(One of those time-wasters added specifically for the purpose of lengthening the story ...)
Part Five - Peace and Omens
Scratchy dampness against his cheek – cold – the echo of excitement, power, revival still beating in his blood. No colour – no light – had he gone blind? A dull throbbing in his left forearm – the smell of dormant earth in his nose and his mouth, a musty scent of dead leaves and coming winter. And then a firm, warm hand grasped his shoulder, half-turning him over.
"He’s coming round," said a distant voice. "Come on, Sirius, sit up. You’ll feel better."
His head pounded. Sirius tried to move his uninjured arm, and groaned; it wasn’t just his head that hurt; he ached all over. "Oh god, what happened?" he managed to moan.
"You fainted," said the voice. Sirius forced his protesting eyes open, and recognized James, a faint black shape against the all-encompassing darkness that was the cottage’s yard. Behind him, he could make out Lily and Peter, also watching him with concern.
Heat rose in Sirius’ cheeks, until he was sure they were glowing in the cold night air. He struggled into a sitting position, brushing off James’ hand brusquely. "I’m okay, really."
"I wouldn’t try to stand just yet," said James, backing away as Sirius tried to get his legs under him.
"James? Do me a favour and shut up." For a moment, Sirius’ head screamed, and his vision clouded over. He swayed on his feet, and caught himself, feeling as shaky as a new colt. "Remind me never to do that again," he said hoarsely. Raising his left arm to look at the wound, he gulped: where there should have been a long cut was nothing more than a thick line of scar tissue, visibly paler than the skin around it, even in the darkness.
"I’m sorry, Sirius, but Cassandra isn’t here," said Lily very seriously.
"What?" Sirius rubbed his throbbing head peevishly.
"You were calling out for her, just now. Oh, here, come inside and get warm." Lily laid her hand gently on his arm – a gesture made all the worse for its sweet maternal warmth – and steered him around towards the house.
Sirius thought seriously about declining the invitation, and creeping off to some place very dark where he could hide his rampaging blush, not to mention getting away from James and Peter, who were both looking at him as though he might break in two right in front of them. But the windows of the little house glimmered invitingly at him, in shades of gold and yellow so rich it seemed he could warm his hands at them even from this distance. He sighed, damned and beaten, and let her lead him up the steps.
*****
At that moment of ultimate, surging power in which Sirius lost consciousness, Cassandra Ravenwood sat up out of a dead sleep, a cry half to her lips, half-expecting to find herself still enwrapped in a nightmare. But no, she was truly awake, her eyes just able to discern the dim shapes of plants and books in the darkness. For several minutes she sat still in the midst of rumpled bedclothes with the cool breeze from the open window playing on her damp face, waiting for her racing heart to slow.
From out in the sitting room, Conall gave a sleepy croak. Cassandra sighed, pushed her blankets aside, and slipped her toes to the cedar floor, which stayed warm, whatever the temperature. Through the dark little house she drifted, like a ghost in a long white nightdress, never bumping into anything, no matter how cluttered the area. Eventually, she halted at the door, hesitated, then lifted her cloak from its hook, pinned it warmly about her shoulders, and lifted the latch.
Possibly one of the best things about having a tiny, insignificant house out in the middle of nowhere, is that nobody is ever around to see you do odd things, like take midnight walks in your nightclothes. Cassandra’s hair streamed out behind her like a dark banner as she slowly made her way around her clearing, the grass icy and wet beneath her feet.
Ynisbofin was an invisible black hulk rising out of the pure, obsidian ocean with its delicately silver-gilt waves, but Cassandra could imagine that she saw the moonlight glancing off the island’s towering ruins, as delicate and precious a work as any in a queen’s jewel-coffer. Three times, she circled her little clearing, padding as lightly over the scrubby grass as a cat with her long nightdress ruffling around her legs. Her eyes, too, were never still as she moved. They roved around, wide-open despite the chilly breeze, working hard to memorize the beauty of this night, in the hope that she could reproduce it later on paper and canvas with paint and quill, working, as a true artist will, to capture a moment so fleeting that the fingers and the mind cannot hope to hold it. But perhaps, just perhaps, the brush can.
