Warning; this chapter contains explicit references to prisoner mistreatment, suicide, and depression.
Merlin had no idea how to find someone in this century. He had barely managed to find people in his century. But they already knew Byron was in Azkaban—so finding him, strictly speaking, wasn't his job.
Finding out about him, on the other hand, proved to be a challenge.
He knew theoretically that if Azkaban was a prison, there had to be a record of prison inmates, a record of the trial and sentencing proceedings, and therefore a file somewhere on a Mr. Byron Meadowes. But it existed in a cabinet in the Ministry of Magic or the Daily Prophet archives or some nondescript clerical office that blended into the muggle world, and Silas flittered with anxiety any time Merlin prompted him on what he wanted to do next. So Merlin left him to think it over and, three days later, just after lunch, Silas poked his arm and pulled him into their room.
He took a deep steadying breath. "I have a hard enough time figuring out how I…how I feel about my brother to worry about how Florean or anyone else might react. There—there has to be a way for us to look into this without involving him, isn't there?"
Merlin regarded him for a long moment. He knew it would be easy to influence Silas to tell Florean—He doubted the Ministry would hand over records to kids anyway—but pressuring someone into a decision before they were ready seldom ended well. And he wanted Silas to decide this himself. So instead, Merlin asked "What happens if we find out Byron is getting released from Azkaban in two weeks? Do you think the Ministry of Magic would force you to live with him since you're family?"
Silas gaped at him. "They can't do that!"
"What if Byron wants to though? You know he'll ask you."
"He's in Azkaban!"
"I said, what if he gets out? What if he's innocent? What if he's a murderer who may try to hurt you? There are many things that you will be unable to control."
Silas folded his arms, a frown tugging on his lip. "I know that," he said, resentful. He opened his mouth, hesitated, and closed it again, avoiding his eyes.
Merlin sighed and dropped to sit on the floor. The action startled Silas but at least he was looking at him again. "You cannot hope to predict a situation if you are ignorant of the finer details, and these questions deserve answering. And, more to the point, once you find him, he also finds you. Are you keeping this close to your chest to protect those around you or to protect yourself?"
Silas bit his lip. "Both," he answered finally. "I hope, but, ah—" he ran his fingers through his hair.
"Protecting against what?" Merlin prompted and Silas took a deep shuddering breath.
"I don't want to make Florean sad because I want to see Byron again, and—and I don't want to insult him by looking for someone else. Florean really cares about us and I like being here with him, he's like family now and—" he trailed off with a helpless shrug.
"And?"
Silas bit his lip then— "What if Florean decides he doesn't want us anymore?"
"He could decide that tomorrow and we'd be powerless to stop him," Merlin pointed out gently. "Do you really think Florean would do something like that?"
"I—well no—but…" Silas winced and Merlin noticed the kid had started picking at the skin around his thumbs. "It's the possibility, isn't it?"
"There is also the possibility that some reporter will notice it when Merlin Evans, the student involved with two different Defense Professor's getting sent to Azkaban, starts asking questions about the prison. And then Florean will wonder why you didn't come to him first."
Silas gave a little, "Oh," of dawning realization. "Right."
"You know," Merlin said with a reassuring smile, "You don't need to make a decision yet. It's a lot to process all at once, you're brother isn't dead and then there's me." He scratched the back of his neck. "Why don't we start small? I'm sure there are some books about Azkaban at Flourish and Blots and although they may not have any information about your brother, they'll at least tell us about the prison. Maybe they have visiting hours."
At that, Silas choked with laughter, swallowing a well of emotion in his throat. "Okay," he agreed, hastily wiping at the corner of his eyes. He then slapped his cheeks with his hands. "Yeah, let's do that."
Living in Diagon Alley sure had its advantages, Merlin thought as he and Silas dipped into Flourish and Blotts. The Hogwarts Library was massive and filled to the brim with dusty volumes, the sweet scent of parchment glue, and the musk of decomposing leather. Merlin supposed Madam Pince's job was as much about the constant repair of centuries-old volumes as it was about organization. Magic kept the pages together when glue failed.
But Flourish and Blotts had new books. Fresh publications sat on a broad bookcase near the entry, Best Sellers highlighted right at the top. Merlin thought it looked sparser now that the Lockhart books had been removed. One of the Best Seller stands had been left vacant, where Magical Me had once stood, waiting for another to take its place. But looking around the rest of the store, it would have been hard to notice the missing Lockhart books. Every crook and cranny was filled with assorted volumes, arrows, and signs for various sections at the end of the shelves.
Merlin had always thought Flourish and Blotts had a good organization system. That is until he and Silas tried to find a book on Azkaban. They didn't find it alphabetically. They didn't find it in government or politics. After nearly twenty minutes, the assistant showed up.
