Shff. Shff. Shff.
Click, click, click—
At a glance, the courtyard—nearly half the size of the entire Hogwarts grounds—was packed edge to edge with Acromantulas, hundreds of them in total, densely crowded together shoulder to shoulder!
Unlike the ground outside the walls, the great courtyard of Avalon Prison itself was nothing but bare sand, smooth and stripped entirely clean of vegetation, without a single tree anywhere in sight.
So there they all stood, plain as day and impossible to look away from, before the assembled young wizards—hundreds of Acromantulas, the smallest among them still the size of Hagrid, the largest as big as elephants.
On top of everything else, the air carried what might have been a faint, coppery whiff of blood, and even Harry, who'd faced these particular creatures before under far worse circumstances, felt the hair on his scalp prickle.
Hundreds of Acromantulas gathered in one place—if they'd shown up in the brutal Battle of Diagon Alley, they alone might well have decided which side actually won.
And most of the young wizards, standing exposed under the open sky and facing down thousands of ceaselessly blinking, green compound eyes fixed on them from every angle, found it hard to even breathe properly, let alone speak.
"They don't normally eat people?"
Cho Chang's close friend, Marietta, stared blankly at Professor Watson, seeking some reasonable explanation for this bizarre claim of his.
"The Ministry certainly doesn't feed prisoners to the Acromantulas as standard practice. Same as Azkaban—the Ministry arranges regular shipments of ordinary animals out here, to serve as the spiders' food supply—"
Bryan smiled faintly at the question,
"But if a prisoner here attempts to escape their confinement, or repeatedly defies the guards after being warned, then the Acromantulas do hold the standing authority to execute them."
Execute—
Hermione pressed her lips tight together and drew a deep breath at the word.
That seemed, on its face, rather inhumane.
Then again, thinking about who exactly these prisoners actually were, and remembering the old Azkaban's grim reputation by comparison, Hermione found she genuinely couldn't bring herself to raise much of an objection to it, when weighing one horror against another.
Clang—
A heavy clash of metal sounded out across the courtyard, and the tall silver-white gate standing before the young wizards swung open smoothly on some hidden mechanism.
A young man, dressed in a style similar to those who had already met them down at the shore earlier, appeared standing behind the entrance of the pentagon-shaped building beyond.
"Hello, Mr. Watson. I'm Heidi Barry—the control room's assigned me to guide today's Hogwarts study trip properly—"
The light-brown-haired young wizard bowed respectfully toward Professor Watson, smiling at the introduction.
The instant the door swung fully open, a cold, faintly fishy wind swept out from the darkness beyond, and the young wizards hunched their shoulders against it without quite meaning to.
"Thanks for your trouble, Barry—"
Bryan nodded and smiled warmly at the young druid guide,
"How have things been running here lately, on the whole?"
"Much better, Mr. Watson, honestly—" said the young man named Barry, falling into step beside them,
"The Acromantulas and the prisoners are gradually starting to adjust to each other's presence, and we've also put some new measures in place since your last visit."
While still standing outside the courtyard walls, looking up at it from a distance, Harry had assumed the pentagon-shaped prison building would turn out to be a two-story structure, but it wasn't, as it turned out.
It had only a single floor throughout—the ceiling had simply been built extraordinarily high.
Beyond the door lay a long, dim corridor stretching ahead of them, its walls, floor, and ceiling all carved uniformly from grey granite.
Whether it was purely his own imagination working on him or not, once inside, Harry kept catching what sounded like faint, half-real wailing drifting from somewhere.
Professor Watson's earlier insistence on strict order suddenly seemed entirely unnecessary, given how thoroughly the atmosphere itself was already keeping everyone silent and close together.
With a heavy click, the outer gate swung shut behind the whole group, and darkness came seeping in from the far reaches of the corridor ahead, the only light now was coming from a scattered handful of torches set into the stone walls at intervals.
A solemn heaviness pressed down on every young wizard's chest; not one of them could shake it off.
The torches on the stone walls only managed to light the lower half of the passage, while the ceiling far overhead hung hidden in a dim, murky gloom that swallowed the torchlight before it could climb that high.
Walking on through the zigzagging corridor, the young wizards kept catching, from somewhere in the darkness the torchlight simply couldn't reach, the occasional soft sound of wings beating close by.
Monitoring Omni-oculars.
Every single move they'd made since first boarding the boat had been under the watchful eyes of these observers.
Harry had assumed, from what he'd seen so far, that the Acromantulas were only responsible for guarding the outer courtyard, but rounding a corner in the corridor, two of them suddenly loomed out of the surrounding gloom without warning, their green eyes glowing especially, unnervingly bright in the dark—and he very nearly stopped breathing at the sight.
Click, click, click—
The young wizards froze as one solid mass, standing face to face at close range with these two crouching, elephant-sized Acromantulas blocking the passage; not one of them dared even breathe properly, let alone move.
His whole body gone rigid, Harry suddenly felt someone grip hard at his wrist from beside him—and that person's palm, pressed against his skin, was slick with nervous sweat.
He turned his head slightly, and a flash of fiery red hair caught his eye in the dim torchlight.
Harry pressed his lips together and gave Ginny a small, reassuring smile in return, trying to steady them both.
"That's—"
Bryan peered curiously at the two enormous spiders blocking their way, his attention caught by something; their broad abdomens were each cinched tight by a round wooden ring.
