"There be among the cunning folk of these islands those who did not merely study the dark,
but sought congress with it, believing the Veil betwixt kinds of being
to grow thin at the year's turning, and that what lay beyond
might be compelled to answer a sufficient offering."
Briggs, A. T., A Chronicle of Extraordinary Practices Among the Magical Communities of Britain,
Manuscript copy, Hogwarts restricted collection, circa 1587
I woke before the others.
The dormitory was fully dark, which meant nothing by itself since the Hufflepuff dormitories were underground and admitted no natural light at any hour. But the particular quality of the silence told me it was early, that heavy stillness that has not yet been broken by the first sounds of waking. I lay there for a moment, doing what I had trained myself to do in the months before Hogwarts: listening before moving. Running over what I knew about the day, what I expected from it, whether anything felt wrong.
Something did feel wrong, and I could not say what it was.
It was not fear exactly. More the kind of alertness that arrives before the reason for it does, a state my body had apparently entered while the rest of me was still catching up. I got up, dressed in the dark without a candle, and went out into the common room.
The common room was empty at this hour. The fire had burned down to coals that threw a faint orange glow across the ceiling and turned the rest of the room into varying degrees of dark. I set a log on the coals and waited until it caught, then sat in the chair nearest the hearth with my runes text.
The book did not hold my attention.
I read the same passage three times without taking it in, then set the book on my knee and looked at the fire instead. There was nothing wrong with the fire. There was nothing wrong with the room. The portraits on the walls were dark and still at this hour, the painted figures sleeping or merely absent, and the usual sounds of the castle at rest, the settling of stone, the distant drip of water from somewhere in the passage, the occasional creak that very old buildings made for no particular reason, were all present and accounted for.
I went back to my book and read until I heard the first sounds from the dormitory.
The Great Hall at breakfast was different in a way I registered before I had a name for it.
The hall was full. Most of the school was present. The food was laid out as usual along the long tables, bread and butter and oats and the small brown sausages that appeared most mornings, and the noise level was approximately what one would expect for this hour. And yet.
The portraits along the upper walls were quiet. Normally the painted figures moved between their frames throughout breakfast, visiting each other's canvases, conducting arguments that were audible from the tables if one sat near enough to the walls. That morning they sat or stood in their frames and watched the hall. All of them. The portrait of the elderly wizard above the Hufflepuff table, who on any other morning could be relied upon to be mid-dispute with the woman in the next frame over a point of medieval Latin, was simply watching the students eat.
Thomas noticed it after I did. I saw him look up at the portraits, then look at me.
I gave him a small shake of the head. Not the place.
Eleanor was watching the portraits too, though she said nothing. Margaret ate her bread with the focused attention she applied to anything that required her not to think about something else.
The owls that came in with the morning post entered from the high windows as usual, circled, delivered, and left. There were fewer of them than was typical. One of the large school owls came in and did not deliver anything. It landed on one of the high crossbeams and sat there for the rest of breakfast, watching the hall in the same way the portraits were watching it.
I ate my oats, which still had no salt in them and remained a test of character every morning, and told myself this amounted to nothing.
The walk to History of Magic took us through the north corridor on the second floor, past the row of windows looking out over the inner courtyard. We passed three students I did not recognize walking the opposite direction, which was not unusual. What was slightly unusual was that they were all looking at the floor, none of them speaking, and they did not acknowledge us as they passed. Students from other houses were not exactly sociable with first years they did not know, but they at least typically registered your presence.
Thomas watched them go. "Strange," he said.
"Just a mood," I said.
But I watched them until they turned the corner.
Professor Deverell began his lesson without preamble, as he always did.
He set his notes on the lectern, looked at the class in the way a man looks at a field he is about to work, and began.
"The thirty-first of October," he said, "is the date upon which, in the old reckoning of the magical communities of these islands, the year was held to turn. Not merely a date of agricultural significance, though it was that also. In the old wizarding tradition of Gaelic Britain and Ireland it was known as Samhain, the boundary between the living half of the year and the dead half. The practitioners of that tradition held, and there is evidence both theoretical and empirical to support the underlying observation, that the boundary between the physical world and whatever lies adjacent to it is thinner at this time of year than at any other."
He wrote the word on the board. Samhain.
"Within the broader community of magical peoples, response to this phenomenon varied considerably across the centuries. The majority treated it as a matter for caution: increased wards, specific protective charms placed on dwellings and livestock, avoidance of travel after dark in exposed locations. There are records from as early as the tenth century of wizarding settlements in Ireland and northern Britain barricading themselves behind layered protections for the full three days surrounding the date. Madam Pringle, if you would read from the passage I have indicated on page forty-three."
A Ravenclaw girl near the front opened her book and read. The passage described a report filed with what had then been the regional magical council of northern England in 1043, written by a wizard investigating the disappearance of a family from a farmstead near what was now Carlisle. The family, a wizard and his wife and their three children, had not been found. Their house showed no signs of forced entry and no signs of struggle. All their possessions were present. Their table was set for a meal that had not been eaten. The investigator noted that the disappearance had occurred on the thirty-first of October.
"It is the final line of that report that is relevant," Deverell said. "Read the final line."
The Ravenclaw girl found it. "'The circle of ash found in the field behind the dwelling, approximately forty paces in diameter, and the remnants of an unidentified fire at its center, were not present when the family's neighbors last visited the property some four days prior.'"
"Thank you," Deverell said. He did not comment on the passage. He moved on.
The next portion of the lecture covered the darker end of the historical record. There had existed among the magical communities of Britain, in the three centuries before the formation of the current oversight structures, a number of groups Deverell referred to only as practitioners of contact rites. They were not dark wizards in the conventional sense, though some were also that. They were something more specific: individuals or small communities who believed that the conventional limits of magical practice could be exceeded by appealing directly to whatever stood on the other side of the boundary that thinned at Samhain.
"The question of what these groups believed they were contacting is less settled than the historical record of their activities," Deverell said. "The records they themselves left, where they survive, use terms drawn from older traditions: beings of immense power, entities not governed by the laws of the created order, names that appear across cultures without obvious transmission between them. The question of what these entities actually were is not one this course will settle. What this course will address is what the practitioners did, and what the recorded outcomes were."
