Disclaimer: The fine tapestry of plot and characters belongs to J.K. Rowling. I am merely pulling threads at will and weaving my own design in counterpoint to hers.
Chapter 44
The Treasure Room
Harry wanted to share his recent discovery about identifying Horcruxes with Ron and Hermione immediately, but finding a free moment without anyone else present proved more problematic than he had foreseen. However, in the wake of high spirits from Tonks’ Apparition workshop, Neville and Daphne wandered off to practice their breathing techniques together. Now, that was a euphemism he hadn’t heard before, Harry thought sardonically; not that he wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to do likewise with Ginny.
Instead, he settled for jumping at the chance to recruit Ron and Hermione for the onerous task of finding Voldemort’s Horcruxes. They shared his enthusiasm and were eager to start sweeping the Room of Requirement immediately that same evening.
“It just seems too simple,” Hermione gushed with excitement. “It’s just like using a Muggle metal detector!”
“I think a Geiger counter would be a better comparison,” Ron corrected her. Then at her incredulous look, he added, “Those are the ones that search out negative vibrations, right?”
“Radioactivity, yeah,” Harry agreed, also impressed with Ron’s acuity.
One would have thought there had been more than six students present at Tonks’ workshop gauging by the number of couples that Harry encountered practicing their breathing techniques that evening. Well, it was Saturday night and the Room of Requirement was hardly a prime destination. Most students still did not know of its existence nor its potential.
Harry warned Ron and Hermione not to attempt to access the room themselves as it had to be done very precisely in this instance. Since they had nothing to retrieve from the Treasure Room “ Harry had decided that’s what he was going to call it henceforth “ there would be no reason for the room to grant them access. Harry’s familiar mantra about needing to access his Potions book worked perfectly and the door materialized in the middle of the unbroken wall before them.
“Now, it’s going to be a bit overwhelming at first,” Harry warned them as he held the door open for Ron and Hermione to precede him. Once inside, he took a moment to wipe the Map and fold the Invisibility Cloak into his pocket before surveying his surroundings. Ron and Hermione were transfixed by the enormity of the scene before them.
“How are we going to search through all this?” Hermione gasped.
“It’s like a small city!” Ron observed.
“At least we won’t be sifting through piles of stuff, that would be a gargantuan task,” Harry agreed. “It’s more like searching for buried coins on the beach with a metal detector. We’ll be able to scan areas in a more general way and still obtain results.”
“Where do you suggest we begin?” Hermione inquired.
“Let’s do it clockwise,” suggested Ron. “Beginning with the left and sweeping around to the door again.”
Following Ron’s directions, Harry took the lead with the small lead-lined box held out in front of him like a lantern. Hermione followed with her dragon hide gloves tucked resolutely into her belt and Ron made up the rear. It was a somber procession as it wove first down one lane and then the next in silence, the locket remaining stubbornly inert inside its box. If only there had been some way to test out his theory beforehand, Harry thought to himself.
“How long have you known about this place?” Hermione whispered as they rounded another corner.
“Since I hid the Half-Blood Prince’s Potions book,” Harry replied without turning his head. “Since the end of last year.”
“But this was the same place that Draco had been using to repair the Vanishing Cabinet, right?” Ron queried.
“Yes, but I didn’t realize that at first. Initially, I only saw it as the form that the room assumed when I needed to hide the book. Obviously, it had been used to hide other objects by previous inhabitants of Hogwarts, but I didn’t realize that it was the place I had been feverishly searching for during all those months. I even spied the discarded Vanishing Cabinet during my very first visit. Not knowing what Draco’s plan was, I totally ignored it.”
“This is the same place that Trelawney uses to hide her empty sherry bottles, too?” Ron asked. “It looks like one big attic to me.”
“Yes, this is where Trelawney surprised Draco and gave me that one bit of information that made everything else fall into place. It’s a rather gruesome sort of attic, though.”
