"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts." -the Counting Crows
Films About Ghosts
Chapter 13: Flesh, Blood, and Bone
The stairs spiraled down seemingly into eternity, but once Ariane lit her wand she saw that it was actually not quite as far as that. In fact there were only fifteen rather steep stairs, but she could see the door into the workshop at the bottom.
"Blimey," said Ron, sounding a bit shaken. "I didn't know you could speak Parseltongue."
Ariane was feeling too irritated with the both of them to be nice. "I may be wrong, but since I'm Salazar Slytherin's sister I thought it would be quite obvious that I would be able to." Ron ran both his hands through his hair, making it stand on end.
"There's nothing down there that might eat us, right?" Harry asked, peering into the stairwell apprehensively. "Because the last place we went that Salazar Slytherin made, there was a basilisk."
"Why would he put a basilisk in his own workshop?" Ariane returned acidly. "I'll go down first, if you don't want to risk yourselves." She began a slow descent of the stairs, careful not to slip on the dust, and then looked back at the two boys. "Come on," she told Harry. "You were so keen to find out what I was on about before."
At the other end of the common room, a voice Ariane recognized said, "Slatero." It was Tuyet, probably coming from Professor Connor's class to tell Ariane off for not going. The stone wall grated slowly aside to let Tuyet into the room.
Eager not to be caught in the Slytherin Common Room, Harry and Ron nearly jumped down the passageway, and in doing so Ron missed a step, slid in the dust, and knocked Ariane and Harry all the way down the stairs. Luckily it was a spiral staircase and that stopped them from building up too much speed, but it was a painful fall. To top it all off, the passageway didn't close behind them, and Tuyet was soon at the top of it looking down.
"Hello?" she called warily, unable to see the tangle of bodies at the bottom. "Where'd this come from?" she muttered to herself.
Ariane opened her mouth to call up to her friend, but Harry clapped a hand over her mouth. She tried to bite him and failed, and then heard Tuyet's feet on the stairs. She's too nosy for her own good, Ariane thought, forgetting that she had to be nearly as nosy. Silently she willed Tuyet to turn and go back up the stairs, go back into the common room, and after Tuyet was there she willed the stone wall to close again.
Stone rasped against stone, and Tuyet gave a short cry of terror as the light from the common room was extinguished. Ariane grimaced and thought wrong order, then pushed someone off her and climbed up the stairs. She waved her hands blindly in front of her, hoping to find Tuyet before her friend panicked. Her fingertips closed around an ankle, and Ariane whispered "Tuyet, come down here," hoping not to alert anyone else that might have followed Tuyet into the common room.
Tuyet panicked. Maybe it was justified, but having someone kick you in the head rarely seems that way. Ariane and Tuyet rolled down the stairs again, but Ariane didn't notice the fall because it felt as though sparklers were going off inside her brain. By the time she was on the ground again, she couldn't have said which way was up, but she was grateful for the solidity of the floor as it tilted and whirled with her. Somebody yelled a spell near her head, making it throb, and then someone else picked her up and propped her against the wall.
"Ariane? Ariane?" Harry slapped her face lightly, which made the world stop spinning. Well, it slowed. She opened her eyes and saw Harry's right in front of her, such a bright green that they had flecks of yellow in them. Ariane's head was too swimmy for her to think clearly, but she had the distinct impression that she'd seen those eyes before. She stored the thought in the back of her mind for further consideration, and then closed her eyes, feeling very sick.
"I think she's got a whatchacallit—a concussion," Harry told Ron, who said "Blimey, she needs to get us out of here!"
"No, I know the password," Harry said confidently. "It was just in Parseltongue, that's all." His hands still held her shoulders firmly against the wall.
"I'm going to be sick," Ariane said, and he released her instantly. She staggered over to a dusty bowl and was about to be sick in that, but suddenly changed direction and threw up her coffee and marmalade onto the floor next to the table the bowl was on. Ariane wiped her mouth on her sleeve and felt much better.
"Urgh," Ron said in disgust, moving out of range of the puddle. "Why didn't you use the bowl?"
"Because," Ariane said in a lofty tone, "That bowl is a Pensieve. Vomit would probably ruin it." She steadied herself on its table, still feeling wobbly on her feet. "Where's Tuyet?"
