Harry Potter and the Fourth Tower

by The-Nameless90

With Dumbledore gone, Grindelwald's remaining followers are finally able to carry out their plans for "the greater good" and install a Nazi-Germany-like regime. But luckily, the Deathstick found a worthy successor who will oppose them. Based solely on the original 7 books, Harry's story is continued. Realistic, increasingly powerful Harry, no AU. BOOK 1/3.

7. Soot and Frost

- Chapter Seven -

Soot and Frost

'Tell me in a nutshell what happened!'

It was the fourth time Harry had heard this that morning, and he was tired of the question being repeated. Firstly, they had to explain the circumstances of their attack to the Aurors and Obliviators who had rushed to the scene - fortunately, the latter were not needed, as there were no Muggles on the quay. Secondly, they were questioned by the with horror petrified Mr and Mrs Weasley, who hurried into the Ministry, and thirdly by Dawlish, who was roused from his slumber by the night-wizard on duty, and appeared at the Ministry in his pyjamas and slippers, eliciting a roar of laughter from old Proudfoot, who was among those who arrived on the scene.

The sun had risen and with it, London was awakening. The sound of muggles and wizards setting to work at dawn filled the city. Soft sunlight streamed through the enchanted windows, and Harry stifled a yawn. He, Ginny, Hermione and Ron sat in four comfortable armchairs in the Minister's study, with Mr and Mrs Weasley and Dawlish standing like guards behind them.

'We've told you, Kingsley,' said Ginny wearily, half leaning on Hermione's shoulder, 'We came out of the Strangled Cat, and then that dementor came...'

'The blue-skinned man came soon after,' Ron continued for his sister, in a similarly tired voice. 'And then he tried to get us to find Voldemort's old hideout.'

The minister rose from his ornately carved, goat-legged chair, his tall figure almost filling the room. Harry had to concede that Kingsley Shacklebolt was a far more awe-inspiring figure than his predecessors.

'He wanted you to find the Riddle house?' he asked back in a soothing, deep bass voice.

'No,' Hermione spoke for the first during the questioning. Harry could tell she was shaken by the encounter with the blue-skinned man. 'He said it wasn't the house he wanted.'

'He said...', Ron took over, hugging his girlfriend encouragingly, 'he was looking for another house. Where Voldemort had been hiding during the war.'

Harry saw Kingsley glance at Dawlish and the Weasleys.

'Do you know of such a place?' Mr Weasley asked the minister.

'No, we don't know of any permanent hiding place,' came the reply. We questioned the Death Eaters in detail, but they did not mention any house where the Dark Lord had stayed for a longer period.

Harry ignored them for a while after that – he felt an unpleasant, searing pain in his chest where the fiery tongue-like curse had hit him. He rubbed his aching chest with his hand. Immediately after the attack, a skilled healer examined them thoroughly, but found no permanent damage or curses. When Harry mentioned the purple fire that had lifted them, the healer simply shrugged and explained that he had never heard of such a thing. Harry was sure the curse was making his chest hurt, and he wondered if his friends felt the same way.

'Dawlish!' the minister changed his tone to formal in a moment, 'You and Proudfoot, put aside all other business, hand it over to Gawain Robards, he'll sort it all out – and deal with this case. Is that clear?'

Dawlish nodded and stormed out of the room. Kingsley sighed heavily, stroking his shaved head.

'And you are going to hide in the Burrow,' he said, turning to them, which caused a general outcry among the young adults, and they began to talk over each other:

'We cannot stay at home!'

'The ministry...'

'The shop...'

'Enough!' the minister interjected, holding up both hands. The four fell silent, sulking. 'I don't care if you don't like it, your safety is the most important thing. If you are being hunted by some madman, you cannot be allowed to wander unguarded...'

'Of course, because he'd probably come at us in the middle of the Auror Office,' Ron remarked bitterly.

'You stay at home, you hide, and the old protective charms are returned to the Burrow...' said Kingsley in an uncompromising tone, and then looked up at Mr Weasley. 'Do you agree, Arthur?'

'Certainly.'

As Kingsley and the Weasley parents talked over the defence of the Burrow, and Ginny and Hermione stared at each other with their hands folded in anger, Ron leaned in to Harry's ear.

'Now I'm definitely not going to vote for him...' he whispered to him.

Harry cleared his throat, however, and waited until the people were finally looking at him.

'What if,' he began, 'instead of hiding, we did what the blue-skinned one said: we went to find Voldemort's house.'

Hermione and Ginny looked at him, and it was Mr Weasley who finally spoke.

'We told you, Harry,' he shook his head good-naturedly, 'V- Voldemort didn't have his own house...' his voice still shook at the pronunciation of the name, but Harry took that as an improvement. Mr Weasley laughed nervously. 'How could he? He'd never been left a house, and he'd never been in one place. Right, darling?' he looked at his wife.

