It was early evening, but the position of the sun made it look quite a bit later. The title house on Bower street was rickety in and downtrodden. Ancient, white paint peeled from it's sides and the whole thing seemed to be slightly slummed over, like a slowly melting piece of ice cream cake.
Frederick gave the place an uncertain look as he walked up on it. Ever the professional, the man much proffered apparating down the street from his intended destination and walking up on it. Sometimes, this could give someone out minding their own business on an empty block quite the scare. He still found it gave his arrival much more of a law-enforcement touch - as if he had already been in the neighborhood.
The man walked up the first couple of cracked step-stones towards the house. The stepping stones had obviously - at one point or another - been organized in a straight path up to the front door. Years of precipitation and lack of maintenance had turned most the yard into a thick, dark mud. The stones had shifted in the it, and now looked like a spot of cement sprinkles thrown on top of a mud sundae.
He heard no sounds nor saw any signs of life coming from the place. He checked his watching. It was just after four-thirty in the afternoon. The Auror knew he had wasted too much time preparing for this meeting.
Over the course of the last few hours, Frederick and Beth had tore through page after page of books on Grindelwald. They had been seeking any information about his foot wear - a rather odd topic of research, and not one thoroughly explored by many authors.
To Fred, the fact that the woman claimed to be in possession of the dark lord's boot seemed like something that could not be accidental. Whether she herself had made it up - or she had actually found a boot she legitimately believed belonged to the warlock - he did not know. Either way, it felt to him like something he should spend some time looking into before meeting with the woman.
Unfortunately, the Auror had come up with very little. Few authors even spoke about the man's appearance at all, and pictures of his feet were very few and far between. In his research, Fred had been able to confirm only one detail important to his case: Grindelwald had, in fact, wore boots.
The house looked dark - only one dim light seemed to show, as if a candle were light in the room just beyond the front door. On this dreary afternoon, Fred could only imagine how dark the home must be on the inside.
The man gave a slight groan as his missed one of the stepping stones, firmly planting his shoe into a cold patch of mud.
"My new shoes!" He lifted his foot higher than he should have and removed his shoe. Balancing on one foot, the Auror shook the shoe wildly. Small clumps of mud flew from it, some of them actually peppering the house's white paint. Fortunately for him, the dry, cold air had nearly frozen the mud in the yard completely. It would have been much worse in the summer time.
The front door creaked open, and the orange glow of candle light spilled onto the small cement-block deck. The stick-thin frame of an elderly woman stepped into view, behind the glass of the storm door.
"Oh, uhm, Hello, m'am!" Frederick looked down, briefly considering the position he was in, and slowly lowered his shoe-less foot down to the cement stepping stone. The cement felt startlingly cold through his dress sock. At the same time, he lowered his shoe-holding hand to his side. Somehow, standing there with one shoe in his hand felt better as long as he was standing normally.
"My name is Sable. Francis Sable, Auror. I am from the MoM." The man stepped forward and reached out the hand not holding his shoe, smiling brightly.
For a second, the old woman just stared at him silently through the glass door. She wore a dingy-looking pair of gray sweat pants, and a sweatshirt that was a completely different shade of the same color. The shirt was speckled with various stains that Frederick could not identify from his current position. Her white hair was wildly unkempt - seeming to congregate in three distinct tufts. One extended out of the left side of her head, one out of the right, and one stood straight up. Taken together, the woman's head had the shape of a three-pointed star.
After what seemed like an eternity of consideration, the woman opened the glass door with much effort. The door creaked loudly as it was pushed forward, and it's small, gold chain-stop dragged uselessly across the cement, obviously broken.
Without the door's glass to mute her color, the woman looked translucently pale. Fred wondered if there were a vein in her body that was not visible to anyone that looked at her. The stains on her shirt appeared to be of a variety of different colors, some of them simply darkened spots that looked like they were left by grease. Her eyes were a faded color of blue so light that Frederick was not sure if they functioned properly or not.
"I mean, you are the one who contacted the Ministry, are you not? Miss.. erhm.. " The man began fishing through the pockets of his grey trench coat, searching for the bit of paper he had written the woman's name on.
"My name is Agnes Brightly." The words crackled from deep within the old woman's chest, "I contacted the Ministry. It isn't safe out here. We best get inside."
She stepped aside, motioning with one hand to her visitor as she held the door with her other.
"Well, M'am. I think you may be misunderstanding the situation. I am one of the Ministry's top Aurors. We are certainly in no danger here." Frederick's voice struck the authoritative, confident chord of an experienced law enforcement official. He reached forward and gripped the door by it's end, hopping over the last two steps - and accompanying mud - and onto the concrete block that served as the woman's deck.
She did not reply. The old woman let the door fall into her visitor's grip and turned around, leaving him standing awkwardly in her doorway for a moment.
"M'am - Agnes - I suppose we ought to just get into first things first here. I want to know why you placed your call to my department." Sable arranged his face into the most serious that he could muster, "The Ministry does not take too kindly to pranks such as this."
"Pranks?"
The woman spoke loudly as she transitioned from her home's entryway into the room beyond it. The detective followed her quickly and found himself in possibly the most cluttered room he had ever been in before.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of paperback books were towered around them. Nearly every square inch of the carpeted floor was covered in stacks of them. The looked to be mostly old fantasy novels, most of them in some sort of disrepair. Many covers were completely, unread-ably shredded. On the walls, a figurative zoo of ceramic animal decorations ran similarly rampant. All manner of cute - or ugly - kittens, rabbits, squirrels, deer, and birds stared back at the pair of them. There had to be at least three-hundred ceramic eyes looking at them, Frederick guessed.
