Chapter 120 — Past the Light

The Fat Lady was awake when I reached the portrait hole. She listened to my request, looked at the parchment in my hands and repeated the part about an unusual name. I told her a professor needed to see it, preferably before it went somewhere else.

‘Then you will remain here,’ she said. She turned towards the adjoining frame and called through it, starting an exchange with someone who plainly objected to being woken. I waited beneath the portrait while the message travelled towards the patrol.

On the map, Peter Pettigrew moved again. His label approached a junction not far beyond the next turn. If he continued that way, I could reach the passage before whoever was coming to help us.

‘He’s moving,’ I said, showing her the parchment. The Fat Lady scarcely glanced at it before looking back at me.

‘Then let the person I’ve called deal with it. That was why you came to me, wasn’t it?’

It was an excellent question. I stepped out anyway, telling myself I was only going far enough to see the junction. When she called my name sharply, I answered that I would be just around the corner. Saying it aloud didn’t make the distance feel quite as harmless as it had in my head.

Low light from the nearest bracket caught the raised edges of the portrait frames. I stopped at the turn and checked the map. Pettigrew’s footprints had paused a short distance from mine, leaving us both still on the parchment while I listened to the cold passage.

Someone snored inside a frame. A draught stirred my sleeve, but I heard no footsteps from the place where the label stood. Then it began moving towards me.

I folded the outer sections of the map beneath the part I needed and held it against my chest. With my other hand, I took a prepared light strip from its cover. The junction was clear, so I threw it towards the open floor beyond the turn and spoke ‘Lumos’ as it released.

The piece spent itself in a modest pool of light. I could see the opposite wall, the lower edges of the paintings and the empty stone between us. It was enough to wake a woman in a high-necked dress directly above it, who leaned out over her painted balcony.

‘Must you do that beneath my frame?’ she demanded. I apologised without taking my eyes off the junction, which appeared to make matters worse.

Pettigrew’s name crossed the passage. I looked from the footprints to the illuminated floor and back again, waiting for a person to emerge beneath the label. The photograph’s round-faced man wasn’t there; neither was a pale figure drifting through the stone.

The name continued past me. I turned with my back close to the wall, trying to watch the next stretch of corridor and the map at once. Something faint brushed against stone, too slight to distinguish from the draught, a frame or my own coat. When I stopped moving to listen, I heard nothing more.

‘Have you seen anyone else come through here?’ I asked the woman. She drew herself up inside the frame as though I had finally remembered whom I had interrupted.

‘I’ve been asleep,’ she said. When I tried asking whether she meant before I arrived, she informed me that had been the answer to my original question too.

Further along, another portrait opened an eye. ‘Someone’s coming now,’ he observed. ‘Perhaps they can explain why you’ve woken us.’

Severus Snape’s name approached from the stairs. I checked Pettigrew’s position, followed it as far as a cluster of cramped lines beyond the turn and lost it. A stronger light touched the wall beside me before I could find it again.

My first instinct was to hide the map. I obeyed it with an efficiency that would have been useful for almost any other response: brush to parchment, closing phrase, folds pulled together as the ink vanished. Then I remembered that I had sent for a professor to examine it.

‘An interesting time for a walk, Mr Mercer.’ Snape’s wandlight reached my face. He had seen enough of the folding to know I had been busy with something.

‘I was sleepwalking,’ I said. The excuse sounded worse in the corridor than it had during the fraction of a second in which I chose it.

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Snape regarded me without speaking. I lasted considerably less time under the stare than I had against the boggart that morning.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t. I asked the Fat Lady to call a professor.’

‘Who told you to remain at the entrance.’ His gaze moved towards the turn I had just come around, then returned to me. ‘And yet here you are.’

My little pool of light was fading. I held up the parchment and said there had been a name on it, one I had wanted to compare with a person in the corridor. Snape held out his free hand, and I gave him the map before attempting an explanation of why I had just closed it.

He touched the blank surface with his wand. A revealing spell brought up lines of handwriting, though they had very little to do with the layout of Hogwarts. From where I stood, I could read the beginning of a sentence addressed to his nose.

‘That isn’t the map,’ I said. Snape looked up slowly, and I realised I had supplied him with information he was unlikely to appreciate.

