Two uneventful days later, Harry, Ron, Hermione, Luna, and Neville came upon a familiar sight. The London streets were covered in fog, but the mist couldn’t hide the crooked, run-down-looking houses that marked Grimmauld Place. At last, their tired feet came to a halt in the middle of two houses that looked oddly squashed together. There were Eleven and Thirteen, but there was no sign of a Number Twelve.
This didn’t seem to worry Harry and his friends as they stood there. But for some reason Harry felt reluctant for them to enter all at once. “Erm, could you guys walk around and see if there’s any sign of Death Eaters or the Order or anybody? I’ll go inside myself and let you know if it’s safe...”
Ron opened his mouth indignantly, but Hermione cut in before he could say anything. “Okay, Harry,” she said, giving Ron a look. “I understand. We’ll look around and wait until you need our help or want to leave or ”” She bit her lip and left the sentence hanging.
They didn’t say anything for a minute or two, then Ron looked up and said, in a falsely cheerful voice, “Okay, we’ll see you in a bit, Harry.” It was clear from the looks on their faces that they were worried about what he might find inside.
Harry grimaced, then turned to face the missing house. The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, he thought, closing his eyes. When he opened them again a second later, Number Twelve had seemingly materialized between the other two houses.
He looked back over his shoulder. Then he steeled himself and, pushing the door open, disappeared through the gaping darkness of the doorway that now belonged to him.
Ron, Hermione, Luna, and Neville stood and watched as the door vanished again, taking Harry with it. Hermione sighed. “Well, I suppose we’d better go and see if anybody’s spying on us.” They separated into two groups and wandered around the opposite corners of the houses.
If they had known how close they were to evil, maybe they wouldn’t have split up at all. They weren’t aware of the many eyes watching them through grimy windows, one pair of which was scarlet with snakelike pupils.
Harry stepped into Number Twelve. As soon as he’d let go of the doorknob, the door slammed shut behind him. He was left in the dark entryway. After a second of letting his eyes adjust to the darkness, he drew his wand and whispered, “Lumos.” The tip of his wand immediately gave off a dim but visible light, helping Harry get a small glimpse of the hall he was in.
It had been so long since he’d been there that it took his mind a moment to remember it. He saw the house-elf heads lining the wall, and the covered painting of Mrs. Black at the end of the hall. Harry wondered whether she would wake up and start screeching at him, even though he was the owner of the house.
He walked quietly toward the end of the hall, looking around, drinking everything in. Some memories of the place hurt, like most of the ones involving Sirius. Harry had never wanted to return here for just this reason, but knew it was necessary to finish their search. He got past the portrait and went through the kitchen, barely looking round as he slid across the dusty floor. The Order of the Phoenix had obviously never come back after Dumbledore’s death last year. Perhaps they were afraid that, with their leader gone, Voldemort might have found out where the headquarters was.
The entire house seemed deserted, but then, Harry had only gone through the first floor. There was still another floor to search. As Harry climbed the steps and made his way across the corridor, however, he saw a light on under one of the doors. Then he heard something that made him stop dead in his tracks, something completely out of place in the musty old building.
Voices.
At least two voices, talking to each other in the lit room. Harry crept down the passage and stopped just outside the door, wand raised in case the owner of one of the voices happened to come out. Both voices sounded very familiar; one was a harsh, oily whisper, and the other a cold drawl.
But still Harry couldn’t quite place them. He listened at the door, trying to make out some of their conversation. A second later he jumped back as he heard the oily voice become louder, angrier. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do all this time, Draco? If you have any useful ideas, please, share them!” A mutter was the only answer he received, but the first voice’s words had been all Harry needed for recognition to come back with a flash.
Snape and Malfoy! They are here... but why? Was Dumbledore right? I have to know...
He debated bursting in on them, or Apparating inside to question them. While he thought, their voices grew louder and louder. Harry, assuming the noise would be enough to drown out any other sounds, shifted his feet the tiniest bit across the floor.
