From the Files of Dr. Dumbledore: The Case of HP: Week 2.
The reality created by Harry's psyche is getting progressively darker. Hogwarts itself, the imaginary refuge for Harry's troubled mind, possesses, he tells me, a "chamber of secrets".
Harry seems to find it quite easy to open up to me, as long as we talk exclusively about the world of Hogwarts. I can ask questions, and he will answer lucidly, as long as I play along and enter his imaginary land. But if I ask a single question about what lies outside the realm of his imagination, he will remain silent.
This week, his mind was occupied with thoughts of the dreaded "hidden room" he refers to as "the chamber of secrets".
Harry hears a voice in his head, whispering of murder. Why can no one else hear the voice? After a macabre Death Day Party, Harry, Ron and Hermione stumble upon the caretaker's cat, petrified. There is writing on the wall: The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. There is a monster loose in the castle. Who is the mysterious Heir of Slytherin who has unleashed the monster? Draco Malfoy, or Harry himself? Harry learns that he possesses the ability to talk to snakes. Does that make him a dark wizard? More students are petrified by the monster. Harry finds a diary, written by a boy from the past, Tom Riddle. Hermione is petrified as well, but she leaves behind a clue: The monster from the Chamber of Secrets is a basilisk, which petrifies anyone who looks at it. But Hermione is holding a mirror in her frozen hand: Even if one cannot look at the monster directly and live, one can see it in a mirror. Then Ginny, Ron's red haired-sister, is taken into the chamber. Harry descends into the chamber and finds Ginny, unconscious, next to Tom Riddle. Tom Riddle, the boy from the past, has possessed Ginny. He made her open the Chamber of Secrets and set the monster free. He plans to kill her, and Harry as well. He is Voldemort… He orders the monstrous Basilisk to kill Harry, but Harry kills it, with the help of a sword brought to him by Dumbledore's phoenix. He drives a serpent fang through Tom Riddle's diary, and the shadowy Riddle disappears.
Ah, the monster from the Chamber of Secrets! Now we are getting, I think, to the heart of the matter, to that dread secret at the center of Harry's hallucinations.
The serpent, the basilisk, the ancient symbol of evil and fear! But what terror is it that lurks within the hidden chamber of Harry's mind? What memory can be so terrifying that it petrifies, quite literally, those that encounter it?
The monster even petrifies Hermione, who represents, I believe, Harry's own intellect. But even incapacitated by the terror from the depth, the intellect finds a solution: The mirror. When you cannot look at the serpent directly, look at it in the mirror.
I believe this is highly significant. Perhaps that is precisely what Harry's fantastic hallucinations are doing: They are creating a mirror that allows him to look at the monster indirectly. Through the mirror of his delusions, he is able to approach that dark secret his mind is hiding without being petrified by it.
The monster threatens to kill the red-haired Ginny. Who is she? The younger version of the flame-haired Lily? It is only natural, perhaps, for the boy to feel some Oedipal attachment to his beautiful mother, and I sensed certain romantic undertones in his tale of the daring rescue of Ginny. But Ginny is not just an innocent victim; she is the one who set the monster loose, after all. What is the significance of this?
And what of Harry's own guilt? He fights the basilisk, he conquers Voldemort yet again, but discovers in the process that he is very much like the Dark Lord. Tom Riddle – what is the riddle behind this curious figure? Voldemort was once a boy like Harry. Is Harry himself Voldemort? Is Voldemort his own shadow self, his hidden dark side? Has Harry committed some unspeakable act of evil that has led his mind to separate his conscious self from its dark shadow?
The scar. The scar is what binds Harry and Voldemort together. I need to find out more about Harry's scar.
As his mother came to pick Harry up at the end of our last session this week, I asked him to wait in the front office with Miss McGonagall for a few minutes. Harry, who has taken a liking to the kind Miss McGonagall, complied quite willingly, and very soon the two of them were eagerly occupied in a lively discussion about Quidditch strategies. Miss McGonagall is quite the sports fan, and she seems deeply fascinated by this bizarre game.
I led the charming Lily into my office and closed the door. She sat down at the edge of a chair and looked at me with apprehension. There was something almost pre-Raphaelite about her beauty, her masses of red curls, luminous green eyes and alabaster skin… Ah, but which one are you, Lily? The grief-stricken Lady of Shalott? Or, I thought to myself, suddenly and absurdly, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the lovely lady who has no mercy…
I shook the odd thought out of my head. Good God, it won't do for the doctor to start hallucinating as well!
Lily accepted the cup of tea I offered her and looked up at me with a look of deep concern. "How is Harry doing? Are you making any progress, Dr. Dumbledore?"
I nodded reassuringly. "Some progress, yes. But there is still a great deal I do not understand about the extraordinary world Harry has created for himself. But since Harry is unwilling to talk about anything outside the emotionally safe boundaries of Hogwarts, I was wondering if I could ask you a question about his past?"
"Anything! Anything at all that can help you heal him…"
"Well, my question is quite simple really. He talks a great deal about an evil sorcerer called Voldemort…"
"Yes," Lily whispered. "I have heard him say that name often, but I can make no sense of the things that he is saying…"
The afternoon sunlight streamed through the window and fell golden on Lily's flaming curls. I wondered, idly, how many men had lost their sanity over Lily's incandescent hair…
I managed to pull myself together. "Ah, well, don't worry about that for now," I said. "What intrigues me is that Harry seems to feel some kind of connection to this shadowy Voldemort, and that this bond between them has to do with his scar…."
"With his scar-?" Lily's voice was almost inaudible. Her teacup dropped to the floor and shattered.
"Oh, I'm so sorry, Dr. Dumbledore. Let me clean that up…" In spite of my protestations, Lily busied herself with picking up the shards and mopping up the tea with her handkerchief. Her red curls fell in front of her face like a veil, concealing her expression from me.
How very curious!
I took the soggy handkerchief from her hand. "Perhaps you could tell me again, Mrs. P, how exactly Harry got his scar-?"
She remained motionless for a moment. Then she shook her hair back and looked at me, her expression composed, but her face whiter than snow. There was no emotion at all in her brilliant green eyes. Frozen. She looked frozen. Petrified?
"I already told you, Dr. Dumbledore. Harry fell down when he was a baby. He hit his head on the corner of the fireplace."
She smiled, and her smile was as lovely as ever. "If that was all, I should bring Harry home now. Thank you, doctor."
She opened the door and left, and voices drifted in to me from the front office: "But what I don't understand, Harry, is the disproportionately large point value assigned to the Snitch relative to…" followed by "Come on, Harry dear, it is time to go home now."
I stood there, foolishly clutching the tea-sodden handkerchief in my hand.
What are you hiding, Lily?