“So much stuff that we could’ve used for the Halloween ball,” Hermione mused. “I’m sure there are loads of old clothes in the assorted cupboards. You shouldn’t have kept this all to yourself!”
Harry stopped dead in his tracks and looked at Hermione directly. “Have you taken a good look at these items? These are the things that people wanted to hide permanently from view, mistakes they did not want to have to acknowledge to anyone else. Look carefully around you: there are discarded containers with all sorts of gristly creatures and concoctions that are probably deadly. Anything in this room is more likely to be cursed or hexed than not! While there may be true treasures among the more sinister items, how can we hope to distinguish between the two?”
“Er, he’s right, Hermione,” Ron hissed. “I saw a skeleton in a box back there that had way too many legs for its own good. And even though I have no earthly idea what creature it may have been, I am virtually certain that five is not an acceptable number of legs!”
“Sorry, Harry,” Hermione added in a squeaky voice. “I guess I wasn’t really thinking it through.”
They resumed their solemn march and a few rows later, Ron was prompted to ask, “Harry, I’ve been thinking about how you first found this room and something’s bothering me. How was Draco able to arrive here in the first place? Did he ask it to produce the room where the Vanishing Cabinet had been banished?”
“Nice pun,” Hermione muttered appreciatively.
“That’s a possibility. It might not have been exact enough, though, since Draco hadn’t hidden the Cabinet here himself.”
“That’s sort of what I’ve been thinking,” Ron admitted. “Only the alternative is more disturbing. If Draco came across it accidentally, just like you did, what was he hiding in the first place?”
“All good questions, Ron, but I can’t answer a single one,” Harry conceded. “The only fact I have is that Draco was already discussing the object that he’d found when I overheard him at Borgin & Burkes before the start of the fall term. So anything that he’d hidden here must have been done at some point during our fifth year.”
“But we were regularly using another version of the room during that time for Dumbledore’s Army!”
“Exactly.”
“Let’s just keep going as quickly as we can before Ron spooks me anymore,” suggested Hermione nervously.
As they rounded a blind corner, they came upon what was obviously a repository for used bottles, acres and acres of used bottles, their glass shapes twinkling in the light. It reminded Harry of an old tire dump he’d ridden by during a rare Sunday afternoon drive with the Dursleys. There had been an ocean of discarded tires far into the horizon.
“Blimey!” Ron exclaimed. “Hogwarts teachers must’ve been drinking on the sly since the school was founded!”
“Very funny, Ron.” Hermione sighed automatically. “Can we just skip this part and come back to it later? I don’t think I could face it right now.”
“Right, let’s move over to the other side of the room then,” Harry suggested. “It’ll be easy enough to remember where we left off on this side.”
The other side must have been the preferred site for discarded pieces of furniture, especially those that blocked the aisles and created impenetrable cul-de-sacs that required them to double-back and retrace their steps. It would have been easy to lose their bearings had Harry not insisted on returning to a spot from which he could view the corridor door before starting down each new avenue.
They were ensconced deeply within one of these canyons when they heard the unmistakable sound of the corridor door opening to admit someone else. Even though they were hidden from view, they instinctively froze in their tracks. Harry motioned for silence and then soundlessly draped himself in his Invisibility Cloak before easing back to the mouth of the avenue. Seconds later, he was back.
“It’s Trelawney,” he whispered after casting a muffliato charm. “Armful of empty bottles.”
“Is she alone?”
“Yes, seems pretty put out that someone left the light on while the room was empty, or so she was muttering to herself. She’s a bit unsteady on her feet.”
Hermione suppressed a giggle as Ron scoffed, “Stupid bat! Thinks this is just like an ordinary room that stays the same after you close the door.”
“Don’t move. I’m going to follow her to make sure that she’s not dissembling,” Harry whispered.
Hermione caught him urgently by the sleeve before he draped the Cloak over himself once more.
