Seven Devils ★ T.M.R ★

Chapter Five

╔═══*.·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·.*═══╗
THE RIGHT TIME TO STRIKE
╚═══*.·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·.*═══╝

MARINA HEAVED A huge sigh as she collapsed on the small rickety bed in the upstairs room of Tomes and Scrolls. The sun was hanging low in the sky, bright orangey light was streaming in through the west window and turned the faded brown bedspread turn a vibrant deep red. 

It had been a very long day. Hogwarts students had started swarming the village every weekend, filling every store with shouts, breaking things, leaving piles of garbage around the bins – which even magically emptied themselves, Marina didn't understand why it was so hard to put chocolate frog wrappers in the actual bin itself rather than the ground adjacent to the magic bin – but most significantly to Marina, they were constantly toppling over stacks of books that she had spent organising. It was relentless. Without a wand, Marina had to tidy the whole store each Saturday and Sunday evening, pulling books out of weird nooks and crannies where students had perused with them and put them down without thinking, removing lolly wrappers stuck on the backs of books, and worst of all, finding single torn pages on the ground and having to figure out which book they came from.

Exhausted, Marina lay motionless on her bed for a full twenty minutes, which she knew because the tiny clockface that sat above the mantelpiece of the brick fireplace hummed satisfactorily every ten minutes. She pushed herself up with momentous effort and lugged her way across the rickety but immaculately clean wooden floor to the desk against the window that also served as her dining table. Flopping into the creaking chair, Marina pulled the diary out from its hidden place in the invisible drawer Dumbledore had charmed onto the underside of the desk.

No one had heard from Riddle in a month. It was getting so bad that Marina suspected that Dumbledore and the others were wondering if she'd made up the whole thing, and he wasn't really in the diary at all. Regardless, it was still her week. Every day for about an hour she wrote in it, trying to be as candid as possible, her spirits deflating with every resolutely blank page that she left behind.

From the regular desk drawer, she pulled out the quill and ink she'd bought her first week on the job. It was a simple yet beautiful quill, pitch black with a purple and green iridescence to it. The ink was plain black – the colour shifting ink was far too expensive for her meagre salary, but she was saving up for the deep pink ink that shone gold in certain lights.

'Today sucked so bad. These kids be seriously testing me, how do you even begin to think it's okay to dog-ear books INSIDE the bookstore that you DON'T EVEN BUY. Genuinely don't remember being that much of a prat when I was thirteen. Actually, that's such a lie, I was horribly cringy in my own way I suppose. But at least I didn't screw up NEW BOOKS. INSIDE THE STORE. A modern tragedy.'

Marina paused, thinking. As she watched the colours shift on the feather, she was reminded of something from back home.

'It's really weird though,' she wrote, absentmindedly. 'I don't really remember much from before I came here. I keep realising that I'm not missing home, or not thinking about it. That's weird right?'

She paused again, trying to think how to word what she was thinking. 'It's not like I don't remember anything, I remember my flat, the university, I remember every sordid detail about my master's thesis, my plant collection, the town I lived in, the café that sells the best cappuccinos that come with one of those fancy chocolate bars on the side. But I can't remember... anyone. Friends, family... Sometimes when I'm just thinking about home in general it's like I remember this vague amorphous presence of who they were, that they were there, around me. But I try to see their faces and... nothing.