Chapter 14 — Nearly Headless Is Still Too Headless

Ron arranged chicken, beef and potatoes on his plate with the concentration of someone solving a difficult practical problem. Once the obvious spaces were occupied, he added bread. I had thought the train lunch might limit what he could manage at dinner, but apparently I had underestimated the distance between meals.

‘You ate half the trolley,’ I reminded him. ‘Where are you putting all this?’

‘That was hours ago,’ Ron said. He reached past me for the gravy. ‘You bought a bag with extra space inside. You ought to appreciate the principle.’

Harry laughed into his pumpkin juice. I passed the gravy and began helping myself, pleased that the day had finally reached a point where the most urgent question was whether anything remained in the serving dish. Dean sat near us, Neville kept checking the pocket which held Trevor, and Hermione was asking an older student about the timetable. Names travelled along the table as people found room to talk between mouthfuls.

For a few minutes I stopped thinking about the questions I had brought to Hogwarts. The food was hot, my friends were beside me and somewhere in the years before this evening my parents had sat at this table too. I was beginning to understand how a castle could become home when a head rose out of the potatoes.

Ron cried out and recoiled. My hand went straight to the pouch before I had identified what I was reaching for, then stopped as shoulders followed the head through the table. A translucent man in old-fashioned clothes floated before us, untroubled by the plates or the disruption to dinner. Nothing had been knocked over except our composure.

‘Good evening,’ he said. He surveyed the first-years as though arriving through the food were the natural way to introduce himself.

‘That would have been more useful a moment earlier,’ I told him. I let my hand drop from the pouch, leaving the prepared paper inside. Harry had gone pale, and Ron was recovering his grip on his fork.

‘There are ghosts at Hogwarts,’ Hermione said. ‘Each House has one associated with it. I read about them.’

‘Did the book mention coming up through dinner?’ I asked. Another pale figure drifted through a wall farther along the Hall, and I began reconsidering how much of the castle counted as a useful barrier.

‘Not that part,’ she admitted. She moved her plate away from the place where the ghost had emerged, an adjustment I considered entirely reasonable even if it couldn’t keep him out.

The older students barely reacted to the other ghosts appearing around the room. Percy greeted ours as Sir Nicholas, while somebody on the far side of the table continued passing vegetables straight through a transparent sleeve. Apparently familiarity could make quite a lot of things ordinary. I wasn’t sure I wanted to reach that point before finishing my first dinner.

Ron recognised the ghost’s nickname. ‘Nearly Headless Nick,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of you.’

‘Sir Nicholas, if you please.’ The ghost drew himself up, looking considerably less welcoming than he had a moment earlier. It seemed that being dead didn’t make a person indifferent to introductions.

I should have left the name alone. Instead, I asked how somebody could be nearly headless, and Harry turned towards me with an expression which suggested he could already see the problem. Sir Nicholas chose to answer by demonstration.

His head tipped sideways until it hung from his neck by a narrow strip. I pushed my plate back without deciding to do it. Around us, several first-years made sounds of disgust, Hermione studied her food with fierce determination and Ron put down a chicken leg. For the first time all evening, nobody seemed interested in whether the gravy had reached them.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That’s a complete answer. You don’t need to show us anything else.’

Sir Nicholas restored his head, evidently satisfied, and floated away. Harry waited until he was out of earshot before telling me that the demonstration had been entirely my fault. I agreed not to ask any more questions involving the ghost’s anatomy, which seemed the minimum apology the table deserved.

The rest of the ghosts became easier to watch once they stopped removing parts of themselves. I wondered what kept them here, able to speak and move around a school long after their deaths. Hermione had known enough to identify the visitors, so I asked whether the book had explained that too.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t read much about what happens after people die.’

I had looked surprised before I could help it. She noticed and added that reading about things she wanted to understand didn’t mean she had learnt everything. I admitted that she had done a convincing job of creating the impression, which earned a nudge against my shoe under the table. It was probably best to find the answer myself when I had access to the library.

Ron resumed eating. I had just begun to consider another helping when Harry stiffened beside me and pressed a hand to his forehead. The change in his face made me put down my fork.

‘Harry? What’s wrong?’

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‘My scar,’ he said, squeezing his eyes shut. ‘It hurt. Just then.’

I asked how badly, and he described a sharp pain which had already stopped. When he moved his fringe aside, the old lightning-shaped mark looked unchanged. I couldn’t see a fresh injury, but that didn’t explain why it had hurt. Ron leaned closer while Hermione watched Harry rather than the scar.

‘Scars can hurt sometimes,’ Ron said. ‘My brothers have got enough of them to complain about it.’

‘It’s gone now,’ Harry told us. He rubbed his forehead once more, then lowered his hand. ‘I’m all right.’

I looked towards the staff table, without any clear idea what I expected to find. Dumbledore was talking to McGonagall, Hagrid was eating and the black-haired professor had turned his attention elsewhere. Farther along sat a nervous-looking man in a turban. None of them supplied an explanation merely by being there.