“Leave the locket with us just in case,” she urged and then slid it neatly into some dark shadows at the base of a particularly garish cabinet with an ax imbedded in its side.
“What if she turns this way and finds us?” Ron moaned.
“Right,” Harry thought quickly. “Pretend that you and Hermione were looking for a private place to snog.” At Hermione’s affronted look, he added with a grin, “How many other couples did we pass on our way up here? No one will give it a second thought.”
“Works for me,” Ron agreed with a smirk.
“Just don’t actually demonstrate for Trelawney if you can avoid it,” Harry warned. “If you do and she ends up chucking you out of the room, you may not be able to get back in.”
“Not even if I beg that I need to rescue my friend, Harry?” Hermione asked apprehensively.
“Not with the new safeguards,” Harry affirmed.
“Well, if that’s the case, then Trelawney can’t be up to anything shifty, either,” Ron concluded in an urgent whisper.
“Probably not,” Harry agreed. “But I’m going to follow her anyway.” Who’s to say she isn’t just checking up on some prior mischief, Harry intoned inwardly as the notion struck him.
He turned the corner slowly and found that Trelawney had gotten one of her scarves stuck and was waving her arms around like a windmill trying to disentangle herself. With a mighty tug, the scarf came loose minus a bit of fringe but Trelawney overbalanced herself and nearly fell flat on her back. With affronted dignity, she righted herself and continued on her way with her bottles clutched stubbornly to her chest once more.
She extended a trembling hand to steady herself as she turned the final corner and almost managed to drop her bottles in the process. By some miracle, she reached the edge of the bottle depository area without further mishap. Trelawney released the bottles from her arms with one motion, causing them to tinkle and crash among the others, the loud noise reverberating from the rafters. Harry resisted the urge to chuckle as she whipped her body around in a half-crouching position and started to make her way back to the door. She came very close to tripping on a number errant items before she was able to let herself back out into the corridor.
Harry returned to the others and reported what he’d seen. With a huge sigh of relief, he refolded his Cloak once more and retrieved the metal box from its temporary hiding place.
They continued their march as before but they hadn’t reached the end of the row before Hermione ventured, “Who else knows about his room?”
“You mean in its Treasure Room mode?” Harry clarified. “That’s what I’ve decided to call this.” He waved his unencumbered arm in a wide arc that encompassed the entire room.
“Nice irony,” Ron noted.
“Yes, that’s what I meant,” Hermione continued doggedly. “How many others know about the Treasure Room?”
“Let’s see, I brought Hagrid, Flitwick, and McGonagall inside with me to retrieve the Vanishing Cabinet. Other than that, there’s just Lupin.”
“You showed it to Lupin?” Hermione’s eyes were wide with apprehension. “I thought we agreed that we couldn’t involve him even remotely in the Horcrux search.”
“I didn’t,” Harry explained. “I just needed to show him the Potions book. Don’t look at me like that! We’ve been trying to figure out Snape’s motivations and it figured prominently in the discussion.”
“What’s to keep him from going over this room with a fine toothed comb?” Ron countered. “You know how he is.”
“Only if he suspects something, Ron,” Hermione came to Harry’s defense unexpectedly. “And Remus has no reason to distrust Harry, does he?”
“None whatsoever,” Harry replied. “He was actually very understanding when I told him that he could only examine the book inside this room as it was my sole key to returning. He waited patiently outside while I retrieved it from its hiding place and likewise when I secured it once more before leaving… Rest assured, he doesn’t even know the mantra that will invoke the Treasure Room.”
With a pang, Harry suspected that Lupin might feel differently if he knew about the conversations with Snape in the mirror. But there was no betrayal there, he would die rather than betray Lupin.
They turned a familiar corner and the ruined cabinet topped with the cross-dressing wizard came into view ahead. Harry felt an inexplicable queasiness start in his stomach. He was always apprehensive in this room until he double-checked that his prize was safe. Moving forward with deliberate steps, he switched the box to his left hand so that he could grab hold of the cabinet door with his right. His hand was actually trembling in the flickering light before him!
