Chapter 2

As her head started to clear, she sat up. She was in the middle of a grassy field with flowers. Birds were chirping and a light breeze was rustling the grasses. In the distance she could see an older, white house sitting in front of a forest of trees.

"Where am I? How did I get here?" she thought. "I wonder if anyone is at home in that house? Maybe they can sort this out."

Hermione stood up and walked toward the house. As she neared it, she could see that the windows were boarded up…not a good sign.

"It looks a bit like the Shrieking Shack. Can it be? Nah, I don't think so."

There was a piece of mail in the mailbox, but it turned out to be nothing more than a flyer advertising muggle video games. She headed around behind the house to see if it was also boarded up. She was surprised to see one of the windows was slightly ajar.

Walking up to the window she called out to get the attention of anyone who might be inside. Getting no response, she decided to climb inside to look around.

It was a bit of an effort, she had been letting herself go soft working at the Ministry. However, she finally managed, with a thud as she fell to the floor, to make it inside. Once there, she found herself in the kitchen. Someone had been here recently. There was a brown paper bag smelling of spicy food, such as peppers, and a bottle of water. An archway led into another part of the house while a dark stairway led up. There was also an open chimney big enough to crawl down…yucky.

She walked through the archway into the living room. Across the room was a wooden door with strange, runic markings on it that was nailed shut. An empty trophy case was against the wall with an old lamp on it. A very ornate sword was mounted above it. An Oriental rug covered part of the floor.

"Curious place," she thought as Fluffy popped into her mind for some undetectable reason. This prompted her to move the rug. Under it was a trap door. With all of her strength she managed to pull it open. There was a stairway leading downward, perhaps to the cellar.

"I've gone this far," she thought, "I may as well look down there."

"Lumos," she said as she pulled out her wand and raised it. Nothing happened. "Lumos," she repeated. "Strange," she thought. "Why isn't my wand working?"

She picked up the lamp and turned it one. It gave off a very adequate amount of light as she stepped down onto the first stair.

She cautiously descended the creaky, wooden stairs. As she reached the bottom the trap door slammed closed with a resounding thud. She could hear someone barring it.

"HEY! I'M DOWN HERE! LET ME OUT!" she screamed to no avail. She was trapped in a dank, damp cellar. "What the hell?"

She tried to apparate back to her office, but that type of magic did not seem to work. For whatever reason, she waved her wand to cast a Four Point Spell. Unlike the lumos charm, it worked. She tried the lumos spell, again. It still did not work.

"At least some magic works," she thought.

In the light from the lamp she could see passages to the north and south of her. There was a steel chute that was too steep to climb to the west. Picking south, she walked until she found herself on the edge of a chasm. It was apparently quite deep, too deep for the lamp to light its bottom.

She continued walking carefully along its brink. Suddenly, she found herself walking into the remains of an art gallery. All of the paintings had been taken or stolen, except one. It was a gorgeous landscape that fancied Hermione's eye.

"What the heck," she thought, pulling it down and sliding it with an uncharacteristic bit of a struggle into her Burberry. "Everyone else has taken one. I might as well take one, too."

After a few minutes of walking, she passed through the door at the end of the gallery and into the artist's studio. It was splattered floor to ceiling with every imaginable color. A fireplace with a chimney was across the room. Could this be the open chimney she saw in the kitchen? She stepped in to investigate. There was a dim light above.

"Ascendio," she said, pointing her wand upwards. A couple seconds later she was back in the kitchen. "That was weird," she thought, looking around for whoever had locked her in the cellar. "Maybe they are upstairs."

The stairs led her into a dark, empty attic. The only things in it were a rope and an old knife. She took them, thinking they may prove useful after the last little adventure. She descended and went into the living room. Strangely, the trapdoor was not barred.

"I probably should have tested it," she thought. "There could be more down there." Then, looking at the sword, she dropped the knife and took it. "Who knows?"

She pulled open the trapdoor. Just before going down she placed the painting in the trophy case for safe keeping. There was a strange dinging noise as she closed it. Once again, she descended the stairs only to hear the door slam closed. She went back up to test it. It was firmly sealed. Even her spells would not open it. This time she went to the north. The blade of her sword was glowing blue.

"Weird," she thought.

A putrid stench emanated from the room as she entered it. Then an axe blade flashed past her face. It was a cave troll, and he was out for blood. Hermione was not the same frightened first year who almost was killed by the mountain troll in the girl's bathroom. She swung the sword, but the troll deflected it causing it to strike the wall and bounce back, cutting her arm. He took an erratic swing losing his balance. Hermione hit him hard across the midsection with the sword, laying him out. With another swing, she finished him.

