2. Lost and Found
January 5, 2003 It began as rather an odd story that no one quite believed in – a quirky tale of dubious origin. The kind of thing they usually assign to me. (Sometimes I think they see me as a quirky oddity, out of place at the Prophet, and they try to find stories that fit me. Do they expect me to thank them, I wonder?) A Dementor had gone missing – or, as the story stood when they dumped it on me, had allegedly disappeared from Azkaban prison. This, I quickly found out, was alleged by an inmate. He did use that exact wording when I interviewed him (breaking into Azkaban, I learnt, was only marginally easier than breaking out of that hell-hole – Lucius Malfoy and Sirius Black were at least spared the paperwork). 'I allege,' he said, 'that one of 'em 'as gone jawohl!' And there went my story, and half my pay check, being part freelance still. But, as always, I stuck to it. There was little else to do but sip vile coffee at the Prophet and fail to speak to everyone. My source (while The story might have been gone, I hoped - as always - to find A story somewhere in the wreckage of the first) was, they told me, the oldest resident of the Azkaban facility. No one knew what he had been convicted of. No one knew how long he had been there. Some speculated wildly that he had been there since before the actual prison complex was built. They called him the First One and he was both a mascot and a curse. He claimed he had grown immune to the Dementors. He certainly appeared happy (one of my first notes was: 'personnel v. disturbed by inmate's blatant happiness'). If the other prisoners hadn't been so far gone, they might have looked to him as an inspiration, proof that there was, at least, a merrier kind of madness. I never did ask him if he knew Black. 'I can hear them whisper in our mind,' he said. At the time, I thought he'd taken to talking about himself in the plural - a kingly madness. How wrong I was. He said one of them was fading, going mad. One of the Dementors, he claimed, was dying. I asked him where it was, why no one else had noticed, why no one even knew it was missing. He told me the 'human folk' no longer kept track of Dementors unless they became a bother, that they could come and go as they wished so long as they 'didn't make no fuss.' A quick dig through our archives seemed to me to verify this claim. It was only when the Dementors were angry, when they 'made a fuss,' that the story of their Azkaban absence hit the headlines. There was not a single small notice, only headlines. It was when I widened my research that I caught the scent of a story again, when I realised that what we had all been taught about Dementors, through school and media, were mostly a bunch of canonized theories. No one even knew where they had come from. No one seemed to think it worth mention these days that they were (so the older reports claimed) immortal. I went back to interview the First One (he never gave me any other name) several times, despite the depression the visits brought me. One time, he stopped his prattling to regard me, almost solemnly, for a long, worrying moment. 'It's them,' he said, and his voice terrified me because it was not the one I had come to know and loath, but the deeper, wiser, articulated tone of a man to whom madness is merely an entertaining pastime. 'It's them, ' he said. 'Not even the solid rock can shield you from them now. This room used to be much too far away for visitors to feel even the slightest whiff of our hellish world. But they are afraid, my dear. They call out. One of theirs has never faded before and they fear that something worse will happen next. The unknown scares them. They are single-minded creatures, animals with an insatiable thirst but innocent as children. They have never known death, nor feared it, for they have never been alive. This terror awakens something in them. Life.' His eyes as they stared into mine were beyond my simple powers of description and I wanted to flee but couldn't move a muscle. To this day, I feel I wouldn't have remembered a word he said if he hadn't inscribed them on my very mind. (And let me tell you, it hurt like hell.) The very last thing he told me was this: 'They are afraid that they will come alive and devour themselves.' Then his stare shifted, he cackled insanely, and shrieked: 'Well, aren't I jus' th'patron o' th'place, m'dear? Patron, I! Patron, us! Paterfamilias! Paternoster! Paternal otter! Eek, eek, eek!' And then I knew I had a story; a difficult, dangerous one, but definitely a story. That was when the news broke about the other story, the one I would eventually be the only one left to cover. The only one left alive.