Disclaimer: Harry Potter leaves from Kings Cross station heading north at 60 miles per hour. His time of arrival is determined by JK Rowling.

Chapter 13

Hermione raced through the Quidditch stands as fast as her legs would carry her, but her mind was racing even faster. Harry's broom had gone haywire—bucking so much that he was about to be thrown off and fall a hundred feet. His teammates might be able to catch him, but it would be a roughly landing, and if they didn't…

Harry's Nimbus Two Thousand was brand new, and it was a top-of-the-line model, she thought, which meant it was undoubtedly individually tested. There was no reason for it to act up on its own. It was also enchanted out the ears with months', if not years' worth of arithmantic planning. She knew from class that enchantments that heavy and carefully designed would not be disrupted by any simple jinx. It would take serious dark magic to override them, even for a moment.

And then she had seen Professor Snape. Everyone knew he disliked Harry Potter in particular, and he'd seemed particularly angry yesterday, but she never imagined a teacher would actually try to hurt a student, much less kill him. But there he was, staring up at Harry's broom, unblinking, muttering under his breath—exactly the kind of spell that was needed to override those heavy enchantments. And she'd just got through convincing her parents that Hogwarts was safe.

Hermione didn't really think at first. She just sprang into action. Normal rules didn't apply to something like this, not when the teachers turned evil. Harry was her newest friend, and she wasn't about to let anyone, even Professor Snape, hurt one of her friends. By the time she was halfway there, she already had a plan. Those chanted curses were very difficult to maintain. All she had to do was to break Snape's eye contact for a moment, and Harry would be able to take back control of his broom. The tricky part was that she had to do it without getting caught.

The whole thing nearly fell apart when she tripped over Professor Quirrell and knocked him forward into the front row. She leapt over the back row and scampered behind the seats, hoping nobody had seen her. A moment later, and she was behind Snape, apparently undetected. She whipped out her wand, pointed it at the hem of his robes, and whispered, "Lacarnum Inflamari."

A bright blue flame landed on his robes and began to smolder. Wasting no time, Hermione pulled a jar from her pocket and got ready. Within seconds, Snape yelped in surprise that he was on fire and jumped out of his seat, breaking his eye contact.

Then, Hermione had to pull off the hardest part of her plan: getting the fire off of Snape's robes without him seeing her. She would only have a split second before he shook his robes out and started looking around for the perpetrator, and if he was already trying to kill Harry, she didn't want to think about what he'd do to the one who stopped him. With one swipe of her arm, Hermione brushed the blue flames off and onto the floor of the stands, where she quickly scooped them up in her jar and ran off.

She got back to the open air just in time to see Harry land hard and roll off his broom onto all fours. Her heart skipped a beat as she feared she had been too late. But then Harry started gagging and coughed something into his hand. He stood up triumphantly and shouted, "I've got the Snitch!"

The pitch descended into confusion. The Gryffindors stormed the field while the Slytherins went from shock to anger. That was probably the most absurd catch of the Snitch any of them had ever seen. Lee Jordan loudly proclaimed that Gryffindor had won one hundred seventy to sixty.

It wasn't till Hermione made it back to where the other first years and Hagrid were standing that the enormity of what she had just done hit her. She didn't mind a little surreptitious magic out of class here and there, now, as long as she didn't get caught, but she had just attacked a teacher! With magic! A teacher with obviously murderous intent! Forget rule-breaking—that was probably the most dangerous thing she had ever done—well, deliberately—she remembered Halloween. And for that matter, a teacher had just tried to kill a student! Her whole world was turned on its head. She clung to Hagrid's cloak to keep from falling over with shock on her way down to the pitch.

"That wasn't catch!" Marcus Flint, the Slytherin Captain was shouting. "He practically ate the Snitch!" The other Slytherins were in agreement, but Madam Hooch ruled the catch good. Harry had the Snitch in his possession in the air, and that was all he needed.

