"This will keep the dementors' energy at bay," the caretaker said. Between his yellowed fingernails, he held a glowing blue crystal hanging from a string.
Fecca took the crystal and knotted it around her neck.
"The energy of a patronus bottled in a rock. Never take that off, you understand?" he asked. He fiddled with the intricate lock on the door.
"I understand," she said. "Can I ask why you aren't wearing one?"
The lock caught and the cement door creaked open, so thick Fecca was surprised it moved at all. He turned to her with a crooked smile.
"They know me."
She hoped he didn't see the shudder that ran up her spine to her shoulders. Truthfully she didn't know much about the creatures that guarded Azkaban. And while she had no desire to work amongst them, the job scrubbing the halls of Azkaban did provide a living space (away from the soul-sucking creatures), and enough of a salary to live off of. The only one she found in the wizarding world that didn't require magical ability.
"You said you were from an orphanage, right? For squibs?" he said, ducking below the doorway where she followed.
"Yes." The official name of the place she had been evicted from on her seventeenth birthday was Mildred's Home for Magically Challenged Children, but the term the caretaker used was more accurate.
The hallway was windowless, like a tunnel, even though Fecca knew they were above ground, or rather, above sea. She could hear the waves bashing against the walls just outside. The caretaker carried a lantern, illuminating the uneven stone walls.
"Do you want me to clean these?" she asked, pointing to the cobwebs decorating the ceiling, but her waved his hand dismissively from up ahead.
"Just worry about the cells."
Their footsteps echoed down into the darkness. Somewhere ahead, dripping water kept time with their strides.
"I can't imagine that's too friendly of a place to grow up, so I'm sure I don't have to tell you this," he said, a hard edge in his voice, "but I'm going to say it anyway: worry only about your job, and keep only to yourself. Don't speak to anyone, don't even look at anyone. The dementors will take care of getting the prisoners in and out of the cells, you just clean. That means zero sympathy. Understood?"
"Zero sympathy," Fecca whispered to herself the next afternoon as she started her rounds. "You will show zero sympathy." She rolled the mop bucket up to the door, trying to push back the memories that would contradict this statement.
"And her temperament?" Mr. Ferguson had asked Mrs. Mildred (great granddaughter of the home's founder). The couple sat in the interview room across from Fecca. As instructed by Mrs. Mildred, she kept her mouth closed.
"On her evaluation it's listed here as friendly, sometimes erratic?" Mrs. Ferguson read.
"For the most part she's too soft," Mrs. Mildred answered, taking her glasses off to wipe them on her undersized sweater. "Too sympathetic, too trusting. Let's the other girls walk all over her."
Fecca tightened the grip of her interlocked hands.
"But once in a while she'll have these outrageous mood swings."
"From happy to sad, or—?"
"Friendly to violently angry," Mrs. Mildred corrected. "The psychologist says she just needs better guidance. Which I'm sure the two of you could provide?"
The answer must have been no, because the Fergusons left without signing the foster care papers.
Fecca hadn't had a mood swing in months, though here in Azkaban, maybe it would have helped. As she undid the lock, she took a deep breath and covered her nose.
It didn't help much. The putrid smell still hit her nostrils, making her gag.
The prisoners might as well have been dead. They certainly looked like it. Behind the barred doors, they lay limp in their cells, some sprawled on the floor or curled up in corners, their striped gowns ripped and fading. Those whose eyes weren't closed stared at nothing. Black hooded figures floated along the ceiling. Despite the stone around her neck, she felt some of her energy instantly drain, as if sucked away.
She approached the first cell on her right, opened it with her jangling ring of keys, and just as the caretaker said, the dementor was instantly inside, drawing the blank-faced prisoner to stand against the door, as if he was under hypnosis.
She mopped the floors and swapped out the paper-thin blanket as quickly as she could, locking the door behind her as soon as the black figure floated out.
Fecca worked her way down the hallway. The dazed prisoners didn't even seem to notice her presence, and she was expecting the same when she reached for her keys again to open the next cell.