Mrs Weasley was still distraught after being awoken after midnight with the news that her children had been attacked. She nodded curtly and sternly, which Harry could only see by craning his neck.

He was beginning to feel uneasy about this, so he got up from his chair, ruffled his hair restlessly, and began to pace the Minister's study with his hands in his pockets as if it were his own. He didn't like Kingsley's stubborn denial and attitude, though he tried to hide it; since he'd entered the wizarding world, Kingsley was the first Minister of Magic he hadn't hated. Portraits of previous deceased ministers followed his movements with painted eyes outside the enchanted windows, and the Weasleys were once again engaged in conversation about security.

Ever since the blue-skinned man had mentioned it, the thought of Voldemort's lair had been on his mind; the thought had been in his head, and for some reason he felt he must find it. In his mind he connected the secret hiding-place with the hooded stranger who had burst upon him in his sleep. He immediately ruled out the possibility that the hooded man and the blue-skinned man were one and the same person – the two figures gave him completely different feelings. The hooded figure was somehow familiar to him, but he had never seen anything like the blue-skinned man.

He stopped and looked up at the paintings, including the portrait of Rufus Scrimgeour. The late minister's piercing eyes immediately turned away, and he picked his nails absently.

'The tower!'

Harry jumped with fright.

Suddenly everyone in the room fell silent and stared at Ginny. She half rose from her chair and pointed to a portrait of one of the ministers. Harry looked and saw it at once: a slender tower dotted with stars against the blue background of the painting.

'Ginny, darling...' said Mrs Weasley, seeing her daughter's strange behaviour.

The portrait figure pointed to himself with a surprised, questioning look, then turned back as if to see if anyone else was behind him. Harry and Ginny exchanged a quick glance, then she cleared her throat.

'Sir, may I ask who you are?' Ginny asked in a respectful voice of the warty old man in the oil painting with a wig.

'Of course, little lady,' the wizard nodded in amazement. 'Wulfrik Artus Selwinus Dumbledore, at your service.'

Harry stifled a stunned groan. He immediately understood what the starry tower represented, and why he hadn't found anything about it in the book Natural Nobility: because of Professor Dumbledore, as Voldemort's sworn enemy, his family could not be included in a work written for the likes of Black and Malfoy.

'Ginny? Harry?' everyone present looked at them, and Harry had no idea how to explain himself out of this strange interlude.

Fortunately for him, Ginny's mind was now sharper than his, which was currently revolving around the details of the dream.

'We just... we saw it somewhere... and we were interested... That's all,' she grinned into her parents' faces.

Kingsley cleared his throat.

'Well, perhaps we could address more substantive issues!' he remarked with a disapproving glance in their direction. 'As I said, safety first...'

Harry ignored him, looking at the portrait, who, however, must have been so embarrassed by the sudden interest that he moved out of the frame and never reappeared – he must have gone to another painting of his.

Mrs Weasley accompanied the four youngsters home, not leaving them alone for a moment. With the Minister's permission, they travelled with a Portkey from the Department of Magical Transportation straight to the living room of the Burrow, and he personally came with them. As he said, he would not trust any of his men to set up the protective charms; too little time had passed since Voldemort's defeat, and he preferred not to take any chances, he admitted.

While Mrs Weasley and Kingsley were busy with the protection spells, Harry was in big trouble. He was trying to decide what to do next.

'Ron, Hermione,' he called to them when he had come to a decision. 'Could you come up to the room for a minute?'

They nodded immediately, as if expecting exactly that, and one by one they ran up the stairs, Ginny trailing behind them. When the door to the smallest bedroom closed behind them, Harry turned to his friends.

'There is something I have not told you.'

Ron and Hermione looked at him expectantly, Ginny glancing nervously from one to the other.

'I've been having strange dreams lately...' Harry started after a deep breath. Word for word, he told his two friends everything, including the Pensieve incident, which Ron received with disbelieving silent curses and Hermione with a disapproving look on her face.

When he finished, neither of them said a word for seconds, just sat there staring at each other. Ron and Hermione were not amused by what had happened, looking rather angry and slightly disappointed.

'You're incredible, mate, seriously,' Ron finally blurted out, fed up with the eye-rolling. Harry didn't know what to say.

'You don't tell us things like that after all we've been through together?' Hermione shook her head, disappointment in her voice.

Harry felt extremely bad at this, far worse than Ron's angry outburst or the assorted expletives his friend was now muttering under his breath. Hermione's expression reminded him of Dumbledore, and now he found himself looking at the floor in shame.

'I'm sorry' he couldn't think of anything else.

