LOST PERSPECTIVE 7
PAYBACK TIME
By Bellegeste
A/N: Sorry for the delay in updating. Haven't been able to log on to FFnet for several days. Hope it's worth the wait!
Glad the Lancastrian Neville didn't freak you all out. There will be more Neville in later chapters.
Vert: Hope I answered your questions.
OK, back to Snape… He returns to Snape Cottage.
Chapter 10 : 'INTO DARKNESSE' (1)
The colour black would be forever associated in his mind with that smell: the charred reek of destruction. Snape was no stranger to the smell of burning. It infiltrated the senses, lingering long after the visual image had crumbled to ash. For years it had taken only the faintest whiff of carbon to evoke in him the nauseating tang of crisply singed flesh, accompanied by the screams of nameless, cringing victims. And now that same trigger would summon the vision of this coal black cremation. Would he now wake in the night, in the pitch dark, with the scent of soot in his nostrils?
It hung in the air, tar-thick and caustic, the stench of smoke, an acrid, enveloping smog that impregnated his clothing with its clogging taint and stung at the back of his throat. The smell of death by fire, the smell - if one wished to be melodramatic, he thought sourly - of Hell. His home reduced to a grotesque charcoal caricature. Polished wood scorched to jagged, blackened, unrecognisable stumps; fabric shrivelled to flapping shreds, funereal weeds; and all smoke-washed, in ever intensifying shades, black on black.
Snape surveyed the burned-out remains of the cottage in cold silence, his expression closed and unreadable. His dark eyes flicked over the wreckage, item by incinerated item, assimilating the totality of the damage, cataloguing the loss. It was a vacated shell. He could turn his back on it, Charm it into invisible unplotability, cast 'Deleodomum!' and eradicate all traces, finishing the job that the Death Eaters and their Raggnerite(2) mercenary thugs had so crudely begun. The thought was tempting.
Decamping to the cottage had, all those years ago, been a temporary measure, a stop-gap, an escape. With the Manor practically under siege by Ministry officials, the investigation squad from Magical Forensics and the carrion-crew from the Daily Prophet, the cottage had offered a refuge. Racked with guilt and grief over the death of his parents and fearing the exposure of his Dark connections, the young Snape had sought sanctuary there. Constructing wards of pentagonal impenetrability he had slunk into his rustic bolt-hole to sit out the storm of notoriety. Even when the flurry of publicity had died down and the enquiries had reported their grisly conclusions, the bodies had been interred and the building cleansed of all remaining Dark spell residue, Snape had been reluctant to move back to the echoing, empty grandeur of the Manor. The simplicity of life at the cottage, the enforced deprivation - at first part of a bitter, self-recriminatory penance – had become a solace, then a habit and later a necessity. If his current life at Hogwarts was deliberately solitary, at the cottage it bordered on the reclusive.
Over the years he had made some refinements – the conversion of the basement into his laboratory being the most obvious change - but he had jealously preserved its seclusion and privacy. The very solitude sustained him. And it remained a refuge. In adulthood he still shied from the demands of the abandoned estate and the Manor, the dust-sheeted responsibilities, dormant, awaiting his return.
He stood for a long time in the doorway, rigid, straight-backed as a headstone, tension betrayed in the grim set of his jaw, hard and angular, calculating, knowing that his next action would be decisive and irrevocable. He was loath to cross the threshold, to desecrate the pyre of his past. Was it time to walk away, to let the dark shroud rest over the last sixteen years?
Or he could restore the cottage. Structurally, the stone walls were still sound; the roof was partially intact - the timber joists were cracked and unsafe and would need replacing; some tiles had slipped and fallen but were salvageable. The contents however (though there was little left to justify that title) – his furniture, his personal belongings, his books – were ruined or fire-damaged beyond repair. Or so he hoped…
It was fortunate that he set scant store by material possessions. There was little that could lay claim to being of significance or sentimental value. Of the few objects that warranted that description, the two most important to him - his Pensieve and Lily's book – had both, coincidentally, been safe in his office at Hogwarts at the time of the fire. His wand had been, as always, with him. As for the rest…
In the last, desperate moments before the flames and smoke had finally driven him back, he had reinforced the protective spells on the basement, adding a Non-Flammability Charm to the security ward he had previously posted on the door. He had safeguarded the animals - his specimens and (he hesitated to acknowledge the term) his pets. Braque and Quig had made their own escapes. And Harry? Snape's overwhelming priority that night had been to remove Harry from danger. It chilled him to realise how urgently he had responded to the instinctual, parental imperative.
xxx
Snape picked his way across the room, treading with precision, stepping over the heat-twisted wreckage. Crushed underfoot the cinders popped and crunched, and brittle twigs of a former existence snapped, recharging the dank air with peat-bog pungency. Wand-water fired to extinguish the flames had mingled with the soot, covering everything in a damp, textured, smoke-black film. By the bookcase - what used to be the bookcase - he stopped, his eyes scouring the smouldered mound at his feet where, three nights ago, the shelves had collapsed, crashing their flammable, inflammatory volumes onto the floor.
"Intacto!" The Cohesion Charm settled over the pile. Under its fixative force the wispy, feather-light sheets of paper-thin carbon held their shape, setting solid where they had fallen, like the ghastly, ash-baked victims of Vesuvius. Bending down Snape began to work, sorting through the rubble, prising apart the book briquettes and scrutinising each one with the care of an archaeologist examining the remains of a desecrated, ancient tomb. Some he could reject immediately because of their size; some were too badly damaged for the charm to have had any effect; others were petrified slabs of literary coal. Here and there a Spell Jacket had protected a book from the worst ravages of the flames, and its charred wads projected from the mass like granite outcrops in an otherwise featureless desert. These he put to one side. Their numbers mounted slowly, building a low wall of tarnished reference, dark and dangerous.