The prisoner, a man with crumpled dark brown hair who sat on his bed—if she could really call it that—with his face in his arms shot up when he heard the keys clink against each other.
She took a step back, her knuckles whitening around the keyring. He looked into her face, crazed eyes widening.
"Bella?" he said. His voice was raspy, like he hadn't spoken in months.
She glanced sideways at the name under the cell number. Rodolphus Lestrange. The sound of it was vaguely familiar…had she read it on the prisoner list in the caretaker's office?
"Uh, no, I'm—" Don't tell the prisoners your name—"I work here, now. I don't know who Bella is."
He rubbed his eyes, smearing dirt across his face, and looked again. Seeing his mistake, and seemed to withdraw a little, but kept his eyes on her.
Fecca took a step toward his cell, keys in hand.
"She's my wife," he said.
"I'm just here to clean." She knew she wasn't supposed to be talking to this man. To any of the prisoners. If she could just get the keys in the lock, the dementor would swoop in and save her from this conversation.
But the man jumped up and was at the bars of his cell in seconds, a mere foot from Fecca's face. She jumped back, heart pounded in her throat. Why wasn't the black, shadowy figure up on the ceiling behind her doing anything?
"Is she alive?" It was a demand, yes, but his voice wasn't harsh. His dark eyes were begging her. Begging for his wife to still exist. He asked in a way that told Fecca he was afraid of the answer, but he had to know.
"Is my wife alive?" he asked again.
"I don't know," Fecca said, her voice just above a whisper. She dropped her eyes so she wouldn't have to look at him. That look in his face, that desperation.
No sympathy, she reminded herself. But she could already feel herself cracking.
"Can you find out? She if she's still here?"
Fecca took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and nodded.
"And my brother, too. Rabastan and Bellatrix Lestrange. They'd be in this wing."
"This wing" was the high security wing. She couldn't understand why Azkaban needed any more security than it already had, but she knew it housed the worst of the criminals.
And still, she was breaking the rules on her first day for this man, this top criminal, because she couldn't get her emotions in check. She couldn't be objective and cold like she needed to be. She knew she wasn't cut out for this job, but it was her last option.
"Okay," she said.
"And wait, give them these." Rudolphus pulled two crumpled papers from inside his mattress and stuck them between the bars. She took them and quickly stepped back. They looked liked letters, with the names of the people she was supposed to look for scrawled on the folded front. Was he just waiting for someone as soft as her to come along, who would do this for him? How long had he kept these hidden?
But now Fecca had given him hope, and the dementor sensed it. It swooped down, sticking its hooded face right up to the cell bars. It took a raspy breath that made Fecca cling to the blue orb around her neck, and the man's eyes went blank. He slumped down in the corner.
If she had hesitancy before, seeing him go limp like that pushed her to walk down the hall, glancing at the names under the cells as she came upon them, the papers held tight in her hand.
Fecca read each of the names on the cells, moving down the long hall and around a sharp turn. The caretaker had said the wings were all one giant triangle of halls, she shouldn't worry about getting lost. But she didn't know how far they went, and she reminded herself the prisoners she sought might not be there at all. They might be dead.
Just as the thought crossed her mind, she saw the first of the two names. Bellatrix Lestrange. She stopped. Inside the cell, she could see a woman sitting on the floor in the same tattered prison gown, her head leaned back on the bed behind her. The black curls of her hair were wild and out of control, and the shadows of the cell played dramatically on the hollows of her face.
"Bellatrix?" Fecca spoke up.
Sunken eyes turned toward her. There was a craze in those eyes, like that of Rudolphus, but while his had been desperate, hers was angry. She moved back a step.
"I, uh, spoke to your husband." The woman's mouth twitched and her brows rose. Now Fecca had her attention.
"Who are you?" her voice was deep with a threatening edge.
"No one important. Just a worker. A cleaner."
