“Has someone been attacked again?” asked Ron, pulling Harry roughly to his feet. “Is it Dad? Is it that snake?”
“No—everyone’s fine—” gasped Harry, whose forehead felt as though it were on fire. “Well… Avery isn’t… he’s in trouble… he gave him the wrong information… Voldemort’s really angry—” Harry groaned and sank, shaking, on to his bed, rubbing his scar.
“But Rookwood’s going to help him now… he’s on the right track again…”
“What are you talking about?” said Ron, sounding scared. “D’you mean… did you just see You-Know-Who?”
“I was You-Know-Who,” said Harry, and he stretched out his hands in the darkness and held them up to his face, to check that they were no longer deathly white and long-fingered. “He was with Rookwood, he’s one of the Death Eaters who escaped from Azkaban, remember? Rookwood’s just told him Bode couldn’t have done it.”
“Done what?”
“Remove something… he said Bode would have known he couldn’t have done it… Bode was under the Imperius Curse… I think he said Malfoy’s dad put it on him.”
“Bode was bewitched to remove something?” Ron said. “But—Harry, that’s got to be—”
“The weapon,” Harry finished the sentence for him. “I know—”
The dormitory door opened; Dean and Seamus came in. Harry swung his legs back into bed. He did not want to look as though anything odd had just happened, seeing as Seamus had only just stopped thinking Harry was a nutter.
“Did you say,” murmured Ron, putting his head close to Harry’s on the pretence of helping himself to water from the jug on his bedside table, “that you were You-Know-Who?”
“Yeah,” said Harry quietly.
Ron took an unnecessarily large gulp of water; Harry saw it spill over his chin on to his chest.
“Harry,” he said, as Dean and Seamus clattered around noisily, pulling off their robes and talking, “you’ve got to tell—”
“I haven’t got to tell anyone,” said Harry shortly. “I wouldn’t have seen it at all if I could do Occlumency. I’m supposed to have learned to shut this stuff out. That’s what they want.”
By “they” he meant Dumbledore. He got back into bed and rolled over on to his side with his back to Ron and after a while he heard Ron’s mattress creak as he, too, lay back down. Harry’s scar began to burn; he bit hard on his pillow to stop himself making a noise. Somewhere, he knew, Avery was being punished.
Harry and Ron waited until break next morning to tell Hermione exactly what had happened; they wanted to be absolutely sure they could not be overheard. Standing in their usual corner of the cool and breezy courtyard, Harry told her every detail of the dream he could remember. When he had finished, she said nothing at all for a few moments, but stared with a kind of painful intensity at Fred and George, who were both headless and selling their magical hats from under their cloaks on the other side of the yard.
“So that’s why they killed him,” she said quietly, withdrawing her gaze from Fred and George at last. “When Bode tried to steal this weapon, something funny happened to him. I think there must be defensive spells on it, or around it, to stop people touching it. That’s why he was in St. Mungo’s, his brain had gone all funny and he couldn’t talk. But remember what the Healer told us? He was recovering. And they couldn’t risk him getting better, could they? I mean, the shock of whatever happened when he touched that weapon probably made the Imperius Curse lift. Once he’d got his voice back, he’d explain what he’d been doing, wouldn’t he? They would have known he’d been sent to steal the weapon. Of course, it would have been easy for Lucius Malfoy to put the curse on him. Never out of the Ministry, is he?”
“He was even hanging around that day I had my hearing,” said Harry. “In the—hang on…” he said slowly. “He was in the Department of Mysteries corridor that day! Your dad said he was probably trying to sneak down and find out what happened in my hearing, but what if—”
“Sturgis!” gasped Hermione, looking thunderstruck.
“Sorry?” said Ron, looking bewildered.
“Sturgis Podmore—” said Hermione breathlessly, “arrested for trying to get through a door! Lucius Malfoy must have got him too! I bet he did it the day you saw him there, Harry. Sturgis had Moody’s Invisibility Cloak, right? So, what if he was standing guard by the door, invisible, and Malfoy heard him move—or guessed someone was there—or just did the Imperius Curse on the off-chance there’d be a guard there? So, when Sturgis next had an opportunity—probably when it was his turn on guard duty again—he tried to get into the Department to steal the weapon for Voldemort—Ron, be quiet—but he got caught and sent to Azkaban…”
She gazed at Harry.
“And now Rookwood’s told Voldemort how to get the weapon?”
“I didn’t hear all the conversation, but that’s what it sounded like,” said Harry. “Rookwood used to work there… maybe Voldemort’ll send Rookwood to do it?”
Hermione nodded, apparently still lost in thought. Then, quite abruptly, she said, “But you shouldn’t have seen this at all, Harry.”
“What?” he said, taken aback.
“You’re supposed to be learning how to close your mind to this sort of thing,” said Hermione, suddenly stern.
“I know I am,” said Harry. “But—”
“Well, I think we should just try and forget what you saw,” said Hermione firmly. “And you ought to put in a bit more effort on your Occlumency from now on.”
Harry was so angry with her he did not talk to her for the rest of the day, which proved to be another bad one. When people were not discussing the escaped Death Eaters in the corridors, they were laughing at Gryffindor’s abysmal performance in their match against Hufflepuff; the Slytherins were singing “Weasley is our King” so loudly and frequently that by sundown Filch had banned it from the corridors out of sheer irritation.
The week did not improve as it progressed. Harry received two more “D”s in Potions; he was still on tenterhooks that Hagrid might get the sack; and he couldn’t stop himself dwelling on the dream in which he had been Voldemort—though he didn’t bring it up with Ron and Hermione again; he didn’t want another telling-off from Hermione. He wished very much that he could have talked to Sirius about it, but that was out of the question, so he tried to push the matter to the back of his mind.
Unfortunately, the back of his mind was no longer the secure place it had once been.
“Get up, Potter.”
A couple of weeks after his dream of Rookwood, Harry was to be found, yet again, kneeling on the floor of Snape’s office, trying to clear his head. He had just been forced, yet again, to relive a stream of very early memories he had not even realised he still had, most of them concerning humiliations Dudley and his gang had inflicted upon him in primary school.
“That last memory,” said Snape. “What was it?”
“I don’t know,” said Harry, getting wearily to his feet. He was finding it increasingly difficult to disentangle separate memories from the rush of images and sound that Snape kept calling forth. “You mean the one where my cousin tried to make me stand in the toilet?”
“No,” said Snape softly. “I mean the one with a man kneeling in the middle of a darkened room…”
“It’s… nothing,” said Harry.
Snape’s dark eyes bored into Harry’s. Remembering what Snape had said about eye contact being crucial to Legilimency, Harry blinked and looked away.
“How do that man and that room come to be inside your head, Potter?” said Snape.