He turned to the second portion of his notes.
"The rites conducted by these groups followed patterns consistent across geography and century in ways that suggest either a common source, now lost, or a common discovery arrived at independently. The patterns are as follows. A defined space, typically circular, bounded by fire. A specific numerical arrangement of practitioners within or around that space. An offering, the nature of which became more severe in proportion to what the practitioner sought to obtain from the contact. A sustained invocation in a fixed form, repeated at intervals, the purpose of which appears to have been less communication than compulsion. And a focal object at the center of the space, typically one of some age, to which the offering was directed."
Nobody asked a question. Deverell noted the silence and continued.
"The outcomes recorded in wizarding investigative documents from this period include the following. Practitioners found dead within the circle with no identifiable cause. Practitioners found alive but in states that made further questioning impossible. Practitioners who were not found at all. Practitioners who were found in apparent good health and whose subsequent histories are significantly worse than the ones that preceded the rite. And, in a small number of cases, evidence consistent with something having come through."
He paused for exactly long enough to make the pause noticeable.
"What came through, in those cases, appears not to have been what the practitioners intended to summon," he said. "Or perhaps it was precisely that, and the practitioners had misjudged what such an entity would do when given access to the physical world. The records are not specific on this point." He closed his notes. "What they are specific on is that these rites were considered dangerous enough to warrant formal prohibition by every wizarding governing body that has existed on these islands since the fourteenth century. The prohibition exists to this day. It is worth knowing why."
He set his notes in his bag and told us to review chapters nine and eleven before Friday.
We filed out.
In the corridor, none of us said anything for a moment. Thomas was the first to speak, and he kept his voice low.
"Doth he believe it," he said. "What came through. Doth he believe that actually happened?"
"He described it the same way he describes everything," Eleanor said quietly.
"That is not an answer."
"I think that was the answer," Margaret replied. She adjusted her book under her arm and kept walking.
I walked with them and thought about the circle of ash forty paces across and the fire at its center, and the meal on the table that had not been eaten.
Herbology ran through the late morning. Professor Graves had us working in the third greenhouse, the one furthest from the castle, sorting and bundling dried specimens that had been hung from the ceiling for the past three weeks. The work required attention and produced a fine dust that sat in the throat. It was also quiet work, which left the mind to operate on its own.
The third greenhouse faced the outer wall and, through its southern window, a narrow view of the treeline beyond. I had looked through that window perhaps a dozen times over the course of previous sessions and seen nothing worth noting. That morning I looked through it once and saw a guard standing at the base of the outer wall, facing the trees, not moving. He stood there for the full length of time I had reason to look in that direction. When I looked again some minutes later he was gone, back to his circuit I assumed, or relieved by another. But the stillness of the way he had been standing was the stillness of a man looking at something he was not certain about.
I said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not be speculation.
At the midday meal I looked for Aldous Fenn and found him at the Ravenclaw table. He gave me a short nod when he saw me looking, the nod of someone who had noticed the same things I had noticed and was currently eating his bread and keeping his observations to himself, which was the correct approach.
The afternoon was Curses and Countercurses with Professor Crane. She entered the classroom with the unhurried manner she always had, set down her case, and stood at the front looking at us for long enough that the room settled itself without her having to ask.
"We will not be covering new material today," she said. "Today we will discuss a category of threat that does not yield to conventional countercurse work, because it does not originate from a conventional curse. I refer to what older texts call incursions: effects produced not by one wizard acting on another, but by something entering the physical world from elsewhere and acting on whatever it finds there."
The room had the quality of silence it sometimes got in this class, where no one moved unnecessarily.
"The countercurse framework assumes a caster," she continued. "You identify the spell, you identify its structure, you interrupt the connection between the structure and its target. This works because wizard magic follows rules. It originates from a soul. It has a pattern. It can be disrupted." She looked at the room. "An incursion does not work this way. It has no caster in the sense you understand. The standard countercurse framework does not apply. For this reason the appropriate response to an incursion is not defensive spellwork. It is removal from proximity, which is another way of saying: if you encounter something that does not respond to anything you know, leave."
Thomas put his hand up. "How doth one know the difference?"
"You do not, in the moment," Crane said. "This is why the instruction is leave. If you are wrong and it was a conventional curse, you have given ground unnecessarily. If you are right and it was not, you are alive to consider the matter further."
She moved the class on to practical review of shielding work. I worked through the exercises with the rest of them and stored what she had said in the same part of my mind where I had put Deverell's lecture, in the section reserved for things that were probably going to become relevant.
By late afternoon the sky had not changed since morning. If anything it had lowered further. Standing in the outer ward between the Curses classroom and the inner gate, I could see the cloud base was below the tops of the highest castle towers, which was unusual. It gave the castle above us a truncated quality, as though its upper portions had been consumed by the gray.
Sergeant Pryce was in the outer ward with two of his guards. He was not drilling them. He was talking to them in a low voice, pointing first to the forest edge and then to the gate and then to the wall walk above us. The guards listened and nodded. Pryce noticed us crossing the ward, held our gaze for a second, and returned to what he was saying. Whatever it was, it was not for us to hear. But seriously, this guy has a problem with that staring. A shiver runs through me, hopefully he's not into little boys… like me. Eh, probably nothing.
Thomas fell in beside me. "He hath been doing that all afternoon," he said. "I saw him from the window after the midday meal as well. Moving his men around."
"There's no telling why. Could just be new routes or something. No need to overthink it. Come on, let's go find the others," I responded as we made our way through the grounds.
The supper for All Hallows' Even was the largest meal I had eaten since arriving at Hogwarts.
The kitchens had produced roasted fowl and a haunch of something larger, dark bread and white, two kinds of broth, parsnips done in dripping, a savory tart that appeared once a week on good weeks and twice never on poor ones, and at the end of the table a dish of something spiced with dried fruits that the older students descended on with enough urgency to tell me it was worth investigating. I do have to give it to the British, they really know how to make tarts. It was pretty similar to the kolaches I had in my previous world, the fruit preserves were made really well. They used a fruit base sugar for the crust, but that added a bit of flavor to it.