Ginny then gently put her hand on his arm and, as if looking into his mind, helped him out:

'We didn't want you to get worried about it,' she said quietly, 'The nightmare ended less than a year ago, we just didn't want it to start again.'

'Just because you ignore it doesn't mean it isn't real,' Hermione looked at them sternly. 'I thought you of all people one would not have to explain that.'

None of them could reply to that. For minutes they sat facing each other, silent; Harry had a suspicion that Ron and Hermione were enjoying that he was feeling ashamed.

Finally, it was Ron who relented.

'And what was that scene in Kingsley's office?' he asked them curiously, his voice no longer reproachful, and it worked; Harry and Ginny told them where else they had seen the tower symbol. They had barely finished, and Hermione was already enlightening them.

'Ginny, the starry tower is the symbol of the Dumbledore family, it was in Skeeter's book...' the girl blushed with anger at the mention of the hated journalist's name, and continued as if she wanted to bite Harry's head off. 'I thought you all knew, since we all read that scribble.'

'And who do you think has the memory you have from us?' Ron came to their defence.

'It's not about memory, Ron!' she replied, but she was obviously enjoying the veiled compliment, because the disapproval in her voice had finally disappeared. 'Dumbledore filled out two of our years, I thought you all knew everything about him.'

'You can never be sure about him...', Harry muttered under his breath, thinking of the thousands of secrets of the former headmaster.

Ron shook his head, and everyone turned to him in interest.

'What is it?' asked Ginny.

'If the tower is a sign of the Dumbledores, what was it doing in the Diggory house?'

Hermione raised an eyebrow.

'Did you see the tower at Mr Diggory's?'

'Harry saw it,' Ron replied. 'And so did I, of course, but I ignored it. What was it doing carved into the mantelpiece?'

Hermione then jumped up from the bed and went to the wardrobe; she opened it and rummaged around in the bottom of it for a long time, while the others didn't say a word to each other – Harry and Ginny because the girl started coughing, and Harry conjured a glass of cold water for her ('The air is so dry in here, can't you feel it? Let's open a window...') and Ron because he kept staring at Hermione's bottom, who was bent over, and when Harry noticed, he pretended to check the state of the room, and from then on he kept turning his head around like a vulture.

'Here it is,' Hermione hopped back onto the edge of the bed, Skeeter's book in her hand. She flipped it open in the middle, turned to one of the marked pages, and then, laying the book on her feet, turned it towards the others.

'That's it, you see?' she pointed to a photo of a coat of arms shield, clearly showing the familiar symbol. It was exactly the same as the one Harry had seen in the Pensieve, on the mantelpiece and in the portrait of Wulfric Dumbledore. 'Every family with golden blood has a symbol that appears on their coat of arms. The Blacks have the hound, the Gaunts have the snake, of course, and obviously we know the Peverells...' she nodded towards Harry, 'and you have the otter...' she looked at Ron and Ginny, 'and the Dumbledore's have the starry tower.'

Hermione passed the book around, reading the footnote under the photo, 'The mysterious Tower that has become a symbol of countless dark alliances since the fateful meeting of Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald.'

'Nonsense,' Harry summed up his opinion with noble simplicity.

'It is,' Hermione agreed, and took the book back. 'It was, among other things, baseless slander like this that led me to sue Rita Skeeter. But that's beside the point...' she added with a sigh, 'The chapter reveals that Dumbledore, having become famous, respected and wealthy, built many houses, most of which he gave away. The Diggory's name is not mentioned in the book, but it is a possible explanation for how the tower came to be on the mantelpiece. Skeeter, of course, explained it by the fact that Dumbledore donated these houses to people who shared his views on magic and held their secret meetings in these places...'

Ginny hissed indignantly at every word Hermione said, and Ron snorted.

'... Skeeter's takeaway was that Dumbledore never abandoned his grand plans to change the wizarding world, he just chose a quieter approach than Grindelwald, being too coward for open warfare...'

'Okay, I'm not listening to this anymore!' Ron interrupted, snatching the book from Hermione's hand. 'Throw this rubbish in the bin, there's not a sentence in it that makes any sense...'

Hermione grabbed the spine of the book to retrieve it from Ron.

'We don't throw books in the bin, Ron!' she snapped. 'That's a real crime!'

'This book is a load of rubbish!'

'I know that,' said Hermione, taking a pull at the printout, 'but if it hadn't been for this book, we wouldn't have recognised the coat of arms...'

Ron didn't give up, and Harry and Ginny watched with glee as their bickering escalated to the point where Ron took a tug on the book, causing the spine to give way and the pages to fall out. The pair continued to gnaw at each other for another 15 minutes, while Ginny slipped out of the room unnoticed.