Immediately there was silence inside the room. Snape whispered something to Malfoy. Somebody crept to the door; Harry could sense the presence of another person listening intently for more noise to betray him. Harry froze, not even daring to breathe while the person on the other side stood there.
After a minute, the other presence seemed to move away, and Harry relaxed, shuffling closer to the door and pressing his ear against it. He couldn’t hear anything.
The telltale creak of the old door’s hinges should have warned Harry that it was about to be opened, but he wasn’t listening for it. There was a pause. Harry touched the wood of the door. There was a rustle of movement behind the door. Then...
Scrape.
The next moment, he was flung facedown onto the floor as his support suddenly vanished. The door had been thrown open. Harry began to push himself up... then froze when he felt the cold tip of a wand digging into the back of his neck.
He scowled at the floor. That had been a dirty trick. The man on the other side of the door had pretended to move away, then had pulled open the door and caught Harry completely off his guard. He must have even gotten his wand ready to trap Harry when he fell, the rat!
Harry heard Malfoy’s voice in front and above him. “Who is it?”
Snape held his wand close to Harry’s neck as he barked, “Who are you? ...And which side are you on?”
Harry thought this was a very peculiar question, as he could have asked Snape the same thing. Whose side are you really on? But, knowing he wasn’t in the position to ask, he said dully, “What side d’you want me to be on?”
The wand drew retreated so quickly it was as though Snape had simply disappeared. Apparently Harry’s voice had been recognized. He tentatively rose up on his hands, then, when he wasn’t stopped, he pushed himself all the way up to a sitting position. His glasses had acquired a thin layer of dirt from the floor; to see Snape, Malfoy, and the room they were in, he was forced to wipe the lenses on his robes. When he was finished, he pushed them up his nose and blinked as the world came back into focus.
They were in a large, dusty room that Harry supposed was once used as a storage room, since there was almost nothing inside. The floorboards were covered in dirt and other unpleasant things Harry dared not think about. To the left of the door, in the far corner of the room, there was an old wooden ladder that seemed to reach up to a loft of some kind.
Harry turned his attention from the room to its occupants. Severus Snape had never looked like a particularly healthy man, but the past two-and-a-half months had not helped. His sallow skin was still very pale, but now stretched impossibly tight over high cheekbones. He was unnaturally thin, and his billowing black robes were patched and faded.
But the long days of being on the run had taken their greatest toll on Draco Malfoy. The normally smug, slick teenager had been reduced to a shadow of his former self. His white-blond hair, always so clean and slicked back, was a tangled, dirty mess. His eyes had a scared, wild look to them. This new, slightly humbled Malfoy felt strange to Harry. Knowing what he was used to, Harry almost felt a bit sorry for him. Almost. He still couldn’t forgive him for what he had tried to do...
Harry stood up. Snape’s eyes followed his every move. Malfoy seemed listless and practically unaware of Harry’s presence in the room, except when Harry reached down for his wand, which had fallen out of his hand when he fell. Malfoy’s eyes suddenly seemed to gleam with an inner light, as if he recognized Harry and was letting him know that he was still the enemy. Then it was gone, and he turned away from the others.
Harry and Snape faced each other for a few minutes, staring at each other, not talking or moving. A thousand thoughts flashed through Harry’s head at once. Does he know why I’m here? What does he think I know? ...Has he really been on our side all this time? He had forgotten about Malfoy, and thus hadn’t included him in his plans. Would the Death Eater boy try to stop Harry from getting the information he wanted? Harry wondered whether he really was a Death Eater.
Snape was steadily holding his gaze, but Harry couldn’t help but notice that the hand that held Snape’s wand was shaking.
“What ” why ” what are you doing here, Potter?” Snape finally managed to say angrily, but Harry could tell he had been shaken by his appearance. Had he been expecting Death Eaters, or maybe Voldemort himself? Or, if Dumbledore had been wrong... the Order of the Phoenix?
“I’m ”” Harry began, but stopped in the middle of his sentence. What should he say? Snape obviously wasn’t going to kill him on the spot, no matter whose side he was on. But then what would he do when Harry asked him the questions that needed answering most?