The hall was lit with more candles than usual, set thick along the table and in the iron brackets on the walls. The combined heat and light of them made the hall feel insulated from whatever was outside it, and that was probably the point. I noticed the older students were louder than usual at supper, which I supposed was due to it being Halloween and these were the medieval wizards so there was a bit more religious or cultural significance that hadn't been diminished like in the Harry Potter canon. In canon, Christianity was so widespread that even the wizarding world took on their holidays. I suspect the increase in muggle population, and muggleborn with it, was the root cause, but I'm sure old Dumbledore had a hand in it as well. Of course, that's just my guess and a pretty good one I reckon.
We made small talk at the end of the House table maybe add something in here or end it right here.
The common room that evening was fuller than I had ever seen it.
Normally after supper the upper years dispersed to studies, to their dormitories, to whatever business filled their time. That night they came to the common room and stayed. By eight in the evening the room held perhaps thirty students, from first years to seventh, ranged around the fire in layers from the front chairs to the benches at the back, sitting on the floor where the benches ran out. Someone had brought in three extra oil lamps from somewhere and set them on the mantelpiece. The fire was built high. The smell of the dried herb bundles someone always put in around this time of year drifted through the smoke.
It was tradition, one of the seventh years explained to no one in particular. On All Hallows' Even the house gathered. It had been done for as long as anyone could remember, probably for as long as the house had existed.
I found a place on the bench along the left wall, the four of us together, close enough to the fire to be warm. Around us were faces I knew from passing and meals, and a few I did not recognize, older students whose dormitories were further from the common areas and who had no reason to cross our paths in the ordinary run of the week.
The evening began with the older students telling what they called proper stories: things that had happened here, or to someone they knew, or to someone a cousin had known. A fifth year named Harwick told a story about a passage in the north wing that did not appear on any map he had ever seen, and which he had entered once and found himself walking for three minutes before emerging from a door on the south side of the castle, which by his reckoning would have required him to pass directly through solid rock. A seventh year girl told a quieter story about a student, some years past, who had gone into the Forbidden Forest on a dare and come out the following morning with no memory of having done so, and who thereafter seemed to know when things were going to happen a day before they did.
A third year boy near the front asked if anyone knew the story of the locked room in the east tower. A second year girl immediately said she had heard it was the room where something had been summoned in the fifteen hundreds and the door had not been opened since because it had not gone back. The third year said no, that was a different room, the one he meant was higher and had a different history. They argued this quietly for a minute while the room listened, and the argument itself became part of the evening entertainment.
At some point, as the fire had burned lower and had been built back up and the room had settled into the particular warmth that a large group of people in a stone room generates between them, one of the older students, a broad-shouldered sixth year named Pemberton who I had not spoken to before, looked across the room at me.
"Thou art the one from the other place," he said. Not unfriendly, just a bit of cultural ignorance or racism against the non-magical worlds. But to give them some credit, in this day and age, the magicals lived very differently and had vastly superior conditions to the muggles, I can understand why they might think themselves a superior race. It would be the equivalent of 21st century America being compared to tribal groups in the Amazon. Still doesn't excuse the rather rude and insensitive description of my birthplace.
"Yes."
"Then thou dost know tales we have not heard. Things from a time and place none of us can know."
I thought about it. There was a particular kind of story suited to this kind of evening, not ghost stories as the seventeenth century understood them, not moralizing tales or strange accounts of real events, but the kind that worked on something more fundamental. I knew several. I had chosen the right one when I thought about what would land with people who had been raised to believe in things that could not be seen and who were sitting in a room that was, whatever the fire and the candles suggested, deep in an old Scottish castle on a night when the year turned. And so I decided on an old story from my earlier years, The Juniper Tree.
"I'll tell you one," I said.
The room settled.
I waited until it was fully quiet.
It is now long ago, quite two thousand years, since there was
a rich man who had a beautiful and pious wife, and they loved
each other dearly. They had, however, no children, though they
wished for them very much, and the woman prayed for them day
and night, but still they had none. Now there was a court-yard
in front of their house in which was a juniper tree, and one day
in winter the woman was standing beneath it, paring herself an
apple, and while she was paring herself the apple she cut her
finger, and the blood fell on the snow. Ah, said the woman,
and sighed right heavily, and looked at the blood before her, and
was most unhappy, ah, if I had but a child as red as blood and
as white as snow. And while she thus spoke, she became quite
happy in her mind, and felt just as if that were going to happen.
Then she went into the house and a month went by and the snow
was gone, and two months, and then everything was green, and three
months, and then all the flowers came out of the earth, and four
months, and then all the trees in the wood grew thicker, and the
green branches were all closely entwined, and the birds sang
until the wood resounded and the blossoms fell from the trees,
then the fifth month passed away and she stood under the juniper
tree, which smelt so sweetly that her heart leapt, and she fell
on her knees and was beside herself with joy, and when the sixth
month was over the fruit was large and fine, and then she was
quite still, and the seventh month she snatched at the
juniper-berries and ate them greedily, then she grew sick and
sorrowful, then the eighth month passed, and she called her
husband to her, and wept and said, if I die then bury me
beneath the juniper tree. Then she was quite comforted and
happy until the next month was over, and then she had a child
as white as snow and as red as blood, and when she beheld it
she was so delighted that she died.
Then her husband buried her beneath the juniper tree, and he
began to weep sore, after some time he was more at ease, and
though he still wept he could bear it, and after some time
longer he took another wife.
By the second wife he had a daughter, but the first wife's child
was a little son, and he was as red as blood and as white as snow.
When the woman looked at her daughter she loved her very much,
but then she looked at the little boy and it seemed to cut her
to the heart, for the thought came into her mind that he would
always stand in her way, and she was for ever thinking how she
could get all the fortune for her daughter, and the evil one filled
her mind with this till she was quite wroth with the little boy
and she pushed him from one corner to the other and slapped him
here and cuffed him there, until the poor child was in continual
terror, for when he came out of school he had no peace in any
place.