Harry picked up the page with the coat of arms photo from the floor and turned it absentmindedly in his hand. On the other side of the page began chapter eight, with the photograph. The chapter header reflected Rita Skeeter's obsessive fascination with mysterious, attention-grabbing titles, but Harry had no desire to read a line of it. So he just threw the chapter on 'Dumbledore and the Fourth Tower' back into the pile and tried to calm down his two friends.

In the days that followed, the house was practically invaded by the Weasley family and former members of the Order of the Phoenix. There was practically not a minute when there were not at least three other people in the house besides Harry and the others. Bill, Percy and Charlie were here most of the time, but Dedalus Diggle and Hagrid, with his large crossbow slung over his shoulder, would often drop in. Mrs Weasley was particularly glad of Hagrid's presence, for she felt that no one could harm the children with him being there. Harry and Ron weren't so sure, but they were glad that the gamekeeper had come to see them.

'So you were attacked by a dementor?' growled Hagrid, when they told him what had happened. His friendly beetle-black eyes squinted at Harry.

'It wasn't the dementor that was strange, it was the blue-skinned man,' said Harry.

The gamekeeper commented on his friend's words with a disapproving hum.

'From time to time such maniacs do appear,' he said. 'They get so deep into the black arts that they can't even look out of it... They're all disgusting,' he concluded, and Harry agreed with him deeply.

One Sunday morning George also turned up, in the pouring rain, but unlike the former Order members, he was not brought by news of the mysterious attack, but by his mother's Sunday cooking. As he put it, he thought it was only a matter of time before someone attacked Harry and his friends, after, in his words, 'they brought down Voldi's revolution'. Mrs Weasley scowled at him, but George didn't bother.

'So you were surrounded by a purple fire?' he asked, after Harry had given a detailed account of the event. Harry's chest hurt again at the mere mention of the fire.

'Well... our new bomb-proof bottom-attachable flamethrower-firecracker has a purple flame,' he shrugged. 'I don't know about anything else.'

'George, believe me when I tell you that was no bomb-proof bum rocket,' said Harry.

Ginny and Hermione laughed.

'I'll ask Ab if he's heard anything about it,' added George. 'People who come into his pub tell a lot of strange stories...'

Harry knew George was referring to Aberforth, Dumbledore's brother. Harry himself didn't realise how, but the Weasley boy and the old pub owner had somehow become friends over the past year. George would often start a story like this, 'I was having a drink with Ab in the pub when...' or 'Ab heard from a drunken dwarf the other day...' The answer was, among other things, obvious: George's girlfriend Katie Bell, with no other job offers, worked in a robe tailor shop in Hogsmeade, just opposite Aberforth's pub, the Hog's Head.

'Ginny, that guy was in the shop again, asking for you,' George suddenly said.

Harry snapped his head up like some bloodhound that found a trail.

'What guy?' he asked.

Ginny blushed and slammed the mug of cocoa on the table, which she had brought for her brother because of the cold outside.

'Some kind of Zabina or something...'

'Zabini!' corrected Ginny, looking at him angrily. 'What did that idiot want now?'

Harry enjoyed hearing the contempt in her voice. George laughed, and since he wasn't wearing his usual sunglasses, it was obvious that his eyes weren't laughing at him.

'He asked where you were, when you were coming to work, things like that.'

Ron also didn't like this at least as much as Harry, but unlike the latter, he said something about it:

'What does Zabini want from you?'

Ginny giggled impatiently and sat down between them at the table.

'He keeps pestering me to go out with him, or go up to his apartment... He's crazy. I told him, but he won't leave me alone!'

Harry and Ron exchanged dark glances, both of them determined to attend to their former fellow Slytherin classmate at the first opportunity.

'I don't understand what's got into you, little sister,' George pretended to be puzzled. 'You turned suddenly from a maneater into a nun? Haven't picked up a guy for over two years...'

Harry felt increasingly uncomfortable, especially as Mrs Weasley giggled to herself.

'Why don't you pick up a guy if you feel there is a lack of it?' retorted Ginny to George.

'Seriously though,' her brother ignored the comment. 'What's wrong with this Zabi kid? He seems cool to me...'

Ron made a sound like the attic ghoul when he's bored and beats the pipes.

'Slytherin...' interjected Harry quietly, between coughs.

'Yeah okay, I take it back,' George changed his mind, and then held up a stern forefinger. 'Ginny, I forbid you to go near that boy!'

The girl was starting to lose her temper.

'Aha!' she put her hands on her hips in anger. 'So, if he's a Slytherin, he's not a real human, is he now? You know what, George? I think maybe I'll give Blaise Zabini a try after all...' (here she winked stealthily at Harry).

Ron and his brother sighed. Hermione just laughed at them, peering out from behind a flimsy old tome entitled House-elf Regulation Measures. Ron scowled at her as she turned her attention back to her reading.

