September 13, 1996
The poster looked up at me with a blank expression of hollowed eyes behind a mask that was ornate, but simple in design that stood out against the dark backdrop of a raised hood. I was looking at a Death Eater uniform for the new information posters for the Daily Prophet. The sketch reached up to remove its mask to reveal a very basic idea of a man.
A wave of sickness came upon me as I pictured my brother's face instead. The intensity of his grey eyes and the rogue lock of dark hair falling across his forehead.
Please don't get arrested. Please leave this story you're pursuing behind to get back to this Thalia person.
I had no leads on Thalia, she was as elusive and mysterious as Alex, there was no paper trail in any family trees the Ministry kept. So I doubted she was related to any pureblood family that still existed. I was beginning to think she was foreign, though Valencia was sure she lived in the UK by the way Alex spoke of her. The idea held water, a foreign woman with no extended relations to show up in generational records the Ministry kept. I would have to start going through the census records next to help narrow down a timeline.
I pushed the poster away, cringing at the Death Eater's expression shifted to something horrible and violent. More animal than human, the barrier fully torn down to reveal hatred and savagery, no those were traits inherent in humans, not animals. A snake and other animals did as their nature commanded. Humans had the capacity to make choices that deliberately hurt others.
Scrimgeour stepped out of his office and tapped his cane on the floor to get our attention, Madam Umbridge stood next to her door with a smug grin, content to be in a seat of power where she wasn't being assailed by unstable children as she called them, something that was so off the cuff it made Percy wince.
"I've taken the liberty of having these posters made by a sketch artist from the Law Enforcement office. People should know what the Death Eater uniform is, even if they don't commit all of their crimes in it."
There were murmurs of agreement throughout the office, including from myself. It made sense, as eerie and unsettling as the image was in the moments of dread where I imagined my wayward brother on a wanted poster.
"I am also pleased to announce we are making progress on arresting Death Eaters, Stan Shunpike from the Knight Bus was arrested early this morning for claiming to have inside information on You-Know-Who's plans."
Stan Shunpike? I remembered him from when the Knight Bus dropped me off at Thornell. Was it almost a year ago? It sure didn't feel that way.
"There will not be time wasted with putting these people to trial," Scrimgeour continued, "We have lost too much time and allowed his supporters to gain a foothold and get comfortable. We must show strength."
"What about the International Confederation?" I slipped into the conversation as Scrimgeour stopped to take a breath. "Unless you have caught this man actively committing acts of terrorism, a burden of proof must be met in the eyes of international law."
Percy looked at me with wide eyes at my blatant questioning of an authority figure.
I could hear Umbridge clicking her tongue in disgust.
"Without indelible proof it's considered an indefinite detention and edges into war crimes, which is not a good look for any administration let alone a fledgling one."
Scrimgeour looked at me as if had grown a second head. I had barely spoken in his presence since our meeting. That comment did not contribute to my wanting him to think me stupid but pleasant.
"When this war is over, we will hold the trials. Until then, they will remain in Azkaban until their master has been dealt with."
Somehow I doubted that.
Administrations never had good intentions when people went to jail without a trial. Offering those things in the aftermath of conflict made an administration look weak and inefficient in the eyes of its people and the world at large and tended to bring more eyes from international managers to create a larger scandal than what one could really imagine.
I nodded quietly and settled in to listen to the rest of Scrimgeour's talk, knowing this was not a fight I could win or sway minds over. I ignored the snide look Umbridge was sending in my direction.
Percy would need to draft some preemptive statements on the arrest and simplify some of these wartime policies for the public, some of which were asking questions and drawing unfavorable comparisons. Scrimgeour would get any meeting notes from the department secretaries. Umbridge was to handle the internal matters handling interdepartmental issues while Scrimgeour made rounds and collected the latest intelligence from the Law Enforcement Office before having his meetings with the Daily Prophet, foreign embassy representatives and other matters related to governance and elbow rubbing.
"Audrey," Scrimgeour's voice cut through my thoughts, I was paying less attention than I should have been.
"Yes, Minister?"
