Chapter Two

St Mungo's

Neville Longbottom opened his eyes sleepily, awakened by the gentle blue light of morning. A warm breeze drifted in through the tall window across from his bed, causing the curtains to softly rustle and sway. He gazed absently at them, blinking, and tried to recall his dream. He had dreamed, hadn't he? Yes, he thought so. In fact, he was sure of it. If only he could remember what about...

For two or three minutes he lay there, unable to recall more than the slightest details. There had been a lot of darkness, that much he knew. It had also been rather sinister, and had left him feeling on edge. Someone had screamed.

A cold shiver ran through him, and he decided the dream was best forgotten.

He propped himself up on his pillows, and looked out at the fields beyond the window. The sun had already risen, and the grassy hills in the distance were dotted with sheep that had been brought out to pasture by the Muggle farmers that lived a little ways from Longbottom Manor. It felt odd, living so close to someone, seeing them day after day, and be completely invisible to them. He didn't see why Muggles should have to live in ignorance of witches and wizards. He also couldn't imagine how it was managed.

He had a suspicious feeling that he was forgetting something again, something important. The clock on the wall read 7:22 a.m., a bit later in the morning than he had supposed. (It also told him the day (Sunday), the date (July 28th), the year (1992), the phase of the moon and even the reigning constellations.)

He knew he couldn't be late for school, it was summer. Besides, he was eleven, and had completed his primary education in the spring. It wasn't the visit to St. Mungo's in the afternoon, either. He could never forget one of those visits.

His musings were rudely interrupted by a sudden pop, like a shimmering balloon bursting inches from his face, which made him start and jerk back, rapping his skull against the headboard.

"Nena, I've asked you not to do that," he chided in what he hoped was a gentle tone. He rubbed the back of his head vigorously, trying to rid it of the smart.

Standing before him on the bed was a most extraordinary little person; no more than two and a half feet tall, it was painfully thin, with large bony hands and an oversized head, huge brown eyes and enormous bat-like ears; wrapped around its tiny body was a strip of faded blue brocade, frayed along the edges where it had been torn from an old set of drapes, and fastened over the left shoulder with a cheap brass brooch. It was a house-elf, servants of the wealthy families of the Magical world.

At his rebuke the elf began wringing and tugging nervously at one of its ears, and, in a voice like a rubber duck being mercilessly trampled, replied:

"Nena knows, Mas'er, Nena remembers that Mas'er Nevie as'd Nena not to pop into his room without warning but Nena sees that the morning is late and Mas'er Nevie isn' up yet and Nena thought Mas'er Nevie might be forgotting Mis'ress's ins'ruction to breakfas' with her -"

Neville leaped from his bed with a look of consternation and ran to his wardrobe.

"Never mind, Nena, you just startled me, that's all," he said placatingly. "Quick, help me with my clothes."

The elf, obviously relieved, hopped from the bed to his side, and clapped her hands. The wardrobe doors flew open, drawers slid out, and shirts and trousers arranged themselves into pairings on the floor, rearranged into new pairings when Neville expressed a preference, and then all but one flew back into the wardrobe, which promptly shut. He pulled on his clothes hurriedly, and Nena smoothed out the wrinkles and parted his wavy brown hair with her dexterous fingers.

Deeming himself presentable, he rushed out the door, down a spiral staircase, through the Dining Hall, and, slowing his pace, entered the family breakfast room.

Already seated at the small, round and highly polished wood table was a stern looking woman one would guess to be in her mid fifties; in reality, she was approaching seventy. She was thin without a hint of daintiness, with a square face and narrow, piercing black eyes; her steely grey hair, which seemed inconsistent with her vigorous complexion, was pulled up and held in place with a diamond-studded pin. She sat sharply upright in her high-backed chair, pouring a copious amount of milk into her tea from a small silver pot. As Neville entered, she fixed on him a gaze usually reserved to judges for defendants whom they have already determined to be guilty, and for whose sake they regret that the law does not permit a higher penalty. All his life Neville had been accustomed to bear this gaze, yet never once did it fail to incapacitate him.

He stood in the doorway with his hands clasped nervously behind his back. He opened his mouth to speak, but, unable to find his voice, he closed it again without making a sound. Finally, it was she who broke the silence.

