Chapter 20 : Halloween Morning
Great Hall — October 31, 1991, 8:03 AM
The bats were alive.
Hundreds of them — real, actual bats — wheeled and dove through the Great Hall's enchanted ceiling, threading between floating pumpkins the size of armchairs. Each pumpkin had been carved into a face by magic, and the faces moved: grinning, winking, occasionally cackling in thin, high voices that sounded like Cork after too much butterbeer. Orange candles replaced the usual white ones. The overall effect was magnificent — an eleven-year-old's dream of Halloween, the kind of spectacle that made the Muggle world's carved turnips and plastic decorations feel like amateur hour.
Matt ate toast. His stomach accepted it reluctantly, the way it accepted food when the rest of his body was running on adrenaline and dread.
Today.
Across the Hall, at the Gryffindor table, Hermione was reading. Ron was demolishing scrambled eggs. Harry was feeding Hedwig a strip of bacon. Neville was explaining something to Seamus about his Mimbulus Mimbletonia — a birthday gift from his great-uncle, still tiny, sitting in its pot on the Gryffindor windowsill.
Normal. Everything was normal. The last normal morning before things went sideways.
"You look awful," Terry said, sliding into the seat beside him.
"Didn't sleep well."
"Nightmares?"
"Something like that." Matt poured pumpkin juice and drank it for the sugar. His hands were steady. Everything else was not.
He'd spent the night reviewing his plan, such as it was. The plan was: when Quirrell announces the troll, leave the Great Hall immediately. Don't follow the Ravenclaw prefects to the common room. Sprint for the first-floor girls' bathroom. Get there before the troll does. Get Hermione out. Let Harry and Ron arrive for the canon moment — Ron's Wingardium Leviosa, the club, the knockout.
Simple. Except for the part where he was eleven, underslept, and about to voluntarily run toward a twelve-foot mountain troll.
The morning classes passed in a blur. History of Magic — Binns droning about the International Warlock Convention of 1289. Matt took notes automatically, his mind elsewhere. Herbology — Professor Sprout supervising the repotting of Bouncing Bulbs, which required two hands and full attention because the bulbs fought back. Matt caught one that bounced for his face and potted it with the mechanical competence of someone operating on autopilot.
Then Charms.
Flitwick's classroom. Gryffindors and Ravenclaws together. The lesson Matt had been dreading since September.
"Today," Flitwick announced, standing on his customary book tower with a feather in each hand, "we practise the Levitation Charm in earnest. Swish and flick! Remember — swish and flick."
The classroom filled with the sounds of first-years failing. Feathers lay stubbornly flat. Seamus Finnigan's feather caught fire — again — and the resulting column of smoke triggered a chain reaction of coughing and displaced concentration.
Ron was struggling. His feather twitched once and went still. He adjusted his grip, flicked his wand, and produced nothing.
"You're saying it wrong," Hermione said from beside him. The correction was automatic — not unkind, but delivered with the particular confidence of someone who'd already mastered the charm and couldn't understand why others hadn't. "It's Levi-O-sa, not Levio-SA."
Ron's ears went red. He tried again. The feather rose — wobbly, imperfect, but airborne. Flitwick cheered. Ron's expression was complicated: relief and resentment and the particular frustration of being corrected by someone who was always, always right.
After class, in the corridor, Ron walked beside Harry with the stiff posture of wounded pride. Matt was close enough to hear — close enough that he could have intervened, could have changed the subject, could have done something —
"She's a nightmare, honestly," Ron said. "No wonder no one can stand her."
The words carried. Stone corridors and high ceilings — the castle amplified sound the way amphitheatres did, turning whispers into announcements. Hermione had been four steps behind them.
She pushed past. Fast. Head down, bag clutched against her chest, and Matt caught the flash of her face as she went — eyes bright, mouth pressed tight, the expression of someone holding themselves together by force of will and losing.
Ron watched her go. Something crossed his face — a flicker, quickly buried — but he said nothing.
Harry said nothing.
Matt said nothing. And hated himself for it.
Intervening changes the timeline. Ron's comment drives Hermione to the bathroom. The bathroom is where the troll finds her. The troll is where Ron uses the levitation charm to save her life. That moment — Ron saving Hermione — is what makes them friends. What makes them family.
He clenched his fists in his pockets and let her walk away.
But I'll be there tonight. I'll be there before the troll is.
The afternoon was the longest of Matt's two lives.
Parvati Patil mentioned at the Gryffindor table during a passing corridor conversation that Hermione had been crying in the girls' bathroom on the first floor and didn't want to be disturbed. Harry looked uncomfortable. Ron looked at his shoes.
Matt checked on Luna during his free period — the Mooncalf was recovering well, Hagrid reporting that she'd started dancing in small circles during the previous night's half-moon. The bandage had come off. The leg was healing clean.
He scratched behind her ears and tried not to think about the clock.
---
Great Hall — 7:45 PM
The Halloween feast was extraordinary. The floating pumpkins had been enhanced with charm-light — orange, purple, gold — and the usual candles were replaced with dancing flames that changed colour every few minutes. The food was themed: pumpkin pasties, cauldron cakes, toffee apples, roast everything. A skeleton orchestra played in the corner, which was either a very complex charm or a very committed performance.
Matt sat at the Ravenclaw table with a plate of food he didn't touch.
Hermione's seat at the Gryffindor table was empty.
He'd positioned himself with a clear sightline to the Great Hall doors. Whisper was in Ravenclaw Tower — he'd left her there deliberately. If things went wrong tonight, he didn't want her near a mountain troll. Twig clung to his hair under his hood, anxious, reading Matt's stress through the bond and vibrating with sympathetic tension.
Harry and Ron were at the Gryffindor table. Ron was eating — of course he was eating — but his enthusiasm was muted. Harry kept glancing at Hermione's empty chair.
"You're not eating," Terry observed.
"Stomach ache."
"You had a stomach ache at breakfast too."
"It's a persistent stomach ache."
Terry studied him with the particular intelligence of a Ravenclaw who could tell when someone was lying and was deciding whether to push. He didn't push. Matt was grateful.
The clock on the wall read seven fifty-eight. Eight o'clock. Eight-oh-five.
The doors burst open.
Quirrell sprinted into the Great Hall with his turban askew and terror on his face — real terror, or performed terror so convincing that the difference was academic. He reached the High Table, grabbed the edge, and gasped the words that Matt had been waiting four months to hear:
"TROLL — IN THE DUNGEONS — thought you ought to know —"
He crumpled to the floor.
The Great Hall erupted. Screaming. Students standing on benches. Food knocked sideways. The noise was enormous — five hundred voices hitting panic at once.
Dumbledore stood. "SILENCE!"
The Hall went quiet. Dumbledore's voice carried the particular authority of someone who could silence a hurricane by asking politely.
"Prefects, lead your houses back to your dormitories immediately. Teachers, follow me to the dungeons."
Movement. Chaos becoming order — students streaming toward exits, prefects calling instructions, the organised evacuation of a building that had just been told it contained a very large, very stupid killing machine.
Matt didn't follow the Ravenclaws.
He slipped sideways — behind a column, past a cluster of panicking Hufflepuffs, through a side door that he'd identified three weeks ago during his corridor mapping. The passage led to a service corridor, which connected to the main first-floor hallway, which led to the girls' bathroom where Hermione Granger was sitting alone with no idea what was coming.
He ran.
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