“Hermione, Ron, please come here!” Harry whispered urgently. Depositing the box into Hermione’s upturned hands, he demanded, “Do you feel anything?” Harry’s heart was hammering so hard that he could hear the pounding in his ears.
“I’m not certain, Harry,” Hermione cried. “It could just be your tone of voice, but I’m feeling nervous all over.”
Ron took the box from her and declared without hesitation, “It’s the box. The bloody locket is trembling inside and it’s affecting us directly. I believe we have just found another Horcrux!”
With a few deep breaths for courage, Harry gingerly opened the door to the cabinet and turned his attention to the items inside. Ron volunteered to hold the locket box and gauge which of the items in the immediate area garnered the biggest reaction. Wordlessly, Harry reached out for Hermione’s dragon hide gloves before lowering his hand into the depths of the cabinet.
“I could really use a bit more light,” Harry whispered.
Almost immediately, Hermione leaned over him with her wand tip glowing brilliantly. She adjusted it so that it shone into the cabinet’s depths and not into Harry’s eyes.
With utmost care, Harry lifted the bird cage with the rotting skeleton and turned towards the others. Ron moved the locket box until the two items were less than an inch apart, then shook his head. Harry repeated the procedure with a silken dressing gown that had huge claw marks raked across the embroidered back. Still no reaction from the locket. It was followed by a hammer and mallet crusted with a thick layer of rust “ although Hermione was convinced the substance was actually dried blood, non-human in origin by its strange yellowish shade. Two jars of some innocuous looking fluid came next, one which felt so icy cold to the touch that Harry nearly dropped it despite his gloves, the other scalding hot.
The pile of discarded objects grew steadily as Harry removed more and more unusual objects from the cabinet, all of which failed to elicit any changes in the locket. Ron assured them that he could still feel it vibrating steadily as before so a true Horcrux must be near.
Apprehensively, Harry removed the last item from the cabinet’s depths. He ran his gloves over the book’s cover to remove any dust that had collected since his last visit, then flipped to the back cover where the now familiar scrawl showed ‘Property of the Half-Blood Prince.’ With a heavy heart, he balanced the book in both palms and held it out for Ron’s inspection. Before the box had approached more than half-way, Harry could feel a strange tingling sensation moving slowly up his arms. He held his breath to try to silence his heart as the metal box approached. By the widening of Ron’s eyes, he could tell immediately that the locket was responding inside of its box.
“It feels like it’s trying to jump for joy,” Ron observed solemnly as he wrapped his hands more securely around the box.
“Subconsciously, I always knew it!” Hermione whispered with mounting dread.
That Severus Snape would have one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes in his possession made perfect sense the more that Harry thought about it. What didn’t make sense was why it has been abandoned in a pile of old textbooks just waiting for an unsuspecting student to appropriate it. In the back of his mind he worried that it, too, might have some sort of proximity curse like the locket although he hadn’t felt any physical symptoms all those months that he had poured over it.
Without a doubt, Hermione’s analysis would attribute his reliance on the Prince’s notes as solid evidence that he was being corrupted by the Horcrux but Harry concluded that would just be bending the truth. More than anyone, Hermione should know that the written word could invoke a spell all its own, bend you to the writer’s will if he was skillful enough (or if the reader was gullible enough), and the Prince’s notations had been no different. Still, it was an argument he wished to avoid at all costs.
In the end, they had all agreed to leave the Potions book hidden in the Room of Requirement. Harry had taken the extra precaution of wrapping it carefully in the discarded silken robe before returning it to the cabinet and placing the gruesome cage on top. They had decided that it was unlikely that anyone else would find it there. Besides, they would still need to have some way to revisit the Treasure Room in the future.
