Chapter 24
Romance and Ravenclaws
The Ravenclaw common room was an impressive sight. Used to the comfortable, rosy intimacy of the Gryffindor common room, Harry and Ginny were taken back by the wide, spacious feel. It was an open, circular room with high, vaulted ceilings that opened up into wooden rafters. The wall opposite them was covered with tall windows that would undoubtedly offer a spectacular view of the mountains north of Hogwarts during the day. Instead they opened up into a black, star filled sky which made the room seem cold even though it was normal temperature. Alongside the windows hung tall, blue draperies that stretched to the floor. In the center of the room were a dozen or so wooden tables with chairs set around each. To their immediate left and right were curving, stone walls, almost completely covered with old, dusty books.
“Wow. Not bad,” Ginny whispered, voicing Harry’s thoughts exactly. It was a rather stunning room, although it lacked the same comfort and coziness (and mess) of the Gryffindor common room.
“Yeah, Hermione would love this place.”
“I can’t believe this!” Ginny whispered excitedly, “McGonagall’d have kittens if she ever found out. Too bad we don’t have a camera, I’ll bet even Fred and George haven’t done this.”
They walked around a little bit, careful not to make a noise. Moving around through the corridors had been relatively easy. Here they had to be especially careful as the slightest noise could alert the Ravenclaws. Around two or three of these tables sat groups of Ravenclaw second and first years, dead quiet and with books open. Apparently the Ravenclaws passed their time by studying, rather than talking and goofing around like the Gryffindors did. Harry thanked the Sorting Hat once again for sticking him in Gryffindor.
After they had explored a bit, taking in the many differences between this room and their own, Ginny spoke up.
“So? Is this it? Is this your blue room?” she asked in a hushed voice.
Harry had already been thinking about whether or not this was the room he had seen in the diary. It didn’t seem likely. “I dunno. I mean the floor is stone and the room’s tall, but there’s no blue light. And in the diary there was only one bookshelf -- here there’s at least ten.”
“Well, did it look like these?”
Harry examined the bookshelves more carefully. “Kind of. Except these are shorter. And the one I saw had the entire top shelf emptied out.”
“Hmm. Let’s look around more.”
They crept around the room, dodging every time one of the Ravenclaws stood up to retrieve a book. Harry studied each of the bookcases in turn, but none of them matched the one he had seen in the diary. He was beginning to think his hunch about the Ravenclaw common room had been wrong. He also realized it was highly unlikely that they would recognize the bookcase even if they were in the right place -- it was bound to have changed after 1000 years. Perhaps it had been moved. Perhaps the top shelf was filled. Perhaps it didn’t even exist…
They explored the common room for a while longer, Harry’s hope sinking with each passing minute. Nothing. Having reached the far end of the room on the right side of the original entryway, they looked back and surveyed their position.
“Harry, what about over there?” Ginny whispered suddenly, pointing past the entryway and center tables to far side of the room.
“Where? The windows?”
“No, see straight across from us, where the bookshelves end?”
Harry squinted to see where she was pointing. “Yes.”
“See how to the right it kind of goes in, like there’s a smaller room next to it?”
Looking more carefully Harry was able to see what she was talking about. Right where the room began to curve into the window covered wall there was a small, open space, almost like a doorway leading into another room.
“Yeah. Let’s go see.”
They silently made their way across the common room, stopping once when Harry painfully stubbed his toe on a table leg causing a nearby first year to look up from his book and ask fearfully, “Peeves? Is that you?” Moving back to the wall with bookcases, Harry and Ginny walked past the original entryway where the room was the widest to where the room began to narrow again. A number of chairs and smaller tables had been placed in this part of the room as well, making for slow movement.
As they got closer to the opening Ginny had pointed out, Harry’s hope began to rise. It definitely did look like there was another room in there. He was about to say so to Ginny when, without warning, someone spoke.
“Might I have a word with you?”
Harry and Ginny froze. Who had seen them? They looked around frantically but couldn’t see the source of the voice anywhere. Harry could feel his heart pounding against his chest. Ginny had stopped breathing.
