Jeremias
So good to see that you weren't stabbed, Mademoiselle Madley! Anyhow, this is a little piece I wrote as an attempt to explain the presence of our hirsute friend at the entrance. At least fictionally!
- He died that night. No. Should have died. It is amazing how the difference between past and present, from the past simple to the conditional, can change someone's world.
Come to us, and we will give you the station you deserve, they had said, black cloaked figures that the boy half-hidden between the balastiers of the stair bannister looked down upon conversing with his parents. Come to us, and assist us in our cause. The Dark Lord remembers those who served him well. There is little you can do to change things now.
The boy behind the bannister noticed that the strangers smiled with their mouths, but not their eyes. His parents did not smile at all.
He had been told not to go into the garden. But when do children listen? The moon, so wide and promising up in the indigo sky, had gazed down upon the yard below his window that night. Despite the reports gleaned from the Wizarding Wireless Network, the snippets of information that his parents gave him, and more importantly - what they didn't tell him - he couldn't imagine anything going wrong beneath her soothing, sagelike presence.
He remembers claws. Teeth. Saliva. Hot breath. And the dull, metallic tang of blood. He remembers legs flailing uselessly as he was pushed down to the ground and soil filled and choked his mouth.
You were lucky to have lived, they had said, surveying him aloofly as he lay in his bed in St. Mungo's. Incurable Diseases ward. Not all of those he visits get off so lightly.
Lucky. But their eyes had told the truth. Silently the boy agreed. He did not feel lucky at all.
His mother had died that evening, protecting him. Brandishing her wand on the front doorstep even as the creature came lunging towards her and bore down upon her with a roar of pure rage. A sacrifice some had said wasn't necessary. He had only come for the boy, after all. A warning. Nothing more. His scars, the terrible ailment that took him off when the moon reached her zenith, the horrendous thoughts that assailed him during that time (kill destroy kill) only a warning. Nothing more. But sacrificed herself she had. The family, the remaining father and son, had not understood at the time.
Soon the Dark Lord was destroyed. The war was over, but not for the family. Never for that family. A hole had been blown through their universe that could never been sewn together by the fabric of time. How can you recover from such a thing? You can't. The father eventually succumbed to ill health. The boy was left to flounder his own way through the world. His life was punctuated by the moon rising, the whispers of kill destroy kill and with them an eternal, undrenching hunger, a need to punish those who weren't like him, to make them the same and suffer what he did.
Those times the moon neared the peak of her cycle, he would crawl away to a cave, a small alcove hidden by the rocks and to humanity, and lie, racked with fevers and sobs until the moods left him. He would wake a few days later, dizzy and disoriented, and hope that the blood found under his ragged nails in the morning was his own.
The old homestead was sold. In later years it was torn down to make way for people living on top of each other and more Galleons to be eked from them being there. But the old doorsteps remained, and the more fanciful believed that they could see bloodstains etched amongst the swirls of the marble. Still, the war was over and people once again flocked to that area, title deeds exchanging hands like notes being passed in a History of Magic classroom.
But the inhabitants began to notice something. One night each month, when the moon again rose to coldly survey her sleeping world, a bundled up shape would clambour shakily up the threshold and then lie there, against the unrelenting oak of the doors and cradled by the marble. By morning it would be gone. Who was it, they asked each other. A thief? One of the homeless? The ghost of a long-dead lover, waiting in vain for his paramour?
Meanwhile the boy grew. He noticed that when he came to his special place the kill destroy kill mutterings diminished and that he could tuck them away to that secret corner of his brain, the part that remembered soft linen and warm arms with the faintest scent of lavender around him. He could gain mastery over such thoughts instead of being owned by them. He no longer desire to harm all living things. Still feverish, he would sleep, and wake with the grey dawn, and make his way to yet another temporary lair.
And so the (now) young man went through life. The world did not change for him, but it changed for others. The land was once again growing still and cold. The stark black and white clippings from the papers told those who read them that all was not well. The young man used the sheets to line his home, and slept.
Once again people were contacted. The parents of families who had received such a visit locked their children in after dark, and were especially vigiliant on the nights the moon, watchful and bloated to her fullest, hung silently in the sky. And they hoped. There was little else anyone had left to do. Once again children were sent, shredded and raving, to lie in crisp and impersonal little cribs in the hospital, and live. If they were lucky.
The young man was also contacted. Run, run with us, they had said. Run with us and the Dark Lord will restore what was taken from you. And even in their human guises, they seemed more animal than not. He had ran, but away from them. Their lupine traits had frightened him. He did not see himself as that, and he had not forgotten that it was the Dark Lord's creature who had taken away what he was now offering in the first place. He made a new lair and hid, hoping against hope that they would leave him alone.
They didn't.
He was once again asleep on his old threshold, curled like a babe in his faded coat, now so stiff with time he fancied that if he took it off, it would walk away without him, and find a new wearer more fortunate in circumstance. The rounded moon surveyed him, serenely remote and undisturbed by the world below her.
He smelt the beast before it was upon him. An instant later he was scrambling for his life. Kill destroy kill. Teeth. Saliva. Hot breath. And the dull, metallic tang of blood. He remembers legs flailing uselessly as he was pushed down to the ground and soil filled and choked his mouth -
But no. He was a man now. And age and the hard years had given strength and resolve to his limbs. Flinging up his hands blindly, he grasped a fistful of fur and wrenched. The creature gave a yowl which deepened to a low, threatening rumble of a growl. He had hurt it, but not badly enough. Now it was angry. Staggering backwards, his shaking fingers enclosed around a rock. It was closing in and every instinct screamed out at him to swing and run, but the rational part of him that still remembered soft linen and warm arms with the faintest scent of lavender around him, the part that made him different from this monster, cautioned him to wait. That he needed to let it closer still. And so, bracing himself until the last possible second, until the dripping fangs were inches from his eyes, he struck.
The creature wavered, then fell back onto the stairs, groggily snarling around for its target. And then, something happened. It convulsed as if stung by a million wires and began to writhe, screaming in agony and in its pain still managing to sound like nothing human. Then the screams died to choking, resigned murmurs. Then it was still. The young man, exhausted and numb beyond description with both the gluttedness of the moon and the fight for his life, settled back into his coat and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
The next morning he was alone. Nothing more sinister was nearby than the local mutt, nosing through the rubbish bins for some forsaken treat. The inhabitants of the building, who had heard the scuffle but had not come out to investigate, long immune to such things and weighted down with the belief that they could do nothing, could not find a trace of what may have occured. Only the young man remained, dosing peacefully against the wall.
Later he learned more. The magic that his mother had unwittingly invoked should have stopped once he became a man, but it hadn't. It had continued to work for him. What the geriatics in the works he had read on the subject hadn't figured out, so obvious in its simplicity, was that a boy may reach manhood, but that a mother never stops being a mother. And so every now and then the young man, now a tad older, a tad more grey and shabby, returns and allows his body to drink up the protection his mother left to him. Sometimes he sits. Sometimes he sleeps. But he remembers soft linen. And warm arms with the faintest scent of lavender around him. He remembers.