Cassandra, though she speculated good and hard on the subject, could not begin to realize why she had come out here, on this night. It was a common enough habit of hers, to leave the closed-in space of her little house for a while when times and thinking came hard. But still, she hadn’t been worrying about anything in particular. Bridget Black had written her back that evening, thanking her for her warning regarding Sirius, from which she could assume that the formidable lady had put a stop to this foolishness – for while Cassandra was, inwardly, something of a romantic, she cherished no illusions of mystical intervention at the time of heroic self-sacrifice, just to save the martyr from his or her otherwise gruesome death. Her duty was done by Lily and James, and Lilith was supposedly in fine health in Brittany.
So why on earth did she feel so reluctant to return to the warmth of the house?
The answer to this question dropped out of the sky like a bolt of lightning not five minutes later in the form of a large barn owl with a small roll of parchment tied to its leg.
Written on it where three lines in Old Irish:
Beware the Morrigan’s thirst, Exiles,
For danger out of the dark wood stalks,
Hand within hand by loyalty broken.
Lil
Cassandra recognized the poetic words with a chill. They formed a line from the famous Tain Bo Cuailnge, Ireland’s national legend, which told the story of the warrior-queen Medhbh of Connacht, who attacked Conchobar of Ulster and his champion Cu Chulainn with an army comprised of most of the kings of Ireland and their men.
With Lilith’s owl on her shoulder, she rushed back to the house, lit a lamp – despite Conall’s croaks of outrage – and snatched up quill and parchment. Hurriedly, she scribbled a note upon a single slip of parchment:
Come visit me.
-Cassandra
She tied the message carefully about the owl’s leg, and let it out through the window.
Then, she sat down at the kitchen table with Conall on her shoulder, and stayed there until the silvery noon sun came streaming in through her windows, when Lilith appeared on her doorstep.
"Cass! Oh, how good to see you!" Lilith gushed, flinging her emerald-robed arms wide and sweeping her younger sister into a hug made rather awkward by the heavy trunk dangling from her hand. Tall and pretty, with red-blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles, Lilith Ravenwood had none of Cassandra’s sharpness, nor her strength of bone; she was a house cat to her sister’s mountain lion. But there was something in the cautious way they moved; the toss of the head, the lift of the chin, the small, fine-boned hands and feet, that declared them sisters.
"How good to see you, too, Lil," said Cassandra, hugging her in return and rather failing to imitate Lilith’s enthusiastic greeting. She felt solemn, and not very capable of joy and happiness, perhaps because of lack of sleep. The world seemed slightly alien, overly bright and threatening, crowding at the door as she led Lilith inside, and seated her at the round little kitchen table.
Lilith said nothing as she sipped tea and watched Conall with a sharp eye – she had her sister’s talent for forcing others to make the first move – leaving the kitchen empty of sound, save that of the clock on the wall, quietly chanting out the minutes in its tiny voice. Cassandra retaliated in kind by staring out of the window with her hands clasped in her lap.
Lilith won the unspoken contest: After several minutes of the painful silence, Cassandra tossed her head angrily, breaking the spell.
"All right then," she said in Gaelic. "Why did you send me this? What does it mean?" She brandished the crumpled slip of parchment upon which Lilith’s message was written. Unfolding it roughly, she read it out loud. "Have you seen something to do with this? Tell me!"
Lilith sighed and folded her hands as though preparing for a very long afternoon of fending off her sister’s unpredictable temper. "Yes and no," she replied. "I saw something, but I can’t understand it. Divination is not a precise branch of magic, Cassandra. It almost never presents details clearly – it leaves you to puzzle them out yourself. You can never be absolutely sure what the omens mean until they come true. And by then," she shrugged, "it’s often too late."
Cassandra’s eyebrows drew together dangerously. She disliked being talked down to, not just by her sister, but by everyone. The way things usually worked, she was the one who did the talking-down. "I realize that," she snapped. "I don’t care what you thought the omens might portend; I want to know what you saw. And why you sent me these words. Am I meant to make sense of them without something solid to base my speculations upon?"