"Ron Stunned her," Harry said, pointing at the crumpled blonde-haired girl at the foot of the stairs. "So that she wouldn't send all the Slytherins down here by screaming."
"Is she all right, though?" Ariane asked, with a worried glance at her friend. "She's not permanently damaged or anything?"
"Bit bruised, yea," said Ron, "But she'll wake up eventually. Don't worry about her—what are all these things?" He pointed at a rusty object that resembled a many-legged creature. "Wild."
"Yeah, this room is full of stuff like that," Harry said, peering around. "A lot of these things look like stuff Dumbledore has in his office." There were a lot of delicate instruments, tarnished with age, standing on tables around the room, and a whole desk full of books and papers. There was a book open on the desk, written in a scribe's neat, readable handwriting. Ariane went over to it and began to read as Harry investigated the empty Pensieve and Ron tinkered with one of the rusted instruments.
"This is a book of law," she said after a few minutes deciphering the Old French. "Punishments for lawbreakers."
"Are they gory?" Ron asked brightly.
"Pretty ordinary," Ariane replied. "Mostly hangings, though if you steal another man's wife you can have your manly bits crushed beneath the miller's stone." Ron and Harry both winced while Ariane giggled. She turned the page. "Oh, here are some interesting ones. These are for murder."
"Murder?" Harry came over and peered over her shoulder. "Like what kind?"
"Mostly it depends on who you murder. Like if you were a peasant and murdered a noble, you would be drawn and quartered, but if you were a noble that murdered a peasant you would only be beheaded. That's a lot more humane than hanging."
Ron used the sleeve of his robe to clean off the silver mirror he had found. "Did you lot really do all that stuff?" He peered at the back of the mirror, then breathed on the looking glass and rubbed enthusiastically.
"Mostly we just hanged people," Ariane said, and shivered. "But sometimes, if what they did was really awful, we went by the books. Here are all the punishments for if you murdered different members of your own family." Her finger ran down the column, and then paused on one that had been circled in ink. There was a date next to it in shaky handwriting: "5th Oct. 1015".
Harry had spotted it too. "What's that one?"
Ariane cleared her throat and read, "If a man should kill his brother's wife or his betrothed sister, he should be sentenced to be hung with weights and marched into a deep pool of water, where he would then be drowned until he is certainly dead..." Her voice trailed off.
She knew that Harry was thinking the same thing she was, and cut him off. "That couldn't be what they did to Salazar. I wasn't officially betrothed."
Harry looked skeptical. "What if Laramy claimed that you had agreed to be engaged or betrothed or whatever?"
"I couldn't be married without my guardian's permission."
"Well then who was your guardian?" he asked, a keen light in his green eyes.
"Salazar, of course," she said with irritation, and then paused as a new memory flared. "No—he and I were both under the care of—under the care of Godric Gryffindor. But he never assumed the responsibilities of a guardian with me."
"But if he was an official guardian, then that kid could have asked him for you and still been inside the law, right?"
Ariane was not sure she liked where this conversation was going. "That's right."
"So if the guy—"
"Laramy," Ariane said crossly.
"—yes, I know that—if he did that then when you died he could have accused Salazar of murdering his betrothed and had Godric as a witness."
That made a lot of sense and Ariane would have been impressed by the logic if she hadn't known it was impossible. She opened her mouth to make a comment that would make it clear that his statement was impossible, found that she didn't have one, and closed her mouth. "He didn't do it," she muttered under her breath.
Harry looked as though he would have like to retort, but was distracted by Ron's swearing as one of the instruments began to claw its way up the front of his trousers. It looked as though it were on a mission. Harry grabbed up the book of law and smashed it to bits, which made Tuyet stir and mutter sourly, which made Ron Stun her again. Ariane didn't like this and told him so, but Ron was convinced he had just narrowly escaped the castrati choir and not feeling very pleasant at the moment. It was a marvelous diversion, and left Ariane to climb onto the sturdy old desk and read through Salazar's papers while Harry and Ron investigated the other instruments.
