7
Thanksgiving came and departed as fast as it arrived. There were two more Quidditch matches before Christmas and it looked like either Griffindor House or Slitherin House could end up winning the house cup and going forward to represent the school in the Inter-School Quidditch Match against Wiz-Tech, but that was still up to whether Ravenclaw could still beat Slitherin in their up-coming match so they were not completely out of the running. Gabrielle's heart was going out to William as he went through two days of bad jokes and taunts from his classmates, mostly from the young criminals and bullies in Slitherin House, but a few from peers he thought were his friends. It got so bad that he asked Professor McGongal if he could be excused from his classes for a few days, but she turned down his request. She would deal with the taunts and jibes, but she would not make him a special case. During study time, he sat in one of the window seats of the assembly hall as far as he could from all the others with the ghost of Marley one of the thirty-four resident ghosts of Hogwarts as his own sympathetic friend. Gabrielle looked over her shoulder to him and back to Chad and Troy. She wondered if they were going to let up with all the teasing.
"I wonder if I should talk to him again." She asked out loud. "He looks so lonely over there."
"I kind of feel bad about the jokes we made." Chad looked to Troy and back again. "I keep forgetting that some of us just aren't that lucky as we are."
"Yeah…" Troy looked up from his textbooks on potions. "You know, it's girls like Sharpay that do that to guys. I can't begin to comprehend what it must be like to be unable to talk to girls. Like I need another reason to not like her…"
"Here he is… here he is…" Taylor was coming up the Ravenclaw side of the Griffindor side of the table carrying a large book with Kelsey following her. She dropped the book before them on the table. They had asked her if she had ever known a Professor Danvers ever connected to Hogwarts, and she had offered to look him up in the school library. She plunked down a copy of "Hogwarts – A History" before them open to the moving faces of teachers both past and present. "Professor William Nathaniel Danvers…" She pointed at the grinning black and white image of Danvers in the book. "He taught History of Magic here at Hogwarts from 1934 to 1951 before taking a sabbatical to teach regular kids. He's now back to teaching students magic at Wiz-Tech!"
"Wiz-Tech…" Gabrielle suddenly recalled a memory. "That's where I heard that name before! That's where my cousins are going to school! Justin told me about him before I came here!"
"What else does the book say about him?" Kelsey asked while pushing her glasses up her nose.
"Not much…" Taylor admitted and read the man's description aloud. "Favored as one of the most popular and beloved teachers under Headmaster Dippel, Professor Danvers started out as an expert in Spells and Hexes before focusing on Muggle Studies and the History of Magic. He is most well known for his defeat of the Morlocks with the help of his close friend, Albus Dumbledore." She looked up as owls came in delivering mail.
"Doesn't really tell us much, does it?" Troy remarked as a letter dropped from an owl into his books.
"I'd bet there's more about him in the restricted section of the library." Chad spoke up as he recalled the section of books locked behind the steel door of the library. It took a note from a teacher to get in that room and the books were never taken out. His Wizards Monthly was finally delivered to him whole and to his lap. A small sack was dropped to Troy from Horace with a gift of cookies from his mother. Maddie also flew in with a larger package for Gabrielle. She dropped it to the table for her and alighted in a circle before resting on the table. Gabrielle grinned to her and held her to her face to make over her and place her to her shoulder before inspecting her package. She flipped it over to the words: "To be opened ONLY in the Griffindor Common Room."
"I wonder who sent you that." Kelsey looked down at it.
"I don't know…" Gabrielle stood with Maddie clinging to her shoulder and collected up her books and package. "I'll tell you what it is later. Just keep searching for more on Professor Danvers!" She was now hastening back to her common room to open her package. Chad looked to Taylor and back to Troy and then hurried after her through the hall of portraits to Griffindor House. They had to give the password to the Fat Lady portrait again after her, but by time they caught up with Gabrielle, she was already sitting on the sofa before their fireplace next to the house's Christmas Tree. She pulled the string off and unwrapped what looked to be fabric wrapped in thin white paper. She found a note.
"What's it say?" Troy noticed two of their co-house members heading out as they arrived.
"Your father left this with me a long time ago. He would have wanted you to have it." Gabrielle read the note verbatim. "That's it. No signature." She pulled out what looked to be a long thin cloak. It was somewhat thin to see through but there were weavings in it that sparkled in the light. "I think it's a cloak." She placed Maddie from her shoulder to the back of the sofa and pulled it over her shoulders, but as she did, it enveloped up her body and made her vanish all but for her head and neck now floating in the air where she stood. All Chad and Troy could see was her floating head.
"How does it look?" She asked.
"There's nothing to see." Troy responded surprised and unprepared. Gabrielle looked down and saw her floor and the table, but nothing else.
"Where's my body?" She started reacting scared to death. "Where's my body?!"
"I know what that is!" Chad reacted. "That's an invisibility cloak. My mom read me about one when I was a kid! You've got to let me borrow it!"
"Someone thinks a lot about you to send you something like that." Troy looked to Chad and back to her with an amused grin.
"But I don't know who that would be…" Gabrielle thought a second and realized that this gift could not come at a better time. "Wait a second, I could use this to get into the restricted section of the library!"
"Yeah, you could…" Troy watched as she pulled the hood up and made her head vanish. "But then… Gabrielle? Gabrielle?! Chad, stop her!!!" They moved to grab the exuberant little brunette but only got the sound of giggling out of the air. Troy felt playfully kicked into the sofa, and Chad felt her poke his shoulder, but all they were grabbing was empty air. Their door to the hall opened and closed by itself.
