls of the castle were swallowed up in grimy shadow. The corridor wall was dank to the touch, scored and pitted, and crumbling slightly, the palimpsest on the walls marking the passing of decades and endless acts of minor vandalism perpetrated by generation upon generation of students. No rune could be made out among the markings, no sign pointing the way to one of the castle's myriad hidden passages, some mapped, others lost. And yet in the dark under the archway, at the touch of something that could not be seen, a fiery glow gleamed for an instant.
Minerva McGonagall looked about her with a melancholic eye. A pale, golden light illuminated the Headmistress's Office at Hogwarts, but a glance out through the tall windows would reveal only a warm but opaque light crossed by dim, fleeting forms and shadows. A nice piece of magic, that was. In any case, there wasn't much comfort to be had from seeing what was actually outside the windows. She sat at the desk, the Headmistress's Desk, and her eyes skipped over the papers and devices that lay there. But there was no school business to be dealt with; Minerva McGonagall was a headmistress without students. They had all been sent home, evacuated in time thank goodness, and she had remained behind, a ghost walled up in her office.
She reached into her desk and took out an orb. It was seemingly made of a dull metal and about the size of the crystal balls formerly used by Miss Trelawny in divination class. She wiped a spot of dust from its surface and looked more closely at it. Let's see what they're up to today. The usurpers. After a few moments the upper torso of a man became visible in the orb, distorted as if seen through a fish-eye lens. The man was seated, peering through thick glasses at the papers on his desk. He looks almost normal, this muggle. She had grown used to seeing the face of this official, or whatever he was. He was her replacement, in a way, having been put in charge of the running of Hogwarts since the day the witch-hunters had arrived. The orb enabled her to watch him as he did his rounds around the empty school, work at his desk, issue orders to his staff, some of them Muggles, others actually former students of the school itself. Sometimes he himself received orders by telephone, and occasionally she had caught him speaking with his wife, negotiating with her to visit him more often.
They had been warned by Patronus the day the witch-hunters came. No plan to defend the school was put into operation: how do you defend yourself from the eyes of the world? When the Ministry fell, the enchantments that kept the wizarding world secret ceased to function, leaving Hogwarts School suddenly visible to the eyes of muggles. With Hogwarts suddenly standing in the open, a great hulking castle by the side of a loch, the only solution was to scuttle away and find somewhere to hide. The children were sent home, house by house, out of a little used back gate and into the surrounding hills. Owls were dispatched to inform parents, calling them to collect their children from hastily arranged portkeys positioned at remote locations in the surrounding forests and moors. The aim was to get everyone out of Hogwarts in the general confusion, before the witch-hunters arrived. And when they did arrive, they were followed by the muggle police, the muggle press and all those who just wanted to gawp at the strange building that had suddenly materialised in the Highlands. The evacuation had been a success. It was Hogwarts' remote location that had helped them more than anything. When the first witch-hunters reached the castle, accompanied by wizards who for some unfathomable reason had decided to work for the muggles, they found it empty. And as helicopters landed in the grounds and the usurpers took possession of the building, the staff of Hogwarts watched from the Forbidden Forest.
It was about time for the superintendent to make his daily search of the school for the Headmaster's Office. Strangely enough, no one had been able to locate it, not even those among the superintendent's staff who had been students at the school. They knew where it was supposed to be, where it had been when Hogwarts operated under cover of magic, but now it was invisible, vanished like the Room of Requirement, which was also the subject of feverish searches. And as the superintendent of Hogwarts had said: until we find the missing parts of this school, we can't be certain that there are no undesirables still on the premises. He was quite right, of course. Undesirables, Minerva McGonagall first and foremost, went about the premises at will.
That grim afternoon in early November as the staff of Hogwarts crouched in the Forbidden Forest, a dusting of snow already covering the grounds and the wind blowing up insistently from the Black Lake, they had been astonished when Professor McGonagall informed them that once everything had calmed down, she was going to go back to work in her office.
'Surely you're not going to give yourself up, Professor?' Hagrid had said.
'Certainly not!' she had said. 'I am merely going back to my office to get on with running the school.'
They had looked at her as if the strain of the day had driven her out of her wits. She wondered how to explain it to them. She suspected that it wouldn't help if she started by telling them that it was Professor Dumbledore himself who had given her the answer. Even though that was the truth.
Once the Patronus had arrived, and she had given orders for the school to be evacuated, Professor McGonagall had paced her office in a frenzy, readying herself for the task ahead and racking her brains as to whether there was any solution other than the order she had been forced to issue. The portrait of a sleeping Dumbledore hung on the walls of the Office, alongside the portraits of countless other headmasters.
'I bet you didn't see this coming!' she had apostrophised the portrait. The figure in the portrait opened an eye and smiled sadly at Professor McGonagall.
'Dear Minerva, even this was always a possibility.'
