Lost: Young Man, Answers to Harry
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Harry had never seen any house as forbidding as number thirteen Grimmauld Place. It loomed, glaring down at him, as he made his way up the stone front steps, carrying his school bag with all his belongings on his back. His godfather paused at the bottom of the steps, glancing around covertly. Harry stood in front of the shabby black door, and reached up to take hold of the silver knocker, which was in the shape of a twisted serpent. Sirius suddenly appeared behind him and grabbed his hand before he could touch it.
"Er…I wouldn't Harry. If I remember correctly, that snake tends to bite anyone it doesn't like."
Harry frowned at the silver knocker, "why did you used to live in this house?"
"I was born in this house," Sirius told him while he tapped the door experimentally with his wand, "it was my parent's house. But they're dead now, and I'm the only Black left to inherit the old place. Hopefully the house will recognise me – although it may not be glad to see me…" his wand-tip hit a sensitive spot on the door and the wood shuddered. Clicks and scrapes could be heard from within, and then, though there was no keyhole, the unmistakable sound of a lock being drawn back. Sirius gave the door a small push and it swung open very slowly. The smell of must and stale air flowed out.
"You can go inside now," Sirius said, "but just don't touch anything yet."
Harry stepped through into the hallway, squinting at the gloom around him. He caught a glimpse of glinting glass, peeling wallpaper, and dusty silver gleams. The only light came from the doorway in which Sirius was silhouetted, and then his godfather pulled the door closed and they were plunged into total darkness.
"Just a moment," said Sirius, and Harry listened to his footsteps shuffling across the threadbare carpet, "I know there's a knob here somewhere," he muttered, then there came a hiss and old-fashioned gas lamps flared into life all the way down the hall. Suddenly the inside of the house was illuminated in the spluttering glow from the lamps, and Harry looked around him in wonder. The hallways stretched away in both directions, lined with enormous portraits filled with grim-faced people and with strange decorations hanging from the walls. Huge, heavy curtains hung across the wall not far away, and snake motifs covered everything. Harry had never been in any house that was so luxurious, so filthy, or so grim.
"Right, now, stick close to me," said Sirius, leading Harry down the hall, "there's bound to be all sorts of rude welcomes waiting for us."
"Why haven't you been back for so long? Did you have a fight with your parents?" Harry asked.
"Something like that," said Sirius. He turned down a flight of narrow stones steps and they came out into a large kitchen, covered in a layer of dust so thick they left footprints behind them.
"Wow," said Harry, staring at an oven large enough to cook a full-grown man, "did you have servants to run this place?"
"Just the one. A house elf called Kreacher. But I don't think-" Sirius was interrupted by a loud crack as something that looked like a small shrivelled bush with two red-rimmed eyes and a snout-like nose appeared in the middle of the kitchen table. Harry jumped backwards and Sirius gave a yell of surprise.
"Who called old Kreacher? Who? There's no one in the old house, no one but poor old Kreacher, who said Kreacher's name?" the decrepit house-elf twisted its neck to look at Harry, "what thief has come creeping into the house of my mistress? What is it? A horrible ugly muggle child, filthy thing, how did it get into my dear mistress's house?"
Sirius cleared his throat, "Hello Kreacher," he said loudly, as if speaking to someone who was partly deaf, "remember me?"
The elf jumped and swung its bald head around to look at Sirius. For a few moments it squinted at him, unable to recognise him, then it squealed and began to rub its hands as if trying to twist them right off, a look of horror encroaching on its wrinkled face, "it's that traitor, that mud-lover, that horrible beast what broke my mistress' heart! Oh, how did it get into the house, was poor Kreacher careless, did I let it in somehow? Oh, Kreacher has failed to protect my dear Mistress' home, I have let the blood traitor into the house!"
As the house elf trailed into unintelligible muttering, Harry raised an eyebrow at Sirius, "what is it?" he asked.
"A house-elf, Harry," Sirius explained, "they're kind of like permenant servants. only it looks like this one might have gone a bit rotten over the years. That's enough, Kreacher!"
