Chapter Two—What Happened Behind the Door

Crookshanks found himself in a low hallway lit only by the light from more windows. He padded up it, alert. It smelled of dust and age, and (curiously) also of green chestnuts. Not many people had used this passage and none of them recently. The cat crept on, silent as only cats can be.

Dust lay thick on the floor. Crookshanks glanced behind him to see a trail of his own broad footprints following him down the hall. He delicately lifted a paw and sniffed it. Strange, he thought to himself. It still smells like chestnuts. He lowered his paw again and looked up, continuing down the hall. Twenty feet or so ahead he spotted the entrance to a narrow tunnel that branched off to the left. A dark swatch of floor was swept clean of dust, as though something had been pushed across the floor here. The occasional shoe print strayed outside this stripe, and the smell of people was now noticeably recent.

Just then, Crookshanks faced the wall opposite the branching passage, and every thought flew from his mind as he beheld a magnificent cabinet of shelves. Around the outsides were intricate carvings. Scripts of all ages and dialects curled over the arched top, and polished wooden branches twined around the legs and sent roots into the floorboards. Even as the cat watched in utter amazement, another delicate wooden root wended its way down and an identical stem grew its way up until it reached the summit of the cabinet. The end filled out and burst into an exquisite cherrywood rosebud.

Crookshanks couldn't take his eyes from the bud, but as it began to open, he caught sight of what was kept in the cabinet and took a second glance.

Behind the incomprehensible doors of the cabinet lay shelves upon shelves of Time Turners.

Each one shone despite the dim lighting in the hall, each perfect glass dome reflecting a single diamond drop of brilliance. Glimmering highlights and frosty shadows played across the face of each minute hourglass, entrancing the cat until he was entirely lost within his own mind. He found himself pressing his nose to the panes of the cabinet door to see inside to the rows of solid time.

Abruptly the cat was pulled from his fascination by a sharp point of pain embedded in his tail. As he had stood watching, a wooden tendril had reached out, searching for a source. Now it took a vice hold on the cat, the thorns taking on an orange hue even as they curled around his pained tail. In a frantic move to escape the ravenous vine, Crookshanks pulled wildly and blindly away from the cabinet, its beauty forgotten.

And the roots securing the cabinet began to loosen and withdraw under the unknowing cat's pulls.

The cabinet began to lean, hanging over Crookshanks as a cliff hangs over its shadow. As it tipped, Crookshanks felt the root finally loosen, and he looked up to see the cabinet fall not only through the space between its place against the wall and where the cat stood, but also through time… to come rushing down to meet the orange cat with an earsplitting crash.

And time shattered.

At least, the rules of time shattered, along with each of the Time Turners on the shelves, splitting into infinite small shards and skittering across the breadth of the low hallway in a crescent sweep of broken glass and time.

The last sense Crookshanks lost to darkness was the smell of chestnuts.

- - -

A/N—Wow! So now you know where the story gets its title… but there's more to come! Short chapter, I know, but a lot happened and you need time to… digest (right about now, I can just see you yelling at me and telling me to just tell you what happens next!) But you'll have to wait for Chapter 3.

Thank you for your reviews: keep telling me what you think!

JayDragon: Thanks, I loved your story too. And I hope you like my revised profile.

LGS: Neither have I… he's not even mentioned much. And he's a great character that you don't know much about…

Siraelle: Thank you! There's not a lot that you can say hasn't happened or been written when it comes to HP on this site. But that's one of the best challenges of writing fics.

Glimmer: I love reading well-written stories too… thanks.

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