"There yeh are, Harry," Hagrid boomed as he picked the boy up by the armpits and set him on his feet, rescuing him from being carried off by the other Gryffindors. "Great catch, there, great catch. But what'd yeh think yeh were doin' up there flailin' around on yer broom like that?"

"I didn't do it," Harry protested. "My broom just went nuts on its own."

"It was Snape!" Hermione cried, but Hagrid wasn't listening.

"Well, yer lucky, whatever it was. Why don' yeh come down to me hut for a cuppa? You, too," he said to Ron and Hermione. "Ain't seen much o' you two in a while."

"Sure!" Ron said excitedly.

"Um, sure, thanks," Hermione replied.

They crossed the grounds and entered Hagrid's hut. It was an odd little place, Hermione thought. She hadn't seen the inside before. It looked like an old-fashioned cabin in the wilderness, except scaled up to Hagrid's huge size. Hagrid got a roaring first going in the fireplace and started the tea.

"So, I heard you three had a little Halloween adventure," he said. "Somethin' about fightin' off a troll?"

The three children turned pink at that. "Well, not exactly," Hermione said. "More like survived it."

"And good on yeh for it. Still, mighta liked to have seen that," Hagrid mused. "Don' see trolls that much 'round here."

And thank Merlin for that, Hermione thought. She'd heard rumours about Hagrid's affinity for dangerous creatures. Then again, he was almost as big as the troll was and could probably fight it with his bare hands if he had to.

Harry saw his friends were getting uncomfortable and changed the subject back to something more relevant: "I still don't understand what happened to my broom."

"It was Snape!" Ron exclaimed. "Hermione and I saw him staring at you and not blinking and muttering something. He must've been cursing your broom."

"Rubbish!" Hagrid cut in. "Why would Snape do that? He's a teacher."

"Because he hates me."

"Rubbish, I say. I told yeh he just doesn't like anybody. He wouldn't cause any trouble like that."

Harry, Ron, and Hermione looked at each other nervously, thinking of all the trouble they had seen Snape cause so far this year.

"I don't know," Harry said slowly. "We know he tried to get past that three-headed dog on Halloween. I think he was mad 'cause I saw he'd been bitten."

There was a loud crash as Hagrid dropped the teapot and spilt it all over the floor.

"How'd you know about Fluffy?"

"Fluffy?"

"That thing has a name?" Ron shouted.

"Of course he does. He's mine," Hagrid said. "I bought him from a Greek chappie last year and lent him to Dumbledore to—uh…"

"Yes?" Harry said.

"I'm not supposed to tell yeh that. Top secret, that is. Don' ask me any more about that."

"But Hagrid," Hermione said, thinking fast, "it's well known that cerberi are guard dogs. What if Snape was trying to steal whatever it's guarding?"

"He wasn't! He even told us he was just checkin' on—well, on Fluffy. Snape's a Hogwarts teacher, an' he'd never do any such thing."

"Then why did he try to kill Harry at the match?"

"I'm tellin' yeh he didn't!" Hagrid said angrily. "I don' know what happened to Harry's broom, but I know it wasn't Snape that did it, so yeh can just forget about it, and while yer at it, yeh can forget about that dog, and forget about what it's guardin'. It's dangerous business, that is, and it's supposed to stay between Professor Dumbledore and—uh…"

"Yes?" Harry said again.

"Nope, can't tell yeh 'bout that, neither," Hagrid insisted. "Just drop it, now. Yer meddlin' in things that don' concern yeh."

They chatted uneasily after that only long enough to finish their tea. The conversation quickly grew uncomfortable as Hagrid got testy whenever they got anywhere near the topic of what was going on on the third floor, so they decided to cut their visit short.

"It seems awfully suspicious, doesn't it?" Hermione said as they made their way back up to the castle. "Snape tried to get past the dog, and you can't help but wonder if he went after Harry to try to cover it up." Harry, who was already looking pale, nodded nervously.