"Can I help you kids find something?" Merlin thought he recognized her face from a crowd of seventh year Ravenclaw girls but he couldn't be sure. He saw her eyes widen briefly as she recognized him but to his surprise, she chose not to comment and turned her attention to Silas.
"Um," Silas glanced at Merlin and then went on in a whisper, "We're trying to find a book about Azkaban."
"Azkaban?" The assistant repeated staring at the two of them. She frowned. "Uh, trust me, you want to wait a few more years before you read that book, kid."
"I don't."
She had sharp brown eyes, like polished wood. They flew to his face at his words, a cautious regard to them. And then, to Merlin's surprise, she gave a slow dry chuckle.
"All right then, hey, maybe if you say something about it they'll finally pay attention." She glanced once behind her and then nodded for them to follow her as she headed up the stairs.
"What do you mean?" Silas whispered behind her.
"If you really want to know, then you're gonna have to read it for yourselves. As far as I'm concerned, I never ran into you and you got in here on your own."
They followed her through the entire length of the floor, to the back of the building where she led them down a second stairwell half-hidden behind a towering stack of books. But this stairwell didn't lead back down to the main floor of the shop. The stairs continued behind the wall, the sound of patrons vibrating the boards around them, until the space opened into what looked like an old cellar, crammed with several more shelves, many of which were coated in dust.
"The Azkaban books are on this first shelf. If a book with vaguely Egyptian-but-not-quite hieroglyphs catches your eye, do not open it. That back door there opens into Knockturn Alley but we keep it locked during the day so don't try to go out that way. If you need to hide, stay out of the necromancy section—the bindings will whisper and give you away. I'm closing this evening so you should be left alone here until I kick you out, sound good?"
"Course it does," Merlin said staring at her. "Why are you—?"
"Maybe I just like traumatizing nosey kids. I am a Ravenclaw," she said with a wink. And then she was gone, and Merlin was left realizing he had never gotten her name. He made a point to ask when she returned and nudged Silas over to the Azkaban books.
Just a cursory glance at the titles had a knot forming in the pit of Merlin's stomach. Most of them were thin memoirs by or about Azkaban prisoners, with titles like In the Dark and Never The Same and Open Wound about witches and wizards who described life after the experience. A few of them were leather hand-bound journals with notes by publishers describing the prison cell they had been found in.
A larger volume called The Ongoing Pureblood Purge had the author's name burned out and on impulse, Merlin picked up the book to find scribbled conversations up and down the margins in different coloured ink which scrambled into incomprehensible assortments as he looked at them. He perused the introduction:
Following the disappearance of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the Ministry of Magic began a series of swift and devastating incarcerations, many of which were and still are detained in Azkaban without a sentencing trial. A large proportion of the arrests were among members of the Slytherin pureblood community, quickly leading the public to assume the muggle hostility of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was a trait that all Slytherins or indeed even all pureblooded individuals share. The overzealous attempt to smoother the movement seems to instead have renewed animosity and further pushed young purebloods toward radicalism…
For the next several hours, neither Merlin nor Silas said a word.
Merlin discovered a lot of the books mentioned Azkaban or talked about things that had happened there, but few were actually about the prison itself. He was hopeful when he started Dead Inside by Tristan Wellesley, a memoir by some journalist who spent a month inside Azkaban in order to document the conditions, but the book started a year after he returned and was only about his experience in St. Mungo's afterwards.
Some days I didn't know what to feel, staring blankly at the wall opposite me. I'll catch myself even now, dissociating until I feel less like myself and more like the paper shell of a man that's crumbling into the sea. In truth, it's not about what you remember; it's about what you feel.
He found a section in Accursed Beginnings by Maddie Pottermore with a brief reference about an abandoned fortress on some remote island haunted by the souls of hundreds of muggle sailors.
It is believed the old wizard Ekrzdis built the original fortress. According to renowned historian Bathilda Bagshot, Ekrzdis had lured muggles to the island where they were tortured and killed; however, some critics have contested the claim. The first ministry officials to investigate the island refused to describe the exact conditions of the fortress, except to say it was a cursed place, infested with dementors.
Of Ancient and Moste Evile Ekrzdis by Ol Greg expanded and greatly embellished the origin story of Azkaban prison until it read like a horrifying folk tale. Merlin decided not to let Silas read it after he stumbled across a particularly gruesome chapter describing various muggle-torture devices supposed to have been used by Ekrzdis based on the time period. Silas didn't fight him on it.
And then Merlin found The Rowle Solution by Josie Keller.
Damocles Rowle was a proud pureblood and vocal proponent of anti-muggle ideology who rose to power and became Minister of Magic, and it is he who established Azkaban Prison in 1718.
Discussions regarding the establishment of a proper wizarding prison had been in circulation long before Rowle arrived on the scene. Once in office, however, he refused suggestions to build the prison on a remote Hebridean island and instead demanded the Ministry begin using Azkaban.