He decided to just blurt out whatever first came to his mind. He steeled himself, then said, “I think a better question would be, what are you doing here, Pro ” Snape? You killed the Order’s leader, and now you come running right to their headquarters? Shouldn’t you be back with Voldemort?” Calling Snape ‘Professor’ had somehow seemed inappropriate to Harry. After all, he really wasn’t a teacher anymore.
Snape remained impassive, but the faintest trace of a frown had appeared on his face. He stared in a calculating way at Harry; he seemed to be weighing the true meaning behind his questions. For a moment everyone was silent. Harry had a funny feeling that the scene was familiar. It was just like in the Shrieking Shack, four years ago, except this time it was Harry in Snape’s position.
Then Snape sighed and replaced his wand inside his robes pocket. “Potter, now is really not the best time for ””
“Answer my question, please,” Harry said loudly. He was slightly surprised at his own daring, cutting Snape off like that. A year ago, he never would have thought to do such an insolent thing to the Potions master. But then, Harry reminded himself, times had changed.
“Don’t you understand, stupid boy?” Snape snapped. “This house is being watched, you took enough of a risk coming here, now they’ll come and...”
Harry’s heart stopped. The house was being watched. And he had left Ron, Hermione, Luna, and Neville out there to fend off Death Eaters and who knew what else. I’m such a fool... Of course Voldemort would be watching the house...
He shook off his worries and asked again, “Why are you here?”
Snape sighed heavily. For a moment he lost his menacing air and seemed to age before Harry’s eyes. “You’re not going to give it up, no matter what I say, are you, Potter?”
Harry shook his head, the picture of stubbornness. Inside, he was quivering with apprehension over what Snape would say next.
Snape looked at him again, then abruptly straightened and swept across the room. Harry’s eyes followed him as he reached the far left corner of the wall. The tall man drew his wand and tapped a section of paneling about six inches above his head.
The wall seemed to open up, revealing a rope ladder climbing up into a loft of some kind. Snape, being so tall, ignored the ladder and reached into the dark space. He groped about for a minute, then pulled out a small silver basin that Harry immediately recognized as a Pensieve. It was slightly smaller than the one in Dumbledore’s office, and had different inscriptions around the brim, but was a Pensieve nonetheless.
Snape came back to Harry and, conjuring up a short table from midair, placed the Pensieve on top. He motioned for Harry to come closer as he swished the basin’s contents around.
“I assume you are quite familiar with these, Potter?” Snape asked, a slight sneer on his face. Harry remembered his dive into the Pensieve during one of their disastrous Occlumency lessons two years ago. The humiliating scene he had witnessed had made Snape furious with him. Harry swallowed and, approaching the table, nodded.
“I thought so,” Snape said softly, staring at Harry with narrowed eyes. It was obvious that they were both remembering the same thing.
The former Potions master looked down, intently studying the silvery memories before him. At last, he took out his wand again and regarded Harry thoughtfully. “I have something to show you, Potter. If you’re really as stubborn and hard-headed as you seem, you’ll have to see this before I tell you anything else. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” said Harry softly. He wasn’t sure if he trusted Snape at all, but if he wanted to know the truth, it seemed he had to. At least long enough to get through this memory, whatever Snape had deemed important enough to show him without further explanation. “Yes, I understand.”
Snape looked at him with that same calculating look, then prodded the glowing depths of the Pensieve with his wand. “Come on, then, I haven’t got all day. Now!”
He grabbed Harry’s collar, and pulled him into the Pensieve without a moment’s hesitation. Harry struggled at first, then allowed himself to be drawn into Snape’s memory. They entered headfirst, were falling, falling, leaving Malfoy in the empty room...
Falling through the hundreds of memories...
Then they landed, hard floor once again beneath their feet. Harry was released from the death-grip Snape had on his shirt, and they were inside the memory. Harry wasn’t sure where they were, as his glasses had been knocked off in Snape’s vehemence. But when he had replaced them and was able to look around properly, he gasped in disbelief.