"I am glad to see you at breakfast on time," she said, turning to look a stately pendulum clock on the mantle, which proclaimed the time to be half past seven, "I was beginning to worry that you would be late again. As I have told you countless times, tardiness is not a failing to be overlooked. It is extremely bad manners, and it has a way of ruining one's opportunities in life."

Neville relaxed, and managed to get out a "Good morning, Gran." He took a seat at the table and began layering a piece of toast with fried egg and sausage. His grandmother leaned back ever so slightly in her chair and sipped her tea.

This was the Honourable Augusta Fink-Nottle Longbottom, matriarch of the Longbottom family, and Neville's guardian.

Neville's grandmother had raised him since he was very small. The two of them lived alone at the manor, as they always had, with Nena the house-elf performing the duties of a domestic staff. Well, not entirely alone. Neville had had a nurse when he was much younger, and then a tutor, but they had been in the employment of Madam Longbottom, and never felt like family. His nurse had not been unaffectionate, but demonstrativeness was nowhere in her highly professional nature. The tutor had been a walking terror. He was not a cruel man by any means, but his manner was cool, distant, and his methods strict and demanding. Neville, who did not have the brightest mind or the strongest memory, had failed his expectations almost daily.

"As I hope you remember," his grandmother began again, "your Aunt Enid and Uncle Algernon are coming over for tea this afternoon. We will be visiting your mother and father this morning after breakfast."

She gave him an inspecting glance, and her eyes rested on his bare forearm.

"How often must I remind you to wear only long sleeves when we are going out? That unfortunate scar will attract attention."

Neville turned over his left arm; a burn scar, pale white and corded, stretched from his wrist to his elbow, forking and branching as it scrolled up the underside of his forearm like a bolt of lightning. It had come from from a cursed teapot that had somehow made its way into their china when he was a toddler. Once, his mother had unknowingly used it, and set it on the side-table full of hot tea. He, like all toddlers, Magical or otherwise, having a habit of getting into things which he ought not, had climbed a chair and tried to take it. As soon as he had touched it the teapot had cracked, sending burning liquid streaming down his arm. All attempts to heal the burn and later efface the scar had been ineffectual.

"Yes, Gran. I-" He paused. He had been about to attempt an excuse, but he thought better of it. "I'll change my shirt after breakfast," he finished submissively.

The rest of breakfast was eaten in silence. Madam Longbottom read a letter that Nena brought in on a silver tray, and Neville let his thoughts wander. Neville took most of his meals alone in his room, but the few he had with his grandmother were always like this. The two of them rarely conversed, unless there was something in which she needed to instruct him or of which to remind him. In such cases, her remarks were pointed, concise, and left little or no room for an answer.

"Nena!" Madam Longbottom called, rising from her chair when they had finished eating. The tiny elf appeared immediately, popping out of thin air as before.

"Ah, Nena, breakfast was lovely. Thank you." The elf gave an absurdly wide smile of pleasure at this simple praise, and bowed her head, making her overlarge ears flap like wings.

Leaping lightly into the table, she nimbly piled the dishes into single precarious stack of platters, plates and teacups, lifted it over her head, and vanished.

Neville's grandmother glanced back at him. "Oh, Nena!" The elf reappeared without her burden. "Before you do the washing up, do help Master Neville find a suitable shirt. One with long sleeves."

Ten minutes later Madam Longbottom led the way into the mansion's foyer, holding a large red handbag that contrasted garishly with the emerald of her dress; perched on her head was a black wide-brimmed hat surmounted with a stuffed vulture (which had a habit of periodically turning its head and blinking its glass eyes at bystanders in an unnerving manner). Neville followed close behind her in an ordinary blue button-down shirt and khaki trousers.

She strode up to the grand fireplace, the largest in the house, and took an elegant black urn down from the mantel. Out of this she pulled a pinch of what looked like faintly luminous, purplish gray cinders.

"St Mungo's Hospital, London, Reception Hall" she called out imperiously, and tossed the cinders into the empty fire-pit. Instantly a heatless blaze of violet flame leapt up, sending a column of indigo smoke spiraling upward until it disappeared into the dark heights of the chimney.

Turning to Neville, she said, "There now, you go through first."

Neville inched toward the roaring inferno uneasily.

"Neville!" his grandmother exclaimed in a tone of long worn-out patience. "You have been traveling by Floo your entire life. Get control of yourself!"