After finding the Horcrux, none of them had the energy to continue canvassing the cavernous room. They vowed to return at a later date to complete the sweep of the remaining quadrants.
Harry felt a weariness down to his bones as he placed the locket box carefully on the desktop and stretched out on his bed. Before he realized it, he had fallen soundly asleep. His dreams were of strange insects that kept trying to attack him even though his bed curtains had been replaced with red mosquito netting. Every time he closed a window to keep them out, they found a new way to enter the tower “ either through the chimney, the drain pipes or the shower heads.
He woke with a start to find that he was still fully dressed except for the shoes that he had kicked off earlier. His glasses had slipped off his face and were half buried in the bedcovers but he quickly retrieved them. A solitary wall bracket was still burning in the common room to provide a bit of light; otherwise, the castle was dark and still.
No, not quite still, as Harry could detect a faint buzzing sound like the insects in his dream. Pulling his wand from his pocket, he commanded the brackets in his room to light. Everything was exactly as he’d left it when he’d lain down. The metal box containing the locket was on the side desk instead of on the closet shelf where he usually kept it, but he had left it out himself. Not wanting any of its sinister vibes to affect his mirror reception, he made to pick it up gingerly.
It was blazing hot to the touch! Harry backed away cautiously, instantly aware that something was amiss. Without coming in contact with the desktop or the box itself, he carefully lowered his ear to it until he felt the increased warmth on his skin. Yes, the buzzing noises were coming from inside the box. Another Horcrux! Right here in his room!
He noticed that he had not replaced the box exactly in the same spot as before and that a portion of the wood had begun to darken slightly from the heat. It would need his immediate attention before any other damage occurred. Realistically, he couldn’t see it actually causing the desk to burst into flames. But if he’d learned anything about magical objects during his years at Hogwarts, it was that they operated according to laws from a totally different reality.
He needed Hermione’s dragon hide gloves. With her asleep in her room, though, there was little chance he could just borrow them “ even if she’d left them in plain sight. He knew that Neville would probably have a pair as well, but he couldn’t very well wake up Neville and not expect a lot of questions followed by a solid offer to help. Harry concluded that his best option was to confer with Ron.
As a precaution Harry placed a muffliato charm on Neville’s door to keep any outside noises from alerting him of their activities. He decided against doing the same for Hermione since he would have gladly recruited her assistance first had it not been for the repelling hex on her doorway. If she woke up from any extraneous noise that he and Ron made, so much the better.
He lit a few more of the brackets in the common room but kept their lights low so as not to alert Neville. Then he quietly made his way into Ron’s room. He turned on a single lamp here, not that he couldn’t simply follow the sounds of Ron’s snoring directly to the bed. Knowing from experience that Ron was an unusually sound sleeper, Harry sat down on the blanket and began to shake his shoulder and call his name sharply.
Abruptly Ron’s eyes popped open and he looked at Harry as if he were a stranger. As the light of reason returned to his face, he cried, “Bloody hell, Harry! Is it time for class already? I don’t even remember what I did on Sunday!”
In a whisper, Harry filled him in on the current situation. Wrapping a robe over his pajamas, Ron tiptoed through the common room and boldly into Neville’s room. After a few harrowing moments that seemed endless to Harry as he waited outside, Ron returned triumphantly with a pair of tattered gardening gloves. Duly armed, they made their way into Harry’s bedchamber.
“Where do you usually keep this?” Ron asked, pointing to the metal box with a gloved hand.
“Don’t put it away just yet,” Harry suggested and directed Ron to rest the box on a pile of discarded socks on the far side of his bed. “I want to isolate what’s causing it to react this way.”
“Do you think it’s another Horcrux?” Ron asked with widening eyes.
“I’m certain of it.”
One by one, Harry removed objects from his desk drawers to perform the proximity test. Ron sat down next to the sock pile and placed a gloved hand gently on the box each time Harry neared with a new object. So far, nothing had elicited a response and Ron reported that the metal was starting to cool off as well. Much to Harry’s relief, the discolored spot on the desktop was also fading so there wouldn’t be any outside questions.
