Chapter 1
Wonthaggi, Victoria
As soon as her head bobbed up above the water, she immediately wished she could have been able to hold her breath for longer. It had been a miserably hot summer, and today was especially scorching. She would have dived down again after only a few seconds, but her goggles were completely fogged up, and she couldn’t put off cleaning them any longer. As she rubbed at them, she also took her snorkel out of her mouth and drained the collected water. Then, taking as deep a gulp of air as she could”although the afternoon heat still made the oxygen feel too thick to breathe”she ducked back beneath the surface of the ocean once again.
For obvious reasons, she wasn’t wearing a watch, so she had no clue as to what time it was. Briefly, she wished she were one of those people who could tell the time of day simply by the position of the sun. All the same, both hands full with ocean souvenirs, the young girl decided she had gotten what she came for and made her way to the shore. Her tee-shirt, shorts, and sandals lay on the dry part of the beach, waiting for her. The girl ignored the scratch of the collected sand against her skin as she rushed towards the large rock formation by the cliffs where her bike was hidden. It was a good thing she lived in the kind a place where a person didn’t need to lock up their bicycle. She didn’t even know what she would have locked it to all the way out here
The initial path ride up to the road was always brutal, but not enough so as to keep the girl from doing it several times a week. It was a nearly forty-five degree incline and by the time she reached the top, the girl would always be red-faced and winded, no matter how many times she rode that path. The highway was empty, completely devoid of cars, so the girl swerved back and forth, enjoying the breeze in the hot summer air. She was very thankful for the new bike she had gotten for Christmas last month. She had outgrown her old one to the point where it was painful to ride and it was scratched, dented, and generally damaged to the point where a person couldn’t even tell what color it was. But at least she had gotten a fair bit of use out of it before she finally outgrew it.
Eventually, the green landscape became dotted with houses, which soon gave way to the town of Wonthaggi. It was a tiny city, understandably so, seeing as most of the population of Victoria lived more than a hundred miles away in Melbourne. White storefronts and speckles of colored houses decorated the Main Street into the town: a greengrocer’s, the video store, a petrol station right next to the used car lot. The ten-year-old girl couldn’t recall one store on this street, or even in town, that had ever closed down, changed owners, or beame anything different than it had always been.
Finally, hopping off the street and onto a small patch of green, she finally jumped of the bike. The dental office was a tiny house on the town’s Main Street. It might have looked just like an ordinary house if it weren’t for the tooth-shaped sign hanging above the door that read ‘Wilkins’ Dental Practice’. Most people in town held this place in a sort of dread, the way most people thought of dentists’ office. The girl had her own share of painful experiences at the hands of this building as well, but at the same time, there was much more to this place than that.
Instead of the front door that all the usual patients were expected to go through, the girl made her way to the side entrance, the one reserved only for the doctors and employees of the office. And she went through as though she had every right in the world.
“Hello!” she shouted out into the office at the top of her lungs. Several of the waiting patients jumped at the loudness of the call, but not one of them seemed surprised to see the source of it.
“Hermione?” the office receptionist called out from behind her desk. “Hermione Wilkins, is that you?”
“Hi, Mrs. Simms,” Hermione said, rushing into the receptionist’s area. “Is Dad with a patient?”
“You’re soaked to the bone!” the receptionist exclaimed, wrinkling her nose at the damp and sandy footprints she was leaving on the floor. “Did you sneak off to the beach again?”
For the briefest of moments, Hermione felt a slight twinge in her stomach that went along with knowing one had done something wrong. On weekdays, while her parents were at work, Hermione was supposed to be staying at the home of their next door neighbor, Mrs. Foster. At any rate, it was completely ridiculous to think that Hermione still needed a babysitter at the age of ten. So lately, Hermione had taken to sneaking out of the old lady’s house the moment her soap operas came on. It was funny; after all the times she had managed to get out, one would think the old lady would have learned by now.