The voice spoke again.
“Mindy, I have something I would like to discuss with you.”
Mindy? Relaxing slightly, Harry realized that the voice was coming from the other side of a leather chair not four feet away from them. Ginny exhaled. It was Dunston Marlowe, and apparently he wanted a word with Mindy Tuppets, not them. They hadn’t even seen them sitting there. Not daring to move and risk being heard, Harry and Ginny stood still. All they could do was listen.
“Yes…more assertive…females like assertiveness…” they heard Dunston mumble next, though his voice was so low they couldn’t be sure. The next thing he said, however, was perfectly audible.
“Now, we’ve been acquainted ever since our first year.” His voice sounded grandiose, yet slightly nervous, as if he were trying to say something extremely difficult. “We arrived at this institution together, and, in a way, have grown up together. Well, what I’m trying to say is…I have a certain fondness for you, and it seems fairly obvious that you have a fondness for me too.”
Ginny exchanged an incredulous look with Harry under the cloak. Had they just stumbled across Dunston Marlowe declaring his love?
“I should have done it! I should have told her…” said Dunston, his voice changing into a helpless, frustrated tone. This time Ginny and Harry looked confusedly at one another. Who was he talking to? They heard mumbling from the other side of the chair, as though Dunston were now talking into his hands. Slowly, making sure the cloak didn’t come off her head, Ginny craned her neck around the side of the chair. She quickly whipped it back, covering her mouth with her hand in an effort not to burst out laughing.
“He’s alone,” she whispered. “He’s just…practicing.”
Dunston had started up again. “Look, I know we both have feelings for each other, I mean, that has been evident ever since we both reached for the same bowl of pickled eel liver in Potions last year. Why deny it anymore?”
Ginny snickered out loud, then shot her hand over her mouth. Harry shot her a warning look.
“…I guess what I’m trying to say is, I think a relationship, a more…romantic relationship, if you will…would be mutually beneficial to the both of us.”
Harry felt his mouth start twitching despite himself. He had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing out loud. The way Dunston was talking you would think he were negotiating international policy rather than telling a girl he fancied her. Realizing they were at much greater risk of being discovered if they stood there listening to him pour out his feelings than they were of trying to sneak past, Harry grabbed Ginny’s arm and pulled her towards away from the leather chair.
They moved carefully, slowly, doing their best not to make a sound. Once they had put several yards between themselves and Dunston they relaxed.
“That was close,” Harry said in relief.
Ginny’s face was bright red with stifled laughter. “That was torture! Did you hear him? He all but told the couch he was in love with it.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think Mindy will be as receptive as it was. By the look of things she feels the same way about him as I do.”
Ginny suddenly tugged on the sleeve of Harry’s robe, motioning forwards with her head. Harry looked up to see the small opening in the wall directly in front of them, only it wasn’t the small, hidden entryway he had thought. Instead an old, slightly crumbling archway stood in the wall, opening up into a smaller ante-chamber. Curious, they entered the room.
Like the common room the ante-chamber was a round, stone room with one wall covered almost entirely in windows. This room was much smaller, however, and seemed to be older than the room they had just been in. The stones in the floor were of a different cut and were smooth and rounded from centuries of foot traffic. Against the wall opposite from the windows stood a…
Harry’s jaw dropped in utter disbelief.
Stood a tall, wooden bookshelf with the top shelf completely empty.
“That’s it!” he hissed to Ginny.
“What?”
“That’s the bookcase I saw in the diary!” he said in a low voice, in case Dunston could hear them from around the corner.
Ginny threw off the invisibility cloak.
“Are you positive?”
“Yes.”
She looked excitedly at Harry as she walked up to the bookshelf and ran her hand along its corner. Suddenly her brow furrowed.
“Wait. You said the room had a weird blue glow to it. If this is really the right room, where’s the blue glow?”