"All right, then," Lilith said hurriedly, recognizing the danger signs. "Those words kept going through my head for some reason, even after the vision. I couldn’t get rid of them, and I could make no sense of them. I thought perhaps you could. But – " she added, before Cassandra could protest, "Of course you’d have to see the rest of the vision to make some sense out of it all, and I can show you, if you let me."
Cassandra made a face and gave Lilith and extremely suspicious look, which her sister returned with one of utter blandness. Though Lilith Ravenwood looked like a bright, freckled farm lass next to dark, reclusive Cassandra, behind the gentle, apple-cheeked face with its full lips lay a mind like a razor – and they both knew it. Finally, Cassandra gave one nod, and allowed Lilith to move her chair around behind her. She flinched slightly at the pressure of Lilith’s fingertips on her temples, but did not protest.
"You’re going to be looking out through my eyes, Cass," said Lilith. "Remember, whatever you see, your body is here. I mustn’t break contact with you, or else you’ll lose the vision."
Feeling the slightest of nods under her fingers, Lilith shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and summoned up the vision.
There is a part of the human mind that can remember everything; even the time before birth; even, to some extent, the future. So recent was the vision that, when Lilith reached into that section of her brain, she found it immediately, brought it up, and let it flow out through her fingertips into Cassandra’s mind. Cassandra stiffened momentarily, and then slowly let herself slump backwards as the coloured shadows of omens filled her.
One moment, Cassandra could feel herself sitting in her kitchen, though her eyes opened on a land totally alien to her, but that reassuring anchor faded distressingly quickly. All of a sudden, she found herself in the midst of the vision, body and soul.
Now she stood upon a steel-grey plain that stretched to the sky; in the distance, she could faintly make out a blur on the horizon that might have been mountains. Trees grew strange and twisted in a small copse to her left, but they were the only things about to interrupt the oppressive flatness.
And then suddenly, they weren’t. Two huge bulls had appeared, but so subtly, that it seemed that she blinked, and they were there, as though she’d somehow missed them before. They faced each other, pawing furious ruts in the grey, dead turf, and snorting pillars of steam. One was a deep, shining brown in colour, the other white as driven snow.
"Cuailnge and Finnbenach," said Lilith’s voice, seemingly right inside her head. "The bulls of Connacht and Ulster."
"I know!" Cassandra thought back furiously. Lilith subsided as the bulls charged suddenly, fiercely tearing at each other with horn and hoof. Blood spattered the earth where they fell, and churned to mud as they hauled themselves upright again, and came back to the attack. Cassandra’s stomach began to twist – she tried to look away, but her head wouldn’t move; her eyes were fixed immovably on the terrible spectacle.
And then, just as suddenly, the scene changed again. Some strange force tilted Cassandra’s head back, and she saw overhead a pair of birds circling furiously. They seemed to be hundreds of feet above her, but somehow, she could see them clearly; she wouldn’t have noticed them otherwise. A pure black hawk wheeled around a dove, occasionally diving in to slash at it as it fluttered clumsily in terror. As she watched, the hawk gave a triumphant shriek and plunged down, wings folded tightly and claws extended. But just as the hooked talons were reaching forward to rake through the dove’s grey feathers, the dove turned into an eagle, which caught the diving hawk in its claws before it could stop. Cassandra winced as the hawk’s dying scream pierced her ears – for a split second, she was sure that it had sounded more human than avian. A few feathers drifted gently on the cold air as the eagle flapped off, testament to the hawk’s fatal mistake. A faint grey shadow seemed to follow the eagle, matching its every move.
And yes, the lines from the Tain Bo Cuailnge were ringing through her head, repeating themselves over and over again in some endless refrain, and accompanied, faintly, by another proverb from another legend:
There is no creature more treacherous than the little grey dove ...
"That’s it," said Lilith’s voice in Cassandra’s head again. "I’ll bring you back now ..."
"What? No it isn’t," said Cassandra in confusion. "Look, it’s changing again."
The woods sprang up out of nowhere, and Cassandra stood in the middle of a huge primeval pine forest – there were mountains in the distance, and a dusting of snow such as one sometimes gets at the end of October upon the ground. In the mouth of a great rocky cave lay a stag, dying from a rat-bite in its foreleg. Worried for it, Cassandra moved closer, reaching out a hand to touch, to heal, and saw that the stag was guarding a red-and-white cat that huddled in the cave, its body curled protectively around a tiny bird.