The papers were hard to read. Salazar drifted between Latin, Old French, Old English, and something Ariane couldn't read that she suspected was their mother's first language. Mostly they were details of spells he was trying or diagrams of gardens he wanted to set up. A few were bad pen drawings of his wife, apparently a series of efforts to prove his affection (Ariane guessed that the reason, judging by the dates of the adjacent notes, was that she had born him a child, most likely a son). She doubted they had ever made it to her; it was more likely that Salazar had asked Helga to do the painting for him.
Bored, she flipped through the notes faster and faster. She paused briefly at the notes regarding Petrification, but they were as brief and impersonal as though he'd never made a mistake and Petrified a human girl. Ariane glanced up for a moment, watching Harry and Ron play with the old magical artifacts. They were politely waiting for her to finish reading, though they might have been unaware of the time due to the steady, dim light of their wands. Hours could have passed and they wouldn't be able to tell.
Ariane glanced back down and saw a bold, shaky title beneath her fingers: "On the Subject of Necromancy and the Raising of Souls."
She brought her lit wand closer. It was a lengthy piece of parchment, nearly four feet, and Ariane skimmed over it hand over hand until she found the section about the actual raising and not the preparations, which were tedious and long.
The kettle should be of a size that the departed can crouch within it, and perfectly formed in all ways.
Right, that was nice. Ariane didn't much care for being raised to life in a kettle. Very unglamorous. Helga would have called it 'kitchen magic'.
Place the departed inside the kettle, making sure that they are entirely submerged beneath the potion. Under this, Salazar had written 'Five buckets full'.
Add: The flesh of a servant
The blood of a foe
The bone of the father
Ariane squinted at Salazar's messy handwriting, brought the light closer, and frowned. He had written 'puzzle?', then scratched it out and written all sorts of synonyms for 'puzzle' underneath it. "Puzzle, enigma, challenge, riddle, problem, conundrum, mystery," Ariane read disgustedly. "What a great help."
"What's that?" Ron asked, testing a pointy instrument on the wooden table. "Got a thesaurus there or something?"
"No," Ariane said, her voice thick with irritation. "I thought the name of my father would be in this and its not."
Harry moved around so that he could peer over her shoulder and read the part about flesh, blood, and bone. Ariane felt him go rigid next to her, and by leaning a little closer she could hear and see the memory that made his face go white.
A caldron sat quietly on the very old grave in a sort of churchyard. Ariane turned inside the memory and looked at Harry, who was bound so tightly to a tombstone that he looked like a spider's prey. His face was scratched and he was staring into the cauldron with dread. The tombstone he was tied to was quite worn and chipped, but the faint family name could still be made out next to it. There was a hunched, shuffling man wrapped from head to toe in a black cloak, who was muttering an incantation.
"Bone of the father, you will resurrect your son." The grave beneath Harry's feet cracked and a white powder flew into the potion. It changed color and threw Harry's face into high relief. Ariane spotted a figure lying on the ground and moved towards it, the memory becoming more vague as she did so. It seemed that when she moved away from Harry, who had experienced the memory, the fewer the details. She suspected that if she tried to leave the graveyard she would leave the memory as well.
She reached the fuzzy figure as the black-robed man began to shudder and shake with fear. Ariane crouched down and peered at its face, wondering who it was and how they'd been knocked out.
It was a boy—a lovely boy, dark-haired and gray-eyed, with the sort of chiseled good looks that made girls go weak in the knees. The dark curls that crowned him were mussed and he had leaves tangled in it, and his head sat at a funny angle on his neck. The gray eyes were oddly surprised and yet unaware, peering into a void that no one could penetrate. He was dead and she knew that he was ice cold even though she couldn't feel it. His name was Cedric Diggory, and Ariane knew that she would never forget his face if she lived a thousand more years.
At that cold moment, a bloodcurdling scream filled the air and Ariane was startled back into her own mind.
Harry was so white that he looked waxy, and this time Ariane had to startle him out of the memory by pinching him hard on the arm. His eyes seemed to snap back to reality, and he shivered, looking at her like she was a monster.
"You came back to life that way?" he asked, a troubled look in his eyes.
"I didn't ask for it," she replied, a slight edge to her voice. "I was dead and probably very happily so."
"How did Slytherin find your father? I thought you two were ba—" Harry stopped at the look on Ariane's face. She was flushed with rage, her violet eyes burning. "I didn't think you'd ever met your father," he amended.