One day the woman had gone upstairs to her room, and her little
daughter went up too, and said, mother, give me an apple. Yes,
my child, said the woman, and gave her a fine apple out of the
chest, but the chest had a great heavy lid with a great sharp
iron lock. Mother, said the little daughter, is brother not
to have one too. This made the woman angry, but she said, yes,
when he comes out of school. And when she saw from the window
that he was coming, it was just as if the devil entered into her,
and she snatched at the apple and took it away again from her
daughter, and said, you shall not have one before your brother.
Then she threw the apple into the chest, and shut it. Then the
little boy came in at the door, and the devil made her say to
him kindly, my son, will you have an apple. And she looked wickedly
at him. Mother, said the little boy, how dreadful you look.
Yes, give me an apple. Then it seemed to her as if she were
forced to say to him, come with me, and she opened the lid
of the chest and said, take out an apple for yourself, and
while the little boy was stooping inside, the devil prompted
her, and crash. She shut the lid down, and his head flew off and
fell among the red apples. Then she was overwhelmed with
terror, and thought, if I could but make them think that it
was not done by me. So she went upstairs to her room to her
chest of drawers, and took a white handkerchief out of the top
drawer, and set the head on the neck again, and folded the
handkerchief so that nothing could be seen, and she set him
on a chair in front of the door, and put the apple in his hand.
After this Marlinchen came into the kitchen to her mother,
who was standing by the fire with a pan of hot water before her
which she was constantly stirring round. "Mother," said Marlinchen,
"brother is sitting at the door, and he looks quite white and
has an apple in his hand. I asked him to give me the apple,
but he did not answer me, and I was quite frightened." "Go back
to him," said her mother, "and if he will not answer you, give him
a box on the ear." So Marlinchen went to him and said, "Brother,
give me the apple." But he was silent, and she gave him a box
on the ear, whereupon his head fell off. Marlinchen was terrified,
and began crying and screaming, and ran to her mother, and said,
"Alas, mother, I have knocked my brother's head off," and she wept
and wept and could not be comforted. "Marlinchen," said the mother,
what have you done, but be quiet and let no one know it, it
cannot be helped now, we will make him into black-puddings."
Then the mother took the little boy and chopped him in pieces,
put him into the pan and made him into black puddings, but
Marlinchen stood by weeping and weeping, and all her tears fell
into the pan and there was no need of any salt.
Then the father came home, and sat down to dinner and said,
"But where is my son?" And the mother served up a great dish of
black-puddings, and Marlinchen wept and could not leave off.
Then the father again said, "But where is my son?" "Ah," said the
mother, "he has gone across the coutry to his mother's great
uncle, he will stay there awhile." "And what is he going to do
there? He did not even say good-bye to me."
"Oh, he wanted to go, and asked me if he might stay six weeks,
he is well taken care of there." "Ah," said the man, "I feel so
unhappy lest all should not be right. He ought to have said
good-bye to me." With that he began to eat and said, "Marlinchen,
why are you crying? Your brother will certainly come back."
Then he said, "Ah, wife, how delicious this food is, give me
some more." And the more he ate the more he wanted to have,
and he said, "Give me some more, you shall have none of it.
It seems to me as if it were all mine." And he ate and ate and
threw all the bones under the table, until he had finished
the whole. But Marlinchen went away to her chest of drawers,
and took her best silk handkerchief out of the bottom draw,
and got all the bones from beneath the table, and tied them up in
her silk handkerchief, and carried them outside the door,
weeping tears of blood. Then she lay down under the juniper
tree on the green grass, and after she had lain down there, she
suddenly felt light-hearted and did not cry any more. Then
the juniper tree began to stir itself, and the branches parted
asunder, and moved together again, just as if someone were
rejoicing and clapping his hands. At the same time a mist seemed
to arise from the tree, and in the center of this mist it burned
like a fire, and a beautiful bird flew out of the fire singing
magnificently, and he flew high up in the air, and when he was gone,
the juniper tree was just as it had been before, and the
handkerchief with the bones was no longer there. Marlinchen,
however, was as gay and happy as if her brother were still alive.
And she went merrily into the house, and sat down to dinner and
ate.
But the bird flew away and lighted on a goldsmith's house, and
began to sing -
my mother she killed me,
my father he ate me,
my sister, little marlinchen,
gathered together all my bones,
tied them in a silken handkerchief,
laid them beneath the juniper tree,
kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I.
The goldsmith was sitting in his workshop making a golden chain,
when he heard the bird which was sitting singing on his roof,
and very beautiful the song seemed to him. He stood up, but
as he crossed the threshold he lost one of his slippers.
But he went away right up the middle of the street with one
shoe on and one sock, he had his apron on, and in one hand he
had the golden chain and in the other the pincers, and the sun was
shining brightly on the street. Then he went right on and stood
still, and said to the bird, "Bird," said he then, "how beautifully
you can sing. Sing me that piece again." "No," said the bird,
"I'll not sing it twice for nothing. Give me the golden chain,
and then I will sing it again for you." "There," said the goldsmith,
"there is the golden chain for you, now sing me that song again."
Then the bird came and took the golden chain in his right claw,
and went and sat in front of the goldsmith, and sang -
my mother she killed me,
my father he ate me,
my sister, little marlinchen,
gathered together all my bones,
tied them in a silken handkerchief,
laid them beneath the juniper tree,
kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I.
Then the bird flew away to a shoemaker, and lighted on his
roof and sang -
my mother she killed me,
my father he ate me,
my sister, little marlinchen,
gathered together all my bones,
tied them in a silken handkerchief,
laid them beneath the juniper tree,
kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I.
The shoemaker heard that and ran out of doors in his shirt sleeves,
and looked up at his roof, and was forced to hold his hand before
his eyes lest the sun should blind him. "Bird," said he, "how
beautifully you can sing." Then he called in at his door,
"Wife, just come outside, there is a bird, look at that bird, he
certainly can sing." Then he called his daughter and children,
and apprentices, boys and girls, and they all came up the
street and looked at the bird and saw how beautiful he was, and
what fine red and green feathers he had, and how like real gold
his neck was, and how the eyes in his head shone like stars. "Bird,"
said the shoemaker, "now sing me that song again." "Nay," said the
bird, "I do not sing twice for nothing, you must give me something."
