Chapter 21 : The Bathroom Door
First-Floor Corridor — October 31, 1991, 8:09 PM
The corridor was empty. Everyone was moving upward — to dormitories, to safety — and Matt was moving against the current, downstream toward danger, his shoes slapping stone with a rhythm that sounded too loud in the evacuated silence.
His lungs were burning by the second turn. Eleven-year-old lungs in an eleven-year-old body, and the distance from the Great Hall to the first-floor bathroom was three corridors, two staircases, and a stretch of hallway that seemed to extend with every step.
Twig gripped his hair so tight it hurt. Through the bond: pure, crystallised terror. The Bowtruckle understood predators — had spent his entire existence in a tree avoiding things with teeth — and whatever was loose in the castle registered in the creature bond network like a pressure drop before a storm.
Matt rounded the final staircase. The first-floor corridor stretched ahead, torchlit, stone, empty.
Not empty.
The smell hit first. Rancid — old socks and blocked drains and something organic and rotten that coated the back of his throat. Then the sound: footsteps. Not human footsteps. The slow, dragging impact of something enormous moving on legs that were too short for its body, each step sending vibrations through the floor that Matt's shoes.
The troll came around the far corner.
[CREATURE DETECTED: MOUNTAIN TROLL. TIER 2. DANGER LEVEL: HIGH.]
[HOSTILE. INTELLIGENCE: MINIMAL. SENSORY PROFILE: POOR VISION, EXCELLENT SCENT TRACKING.]
It was twelve feet tall. Matt had read that number a hundred times across two lifetimes, but numbers on a page were abstractions — polite, contained, safely theoretical. The reality was a wall of grey-green flesh that filled the corridor from floor to near-ceiling, shoulders scraping stone on both sides. Its head was small and flat, the skull of something that had invested its evolutionary budget entirely in mass rather than cognition. In one hand it carried a wooden club the length of a grown man, dragging it along the floor with a grinding scrape that left gouges in the flagstone.
It was moving toward the bathroom.
Hermione was inside. Twenty feet ahead, the bathroom door — closed, lamplight visible through the gap at the bottom. She was in there. Crying, probably. Alone.
The troll hadn't noticed Matt yet. Its tiny eyes were fixed forward, following the scent of something — human, alive, close. Its nostrils flared. It took another step. The floor shook.
I'm eleven years old. I weigh six stone. My best offensive spell is Lumos. And there is a twelve-foot troll between me and that door.
His wand was in his hand. He didn't remember drawing it.
Think. Don't freeze. Think like a vet, not a hero. Animal behaviour. Stimulus-response. Trolls are stupid — profoundly, categorically stupid. They follow stimuli. Loud noise, bright light, movement. Redirect its attention. Give it something more interesting than the bathroom.
Matt pointed his wand at a suit of armour ten feet behind the troll — one of the decorative sets that lined every Hogwarts corridor, iron and empty and heavy.
"Flipendo!"
The Knockback Jinx was a second-year spell that Matt had practised in the Ravenclaw common room for precisely this scenario. It hit the suit of armour dead centre. The impact launched the breastplate off the stand with a crash that echoed through the corridor like a cannon — metal on stone, ringing, reverberating, enormous.
The troll stopped.
Its tiny head swivelled. The eyes — dull, confused, operating on a brain that processed one input at a time — found the source of the noise. The armour was clattering across the floor behind it, spinning on the flagstone, throwing sparks.
The troll turned. One hundred and eighty degrees, slow as a landslide, the club scraping a fresh groove in the wall. It lumbered toward the noise.
Matt moved.
He sprinted past the troll's flank — close enough to smell it, a hot wash of rot and animal musk that made his stomach heave — and reached the bathroom door. He grabbed the handle. Locked. His hand slipped. Grabbed again. Pulled.
The door didn't budge.
Locked. She locked it. Of course she locked it — she's been crying alone for hours, she doesn't want anyone —
"Alohomora!"