"She's going to get us in a lot of trouble." Troy realized.
"Or expelled." Chad looked to him. "Oh yeah, I know my priorities!"
Feeling like one of the ghosts, Gabrielle was hurrying through the hall of portraits as if she was a little girl. In the hall outside the assembly room, she playfully tapped Kelsey then Taylor, giggling at them briefly before rushing on her way through the castle to the library on the second floor. On the way, she dodged other students and Mr. Filtch, the caretaker. At the stairs to the second floor, Snape had Sharpay, Lily and Tawni cornered at the bottom landing.
"Someone has been stealing from my private ingredients." He accused the girls. "If I had any suspicion that it was any of you, I'd…" He seemingly sensed Gabrielle and somehow saw her… or not. He started reaching out at her as she backed away from his grasp; nothing catching in the air of his fingers. He sensed a presence, but not who or what it was. Gabrielle, meanwhile, rushed past him and the girls, carefully treading the stairs as the late afternoon sun was streaming through the west side windows, casting long shadows through the room. Her uninhabited shadow jumped and danced from shelves to tables, nary a student noticing as she haunted the length of the library dodging classmates nervously on her way to the restricted wing.
"Alohomora." She briefly popped the lock with a whisper, pulled the door open slightly to slide in sideways. Her cloak briefly caught on the door and her leg and arm were exposed but just briefly. Catching it, Gabrielle moved out of sight behind the first shelf and pulled back her cloak. With just her head bobbing along, she checked out some of the titles. It was in order as was the regular section by subject. The history books had titles like "A History of the Dark Arts" and "Witchcraft Through the Ages." Under law, there was a book called "The Great Witch Hunts," and the sciences section included "The Last of The Dinosaurs," "Cryptids And Creatures" and "The Secret History of Dragons." A look to watch out for someone, and she moved to the biography section for books ranging on such personages as Viscount Barnabus Aarnulf to Queen Catherine Zyckoff.
"Baroness Russlein Altebar, Countess Ersebet Bathory, Dryllus Bord, Silas Broadmoor, Amadeus Byrd, Celestine Carnavon…" She read a few of the names under her breath. "Cassius the Cruel, King Conaan, Cyrus of Stygia, Dacchus of Bechtin, Antonius De Moor, The Diary of Lemuel Dehner… No Danvers…"
"Who left the Restricted Section unlocked?!" Madame Proudfoot asked the other librarians. Startled and surprised, Gabrielle looked back quickly and pulled her hood over to enclose and conceal her head again. Madame Proudfoot was closing and locking up the restricted section once more. Once heading to return some books to the shelves, she stepped over to lock up the restricted section and started swinging the door closed, but then it stopped on something. She made an odd look and checked the floor and opening for something stopping her then stamped the rug with her foot to flatten anything stopping the door before finally sealing the door and relocking. Her cart of books jostled as if someone had it, and Susan Bones stumbled over something in her way and dropped her books. Danae Starling and Melody Lightbringer felt someone brush past them and stepped back looking around, and Randall Crumbs felt something push against him in the doorway as he and Rhesus Carrigan tried to enter.
Daintily hurrying on her way, Gabrielle raised her cloak to rush back to the meeting hall, but instead of heading the length of the library to the main stairs, she rushed toward the north hall for the rarely traveled back stairs. This way was rarely traveled. It was darker and foreboding with forgotten and deserted furniture on the top landing outside of the library. As she hastened to the common room again, she noticed someone and ducked to hide behind a support column for the roof. Her back pressed to the cold brick, she looked again to see if it was clear and realized the truth. She had just seen her reflection in a mirror. It was a large floor mirror in a wood-carved frame with letters carved across the top. It read "Yensid." As she came closer to look upon it, her reflection faded away and turned into a vision. In the glass, she saw her home on Waverly Place, and in the loft above the restaurant, she could see Justin, Alex and Max… her Uncle Jerry and Aunt Theresa… She could not hear their voices, but they had to be waiting for her to come home from school, yet… there were no Christmas decorations in the loft. If she could see her home from many miles away in the glass, why wasn't there any Christmas decorations up yet? She looked deeper and saw the calendar. It read March 2009. If this was the past she was seeing, where was she? Why was she not in the vision? When her fingers tapped the glass, the vision fogged over and changed location. It turned into the location of a huge hotel lobby of grand and opulent reputation. Two twin young boys rolled through the lobby on skateboards chased by an irate African-American hotel manager past a candy counter area. At the counter was Sharpay and in front of her was Taylor and… herself!!! What did these images mean? Where they the future? Why was she not in the other image? In this image, she called Sharpay "Maddie" and she called Taylor "Mary Margaret," and they called her Corrie! The boys were named Zack and Cody, and they were being berated by hotel manager Marion Moseby. What were these images and why was she seeing them?! Gabrielle tapped it again and the image faded away again to a ski lodge somewhere else. It revealed a karaoke contest and in this vision Troy was pulled up on stage next to her, but in this vision, her counterpart seemed quieter… more aloof or withdrawn. It didn't make sense. Images of her family without her, images of herself with other names, images of herself doing things she did not recognize… Her eyes filled with tears of confusion as she pulled her invisibility cloak tight over her head and raced down the back way to the first floor.