"Wife," said the man, "go to the garret, upon the top shelf there
stands a pair of red shoes, bring them down." Then the wife
went and brought the shoes. "There, bird," said the man, "now
sing me that piece again." Then the bird came and took the shoes
in his left claw, and flew back on the roof, and sang -
my mother she killed me,
my father he ate me,
my sister, little Marlinchen,
gathered together all my bones,
tied them in a silken handkerchief,
laid them beneath the juniper tree,
kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I.
and when he had finished his song he flew away. In his right
claw he had the chain and in his left the shoes, and he flew far
away to a mill, and the mill went, klipp klapp, klipp klapp,
klipp klapp, and in the mill sat twenty miller's men hewing a
stone, and cutting, hick hack, hick hack, hick hack, and the mill
went klipp klapp, klipp klapp'klipp klapp. Then the bird went
and sat on a lime-tree which stood in front of the mill, and
sang -
my mother she killed me,
then one of them stopped working,
my father he ate me,
then two more stopped working and listened to that,
my sister, little Marlinchen,
then four more stopped,
gathered together all my bones,
tied them in a silken handkerchief,
now eight only were hewing,
laid them beneath,
now only five,
the juniper tree,
and now only one,
kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I.
Then the last stopped also, and heard the last words. "Bird,"
said he, "how beautifully you sing. Let me, too, hear that.
Sing that once more for me."
"Nay," said the bird, "I will not sing twice for nothing. Give me
the millstone, and then I will sing it again."
"Yes," said he, "if it belonged to me only, you should have it."
"Yes," said the others, "if he sings again he shall have it." Then
the bird came down, and the twenty millers all set to work with a
beam and raised the stone up. And the bird stuck his neck
through the hole, and put the stone on as if it were a collar,
and flew on to the tree again, and sang -
my mother she killed me,
my father he ate me,
my sister, little Marlinchen,
gathered together all my bones,
tied them in a silken handkerchief,
laid them beneath the juniper tree,
kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I.
And when he had done singing, he spread his wings, and in his
right claw he had the chain, and in his left the shoes, and
round his neck the millstone, and he flew far away to his father's
house.
In the room sat the father, the mother, and Marlinchen at dinner,
and the father said, "How light-hearted I feel, how happy I am."
"Nay," said the mother, "I feel so uneasy, just as if a heavy
storm were coming." Marlinchen, however, sat weeping and weeping,
and then came the bird flying, and as it seated itself on the
roof the father said, "Ah, I feel so truly happy, and the sun is
shining so beautifully outside, I feel just as if I were about
to see some old friend again." "Nay," said the woman, "I feel so
anxious, my teeth chatter, and I seem to have fire in my veins."
And she tore her stays open, but Marlinchen sat in a corner crying,
and held her plate before her eyes and cried till it was quite
wet. Then the bird sat on the juniper tree, and sang -
my mother she killed me,
then the mother stopped her ears, and shut her eyes, and would
not see or hear, but there was a roaring in her ears like the
most violent storm, and her eyes burnt and flashed like
lightning -
my father he ate me,
"Ah, mother," says the man, "that is a beautiful bird. He sings so
splendidly, and the sun shines so warm, and there is a smell just
like cinnamon."
My sister, little Marlinchen,
then Marlinchen laid her head on her knees and wept without
ceasing, but the man said, "I am going out, I must see the bird
quite close." "Oh, don't go," said the woman, "I feel as if the
whole house were shaking and on fire." But the man went out and
looked at the bird.
gathered together all my bones,
tied them in a silken handkerchief,
laid them beneath the juniper tree,
kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I
on this the bird let the golden chain fall, and it fell exactly
round the man's neck, and so exactly round it that it fitted
beautifully. Then he went in and said, "just look what a fine bird
that is, and what a handsome golden chain he has given me, and how
pretty he is." But the woman was terrified, and fell down on
the floor in the room, and her cap fell off her head. Then sang
the bird once more -
my mother she killed me.
"Would that I were a thousand feet beneath the earth so as not
to hear that."
My father he ate me,
then the woman fell down again as if dead.
My sister, little marlinchen,
"Ah," said Marlinchen, "I too will go out and see if the bird will
give me anything," and she went out.
Gathered together all my bones,
tied them in a silken handkerchief,
then he threw down the shoes to her.
Laid them beneath the juniper tree,
kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I.
Then she was light-hearted and joyous, and she put on the new red
shoes, and danced and leaped into the house. "Ah," said she, "I
was so sad when I went out and now I am so light-hearted, that
is a splendid bird, he has given me a pair of red shoes." "Well,"
said the woman, and sprang to her feet and her hair stood up
like flames of fire, "I feel as if the world were coming to an end.
I too, will go out and see if my heart feels lighter." And as
she went out at the door, crash. The bird threw down the millstone
on her head, and she was entirely crushed by it.
The father and Marlinchen heard what had happened and went out, and smoke,
flames, and fire were rising from the place, and when that was
over, there stood the little brother, and he took his father and
Marlinchen by the hand, and all three were right glad, and they
went into the house to dinner, and ate.
(A/N: credit for the story goes to the Brothers Grimm who collected over 200 such tales, like Hansel & Gretel, etc. in the 19th cuentury)
The room went silent for a minute or two before it broke out into whispers, some people pretty thrilled by such a story, unlike anything they'd heard before.
Eleanor leaned toward me and said, in a low voice, "Where did that come from?"
"It's a muggle story, an old wive's tale I heard before," I said.
"Are there worse ones?"
"Oh yes, this was actually pretty mild. At least it had a nice ending."
She considered this. "I am satisfied with that one for the present."
The room stayed animated for a while after, with the particular energy that comes from a story doing the work it was designed to do. Pemberton caught my eye and gave a short nod that I understood as acknowledgment. The older students picked the story apart in the way people do when they want to reason their way back from a sensation they do not like, arguing about what could have been meant, what the ending implied, whether the man was the man. The arguing helped.
By nine in the evening the room had thinned to about a dozen of the older students, still talking, their voices lower now. The first years had mostly gone to bed. Our group stayed a little past the rest, and then Thomas and Eleanor went up together, leaving Margaret and me at the edge of the fire.