"The Aurors have moved some old materials up to the extra storage room down the hall to make room for new records and sort incoming material, files, old evidence and the like. Perhaps you could take some time to sort it out and look for anything related to the previous war that the may have sent up by mistake."
"When was the last time anyone went through it?"
"I was told five years, but it's probably been longer."
Meaning they threw everything in a closet until they needed the space and were lazy about putting things away when they moved it.
"Of course, sir. I'll head right down."
He seemed satisfied with this and called the meeting to close, Percy finishing up his meeting notes with a final flourish of his quill.
I gathered up my papers, checked my intake tray and placed everything in its proper place. I doubted I would be back in the office in a formal capacity today, sorting old files was full and time consuming, I would have to find a radio after lunch. Though the job would get me away from my desk for a few hours. I stepped out the door after exchanging a few quick words with Percy about editing some of the longer speeches for him, he thought they were missing something.
The storage room was halfway down the hallway, a recent edition from magical maintenance, I had heard them moving stuff in there yesterday while I was scheduling important court cases that needed the Minister to preside for the Wizengamot, instead of just the head of the necessary department. The new door was heavy and made of oak, no different from any of the other doors on the floor, but with no fancy plaque to mark its status as a a glorified closet.
I closed the door to the storage room behind me and lit one of the magelights by the door, a soft glow soon emerging to reveal a collection of boxes and filing cabinets that were dented and piled in various corners of the small room. Most of the filing cabinets were along the wall, but probably unsorted and unorganized within. The piles of boxes spread throughout the center of the room were probably excess files that I would have to put an extension charm in place for. I took note of a very large storage cabinet in the back of the room that looked as if it had been carelessly thrown into its new home. It looked ominous for the sheer size and weight in comparison to the others.
I climbed over a box that I was sure was full of papers and moved the magelight to the ceiling where it belonged before opening the box to look at the files inside. Maybe I would be lucky and something about Thalia would land in my lap.
No. Never mind. These files were from the fifties.
Who sorted these case records for law enforcement?
Oh, this was a case about a black widow who killed three husbands! Fun!
There was a scratching noise from somewhere behind me, low and soft. Probably a mouse.
It was easy to fall into the rhythm of the work, letting my eyes drift and let the sheer mindlessness of the task come over me. The steady shuffling of paper as I moved everything aside by date to hit with a sorting spell that Percy had showed me when I was finished emptying the box. Being a secretary was not a bad job, all things considered. I just needed to have more patience for handling clowns with political power and war crimes.
Skreee
The sound made me jump, it seemed closer and or was echoing off the walls. The room was still and silent for a moment before I shrugged and returned to my task. Probably a rat.
My tasks were not things I found difficult. Though it was the sort of thing that would send me to an asylum in one of the special jackets without something to distract me. I began to whistle some song from the radio I had heard last night.
I heard skittering somewhere above my head and looked around the room with a hand resting on my wand. There was nothing above me. Nothing around me- Wait! What was that odd shape…!
Suddenly, the magelight dimmed causing me to look up once more as my wand made a soft ringing noise. My eyes took precious moments to adjust to the sudden lack of light before my wand lit with a lumos charm only to be pointed frantically around the room as my heartbeat quickened.
Skreeee
Something wet and smelly dripped onto the floor next to me.
I moved my wand up quickly, my eyes now adjusted to the light my wand provided.
The lich looked down at me from the ceiling, its nails dug into the ceiling to hold it in place. Its head tilted, smiling a gleaming, toothy smile as blood dripped from its eyes to the floor below, half of its face lit while the rest lay in shadow. A wild shriek escaped my throat as I scrambled to my feet and pressed my back to a nearby filing cabinet, my heart pounding loudly in my ears. It released its grip on the ceiling and fell to the floor in a crumpled heap like a rag doll before rising onto shattered limbs, spewing more vile on the floor as it's claw like hands scratched the floor like a cat, tearing at the carpet with a ripping sound as it dragged it's broken limbs behind it.
My stomach churned at the image in front of me.