She had a point. Standing directly in front of the bookshelf, Harry tried to picture exactly what he had seen in the diary. Stone floor, tall, wooden bookcase with the top shelf empty, everything bathed in a calming, blue light -- It was all there except for the blue glow. In the diary it seemed to come from behind him…
Turning around, Harry studied the wall opposite the bookshelf. It looked like any other part of the wall; grey stone with long, narrow windows set into it. These windows were shaped a little different than the others, however, and on further inspection they seemed to be made of a different material. While the other windows were clear and the stars could be seen perfectly through them, these ones had a rippling surface like a frozen sea and the like came through murky and distorted.
“Stained glass,” whispered Ginny, who had walked up beside Harry to investigate. She pulled her wand out and whispered “Lumos”. Shining the beam of light in the corner of the window away from the common room so no one would see, they saw the glass had a deep blue tone to it.
“Harry, was it day time in the diary when you saw this room?”
He had already come to the same conclusion she had. “Yes. The sun would’ve been shining through these windows, making the whole room blue. This is it…”
They smiled excitedly. Suddenly Ginny whipped the cloak off Harry and threw it over her shoulders, vanishing into thin air. He heard the swishing of robes as Ginny walked past him back through the open doorway.
“Er…what’re you doing?” Harry whispered in confusion.
Suddenly, from around the corner there was a sharp crack followed by the sound of a large number of books crashing to the ground off in the distance. A couple of seconds passed, then:
“Hey! You lot! I hope you plan on picking those up, Hansen. Don’t get cheeky with me!”
A couple seconds later Ginny appeared right beside him, wand in hand and giggling. “Hurry! Loverboy over there should be distracted for at least a minute,” she urged.
After taking a brief moment to marvel at Ginny’s ingenuity, Harry pulled out his wand, turned to face the bookshelf, and took a deep breath. This was it. Time to see if all this had been for real or just a stupid hunch.
“Acclaronius!”
Half expecting the bookcase to turn into a secret passageway, half expecting nothing to happen at all, Harry was surprised when a strange, dark object suddenly appeared in the center of the top shelf.
Ginny gasped.
“What…what is it?”
Looking closer Harry could see it was a dark, thick rectangle, with a midnight blue cover…a book.
Heart pounding with excitement he reached for the book. It was too high. “Accio book!” he whispered. It flew into his hand. He looked at the cover. He had seen it before. The same strange, silvery writing he had seen on the first one.
“It’s another one…”
“Another one what?”
Puzzled, Harry opened the book and scanned through the pages. Small, spidery writing stretched across each page.
“Another diary…”
Ginny looked at the diary, then back to him. “Wait. The last diary told you about the founders, then gave you a clue on where to find this one. Does that mean this one will tell something more about them, then have another clue at the end of it? Like some sort of…treasure hunt?”
“I don’t know. Possibly,” Harry replied. Dumbledore had never said anything about a second diary, and he couldn’t ask him about it until he had shared the prophecy. A strange thought occurred to Harry. What if Dumbledore didn’t even know about it? What if he was the first one to find where it was hidden…
“Well read it! See what it says!” Ginny urged.
“We can’t read it here, it takes a while. It kind of…well...puts you in a trance.” Harry explained. Noticing that it was silent in the Ravenclaw common room again he added, “We should get out of here.”
Ginny looked over her shoulder, then back at Harry and nodded. He slipped the diary under his robes and lifted the invisibility cloak over them. With a last glance at the room they walked through the doorway and back into the Ravenclaw common room.
Harry’s mind was abuzz. A second diary? What was in it? Would it point them towards Wulfric Gryffindor? And what if it wasn’t the last diary? What if there was another one? How many would there be?
Harry walked through the common room, lost in his thoughts until Ginny tugged on his arm and snapped him out of his reverie. She pointed ahead. Dunston Marlowe had returned to his previous seat, apparently finished chastising the first years for spilling books. He was still mumbling to himself. The tall leather chair he was sitting in had been moved back a couple of feet, making the small gap they had snuck through much tighter. It would be nearly impossible to squeeze back through it without being detected.
