Disclaimer: I am not J. K. Rowling, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, or anybody else I may allude to in this story.

A/N: Thanks to all my reviewers! I'm trying to include at least a few gothic elements (ideally full gothic, but I doubt I was successful), so if anyone can comment on that I would really appreciate it.

"But I should die of shame before our Trojan men and noblewomen if like a coward I avoided battle, nor am I moved to."The Iliad


The next morning, Lily was tired, having had difficulty getting back to sleep. She shrugged at her overactive imagination that had so affected her dreams and then got dressed and ready for her second day of classes.

The day passed fairly uneventfully, unless one would count the fact that Severus Snape had been her assigned partner for Potions that day. Professor Slughorn enjoyed putting the pair together, claiming that his "two best students should learn to work together because they could come up with brilliant ways to improve existing potions" and other loads of bull like that.

Lily did not particularly mind working with Snape, for he really was one of the best students in Potions, and he usually unwittingly taught her something new every time they worked together, but he was always smug about it when he did so. Snape, on the other hand, absolutely hated working with "the great Lily Evans" in Potions. He could not stand that a Muggle-born could be as good at Potions as he was. He had almost started to think of her as a decent person when she was always yelling at James Potter, but now that she was friendly with him, he could hardly stand her.

Whenever they worked together, he always had to sneer at her and tell her that the way she was mixing the potion was not the best way: that it may be the way described in the textbook, but there were better ways to make the potion.

That particular day had been one of the worst working with Snape. He unceremoniously asked her, sneeringly, how she had been handling the haunted dormitory. Always trying to be the more mature person, she did not rise to his bait and merely smiled and told him she did not believe the stories about the dorm.

"Did you know that the Canton was a Mud – er –Muggleborn, and Betancourt was a pureblood?" Snape could not risk insulting a member of the professor's "Slug Club" outright in the middle of Potions class. He continued, "And that this is the first time in one hundred years that the Head Girl has been Muggle-born and the Head Boy pureblood? There are several similarities between you and Canton and Potter and Betancourt. Everyone knows Potter has a crush on you and would probably do something drastic to keep you to himself."

Lily rolled her eyes at this. "Yes, Snape, I am sure that James is going to kill me. I will lie awake at night wondering when he is going to come in and strangle me in my sleep." She tried to keep her face from reflecting the slight fear she still felt following her nightmare.

"Scoff if you like, but don't come haunting me when he kills you," Snape sneered.

"I'll take your advice under advisement," she replied dryly. They worked the rest of the period with as little conversation as possible, Lily trying to peer over Snape's shoulder occasionally, attempting to read what he was writing in his textbook and Snape glaring at her whenever she did so.


That evening, Lily related the events to the other Seventh year Gryffindors, who had mixed reactions. Samantha and Remus rolled their eyes, Peter looked slightly weary, and Sirius and James looked livid. They were always up for giving Snape Hell, but were occasionally restrained by Lily. She saw the looks on the pair's faces and glared at them. "Don't even think about it," she glared.

"You can't let that git insult you like that," James said.

"He didn't insult me, he only tried to scare me, and I assure you he did not succeed," Lily stated stubbornly.

James relaxed slightly, but stated, "Well, tell us if he tries anything else."

"Whatever," Lily replied, then looked over at Samantha and changed the subject, asking her how Binns was doing. "Still alive?" she quipped.

"Just as old, oblivious, and alive as ever." James, Sirius, and Peter, who were also in the class, cringed and nodded their agreement, bringing smiles to the faces of the two remaining Seventh years, neither of whom had taken a class from Binns since their fifth year.


The next morning at breakfast, Sirius asked, "So, Lily, it's Friday, and you have now spent three nights in the most haunted room of the castle. How are you holding together?"

"I'm fine, thank you. Been sleeping like a baby actually."

"Awww, how cute, little Lily Evans sleeping like a baby." Lily rolled her eyes at Sirius's comment, and then looked to her best friend.

"So, Samantha, do you have any big plans for the weekend?"

