An Opus Alchymicum Vol 1: The Experimental Theologian's Apprentice

The Vanishing Man

The confession that Harry had been hoping for didn't come right away. His parents, though a little more distracted than usual, were perfectly jovial when they arrived home after their clandestine meeting at the inverted pyramid. There was a slight strain to the air, but neither James nor Lily Potter seemed at all inclined to answer their son's unspoken and burning curiosity about what had happened.

And, of course, Harry wasn't able to ask anything himself, for to do so would require confessing that he had overheard a conversation that he shouldn't have, after sneaking into a part of the city where he shouldn't have been. Both admissions would likely land him in serious hot water, and Harry had an aversion to being in trouble.

So he had no option but to stay quiet and wait until his parents were ready to let him in on their little secrets. But Harry had secrets of his own, special places he had found around the city where he could go to be on his own. And he was on his own a lot, which he didn't mind so much as he didn't know any different.

One such place was high up on the sheer wall in the very West of Pont-y-Annwn. A crude sort of staircase had been cut into the side of the rock, or maybe it had just worn down that way after centuries of use. Harry wasn't sure about this, but his active mind liked to imagine all sorts of subterranean creatures beavering away with pick-axes and shovels as they mined away, though what they might be mining for Harry couldn't conceive.

At the top of the stairway the rock levelled out onto a narrow parapet, giving a sweeping view of the whole city from up here. Harry would sit for hours, dangling his legs over the ledge and looking across at the huge towers of The Spike and The Pickle, whimsically named after sister buildings in surface London hundreds of miles away, and fighting sickening bouts of vertigo if he ever felt brave enough to look straight down over the edge.

For it was a long fall to the streets far below ... almost a thousand meters, some guessed, from floor to roof. It was a height almost impossible to believe, considering that the whole enormous chasm had been artificially hollowed out deep beneath the surface of the Earth, which was yet higher still through seven miles of solid bedrock.

But that wasn't the only thing that Harry found impressive about his home, and one of the other major reasons was the cause for the High Parapet being the favourite of his secret places, and the thing that had drawn him here today. He took his favourite seat on the ledge and his gaze quested across to the sweeping vista of The Light Deck ... the array of hundreds of brilliantly lit, giant glass globes that provided illumination to the city down below. That was a truly impressive sight, but Harry's goal was something else entirely.

For a new species of insect had found a way to evolve and thrive down here in the perpetual darkness. It was a special type of moth that fluttered and snapped, thousands of them, around the globes of the Light Deck, absorbing the light and then changing it to different colours. It was the most mesmerising thing, to watch all of the reds and blues and golds flash and sparkle against the backdrop of that palpable blackness.

"Beautiful, aren't they?"

Harry slammed his head so hard to his right that his neck ached in protest. Then he scrambled up in his surprise, away from the ledge and backed into the wall, where he huffed hard for a clean breath of air. For there was a stranger up here with him, a tall man in a long cloak that Harry had been quite unaware of until he was suddenly there. He might as well have popped out of thin air, such was the abruptness of his appearance.

And his appearance was what drew Harry's attention first, once his shocked pulse had calmed down enough for sense to return to his mind. For Harry had never seen anything like this man in his life, and it was unlikely that anything even remotely close had ever been seen in Pont-y-Annwn before ... and if this man ever was seen, he'd likely be carted away by the authorities to have tests run on him, such was the bizarreness of his attire.