Kreacher ceased his muttering and stared at Sirius, wheezing quietly, "does it order me? Does the scum that abandoned my Mistress dare to order me?"
"I am the master of this house now, Kreacher," said Sirius, "and you have to obey me."
"Obey! Ha," Kreacher wheezed, apparently under the impression that Sirius could not hear him, "it does it's best to order Kreacher, the dirty little mud-screwer! Does it think Kreacher will listen?"
"You had better listen, Kreacher," Sirius put his hands on his hips, "I don't want you in my sight but I don't want you anywhere else, either. I am giving you a direct order: you are not to leave this house without permission. You may not contact anyone outside this house in any way, nor tell anyone outside this house that Harry and I are living here."
"Oh, the wretch, the cruel betraying wretch. Kreacher will not look at them, he will not think about the beast, and that whelp, is it the wretch's son? It must be, a bastard child of my mistress' blood, oh she would never have allowed it," Kreacher trailed off into muttering once more, and then he turned his back on Sirius and shuffled away across the table. When he reached the end he dropped down onto the ground and, hunched over and rubbing his hands, he made his way up the stairs and disappeared.
"I don't think it listened to you," said Harry.
"Oh, don't worry, house-elves have to obey their masters," said Sirius, "he'll do as I tell him. But the little toe-rag seems to have lost his marbles, living in this house alone all these years. Just don't listen to all the horrible things he says. I'm going to go down to the corner store and get us some lunch to celebrate our new home. Er…" he looked at the stairs up which Kreacher had disappeared, "perhaps it would be better if you didn't leave the kitchen until I got back. I think a lot of the doors have got jinxes on them."
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Sirius, returning from the local grocer with his arms full of plastic shopping bags, entered the front door and tiptoed down the hall, past the tall portraits which stared grimly over his head. He was beginning to wonder if it had been such a good idea to bring his godson here after all. It wasn't exactly a welcoming environment to live in. But he could already see that Harry was enchanted by the old house, and he had been so excited about living in London. Sirius couldn't take that back now.
As he reached the stone staircase that lead down to the kitchen, he heard a distant clattering, like particularly crude wind chimes.
"Harry?" he called as he put his foot on the top step, "I'm back…"
"Sirius!" came a distant cry, and suddenly the clattering sound intensified, "quick! Bring wand!"
Sirius dropped the bags of shopping and leapt down the stairs, four at a time, whipping his wand out of his robes as he ran. He emerged into the kitchen and was brought to a halt by an amazing and terrifying sight. All the cupboards in the room lay open, some with their doors hanging off their hinges. A dozen pots and pans were bouncing along the stone floor, shaking off layers of dust as they jumped in circles, smashing into each other and rolling on their sides before leaping up again. Meanwhile, the plates were zooming and spinning through the air like muggle flying saucers, some performing complex flying manoeuvres around each other while others crashed into the walls, shattering, or skimming off the table like stones on a pond. The cutlery whizzed back and forth, striking the great iron oven with enough force to leave tiny dents and slamming into the wooden table so that they stood, quivering, stuck two inches into the wood, before jerking themselves out and continuing their mad flight. Harry was nowhere in sight.
Sirius had only a few moments to appreciate this amazing performance before three butter knives and a pair of bent forks noticed his presence and veered around, shooting towards him like deadly darts. Sirius raised his wand and fired two stunners at them, but both red bolts missed the tiny targets and smashed into the distant wall. Surprised by his lack of effect, Sirius just managed to hurl himself out of the way as the murderous cutlery sliced through the air where he had been standing and clattered onto the stones behind him.
The plates, disturbed by the fruitless stunners, suddenly paused, spun around and shot towards Sirius, and he threw himself to the floor as they whizzed through the air. He felt sure that if he had not moved, they would have decapitated him.
"Wow, you really made them mad," said a voice. Sirius turned his head and saw Harry crouching under the kitchen table, brandishing a wooden rolling pin like a sword and holding a breadboard in front of himself, like a shield. There were two steak knives buried in the impromptu shield.
