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The entire morning Gwendolyn heard nothing but talk of Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, but all she wanted was a quiet morning and a peaceful first day. But with Potter roaming the halls that felt to be impossible.
"There, look."
"Where?"
"Next to the tall kid with the red hair."
"Wearing the glasses?"
"Did you see his face?" "Did you see his scar?"
Whispers followed Harry from the moment he showed his face the next day. People lining up outside classrooms stood on tiptoe to get a look at him or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring. Gwen wished they wouldn't because she was trying to concentrate on finding her way to classes and with the hoard of students gawking at Harry, it proved to be much harder to navigate the halls of Hogwarts.
There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Gwendolyn was sure the coats of armor could walk.
The ghosts didn't help, either. It was always a nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying to open. The Bloody Baron usually always gave the Slytherins the correct directions, but Peeves the Poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class. He would drop wastepaper baskets on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk, or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose, and screech, "GOT YOUR CONK!"
Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Though warned by her brothers about him she watched as Harry and Ron managed to get on the wrong side of him on their very first morning. Filch found them trying to force their way through a door that unluckily turned out to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. He wouldn't believe they were lost, was sure they were trying to break into it on purpose and was threatening to lock them in the dungeons when they were rescued by Professor Quirrell, who was passing.
Filch owned a cat called Mrs. Norris, a scrawny, dust-colored creature with bulging, lamp-like eyes just like Filch's. She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out of line, and she'd whisk off for Filch, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Filch knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone and could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. Gwen's brothers told her the students all hated him, and it was the dearest ambition of many to give Mrs. Norris a good kick.