Snape knew exactly what he was looking for - what he didn't know was whether it was still there or whether the arsonists had claimed their deadly trophy. He was angry with himself: if only he'd thought about this on the night of the fire, he could have destroyed the damn, damning book with a single curse, dispelling all doubt. But at that time he'd had no idea that Lucius - supposedly of no threat in Azkaban – had masterminded the attack. He'd had no reason to make the connection with the dusty spell-book, unread and long-forgotten, relegated to unreachable obscurity on the topmost shelf.
It had been no more than a casual comment, all those years ago, when Lucius, his friend and mentor, had lent him his rare manuscript 'Into Darknesse'. Denounced and banned as heretical in the Malleus Maleficarum(3, this text had even earned a reputation in the Muggle world. Flattered and with the impressionable zeal of a recent recruit, Snape had lingered over the thick parchment pages, revelling in the age old devilry of its Dark lore. The very names had thrilled him: the Carnifex Curse, Charon's Charm (4). Fascinated he had turned to the chapter on Scelerosi Spells - here was an unimaginable catalogue of macabre magic, inspirational malice. He remembered laughing with Lucius to note that the Humavi Hex (useful for burying one's victim alive), had been meticulously cross-referenced with Syrtinex! (Death by Quicksand).
"Much of it is hokum, Severus, but there's some gold amongst the dross - and not Leprechaun gold either!"
In the margin next to Vermiscutum! someone had quilled its more common name: Ward Worm. Snape had scanned the formula, already impatient to put the old incantation into practice. This one was a saboteur's dream (if it worked): slow-acting but undetectable it was supposed to infiltrate and undermine a range of Securing Spells from Locking Charms to protective Wards. Peering over his shoulder, Lucius had caught the direction of his gaze:
"Ward Worm, eh? Wonder if we could burrow our way into Hogwarts with that!" he'd joked, drawing Snape away, his mind on more immediate evil.
A throw-away remark, instantly discarded. But, years later, Snape had taken the precaution of transferring it to his Pensieve…
…where it had remained, unremarked, until the day that someone - no prizes for guessing who, he thought wryly - had violated Pensieve privacy and stolen the code keys to the perimeter wards of the Snape Estate. And at the same time the thief had scooped out a mindful of memories of Snape's early days with Lucius…
Dumbledore might view the latest attacks as opening gambits in a renewed campaign against the Order, but to Snape they had all the hallmarks of a personal vendetta. Of Lucius, embittered and desperate, plotting revenge. Plotting the raid on Snape Cottage as an amusement, another happy thought to sustain him and the remaining Dementors for a week or so. The more he deliberated about it, the more Snape had become convinced that the original target that night had been neither Harry nor himself specifically, but rather his property in general. If this were another of the Dark Lord's attempts to injure Harry, the plan would have been more subtle, deviously engineered. This plan had been too crude, too dependent on coincidence to be sure of success. The thugs had been intent on vandalism not murder. And retrieving the manuscript? Pure opportunism! Lucius had never bothered about it before. He would not have known that it was kept at the cottage. No, decided Snape, the information had come to Lucius by chance. It was not even certain that he had acted on it. Yet the memory had been missing from the Pensieve; Snape couldn't afford to take the risk.
If, however, the Dark Lord were planning an assault on Hogwarts now or at any time in the future, the old magic spells might indeed prove invaluable. Snape had to ascertain whether or not the Death Eaters were now in possession of the ancient volume.
All this anxiety over a book. Snape straightened up for a moment's respite, flexing his shoulders and wincing as the stiffness in his neck suddenly arc-ed down his spine. The toxic, smut-laden air was stinging his eyes, giving him a headache. He needed to take a breather, to get some fresh oxygen into his lungs. He turned towards the buckled doorway. Then he saw it. On the floor, slightly to the left of the door, half-buried in ash and filth, the square-ish, leather-bound tome was unmistakable. He must have practically stepped over it when he came in. The momentum of the falling shelves alone would never have flung it so far - had it then been carried there and, for some reason, dropped? Weighty and substantial, the volume appeared to be intact - Snape had not expected the Cohesion Charm to extend so far. Or were those pages preserved by sorcery? Fingering his wand he approached warily, as though the abandoned book might, like Fluffy, leap up and bite him on the leg. But it lay inanimate and inert. Squatting down to take a closer look, Snape felt some of his old awe rekindling: this book was unique - it would be criminal to destroy it. He reached out to lift it… and at his touch the ancient manuscript crumbled to dust.
Snape pulled back, startled, unnerved, smacking away the ash and staring at his palms in disgust as though a funeral urn had been emptied into his hands. Suddenly he was finding it impossible to breathe, and his heart was clamouring in his chest. Four strides took him to the back door. Wrenching it open he swept outside and inhaled a draught of cool, clean morning air. The flicker of panic had left him feeling foolish and undignified. After all this time, sixteen years of denial and strenuous rectitude, he was still susceptible…
End of Chapter.
1 'Into Darknesse' : First reference to this text appears in LP2 'Snape's Confession
2 Raggnerite - vandalistic follower of 17thC Welsh rebel wizard, Cribyn Raggner. (cf. Lost Perspective 6: 'Deck the Halls')
3 Malleus Maleficarum – ( c. 1486) Definitive Muggle text in condemnation of witchcraft used as the 'handbook' for the European anti-witch Inquisitions of the 15th and 16th Centuries.
4 Charon: the ferryman of Hades
Next Chapter: LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD. Hermione has a theory