“Don’t worry! I didn’t drown!” Hermione said, stating the obvious. “Do you know how much longer Dad will be? I have something I really wanted to show him.”
Mrs. Simms shook her head. “You can sit in one of the chairs.”
Nodding, Hermione wondered to herself just how bad of an appointment it was and how much time it would be as she made her way to the waiting area. Hermione hated the waiting room, but she was excited enough to see her dad that she was willing to put up with it. There was one familiar face half-hidden behind a dog-eared copy of Take Five, however, that also helped to make the time pass.
“Hey, Jessie!”
The sun-bleached blonde looked up over her magazine, her own eyes lighting up with recognition in this dreaded place. Jessica Thompson was one of Hermione’s best friends. They had met on the first day of first grade when Hermione had had her lunchbox stolen by a fourth grader. Jessica didn’t have any lunch either, but she did track down the boy who stole Hermione’s lunchbox and the two of them beat him up together before sharing Hermione’s lunch.
“Minnie!” the girl exclaimed, setting her magazine off to the side. “Why are you here? People don’t usually sit in dentists’ offices unless they have to.”
“I’m waiting for my dad,” Hermione told her, shifting somewhat uncomfortably on the ancient sofa. “You?”
“I have to get my braces tightened,” Jessica replied, grinning widely to show the metal work stretched over her teeth. Even though she had gotten used to this no longer new aspect of her friend’s appearance, Hermione still couldn’t help but shutter a bit at the sight of them, imagining solid steel slowly stretching her teeth apart. Certain boys in their grade had even recently taken to calling her ‘Bracy’ as she walked past.
Unlike Jessica, though, there was nothing particularly striking about Hermione’s appearance; she had brown hair and brown eyes. She wasn’t particularly tall or short, and she didn’t wear striking clothes or shoes. Her hair was quite bushy, but it almost never mattered, because it was always tied up or soaking wet. In many ways, she was no different than any other child in the town of Wonthaggi. And according to her parents, she was never going to need braces either.
“It’s nothing to worry about, Mrs. Johnson,” Hermione suddenly heard a man’s voice say from one of the opening exam room doors. “Just make sure Mitchell doesn’t try to eat anymore rocks, and you should be just fine.”
Hermione leapt from the sofa and bounced towards the exam room door. “Dad!”
Mrs. Johnson and her rock-eating son jumped out of the way as Hermione locked her arms around her father’s lab coat.
Unlike Hermione Wilkens, her parents were the type that would be quite easy to pick out in a crowd at school events and around town. Her father was quite a bit older than any of her friends’ dads, so was her mother”to the point that they were sometimes mistaken for her grandparents. Also, each had a very distinct British accent that could be picked up on three words into every conversation. And, of course, her father had drilled the cavities of nearly every student of Wonthaggi Primary, and some of the teachers too.
“Ugh, Hermione! You’re getting me wet!” He worked to pry Hermione’s arms off his dampening lab coat.
Hermione let go, jumping instantly to the next subject. “I have something to show you!”
Hermione heard her dad sigh, and she looked up just enough to see him shaking his head at her wet clothes and sand-covered sandals. “You ran off to the beach again, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did,” Hermione admitted shamelessly. “But it was worth it. Take a look at what I found!”
And with a flourishing motion, Hermione extracted her treasures from her slightly damp backpack: a plastic bag filled with seashells and smooth pebbles and an odd sort of rough coral formation nearly the size of her head. “Isn’t it wicked?” she asked, still admiring her own finds. “They’ll look amazing in the aquarium, don’t you think?”
“Hermione, love,” he said, “they sell these in the pet store, you know?”
“I have pets from the pet store, Dad,” she reminded him. “But I can get these myself.”