'I think she's sick!' George declared expertly after touching his sister's forehead. 'Mum, does she eat all right? She must have some terrible disease...'

'Or maybe it's just because my brother died.'

As soon as she said it, it was obvious that she wanted to take it back. The grin disappeared from George's face as quickly as if Ginny had slapped him. Harry could also see that Mrs Weasley, fiddling with the laundry basket, turned as pale as clay. The good mood vanished in an instant, as if the dementor of the dock had returned.

Not a word was spoken thereafter, not even during lunch, everyone spooning Mrs Weasley's delicious Sunday soup in mournful silence. After lunch, George just said goodbye to everyone and quickly stomped off to the shop. As Ron glanced at his sister, an unmistakable message could be read in his eyes: "What was that for?"

One windy, rainy morning, Harry woke up again with a scratchy throat and a dry mouth, and soon after waking up, he was seized by a persistent coughing attack.

'You all right, Harry?' he heard Ginny mumbling from between the pillows.

'Yeah, I'm just... um... I'm just... I'm just going to go to the bathroom...'

Annoyed, he turned on the tap to get a drink of water, but when he picked up the chamber glass, he noticed that his hands were caked with some stubborn dirt.

'What the...?'

He examined his palms, then looked in the mirror in front of him: he saw that black dirt had settled around his mouth, and he was so shocked that he coughed again.

'Damn it!' he growled to himself, then coughed again, putting his hand over his mouth...

The white enamel of the sink was soiled with falling black dust, and Harry kept coughing, his throat scratching, burning, his eyes watering. He clamped his left hand on his chest, where the pain was again searing, and every breath was as hot as if he were in a boiler room. And the black dust kept falling with each cough, and Harry had the absurd thought in his head that he was coughing up soot.

The cough went away as if someone had pressed the off button. Suddenly, clean, fresh air filled his lungs again, and he looked at his own reflection with a frightened, tearful face.

He saw Hermione standing behind him, and suddenly he spun around, facing her. Hermione, in her pyjamas and dressing gown, stood with sleepy eyes against the doorjamb, her gaze wandering from Harry's face to the sink. It was full with soot.

'Oh, no, you too?' said the girl, tired and frightened.

Harry gasped and tried to calm his pounding heart. Few things had scared him so much lately.

'Me too what?' he stared back at her. 'Are you... coughing too?'

'Ron had one attack... this morning at dawn, that's why I got up,' she replied. 'The water doesn't really get rid of it, use your wand!' she added, when she saw Harry turn on the tap.

Harry did as he was told, cleaned up the dirt, then sighed heavily, testing to see if the unpleasant stimulus would return.

'What's happening to us?' Hermione asked him in a voice as if she was about to cry.

Harry walked up to her and gave her an encouraging hug. The girl indeed started to sniffle and Harry patted her back reassuringly.

'I think...' Hermione muttered, 'I think we're about to find out what we've been cursed with...'

'Did you find out?' Harry asked automatically.

Hermione let go of him, wiped her eyes and shook her head.

'No... I don't know,' she said, 'I just meant that... you know, we got a month. I think we really have a month left... or not even that much anymore.'

Harry slowly began to understand what she meant.

'Are you saying that when the time is up, the curse will kill us?'

Hermione nodded mutely.

Harry's mind was filled with this horrifying suspicion, and now that he thought about it, he realized how stupid they had been. How could they think that the blue-skinned man would let them go so easily? How could they have been so naïve as to think that the purple fire that surrounded them, the like of which noone had ever seen before, would do no more than lift them from the ground? Most likely the blue-skinned one was keeping an eye on them all the time, perhaps lurking around the house at this very moment, or the strange dementor is on guard, and that was why the weather was so lousy... Harry felt stupid and helpless.

With a new, firm decision in his mind, he went back to Ginny's room, now fully awake. His girlfriend was sitting on the edge of the bed, coughing. Harry paused in the doorway.

'Eh...' she moaned with a sore, hoarse throat, 'I think I caught it from you...'

After helping Ginny out and putting her back to sleep, he went to the wardrobe and began to dress quietly. He crept down the stairs to the kitchen, then pulled on his torn trainers, and just as he was grabbing for his travelling cloak, Hermione appeared in the kitchen with an empty coffee cup in her hand.

'Where are you going?' she said in an accusatory tone, and nothing reminded him of her weakness of a moment before.

Harry blinked uncertainly at her as he slipped into the cloak.

'I'm going to go and get to work at last,' he announced simply.

'To do what exactly?' she asked him with her hands on her hips, which reminded him very much of Mrs Weasley.

'I'm going to go to Knockturn Alley and ask around the shopkeepers...'

Hermione's eyes widened.

'You're out of your mind!' she snapped at him. 'That place is full of people who want to kill us!'