Pieces of the monster's skin were falling away like ash, leaving only exposed flesh and bone as a black bile dribbled from its cracked, dry lips. The eyes took all of my attention. I realized it was not blood that was coming from its eyes, it was more the black bile of rot and decay. The smell was otherworldly, the heavy stench of rotting meat fell over me like a cloud as the beast shambled forward, shuttering and moaning its unnatural existence. A creature from my nightmares as a girl after listening to Grandpa's story about the man who tried to bring his wife back from the dead, my child's mind turning it from something stagnant to something out of horror and myth, a thing that I was convinced lived under my bed or the attic.
"B-back to the grave with you!"
Fire sprung from the tip of my wand with a roar, the air growing suddenly hot from the force of the flames.
The creature screamed as the fire engulfed it. The flames died and left the monster to shamble awkwardly in place, it moaned as its flesh fell away, blowing away like ash and cinders to form something new in its place. A face emerging from the monster's chest, it features hard and masculine.
I took a step to the side, my back still pressed against the file cabinet and placed a hand on my erratically beating heart as the creature in front of me warped and twisted, straightened itself to stand like a person and not in its usual slumped posture, its bones cracking as they repaired themselves.
My father stood before me, looking at me with his dark eyes, his silver hair in radical contrast. The Graves men did tend to start graying fairly young. He was standing tall and efficient in his dress robes, his expression was one of stoney continence and a set stubborn jaw. It was odd to see my father in front of me after so long apart. I forgot how tall and imposing he was, how much space he took up by standing in a room. Jack Graves was not heavyset, but he was sturdy and broad shouldered, like a tree with deep roots who could not be moved or intimidated by the act of an ancient god.
Jack Graves looked disappointed, his eyebrows in an arch, creased together in the way he had looked at me on the night I left home and vowed to find Alex. It felt so long ago now.
"I was right." Jack's voice was low and authoritative in a way that left me feeling small. I doubted it was something he did intentionally, but it felt very much like it was in this case after the things I had yelled at him. My wand arm went limp at my side. "You'll never find him. He doesn't want to be found. Give up and come home!"
I shook my head.
"You have failed! You'll be nothing more than a failed Graves, you bring shame upon this family!"
I covered my ears, my wand fumbled through my fingers, the handle of my wand pressing against the shell of my ear so hard it hurt.
Jack's hair began to darken, the wrinkles on his face began to fill and the years began to fall off of him like the hands of time were moving backwards. His dress robes darkened from a deep blue to a heavy black, like what I had seen in the Death Eater wanted posters as my brother now stood before me.
He looked at me before putting a silver mask on his face, his grey eyes visible through the holes in the mask.
Alex.
Come home.
Please.
The words died in my throat as he pulled his wand from his sleeve, revealing the dark mark burned upon his arm. I stepped to the side once more to put distance between me and my brother. I stepped back as he stepped forward. I tripped over something behind me and fell to the ground, I felt something wooden scrape my back as I fell, pain shooting up my spine as my wand rolled out of reach into the darkness beyond.
Alex loomed over me like a specter, a hollowness in his eyes that spoke to an empty soul, one corrupted by something I did not understand.
"No. NO!"
It hurt to breathe. The ache in my chest moved into my throat, a dry scratchy sensation of grief and dust.
"Please...!" The word was so quiet it was not even a whisper, just a breath into the empty silence of the room.
Don't go where I cannot follow.
He was pointing his wand at me. I had seen Alex duel a hundred times and he looked as he did now. A firm stance and a steady grip on his wand as he slowly advanced.
The tip of his wand was pointing at my face when Alex suddenly turned his head to something behind me and melted away into a vague glob I did not recognize.
A group of eight redheads with their backs to me.
Odd.
What did one call a group of redheads? A flame? A burning? Didn't matter. Stupid thought.
"Riddikulus!"
The red-haired hoard turned into a flock of cardinals that flew back into the large storage cabinet drawer with a chorus of birdsong. The drawer slammed shut with a clang before the cabinet was bound in conjured silver chains.