"So you're with us that Snape's a bad guy?" Ron asked.

"I guess so," she replied glumly. "I can't believe he would try to kill a student, but I can't imagine what else he could have been doing. And Percy said he's very interested in the Dark Arts, so he'd certainly be able to. If only we knew what that dog was guarding, then maybe we'd know what he wants."

"Hermione," Harry said, "you said maybe we could figure out what it's guarding?"

"Well, we can try. I mean, there can't be that many things that are that small that are worth all this trouble. I'm sure we could find all the things it could be in the library…unless it's so secret that it's not written in books at all."

"I think we should try," Harry said firmly. "I've got a feeling it's important. We can start tomorrow maybe…" Then a thought struck him. "Of course, I wouldn't want to get in the way of your exploring the castle, though. We can still help you out with that, right Ron?"

"Sure. If you can prank Fred and George doing that, it's bound to be useful sometime."

"Thanks, guys," Hermione said, smiling. "I'd be happy to help you solve your puzzle if you help me with mine. We can split the time, maybe."

"Thanks," Harry agreed. "Do you want to try tomorrow afternoon, then?"

"Yeah, that sounds nice."

And so, the next day, after lunch, the trio found themselves wandering around the Entrance Hall and the Great Hall once again, trying to figure out how one might get up to the space above them.

"What about getting in from the Grand Staircase?" Ron suggested.

"No, I looked all over that section," Hermione said. "They're not connected at that level."

"So how do we find a secret passage?" Harry asked. "We already tried the doors and tapestries and stuff."

"Fred and George talk about secret passages sometimes," Ron answered as he drew his wand and started tapping it at various places on the wall. "They say sometimes you have to tap your wand in the right place and say a password, kind of like getting into Diagon Alley. And sometimes you have to tickle the wall in the right place or walk by it twice or do something strange like that."

"That's got to be hard to figure out what to do," said Hermione. "In muggle stories, you always have to press on the right brick or pull the right book of a shelf, and it's like a door handle…Hmm…" She got an idea and pulled one of her empty flame jars from her robes, put it to the wall, and pressed her ear to it. Then, she started knocking in various places on the wall.

"What are you doing?" Ron asked in confusion.

"I'm listening to hear if any places behind the wall sound hollow. It's what they always do in muggle stories."

"Huh, neat. I'll have to tell my dad about that. He always likes hearing about muggle stuff. Course, it won't work if there's a Silencing Charm on it."

Hermione shrugged. "It's worth a shot."

Hermione went down the wall in an orderly line, while Harry and Ron haphazardly tried out the ideas Ron had thought of, but the wall remained stubbornly solid. They tried the next wall and were just about to give up on that one, too, when Harry cried out, "I found something!"

"You found the way up?" Hermione said excitedly.

"No, it's just…I guess it's a little broom cupboard," Harry said, disappointed.

Sure enough, a hidden panel in the decorative stone work around the Architect's Statute had opened up, revealing a small cupboard, only about four feet high and filled with cleaning supplies. There didn't seem to be anything remarkable about it, except that it was hidden—and that it probably didn't quite fit in the floor plan of the castle, Hermione thought with annoyance. In a normal building, one could add up all the internal and external dimensions and figure out where all the hidden rooms could and couldn't be, but at Hogwarts, that wasn't going to work.

"Well, that's something," she admitted.

"How'd you find it?" asked Ron.

Harry turned a little pink. "I, uh, tickled the statue's foot."

Ron guffawed. "No way!"

"I did…" Harry let go of the panel, which swung back into place and blended seamlessly with the wall. "I just…" He tickled the statue's foot, and, sure enough, the panel opened again.

"Huh. That's odd," Hermione said. "I wonder if…" She reached out and tickled the statue's other foot. There was a soft scraping sound, and an identical little cupboard opened on the statue's other side.

"Wicked," Ron commented.