"That's a precautionary measure of ours, Professor Watson—"
their guide Barry said with a small, tired sigh,
"We don't much want to do it, but there's no other way around it. The Ministry's thinking on the matter is that if the Acromantulas aren't given enough food, and are kept hungry, it creates a considerably stronger deterrent effect for the prisoners watching them.
Some prisoners who spent too long already in Azkaban before coming here have all but lost their sanity by now, and they tend to be a good deal more aggressive as a result. We try our very best not to let prisoners become spider food if it can possibly be avoided, so we put rings like these on the prisoners too, in certain cases."
Whatever purpose it currently served in the system, Harry thought grimly, it couldn't possibly be anything good for the person wearing it.
Theodore Nott's face had gone ashen at the explanation; he glared hard at this young "warden" with resentment burning behind his eyes, and the Greengrass sisters, walking nearby, had fallen unusually silent as well.
A green glow gathered slowly in Barry's palm as he pressed it flat against the wall behind the waiting spider, and then, amid a deep, grinding rumbling sound, the whole wall sank steadily downward into the floor.
It seemed ordinary magic simply couldn't open these stone walls—Hermione realized as much, watching closely; only the special magic that Professor Rahansen and his people wielded could manage it.
Hermione counted silently to herself as they went, tracking it: they passed through nine such heavy stone doors in total before they finally made it all the way through the winding maze of the corridor.
And before every single one of those nine doors, without exception, an Acromantula stood posted on guard.
At last, the whole group of young wizards emerged from the confining corridor and stood together on a wide walkway ringing the inner circle of the pentagon-shaped prison.
The walkway ran in a full circle, and within its ring, an enormous open space stretched downward beneath them, roughly three or four full stories deep by rough estimate.
A vast ceiling, built something like a great hall's roof, reflected the bright sky outside down into the space below, lighting the whole enclosed interior with soft daylight.
The young wizards all let out a collective breath simultaneously, the tension was finally breaking—that long corridor they'd just walked through had been truly suffocating.
"Oh, is that—"
The very first thing Harry noticed, looking down over the railing, was that down below, on a spacious stone plaza that was itself also guarded by watchful Acromantulas, several tall goal hoops stood erect in a familiar formation!
"Avalon Prison permits its prisoners a measured degree of physical activity, to ease the ongoing strain on body and mind—"
Bryan explained to the young wizards, whose faces had all turned in unison to looks of surprise at the sight,
"But only on designated rest days, mind you."
"There are rest days here?"
Theodore Nott cut in at once, startled out of his earlier grim silence.
"That's right, there are, but only three days out of every month—the 10th, the 20th, and the 30th, specifically—"
Bryan nodded, certain of the figures; he'd set these particular management policies himself from the ground up, after all, so he knew every detail of them well.
After a moment's heavy silence, Theodore Nott gave Professor Watson a small nod of something like reluctant thanks.
"The prisoners are in lessons right now, as it happens, Mr. Watson—and all of you students, this way please, if you'd follow me—"
Prisoners. In lessons?
Barry's single, offhand remark left the whole crowd of young wizards baffled all over again.
But Nott, desperate above everything else to actually see his father with his own eyes, paid none of that surrounding confusion any mind at all—he hurried after Barry, visibly agitated, pulling slightly ahead of the group.
As the students moved along together on the second-floor platform, Hermione noticed, that besides the Quidditch pitch below, Avalon Prison had even equipped its prisoners with what looked like a library!
But glancing quickly through the gleaming glass window set into the wall at the books arranged on the shelves inside, Hermione saw that most of what actually sat there were magazines, ordinary newspapers, and light story collections—nothing much at all in the way of magic books that might teach anything useful.
"Dad!"
Even though he'd braced himself for it beforehand, steeling his nerve the whole walk over, the moment Theodore Nott actually saw, through the massive glass window ahead, his father sitting upright in the huge classroom below—dressed in blue-and-white striped prison robes, sitting rigidly straight in his seat, listening intently to the lesson being given—he lost all his control.
Tears welled at the corners of his eyes, and he lunged forward two full steps toward the glass, pounding his fist again and again against the barrier that sealed off both sound and sight from the room beyond,
"Dad, it's me! Can you see me out here?!"
A number of the watching Slytherins fell silent together at the sight; most of them knew Theodore's father, from visits and dinners in better years.
In their memory, Nott Sr., though rather ordinary in his looks, had never once failed to carry himself with the bearing of a proper gentleman.
And now, sitting below the lectern in that room, more diligent and attentive than any of them had ever managed to be in an actual Hogwarts class, he was nothing now but a thin, shrunken old man.
The noise Theodore was making against the glass couldn't reach inside the sealed classroom—but the Acromantula "supervising" the spacious room from one corner sensed it all the same.
The spider, which had been crouched low on the floor with its legs drawn in beneath it, suddenly bared its full ferocity and sprang straight up with a sharp snap of motion, its two great pincers were beginning to click together rapidly.
This single movement set off outright disaster inside the room at once—the prisoners, who had been sitting obediently through the lesson under watch, immediately assumed the Acromantula could no longer restrain its appetite and was about to strike.
One after another they leapt from their seats in sheer terror, surging toward the classroom's single door in a desperate frenzy, pounding hard on the sealed iron door with bare fists—and the most frantic among all of them—
"Hermione—!"
Through the small pane of glass set into the iron door, a face both familiar and strange rose into view. Harry swallowed hard, gulping, his whole expression was one of utter, uncomprehending disbelief.
"Mm."
Hermione had seen the very same face at the same instant.
She answered him in a trembling voice with her stunned eyes stretched wide open.
"Professor Lockhart."
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