Chapter 24 : The Name on the Card
Library — November 10, 1991, 4:45 PM
Harry's leg was bouncing.
It was his tell — the thing he did when information was pressing against the inside of his skull and needed somewhere to go. The same leg-bounce that had preceded "My scar hurt during Defence" and "McGonagall says I'm on the Quidditch team." Matt had catalogued Harry's tells the way he catalogued animal behaviours: involuntary, diagnostic, useful.
"Something happened," Matt said.
Harry looked left, then right. The library was mostly empty — mid-afternoon on a Monday, most students were in common rooms or on the grounds. Hermione was at the far end of the table, deep in a Transfiguration essay. Ron was absent, serving detention with Filch for cursing at a suit of armour that had tripped him. Neville was in the greenhouses.
"Last night," Harry said, voice low. "After the Quidditch match on Saturday — you know Snape was limping?"
Matt had noticed. Snape had been favouring his right leg since Halloween, a limp that he disguised with the billowing robes and the aggressive stride of a man who refused to acknowledge physical limitation. Most students hadn't registered it. Harry, whose survival instincts had been sharpened by a decade of reading his uncle's moods, had.
"I noticed."
"I went to the staff room to get my Quidditch Through the Ages back from Flitwick. The door was open. Snape was inside — with Filch. He had his trouser leg rolled up. Something had bitten him. Badly. Three gashes."
Three gashes. Three heads.
"And he said —" Harry leaned closer. "He said to Filch, 'How are you supposed to keep your eyes on all three heads at once?'"
Matt's pulse didn't change. His expression didn't shift. Five years of practising the blank face, of hiding what he knew behind what he could plausibly have learned.
"Three heads," Matt repeated.
"Three heads." Harry's green eyes were alight. "There's something on the third floor. Remember what Dumbledore said at the feast? 'The third-floor corridor is out of bounds to anyone who does not wish to die a most painful death.' And Snape's been going up there."
"You think Snape is after whatever's behind the three-headed guard dog."
Harry blinked. "How did you know it's a dog?"
Matt paused. Adjusted. "Three heads, guarding something, Hagrid's area of expertise — Cerberus is the most famous three-headed creature in mythology. And Hagrid would be the one to supply a guard creature for Dumbledore."
Harry considered this. "That... actually makes sense. When we visited Hagrid, he mentioned Fluffy, remember? Something between him and Dumbledore?"
"I remember." Matt leaned back in his chair, affecting the posture of someone working through a puzzle rather than someone confirming what he'd known since before he could walk in this body. "So there's a three-headed dog guarding something on the third floor. Snape's been injured by it, which means he tried to get past. The question is: what's it guarding?"
"That's what I want to find out."
From the far end of the table, Hermione's quill had stopped moving. She was listening — not looking up, not turning, but the particular quality of her stillness said I hear everything and I'm deciding whether to intervene.
"The package," Hermione said without raising her head. "From Gringotts."
Both boys looked at her. She set down her quill with the precise deliberation of someone who'd been holding this piece of information and waiting for the right moment to deploy it.
"When Hagrid took Harry to Diagon Alley," she continued, "he retrieved a small package from vault seven hundred and thirteen. He told Harry it was 'Hogwarts business.' That same day, someone tried to break into Gringotts — vault seven hundred and thirteen. The vault was already empty. It was in the Daily Prophet."
Harry's mouth opened. "I forgot about that."
"I didn't." Hermione finally looked up. "Something was moved from Gringotts to Hogwarts. Something valuable enough that someone broke into the most secure wizarding bank in the world to steal it. And now it's behind a three-headed dog on the third floor, and a professor is trying to reach it."
The three of them sat in the library's silence. Dust motes drifted through the window light. Madam Pince's quill scratched at the returns desk.
"We need to find out what it is," Harry said.
"We need to find out who owns it," Matt corrected. "Dumbledore wouldn't hide something at Hogwarts unless the owner asked him to. If we find the owner, we find the object."
Hermione nodded — the crisp, businesslike nod of someone being given a research assignment and finding the prospect thrilling. "Where do we start?"
Matt considered his options. He could give them Flamel's name right now — end the investigation before it began, save months of searching, jump straight to the conclusion. But the investigation mattered. Not for the answer, but for the process. Harry and Hermione and Ron needed to learn to work together, to research, to follow threads, to trust their own intelligence. Matt's meta-knowledge could solve problems, but it couldn't build the skills they'd need when he wasn't there.
Guided discovery. Breadcrumbs, not answers.
"Dumbledore," Matt said slowly. "What do we know about him? Not the Headmaster stuff — his other work. His research. His colleagues."
Hermione's eyes narrowed. "He's published extensively on Alchemy, Transfiguration, and the uses of dragon blood. His most famous collaboration was —" She stopped. The mental library was being searched, cards pulled and cross-referenced at a speed that would have impressed a professional researcher.
"I don't know," she admitted. "I know his twelve uses of dragon blood, but not his collaborators."
"Then that's where we start," Matt said. "Who did Dumbledore work with? What are they known for? What might they have that's worth hiding behind a Cerberus?"