They tried to see if the statue did anything else, as far as they could reach, which wasn't much above the knees with it being on a pedestal, but no other hidden panels appeared. Going around the rest of the Entrance Hall, they managed to find two more panels that opened onto what looked like small storage cupboards, but they were empty.

"That's probably all we're going to find in here," Harry decided. "Do you mind if we go up to the library now? We can keep looking if you want."

"Sure, I mean, it's fine, I guess," Hermione answered. "We've probably spent enough time on this for now. Let's go."

They wandered up to the far corner of the castle to reach the library and quietly walked past Madam Pince before Hermione led them to the history section.

"So what are we looking for?" Ron asked.

"Hmm…treasures would be a good start," Hermione mused. "Famous wizarding jewelry, that kind of thing. We know the whatever-it-is is small. But we might also look at biographies, since it could be a relic from Merlin or one of the Founders or something. Hogwarts, A History had a little about that kind of thing, but the only thing that would be small enough would be Salazar Slytherin's locket. We could also look up famous battles and see if any special weapons or cursed objects were used that might be powerful enough to keep locked up like this."

"That sounds like a lot of work," Ron complained.

"I know it's a lot of ground to cover," she admitted. "We really don't have much to go on. I think we should make a list of anything we find that might fit, and maybe we can narrow it down by looking up the history of each item."

Ron still looked unhappy at having even more work, but he held his tongue.

"It'll be alright," Harry assured him. "It's not like we're in a hurry. We can just work on it when we have time."

"Let's start by looked for books about jewels and treasures," Hermione suggested. "Those will probably have the most leads."

They got to work. In Hogwarts's vast library there were a number of books that were specifically about those kinds of things. They turned up a lot of possible leads, especially if one considered that the jewels might have been separated from the necklace or diadem or sword they were mounted in, but there was very little that looked to be of "break into Gringotts" calibre. The best leads they found were Slytherin's locket (which looked to be of no more than historical value), plus the jewel from Merlin's staff and the one from Morgan le Fay's diadem, both of which were supposed to be lost for nearly a thousand years. By the time they had to go down to dinner, it was becoming clear that this would take quite some time.

The days passed quickly for the nascent trio. Hermione was feeling much better now that, with her roommates' help, she was consistently getting enough sleep again. They had to practically drag her up the stairs a couple of times, but they got her back onto a normal schedule. Of course, she still woke up early against her will at times. When that happened, she would sit up and talk to Lily and Sally-Anne until the others were awake, but that problem was quickly going away.

Now that she was talking to them more and had got to know her new friends better, Hermione's suspicions were confirmed. Recklessness aside, Harry Potter was a completely normal product of the muggle world, like herself. Well, not completely normal: he remained very reticent to talk about his home life, which concerned her a little, but he was otherwise a pretty normal kid. Ron Weasley, on the other hand, had been something of a surprise. If you cut through the glaring inferiority complex and the Quidditch obsession, he turned out to be pretty nice. And he seemed reasonably bright if he would only apply himself. He was good to have around, too, since he was the only one of the three with experience in the wizarding world. Suddenly, it seemed silly that she had written them off as troublemakers at the start of the term.

Harry was getting adulation (and anger and mockery from the Slytherins) all week for his most unorthodox Quidditch victory. Hermione found it a little off putting, but Harry actually seemed to prefer that to the constant Boy-Who-Lived talk. Professor McGonagall seemed especially pleased about the victory, but the real surprise came from Snape, who seemed no more disagreeable than usual by the time Potions came around on Friday. Harry speculated that it was because he wasn't limping anymore.

They spent a fair bit of their spare time in the library, working on their private research project. It was slow going. By muggle standards, the organisation of the library ranged from mediocre to terrible—though they didn't dare tell Madam Pince that. Given the small population and long history of the wizarding world, many of the books were ancient, and few were truly up to date. Also, many of them were not that well written, and the documentation was usually poor, so it was uncommonly hard to find anything.

