Draco Malfoy, Seeker Of Souls
Chapter Seven
What Was Left Of Ginny
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Harry and I were soon tiptoeing through the familiar halls of the Black School where we had had classes less than a month ago. It seemed like so much longer that Ginny had been gone, but really it had only been a matter of weeks. I couldn't figure out if time dragged or flew by.
Harry checked his watch. "We can't loose track of time," he whispered. "It was always too easy to do that."
I nodded. "I wish Snape was with us. He would know right where to go. Too bad he needed to work the gate. What are we going to do?"
Harry gripped my arm, staring at my chest. "Draco, take out the key!"
"What is it?"
"It's glowing!"
I reached into my robe and pulled out the key, which had been glowing brightly through the fabric of my robe and cloak. "So it is." I held it out in front of us, careful not to let it fall out of the invisibility cloak, even though there was no one around.
Harry leaned forward to gaze at it, the light reflecting in the lenses of his glasses. "What should we do with it?"
I shook my head. "I don't bloody well know." We both stared at it, thinking, while our time ticked away. "You know, Harry, sometimes the most stupid questions can get you want you want." I held the key up a little higher and simply asked it, "I say…will you please take us to Ginny?" I looked at Harry and shrugged, and he did the same. Asking politely was always a nice thing.
The key gave a little lurch and flashed. It then lifted until it was horizontal on its string and the notches were pointing down one of three corridors. Harry and I gawked at it, but wasted no more time. We tiptoed down the corridor as fast as our legs could carry us quietly.
We walked for a dreadfully long time, twisting and turning down dark hallways, drips of icy water falling on our heads, seeping through the cloak. "I sure hope this key will show us the way back to the gates, provided it knows where we're going right now." Harry eyed the key, which I held in front of us. It vibrated and decided on a left-hand turn down an even darker and colder tunnel.
"Me too," I agreed. I felt guilty that it was Harry who was with me instead of Ron, since he was Ginny's brother and all. Ron was swell, but Harry really had the brains when it came to dangerous rescue missions. I was quite glad he was with me.
Eventually we stumbled into a low passage that was colder than ever. Harry almost had to stoop to keep his head from hitting the ceiling. Another good reason to have Harry along – Ron's head would have definitely scraped the ceiling.
Harry and I pulled out our wands. "Lumos," we chanted. The dim light that sprang forth from our wands illuminated the stone walls. Writing was scrawled in the stone, in Latin or some similar ancient text. Harry was breathing heavily. "What does it mean? Do you think it's some kind of trap?"
I shrugged. My heart skipped a beat when Harry said 'trap.' I had never considered that these hallways might be booby trapped in some way. "I don't know much Latin. I don't even know if this is Latin." I wracked my brain, traveling back to when I was about nine and ten when Father tried to teach me some old world languages. I never was very good. "Um… 'Alaisdair'… 'Cornelius'…I think they may just be names. There are other words, sure, but all I can make out are names."
"I can see names too," said Harry. "I wonder if Ginny's is on here? Maybe they're people who had to stay behind."
I had been thinking along the same lines. "Let's keep moving. We must be on the right path." I felt like the walls and ceiling were starting to close in on me. I was starting to feel very unnerved.
Harry and I trooped on, as the ceiling became lower and the walls closer to us. Harry and I held onto each other for comfort as we crept along. It felt like being in a haunted house with no exit. There we were, half-grown boys, fighting the desire to whimper aloud.
Out of nowhere, Harry went sprawling onto the floor, and our wands were dropped in the confusion. As soon as they left our hands, the magic was doused and we were left alone in the darkness.
I screamed. I couldn't stand the claustrophobia of it anymore. "Harry! Harry!" I couldn't breathe.
"Draco!" he answered, sounding as panicked as I was. It reminded me of being in the Forbidden Forest with him and old Hagrid's dog, back when we were just little tykes of eleven. Only, this is the part where Fang and I turn tail and run like maniacs.
I heard Harry fumbling around near me, and then the word, "Lumos." Harry's wand blazed forth in a most welcomed gleam, but it turned out Harry wished it was still dark. He was sitting on a rotted corpse. He started to scream his head off, and I gladly followed his example. The cowardly twins where back again, full throttle.
Harry's body made a rolling motion with a will of its own. He careened into me, and we stared at the old bodies that lay all around us, covered in moldy sheets. We never stopped yelling the whole time. Finally, Harry wrapped his arm around my neck and covered my open mouth from behind. "Shut up, Draco!" he gasped. "We have to be quiet or someone will hear us!" His voice was very choked up in his throat.
"I don't much care for that!" I muttered, pulling his hand away. Being heard was the last thing on my mind. On the contrary, I thought we needed some rescue efforts from others. I stared at the bodies. "What happened to them? Had their Souls stolen, I suppose." I tried to catch my breath.