"What on earth?" Lilith gasped, startled. She’d begun to lose the clarity of the vision the moment the ancient words from the epic began ringing in her head, but Cassandra evidently hadn’t. Clamping her hands firmly against her sister’s temples, she tried to force herself back into that strange other-world, but it wouldn’t come. The mere memory of vision was developing into an entirely new one. One in which her sister, though she’d never before shown a talent for Divination, was inextricably lost.
A sudden sound – did she really hear it? – made Cassandra look round, away from the stag, cat and bird. Not ten feet away lay a great black dog that looked more than half wolf, apparently asleep. The invisible force carried her footsteps closer, and she saw that, no, it was not asleep. The poor thing was caught in one of the cruel leghold traps that the farmers around Cleggan set for foxes and other pests – or at least, they had until Cassandra moved there. Another movement drew her eyes round to another point, where a wolf – why didn’t it try to help the dog and the stag? – howled a song of pure heartache to the sky.
Footsteps crunching dead needles and the thin crust of snow! The wolf’s head went up and its ears lay flat; it wheeled around and dashed off into the undergrowth. The stag, cat and dog, however, made no move as a tall, pale farmer strode into the clearing round the cave with his rifle over his shoulder. He did not seem to notice Cassandra, walking right past her without a glance. For some reason, he sent waves of terror raging through her veins, ordering her to run, but she stood transfixed, watching the farmer as he bent over the recumbent black dog. His mouth moved, the corners pulled tight in an ugly smile, and he reached down to pat the dog on the head.
Feebly, it lifted its head and snapped at his hand. Cassandra distinctly saw its long, sharp teeth bury themselves in the farmer’s flesh; but he pulled away with a silent laugh, utterly unharmed, and unslung his gun.
Realizing what he was about to do, Cassandra lunged forward, her hands outstretched to wrench the firearm out of his grip. He laughed again, evading her easily, and moved the gun up to his shoulder. Cassandra saw his finger pull at the trigger.
Lilith had sat still for over ten minutes, holding tight to Cassandra’s shoulders, keeping her from falling over, lost to the vision-trance as she was, but it seemed unnecessary. Cassandra sat perfectly still, staring straight ahead of her, sometimes muttering unintelligibly under her breath, but otherwise quite stable. Lilith was utterly unprepared for it when she suddenly arched back and loosed a war-cry so filled with ancient grief that it lifted the hairs on Lilith’s back. The cry scaled upwards into a ragged scream of hatred and grief, ending as though cut off with a knife, and suddenly Cassandra slumped forwards to the floor.
"Cass!" cried Lilith in a panic, and lunged after. She scrambled across the floor, bruising her knee badly against a brick in the hearth, to steady Cassandra’s head. There was no need, however: Cassandra, instead of going into seizure as Lilith had expected, went quite still and pale, but her breathing was steady. Finally, she opened her eyes and rasped:
"Water?"
In her hurry to the sink, Lilith knocked her knee again, this time against the table, and splashed water all over as she filled the glass. "Well?" she said impatiently, while Cassandra drank deeply. "What did you see? You lost yourself to a completely new vision! I’ve never seen anything like it!"
But a closed look had come over Cassandra’s face. "I can’t remember," she said flatly, slowly getting up to fetch herself more water. "Doubtless it’ll all come back to me in time."
Lilith knew better than to argue. Can’t she remember what she saw? she thought, or is it that she won’t?
"Let’s try meditating, then," was what she said out loud.
There was nothing that Cassandra could say to refuse that.
*****
It was evening by the time Sirius left Lily and James’. Exhausted, his mind still filled by the sensation of pure magic tearing like wire along every vein, he fell fast asleep on the sofa and didn’t awake ‘til the late afternoon. Peter, he discovered, to his humiliation, was already gone by that time, leaving, by James’ suggestion, a slip of paper with the address of his hiding-place for Sirius, who’d promised to check on him regularly. Tired as he was, Lily’s offer of dinner somewhat overrode Sirius’ desire to leave – as did her pointing out that he had nothing more than toast to come home to. Stale toast, at that.