"What did you do?" Sirius gasped, rolling sideways as two frying pans suddenly hurled themselves at him, trying to beat him around the head. He scrambled to his feet and began casting freezing charms at the pots, which effectively stopped their rampage.
"Hey, don't blame me, I just opened one of the drawers," said Harry, having to shout over the banging of the remaining pots, "and suddenly they all came flying out at me. But they were just bouncing around in circles until you turned up!"
Sirius tried to curse a number of plates that were whirling around for another go at his head, but again, the targets were too small and he missed. As he leapt sideways to avoid the plates, Harry, who had crawled out from under the table, brought his rolling pin down on the flying platters and in mid-air smashed them to the ground. Once they were in pieces, they stopped moving.
"There's another – ugh – board in the cupboard behind you!" Harry yelled as he climbed up onto the table and began smashing the plates and the cutlery out of the air. Forks shot towards him but Harry brought up the breadboard and they slammed into it and were stuck, trying to wriggle their way out in vain.
Sirius turned and saw that there was a meat cutting board sitting in the cupboard. He grabbed it and used it to smash another plate out of the sky. It was strangely satisfying. He saw two huge breadknives zoom towards him and knocked them both flying. Unfortunately one of the tiny cake forks took the opportunity to shoot under his arm and tear through his robes before burying itself in the bench behind him. Sirius grunted, feeling a sting, but the fork had just grazed him and he whacked it with the meat board before it could wriggle away.
It took only a few more minutes to subdue the rest of the kitchenware. The last of the plates and spoons clattered to the ground when Harry smashed his rolling pin down onto the cheese grater, which was wobbling uncertainly towards him. Panting with exertion, the two of them slumped down onto the wooden chairs, grinning at each other in their triumph.
"I've missed being an auror. I've been spoiling for a fight like this for seven years now," said Sirius, opening the rip in his robes to inspect the cut the cake fork had left in his ribs. It was nothing more than a shallow graze surrounded by a rapidly purpling bruise, and he touched it with his wand, sealing it up, "but I didn't think it would be with my mother's best china."
Harry, still cradling the rolling pin, laughed, "I like it here already. But will the rest of the rooms do that to us as well?"
"I sure hope not," his godfather replied, leaning over to drop his meat board on a fork which was wriggling away towards the pantry, "are you hungry?"
When his godson enthusiastically replied to the affirmative, Sirius went back upstairs to get the shopping and brought it down to the kitchen. He laid the food out onto the table while Harry collected some bent cutlery and plates which had not been cracked too badly in the melee. The knives gave a defiant shudder as he laid them on the table, but the spell that had enchanted them seemed to have been suppressed.
"Wow!" Harry's eyes widened as they roamed over the feast Sirius was presenting. Two loaves of brown bread, oranges, cheese, muffins, a bag of sliced ham and a long salami, a tub of good butter, a jar of boysenberry jam, a carton of eggs (half of which had broken when Sirius had dropped the shopping) and four bottles of butterbeer, "how come we can afford all this?"
Sirius opened one of the bottles with his wand and butterbeer foamed out with a hiss, "there's bound to be plenty of old stuff in this house that we can sell," he said with a grin as he passed Harry the bottle, "so no worries about money right now," he opened a bottle for himself and the two of them brought them together in a toast.
"To city life!" said Harry as the bottles clinked together.
"To your eleventh birthday," said Sirius, and Harry did not seem notice the subdued tone of his voice. They sat down and began serving themselves from the delicious platters.
"Which, if you remember, is next week," Sirius added as he spread a thick layer of jam over his bread, "what do you feel like doing?"
Harry chewed meditatively on his ham sandwich. Apart from an afternoon at the park, or spending a day running through the forest with his godfather chasing birds in his dog form, he'd never really done anything special for his birthday, "I don't know," he said finally, "what sort of things could I do?"
Sirius shrugged, "well, I sort of thought, perhaps we could go shopping for a birthday present."
