Peeves found him on Thursday.
Rowan was walking the fourth-floor corridor after dinner, heading back from the library with the ritual manual and two books on metamorphic theory he'd pulled from the stacks. His mind was on moonstone formation rates and whether ambient magical concentration could accelerate crystal growth by an order of magnitude or only a factor of two, which was the difference between finding usable moonstone on the ridge and spending the rest of the year hiking.
Something cold and soft hit him in the back of the head.
He spun around, wand up, and a rotten apple sailed past his ear and burst against the wall behind him. Another came from the opposite direction. He ducked and it splattered across the flagstones at his feet.
A small, dark-eyed man in a bell-covered hat was floating upside down near the ceiling, cackling. He had a rotten pear in one hand and something brown and overripe in the other and was winding up for a throw.
"Ickle student out all alone! Peevesy loves a target that doesn't duck!"
The pear came fast. Rowan cast a Shield Charm and the fruit exploded against it, spraying pulp across the corridor. Peeves looked delighted.
"Ooh, the ickle one can cast! How exciting! Let's see if the ickle one can cast and run!" He produced a handful of something from behind his back, which was impressive given that he'd been empty-handed a moment ago. Rotten plums, by the smell.
"I'm not interested in playing," Rowan said. He picked up his books from where he'd dropped them.
Peeves's face split into a grin that was too wide for a human face, which made sense because Peeves wasn't human. "Not interested in playing! Not interested in PLAYING! Peevesy lives to play! Playing is what Peevesy DOES!" He swooped lower, close enough that the bells on his hat jingled in Rowan's ear. "All work and no play makes the ickle student dull dull dull!"
Rowan started walking. Peeves followed, hurling rotten fruit at irregular intervals, singing a song about a student who was too serious and eventually turned into a desk.
"Playing is playing and working is working and never the two shall meet, unless you're Peevesy, who makes working into playing and playing into GRIEF!" He lobbed a plum at the back of Rowan's knees. Rowan sidestepped it without looking back.
He was halfway to the staircase when it hit him.
The thing that plays.
He stopped in the middle of the corridor. The riddle from the Restricted Section journal, the one he'd copied into his own notebook over a year ago and hadn't been able to solve. The 1473 journal. The headmaster who'd spent forty years studying the vaults beneath the school.
What has no door, yet bars the way? What holds treasure but refuses to give? What speaks without a voice and guards without hands?
The answer is not the vault itself. The answer is the thing that plays.
Peeves. A poltergeist. A spirit of chaos that played tricks, played games, played with everyone and everything it touched. The thing that plays.
A rotten apple hit him in the shoulder. He barely felt it.
"Peeves."
"WHAT?" Peeves was right behind him, a bruised pear cocked back in one hand, his face lit up with the pure joy of someone who had found a target that wasn't running away fast enough.
"The cursed vaults. Beneath the school."
The change was instant.
The pear in Peeves's hand disappeared. The grin vanished. The manic energy that animated every inch of him drained away and what was left was something Rowan had never seen in a poltergeist and didn't want to see again. Peeves was still. Completely, unnaturally still, hanging in the air like a puppet whose strings had gone taut. His eyes, which had been darting and gleeful a second ago, fixed on Rowan and didn't move.
When he spoke, his voice was different. Lower and slower. The singsong cadence gone, replaced by something that sounded like it came from a long way away and a long time ago.
"You found the journal."
It wasn't a question. Rowan's skin prickled. The corridor felt colder.
"Yes."
Peeves drifted downward until he was at eye level. This close, Rowan could see that something was wrong with his face. The features were the same but the expression behind them was different, as though something older and more deliberate was looking out through Peeves's eyes. The bells on his hat didn't jingle. The air around him was still.
"Students aren't supposed to find the journal. Old Rackham hid it well." Peeves tilted his head. The movement was too smooth, too controlled. "But someone always finds it eventually. That's what journals are for."
He drifted closer. His eyes hadn't blinked.