On Saturday, a week after the Quidditch match, they spent some time exploring again. Hermione had a hunch that one or more of the many wooden panels on the lower sections of the walls in the Great Hall would open onto a stairwell up to the space above, but even finding the correct panels, let alone figuring out how to open them, would be a difficult task. Ron was still sceptical of her method of listening to the wall through a jar, but he and Harry didn't have any luck either. After an afternoon spent covering most of the Great Hall and not finding anything, none of them had much confidence in any of their methods.

"Maybe we should look around the castle and see how the other secret passages work," Ron suggested. "Maybe we can get Fred and George to tell us."

"I wonder if there are any spells to detect secret passages," was Hermione's idea, "and if there, are, if we can convince someone to teach them to us, and if they would even work in a place as magical as Hogwarts."

"What do you think's up there, anyway?" Harry asked.

"I don't know. It's probably just storage or something, or it might just be empty. But it's just odd that nobody seems to know."

They gave up for the day soon afterwards, but the problem was still bugging Hermione. She felt like she was missing something, but she wasn't sure why. She wanted to go check it out again the next day, but her friends were not as helpful then.

"Sorry, I've got Quidditch Practice," Harry said. Wood rescheduled it 'cause we skipped them last week.

"Oh," Hermione said, a little crestfallen. "What about you Ron?"

"Nah, sorry, I've got homework," he grumbled. "I bet you've already finished yours."

"Well, yes…did you want some help?"

"Kinda…I think I'm okay for now, though. I can always ask you tonight. You can go ahead if you want."

"Really?" That was surprisingly considerate for Ron. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, it's cool."

"Sorry we can't help you out," Harry added. "But you don't need to let that stop you if you don't want. We can still help you some other time, though."

"Well, thanks…I did want to take another look around today…I'll see you later, then, I guess."

"Yeah, see ya," they called after her.

Hermione walked down to the Great Hall alone. It was unfortunate, but she could understand their problems. She felt a little awkward going off on her own. She really shouldn't feel that way, she thought. After all, it was her project. But they were more or less working together, now, and she knew Harry and Ron would be disappointed if she found something while they weren't with her. Oh, well, she'd certainly show them right away if she did.

They'd looked over most of the obvious parts of the Great Hall yesterday. The largest area left to be searched was the wall behind the High Table, where the teachers sat at meal times. It seemed a little bit wrong to go behind there, but she needed to be thorough, so she strode up cautiously to the back wall, placed a jar against one of the wood panels, pressed her ear against the glass, and knocked on the wood. She heard the same dull thud of all the other panels that were mounted on the solid stone wall. It was entirely possible that Ron was right, and she wouldn't be able to find anything by sound, but she couldn't help feeling that it should be easier than that—that there should be an easy way to find things that were hidden. She kept going, panel by panel until—wait! She knocked again and carefully compared the two adjacent panels. Yes! She could hear the reverberation. There was definitely a hollow space behind this one. Whether it was a stairway or another cupboard she didn't know, but there was something. Now she just had to figure out how to open it.

She ran her fingers around the edges of the panel, but nothing was out of the ordinary. She knocked on the adjacent panels and got a good idea of the size of the door—it was small, like the cupboard doors. But there were no distinguishing features to them. They looked just like all of the other panels in the Hall. She tried pushing on them. She tried tickling them here and there. She tried tapping her wand to them. But nothing worked. Maybe she had to tap the six panels in a certain order—that meant 720 permutations though. Or maybe the latch was somewhere around the door. Or maybe she had to speak a password. Or maybe there was a button on the Headmaster's chair, which was just behind her and a few seats over. There were too many possibilities to contemplate and absolutely no clues to work with. It didn't make sense that the door should carry no indication that it was even there. The trick should be easier than that—shouldn't it?