"I haven't," she said stiffly. As an excuse to avoid both of their stares, she peered down at the notes again.
Puzzle, enigma, challenge, riddle, problem, conundrum, mystery.
Ariane frowned and squinted closer. "Harry, give me your glasses," she demanded without explanation. He handed them over warily, looking very odd without the circles around his eyes.
She used them as a magnifying glass, to make each word a bit larger. There were tiny markings beneath certain letters.
Puzzle, enigma, challenge, riddle, problem, conundrum, mystery.
On the line beneath that were more words, this time stranger still.
Acquisitiveness materialism cupidity hunger avarice insatiability covetousness acquisitiveness
The last line was one word: 'riddle?'
"Give me a pen," Ariane said, her breath coming short. How had Salazar come to hiding things so carefully in his own workshop? Ron put a pen in her hands and a small bottle of black ink and Ariane began to scribble down the letters in the order they were marked.
P-E-R-C-Y-S-E-E-S-T-R-U-T-H-A-B-O-U-T
Ron peered at it, frowned, and ran his hand under the first five letters. "Percy," he said. "Was that someone you knew?"
"I've never met anyone called Percy," Ariane said, handing Harry back his glasses.
He blinked at the letters. "Percy sees truth about," Harry said, and he exchanged a glance with Ron. Between both of them concentrating on the same thing, Ariane got a brief mental glimpse of someone red haired and tall, then it was gone.
"You two know someone named Percy?" Ariane asked curiously.
Ron made a face. "My older brother," he said with disgust. "But he's disowned himself from the family."
"Oh, well that's not him then," she said, flipping to the back of the scroll of parchment. "Unless he's about a thousand years older." She peered at a few short notes.
Found him, the man who claims to be my father. He is tall and dark-haired, like I am, but there is something of Ariane in his face. I always thought that she was a copy of our mother, but the set of her eyes and her thinness belong to him. His Christian name he will not give, so I call him the Draconigen because I refuse to address him as my father.
"My god," she whispered. "He found my father."
"Who was he?" Harry asked, leaning in to look over her shoulder. "What's all that say?"
Ariane cleared her dry throat and began to translate the Old French aloud for their benefit. "He will not tell me from what country he hails, but he claims to be king of it. He says that I am now his only heir, since Ariane is now dead, and that I should be known as a royal bastard—or, as he put it, a half-blood prince. I admire his ambition (and would like to be able to claim the title of prince), but it is not his ambition that I need. In two days time the window for the resurrection of my dear sister will be closed, and no matter what, I will have her by my side again."
"Blimey, he was obsessed," Ron said, ruffling a hand through his hair so that it all stood on end. "Don't you find that a little creepy, the way all he thought about was you? It was like you were married."
"Salazar had a wife," Ariane protested. "She was quite nice."
"Is there anything more here?" Harry asked.
She looked where he pointed and flinched. "That's probably the part where he says how he killed our father."
"You don't know if he—"
"I'm here, aren't I?" Ariane sagged a little. Salazar would never had killed anyone before she died—look what he'd come to, trying to bring her to life, and he had died thinking that he'd failed. She crumpled the parchment in her hands and threw it into the Pensieve. "I don't want to know how he did it," she told them. Harry looked as though he was dying to creep over and read the discarded parchment, but he restrained himself.
Ariane began to flip through the rest of the forms, none of which interested her, until she came to the last one. It looked like it had been scratched out in a hurry, and Salazar's handwriting was sprawled over two whole feet of parchment.
By the nine fires of hell and the demons within
I curse you, GODRIC GRYFFINDOR, and all your seed
May your fields shrivel and your descendants be common
Until my sons arrive to rape your women and kill their husbands
May your daughters die in childbirth
May your sons heads be smashed by enemies
May your children's children be cursed to die
And may my children's children live to walk away
with GRYFFINDOR blood on their hands and swords.
Ariane recognized the curse: it was used most often by thieves and criminals just before they were hung and allowed to speak last words before the hangman kicked over the stool they stood on. The only differences between this one and the book version were the obvious insertion of 'Gryffindor' in the second and ninth lines, and also an alteration in the third line. 'Common' was Salazar's way of saying 'non-magical', but in the proper version of the curse it said 'barren'.