"I know what's in the vaults. I know what they do. I know what happens to the people who open them, and I know what happened to the last person who finished all five." His lips moved into something that wasn't a smile. "Four centuries ago. She walked in a student and walked out something else entirely. Something more." Peeves's voice dropped. "Each vault you complete gives you a piece of what she got."
"What do I have to do?"
"You already know where the first one is. You've been walking the fifth floor for years, pretending you don't feel it pulling at you." Peeves's voice dropped lower. "You can't fight it the way you fight everything else."
"Then how do I fight it?"
"You'll have to figure that out yourself." Peeves's mouth twitched. "But I'll enjoy watching you try everything you know and learn that none of it is enough." The wrongness behind his face flickered. "The vaults take something from everyone who enters them. Even the ones who win."
Then the stillness broke. The bells jingled. Peeves's eyes went wide and manic and he shot up toward the ceiling cackling, rotten fruit materializing in both hands.
"Ickle student stood still for too long! SITTING DUCK!" He threw both at once. An apple caught Rowan in the chest and a plum burst against the wall and Peeves rocketed down the corridor shrieking about ducks and students and the terrible tragedy of clean robes.
Rowan stood in the corridor, books in his arms, pulp and juice dripping down his front, his heart hammering.
He found Iris in the common room. She was curled in the window seat with a Transfiguration essay, her quill moving in the steady rhythm that meant she was almost finished. She looked up when he sat down across from her.
"You've got something on your robes." She wrinkled her nose. "Is that fruit?"
"Peeves."
"Lovely." She went back to her essay. "Did you get the metamorphic theory books?"
"Yes." He sat there for a moment. "Iris, I need to tell you something. I found out about the cursed—"
The words stopped in his throat. His mouth kept moving but no sound came out, as though something had reached into his chest and closed a fist around his voice. He sat there with his jaw working and his lungs pushing air and nothing coming out, and the sensation was so alien and so specific that for a moment he thought he'd been hexed.
Iris had put her quill down. "Rowan?"
He tried again, differently. "Peeves told me about—"
The same thing. A door slamming shut somewhere between his intention and his mouth. The words existed in his mind, fully formed, and they could not reach the air.
"Are you all right? You look like you're choking on something."
"I'm fine." Those words came out easily. He could talk about anything else. He could describe the weather, discuss the Transfiguration essay, tell her about the thornback clicking patterns. He just couldn't say the thing he'd come to say. "Actually, I wanted to ask about your mapping calculations for Saturday. The lunar alignment data you collected on the shelf."
Iris looked at him for a long moment. She knew him well enough to know that wasn't what he'd sat down to say.
"The alignment data is in my notes. I'll bring it Saturday." She picked up her quill. "When you're ready to tell me whatever that actually was, I'll be here."
She went back to her essay. Rowan sat there and thought about it. Speaking hadn't worked. Maybe the block was only on his voice. He reached for Iris's mind with a light Legilimency probe, the gentlest touch he could manage, carrying the image of the vault door and the shape of what Peeves had told him.
The probe connected and then collapsed. The information sheared away at the point of transfer, the images dissolving before they could form in the space between his mind and hers. Iris didn't even flinch. She hadn't felt anything. Whatever was stopping him operated at a level deeper than speech or writing or thought, and it didn't care which method he tried.
Rowan went upstairs. He sat on his bed and pulled out his journal and tried writing it. The cursed vaults are— The ink vanished as it touched the page. The parchment was blank and dry, as though he'd never written anything at all.
He stared at the empty page. Lawrence was asleep. Hector was reading his Quidditch magazine. Somewhere far below, in the pipes or the walls or the foundations of the castle itself, something hummed at a frequency just below hearing, and he wasn't sure if he was imagining it or if it had always been there and he was only now able to notice.
He turned to the riddle page, the handwriting already looking younger than his current hand.
The answer is the thing that plays.
He closed the journal and put it under his pillow and lay in the dark and didn't sleep for a long time.