Rowle expressed his justification for the location in a proclamation to the Wizengamot: "Azkaban is the prime candidate for an efficient and economical wizarding prison, precisely because we can use the existing Dementors as a method of prisoner control. A particularly motivated wizard can break out of even the best cage, but if we keep the morale of the population low we could leave the front doors open and not a single prisoner would have the strength to walk out."
The arrangement provided the added benefit of keeping the Dementors away from the general populace; however, many argued against the decision, calling it inhumane and dangerous—not to mention reckless to intentionally drive criminals into insanity. Disregarding these concerns, Rowle established Azkaban and the Ministry of Magic has used the prison to great effect.
However, some psychologists argue that very few individuals, if any, ever recover after their experience, quoting shortened life expectancy among both incarcerated prisoners and those who have finished their sentences. In spite of this, general opinion remains largely in favour of continuing to use Azkaban, in light of the fact that no one has ever escaped the island.
"This Azkaban is starting to sound positively medieval, in my opinion," Merlin grumbled, glancing up to find Silas with one hand over his mouth as he read his book. He looked up with a little start at the sound of Merlin's voice.
"We have to get him out of there."
"We—what?"
"Byron. We can't just leave him in this place." Silas turned the book around for him to read, and pointed at a passage. "It's this Minister, Eldritch Diggory, his account of what the conditions of Azkaban were like when he went to visit."
"For the first time, I understood what it meant to have the eyes like the dead. The stench was so awful, putrid with a heady combination of sewage, blood, and rotting flesh that I dared not enter without a charm of fresh air. It did not look like anyone had bothered to renovate the fortress into a prison. The prisoners had been unceremoniously banished to the island and left to fend for themselves. The few of them that were still alive had been driven utterly mad. At one point, I came upon a horrific scene of three inmates thin as skeletons gathered around a corpse, one of them just barely producing enough fire with their fingertips to cook a dismembered forearm. They looked up at me with dull soulless eyes and began to cackle—"
Merlin grimaced and glanced up at Silas. "There's no way it's still like this." Silas reached over and flipped to a different page.
It was obvious that only the very bare minimum had been set up on the island in terms of facilities, the Rowle administration assuming possession of an abandoned fortress inside of which was the largest known Dementor colony in the world. Some scholars have argued that the Dementors predate the fortress and that the location is, in fact, the homeland of all Dementors. Whatever the case, their presence has permeated the very walls with a helpless sense of despair.
Over the years the conditions at the prison have improved only marginally, mostly as a result of expansion projects and the construction of different wings for temporary incarcerations versus life-timers. Prisoners are, at the very least, now provided with plumbing, two meals, and their own rooms but the awful miasma of despair is still so palpable that the Ministry has left the control of the prison solely in the hands of the Dementors, with the only visitations being to collect or drop off prisoners.
Those who have been to the island for brief sentences have said that as long as they stayed in their wing, they were free to move through Azkaban however they wished. But, prisoners tended to keep to their cells unless they were out on work detail, digging graves, working in the prison kitchen, or doing other assorted janitorial and maintenance tasks. As a result of the prison being entirely staffed by its own inmates, in addition to not a single escapee in three hundred years, there have been no riots by the prisoners despite the high number of deaths from despair.
"How can they leave people in a place like this?" Silas asked after Merlin looked up. "In another section, they talk more about how many people die before they even finish their sentence. How terrible does a place have to be that they would rather let themselves starve to death? Because that's what it says here—"
"Silas—"
Silas ignored him and grabbed another book from the pile they had accumulated on the floor between them. "It says in here that most prisoners die of despair. They lose the will to live and stop eating meals until they are too weak to even get out of bed. And then they die. That's what "death of despair" means. And I don't even want to know what this bit about, "In the end, some prisoners just let the Dementors kiss them," means, but apparently, it's irreversible and so far every single person who has kissed a Dementor eventually died of despair."
The idea of kissing one of those horrible creatures sent a shiver of Goosebumps cascading down his arms. Merlin had only briefly met the Azkaban guards and as the incident had reactivated a debilitating curse upon his mind, his memory was one of sharp lightning bolts of pain and the echoing lack of hope, as if nothing he had done in his life made the least bit of difference to anything or anyone.
An enormous lie, of course—but for a moment there—
"Seems a tad excessive, doesn't it?"
Silas stared at him like he had missed the mark completely. "A tad? This is barbaric!" he snapped. "Most people don't survive inside longer than a year!"
A creak sounded behind them and they both jumped, turning to see the shop assistant come down the stairs. She took in the books still propped open on their laps and their varying expressions of horror and disgust. She broke into a smile. "I take it you've learned all about the Ministry's dirty little secret."
"How can you smile about that?" Silas shot at her.