Oh. It was a boggart. We did not have many of those in the states. A few in big cities or mostly abandoned farms, but they were an uncommon menace. I felt as if I had known this, but the fear had eaten away at my sense of reality.
"Audrey!" I looked up to find Percy moving towards me at a run, hauling himself over a large box to kneel by my side with a hand on my shoulder. I kept my attention on the cabinet the boggart had retreated into as Percy fussed around next to me to find my wand and press it into my shaking hands. "Are you alright?"
I managed to nod, my lips were pressed tightly together and I rolled my wand against my leg while small white sparks leapt out of the tip.
"Can you stand?"
It took a moment to get my legs to cooperate to try and get to my feet. Percy was faster, he leapt to his feet and extended a hand to help me stand on wobbly knees and lead me away from the box with the monster inside back towards the door.
I assumed he was going to take me out to the hallway but he guided me out the door to the break room down the hall while my knees seemed to take the spineless texture of jelly.
"I'll inform the storage team that they have a boggart and that they need to be more careful in the future in regards to checking their materials." He helped me into a chair before putting his efforts into finding me a glass of water. "Honestly, they should be better than this!" He looked over at me, his glasses sliding down his nose before he came back to my side, pressing the glass into my shaking hands. "No Death Eater will ever darken the halls of the Ministry, Audrey, that much I can promise."
"Thank you." My voice sounded muffled to my own ears. I didn't bother to remind him that Lucius Malfoy, one of Fudge's regular visitors, was currently sitting in Azkaban for his part in the Department of Mysteries break-in. It seemed counterproductive. "How did you know to come find me?"
"I heard you screaming."
Oh.
I didn't know when I started screaming. That was unsettling.
I took in the smudges of dust on his robes under the bright lights of the break room. Odd for someone so proper. I peered down at my own robes, I looked like I had been rolling around in a dust bin or in a pollen filled meadow. I attempted to brush the smudges away with shaking hands, but they only seemed to become more noticeable by my attention.
"I'm… I'm sorry you had to see that."
Did he just see the Death Eater of my brother and not the other things? I hoped so.
"Boggarts like to play with people, they dig into your subconscious mind and show you things that you may not even know frighten you."
I nodded slowly letting Percy's calm tones wash over me like a soothing balm.
"But they only have as much power as you give them."
I brought the toes of my shoes together in three loud taps as if the motion would apparate me away with nary a thought.
Percy drummed his fingers on the table. "I was… Little during the first war. I think my first memory is my mother finding out her brothers were killed or her telling us where to hide in the house. I don't know, it just runs together."
I looked at Percy carefully, he remained stoic and calm, but the monsters for him were real ones, not like the ones I had crafted as a nervous child. His monsters had returned and mine only lurked in the shadows of old stories. My brother was potentially Percy's nightmare and he still did not hesitate to help me get away from the boggart. Maybe the boggart decided to kill two birds with one stone over a similar fear?
The boggart changing to what I now realized was Percy's family seemed to strike a similar chord to my own fears. Was he afraid they would never welcome him back? That his rejection was so full that not even one of his siblings would reach out? I had support. I had Lucinda and Tavish. Misty and Zara. Valencia, Quincy and Cassandra. I thought about Arthur and the family photo, was that something Percy wanted when he sat alone in his home?
In a way, Alex and Percy were alike. Willing to walk away from family entirely. Was I the outlier in this trifecta of abandonment or just the one not plagued by male pride and ego?
"How… How much did you see?"
"Just you on the floor. I thought you hit your head or something. And the boggart of course."
I nodded, relief making my limbs slack before Percy moved his hand towards the glass of water I was caressing as if to quietly tell me to have a drink. Which I did so quickly, the cool glass restoring feeling to my face and enforcing that I was safe. That everything was okay.
"The boggart didn't lead with the Death Eater. My grandfather was an Auror, important and well respected for solving many cases of dark magic. He spoke of one specific case that's haunted me for years."
"What was the case?"
"There was a man who loved his wife beyond all reason and upon her death, he fell to the siren call of the Dark Arts. The voices told him that he could bring his wife back from the dead. That her soul was free in the world and sought only a vacant, physical shell. After all, no one notices when No-Maj prostitutes disappear."