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, bracing himself, then stepped into the gaping mouth of the fireplace. The cool flames engulfed him. He had a sensation of rocketing upward, up the chimney and into the sky, and then plummeting back to earth. His feet touched solid ground again, not with any great force, but he was so disoriented that he tripped, fell, and tumbled across a very hard floor for a couple of yards.

His eyes shot open and he scrambled to his feet, fighting nausea and the pain in his head. He was standing in a large reception hall with sparkling white floor, walls and ceiling. It was crowded with people, nearly all of them seated in long rows of wooden chairs. Many of those closest to him were now staring at him over the top of whatever out-of-date magazine issue they had been reading, while others seemed not to have noticed his unconventional entrance, being too engrossed in their own troubles. A large portion of these latter were grotesquely disfigured, with too many or too few appendages, or partially animal anatomy. One man had at least dozen fingers on one hand, sticking out in all directions like the tentacles of an anemone. A young lady further down the line had what appeared to be an enormous toad's eye surrounded by warty gray-green flesh, which contrasted grossly with the beautiful hazel eye with dark lashes on the other side of her face. And then there was an old woman at the end of the row who sat with her legs drawn up under her on the seat and her body doubled over, gobbling and crowing continuously as a younger man tried to soothe her. The tip of her nose hung down in front of her lips, elongated and swollen, and swung side-to-side as she jerked her head. Neville, still unsettled from his trip through the fireplace, nearly lost his ample breakfast at the sights. Up and down the rows walked three wizards in white robes with the Healers' insignia, a crossed wand and bone, embroidered on the left breast in light green thread. They were asking questions of the waiting patients and writing in clipboards they carried.

The fireplace behind Neville blazed purple again, and out strode Madame Augusta Longbottom with imperturbable dignity. It was still a mystery to him how she managed to keep her balance when traveling by Floo, let alone her poise. She came up to his side, and eying his untucked shirt and disheveled hair, gripped his shoulder tightly and marched him up to the front desk.

"Ah, Madam Longbottom," said the lady behind the desk, a plump blonde woman in her mid twenties, "you are here to see your son and daughter-in-law?"

It was strange to see the welcome witch so polite and talkative, comparatively, as Neville had just seen her dismiss two unfortunate patients by pointing to a sign to her left, wordlessly and with evident impatience, after a single glance, without waiting for them to speak. But then, his grandmother had that effect on everybody, in part because she was well known and well respected, but mostly because her overbearing demeanor threatened grave consequences to anyone who did not treat her with the utmost consideration. No one ever dared to test her.

"Yes, thank you," replied Madam Longbottom, as the welcome witch made a mark in the visitors' log.

They made their way to the far end of the reception hall, past the rows of waiting patients, to a pair of crisscrossed staircases. Escalators, in fact, operated by magic. At the foot of the ascending stairs his grandmother stopped him; drawing her wand from inside her jacket, she reordered his mussed hair and clothing and soothed the stinging goose-egg that had swelled up on his forehead with a few silent waives. Then, after giving him an unmistakable warning with her eyes not to make a fool of himself again, she led the way upstairs.

The wall to their side was lined with portraits of elderly men and women with a decidedly sanctimonious air, who turned their heads to watch the two of them move slowly by, or paused in their learned and often heated discussions amongst themselves till they had passed. Yes, the portraits moved and talked, as did most of the paintings and even photographs in the Magical world.

As they passed one particular portrait of a man of at least ninety years of age, with a towering forehead, deeply sunken eyes, and thin grey hair that hung down in corkscrew curls to the collar of his stiff black suit, he addressed Neville as 'Young Master' and began offering advice on treating Pilgrim's Dropsy, claiming proudly to have discovered the cure through successful self-experimentation. Neville, who, needless to say, did not suffer from any kind of dropsy, and yet, though hardly corpulent enough to warrant such a drastic diagnosis, wasn't exactly skinny either, flushed hot all over with embarrassment.

The building that was now St Mungo's Hospital had originally been a dilapidated 1920s department store, Purge and Dowse, Ltd, and, while the spacial dimensions of the structure's interior had been greatly deformed and expanded, the floor plan remained largely the same. The reception hall was on the ground floor, it's vaulted ceiling rising five stories high. Each upper floor had a wrap-around balcony that overlooked the waiting area.