Curses on a family were not to be taken lightly. Usually they were a direct ticket to Hell because of all the innocent descendants harmed. Ariane put a hand to her forehead and rubbed her throbbing temples. There was no doubt Salazar had done this.
She didn't like the version of her brother that had been locked inside his workroom all these years.
"Hey, I think we can get out again," Ron broke into her silent reverie, tapping his watch. "Most people will be in class."
"And those that aren't in class will be outside," Harry added.
Ariane folded up the paper and nodded, still very shaken. "All right." Her voice emerged as a tiny squeak. She tucked the curse into her pocket and went towards the staircase. A figure lay there, fair-haired and small looking. Ariane jumped a foot, thinking that it was Salazar's Petrified village girl, and then remembered that they had left Tuyet lying Stunned on the floor for at least an hour.
"What're we going to do about her?" Ron asked. "Hospital Wing?"
"No, Madam Pomfrey will know she's been Stunned," Harry objected. "We could perform the countercurse but then she'd wake up and start going mad at us again."
"Let's just drag her up to the Common Room," Ron said without enthusiasm. "Maybe one of her Slytherin mates will help her."
Ariane's temper flared again. "I'm one of her Slytherin mates!" she snapped. "Look, I'll take care of it." She dragged Tuyet up into a standing position and let the taller girl fall across her shoulders. Ariane staggered but didn't fall, and the three of them started up the steps. Harry spoke the password because Ariane was still finding it hard to talk when she wasn't in a rage.
The common room was empty as Harry and Ron had predicted. Ariane staggered over to her dormitory's stairs and dumped Tuyet at the foot of them, amazed at how heavy someone who looked that thin could be. "What's the counter-jinx for this?" she asked. "I've forgotten."
"Enervate," Harry said. "See you around." She gave him a disbelieving look, but he either missed it or ignored it because he and Ron vanished underneath Harry's silvery cloak.
"Enervate," Ariane repeated quietly, pointing her wand at Tuyet's face. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then Tuyet's slanted eyes flicked once, twice, and then fixed on Ariane. "What happened?" she asked, trying to sit up. "Ouch."
"You fell down the stairs," Ariane lied quickly. "You've been out for nearly an hour."
"Really?" Tuyet said, tipping over. Her friend caught her. "I am feeling a bit woozy."
"Let's get you to the hospital wing. I think you might have a concussion." The effort it took to lift Tuyet again made Ariane dizzy. "I might have a concussion," she mumbled to herself.
"Yeah, you've got a killer bruise on your face," her load said. "What happened?"
"You fell on me."
"Did I?" Then Tuyet lapsed into silence. Ariane remembered Rowena saying that it was very important to keep head injury victims awake; otherwise they might lapse into a sleep too deep to be broken.
"Talk to me, Tuyet. About anything."
It took some prompting, but soon Tuyet began to babble. Ariane tuned most of it out as she concentrated on pulling the taller, heavier girl to the hospital wing.
"—well, I've never really liked my brother, you know," Tuyet said vaguely while Ariane was pulling her up the main steps. "He's a real jerk to most people. We play him in Quidditch in a few weeks, though."
"Really?" Ariane panted, not really attending. "Your brother?"
"His name's Zacharias, and I swear he's the shame of the family. Imagine having a brother in Hufflepuff."
"Really?"
"Yea, but like my dad's always saying 'You must use what God is smoking to further your causes'..." Tuyet giggled loudly. "I mean, 'spoken'," she whooped. Luckily this occurred right outside the hospital wing, and Madam Pomfrey came rushing out.
"Goodness, what happened to you both?"
"She fell down the stairs," Ariane said truthfully. "I think she's got a concussion."
"And you?" Madam Pomfrey touched Ariane's left temple, setting off a dull throb. "That's a very deep bruise." She whipped out her wand and poked it, and Ariane felt the throb fade into nothing.
"I was beneath her on the stairs," Ariane told her, once again totally honest. "I've got to be off to class now."
"Which class?" Madam Pomfrey asked, peering into Tuyet's hooded eyes.
"I've got Charms this afternoon." Ariane scratched at her short hair. "Is she going to be all right?"
"She'll be fine, though I don't fancy her chances at the next Quidditch match. They'll have to tie her to her broom."