"We'd better move. Let's find Ginny and get her out of here." We started to run the best we could, even though we were running half-hunched over from the low ceiling. We tripped several times over the corpses which because fresher and fresher the farther in we went. I thought I might be sick before we found Ginny. And to think that these poor people were once students here, their only crime wanting to leave. And I suppose they lay down here in the cold, alive but without a Soul, for a long time before their bodies finally stopped working. And they never knew a thing. I had started to cry silently without even noticing.
"Red! I see red hair!" Harry threw himself down and started to dig through a pile of people, more recently dead than any others. Old enough not to smell, but new enough to be identifiable. I was so relieved that I didn't know a one of them.
It snapped in hard what Harry had said, and I was on my hands and knees too, tossing the grossly wrapped shapes aside. "Ginny!" We pulled up Ginny, clothed only in a thin sheet. Her mouth hung open, and she was shivering slightly. She was alive! Her eyes were tightly closed and had not been opened for some time. Her skin was very white and the blue of her veins could be seen right through it. She had some kind of bug in her hair…I didn't even want to know what it was. I knew that Ginny wasn't inside her body, but I so glad to just have that, that I hugged her as tightly as I could. Harry threw himself on her naked legs and held on hard.
We wasted little time after that. I pulled the satchel off of Harry's back and I pulled out the sweater and pajama pants that Snape had packed to dress her in. I sat her up and pulled the sheet off of her. I had no time to consider the fact that she was naked, poor thing, except for her undies, I was too busy pulling the sweater over her head. I'm sure she would have had a fit if Harry had seen her without clothes on, but Harry was working to get the pants over her feet, and paying no attention. We soon had her dressed, and in my arms. She weighed next to nothing. I was very scared.
We walked along quickly, once again under the cloak, Harry holding the key in front of us and rubbing Ginny's white bare feet helplessly from time to time. I was jabbering to fill the void of silence. "We did it. We have her, Harry! Now all we have to do is get her Soul back. How hard can that be? Heh heh." I sounded like a fool. Harry smiled at me in a pained way. I was glad he was humoring me.
For as long as it took us to get down there the first time, we seemed to make it back up to the populated part of the school quite quickly. To our horror, there were now students in the main cavern of the school, which we conveniently had to cross to get to the main gate and Snape. "Oh no! What do we do? What if they hear us?" I was feeling more cowardly by the second. I wanted to go home and be normal!
Harry rubbed my shoulders. "We can do it. Just be as silent as possible. They won't hear us." He pulled the cloak farther over our heads and we tiptoed in though the huge room. I had my mouth open in fear. What if we couldn't get her out? I would never forgive myself, and neither would Ron, her parents, Snape, Dumbledore, and about a million other nice people, unlike me.
The students sometimes vaguely looked our way, as if they thought they heard footsteps or sensed a presence, and I gulped, looking into their eyes and wondering if they could see mine. But the Black School itself was shrouded in mystery and I wouldn't have been surprised if there had been invisible silent beings slinking in the hallways unknown to all, just like us.
As soon as we made it to the main hallway, we took off in a dead run. Snape was standing outside, the sun shining on his dark hair. He looked rather like an evil god, which made my heart leap. I wished I could look like him someday.
Harry plummeted on the gate. "Professor!" he hissed.
Snape started and touched the gate with his hand. It opened and we threw ourselves at him, making it out of the Black School without any incident. The cloak fell off us as we lunged and he barely caught us. He grunted. "I see you found her." He steadied us and ran a hand over her cheek. "She looks bad, but I think we'll find a way to fix her."
"I know how to do it." I said. I clutched a stitch in my side and leaned against Harry. I had never been so relieved in my life.
"We'll talk about it later. In the meantime we must get her back to Hogwarts and get her completely warm and food inside of her. Take the brooms. I'll apparate with her. See you shortly, boys. You've done very well, the both of you." He took Ginny from me. She looked tiny and frail in his arms. I whimpered. Meanwhile, Snape disappeared.
Harry pushed me to my feet again. "Let's go!" He ran to the brooms and hopped on. "I want to be there when Ron sees her, don't you?"
"Yes." I followed him, but I dragged my feet a little bit. It just didn't seem real, and it had sunk in that Ginny wasn't really back. We only had her body. I couldn't even start to imagine what it would be like when she awoke. Part of me didn't want to know.
Harry smiled. "Come on."
I was so grateful for Harry at that moment, that I threw my arms around his neck. He made a small yelp. It was the first time I had given him a real hug. He patted me awkwardly. "It's all right."
"Er…thanks." I pulled away, my face burning, and climbed on my broom. My hand were bound by the red cords and we were soon blasting over the countryside.
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Note: I had a couple of requests for e-mails when this was updated, so I just wanted to let everyone know that if you do want updates on fanfiction, you can join my updates list on my drawing page found here: http://www.angelfire.com/mi3/ladygrizdrawings . There are updates on fanfiction as well as art, so you can keep up with it that way if you wish. Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed this rather intense chapter. Next time, what will Ginny be like when she awakes?…provided she does awake.