"Shopping?" this idea obviously didn't appeal to Harry, "where would we go shopping?"
"Where all wizards shop," Sirius told him, trying to keep his tone casual, "Diagon Ally. That's where all the magical stores are. And I thought – well, with the holiday rush, it'll be pretty crowded. We might be able to…sort of…blend in."
Harry put his sandwich down and looked at his plate. For a moment, Sirius thought he was crying, and he said quickly, "but, I mean, it's your birthday, we'll do what you want…"
Harry raised his head and his godfather saw that he was grinning from ear to ear, "are you kidding? We could really go see other wizards? Look at magic shops? I wouldn't need a disillusionment charm on me or anything?"
Sirius sighed in relief, and he nodded, "I thought, maybe we'd change your hair colour, but you wouldn't have to be invisible."
Harry shook his head in disbelief, still smiling, and picked up his sandwich again, "and I can pick a birthday present? Anything at all?"
"I had a few ideas, and it has to be within reason," his godfather quickly added, "I mean, you're not coming home with a hippogriff on a leash. But yes, it'll be your choice."
Harry continued to grin while he ate the rest of the lunch, but he did not speak, just stared wistfully over Sirius' shoulder at the wall, apparently lost in thought.
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That afternoon they began to look into cleaning the rest of the house. It was rather like inspecting a field full of mines. Sirius would enter a room first, wand drawn, awaiting any sound that betrayed the release of some poisonous gas or a dangerous beast dropping from the rafters. But apart from a nasty doxy infestation, a carpet that did its best to strangle them and a number of what looked like deflated black party balloons that left nasty red welts on Harry's hands when he picked one of them up, there was nothing else in the kitchen, downstairs dining room, or any of the bedrooms they entered that directly attempted to endanger their lives. But they had barely begun to explore the house, and though Sirius' face became grimmer every time the people in the photographs mounted on the walls turned their backs on him, Harry could not wait to see what other mysteries Grimmauld Place would reveal.
"Once we actually start touching some of those old relics," warned Sirius, "oh, then we'll be in for a rough ride. A lot of them are illegal by any laws. My parents specialised in dark magic that most people wouldn't even have nightmares about."
They had found a bedroom that was relatively empty and free of anything that might have posed a threat, and had finished scourging it out as best they could with Sirius' limited knowledge of domestic cleaning spells. As Harry knelt to check under the bed for any more spiders – which seemed to have mutated to monstrous size – he saw two huge grey eyes peering back at him. He gave a shriek and scampered sideways, as Kreacher emerged from under the bed, glancing left and right with his bloodshot gaze.
Sirius, who had spun around with his wand raised at Harry's cry, lowered his arm and glared at Kreacher, "what are you doing under there?" he demanded.
Kreacher clambered to his feet, and bowed to Harry, one arm clamped behind his back, "Young Master must forgive poor Kreacher, Kreacher did not mean to frighten him. Horrible, ugly brat that he is, oh, my Mistress would not have let him touch the hem of her cloak, oh no."
Sirius gritted his teeth and made strangling motions with his hand, "you're going to end up hammered to the wall if you don't get out of this room, Kreacher – hang on, what's that you've got behind your back?"
Kreacher's eyes widened and he began to back towards the door, "Master is busy, Kreacher should not be disturbing him, look at him, how dare he come back to the house of my Mistress as if he owned it, looking like a vagabond with his scarred beggar-boy of a son…"
"Oh, you little cockroach!" Sirius pounced on Kreacher, who squealed and fled from the room. Harry, who despite Kreacher's cruel words could not help laughing, sprinted after his godfather, who had chased the house-elf down the hall and vanished around the corner. Seeing a door ajar, Harry threw it open and stepped inside, thinking Sirius and Kreacher had just entered it.
He quickly realised he was mistaken, for the room was empty and still. It looked like a drawing room, with a writing desk standing to one side, a large blue and gold tapestry on the far wall and tall glass-fronted cabinets looming around him like glistening towers. Harry stepped closer and peered inside the nearest cabinet. It was filled with an array on strange objects, unnamable and sinister. He reached out to touch the door of the cabinet and, as his hand pressed against the glass, there came the faintest click and the door sprang open.