With a hammering heart, Harry unlocked the drawer that held his most private possessions in order to test them next. In a moment of clarity, he had already removed his duplicate wand and the mirror log to another hiding spot before going in search of Ron. He would have to test them on his own later, if needed.
Neither the Patronus list nor Ginny’s photo reacted with the locket. Harry’s apprehension was growing as he retrieved his Omnioculars and tired those as well. No response.
The last item was the photo album that Hagrid had removed from the ruins of his parents’ house. The moving pictures within spoke of a carefree life despite the looming shadow of Voldemort. It had provided Harry with countless hours of comfort.
“You’ve got to try it, mate,” Ron whispered as he saw Harry hesitate. “What are the odds anyway?”
With an air of indifference to mask his trepidation, Harry brought the photo album close to the metal box. Immediately Ron gasped and drew his glove away. There were actually small tendrils of smoke emanating from the box.
“It felt like it was dancing inside!” hissed Ron.
Harry moved away quickly and returned the precious album to the drawer, locking it once again. He sank on the bed in despair. How could it be? That album was the only real tie he had with his parents; he couldn’t bear to lose that now.
“Let me put the other items from that drawer into the secret compartment of your trunk. That way they won’t be in contact with the Horcrux. Does that sound all right to you?” Ron offered solicitously.
Harry nodded and rose mechanically to return the metal box to the back of his closet shelf where he normally kept it. He removed his glove to test the temperature before placing the usual stack of books in front of it. He gathered up the other discarded items from his desk and piled them all on top for sorting later.
When Neville left to do his early Sunday rounds the next morning, they filled Hermione in on the most recent developments. She was sympathetic to Harry’s plight and suggested that he consult with the Creevey brothers about getting some duplicate photos made.
“It may not be as much of a long shot as you think,” she added. “What have you got to lose?”
Everything, Harry thought darkly as he sank down onto the sofa. He didn’t have the heart to tell either of them that after Ron had returned to bed, he had spent the rest of the night looking through the album as if it were his only lifeline. How could such an object, a thing with no life of its own, take on so much meaning?
“How could it be?” Harry muttered more in a rhetorical manner than anything else.
He was surprised when Hermione answered anyway, “It had to have been caused by the death of one of your parents. Since Voldemort gave your mother a chance to step aside, it’s more likely that it was your father’s murder that allowed the creation of the Horcrux.” Hermione’s words cut like a sharp knife, even though her tone was soft and gentle as if she were reassuring a baby. “I’m sorry, Harry, is this too painful for you?”
“No,” he lied. It was still better than facing it alone, he thought. “I want to hear your theories. It helps me to distance myself.”
“Only if you think so,” Ron added with a note of skepticism. “You have to admit it was rather diabolical, leaving that album right there in plain sight where anyone could have picked it up.”
Picking up the thread, Hermione supplied, “The sheer randomness of it would have made locating the Horcrux later virtually impossible -- even for Voldemort himself.”
“Do you think he may have intended for one of the Muggle neighbors to pick it up, instead?” Ron countered.
“That would have made for a nice twist.” Hermione nodded appreciatively. “What do you think, Harry?”
“I suspect that no one other than Hagrid would have been able to see it,” Harry offered. “Especially based upon the way he described his uneven reaction to the Fidelius Charm. Which means that the Death Eaters, assuming that there were some present the night of the attack, are still looking for it. One more reason why Godric’s Hollow is a dangerous place to visit.”
“You think Lupin’s right in claiming that it’s a trap?” Ron prodded.
“More than ever. Besides, Lupin’s generally right on the mark. Some days I think I’d trust him before I trusted myself.”
Harry Potter and the Hero's Lament by L A Moody
Chapter Notes: The trio mounts an expedition to the Room of Requirement to search among the discarded objects.