She had said almost nothing since the story. She had her book open, but she had not read it. The cover was face-up and she was looking at the back of it, which did not contain text.
"It is a story," I said.
"I know it is a story," she replied. "That is not what I am thinking about."
I did not ask what she was thinking about. Lord knows what the female mind thinks of, much less how to understand it; I wrote that off years ago. Plus, there's no way I'm buying that given how she's behaved thus far. Women say one thing but think another, and I guess it applies to girls as well. At least a guy will tell you what he thinks, but I digress.
After a time she gathered her things and said goodnight, and I went to bed.
*knock knock* Someone was lightly knocking on our bedroom dorm. I was still up, reading an intriguing section on how to combine runes into a runic scheme, like a computer function in application. The knock drew me from my book and I looked up across the dim room. Thomas had drawn his curtain around his bed as he hit the hay for the night. I placed the book upside down to keep my page and got up, walking over to the door.
Slowly, trying my best to be quiet for my sleeping roommate, I twisted the know and opened the door, only to be greeted by Margaret who stood in the passage with a tallow candle shielded by her hand, in her plain nightclothes consisting of white stocks and a white dress which went below the knees, her cloak over one arm.
"Hey, Margaret. What's up?"
She took a second, raised her head, and scrunched her eyebrows answering, "The ceiling?"
"That's not what I meant. What's up is another way to say, what's going on or what can I do for you?"
"Oh, I cannot sleep. Your story is keeping me up and I cannot fall asleep in the dark."
"Ah, I see. That's my bad. I won't tell such a gruesome story next time. Where do you want to go?"
"I do not care. Somewhere that is not that room," she said a little pouty. I forget these children are exactly that, children who can still get scared from a story, especially little girls.
I took my cloak from the hook and followed her into the passage.
The common room was empty. The fire had been banked down to coals. The oil lamps the older students had brought in were cold and dark on the mantelpiece. The room had shed the warmth and noise of the evening and returned to what it always was when no one was in it: stone and shadow and the low sound of the building around it.
"We could sit in one of the chairs or couches or would you rather go for a walk before the tenth bell rings?"
"Let's walk for a bit"
With that, we went up through the passage and into the castle proper.
The corridors at this hour were lit by the guttered-down torches that burned through the night, giving enough light to navigate by and not much more. The portraits were dark, the painted figures absent or still, their pigmented figures sleeping and in the case of one rather large man, snoring loud enough to echo through the halls. The sun had already set and the moon was high in the sky, bright and full, but now the overcast cloud coverage and low altitude fog was back with a vengeance and light by a candle was all we had.
We had no destination, just walking to walk really. We kept to the covered passageways on the inner side of the castle and moved at the speed of people who are not going anywhere in particular, our steps in rhythm. As I noticed this it made me idly wonder about how crowds of people subconsciously match steps with others. There was a bridge I had remembered learning about where people walked in sync at just the right pace that the frequency resonated with the bridge so that it started swaying. Even when running away, the people hadn't realized that if they ran out of sync on purpose, the bridge would have naturally stopped. The bridge was in Europe if I recall correctly, but I couldn't remember the name for the life of me.
We had been walking for perhaps twelve minutes when we passed the window.
It faced south-west, a broad window in a corridor I had not had reason to use before today, looking over the outer ward and past the curtain wall toward the hillside and the forest below. The torches on the wall walk were visible from here as small orange points. Beyond the wall the slope fell away in darkness, and beyond the slope the forest began, its treeline a dense black edge.
And beyond the treeline, not deep in the trees but at their very margin, there was light.
Margaret stopped.
The light was not torch-light in the way of a man carrying a torch. It was multiple sources, small and close to the ground, arranged in a pattern that even at this distance resolved as a circle. The spacing between them was too regular to be accidental. Within the circle something larger burned: a fire, high enough to throw orange-yellow against the nearest trunks of the trees and set them moving as the light moved.
"What is that?" Margaret asked, rhetorically I hope because I ain't got a clue.
"I do not know but surely we head back and not venture out into the the dark where-," I was saying before realizing she had already started sneaking forward. "Hey," I whispered rather loudly, "where are you going?"
"The wall walk," she said. Oh this little insufferable smart alek. Wait 'til I get my hands on you.
We moved as silently as we could, only moving forward at a snail's pace, my feet sliding forward as the candle had been extinguished by the wind. "Silencio silencio," I whispered softly, casting one on each of us. She turned and tried to speak but realized she couldn't. I started to tell her why but realized the spell not only silenced our steps and breathing but our voices as well. I facepalmed hard, leaving a bright red spot. Dadgummit, I'm freaking retarded. How am I going to cast without speech! I haven't learned silent casting yet. Should've tried learning the muffliato but that'll have to be done later. No use crying over spilled milk as the saying goes.
The stair tower was where I remembered it from our first Sunday on the grounds: the small door at the base, unlocked, and the tight spiral of worn stone rising into the dark above. I went first this time, the candle in my hand throwing a circle of light up the curve of the wall, Margaret's hand on the corner of my cloak as we made our way into the dark room. I could only move by touch, one hand grabbing onto Margaret to guide her up and the other against the wall, my feet slowly stepping up, making sure where each step was.
The hatch at the top opened onto the wall walk, and the night air came in immediately. The temperature on the walk was a full measure below what it had been in the passages below. The cloud cover had, if anything, thickened since I had last seen the sky and the torches along the wall walk burned with the slightly flattened quality torches produced in still air. The moon could barely be made out in the slightest of cracks in the overcast sky.
We moved to the outer parapet.
The view from the wall walk was the one I had fixed in memory: the outer ward below, the curtain wall curving with the natural contours of the hillside, and beyond it the slope and then the forest. From this height and angle the circle of lights below was fully visible, and the fire at its center was large. I really hope it's just for making 'smores but as my eyesight adjusted and the fog moved, I could make it out..
There were torches planted into the ground forming the outer ring. Fourteen of them, set at intervals around a circle I estimated at fifty feet across, perhaps more. Within the ring, at intervals between the torches, figures. Cloaked and cowled, no face visible, no detail of person. They were not moving. They stood with the stillness of people who were waiting, or of people who were already doing something that did not require visible motion. It was eerily reminiscent of Narnia's hag who was trying to resurrect the white witch, but mixed with more satanic vibes such as the pentagram drawn on the ground with what I hope is paint.
