When the second war rolled around, there was no point in fighting to write about it. Everyone was allowed to until they weren't. Because of the article, Rita had been given access to the trials and earned a reputation for her reporting. This time, it was strangely the same. She did not want to write about missing people, missing children. She found that she didn't want to write about blown up bridges, cars set on fires that couldn't be put out with water. So she didn't. Even then, even as she enjoyed writing about the war, as much as one could, she could feel everyone becoming tired of having to be confronted with their reality in writing. She wrote the articles and tucked them away and then she stopped writing them all together. The first war had made her famous. The first war had made her wealthy and it had made her tired. When she did write an article or a paper, she could feel the old rush return. She could feel the old feeling of hunching over a stack of parchment. She remembered that once upon a time, she had had to re-dip her quill several times an article and it made her smile and she was proud of her herself, she was proud for herself for what she had done. She would look up from days of writing and refilling coffee at the longform article and feel the satisfaction of a fresh start and a new ending. She filed those papers away with the pieces of other projects. As far as her writing was concerned, the war ended after the trials. As far as she was concerned, the details and the truth of the wars were no longer worth sharing.
If Rita had had it in her, she could have found out more about the missing woman. She could have untangled some of the details. Maybe she would know a fuller story but she was already assigned to another piece and took the opportunity. You must remember how things were then. They were quiet and then they weren't and then it would be quiet for such a long time that people might forget and then…
It went something like this: Marlene offered to be the one who said she alerted the ministry because she lived so close to the woman, that it would make it more believable. Rita could not have known that Dorcas had arrived on the scene first with the Prewett brothers and a man named Basil. It was because of this article that didn't exist that Rufus Scrimgeour would never know that he had been correct. The usual order of things, that a muggle did indeed let a witch know is exactly what happened because one had. Phillipa when they arrived back from camp to drop Basil off first was the one to sound the alarm. It was she who pointed out the looping peculiarity of fog and sparkle, the congregation of what appeared to be starlight hovering over the missing woman's family home. Everyone thought that her insistence on turning around to check was from her desire to be on a broom again. Her insistence initially made them all question this fog's meaning and relevance but she had been correct. It did seem magical. It was magic. During the trials of the first war, the name for this magic and its purpose would be explicitly revealed. It had been termed the Dark Mark partly for its irony. It was a shimmering, greenish, lovely even. It did not take its full shape until the intervening years, the time between the wars, when in honor of their fallen leader, the light and fog was organized into the same symbol their progenitors used to bear on their bodies: a snake, slithering through a skull. So when the second war began, when the mark showed up again, people knew and understood and were afraid. But then, after one of the happiest days of some people's lives and the worst for others, a muggle woman was making her way towards the sea pulled by an unknown and unknowable force having left a mystery behind her.
Close your eyes. You are closing your eyes so you can accurately imagine what is about to be described and also so that when you understand what you are imagining, you can open your eyes again and realize you are safe and not actually witnessing what you are imaging. Have you closed them yet? Good. The missing woman was dead but you, like Rita and Rufus and the wizarding England that read the Daily Prophet, must have known that. You are sitting on a cloud or rather, maybe you are the cloud. If you look down below, there is the deep turquoise of the sea. If you look out in front of you, you are looking at a cliff face and you can see part of the top of the cliff straggly with itchy, green seagrass that can survive the saline air coming off of the ocean and the cliff face itself angled toward the ground, is not black when dry, but here it never is. The cliff is glistening from the moisture in the air and below that you can see the bright sand. The day will end soon but it is still bright and you notice the sand in a little patch on your right is moving. But it isn't sand at all. It's a person? You hop onto another cloud or merge with the vapor that comes from a crashing wave. It IS a person. You wonder if you should become a grain of sand or the cliff face itself. But stay where you are to understand. So you lean in as best as you can and this person, as they continue walking along the shore, you realize is a woman and you know this, as far as your knowing goes, because the woman is naked. Ah, now you get it! This happens sometimes. But, then again, you think, not here usually. How did she get down here, you wonder. How could any one get down here? There is no discernible foot path for miles and when high tide comes in, the very sand she is walking on will be completely submerged by several feet of water. Something must be wrong. Something is wrong. You lean in closer.