And so when he finally did leave, he was full, rested, and wearing a borrowed coat that James had forced on him with the words: "D’you want to freeze to death, you great prat? Take the coat!"
As he wheeled his bike back out into the road, Sirius turned his head to wave his goodbyes, but the house looked suddenly uninhabited: its windows, lit by the cold, steady light of Muggle lightbulbs, empty-looking, its door sagging at the hinges like a half-wit’s mouth. He shivered, unnerved by the lifeless sight. He then waited barely until he’d cleared the houses before he lifted into the air, anxious to put the forbidding feeling behind him.
In the end, he was glad of the coat; the weather had gotten even chillier during the day, making the six-hour ride back to Bristol one long torment of wind so cold that it burned. It became briefly lightened at the outset by a magnificent sunset that disappeared far too soon into the obsidian-overlaid indigo of night.
Just like my life, Sirius found himself thinking, and then felt startled by this sudden burst of philosophy.
*****
At first, Cassandra refused to relate to Lilith what she’d seen in her vision, preferring to work out the secrets concealed within it by herself. Eventually, though, and with great reluctance, she described it, and then only after considerable begging, entreaty, and threat on Lilith’s part. As she’d half-expected, however, her sister had no more answer to their problem than she did.
The two women spent the next several days in a frenzy of speculation, meditation, and leafing through Cassandra’s formidable collection of books on magical theory, always searching for the answer to their grim puzzle.
"I don’t understand it!" Lilith said once – for the thirtieth time that day. "There must be some reason the vision came to you! You must be able to interpret it correctly, else why didn’t it come to me instead?" She stopped short of remarking that she had the more experience in Divination, noticing at just the right moment the way that Cassandra’s fingers were tightening on her quill.
Again and again, over the last four days, all research had halted, both sisters had crowded round one huge old book or another, excited and relieved to have found the answer, only to be sent skulking back to their seats at opposite sides of the kitchen table by a false lead. Four days. Four interminable days of poring over old books, searching for nothing in particular, and with tempers running high. Cassandra didn’t think she could take much more.
"It’s a metaphor – it must be!"
Lilith slammed her book shut, and banged her forehead against the crackling, ancient leathern cover. "All visions are metaphors, formed by the Seer’s own view of people or places or – or whatever! It has – to – be – something – you – can – solve, Cassandra!"
"If you don’t hold your tongue from this moment on," said Cassandra, with considerable restraint for her, she thought, "I will set my mind to solving the problem of you."
"Mam was right when she said Sirius Black was a bad influence on you. You were never this mean before you met him," replied Lilith icily.
"That does it!" Cassandra nearly sent the old codex she’d been reading flying off the table in her rage as she slammed it shut and shoved it away from her. It was only saved from an untimely demise by another pile of paving-stone-sized books located a mere foot away. Her chair, however, was not so lucky: It went toppling over with a loud clatter on the wood floor, as she leapt up, wrenched the door open, and paused.
"I trust I needn’t remind you, sister, that you are under my roof, and my charity. Don’t touch anything!" she snarled back at the stunned Lilith, and then she whipped out the door. The crash of it slamming rattled the windows, and set Conall to screeching loudly in indignation.
The air outside was so cold that Cassandra found it difficult to breathe at first. She drew deep lungfuls of it, enjoying the sting of winter and peat smoke in her throat. There was a regular storm building up to the north – far, far off, the charcoal-purple clouds amassed, like the troops of some dark army, waiting for the signal to invade. The usually rowdy wind had hitched up her skirts and leapt into the steps of a rousing country jig, ruffling the boughs of the pines and tossing Cassandra’s hair playfully. Her long black robes, made of light Indian cotton, buffeted around her legs, urging her feet, as well, to join in the wild, lawless dance. Feeling like a tiny girl again, she did so, kicking up her feet, twirling wildly to nature’s music, with the storm breeze for her partner.
And suddenly, she stopped. The wind continued without her, giving her hair a last tug, as though chastising her for halting in the dance.
There is no creature more treacherous than the little grey dove.