Harry gave her a downcast look.

'You're overdramatizing things. Half the country used to want to slit my throat, and I've been to Knockturn Alley before. Nothing has changed.'

'No?! No?' she said hysterically, and Harry thought that if he did not leave quickly, he would not get rid of her easily. 'We've just been attacked by a madman who knows spells that even the Ministry and the St. Mungo's haven't heard of!'

'It's not the first time it's happened,' Harry shrugged, and then, seeing that he had no chance of calming her down, changed tactics. He sighed deeply and put his hand on her shoulder. 'Look, Hermione, I don't have a choice. We're all getting worse, we need to find out from someone what this curse is, or where Voldemort's lair might be. The answers to both of these questions lie with black wizards, and there aren't many of them running around the streets these days. I must find them.'

She bit her lower lip and looked at him with a miserable expression, and Harry knew he had won. After that, surely all he had to do was listen to the words of caution and he was on his way.

'Harry, at least be very careful...' Hermione pleaded, as he expected. 'Don't go looking for trouble, and at least don't go to Knockturn Alley...'

'But where to then?' Harry folded his arms in nervousness. 'Do you know another place where I can run into black sorcerers in broad daylight?' and he was off towards the door.

She ran after him and stepped in front of Harry, forcing him to stop.

'As a matter of fact, I do,' came the surprising answer.

Twenty minutes later (a quarter of an hour of which was taken up with more persuasion and reasoning), Harry was standing in a muddy side street in Hogsmeade in his black road coat, hood over his head to keep out the rain, staring at a bizarre sign on the front of a house. The weathered facegere depicted a winged boar with a bloody spear sticking out of its side. Harry apparated directly in front of Hog's Head, having promised Hermione he would take her advice and go to a safer place for underworld information.

He stepped through the creaky door into the dusty, goat-smelling room with its tiled floor. He paused in the doorway due to the unilateral glances at him; the cold autumn wind blowing in from outside was stirring his cloak.

He walked around the room, and in keeping with local custom, he did not remove his hood –as he quickly counted the number of customers in the pub, four out of twelve had their faces hidden behind hoods. There was a mixed crowd: dwarfs and tall behemoths alike, someone drinking alone, while at the largest table a man chatted with his wife. They seemed to be passing through.

Harry hurried straight to the counter, pulled out a high bar stool and sat down on it. A bald man with a strange tattoo on his face, drinking a beer next to him, eyed him suspiciously. Harry was forced to agree with Hermione that the Hog's Head was indeed almost as well suited for his intentions as Knockturn Alley.

A back door, which Harry knew led to an upstairs living room, creaked open, and from it appeared a thin old man with long grey hair and a beard.

'Hello, Mr Dumbledore!' he greeted him loudly.

Everyone sitting at the bar looked at him. Harry wondered if he had said something wrong.

'Hello, Potter,' muttered Aberforth. 'I wish you'd stop shouting in my pub...'

'Sorry, I was just...'

'Tell me, what do you want?' said Aberforth, and without a word he grabbed a horribly dirty glass and filled it with a phosphorescent green mass. Harry decided to ignore the drink.

'I need information,' he said more quietly. Aberforth hummed and squinted at him.

'George Weasley told me what happened to you,' the old man growled, lowering his voice so that only Harry could hear.

The tattooed man sitting next to them gave them nervous glances. Aberforth cleared his throat and leaned even closer to Harry.

'You came at a wrong time. I can't leave the bar. And we shouldn't be having this conversation here.'

Harry frowned at him.

'What?' he asked curiously, and then he remembered and covered his mouth. 'Do you know where Voldemort's secret lair...?'

'Shhhh!' the old man hissed, reaching forward with his wrinkled hand and twisting Harry's nose.

'Ouch!' he cried, looking up at Aberforth with a scowl. 'There was absolutely no need for that!'

Some of the guests stared at them, craning their necks.

'Sure there was, if you're shouting like a half-crazed lunatic!' he snarled from under his beard.

He snatched the rag from his hand angrily and sighed nervously. He seemed torn, and whatever he was thinking, his better half must have won out in the end, for he leaned forward over the counter again, his beard dangling into one of the beer puddles.

'I don't know of any hiding places...' Harry sighed, disappointed. 'But I know what that guy did to you.'

The man with the tattooed face blinked at them again, and when Harry noticed, he tried to hide it by holding up his empty beer mug as if to drink from it.

'What did he do?' he asked Aberforth. 'What is that curse? How do you know it?'

The old man reached out for his nose again to twist it, but Harry was quicker this time and leaned back, nearly falling from the bar stool.

'Yes, yes, sorry!' he apologized when the old man looked at him like an eagle at a mouse.

