The staircase was tinged in dark green with hints of black, and its burnished silver railings seemed as if they has just been polished. The little light that reached the staircase from its high-up ending point danced over the banister and alighted softly on the seventh step. As Harry climbed, he felt oddly as though he were advancing faster than normal, but each time he stopped, he realized the height to which he had already climbed and hurried on again. Every now and then, he glanced up at the seemingly-never ending stairs and wondered why he was still going.
It seemed he would never approach the top, but all of a sudden, he rounded the next bend and found himself at the landing and walked into a marvelously empty area.
At the far end of the otherwise-bare round stone room was a gothic window covered, on the outside, with interlocking iron rods. Just below the window, a small, plain table stood, atop which there was an inkpot, an odd quill, and a heavy tome flipped open to the very last page.
Suddenly, the quill stood upright and began writing. Harry approached and saw the name it has written down.
Alice Belfrage-Walton
1, Crouching Avenue
Coventry, England
Harry realized where he was. He was in the Small Locked Tower, a tower in Hogwarts where the Book of Admittance and the Quill of Acceptance lay. It had never been accessed by students before, and neither the book nor the quill had been touched since the Founders' time. Harry stood, breathless in front of them.
Surely, the book had not haphazardly chosen a name? Harry would have to convince Tom to allow for a shopping excursion in Coventry.
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As if Fate had it all planned, Tom did not need convincing.
He was planning to visit Rosier, who was visiting his great uncle Tiberius Rosier's second cousin's best friend's new, young wife.
The Malfoys wanted to accompany Harry for shopping, and Regulus and Barty didn't mind a vacation to the birthplace of St. George.
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Coventry's West shopping mall was quite new, and Harry found that his tie-shopping for Tom had been successful. He had acquired three dark green ties with varying silk patterns on them, a plain black tie, a glimmering dark red tie, and an atrocious neon tie that he was going to make Tom wear at the next Death Eater meeting.
Tom was going to be a big hit--Harry just knew it!
He wondered if he should get Tom a sheer shirt to complement the diva look, but he quickly pushed that out of his mind...for now.
He and Draco were sitting in a café, sipping tea with excessive elegance and looking around curiously at the Muggles around them. Muggles were very strange, Draco decided.
Several of the graying ones had set out large newspapers in front of them and adjusted their spectacles, demonstrating remarkable eyebrow athletics and sniffing skills.
A man in the corner glanced around the room and then back at his magazine periodically. The magazine had a very nice lady on the cover. Some more Muggles in suits arranged stacks of paper, wrote things on them, and looked very stressed.
The door to the café opened with a twinkle of bells, and the Muggles craned their necks to stare at the two bizarre men in what looked like long black bathrobes being dragged by a small girl with black hair and brown eyes. Behind them strode an impressive woman who stood nearly 2 meters in height because of her red high heels. She was dressed in a beige cotton trench coat and grey slacks and held a briefcase tightly.
"Hey, Harry!" Barty greeted exhaustedly as he sank into a chair at the adjacent table. A newspaper-man looked up and scowled distastefully at Barty's fashion choices. "We've been running all over Coventry with Alice here," Barty continued, patting the chair next to him (on which he had sat the little girl down on some seconds before) and finding it empty once more. He smiled sheepishly. "She's very shy," was his not-so-convincing explanation.
As little Alice wandered around the café poking people and rearranging the chairs as she liked, Barty abruptly introduced Harry and Draco to Alice's mother, Mrs. Belfrage-Walton.
She was a lovely woman with an honest Muggle job that Draco had never heard of and didn't particularly care to learn about. Her parents had emigrated from Kazakhstan, but she had lived in Turkey for her childhood before she had moved to the U.K with her late husband. Draco commented that his friend Blaise's new stepfather owned twenty acres in Kazakhstan. Mrs. Belfrage-Walton was really a wonderful, down-to-earth woman, but as she narrated her life story, all those around her were paying more attention to stopping Alice before Alice's curiosity got the better of her.
Regulus and Barty had apparently met the mother-daughter pair while trying to find Harry and Draco (who had gone off on their own) before Tom came back from his stiff meeting with Rosier and Rosier's great uncle Tiberius Rosier's second cousin's best friend's new, young wife, Flavia. Barty and Regulus had rushed from store to store to peer creepily into windows and see if Harry and Draco were there (the boys were far too speedy for them).
Despite not finding Harry and Draco for a while, they had witnessed Alice levitate a screeching cat from the corner of a store to behind the cashier's desk, where it had mussed up all of the clothes in line behind the poor cashier.
Regulus and Barty (more like Barty, though) broke the glass door to save Alice from the angry cashier and sped away with her on Barty's back, much to the ire of her mother. They had later explained magic to her from behind a suspicious bush (They had thought themselves very secretive), effectively breaking more than a dozen laws, both Muggle and Magical.
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With Mrs. Belfrage-Walton's consent, Barty and Regulus had acquired an unofficial protégé.
Alice was to begin her stay with them once she turned eleven and started school at Hogwarts, with the exception of summer break, whence she would return to Coventry. In the meantime, Alice was authorized (by Barty) to use a Portkey to transport her to Barty and Regulus's manor in Suffolk.
Harry only hoped Barty and Regulus stopped their Very Interesting Exercises, since Alice could arrive at any time. She was particularly adept at arriving during inopportune ones.
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Several nights after his return from Coventry, Harry found himself once again in the Small Locked Tower.
He leafed through its crinkly pages and dragged his thumb down its lines of long-dried ink. The pages were not has stained as one would expect them to be, because they had been magically preserved. Suddenly, as if the book knew what he was looking for, his eyes seemed only to see the admittance of Alex Potter.
Alex Remus Potter
6, High Street
Godric's Hollow, England
Then, the quill dropped onto the page, expectantly. Harry picked it up and, seeing that it was quite a normal-looking quill despite being a historic magical artifact, gleefully scratched out Alex's name.
Somewhere outside the window, somebody screamed. Harry looked out of the window, only to see a round bundle of robes with flaming red hair zooming away into the distance.
He scooted closer to the window. The little bundle was moving so fast that it looked like a racing pigeon--it was even squawking like one! How delightful! Maybe Hogwarts was introducing a pigeon-racing course!
The bundle became smaller and smaller as it got farther away, but as Harry watched, it stilled the minute it exited Hogwarts's wards. The little bundle went down, hopefully never to be seen again.
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Unfortunately, pestilence is persistent.
YOU ARE READING
Sweet Revenge
FanfictionA smile twisted onto his lips. "Oh but darling brother....you expect me to be so merciful..." On that fateful night of Halloween, Dumbledore makes a fatal mistake; the wrong boy-who-lived is named. Soon after, Harry James Potter was thrown in Azkaba...
