Ternion || Oliver Wood

Chapter 123

On Christmas Eve

We stood there beneath the Cloak looking at each other. Harry raised his eyebrows and Hermione gave a tiny, nervous nod and so did I.

We stepped toward the woman and, at once, she turned and hobbled off back the way we had come. Leading them past several houses, she turned in at a gate. We followed her up the front path through a garden nearly as overgrown as the one we had just left. She fumbled for a moment with a key at the front door, then opened it and stepped back to let us pass.

We pulled the Cloak off and she closed the door behind us, her knuckles blue and mottled against the peeling paint, then turned and peered into Harry's face. Her eyes were thick with cataracts and sunken into folds of transparent skin, and her whole face was dotted with broken veins and liver spots.

The odor of old age, of dust, of unwashed clothes and stale food intensified as she unwound a moth-eaten black shawl, revealing a head of scant white hair through which the scalp showed clearly.

"Bathilda?" Harry uttered once again.

The lady nodded in our direction. She shuffled past us, pushing Hermione aside as though she had not seen her, and vanished into what seemed to be a sitting room.

"I'm not sure about this," breathed Hermione, looking at me and Harry with worried eyes.

"Look at the size of her, I think we could overpower her if we had to," I told Hermione.

"Ron's aunt Muriel called her 'gaga' before." said Harry, my eyebrows furrowed in confusion at the random information that Harry told us.

"Come!" called Bathilda from the next room making Hermione and I jump a little in shock.

"It's okay," said Harry reassuringly to Hermione, and he led the way into the sitting room.

Bathilda was tottering around the place lighting candles, but it was still very dark, not to mention extremely dirty. Thick dust crunched beneath our feet, and I smelled something underneath the dank and mildewed smell, something worse, like meat gone bad. I wondered when was the last time anyone had been inside Bathilda's house to check whether she was coping. She seemed to have forgotten that she could do magic, too, for she lit the candles clumsily by hand, her trailing lace cuff in constant danger of catching fire.

"Let me do that," offered Harry, and he took the matches from her. She stood watching at Harry as he finished lighting the candles. Hermione and I also helped on lighting up the candles, Bathilda was both watching us as we did.

"Mrs. — Miss Bagshot?" uttered Harry, and his voice shook slightly. "Who is this?"

Bathilda was standing in the middle of the room still watching Hermione and I lit the candles for her.

"Miss Bagshot?" Harry repeated, and he advanced with a picture in his hands as the flames burst into life in the fireplace. Bathilda looked up at his voice. "Who is this person?" Harry asked her, pushing the picture he was holding forward.

She peered at it solemnly, then up at Harry while I squinted my eyes to try and see who it was.

"Do you know who this is?" Harry repeated in a much slower and louder voice than usual. "This man? Do you know him? What's he called?"