Hardly daring to breath, Harry bent to look at the nearest shelf. Something at the back glittered gold. He reached into the dimly-lit regions at the back and his hand fell upon something round and cold. His fingers closed around it and he lifted it into the light to get a better look.
"There you are," Harry spun around to see Sirius leaning into the room with his hand on the door handle, "I'm afraid the little scum-raker got away. He seems to be living in the air vents."
"Look what I found," said Harry, and held out his hand towards Sirius. In his palm lay a large gold locket, the chain swinging slowly in the dusty air.
"Wow, that's great," Sirius stepped in the room and reached out to take the locket, "we can sell that for sure. Forty galleons, if it's real gold – and I'll bet you anything it is."
At Sirius' words, Harry snatched his hand back, holding the locket to his chest, "let's not sell this one. I like it," he added casually, lifting the chain over his head so that the locket hung around his neck. It felt heavy and cold.
Sirius frowned, and then shrugged, "suit yourself. There'll be plenty more treasures hidden away in this place. Just be careful it doesn't explode or anything," he glanced at the tapestry across the room, glared at it for a moment, and then headed back out, calling back over his shoulder to watch out that Kreacher didn't ambush them in the halls.
Harry followed him, taking the locket off as he went. He felt lighter without it, but strangely weaker as well.
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"You can have your own bedroom now," Sirius told Harry while they prepared dinner, "do you want to pick one after tea? There's the whole house to choose from."
"Sleep in a room all by myself?" this was a daunting prospect for Harry. He'd never gone to sleep without Sirius' light snores nearby, "but it'd be all dark. I think I'd be scared."
"Well, we can move a second bed into that big empty room on the second floor, and we'll both sleep there tonight," his godfather suggested, poking at their lamb chops with a spatula that bore a silver serpent handle, "tomorrow you can think about having your own room. And once you've got a bedroom, we'll start looking to see if any of the cellars could be ready before Sunday."
"Yeah," said Harry, trying not to feel gloomy about the coming Sunday, which was a full moon, and also two days before his birthday. But he was distracted as yet another potato peeler wriggled out of his grasp when he picked it up, trying to take a bite out of his thumb. He gave it a quick whack with a potato and it became stiff and silent once more.
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Harry was already in bed when Sirius, after double checking that everything in the room and the corridor outside was staying put and not exhibiting murderous desires, pulled on his nightclothes and crawled under the heavy blankets of the rickety old four-poster bed. Luckily there had been a stasis spell on the linen closet that meant the sheets had not been eaten by moths over the years the house had been unoccupied, but it did mean the beds they were sleeping in had an odd coppery smell of magic about them. Sirius reached over to turn out the lamp and noticed that the gold locket Harry had found was sitting on the bedside table next to Harry's glasses.
"Did you put that there?" Sirius asked. Harry turned over to see what he was talking about.
"Oh, yeah," he said, yawning, "I didn't want Kreacher nicking it in the night."
Sirius did not know why he disliked the locket so much. He certainly didn't remember it from his childhood in the Black house, and it wasn't the sort of thing his mother would have worn, so why did it give him such a feeling of aversion?
"Are you sure you don't want to sell it?" he asked his godson, "it's too heavy to wear, after all."
Harry shook his head, "I like it," he said, "It kind of feels like it knows me."
"Knows you?"
"Yeah," said Harry, "like, I've met it before, or something."
Sirius forced a laugh, "well, alright. I'm not one to argue," he turned out the light and rolled onto his back, trying to repress his foreboding.
"Yes, you are," came Harry's cheeky reply from out of the darkness. Sirius snickered and closed his eyes. It was being back in this horrible house that was putting him on edge, that was all. Well, he had to forgot about all his previous memories of Grimmauld Place. The house belonged to him and Harry now.
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TBC