A/N: DUN DUN DUN DUUUUH.
BTW, REREAD THE END OF CHAPTER 17 WHEN CASSIE ALMOST DROWNS. I IMPROVED IT IMMENSELY. PLEASE PLEASE REREAD IT.
She giggled loudly and swatted Sam on the chest, giving him a playfully reproaching finger to his chest at what he had just so blatantly suggested. They were currently holed up inside an abandoned classroom, studying the fine art of snogging with perfection when a teacher had nearly entered the room. They were forced to dive under an old, mouldy sheet to prevent getting caught and put in detention. After the coast was clear, he turned to her with a quirky grin and proceeded to tell her what exactly most people their age did when under sheets. Externally, Cassie giggled, but internally she was having a bit of a crisis, desperately bidding her face not to turn scarlet.
She squeezed her eyes shut once she was sure Sam was looking away and managed to hold the blush at bay. She was sixteen years old, not twelve!
But this is only your first boyfriend..., a voice at the back of her mind sniggered rudely.
Shut up!, she shouted in her head, shaking it like a dog ridding itself of water. She refused to let those annoying voices get to her!
It was four days after the Giant Squid had mistook her for his lunch, and Sam DuPrau, (the 'Sexy Saviour', as Kelly labelled him), had asked her to be his girlfriend two days earlier.
She'd been sitting under a peach tree under the warm sun reading a favourite book of hers, when he and his crew of other handsome Quidditch players came waltzing out into the sunshine. Their appearance caused collected sighs from the surrounding girls (and from a few guys that stole sneaky glances), but they're attention was not for them. They all came walking towards Cassie and her shady peach tree on the edge of the forest, following their leader (who happened to be Sam) and all wearing the same encouraging, beautifully white-toothed smiles.
The rest of them hung back, and Sam stepped forwards. Cassie finally looked up from her book, realizing that he was actually paying some attention to her and gazed at his handsome face with doe eyes as her face turned red. She watched, excitement building like a giggly, happy disease inside her bowels as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a beautiful pink and red lily, with the words 'Wanna go out with me?' written in wonderful penmanship on a piece of paper stuck neatly between two of the petals.
Her happiness had been so great that she'd even let the bad grammar go.
With a rather screechy-sounding squeal, she leapt into his waiting arms gibbering affirmatives into his soft school jumper. At the back of her mind, she'd made note to perfect her squeals of happiness in the future.
Wonder what else you could end up squealing for with this stud..., muttered The Voice evilly.
She paused and thought a moment at what her brain had just whispered. She blinked a few times, and wisely decided never to tell anyone that she talked to herself to the extent that she did.
As soon as the halls were deserted, boy and girl skittered along the walls through the dark corridors, pausing at intervals and making sure that a teacher wasn't around the corner before they continued towards their respective house dorms. A couple corners back, she'd bid Sam farewell at the portrait of the Drunk Monks down the hall from the kitchens where Hufflepuff house was situated. Now she was alone, her lips slightly puckered from her strictly wordless goodbye, and feeling rather giddy. She forced her surely manic giggles down, swallowing the wetness in her mouth until she was sure she wasn't going to burst out in fits of laughter. Then, as quick as a wink and as stealthy as a guilty child with a stolen cookie, she set off towards the dungeons.
As she passed the girls' bathroom, she noticed something bright reflecting the cavernous ceilings. She paused, looking curiously at it, before continuing forwards. As she got closer, it became clear to her exactly what it was:
Water.
It lay like a glassy coat of clear ice on the rough stones, showing Cassie the ceiling with perfect distinction as though it were a mirror. Cassie's heart slowly began to beat faster.
A toilet is just flooded, or something...¸she told herself, trying to brush it off. But she could not disperse the ominous feeling that crept like a black disease over her body, freezing her insides painfully solid.
Something, intuition perhaps, told her to not look around. That intuition told her to never look behind her, and never look at the floor. She did as her feelings bid her without question. She stared straight ahead at the wall at the end of the hall, her eyes grasping onto a burning torch and she watched the flames crackle, never taking her eyes off of it.
The tiniest of breaths sounded behind her, and every hair on her body stood up, sending a giant wave of gooseflesh passing over her now cold skin. Another breath, rougher this time sounded hollowly in the stone hall.
Her heart suddenly stopped its furious tattoo inside her chest, and along with it, her breath stopped. But even as she felt her bodily functions begin to cease, something inside her brain told her to never take her eyes off of the distant burning torch. She never did. The air was cold, and the mysterious breaths behind her sounded more frequently. She stared unblinkingly at the wall.
As suddenly as it had come, the ragged breathing became less and less pronounced, a soft squelching that sounded horribly like slithering alerting that It, whatever It was, was going away.
Suddenly, her heart began to pump warm blood rapidly to her frozen limbs, and her chest began to rapidly rise and fall with each new breath, as though it were trying to make up time for lost breaths. But Cassie couldn't move, couldn't possibly move, until the black disease of fear that had crept up from the shadows in the hall had completely deserted her.
She fell roughly to her knees, her shoes and skirt splashing in the thin pool of water. Warmth had returned to the air now.
As she tried to recompose herself, another feeling crept into her. Its voice wrapped around her mind, and said one thing, over and over again...
Check the bathroom, it whispered, check the bathroom...
She was moving before she even acknowledged it. Her body screamed at her to turn around, and run as fast as she could in the opposite direction.
DANGER!, it screamed, DANGER!
But she wasn't listening.
Inside the cold bathroom, the water lay deeper than out in the hall. One of the sink taps was broken and gushing water freely into the overflowed sink, that spilled onto the floor in a way that reminded her sickly of blood. She stepped through the ankle high water carefully, the translucent liquid seeping quickly into her shoes and the fabric of her socks.
Something told her to go and check near the stalls.
Her body moved for her, stepping towards the stalls with little effort on her part, leaving her to wonder what horrors lay there...
As she turned her head up to look down the rows of stalls her heart halted roughly in her chest for the second time.
A horrible, gut-wrenching moan of horror was echoing off of the stone walls, and it took her a moment to realize that gut-wrenching moan was her own.
There, lying on the wet floor was a tiny Gryffindor first year girl. Her hand was raised in the air, her little face screaming in terror, forever trapped in a sculptor's sick parody of a piece of art.
A/N: Well. I'm more than a little pathetic. Every time the phone rang as I was writing this, I jumped in the air about five miles. XD Pretty sad when your own story makes you jump...Well...Not really. It just means you're really into the story...-nod nod- Anyways, reviews make my day so why don't commit yourself to something as simple as writing one? Free appreciation of feeling good! Or...Whatever. : D