*****
Sirius Black sat staring glumly at a slip of paper in his hand. In the dim light, he could barely make out the letters. It wasn’t that the light was so particularly dim, it was just that he needed glasses. He had for years, but he’d always refused to get them. Often he’d paid for his vanity, but only with small things: just the odd exploded desk or teacher suddenly rendered bald by an ill-aimed spell. Nothing much, really.
But the light was dim; there was a full-fledged tempest raging outside, beating at the chipped and fracture windows like a wild thing, after all. Rain spattered down in angry torrents, so thick that he could see nothing but a continual blur of water against the cold glass. Again, this may have been due to his vision-deficiency, but mostly he preferred to blame it on the storm. Whatever the case, he could still barely read the address, 320 Railview Street, Bristol, printed in smudgy ink on the paper. He knew the place. It was barely half an hour’s drive from Peter’s house.
Trust Peter to make a hash of anything, even finding a hiding-place for the time-being. He bungled everything.
Sirius cocked his wrist to look at his watch. There was one good thing about Peter’s choice of hideouts: it wouldn’t take Sirius hours and hours to get there. He wouldn’t need to leave ‘til late, five in the evening, most likely. He could get there in the dark, leave, and return home in the dark. Safety could be found in the darkness. As though it were a great, comforting blanket, the night and the darkness made Sirius feel safe: He could go anywhere he wanted. The night was his, after all.
*****
"Treachery!" Cassandra spat the word like a curse. "I knew it! I mean, I should have known it! I mean – I haven’t the faintest idea what I mean!"
Lilith was hard-put to get a word in edge-ways to her sister as she paced wildly around the tiny kitchen. "Stop or you’ll wear a hole in the floor!" she commanded finally. Cassandra stopped, but she had her hands on her hips in a way that said she was far from calm.
"At least we have something to work with now," Lilith pointed out reasonably, now that she had Cassandra’s attention. "The little grey dove. He – or she – must be the clue we’ve been looking for."
"Well what d’you want me to do?" Cassandra was nearly waving her arms around in her agitation. "Walk up to Sirius and say, ‘Oh, Sirius, a dove is plotting your destruction’?" For she was sure now who the diving hawk had represented: not James, but Sirius, proud and strong, and, at the center, dark as night.
"Of course not. He’d either laugh in your face or start a panic."
Cassandra brushed her hair away from her face with the back of a hand. She felt uncomfortably hot, and stressed, as she’d felt when cooped up for too long in sweltering, odd-smelling classrooms. "The former, I suspect. Or he’d curse me, right then and there. I daresay he’s sick to the heart of my poking around in his life."
"Why Cassandra, I wouldn’t have thought you cared!" Lilith teased gently. Cassandra, though, instead of laughing or bursting into a rage, as per usual, ignored her. She sighed, and continued, "Are you so sure he wouldn’t trust you? He must know that someone close to him – or, more appropriately, to the Potters – has turned traitor."
"Oh he must know," Cassandra said grimly. "But I’d wager my life that it wouldn’t make him trust me one whisker more. No, no, I want more evidence before I go running to him with my wild tales."
She’d startled slightly at the mention of the Potters, suddenly remembering that they had a role in this little drama, too. Odd: She’d been thinking of Sirius as the only one in danger. Perhaps she was somewhat justified, she thought as she sat there, rationalising, hypothesizing furiously, barely aware of Lilith. If Sirius had anything to say about it, Lily and James Potter were safe as houses. Sirius, on the other hand, had no one to protect him. And without a protector of some sort – here Cassandra’s basic disdain for men and their ability to strategise came in – he was as good as dead.
Never once, however, did either sister consider Peter Pettigrew; bland, innocent little Peter, soft as swansdown and with a backbone of white bread. Even Cassandra, who had had far longer than Lilith to become aquainted with James Potter and his various friends, overlooked him entirely. He was the shivering dove, hiding in the briar while the hawks stood guard over him, unaware of the eagle that stooped down upon them from above.
*****
320 Railview Street, Bristol was a ratty little building, covered in grey stucco, that had a twin in almost every other house on the street. The shingles on the roof were beginning to come loose, and white paint around the windows, only marginally cleaner than the rest of the house, had long ago begun to peel. In the dusky orange lamplight, it looked somewhat cleaner than it most likely appeared by daylight, but that may have simply been Sirius’ need of glasses speaking again. In the event, with the wild gale hurling itself determinedly into every nook and cranny, the little house’s sole virtue lay in its possession of a porch, sheltered – albeit badly – by an extension of the roof.