Aberforth served the big man at the other end of the counter with some kind of smoky red drink that gave off a pungent wet cat smell throughout the pub, then strolled back to Harry. On the way, he cast a dark glance at the curious bald man, who nervously rolled the glass between his hands until Aberforth took it from him like a stern father taking a naughty child's toy.

Outside, it was getting dark, and Harry thought how early winter was coming this year.

'We're not going to talk about this here, kid!' the barman hissed angrily at him over the counter. 'This is neither the time nor the place. Come back at closing time. We'll talk then.'

'But...' began Harry, but Aberforth would not let him.

'You shut up.'

'Okay, but...'

'I said shut up!'

Harry didn't dare take any more risks, for fear of getting his nose twisted again. Aberforth turned away from him and stepped up to the tattooed, bald man.

'Now it's time for you to pay!'

The bald man looked at him with a frightened expression, as if he had told him it was time to cut off his arm. Harry was not paying attention, but was trying to fish his wallet out of the inside pocket of his robe, when he heard a sudden thump, and before he'd know, someone hit him on the back of the head with a blunt object.

The guests started shouting and Harry fell off the bar stool.

'STOP!' someone shouted, as Harry, still seeing stars, struggled to his feet. 'Nobody move! Everybody stay still!'

'What the hell is wrong with you, you idiot?' Harry heard Aberforth roar in anger, and opened his eyes.

The bald, tattooed man was waving his wand in the middle of the bar, shouting non-stop.

'What is wrong with me? What's wrong with me?!' he snarled like a madman. 'You're trying to get me, you... you and Potter! I can see right through you...'

'You can't even see through your eyeballs, you bastard, we didn't want anything from you!' Aberforth shouted back from behind the counter, clearly not deterred by the troublemaker.

'Nobody move!' the man shouted again, his breath showing in the cold. 'Especially you, Potter!'

Harry had just got up from the floor, and was tapping the bump on his head, which he had apparently received from an empty butterbeer bottle, now lying broken on the floor. Harry held up both hands when the wand was pointed at him.

'I saw Potter reaching for his wand! I'm not stupid!'

'Calm down, my good man,' the big man tried to calm him down from the other end of the bar, and approached him with both hands raised in a conciliatory manner. 'Nobody wants to hurt you.'

However, the bald man did not seem to be reasonable to talk to.

'Right!' the man sputtered frantically, 'I've already told the Aurors that I have nothing to do with Death Eaters! The damned poison wasn't mine! You... you hid it in my house! Damn Weasleys! You're after our money... but I'll show you...'

At that moment, the mouldy window of the Hog's Head overlooking the street burst open with elemental force, spraying shards of glass at the people gathered in the pub. The man wielding the wand took the brunt of it in the back, Aberforth, Harry and the others shielded their faces with their arms, but here and there they were also cut by the shards.

'Oh Merlin!' cried several people in terror, hiding under the table or jumping behind the counter.

Harry poked his eyes out from behind his upturned arm, where a stabbing pain marked the location of an embedded shard. A chill of winter blew in through the broken window, and dark clouds loomed in the sky.

The man's wand fell out of his hand, and he looked at everyone with a stare, as if he didn't believe his eyes. Blood and saliva oozed from his mouth in thin streaks.

Harry took a step towards him.

Before he could recover from the momentary shock of the explosion, through the hole lined with sharp shards of glass, a black arm reached for the man staggering away from Harry towards the window. It seized him as if he were a light rag doll and pulled him through the hole.

'AAA!'

The woman huddled under the table screamed, several of the others cried out in shock; what they saw filled them with bone-deep fear. Outside the window, a sea of blood was pouring down from somewhere above. It was as if someone had leaned out of an upstairs room and poured it out of a bucket. Almost equal to the sight were the ripping, tearing sounds that came in.

Harry staggered and fell to his knees. He started coughing again, the musty stench got in his nostrils, and his stomach churned. He hunched and began to gag, his eyes watering with exertion.

'Potter, Potter!' Aberforth noticed his indisposition, ran up to him and put one hand on his shoulder.

Harry, his eyes blurring with tears, saw the old man point his wand towards the carnage outside, bracing himself for the unknown. He also saw something large and black glide past the resulting gap, and he knew what it was before the door opened.

No one could utter a sound, terror seared their lips; only the woman sobbed helplessly under the table when the dementor arrived.

Harry stopped coughing and looked up. Again it passed as if it had simply been cut off, and again the clean air surprised his tired lungs. He wiped the soot from his palms and mouth, then rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

He could see clearly the hooded form of the dark creature, and the red, sticky substance dripping from the black, withered hand through the folds of the cloak. The stench of death was everywhere, the heart-stopping cold of fear, despair, hopelessness, was everywhere. Someone simply lowered his wand, as if feeling that there was no point in fighting, that all was lost anyway, that there was no point in living any longer...