She is walking in a strange way. She is upright and looking ahead and yet her limbs are somehow behind her. Something is trailing behind her but she is all there. And that's when she trips over her own feet but she keeps walking. She does not break her fall with her hands her feet keep going forward and she uses her hands to get up after her head plows a little trough in the sand. Yes, something is very wrong. When she stands up she continues as if nothing has happened, you force yourself to sit on an atom in the air in front of her and one of her eyes is filled with sand grains that she makes no attempt to get out of her eyes. She's not even blinking. You realize that you shouldn't have tried to understand. You have missed your opportunity to turn away. You know she is not ok but- You go back to your perch on a cloud or over the ocean.
You watch her stop in front a clearing in the rock, a fissure. She stops and turns her head as if looking around but something tells you that she can't actually perceive what she's. Maybe she can see but she doesn't know or understand what's she's. Nevermind. She finds what she must have been looking for and slams her hand onto a sharp edge of jutting from the cliff wall. You wince. If you have to open your eyes, please do. What is she doing? What is wrong? Are you, alright? Good. Close your eyes again.
You decide to follow her now, maybe you can help but, no. You feel something drop in your stomach, the fissure is more like an opening (was it before and you just hadn't noticed? But it wasn't like that before, was it?) and you follow her into the opening. You can be yourself now. If you're going to help, you will need all of yourself. You can't do anything as a cloud or seafoam or a teensy atom. Her hand is bloodied but even her blood is the wrong shade, it's behaving incorrectly and you don't want to think it but there should be more of it but it's also very dark in here. You feel a feather, having fallen from the base of your head, fall to rest in between your shoulder blades which makes the hair on your neck stand up. When you reach for it there is nothing there but you felt something all the same. You are momentarily distracted by this feeling, going so far as to check your hand for a feather you know was never there. There is nothing and it's dark, you can barely make out the outline of your own hand. When you look up, you notice the woman walking forward getting shorter in a strange way and now your shoes are wet. She has waded into a shallow and you understand now that there is a shimmer coming from what you understand is water. You back away. Wait! you want to say. Turn around! but the words are stuck in your throat and she can't hear you because you're not there and, if you were, she can't hear you because she is listening to something else somewhere else in her.
She walks into the water thats up to her knees and she's not doing that thing where you feel the heaviness of water, she's not trying to keep balance, she's walking straight in and then she drops out of view like she's walked over a sand shelf but she doesn't bob back up. She is gone. You keep backing up because it's very dark. You want to turn around and run but before you do, your back bumps into the wall which makes you jump away from it. You turn and find the way is shut.
You came through this way, right? The distance wasn't even that far, was it? You're not even thinking about the woman anymore but you know she is there, you saw her disappear into the water. You saw her and you know she is there and you know she knows you were there and did nothing to stop her but you cannot get out. You think, maybe, you too can slam your hand against something if only you can be back on the beach on the sand. You can't put yourself on a cloud from inside of this place because you don't know if it's still there. The tide will rise soon and you don't know if it will come in and flood this place, if this water is the same as the sea, if the saltiness of the sea will make whatever is in the water float. You have, again, backed yourself into what you know is the inside of a sea cliff. And you feel the salty stickiness of the wall and the discomfort of wanting to sweat when you are in a cold place. You can feel night falling in the cave even as you know it is still day outside. Don't be so silly!, you tell yourself. You just got in here! but you feel the height of the cliffs around you how expansive this place is and as your eyes adjust, the glow in front of you does not reassure you. The light is swallowed up by the great darkness around it. You were right about the water that made your shoes wet. It looks like a black pane of glass where the light hits it.
How is the water so still, though? Not even a ripple on its surface. You can't let your own mind fool you into thinking the woman did not fall into it or even that she didn't exist. But you stare at the wet, shining, still water mesmerized. The light is getting ever but only slightly brighter as your eyes keep adjusting and adjusting and you know your mind is playing trick on you because you feel like if you stand there long enough, the entire cave will be filled with the brightest, cleanest, coldest light you have ever seen. The darkness was bad enough but, this is worse. You open your eyes.