The lock clicked. He yanked the door open.
Hermione was at the far wall, pressed against the sinks, face blotched and tear-stained and terrified. Not crying anymore — the crashing armour had killed the tears — but frozen, the way prey animals froze when the world stopped making sense.
"HERMIONE! We need to go — NOW —"
"Matt? What — why are you —"
"TROLL. In the corridor. Move."
The word cut through. Troll. Hermione's eyes went wide. Her body unfroze. She grabbed her wand from the sink ledge and ran toward the door.
Behind them, the troll roared.
Matt's blood went cold. The sound was — not loud, exactly. Loud was insufficient. The roar was structural. It vibrated through the walls, through the floor, through Matt's ribcage, the sound of something enormous and angry realising it had been tricked. The distraction was over. The armour had stopped moving. And the troll could smell them.
It was coming back.
"This way —" Matt pulled Hermione left, away from the troll's approach, toward the far end of the corridor where a staircase led up to the second floor. If they could reach it before —
The troll rounded the corner ahead of them.
Wrong direction. It circled. It CIRCLED.
For a creature with minimal intelligence, the troll had displayed a terrifying amount of spatial awareness. It stood between them and the staircase, filling the corridor, club raised. Its eyes found them — two small shapes, two sources of scent, two things to hit.
Matt pushed Hermione behind him. His wand arm shook. His mind was cycling through options at a speed that felt like falling — Flipendo won't stop it, Lumos won't blind it for more than a second, I don't have the power to hurt something this big, I'm eleven, I'm SIX STONE, I'm going to —
"OI! PEA-BRAIN!"
The shout came from behind the troll. Ron Weasley, red-faced and wild-eyed and holding a length of pipe he'd grabbed from God knew where, standing at the corridor's far end with Harry Potter beside him.
Harry threw something — a broken brick from the collapsed armour stand — and it hit the troll in the back of the head with a sound like a melon dropped on concrete.
The troll bellowed. It swung around. The club swept the wall, shattering a torch bracket, spraying sparks.
"Matt! Get her out of there!" Harry yelled.
Matt grabbed Hermione's arm and pulled. They ran — back past the bathroom, back toward the open stretch of corridor, putting distance between themselves and the troll. Behind them, the sounds of Harry and Ron doing something incredibly brave and incredibly stupid: more thrown objects, more shouting, the troll lurching and swinging and missing because eleven-year-old boys were small and fast and hard to hit.
"HARRY, DUCK!" Ron's voice cracked on the word.
The troll swung. The club hit the wall where Harry's head had been a half-second ago. Stone exploded. Dust billowed.
Ron's club was on the floor. The troll had dropped it during a wild swing — the weight too much for even its massive grip when combined with the centrifugal force of the miss. The club lay on the flagstone, directly below the troll's raised arm.
"RON!" Matt shouted. "The club! LEVITATE THE CLUB!"
Ron looked at the club. Looked at his wand. Looked at the troll.
His wand came up. His arm made the motion — the swish, the flick, the exact movement Hermione had corrected him on twelve hours ago.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
The club rose. Twelve feet, straight up, wobbling in Ron's magical grip, rising until it hung directly above the troll's flat skull.
Ron let go.
The club fell. The impact was seismic — a crack that Matt felt through the soles of his shoes. The troll's eyes crossed. Its knees buckled. Twelve feet and God knew how many stone of mountain troll collapsed forward, hit the floor, and didn't move.
Silence.
Dust settled. The corridor creaked. Somewhere above, a portrait screamed.
Matt's legs gave out. He sat down — just dropped, like someone had cut the strings — and his back hit the wall and his hands shook and he stared at the unconscious troll and breathed.
Hermione sat beside him. She was shaking too. Her face was white. Her wand was in her hand, though she hadn't cast a spell — the shock had been too fast, the troll too close, the entire event too far outside what any textbook could prepare you for.