"You're not from the ministry," she said getting up and coming to the bars. She dragged a long nail along the metal, making an awful screeching sound that set Fecca's teeth on edge. "You're not come along to play some game with me, try to torture me?" Her eyes narrowed and she leaned closed on the bars. "Because let me tell you, I am the master of torture." She let out a deranged laugh, and Fecca saw a flaw of dark ink on her forearm. This close she could make out the grime on Bellatrix's face, the creases in her skin, and the stains on her teeth. But the woman still carried herself like royalty. Even with her behind bars and Fecca free in the hall, she still felt Bellatrix was somehow in control.
"No," Fecca said. "I swear I'm not. I can't even do magic. I was going around cleaning the cells and your husband, Rudolphus. He wanted to know if you were alive."
Bellatrix didn't soften, per say, but seemed to take her threatening air down just a notch.
"Rudolphus," she repeated. "Asked you to check if I was alive?"
Fecca nodded. "And he wanted me to give you this." The young woman held up the folded paper, Bellatrix's name visible in black ink.
Bellatrix's eyes widened.
"Give me that," she spat. Reaching between the bars and snatching the paper out of Fecca's hand. Her talon-like nails scratched the teenager's soft flesh.
Bellatrix retreated back into her cell, holding the paper possessively to her chest. Giving Fecca a dangerous look that made her shudder, she held the paper up to the single, dim light in her cell, and unfolded its contents. Fecca could see a full page of words, but it was much to far away to make any of them out.
"It's his handwriting." Bellatrix turned back to Fecca once more, her eyes narrow. "I'll trust you're not lying to me."
"No ma'am."
"In that case, tell Rudolphus I'm alive, and that I'm…glad to know he's still with us."
Fecca nodded and started down the hall, leaving Bellatrix to read whatever message her husband had written.
Fecca found Rabastan in the third and final hallway. He didn't say a word when she explained his brother had inquired about him, and wanted her to pass on a letter. He just seized it from her hand and hunkered back into a corner. Fecca hoped he at least understood what she said.
She turned the corner back to the first hallway, Rudolphus' hallway.
Rudolphus, Bellatrix, and Rabastan Lestrange…
She stopped. She knew why Rudolphus' name was familiar, now that she put them all together.
Fecca remembered sitting in history class, some years back, at the orphanage. Their unit: the downfall of you-know-who.
"The Lestranges were some of you-know-who's most devoted followers," her history teacher said. "And they didn't give up after his downfall. They were tried and convicted for torturing two top Aurors into insanity, and sentenced to life in Azkaban."
She already knew she wasn't doing a favor for any saint. Why did she have to be so pliable, so sympathetic and easy to cave?
"You think you see the good in everyone," Mrs. Mildred had once told her. "The problem with that, Alphecca, is that sometimes there isn't any good at all."
She returned to Rudolphus' cell. The dementor had floated away, and he was now sitting on the bed.
"Your wife is terrifying," Fecca said. He was up and alert at her words.
"You spoke to her? She's alive?" His eyes were wide, voice urgent.
"Yes, she's alive. I gave her your letter. She wanted me to tell you that she's glad you're still with us."
Relief flooded his face, and Fecca could see the dementor creeping in the shadows, sensing the emotion and ready to take it away.
He loves his woman, Fecca thought to herself. This wild, terrifying woman.
"And Rabastan?"
"He's alive as well. He didn't speak to me, but I gave him your letter."
Rudolphus nodded.
"I can't do any more for you," Fecca sighed. "I'm not even supposed to talk to talk to the prisoners let alone pass messages for them. I need this job. I'm sorry."
"Thank you," Rudolphus said. And the sincerity in his face made Fecca forget, just for a second, that he was a convicted Death Eater, a torturer and a prisoner on Azkaban's worst wing.
"I need to clean your cell now." Fecca turned the keys in the lock, and the dementor hovered in and guided the man out in a trance.
Fecca wasn't actually worried about losing her job over what she had done. Dementors tell no tales. The caretaker would never find out. But she was worried about the way a prisoner had already broken through to her, made her feel for him as a human. Blue orb or not, she didn't know how she would maintain any level of sanity if she let herself feel the same sympathy for all the prisoners as she had for Rudolphus Lestrange.