The dementor removed his hood, revealing his once human-looking face. Harry knew that dementors had once been humans, but he was surprised at how strange and unlike anything else its face looked. Its skin was dark, greyed and withered, dry as paper, clinging to its skull so that its protruding cheekbones were visible. It was hairless – perhaps its hair and eyebrows had long since fallen off.

Although he had seen a dementor without a hood, he had no memory of it, because he fainted immediately afterwards. He had always wondered what these horrible creatures, which he had feared more than anything else in the world since he was a child, looked like... He had always tried to imagine what they looked like under the cloak, even asked Lupin once.

But that was the last thing he expected.

The dementor wore a rusty, perhaps bronze, perhaps iron headband on its forehead. It didn't look like a crown or a tiara, more like something people used to use to hold their hair back. Harry also noticed that the dementor wore a necklace: a leather strap with some kind of talisman, which looked like a T-shaped letter turned downwards. On his black, skeletal fingers he also wore rusted, deformed rings.

Harry could hear Aberforth panting beside him, and his wand-holding hand was trembling more and more. Harry himself just crouched on the ground, gripping his wand, but all determination to lift it was gone. He couldn't... Even as the dementor glided straight towards them.

'Expecto Pat...!' shouted Aberforth, but he could not finish the incantation.

The black creature made an impatient gesture with his hand, as if to ward off a fly – and the old bartender flew across the room, his long grey beard waving like a flag.

'For Merlin's sake, do something!' the woman cried desperately, but no one could do anything. The guests gathered in the tavern shivered, their faces buried in their hands, hunched. The strong, rugged-faced man sobbed as he sat on a bar stool. Harry could still think soberly, but his fighting spirit was gone, as if it had never existed. He thought of his old fire only as a memory, for it was out. It was as if the dementor had sucked his soul dry and he could do nothing about it. Because he no longer wanted to... There was no point.

The creature hovered straight in front of Harry, and with the hand that had just sent Aberforth Dumbledore into a corner, now waved upwards. Harry felt an irresistible force pull him up, and he was on his feet, face to face with the dementor.

Before, he always believed that these creatures had no eyes. This strange specimen, however, looked at him with pitch-black eyes that showed no emotion.

The dementor leaned forward, holding his ugly, stinking head close to Harry's face, who was certain that the end had come.

The black figure sniffed at him. It wagged its head like a dog, walked around Harry, smelled his hair, his ears, and he didn't dare move, just stood there like he was petrified. The creature moved strangely. It changed positions in what seemed like the blink of an eye, as if Harry were seeing only every other frame of a running movie.

Now it was facing him again. For a few moments nothing happened, it just looked at him, blankly, and Harry understood that there could be no soul behind the black eyes, for there was nothing to reflect in them.

There was not a peep to be heard in the pub now.

Then the dementor began to speak. Harry couldn't understand a word it said, for it was speaking to him in some ancient-sounding foreign language he didn't recognise. It must have been a rattling, harsh, coarse speech, much softened by the dementor's low, hissing voice. It spoke as if it had not spoken for a long, long time – perhaps it hadn't. Its whole being radiated an antiquity, a force of the past, as if it were a relic of a bygone age. It was unmistakable: Harry didn't know from where, but he was sure it was the one with the blue-skinned man on the quay. It couldn't have been anyone else but him...

Before, he had never thought of dementors as persons, he had always thought of them as some kind of collective, consciousness-owning, general and evil phenomenon, with no individuality, no distinguishing marks, they were simply "the dementor"... But this was different. He was different.

The creature glided away from him, turning its attention to the others present. The cold approached like a predator looking for it prey again, coming in through the window, crawling across the floor, up the wall towards them, and marking its path with a trail of dirt that settled on the glass pots, the half-empty beer mugs, the lenses of the glasses. The presents' hearts were filled with terror, the woman began to scream again, a young boy huddled in the corner, lurching back and forth as if confused; Harry did not see Aberforth anywhere.

'Come, come,' said the strong rugged-faced, crying man at the bar to the creature. 'Take me in! Free me, please...'

The dementor went to him first, Harry followed with his eyes, his wand still dangling limply at his side. If he could summon a patronus, he might save the man. But the little voice in his head whispered the grim truth to him. Even if he raised the wand, he would not have the strength to bring out the stag. So why go to battle?

The creature stroked the crying man's face. The touch of its fingers settled blood and sweat on his skin and his freezing hair. Before it happened, the dementor looked back. Harry could have sworn there was a wicked, hungry grin across the black face. Again in a blink of an eye, it raised its decaying hand and swiped it across Harry's face, as if wiping the mist from a clouded mirror. Everything went black before Harry, and he could no longer hear the screams in the pub..