Bella and the Chamber (Book Two)

Chapter Sixteen

By the time Halloween arrived, I was cursing Harry for his promise that we'll go to the Deathday Party. The rest of the school were happily waiting for their Halloween feast; the Great Hall had been decorated with the usual live bats, Hagrid's huge pumpkins had been carved into lanterns large enough for three men to sit inside and there were rumours that Dumbledore had booked a troupe of dancing skeletons for the entertainment. Sounds like we're missing out on a good night.

"A promise is a promise," Hermione reminded Harry when he complained. "You said you'd go to the Deathday Party"

I glared at him. "Yeah, and dragged us along too!"

Harry frowned. 

So, at seven o'clock, myself, Harry, Ron, and Hermione walked straight past the doorway to the already packed Great Hall, which was glittering invitingly with gold plates and candles, and directed our steps instead towards the dungeons. 

Oh, how I'm going to miss the food tonight...

Great, now I'm sounding like Ron.

Curse you Ronald!

The passageway leading to Nearly Headless Nick's party had been lined with candles too, though the effect was far from cheerful: these were long, think, jet-black tapers, all burning bright blue, casting a dim, light even over our own living faces. The temperature dropped with every step we took and the breath from our mouths could be seen in the air when we breathed out. I shivered and wrapped my robes tightly around me and as Harry wrapped his arms around me pulling me close, I heard what sounded like a thousand fingernails scraping on an enormous blackboard. Cringe.

"Is that supposed to be music?" Ron whispered. We turned a corner and saw Nick standing at a doorway hung with black velvet drapes.

"My dear friends," he said mournfully, "welcome, welcome...so pleased you could come..."

He swept off his plumed hat and bowed us inside.

It was an incredible sight that's for sure. The dungeon was full of hundreds of pearly-white, translucent people, mostly drifting around a crowded dance floor, waltzing to the dreadful, quavering sound of thirty musical saws, played by an orchestra on a black-draped platform. A chandelier overhead blazed midnight blue with a thousand more black candles. Our breath rose in a mist before us, it was like stepping into a freezer. Damn, it's cold.

"Shall we have a look around?" Harry suggested as he shifted on his feet. They were probably cold. 

"Careful not to walk through anyone," I said nervously, and we set off around the edge of the dance floor. We passed a group of gloomy nuns, a ragged man wearing chains, and the Fat Friar, a cheerful Hufflepuff ghost, who was talking to a knight with an arrow sticking out of his forehead. I wasn't at all surprised to see that the Bloody Baron, a gaunt, staring Slytherin ghost covered in silver bloodstains, was being given a wide berth by the other ghosts.

"Oh no," Hermione said suddenly, stopping in her tracks. "Turn back, turn back, I don't want to talk to Moaning Myrtle-"

"Who?" Harry asked, as we backtracked quickly. 

"She haunts the girls' toilet on the first floor," I explained. 

"She haunts a toilet?"

"Yes. It's been out of order all year because she keeps having tantrums and flooding the place. I never went in there anyway if I could avoid it, it's awful trying to go to the loo with her wailing at you-" Hermione was cut off. 

"Look, food!" Ron grinned. 

Now we're talking!

On the other side of the dungeon was a long table, also covered in black velvet. We approached it eagerly, all of us hungry, but next moment we had stopped in our tracks horrified. The smell was quite disgusting. Large, rotten fish were laid on handsome silver platters, cakes, burned charcoal black, were heaped on salvers; there was a great maggoty haggis, a slab of cheese covered in furry green mold and, in pride of place, an enormous grey cake in the shape of a tombstone, with tar-like icing forming the words,