At the center of the ring, on the side furthest from where we stood, was something I had to look at for several seconds before I understood its shape.
It was large. Four or five feet, mounted on a stone base that raised it another foot from the ground. Dark metal, the surface catching the firelight in the way that cast iron or brass does, returning it slightly warmer than it received it. The shape was not a human shape, though it was roughly human in its proportions. Its arms were extended outward from its body at a downward angle, the angle of outstretched hands cupped to receive something, or the angle of something prepared to drop what it held into the fire burning at its base. These freaks had put together a frankenstein amalgamation of magical creatures, and the rest of their bodies and bits were in the red 'paint' and sticking out of the central bonfire.
One of the cloaked figures separated from the ring and moved to the center of the space, near the fire. The others shifted, not moving from their positions but inclining forward, the posture of people directing their attention to a fixed point. The figure at the center raised both arms above its head, and began.
The sound reached us on the still air. I could not have said what language it was, or whether it was a language at all in any conventional sense. It had the structure of speech, the rising and falling of deliberate utterance, but the sounds that constituted it were not sounds I had heard arranged in that way. Guttural and low and rhythmic, with a fixed pattern of emphasis that repeated at intervals, the same sequence returned and returned.
After a time the other figures joined it. Their voices added a set of fixed responses, short phrases that followed each line of the central chant, call and answer. The combination of voices was not loud but it was present and it carried up the hillside with the clarity of sound on still air.
Beside me I heard Margaret draw a slow breath. Crap, the spell wore off. I grab her hand and, though I am a Baptist, I start chanting scripture as though I were a devout priest preparing to exorcise demons, which to be fair, the way things were progressing, it wasn't an impossibility.
Two of the figures broke from the ring and moved to where a shape lay on the ground outside the circle. They bent and lifted it between them and carried it forward into the firelight. It was an animal, large enough to require two people to manage, a goat by its shape, bound at the legs and alive. I could tell it was alive because it moved in the way of something that would have struggled if struggling had been possible, a writhing that produced nothing because the binding was thorough. They set it down on the flat stone at the base of the metal figure. A distinct singular horn shown in the night, reflecting the light of the fires.
The chanting paused.
In the silence, the animal screamed. A shrill sound that could shake any normal man to his very soul. Like the screaming of a woman violated or an infant tortured, that''s how bad it was.
The sound of it rose up the hillside and reached us on the wall walk clearly, a sound with nothing in it that was anything other than what it was. Margaret's hand squeezed hard and she looked away, shaking.
The figure at the center moved to the stone. The chanting resumed, louder. One sharp motion downward, and the animal's sound stopped, replaced by a different kind of sound, wet and brief. The figure at the center worked quickly, methodically. Blood ran black in the firelight along the channels in the base stone and pooled at the feet of the metal figure. The two who had carried the animal moved to its side and lifted the carcass up, tilting it into the angled arms of the figure, and the blood that remained in it ran down from those outstretched arms into the fire below.
The fire burned higher.
The chanting changed. The rhythm of it shifted, faster now, and the quality of the sound shifted with it, the way a piece of wood in a fire changes its sound as the burn progresses. The figures in the ring began to move, slow and measured, stepping in place or shifting their weight in a pattern I watched for a full minute before I understood it was ritualistic in movement, definitely not just a sharkbait hoo-ah-ah situation. All of them moved in the same direction at the same slow pace, and the effect of it in the firelight and the torch-light was that the shadows they cast along the ground rotated too, reaching outward and then drawing back as each figure passed before the fire.
I heard faint footsteps behind us. Turning my head to see behind us, I cannot find the source of the noise.
One footstep, then the sound of a person shifting weight, the scrape of a boot sole against stone. A guard on his circuit, coming along the wall walk from the northern tower. I calculated the distance from the sound. Thirty feet, perhaps less. I looked at the parapet, at the two merlons nearest us, at the gap between them.
I took Margaret's arm and moved us both against the stone face of the nearer merlon, into the angle of it, pressing us flat against its inner surface. The gap between this merlon and the next was about eighteen inches: enough to see through, narrow enough to break our silhouette against the sky. I pulled my dark cloak around us both and stood still.
The footsteps continued. Steady, unhurried, the cadence of a man walking a route he had walked a thousand times.
They stopped because of course they would, why not?
He had heard something, or seen something, or was simply pausing in his circuit. He was just feet away, the only sounds I could hear was the constant chanting in what sounded like Latin, Margaret shallow hurried breathing, and the guard who was looming over us. I could not see him from the angle of the merlon but I could hear him breathing and the small sound of his equipment settling as he stood still. Margaret was rigid beside me, her shoulder against my arm, not moving. I put my hand over her mouth gently and she did not resist it. Her breath came through her nose, slow, shallow.
The guard stood for what I counted as forty seconds. In that time, through the gap in the merlons, I could see the ritual continuing below. My heart beat pounding in my ears, adrenaline pumping through my veins as I prayed harder than I had ever before.
The rotation of the figures had stopped. They had returned to their standing positions in the ring, all of them now facing inward, toward the fire and the metal figure and the carcass cooling in its arms. The central figure had stepped back to the edge of the fire and raised both hands again, palms toward the figure. The chanting was at its loudest now, all voices together, no longer in the call-and-answer pattern but in unison, the same phrase repeated.
The fire bent, like harsh rain on a windy Texas day, making a sharp 45 degree angle, flaring to four quadrants.
And it was not in the way fire bends when wind moves it. The air had stilled, no wind blowing even high up on the wall. The fire then curved inward, making an arc from each quadrant toward the base of the figure, the flames drawing away from their outer reach and concentrating at the center of the blaze as it created a fiery cocoon. The heat from it, even at this distance, seemed to change. Each person pulled out small creatures of varying sizes and race, slashing their throats, spraying blood over the stone, fire, and themselves, creatures shrieking in existential horror. The orange-yellow flames became something whiter and more direct, and the shadows it threw were sharper.