The scraps I remembered about Harry were no better. I knew the scar came from Voldemort’s attack, but I couldn’t connect a brief pain during dinner with anything reliable. Inventing a cause would be easier than discovering one, which was a good reason not to do it. ‘Tell us if it happens again,’ I said. Harry agreed and began eating, apparently willing to let the moment pass.

I fixed the details in my mind for the notebook: first night, during the feast, sudden pain, no visible change and no obvious cause. Dad’s experiments had taught me the value of recording what happened before memory supplied a tidier version. For now I left Harry in peace, checking his expression when he went quiet without making the entire meal an examination.

After dessert, Dumbledore stood again. This time his notices used full sentences, though their content was not altogether reassuring. Students were forbidden to enter the Forbidden Forest, which struck me as a rule the name had already made a considerable effort to explain. Then he warned us away from a third-floor corridor unless we wanted a particularly painful death.

I turned towards Percy. ‘Does he usually make safety instructions sound like a challenge?’ I asked. ‘That seems a risky approach in a room full of children.’

‘Just don’t go there,’ Percy said. He sounded as though he expected to repeat the instruction several times before the end of term.

That had been my plan already. Ron thought the warning would have the opposite effect on Fred and George; farther down the table, one of them raised his goblet without looking round. Whether he had heard us or simply anticipated the accusation, I decided Percy was likely to have a difficult year.

The school song followed. Everybody appeared entitled to choose a tempo, which gave the Hall more music than it could comfortably contain at once. When it finally ended, Percy gathered the Gryffindor first-years and led us out, away from the warm dishes and into the passages beyond.

Without the Great Hall around us, the castle became harder to understand. Corridors joined staircases at angles I hadn’t expected, and portraits interrupted Percy’s explanation by moving between frames. I watched a painted knight leave one picture and appear in another while Percy tried to make certain we were watching the actual route. Both activities seemed relevant to avoiding getting lost.

Then a staircase changed direction. Harry stopped beside me, and Percy held the group back before anyone could follow the wrong flight. ‘Pay attention when you’re moving round the castle,’ he told us. ‘They don’t always lead to the same place. Some of the doors need watching too.’

‘Does the floor stay where it is?’ I asked. I was trying to establish which parts of the building we could take for granted.

‘Usually,’ Percy said. He waited for the stairs to settle before allowing us forward, apparently satisfied with an answer which had not improved my confidence at all.

We climbed until Ron began objecting to the height of Gryffindor Tower. I suggested that the stairs might help with dinner, and he said he had already climbed enough to account for breakfast as well. At least nobody could mistake his complaints for uncertainty about whether we were going the right way. He followed Percy as determinedly as the rest of us.

Our guide stopped at a portrait of a large woman in a pink dress. She asked for a password, and Percy answered, ‘Caput Draconis.’ The portrait swung out, revealing an opening in the wall. I looked through it and felt a familiar mixture of admiration and irritation at the school hiding useful doors behind things which appeared to be decoration.

Percy made us wait before entering. The password would change, he explained, and we needed to remember the new one when we were told. The Fat Lady wasn’t going to let us in simply because we turned up late and looked miserable.

‘Won’t she recognise us?’ Harry asked. He glanced at the portrait, which was waiting with very little interest in making exceptions for the first night.

Hermione said Ravenclaw students had to answer a question to enter their own common room. Ron immediately expressed gratitude for our password. After a day of unexpected instructions, I could see the attraction of an entrance with one answer you could actually learn in advance. We followed Percy through the opening before the Fat Lady decided to close it on the discussion.

Firelight filled the room beyond. Armchairs stood near the hearth, sofas offered enough space to sit without balancing a plate on your knees, and small tables held books and unfinished games. Red and gold surrounded us, much less formal here than the banners in the Hall. For the first time since the lake, I could imagine belonging in one part of the castle without needing to inspect it from floor to ceiling.

Percy stood by the stairs until we had finished looking. Boys’ dormitories were to the left, girls’ to the right, and our luggage had already been delivered to the rooms for our year. Ron looked at my pouch and remarked on the advantage of arriving with your things still attached to you. I checked that it was secure, glad at least one part of the journey had remained straightforward.

The explanation continued through quiet hours, curfew and finding a prefect if we got seriously lost. Behind Percy, Fred and George silently illustrated the rules with increasingly dramatic expressions of distress. He didn’t turn round, which made me suspect years of experience had taught him exactly how much attention to give them.

When he released us, groups began forming towards the dormitories. Harry and Ron stayed beside me without needing to arrange it. Neville remained near the stairs with Trevor in both hands, looking from one group to another and not joining any of them. Harry noticed before I had decided what to say.

‘Neville, come with us,’ he called. He waited while the boy looked up, then indicated the stairs. ‘There’s room.’

Neville asked whether we meant it. Ron said solemnly that we were really planning to steal Trevor, then had to explain he was joking when Neville failed to look reassured. By the time he joined us, all four of us were smiling, though Ron seemed slightly embarrassed by the effort it had taken.

‘We survived the first day,’ I said as we started upstairs. ‘That’s something to build on.’

‘It isn’t over yet,’ Harry pointed out. I told him not to challenge the rest of the evening, then followed the others towards the room where we would spend our first night at Hogwarts.