"Tha' was no prank. Grindelwald was here. Left his boot in tha' front yard. Got stuck in tha' mud." The woman backed up to a dated, mauve-colored reclining chair and practically fell into it. The thing rebounded back a few extra inches, rocking itself back into a stable state slowly.
Agnes reached down next to her chair, behind the closest pile of abused books, and plucked a large black boot off the floor. The loose skin on her upper arm wiggled as her arm began to shake with effort. She barely got the thing up and over herself before she was forced to drop it to the floor, right between the two of them.
The boot clunked as it hit the ground and flopped over onto it's right side. It looked to be fairly old, though many in the wizarding community preferred their clothing this way, so it wasn't particularly unique.
Sable knelt down and picked the thing up gently, as to not disturb any potential clues. He move his left wrist slightly, and his wand slipped from the sleeve of his coat. Wordlessly summoning a small amount of concentrated light from it's tip, the man looked the boot over.
The thing was definitely very old. Aside from this, it appeared to just be an average boot. The man turned it over and held his wand above the bottom of it. He frowned. Right at the heel, someone had deeply carved two letters.
"G.G. That's .. Interesting." Frederick glanced up at the woman and saw that she wasn't paying any attention to him at all. She seemed to have chosen a book at random as was flipping through it's pages much the same way, seeming to hop from one paragraph to one several pages away with no rhyme or reason.
"Agnes. I want you to tell me the truth. Who gave you this?" The Auror slipped his wand away and held on to the boot with two hands, as if it could decide to make a run for it at any moment.
"You see his initials right thar, sir. Gellert Grindelwald. The Dark Lord. He came to see me here, brought his boot. It got stuck in tha' mud." The woman answered him without looking up from her book.
"You called me out here to give me this boot? Why did you insist that it be me - or the other man?" Frederick avoided saying Harry Potter's name, as was common practice in a situation like this. Any mention of his name in front of the wrong people, and you would be stuck talking about the man all day long. The community at large was absolutely fascinated with Potter, and mentioning that you worked with him was something that could absolutely destroy an interview.
"Ta' give you somethin' ... To give you this!" The woman looked up suddenly and Frederick dropped the boot in surprise. Her pale blue eyes were now a shocking, inky black color. The darkness of them grew to encompass the whites of them. It seemed to be fighting to get free of her eye sockets.
The woman's mouth opened and it, too, seemed to be filled with a black smoke - something that was more the absence of color than any one in particular. A dry croak started deep in within her throat and grew in volume until it threatened to burst the Auror's ear drums.
Without ceasing the horrific, croaking roar, the woman flew forward out of her chair. Her arms extended and her fingers bent as if they were claws preparing to strike. Sable pushed his wand forward, placing it between himself and the lunging woman.
"Stupefy!"
A crimson flash of light exploded from the end of his wand just as the woman was upon him. Her right hand - curled into a gnarled, bone-bending claw shape - caught the edge of Sable's face just in front of his ear. As the woman was lifted off up and blasted backwards, her finger nails dragged forward and tearing into him.
The Auror let out a small cry of pain as his opponent was sent sprawling backwards. An animalistic, pained scream escaped the woman's lips as her body smashed into several towers of books. The towers collapsed, and the stunned woman was nearly completely covered in the pile that the books settled in to.
Frederick reached up and touched his left cheek. He felt the warmth of blood and the brutal sting on a fresh wound. Lightly dragging his fingers across it, the man could feel at least three deep gashes had been left in his face.
Turning his attention back to the now-motionless woman, Sable slashed his wand through the air in her general direction. The pile of books on top of her burst out as if they had been hit by a particularly powerful gust of wind.
"Son of a Banshee!" The man spoke softly to himself as he stepped forward examine the woman.
Almost instantly, the woman's eyes flung open. The blackness from before was gone, but they looked no less eerie. Staring straight ahead with a terrified look, the woman's body lifted off of the ground as if someone had grabbed her by the ribs. Her head fell back and her mouth burst open. A small black object was ejected from it powerfully, smashing into the ceiling and then dropping back onto the woman's chest.
Sable waited silently for a second, taking it all in. He could not hear the woman's breathing. Keeping his wand handy, he stepped forward and kneeled down to her side.
"Agnes!?" The man was concerned for her, but did not risk reaching out to her yet. It had been years since he had seen anything so powerful manifest itself in another human. He did not know if it were some sort of demonic possession, or if they woman was under the influence of some sort of dark magic - what had just happened was many leagues different than anything Frederick had seen before.
The Auror cautiously placed his rest hand just above the woman's face. He felt no air being expelled from her lungs. He quickly checked her pulse, and his fears were confirmed - she was dead.
Sable suddenly realized that this had been a trap. He looked around the room quickly and raised his wand, ready for whatever came next. In moving his arm, he caught a glimpse of the object that had came out of the woman's mouth. Even the highly-experienced Auror was shocked at what he saw. A large black crow - dead, it seemed - was laying against the woman's chest.
For the first time in his entire career, the scene in front of him caused Frederick Sable to vomit.