Harry was watching him again — that quiet, steady look from the train compartment, from the feast, from every moment when Matt demonstrated knowledge or instinct that an eleven-year-old shouldn't have. But Harry didn't question it. He'd learned, over a year of friendship, that Matt knew things and those things kept people alive. The why could wait.
"I'll check the library," Hermione said, already standing. "Biographical references. Dumbledore's published works will have acknowledgments. If he collaborated with someone —"
"Check the Chocolate Frog cards too," Matt added. "Dumbledore's card mentions his notable achievements. It might list partners."
Hermione paused. Something flickered across her face — the memory of a Chocolate Frog card, the one Harry had opened on the Hogwarts Express, the one that listed Dumbledore's accomplishments in gold text on the back. The same card that mentioned —
"His work in alchemy," Hermione breathed. "With his partner —"
"Nicolas Flamel," Harry said.
Silence.
Matt blinked. He hadn't expected that — not yet, not this fast. Harry had remembered the Chocolate Frog card from the train. Two months ago, on the first journey to Hogwarts, he'd read Dumbledore's card and the name had stuck somewhere in the back of his mind, dormant until now.
"Nicolas Flamel," Hermione repeated. She was already moving, crossing to the library's biography section with the urgent stride of someone who'd caught a scent and intended to follow it to ground. "I've seen that name. I know I've seen that name — it's in —"
She disappeared between shelves. The sound of books being pulled and discarded — too fast, too rough, Madam Pince would have had an episode — echoed through the stacks.
Harry looked at Matt. "She's going to find it, isn't she?"
"She always does."
Three minutes. Hermione returned with a book — thick, leather-bound, gold lettering on the spine. She dropped it on the table, open to a page she'd marked with her thumb.
"Nicolas Flamel," she read, voice tight with the particular excitement of someone who'd solved a puzzle and was furious she hadn't solved it sooner. "The only known maker of the Philosopher's Stone. The Stone, which produces the Elixir of Life, has made its owner immortal. Mr. Flamel celebrated his six hundred and sixty-fifth birthday last year."
The library clock ticked. Harry and Hermione stared at each other across the open book with the expression of people who'd just discovered that the most valuable magical object in existence was hidden in their school, three floors up, behind a three-headed dog that belonged to the groundskeeper.
"The Philosopher's Stone," Harry said. "That's what Snape's after."
"That's what someone's after," Matt corrected. Careful. Always careful. Snape wasn't the enemy — Quirrell was — but Matt couldn't say that. Not yet. "We don't know it's Snape. We know he was bitten, which means he went to the third floor, but there could be reasons."
"He was protecting it?" Harry's tone was sceptical.
"Maybe. Or checking on it. Or investigating, like us. The point is — we don't have enough information to accuse anyone. We need to watch. All of us. Pay attention to who goes near that corridor, who acts strange, who seems interested in the Stone."
He met Hermione's eyes across the table. She was doing the thing — the analytical scan, the case-building, the slow assembly of facts into a picture. Her gaze held his for a long moment, and Matt saw the question forming behind her eyes: how did you know to ask about Dumbledore's colleagues? How do you always know the right question?
She didn't ask. Not today. The Stone was bigger than her suspicions about Matt, and Hermione Granger had always known how to prioritise.
"I'll research the Stone," she said. "Properties, protections, everything available in the library."
"I'll watch Snape," Harry said.
"Watch everyone," Matt said. "Not just Snape."
The library was darkening — November evenings came early, and the windows showed a sky that had gone from grey to ink. Madam Pince was lighting candles with a flick of her wand, each flame catching with a soft pop.
Matt gathered his books. In his pocket, Twig stirred — the Bowtruckle had been asleep for the entire conversation, curled against the warmth of Matt's body with the serene indifference of a creature whose priorities were wood, warmth, and woodlice, in that order. Through the bond, a faint pulse of contentment.
Harry was already making notes — names, dates, the vault number from the Prophet article. Hermione had the biography open on three different pages, cross-referencing. The investigation had begun.
The walk back to Ravenclaw Tower was cold. Matt's breath misted in the torchlit corridors. The castle was settling into its evening rhythms — portraits snoring, staircases shifting, the distant sounds of students heading to dormitories.
They found Flamel faster than canon. Hermione and Harry together, feeding off each other's memories, guided by one question I planted about Dumbledore's colleagues. The timeline is accelerating.
The eagle knocker's riddle tonight was simple: "I have keys but open no locks." Matt said "A piano" and the door swung wide.
In the common room, by the fire, Terry Boot was reading a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that Matt had loaned him. He looked up.
"Matt. There's a rumour going around that Snape tried to get past a three-headed dog."
"Where'd you hear that?"
"Hufflepuff grapevine. They know everything." Terry marked his page. "Is it true?"
"I honestly don't know," Matt said.
It was the first fully honest answer he'd given anyone in weeks, and it tasted like relief.
He sat beside the fire and pulled out his coded journal — the one written in veterinary shorthand, unreadable to anyone who didn't know canine dental notation. He turned to a fresh page and wrote three words:
Flamel. Found. Accelerating.
Then he closed the journal, stared at the fire, and started planning for Christmas.
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