The Girl Who Hid | ✓

|150| Death

"I've got your clothes," a voice said from next to me.

Looking up, Harry wasn't looking at me but held out a shirt and pants for me. I only then realized I was naked. I gasped and snatched the clothes out of his hand and quickly slipped them on. Standing up, I looked around.

"Where are we?" I breathed.

"I have no clue," he admitted.

We were in a great domed glass roof glittered high above us in sunlight. Perhaps it was a palace. All was hushed and still, except for those odd thumping and whimpering noises coming from somewhere close by in the mist.

I turned slowly on the spot, and our surroundings seemed to invent themselves before our very eyes. A wide-open space, bright and clean, a hall larger by far than the Great Hall, with that clear, domed glass ceiling. It was quite empty. Harry and I were the only people there, except for —

I started. I had spotted the thing that was making the noises. It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath.

"You cannot help."

I squealed and spun around, Harry holding me close to him. Albus Dumbledore was walking toward us, sprightly and upright, wearing sweeping robes of midnight blue.

"Harry, Maisey." He spread his arms wide, and his hands were both whole and white and undamaged. "You wonderful kids. Correction— brave woman, brave man. Let us walk."

Stunned, Harry pushed me forward as we followed Dumbledore, who strode away from where the flayed child lay whimpering, leading us to three seats that I had not previously noticed, set some distance away under that high, sparkling ceiling. And yet...

"But you're dead," said Harry.

"Oh yes," said Dumbledore matter-of-factly.

"Then . . . are we dead too?"

"Ah," said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, I think not."

We looked at each other, the old man still beaming.

"Not?" I repeated.

"Not," said Dumbledore.

"But..." Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. I gasped and then touched my own shoulder, it was smooth. "But we should have died — I didn't— we didn't defend ourselves! We meant to let him kill us!"

"And that," said Dumbledore, "will, I think, have made all the difference."

Happiness seemed to radiate from Dumbledore like light, like fire: I had never seen the man so utterly, so palpably content.

"What? Explain," I said.

"But you already know," said Dumbledore. He twiddled his thumbs together.

"We let him kill us," said Harry. "Didn't we?"

"You did," said Dumbledore, nodding. "Go on!"

"So the part of his soul that was in us..."

Dumbledore nodded still more enthusiastically, urging Harry onward, a broad smile of encouragement on his face.

"...has it gone?"

"Oh yes!" said Dumbledore. "Yes, he destroyed it. Your souls are whole, and completely your own."

"But then..."

Harry glanced at me and then over his shoulder to where the small, maimed creature trembled under the chair.