Then the fire shrunk inward all at once, condensing sharply, as though something at the center of it had inhaled.
In the space that opening made, in the air above the stone base and between the arms of the figure, for a duration I could not have measured, there was something present that had not been present before. It did not emit light. It did not have a defined edge, rather there was an emptiness to it a soulful dread and unrightness permeated the air. It was large, above the fire and it was between the arms of the figure and it was not, in any way I could determine, affected by the fire below it.
The chanting stopped.
Every figure in the ring dropped to the ground at once, full length, face-down. Not a fall. Not a feint. They went down deliberately, all dozens of them, at the same moment, and they did not move.
The shape remained for what I estimated at ten seconds, though time seemed meaningless as everything went unnaturally silent. It had no sound. It produced no perceptible movement. It was simply present in a way that was worse than any movement would have been. Then it was not present. The fire snapped outward again, filling the space, and the light returned to what it had been.
Margaret turned her face against my chest, her arms squeezing me hard enough to pain me despite the muscle I had built up from the manual labor of the past year.
The guard behind us moved. His footsteps resumed, continuing along the wall walk away from us, steady and unhurried. I tracked the sound for thirty seconds, forty, until I was certain the distance was sufficient. Then I took my hand away from Margaret's face. She did not move for a moment. I kept watching through the gap.
Below, the figures rose one by one. The fire was burning down. Two of them moved to the Frankenstein-esque figure and began the work of dismantling whatever was at its base. Others collected the torches, extinguishing them in sequence, and with each extinguished torch the scene became darker and smaller.
Then there was nothing. Only the darkness at the forest edge and the coals dying on the ground and the shape of the stone base, already indistinct in the dark.
I waited two full minutes after the last silhouette was gone before I moved, gently shaking Margaret but she wouldn't move, sobbing into my shirt. Great, not only did she not forget about the campfire tale I had told, but she witnessed perhaps the closest thing to a demonic ritual one could imagine. But seriously, is this a normal thing I'm going to have to deal with? The guard didn't even react, like this was the most normal thing in the world. It's ….. No amount of expletives or curses could truly do justice for the thoughts and emotions warring inside me. So I sat there stewing on it, cradling Margaret and rocking her back and forth for an unknown amount of time.
Eventually I broke the silence, "How about we stay in the common room next time and I'll tell a story from the Good Book or something, okay?" I softly said. She nodded softly and I wiped the tearstins from her cheeks.
"Come on, we should get back to the castle." I stand up and take her hand, heading back the way we came.
We walk down the stair tower slowly. I go first and keep the pace moderate silently moving, hand along the wall. The passages back to the common room were the same as they had been an hour ago, the same guttered torches, the same cold flags, the same dark portraits. Everything was exactly as we had left it. I noticed I was checking the corners before we reached them, which I had not been doing on the way out.
The common room was dark except for the coals in the hearth, the same banked red glow that had been there when we left. I set a log on it without thinking. Old habit: when you find a fire dying, you feed it.
We sat in a love seat which was big enough to easily accommodate two eleven year olds, closest to the heat and said nothing for a long while. She leaned on to me, staring into the hearth, the flames casting shadows behind us.
When Margaret finally spoke her voice was level and quiet and she chose her words with the care of someone who has decided to be precise about something.
"The thing that came," she said. "What was it."
"I don't know precisely."
"But thou hast an understanding of it."
I did not answer immediately. The fire took hold of the new log and began to build.
"Deverell said the practitioners had records," I said. "He said those records used names that appear across cultures without obvious transmission. There are names for what they were trying to call. Old names. What it was or its name, I don't know. Just that I never want to witness that ever again."
She looked at the fire.
"Those people were students," she said. "Or teachers. They were inside these walls today. They ate in the hall."
That was the part I had been sitting with since we came down from the wall. The circle had been deliberate and practiced, the ritual well-known to everyone participating in it. That was not something done for the first time. The timing, the location, the hour, the particular night: none of that was accidental. People who knew what they were doing had been inside this castle today and would be inside it tomorrow.
"Yes," I said,"and they need Jesus." I chuckle at the joke which even the most stout atheist would agree with in this situation.
Margaret folded her hands in her lap and looked at the fire for another minute. Then she said, "We will not tell Thomas and Eleanor about tonight."
"Agreed, though whether they would believe us is another question."
She rose and gathered her cloak from the back of the chair. At the door to the dormitory passage she stopped without turning.
"Thou didst not look away," she said. "Up there. After I turned. Thou didst not look away."
"No, I did not." Something I am coming to regret. First waking in a pit full of diseased corpses naked and freezing, now I am finding out this world is filled with religious muggles who are gunning for the death of all wizardkind and the very wizards themselves are communing with the devil or some pagan god.
I stayed by the fire for a while longer. The castle settled around me with its usual sounds, stone and wind and the old building breathing, and I sat in the chair and looked at the flames and thought about the angle of outstretched arms and the sound of an animal that had stopped making sounds and the shape of something that had no defined edge occupying a space between the fire and the iron and the dark.
I said my prayer. A prayer ranging from Genesis to Revelation and everywhere in between.
Then I went to bed, and I lay on my back and listened to the silence and the static your mind conjures up in that void, and I watched the dark ceiling until sometime well past midnight when my body, against my better judgment, decided it had had enough and let me sleep.
It was not a restful sleep. The common room lingered at first: the fire, the low voices, Margaret's book open in her lap but the edges began to dim, the faces thinning into shadow until they stood as black-cloaked figures in a wide circle. Their heads bowed toward something vast at the center, a shape I could not fully see, only the suggestion of twelve horns rising unevenly against a sky that had gone the color of bruised iron. The air thickened. The ground beneath me felt scorched, blazing flames visible from an enormous hole that formed out of nowhere, expanding rapidly. Then the heavens opened at the sounding of a great horn, and great stars began to fall, descending onto the earth at terminal velocity. One headed to my position, began to drop, growing larger, filling my sight, the light bleaching everything else away and just as it was upon me, I woke, a sharp intake of breath and sweat seeping out on my brow. The darkness of the dormitory, the silent breathing of Thomas, and the fading memory of what I had just dreamed were all there was.