Neville and his grandmother ended their ascent at the fourth floor, where patients received treatment for spell damage, and made their way across the balcony to a pair of double doors, over which the sign read 'Janus Thickey Ward'. Passing through these, they entered a large room that looked more like the parlor of a fashionable hotel than a hospital sickroom. The walls were paneled with somber brown walnut, and matching wooden chairs and sofas were upholstered in whites and grays. Golden-white light shone from cloudy crystal orbs that floated in a chandelier-like cluster at the center of the ceiling. All around patients in every stage of life, perhaps a dozen in all, were sitting in thickly cushioned chairs or milling about the room. A few were engaged in card games or other light activities.

As Neville and his grandmother entered a woman rose from her seat and approached them. She was thin and frail looking, her once brown hair heavily streaked with gray, and her pale face deeply lined. There was a vacancy about her that spoke of mental illness, and her expression was one of weary melancholy.

She brightened perceptibly when she saw Neville, and a look of almost liveliness came into her brown eyes. Neville hugged her around her waist.

"Mum," he said in a subdued voice.

His mother put an arm around his shoulders and softly stroked his head with a blue-veined hand.

"Good morning, Alice," Madam Longbottom said gently. "Are you feeling well?"

Alice Longbottom did not acknowledge that she was being spoken to, and continued to embrace her son in silence.

"How is Frank?" Madam Longbottom asked again, perhaps a little less gently. "Is he awake?

In answer, Neville's mother took him by the hand and led them from the parlor, down a corridor full of closed doors and into a private bedroom.

Frank Longbottom lay on the bed, nearly motionless. His looked to be of an even more advanced age than his wife. His hair had gone completely gray. His eyes, sunken and shadowed, rolled to follow his visitors as they entered, but his haggard, ashen face remained impassive.

"Hullo, Dad," Neville said, planting a kiss on his father's forehead. The invalid gave no sign of recognition. Madam Longbottom came up to his bedside and took his hand in hers.

"Hello, Son," she said lovingly. There was a feeble confusion in his eyes as he gazed up at his mother.

These were Neville's parents as he had always known them. They had been injured in a mysterious assault on the mansion nearly ten years prior, and had been tortured with black magic beyond the limit of human endurance. They had been left alive, but robbed of their vitality and their cognition. At that time they had both been proficient Aurors, elite dark wizard hunters employed by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and authorities believed that the object of the attack was to gain information on covert operations that the Longbottoms had been involved in. However, the perpetrators had never been apprehended, or, as far as Neville knew, even identified, and in all the years since that night neither of the Longbottoms had uttered a single word.

Neville loved to visit his parents, and wouldn't give it up for anything. He knew that seeing him was one of the only things that brought meaning to his mother's existence. But it filled him with an unrelenting ache to see them as they were, wasted, a ruin of the young and happy man and woman he knew they had been before, so full of life and joy and hope.

He sat with his mother on the love-seat, his head on her shoulder, and told her about the things that had happened to him since she had seen him last. There wasn't much to tell, and he didn't think that she really understood what he did tell her, anyway. But it made her happy, listening to him talk, so he talked about everything he could think of. The books he read, the adventures he pretended to have in the vast, empty mansion, the flowers he was growing in his window-box. He especially liked telling her about his flowers. Getting plants to grow was one of the few thing he was decently successful in, and that gave him real satisfaction.

It had been nearly three quarters of an hour when Madam Longbottom laid her son's hand gently back down on the coverlet. "We've brought you something," she said, opening her red handbag and taking out an impossibly large pot of white and purply pink flowers. "Orchids, from the manor's conservatory. Neville picked them."

She placed the flowerpot on the nightstand at Mr Longbottom's bedside, and the room began to be filled with a faint but delicious scent. He did not seem to notice. His wife, however, took something from her pocket and dropped it into Neville's hand with a dim smile. It was a candy wrapper, crinkled, yellow and transparent.

"Thanks, Mum," Neville said with sincerity.

"Yes, thank you, Alice," said Madam Longbottom generously.

Aside to Neville she said quietly, "It is time to go now. Say your goodbyes.

"The wastepaper basket is by the door," she added in a whisper.

Neville slipped the candy wrapper into his pocket unobtrusively. He gave his mother another hug, and pressed his father's limp hand.

"Goodbye," he said, "We'll come back to see you again soon."