'What will happen to Hogwarts now?' cried Professor McGonagall. 'Will they burn it down? Or worse, will it become some sort of hotel and conference centre for muggles?'
'It's a lovely piece of architecture, that's for sure,' said Dumbledore's portrait, with a serenity that no living person could hope to exude. 'But unfortunately for any future muggle visitors to Hogwarts, I fear they will never get to see the whole of the castle.'
'Albus, you had better say what you mean right this instant!' cried Professor McGonagall, seizing on the hint the portrait had made.
The portrait smiled a waxen smile.
'Simply this,' said Dumbledore. 'Although there is no spell that can hide Hogwarts again from non-magical eyes while simultaneously erasing its memory from the minds of millions, the enchantments that kept the castle hidden are just one level of its concealment. But there are other, custom-made enchantments in place, put there for this very purpose. Just because Hogwarts is now visible to the world, it doesn't follow that this office, for example, is too.'
'Is that so?' said Professor McGonagall.
'You could stay here for months and no one would know. Trust an old portrait, Minerva.'
'That's all very well,' replied Professor McGonagall, who had spotted a flaw in the plan. 'But if I start apparating in and out of this office, these witch-hunters will soon be on to me.'
'Quite so,' replied the portrait. 'But there will be no need for you to do that. I don't want to sound immodest, but all you need to do is follow in my footsteps.'
'I'm afraid I haven't the nerves for riddles at the moment,' said Professor McGonagall curtly.
'Oh, I mean it quite literally,' said Dumbledore, who seemed to glance down from his portrait in the direction of the floor. Professor McGonagall followed the gaze of the eyes in the portrait and looked down at the floor. It was crisscrossed with glowing footprints.
'As you can imagine, in my time I covered a great deal of the castle on foot,' continued the still smiling portrait. 'In fact, I would think that there's scarcely a corner of the castle I haven't visited at some point.'
Rather circumspectly, Professor McGonagall reached out a black-booted foot from under her robes then stepped onto the nearest footprint. As she did so she smiled.
'Well, Albus,' she murmured. 'This Headmistress of Hogwarts hasn't been relieved of her duties after all.'
Since then she had been able to go back and forth between her office and the outside world, follow the fruitless searches of the castle for hidden entrances, and listen in on the conversations of the temporary caretakers of Hogwarts, all without detection. The discovery of this excellent technique was followed by other useful discoveries. In addition to the Headmaster's Office, Hagrid's house was found to have remained quite untraceable. The Room of Requirement, meanwhile, kept itself hidden, presumably of its own volition. The inexplicable untraceability of Hagrid's House meant that it was able to serve as a kind of headquarters, and even rudimentary accommodation for those members of staff who were reluctant to abandon Hogwarts. However, the problem of overcrowding and the rusticity of the accommodation were such that most preferred to find other places to stay. One exception was Neville Longbottom, whose attachment to Hogwarts was such that he had taken up near permanent residence in the pantry. As a result, Professor McGonagall, Neville and Hagrid had formed a kind of skeleton staff keeping watch over the school. Professor McGonagall covered the school itself, Hagrid the grounds and the Forbidden Forest, while Neville was the liaison with the outside world, often journeying across great swathes of the country to keep in touch with other members of staff and wizards.
And so they waited and kept watch over Hogwarts, reliant on Neville's information gathering and the occasional owl that still got through for news of the rest of the wizarding world. What the best course of action might be was unclear to them, but abandoning Hogwarts to the witch-hunters was out of the question. An entire winter had passed; conditions had been tough in Hagrid's snowbound hut, but the snows had not lasted into March. And from what they heard of it, the outside world was of little appeal. The staff members who journeyed on the outside spoke only of the hardships endured in trying to make their way in a world where even small acts of magic risked discovery, incarceration and something ominously referred to as 'regularisation'.
It even took some time for the full account of the failed defence of the Ministry to reach Hogwarts, the story gradually piecing itself together through the scraps of information that Neville and others brought them: hundreds of wizards imprisoned inside the Ministry, the scant defenders of the Ministry scattered across the country, some even gone abroad, Harry Potter in a coma, Hermione Granger missing.
The door of Hogwarts opened again, but this time so silently and minutely that the sentry didn't stir at his position. Equally imperceptible to him was the trail of glowing footsteps crisscrossing the main courtyard, leading out of the castle precincts and across the grassy incline in the direction of the Forbidden Forest. Minerva McGonagall glanced back at the sentry as she passed him, disappearing into the gloom of the grounds. Not a former Hogwarts student, at least. I wonder where they got him from? From a foreign school of magic? From an ordinary Muggle school? Or was he taught by an itinerant? The utter futility of his task made her almost feel sorry for him. But then she pictured Harry in his hospital bed. Four months it's been now. Her throat constricted, any feeling of pity choked off, swallowed up not by anger but by fear, numbing her steps as she passed under the trees.