He disappeared in a cloud of black fog. Her sword was no longer glowing. She dropped the sword next to the skeleton of someone who must have fallen victim to the troll long ago, thinking it must be broken. Her arm throbbed from the pain. She pulled a bottle of essence of dittany from her bag and applied it to the wound. The pain dissipated.

"He could have killed me," she thought. "What kind of place is this? I have got to find my way out of here."

She wrapped a headscarf from her bag around her arm and walked east passed two more skeletons and then up some stairs to the north. This led her into a large, round room with many exits, many of which were blocked by cave-ins.

"Okay, which one, Granger?" she thought. "Think."

Thinking of the room like points on a compass, she picked the SE entrance because it looked cleaner and a bit larger. She marked the way she had come into the room with a rune, and then also marked the new path in case she returned to this room. That way she would remember the ones she had already taken.

The cave was covered with a great many engravings. Whoever had preceded her had spent a lot of time decorating the cave walls with all sorts of things. The cave exited onto the mezzanine of a tall room featuring an intricate domed ceiling. She was glad there was a wooden railing. It had prevented her from accidentally walking off the edge. Below her was a room with what appeared to be a marble floor. Something was standing in the center of it.

After a bit of thought, she tied the rope onto the railing so she could lower herself down. It turned out that the rope only reached about halfway. Letting go, she dropped onto the floor, which was, indeed, marble. The structure in the middle of the room was a marble pedestal with an ivory torch blazing away to light the room. She turned and walked south through an archway that turned into giant, marble columns.

The new room was a large temple of some sort. The eastern wall was covered by a prayer-like inscription in an ancient language. Below the prayer was a descending stairway. A table sat next to it with a little, brass bell on it.

"I used to think the dungeons at Hogwarts were odd," she thought as she walked down the steps.

The stairs emptied into a room resembling one of the Egyptian tombs she had seen in the pictures of the Weasley family vacation to Egypt. A solid gold coffin fit for a pharaoh sat in the middle of the room. Not being against a little capitalism, Hermione fought it into her Burberry.

This room was proved to be a dead end. She returned to the temple and approached the altar in hopes of finding another passage. In a dark corner behind it, she spotted an opening. Wriggling through it, she suddenly found herself outside in the middle of a forest. Seeing sunlight to the east, she turned off the lamp and walked towards it.

She eventually found a clearing where to path split east and west. She went east, eventually arriving at the western edge of a great canyon with a vast forest and mighty river roaring below her. The other side of the canyon rose up into massive, white mountains. Upstream she could see a waterfall. She headed towards it.

Upon reaching the waterfall she found a path leading down. She walked downward to a rocky ledge. The path toward the waterfall looked too treacherous, so she continued downward until she reached the canyon floor and a small, rocky beach. Suddenly, a large spider appeared in front of her on a rock.

"Good thing Ron isn't here," she thought, picking up a rock to throw at it as it moved her way.

Then there were two of them coming at her. Then another, and another, another, and another, and another. They were coming at her from all directions. She was surrounded. She pulled out her wand and yelled "Immobius". Nothing happened. She tried "Confringo!" "Reducto!" and other attacking and repelling charms. None of them work The spider kept coming. "Protego!" Nothing helped.

Then the spiders were on her. She could feel their feet crawling up her legs, across her breasts and face as the starting wrapping her in their gauzy silk.

"Think, Granger!" her mind was screaming. "I'm going to die!"

They had big, nasty, pointy fangs, but they were yet to bite her. Maybe that was the way they liked their prey…alive and wriggling. A poem suddenly popped into her head.

Old, Missus Buffet

Sat on his tuffet

Eating his curds and whey

Along came a spider

And sat down beside her

So she used peppermint

To chase it away

Hermione wiggled her fingers into her bag. "Accio peppermint oil, she said.

The bottle popped into her hand. With the determined effort of a person fearing for their life, she got it open. It spilled onto her fingers and she poked them out between the silky strands. Flicking them as hard as she could, she sprayed droplets at the spiders.

Suddenly, the spiders turned and ran off. The peppermint oil trick really worked. Now she had to free herself. It took a considerable amount of time and effort, but she freed an arm. From there she freed her other arm and eventually extricated her from the death trap that had almost enveloped her.

"Ohmigod," she panted, sitting up and surveying her surrounding to make certain the spiders were gone.

She needed a break before continuing, so she wrestled the coffin out of her bag to examine it. In the process, she dropped it and it broke open revealing a jewel-encrusted scepter. As she picked up the scepter a rainbow appear that was seemingly solid enough to walk on. Stepping onto it, she could see something at the end. Before long she found herself in possession of a pot of gold.

"Awesome," she thought, sliding it into her bag along with the scepter and coffin. "I'll be rich, if I find my way home."

She followed the beach along the river and into the trees. All of a sudden she found herself back behind the white house.

"I must have just walked in a giant circle," she thought.