The only other option was to try and sneak by in front of him. There was plenty of space, but they would have to be extremely quiet…
“What do you reckon?” Harry whispered to Ginny.
“Let’s go around. It’d be easier than trying to squeeze behind.”
Slowly, cautiously, they began walking towards the chair Dunston Marlowe was sitting in. Luckily he was looking at the floor, a faraway look in his eyes. Soon they were directly in front of him. They could hear what he was saying.
“…I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, Mindy. It’s like I have a giddy charm on me all the time…”
Harry quickly stifled a laugh and looked warningly at Ginny, who was trembling slightly. A couple more steps…
Suddenly, expectedly, Dunston looked up. His face was serious. In his right hand he held a small pillow that had been lying on the couch. Slowly, inexplicably, he raised the pillow in front of him so he was looking directly at it.
“I want you to be mine, Mindy. I love you.” With that he brought the pillow to his face, cupping it with his hands, and kissed it tenderly.
It was too much. They couldn’t take any more. The laughter exploded out of their lungs like a dam bursting.
“HAHAHAHAHA!”
Dunston jumped up and whirled around. “Who’s there!” he took a few steps back, tripped over the leg of the chair, and tumbled onto his back, legs flying in the air.
“Go. GO!” Harry shouted as he pushed Ginny. They tore through the Ravenclaw common room, all caution blown to the wind. The first and second years looked over at Dunston (who was still scrambling to get up) curiously.
Apparently the dance had ended, as a number of older students had returned to the common. Doing their best to dodge them (though failing a couple of times), Harry and Ginny rushed out of the common room and back into the hallway, laughing uncontrollably the entire way.
*****
Harry returned to his own dormitory that night (holding the second diary securely under his robes) to find Dean, Seamus, and Neville sitting on their beds talking. Dress robes had been strewn messily about the room. Dean had been in the middle of explaining something to the other two.
“Oh, hi Harry.”
“Hey Harry,” Seamus and Neville said automatically.
“…so then I just told her that I thought she was nice, but that we should just be friends…” Harry overheard Dean say as he walked to the other side of the room and tried his best to nonchalantly place Ravenclaw’s diary in his trunk. He tucked it under a few sets of robes to keep it hidden. He could hardly wait to read it. He pulled his robes off and rolled onto the bed. Perhaps he could read it tonight, perhaps when the others fell asleep…
“…she seemed to take it pretty well. Cried a little bit, of course, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do…”
Just then the door opened and Ron entered the room with a dreamy, contented expression on his face. Dean immediately went quiet.
“Hey guys,” he said absently.
“Hey Ron. How was your night?” Seamus asked, an amused look on his face.
“Good.” He stopped suddenly, seeming to snap out of his dream-like state.
“Oh, hey, Dean. Look, I just wanted to tell you sorry for being such a git about you and my sister. I mean, I know you’re a good guy and that you wouldn’t ever do anything to her, so…er, sorry.”
Seamus started laughing. Neville inhaled sharply. Dean looked pleadingly at Seamus.
“Well, er…actually Ron…” Dean stammered, awkwardly.
Seamus stopped laughing and grinned at Dean, who was looking frantically about the room as though trying to find something to hide under. Ron’s brow furrowed.
“What’s going on?”
Seamus watched Dean expectantly. When Dean didn’t say anything, he answered for him.
“He just dumped her!”
Dean looked up at Ron with a terrified look in his face. Ron’s face went from confusion to anger.
“You dumped my sister on the night of the Halloween Ball?” He pulled his wand out from under his robes.
“No, no! She dumped me! She said she felt it just wasn’t clicking and that we’d be better off…”
“You liar! You told us you broke up with her!” interrupted Seamus.
“It was a lie! Honest Ron, it was her decision, I…” Dean said frantically. But it was no use. Ron pointed his wand at Dean and muttered something Harry couldn't hear. There was a bright flash and a startled yelp, almost immediately followed by the unmistakable sound of vomiting as the scent of slugs filled the air.