Percy stared at me with a horrified expression. Maybe normal people did not talk about things like this, Annette was not a bar one should hold up to diagnose normality, but for once he was silent and all my lips could do was move as the story took hold of my senses, Grandpa Atticus' excited voice filling my memory as the words twisted to something of my own telling.
"Well, word finally reached the Aurors after he stole away a witch. They stormed the wizard's home, a scent of decay in the air while bones were hanging from the rafters. He had completely lost his mind, but the worst thing was in the back room. Something… unnatural." I took a deep breath. "He took the parts of the women made a terrible thing, grandpa called it the lich. It laid on the table and moaned, but there is no true life in a creature sewn together by a madman. It never moved, it just stared at them and seemed to ask for death."
Unlike Grandpa Atticus and Annette who took an odd pleasure in such matters, I was not going to mention the skull bowls and the cannibalism.
"I used to see it in my closet, the mismatched, misshapen limbs and empty eyes. That was the first thing the boggart used to upset me. Then it preyed on the fears that did not belong to a little girl."
We were silent for a few minutes, the openness of the conversation left me feeling vulnerable in a way that was unsettling. I had a very easy life in many ways, I had an opportunity to have childhood fears, the create something dreadful that as an adult I knew could never exist in this reality. Percy never had that, his monsters were as real now as they were when he was a child.
"I'll make the arrangements to get the boggart removed."
I felt my head bob in agreement.
"Do you want to go home?"
"No. I've got too much to do here."
"I can cover for you, Audrey, it's not a problem."
"Thanks, but I'll be fine in a few minutes." I looked up at him with a small smile. "Thank you."
"Anytime."
Oo0Oo0
There was something different about my apartment. I was not a messy person, everything had a place, a time and a particular way to exist in my space. I cleaned once a week on Thursday nights while listening to the news and a radio show that told dark fairy tales from around the world because aside from the incest and creative murders, it was very easy to listen too.
It was not Thursday and my apartment was spotless.
The carpet was fluffy. The kitchen counters and various tabletops polished to a shine. The spider web in the upper corner of the living room had been removed.
Unusual. I was not this through.
Did someone break into my apartment just to clean it? Or did I just have a very courteous burglar?
I pulled my wand out of my pocket and turned out the lights. Homenum Revelio. The light at the tip of my wand pulsed and flickered before fading away. No one was here. Should I step outside and call the law to be sure?
I dallied in the doorway over going further into my home and stepping outside to go run to Lucinda and the authorities. No. This was my home. I couldn't run to Lucinda over everything. I was capable enough to investigate this odd situation and handle the consequences.
The deep breath I took steadied me as I stepped into the apartment, my stomach in knots as I gathered a stunning spell at the edge of my mind. I was not a good duelist or experienced in combat, but anyone who was still here would expect me to be comfortable, to not notice anything amiss and be unarmed for my comfort.
I checked under the couch before pressing my back against the wall to peer around the corner down the dark hallway.
No. I was not going down there.
I cast another spell to reveal latent charms and a stronger spell to detect life of any sort. Nothing. Nothing at all.
The door had been locked with a particularly difficult charm when I left this morning, if anyone had tried to come in, the door would have turned red when I put the key in the lock. I had anti-apparition charms all of the apartment. Those were still up too.
Who comes into an apartment just to clean it? Was it Barry? No, he'd never leave Thornell for an out of the way nicety or do anything like this without telling me.
After several minutes of checking for spells and other things, I declared the apartment was just cleaned and not tampered with I started to relax. I did good spellwork, I knew this. I was safe.
But who comes to an apartment without leaving any evidence just to clean?
Oo0Oo0
Author's Note: I have thoughts on Boggarts, I think when they pick on a single person, it's not about speed, it's about drawing every bit of terror out of a person like a horror movie because it's getting to explore a person psychologically and reveling in the experience to feed.
I am very into ghost story documentaries and true crime, which is why this chapter is full of horror elements.