Chapter 15 – The two Snapes

They left by the orange door, where there was a flying note: "GO TO THE YELLOW DOOR". They ran to the yellow door, and before entering it, they found another note: "LET HERMIONE MAKE THE CHOICE." And they finally got into the mirror room, where each one of them saw different images. Hermione looked at the inscription: "EACH DOOR IS A MIRROR, EACH MIRROR IS A DOOR. DO YOU KNOW YOURSELF? THE RIGHT CHOICE IS THE THING YOU'RE MOST AFRAID OF." She didn't know it, but just as the images, each one of them read a different sentence. Hermione tried to fight against the sensation of dizziness in her mind. Then, she saw just in front of herself, Professor McGonagall saying she wasn't good enough, that she had been reproved... it was the same thing she had seen two years before, when she faced a boggart... in a deeper reflection, she thought it wasn't the thing she was most afraid of now... she looked and saw herself between Harry and Ron, who were saying"You made the wrong choice, Hermione". She opened this door quickly, just in time to pull Ron (who had just been bewitched by a veela he had seen in the mirror) and Harry inside it with her.

"Lumos," said the three of them at the same time (just after Harry brought Ron back to reality slapping him lightly on the face). The walls got lighted and Hermione screamed as she saw the amount of insects. Ron did the same as an enormous spider passed past his foot. A luminous note appeared just in front of them: "COUNT TEN TILES ON THE FLOOR AND SKIP THE ELEVENTH. KEEP AWAY FROM THE TRAP SIRIUS GOT INTO." They counted and jumped and another note emerged: "IF YOU GOT HERE, RUN." And so they did, and also heard something really big getting closer to them. A flying arrow pointed at a niche in the right, where the three of them jumped into and right after this, an enormous rock passed rolling. They were in the middle of a winding staircase, that headed both upstairs and downstairs. There wasn't any note.

"Hey," said Ron, "do you think something happened to the note?"

"Or to Sheeba," replied Harry, "What are we going to do now? The best thing we can do is to separate: the two of you go upstairs and I'll go downstairs."

"No way, Harry," said Hermione, "There might be a trap both upstairs or downstairs. Let's go upstairs together, the three of us, and then we go downstairs."

They climbed five loops of the stairs and were already running out of breath when they saw a massive door with a burdensome padlock.

"What might be there?" asked Ron, "Maybe it's an exit door?"

"There must be someone imprisoned there..." said Hermione, knocking the door, "Is somebody there?"

"It's me!" said a voice, inside the door, "Snape! Who's outside?"

"Is Cho Chang there with you?" asked Harry.

"Who?" replied the voice. Hermione grasped Harry's arm, she had heard a noise. Somebody had started climbing the stairs, "Whoever is it outside, I'm imprisoned here, alone and without my wand. He took it away from me."

"He? Who?" the steps were getting louder.

"Somebody else, with my looks, but it's not me. Try to open the padlock, the key's here," he said and a key appeared under the door.

"Don't do it!" a voice echoed from downstairs, it was Snape's unmistakable voice, "he's an impostor!"

"What are we going to do now, Hermione?" whispered Ron, "Which one of them is the real Snape?"

"I don't know! I can't see the eyes of anyone of them, how am I supposed to know?"

"Who's upstairs?", Snape number two repeated.

"How did you get the key being held inside the door?" asked Harry.

"Potter? Is it you? Get me out of here or I'll put you in Detention for making inconvenient questions."

"There's only one way to discover," said Hermione, "Harry, open the door."

Snape 2's steps got even louder as he kept going upstairs, now even more quickly. Harry put the key into the padlock and Snape 2 appeared at the last casting of stairs and Hermione saw his eyes, "Don't open!"

Too late. Somebody, wearing Snape's exact appearance, flung the door open, "Fools."

"Expelliarmus!" shouted the true Snape from where he was. The trio ducked aside just in time to slip from the white light that disarmed the fake Snape, who jumped onto Hermione and seized her.

"I'm going to strangle you, you disgusting know-it-all."

"Impedimenta," shouted Ron, whose wand almost touched fake Snape's chest, who ended up falling at the other side of the room, just next to his own wand.

He grabbed his wand and pointed it to Ron, "Avada Kedavra!"

"No!" yelled Hermione, holding Ron, but nothing happened. Fake Snape ran through a door behind him and the real Snape reached them at the very moment.

"You're lucky that one was incompetent," he said.

Harry immediately remembered the class he had about the lethal curse Avada Kedavra, and how the teacher said it was necessary much magic behind the wand to conjure it.

"I managed to be away from them until now, but I believe they got hold of Black and Sheeba. We have to go after him."

"Who are they, professor?"

"One of them is that bastard, Pettigrew. The other one I really don't know," said Snape, "I just know he uses much Polyjuice potion. He was wearing the looks of a student when I started following him, and now he's wearing my appearance."

They walked towards the door where fake Snape disappeared, but at this very moment, an invisible someone's voice said behind them, "Expelliarmus!" their wands flew towards the opposite door, "Atonos!" a purple flame crossed the room and knocked all of them down, making them lose their senses.

At the door, Wormtail removed his Invisibility Cloak and started laughing as a madman.

Many miles away from there, a nurse witch yelled. The patient Sibyll Trelawney, who had gotten into the hospital unconscious, started changing her looks slowly. Some minutes later, she changed completely. Now she was a seventeen year old girl, with black hair and almond shaped eyes.

She had turned into Cho Chang.