Sirius’ fist made a strange, hollow sound on the blistering paint of the door as he knocked. He hunched his shoulders under his cloak, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, waiting while the storm cheerfully demonstrated its disdain for his poor shelter.
After two minutes, he knocked again, louder this time. Still there was no sign of life from within the house. Finally, freezing cold and heartily cursing Peter for taking so long, Sirius tried the door, and found it unlocked. That was in itself so odd that he nearly held his breath as he eased the doorknob round, gritting his teeth at the faint click, and pushed it open.
He’d half-expected a crew of heavily-armed monsters to leap out at him, fangs bared, but no, all that was there to greet him was a rather short hallway with mouldering paper on the wall, and a definite scent of rot arising from beneath the linoleum on the floor. Everywhere was silence.
Sirius left the door slightly ajar rather than risk the sound of it closing. His boots made no sound on the old linoleum as he edged his way down the hall, one hand gripping his wand, peering cautiously into each room before he presented his entire body to whoever was inside them. There was no one, of course. It was a mere precaution.
"Peter?" Sirius hissed finally. His voice refused to rise higher than a bare whisper that sounded loud in the ghastly silence. No reply came. Peter was no longer here.
There was no evidence of a struggle; that puzzled Sirius the most: Surely, even if Voldemort’s Death Eaters had suddenly appeared, grabbed Peter, and Disapparated, they would have knocked something over. But no – everything was in almost sterile order. The next room was the same, and the next. There were several glasses and plates sitting unwashed in the sink. They looked almost artistically arranged to appear as though this place was occupied, though the effect was somewhat spoiled by the bare emptiness of the rest of the house.
It’s frightening, that first moment when the blood freezes in your veins.
The wind, hissing busily about outside, suddenly discovered the delights of catching an improperly shut door and slamming it with a heart stopping bang; Sirius nearly leapt out of his skin in shock. Instinct alone threw his body out of the kitchen into the shadows of the hallway: his mind had nothing to do with it. He stayed that way, pressed against the wall, wand caught tight in a tense, white-knuckled hand, hardly daring to breathe for minutes on end. But no masked and sinister Death Eaters came marching down upon him; Voldemort did not appear, livid eyes and curling snakelike lips smiling as he whispered a fatal curse into the stale air.
Voldemort. That name was a key to the grey and windowless concrete room, the hinges of its door red with rust, where Sirius kept all his fears, locked away from the day, and from which they could only escape like burglers by the dark of night.
Sirius’ frozen blood suddenly broke free of its icy prison, and flooded through his veins, the most primeval of rivers in furious, pounding spate, making him gasp for breath. Head spinning, he stumbled back and half-collapsed against the wall, wanting to feel its comforting solidity. The dagger, which he’d carried faithfully in his pocket since the day he’d got it, burned so hot that he could feel it through the cloth.
Fight back, fight back!
He ground his teeth together and mentally shoved at the dizziness, warding it off. It was like trying to stop a flash flood with his bare hands. The blood in his veins was boiling, hissing – it would simply burn him away with its raging heat if this kept up. It was pain, pure and simple: grinding, rasping, hideous pain that surrounded Sirius in an opaque cloud filled with nothing but agony. He could not see, could not hear, and all he could feel was a pressure like being trapped between two jagged rocks, pressing closer, closer ...
Next came a feeling of breaking, tearing, and Sirius lost control of everything and started to sink into unconsciousness. Somewhere in the distance, he heard a glass shatter, a woman screamed, and then the world went away.
Fortunately, when he awakened – groaning and cursing Peter, the house, the pain, and everything else he could think of – he found that he’d been out barely five minutes. As with before, every muscle screamed pitifully and begged for mercy as he hauled himself upright, leaning on the wall for support. A gold mist gathered before his eyes, and his head reeled sickly, but only for a moment.
He knew where the house was. He could Apparate.
He left the door open as he left, and the wind leapt inside like the wolf in the fairy tales, sporting joyfully through the ugly little house.