"What else am I supposed to do about it?" She gestured to her tag and Merlin saw the name Audrey pinned there. "I'm working in a shop. I barely got a say in the matter, don't I?" They gaped at her as she started to reshelve the scattered books.
"But—" Merlin stood up, helping her. "If people knew—"
"Oh kid, everyone knows." Audrey tapped her nose and sighed. "But no one is interested in tackling it because the prison has a flawless record. As they say, don't fix what isn't broke."
"You wouldn't say that if you went to Azkaban," Silas grumbled, his hands balled into fists. He was staring down at the book they had been last reading from, a shine in his eyes.
Audrey visibly softened at the sight. "You're probably right. Denial is a powerful drug." She paused, running a hand through her hair with a nervous twitch. "But," she went on, "I'd say Azkaban is pretty broken, wouldn't you agree?"
Silas sniffed and nodded, hastily turning to dab at his eyes with his shirt collar. Merlin glanced down at The Rowle Solution, still held in his hand.
"Hey, Audrey, which of these books would you recommend we purchase this evening?"
By the time they left Flourish and Blotts, Merlin had shrunk Azkaban: The Unabridged Story by Kazak Kaminski and The Azkaban Problem, another book by Josie Kellerto fit into his pockets. Audrey hadn't even charged them, saying these books had been returned to the shop years ago and had been collecting dust ever since. "Someone might as well read them," and then she had pushed them out the door and locked it behind them.
The entire way back, Silas didn't say a word. He kept his eyes on the cobblestoned ground, a thundercloud in his eyes. Around them, the lanterns flickered into light along the empty Diagon Alley streets and Merlin resisted the urge to break the silence.
The windows to the Florean's Ice Cream Parlour were shuttered when they got there. Silas came to an abrupt stop, staring at it. "Do you think Florean locked us out?"
Merlin reached for the door handle instead of answering. It opened and he glanced back with a shrug. He had just stepped inside the Parlour however when a shout made them both jump.
"BOYS!"
Florean looked harassed, a flush in his cheeks, and he crossed from the stairwell leading up into their flat to stand before them in a whirl of agitated magic. And then, before either Merlin or Silas could speak, Florean pulled them both a tight hug. Merlin could feel the man trembling and his heart sank.
"You had me so worried! I thought—" Florean couldn't finish and Merlin didn't have to be a genius to guess what his imagination had supplied in their absence. "I didn't see you leave and by the time I realized you were gone, I didn't know for how long, and why didn't you leave a note!? What were you thinking? I didn't know if—"
"I'm so sorry," Silas buried his face into Florean's waistcoat.
"We—we forgot about the time," Merlin managed.
Florean took a deep breath and pulled back, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "Now I don't believe in curfews but I can't have you disappearing on me like that. The mood on the streets is changing. Things aren't like they used to be. I'd never even heard of a Hogwarts professor getting kicked out, and now we've had two who've attacked you, Merlin, two years in a row—"
Merlin didn't know how to reassure him. He could feel the tight outline of the books from Flourish and Blotts in his pocket and knew it would be easy to tell him where they had gone. But Florean would want to know why and it would worry him even more to know. It was like Audrey had said; Azkaban wasn't a topic for kids. Merlin found himself apologizing anyway, mumbled words that meant very little. Florean eventually told them to not do it again and had let the conversation flow to more cheerful topics. But Merlin still thought the hug Florean gave them as he wished them good night was tighter than the hugs he used to give.
That night, as Merlin lied awake in bed, his insides squirmed. Azkaban haunted his thoughts. He thought of Gilderoy Lockhart and wondered if he deserved it. Silas had said most prisoners didn't make it past the first year—had Quirrell? He rolled over, got his legs tangled in the sheets, and rolled over again.
Did anyone really deserve to die of despair?
"What do you think Audrey meant?" Silas whispered suddenly into the quiet. Merlin heard him shift in bed.
"I dunno, I don't see why anyone would care what a couple of kids think."
Silas didn't reply for so long, Merlin began to wonder if the kid had fallen asleep. Then, "But they might listen to you."
"What—?"
"Listen," Silas interrupted and he sat up in his bed, leaning over to look at Merlin. "You've basically sent two people to Azkaban, right?"
Merlin flinched, avoiding his eyes. "Look, Silas, if I had known it was like that—" but then what could he have done? In the end, it had never been up to him what became of either Quirrell or Lockhart once they had been arrested. He had trusted the Ministry would handle it…
"No, I mean—you're the victim, right? If anyone would want them in Azkaban, it's you."
Merlin sat up in bed too. He had a feeling he knew where Silas was going with this. "And if I were to kick up a fuss about the conditions…"
"Maybe something would change."
They stared at each other for a moment.
"It won't get us any close to Byron," Merlin said slowly, "but it's a start."