"Of course. I'm going to sleep, then I'm going to eat, and then I am going to go back to sleep again. Sunday night I will rush to do all of my homework, and then I am going to go to sleep much later than I should."

Lily roller her eyes again, this time at her friend's honest analysis of herself. "Why do I ask?"


That night, Lily stayed up until eleven reading Northanger Abbey, chuckling to herself about how silly and over imaginative Catherine Morland could be. The girl, having read too many novels, was always imagining the worst of people. She had gone as far as to think her friend's father had killed his wife just because he did not like to see her favorite part of the garden nor would allow anyone to go into her old chambers! Lily hoped she would never be that silly.

Not long after setting aside her book and drifting off to sleep, she woke to the sound of voices again. They were not ghostly, however, but distinctly living, breathing, seventeen-year-old boy voices. She groaned aloud as she heard a particularly loud shout from what must have been none other than Sirius Black. She dragged herself out of bed and put on her dressing gown, knowing that she would never get to sleep with them making such a racket in the Head's Common Room. Lily descended the stairs to find the four boys playing a particularly loud game of Exploding Snap. Upon seeing her at the bottom of the staircase, the boys' faces assumed looks of guilt.

Ever the negotiator, Remus promptly apologized for the ruckus, while Sirius cheekily asked, "Did Elizabeth wake you up? Do you need some strong men to save you from the horrors of the Head Girl's dormitory?"

Lily glared at Sirius and asked them to be quiet. "You don't want to see me when I'm tired."

"I think we'd better be quieter, guys," Peter stated in an attempt to keep the peace.

"Thank you, Peter," Lily replied, turning to head up the stairs once more.

Thirty minutes later, just as Lily was drifting off to sleep once more, she heard voices again, this time the disembodied voices she has heard her first night. Now, she distinctly heard the word "us." The voices whispered "help us," "save us." There was also a faint pounding noise accompanying the voices. Lily shivered involuntarily. She looked towards the window, though which she could see the eerie light of the waxing crescent moon glowing through the tree branches outside. The air was spookily still, especially compared to the steady breeze that had been blowing the past several days. She got out of bed, slipping her house shoes onto her feet to protect them from the frigid stone floor. She grabbed her wand from her nightstand, lighting it as she approached the bookcase beside the open window. The still, cold night air engulfed her as she got closer, and the voices and poundings seemed to get louder, though they were still faint. A particularly loud cry of, "Oh, d—n, it's useless," shocked Lily out of her stupor, and she ran out of her dorm and down the stairs to the Common Room, where James and his friends were poring over a sheet of parchment, conversing conspiratorially, yet more quietly than she had ever heard them.

They looked up as she entered once more, panting from lack of breath from not only the run downstairs, but also fear. Sirius quickly muttered a few words at the parchment that Lily could not discern, and the four boys looked at the teenaged girl, with apparent concern. James was the first to speak, "Are you okay, Lily?"

In the warmth and light of the common room, Lily began to feel silly for her reaction to the voices and noises she had heard, but her embarrassment quickly turned to slight anger. She looked suspiciously at the boys and asked if they had been sneaking into her room.

Confused, James replied, "Of course not, why?"

"Because walls do not usually pound on themselves and cry 'help us, save us,' Potter. You boys must have had something to do with this. No one else has access to this area."

James looked slightly hurt at her accusation. "We've been down here the entire time, honest. Besides, we're all talk and no action when it comes to scaring you, and you know that."

Lily could see the honesty in his eyes and sighed. "I'm sorry. I guess all of those stories are getting to me. And to think I was laughing about Catherine's overactive imagination." At the boys' confused faces, she explained Catherine was a character in the book she was reading, and the boys shrugged, not caring about a "girly" book, as most boys considered anything written by Jane Austen.

Although she had calmed down considerably since she had burst unceremoniously into the common room, Lily was not quite up to sleeping in her room that evening, so she opted to curl up in one of the armchairs, letting the boys' quiet whispers lull her to sleep. Unfortunately, she missed Sirius' question of, "What if it really is the ghost of Elizabeth Canton? But then, why would she say 'us'?"