Then, she looked down at her wand in her hand. Suddenly, that nagging feeling she'd been getting clicked into place. She wondered why she hadn't thought of it sooner. Maybe this wouldn't work on all hidden doors, but if it worked on the door that housed a giant three-headed dog, of all things, it was worth a try. She pointed her wand at the hollow panel and whispered, "Alohomora."

There was a click, and the panel popped open.

That was almost certainly not the intended way to get in. Leave it to wizards to not think about the most obvious solution.

With the panel open, Hermione could see where the latch was, although she still couldn't make out how it was supposed to open normally. But more interesting was what she saw inside the panel. It wasn't a cupboard. Instead, it was a miniature spiral staircase, looking like it was built for dwarfs, which extended both up and down from the ground floor. This was it! The only place it could possibly go up from there was directly over the Great Hall. She was so excited that she barely even gave a thought to Harry and Ron. She'd give them a tour once she knew what was up there, she decided.

She hesitated on the threshold, though. This door had to be locked for a reason—no, not locked, just hidden, she reminded herself. She didn't know for sure if it was locked. Still it was a strange, cramped little space. It might be off-limits, or even dangerous. You'd think places like that would be more carefully secured, but the thought of that dog dispelled that idea.

On the other hand, this was a place that even the teachers didn't know much about. It was probably not off-limits just because no one thought to make a rule about it—or no one remembered it if there was one. And certainly no one had ever told her that it was off-limits. That would have to count for something, right? She took a deep breath and stepped into the stairwell.

The staircase looked almost like something out of a dollhouse. The steps were only about four inches high and six inches deep. She could barely get her shoes to stay on them, and with the low ceiling, she quickly found it was easier to crawl up the stairs on her hands and knees, as uncomfortable as it was. The space was also very narrow. A large man would have a hard time squeezing through it. Hermione propped the door open with her jar, just in case, ascended a few steps, paused to make sure she would have enough room to turn around if need be, then started climbing.

The spiral stairs wound around and around tightly as she climbed. There was no way to see how far they went in either direction. She just kept crawling. By counting the shallow steps, she could tell she was climbing high. A hundred and fifty, or two hundred, she guessed, would put her at the level where she wanted to go. There were no pauses or landings in the staircase, not surprisingly, since the only thing on the other side was a solid wall. On the other side, there were only slits for windows, and the staircase was lit by some kind of enchanted glowing lights, rather than torches.

Finally, about when she judged that she'd reached the level of the ceiling, the stairs stopped and let out onto a small landing, which ran a few yards until it turned left into a cramped little hallway that ran directly down the entire length of the spine of the Great Hall's Enchanted Ceiling.

Hermione tried to stand, but the ceiling in the hallway was only about three feet, nine inches high, from what she could tell, measuring with her hands. Like the stairs, the space was also only one foot, ten inches wide. But the strangest part was that the entire hallway was lined with little doors—perfectly ordinary looking, but half the normal size. She tried the first one. Locked. She considered trying to spell it open, but she saw a flickering light at the far end of the hallway, so she decided to investigate that first.

This probably counted as one of the stranger things she had done: crawling on her hands and knees in what amounted to the attic of a magical castle, wondering why anyone needed a half-scale hallway up here and why no one downstairs knew about it.

It was quiet up here—no sound but her shuffling and no sign of movement besides the flickering light ahead. Hermione had got about halfway down the long hallway when it happened: one of the little doors opened, and something stepped out.

The creature looked like a tiny person, but it was very skinny, and it had large, bat-like ears on either side of a bald, wrinkly head, plus an angular, over-sized nose, and huge, blue eyes the size of tennis balls. It was wearing a toga with the Hogwarts Coat of Arms on it, which was very fuzzy-looking and appeared to be made out of a tea towel.

The creature looked directly at her and froze in place.

"Ah!" Hermione shouted in surprise.

"Ahhh!" it yelled back in a squeaky voice.

"Ahhh!"

"Ahhh!"