‘You astonish me.’ He lowered the parchment as footsteps sounded behind him. Lupin came into view, fastening a cuff, and stopped at the sight of what Snape was holding.

‘You recognise this, then?’ Snape asked. Lupin looked at the writing before answering that I had shown him the map in a lesson. McGonagall and Dumbledore already knew I had it.

‘No one told me to come out,’ I said before Snape could ask whether they approved of this particular use. ‘That part was mine.’

‘How refreshing to establish something without a second attempt.’ Snape turned the parchment slightly towards Lupin, who had moved closer. When Lupin asked what I had seen, I made myself stop watching the map and answer him.

‘Peter Pettigrew.’ Neither professor spoke. I felt the silence change and added, ‘His name. Ron saw it too before I left. I wrote down the time and the corridor.’

Lupin’s hand closed around the edge of his sleeve. Snape looked at him, then at the parchment, and repeated Pettigrew’s name as though checking whether I would alter it under closer attention.

‘The whole name,’ I said. ‘I read it more than once. The footprints came through that junction, but I couldn’t see a person.’

Lupin reached for the map. Snape kept hold of it and asked what he could contribute. For a moment, I stood between them with my brush still in my hand and the distinctly unhelpful feeling that I had interrupted something older than tonight.

‘I can check the enchantment,’ Lupin said. ‘And the place Oswald saw.’

‘So can the headmaster.’ Snape’s fingers remained closed around the edge of the parchment. I looked from one to the other and spoke before the exchange could move any further away from the name.

‘He should know,’ I said. ‘Please. That was why I asked for someone to come.’

Snape looked at me, then released the map into Lupin’s hand. Lupin said we needed a table and enough light to read it properly. Snape would see that the headmaster received the report; we were to remain in Lupin’s office.

I began to put my brush away, relieved that we were finally doing something useful. Snape said my name before I had finished, and the relief developed a familiar qualification.

‘You will give Professor McGonagall a written account tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Explain why you left the place where you were instructed to wait. Include your decision to close the very object you had summoned a professor to examine.’

My face grew warm. I said I would, and he added that McGonagall could decide whether my recent experience of disregarding instructions had taught me anything. The Animagus review was fresh enough that I had no answer worth making.

Before we left, I pointed out the junction and the turn beyond it. Lupin asked which direction the footprints had taken and where I had lost the label. As I described it, he looked along the wall at floor level, then towards the darkness beneath a frame. He didn’t explain why.

We returned past the Gryffindor entrance first. Ron stood just inside with my notebook, and the Fat Lady looked considerably more satisfied with my current company. Lupin told him where I was going and that I would be brought back, then asked whether he had read the name himself.

‘Yes,’ Ron said. ‘Peter Pettigrew, on the corridor.’ He handed me the notebook without taking his eyes off the folded map. I thanked him for waiting, and he nodded before the portrait closed between us.

This time I followed the professor without improving the route. His office felt warm after the corridor, and he set the map on the desk before asking for my notes. I opened the book to the name, time and location, leaving the brush beside it.

Lupin read the entry, then asked me to describe the movement once more. I showed him the junction I had drawn and explained how the footprints had passed the lit floor. He kept his finger beside that part of the sketch after I finished.

‘Peter could have been transformed,’ he said. The words came quietly, but without the surprise I had expected from a new possibility.

‘The map would still show his name?’ I asked. Lupin said a change of shape needn’t conceal someone from it, and I looked from his hand to his face. ‘You know he could do that.’

He took his hand away from the page. ‘I knew Peter could take another form,’ he said. He had stopped short of telling me which one, leaving a pause I couldn’t see a reason for.

‘What form?’ I asked. Lupin closed his eyes briefly before answering.

‘A rat.’ He looked at the notebook again, and I thought of Ron beside the empty box, telling us about twelve years of Scabbers in his family. I had been searching for a rat all week; tonight, I had watched a dead man’s name move through an apparently empty corridor.

Neither observation joined the two by itself. Together, they were suddenly impossible to leave out of this conversation, and I leaned forward over the desk.

‘Scabbers,’ I said. Lupin’s attention came back to me at once.