Harry and Ron stood on the other side of the troll. Ron was still holding his wand up, arm extended, as though he'd forgotten how to lower it. Harry had dust in his hair and a scrape on his cheek and the particular expression of someone who'd just done something heroic and was now processing the fact that he could have died.
Footsteps. Running. Multiple.
McGonagall came around the corner first, followed by Snape and Quirrell. The Head of Gryffindor took in the scene — unconscious troll, four students, destruction — and her face cycled through emotions faster than Matt could catalogue: shock, fury, relief, fury again.
"What on earth were you thinking?" McGonagall's voice shook. "You could have been killed! Why aren't you in your dormitories?"
Hermione stepped forward.
"Please, Professor — they were looking for me."
Her voice was small but steady. The same voice that had recited Gamp's Law with surgical precision six days ago, now deployed for a different purpose. "I went looking for the troll because I thought I could handle it — I've read about them. Matt found me first and tried to get me out. Harry and Ron came after that."
It was a lie. A clean, deliberate, selfless lie — Hermione Granger, who worshipped rules and authority and the correct way of doing things, lying to a professor to protect three boys who'd risked their lives for her.
McGonagall studied them. Snape's dark eyes swept the corridor, lingering on the troll, then on Matt, then on the bathroom door. Quirrell leaned against the wall, theatrical in his distress, and Matt's Creature Sense — even suppressed, even in the aftermath of adrenaline — caught the cold overlay pulsing from the turban like a heartbeat.
"Five points from Gryffindor for your foolishness, Miss Granger," McGonagall said. Her voice had softened, fractionally. "As for you three — not many first-years could take on a full-grown mountain troll. Five points each to Gryffindor. Mr. Summon — five points to Ravenclaw, for bravery worthy of any house."
She turned and swept away. Snape lingered for a moment, his gaze sharp and calculating, before following. Quirrell stumbled after them, hand pressed to his turban.
The four of them stood in the wrecked corridor.
Hermione looked at Matt. Her eyes were red from crying, bright from adrenaline, and steadier than they had any right to be after what had just happened.
"You came looking for me," she said. "Before anyone else."
"You weren't at the feast." Matt's voice was rough. "Of course I noticed."
Something crossed Hermione's face — complicated, layered, the kind of expression that belonged on someone much older than eleven. She didn't speak. She filed it away.
Ron cleared his throat. His ears were crimson. His wand hand was still trembling. "Hermione — I'm sorry. About what I said. About —" He swallowed. "You're not a nightmare. You're —"
"Don't ruin it," Hermione said, and something in her voice cracked, and she smiled through it.
Harry grinned. Dusty, scraped, alive. "Can we go eat? I didn't get to finish dinner."
They walked back to the Great Hall together. Four abreast, because the corridor was wide enough and because after a troll, you didn't walk single file. You walked side by side, shoulder to shoulder, claiming the space you'd earned.
Matt's hands had stopped shaking by the time they reached the stairs. The lucky coin in Harry's pocket — the one Matt had charmed in the Manor workshop two summers ago, the one Harry touched like a talisman — had warmed against Harry's skin during the fight. Matt had felt it through the distance, a pulse of protective magic reaching for the boy it was bound to.
It hadn't needed to activate. Harry hadn't been hit. But it had tried.
Next time, Matt thought, it might have to.
The feast was still warm when they sat down. Ron loaded his plate. Harry ate everything in reach. Hermione sat between them and didn't correct Ron's table manners once. Neville, who'd been frantic with worry and had apparently tried to follow them before a prefect stopped him, hugged Matt so hard that Twig squeaked in protest from his hair.
Tomorrow, the whole school would know about the troll. Tomorrow, the questions would start — why was a Ravenclaw in the first-floor corridor, how did he know where to go, what was he doing away from his house group. Tomorrow, Snape would look at Matt with those dark, evaluating eyes, and Dumbledore would file another note in whatever mental dossier he was building.
But tonight, four first-years were eating together at the Gryffindor table, and nobody told Matt he was at the wrong one
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