"Slytherin has a match?" Draco was going to be so angry if Tuyet couldn't fly. As far as Ariane knew from listening to the Quidditch babble around her at lunch, Slytherin did not have a back up for the Keeper position. "When?"
"Next weekend. They'll play the winner of the Hufflepuff-Ravenclaw match." Madam Pomfrey lit her wand and shone it in Tuyet's eyes. Her eyes followed the light dreamily, and Madam Pomfrey nodded in approval.
"Won't she be better by then?"
Madam Pomfrey fixed Ariane with a stern gray gaze. "The brain is a complex and many-layered thing. No injury to it can be predicted. Who knows, this may have upset her balance permanently." Seeing Ariane's look of horror and misplacing it, she said, "Don't worry, Ariane, she'll probably be just fine for the match."
She left the hospital wing feeling distinctly guilty, not to mention worried that Tuyet would once again wake up hexed after Draco and Pansy found out that she'd not be able to fly next weekend. On top of all that, Salazar's curse against the Gryffindor family was still folded tightly in her pocket, and the nightmare of her brother that had been locked away in his workshop for a thousand years had come out to follow her around like a shadowy dog.
Ariane went to Charms out of a sense of duty, numb to the stares and whispers around her. She took copious notes and listened intently to everything Professor Flitwick said. Pansy's stares didn't bother her; Draco's stony silence broken by occasional malicious comments didn't even make her blink. The day passed quickly and faded into night so fast that Ariane found herself wondering how she'd gotten through the day without noticing.
She was quite shocked to run into Professor Connor on her way to her common room. The Defense Against the Dark Arts professor looked drawn and pale, her magnificent hair dull and uncombed. Despite her sickly appearance, her voice was just as snappish as ever.
"You skipped my class today, Somerled."
Ariane opened her mouth to defend herself, but Professor Connor cut her off. "I don't really care if you pass my class or not, Somerled, but you will put in the work and the time or I'll know why." She then proceeded to assign her dumbstruck student an extra two feet on vampires to go with the foot already assigned. "If you want to quit my class, please do so. Don't waste my time." Professor Connor stalked off, her hair swishing like a horse's tail. Ariane made a rude gesture at her back, and then noticed that down the hall one of the windows was beginning to glow with the faint promise of a lovely harvest moon.
A full moon.
Frozen in horror, Ariane watched as a single shaft of moonlight broke over the horizon and pinned the tall woman on the spot. It picked out all the fine hairs around her face and gave her a fluorescent halo. It also lit up the stiff, fearful look on Professor Connor's face. Her whole body began to shiver, as though her human form were rebelling the changes beginning. One white hand was visible, and it slowly began to curl in on itself until each nail became long, hooked, and gray, and fur prickled into life along her arms like Pansy when Tuyet had jinxed her. A convulsion began at the base of her spine and bent Professor Connor double, her robes ripping to reveal a ridged spine that soon disappeared beneath the ginger fur growing on her back. Another convulsion and a wolf was standing in the shreds of Professor Connor's robes, snarling and snapping. It turned towards Ariane and regarded her curiously with eyes the color of molten gold.
Not safe! A monster! Disconnected thoughts raced through Ariane's head, crowned by a whining shriek that said: Why is she in the halls?
The werewolf pricked its ears forward. It was really a very nice-looking animal—a nice looking monster, Ariane corrected herself. White teeth, golden-red fur, and the gold eyes that looked nothing like a human's. It tilted its huge, magnificent head and then sat back and howled.
It was the loneliest sound Ariane had ever heard. The low, throbbing cry made all her hairs stand on end and it made her heart ache. It also made her want to run, because she didn't want that loneliness for herself. Her feet had moved about five steps when she heard another low growl behind her.
She peeked over her shoulder, so frightened that she could hardly make herself look.
There was more than one. A small sob escaped her lips as the second werewolf came out of the shadows, teeth bared.
Author's Note: Yes, finally, I know. But it's done, thank god. School has started up once more for me, so updates will be spread out. I have all intentions of finishing Films About Ghosts, but the chapters are going to be typed four sentences at a time. My suggestion? Review and click the author alert button (if you haven't already). That way, when I update you'll know without checking the site (I hate doing that myself so I have like 25 author alerts XD). Well, that's it.