Hermione knew her dad would never admit it in front of witnesses, but he liked the adventurous streak that ran through his daughter. It was Hermione’s mother who remained the most nervous about these sorts of things. It was one of the reasons she believed her daughter still needed a baby-sitter at the age of ten (almost eleven). And her dad was an adventurer at heart too; deep, deep at heart, but it was there. Otherwise, Hermione never would have convinced her dad to go sailing, snorkeling on their trips to New South Wales, or mountain biking and hiking along the cliffs. All that energy towards it must have been pent up after so many years with his head over a book and his hands in a patient’s mouth.
“You better get it home to the aquarium, then,” he told her. “This bag doesn’t look like it’s going to last.”
Then, he leaned down to whisper, “And if your mother catches you here, I’m not sure I’ll be able to guarantee your safety.”
Taking good advice when she heard it, Hermione rushed for the door. “Especially since you aren’t wearing a helmet!” her father added while his daughter was still within earshot.
Hermione nodded quickly before racing back out the front door, with Jessica squeezing in a ‘Good-bye, Minnie!’ before Hermione’s dad called her back to begin her torture session, and out the front door with the overhead chimes ringing loudly above her.
Once she was out of the office, Hermione found herself running just a little bit faster towards her bike, just in case her mother did see her riding her bicycle without a helmet. She couldn’t even remember where her helmet was. After propping her bike back up and hopping onto the seat, she rode seamlessly over the grass and jumped off the curb without a hitch. Again, the rush of the breeze felt wonderful in the summer heat.
Hermione didn’t end up going back to Mrs. Foster’s house. Her parents were only going to be another two hours before they came home from work, and she felt at least somewhat confident she could stay out of trouble for that long. Besides, she would have a lot of work to do rearranging the setup of her aquarium.
A mile and a half away from Main Street, another street branched off into a dead end road, which was home only to houses. This was the street that the Wilkens family called home, and sadly, so did their neighbor, Mrs. Foster.
Keeping herself quiet, in case the soaps ran short today, Hermione snuck herself and her bike quietly up the driveway. Setting the bike beside the siding, and making her way to the side of the door, she crawled in through the milk door”a tiny door on the outside where milkmen used to push milk through into a tiny room with a door on the other side that lead into the kitchen. She had no idea why they still had it; no one had used milkmen in years. People in Wonthaggi bought their milk and eggs at the grocery store, as did everyone else in Australia. But that didn’t mean Hermione hadn’t found use for it.
Finally, she squeezed her way through the milk door, receiving a slight scrap on her shin. She probably wouldn’t be able to fit through it for much longer.
The Wilkins’ house was clean, at least by the family’s ‘new standards’. Hermione parents had told her that before she was born”all the books had been in alphabetical order, the kitchen floor was always clean enough to eat off of (although any food that did fall on the floor had to be thrown away”no five-second rule), and a coffee cup without a coaster under it was a major catastrophe. But that after they’d had a baby, the couple had learned that it was impossible to organize the world. As long as everything was in a place where you could find it, anything above and beyond was self-inflicted torture. Hermione wasn’t sure if this philosophy that she had brought to her parents was a good thing, but she told herself it was.
No longer worried about being heard now that she was inside her own house, Hermione kicked off her sandals and slid across the hardwood floors In one swift motion, she grabbed hold of the banisher and raced up the staircase, something else that would have made her mother sick with worry if she saw her. Hermione’s bedroom was in the attic. In old storybooks, it was always made to seem like some horrid punishment, a place to hide away unwanted children. But Hermione loved her room; it was the biggest one in the house, with windows on all four sides of the room.
Up the small staircase and just behind the banister, a rather large, luminous fish tank rested filled with bits of coral and various found objects from the beach in order to make it as homey-feeling for the fish as possible. All the fish in the tank were ones that Hermione had caught herself on several winter trips that she and her parents had taken up to New South Wales. Her parents, who were both originally from the cooler lands of Britain, insisted that Victoria was not a terribly cold place; but that didn’t stop Hermione from feeling the goose bumps on her skin every winter when she would need to wear an extra jumper.
“Here you go, fellas!” Hermione announced to her fish as she dunked her arm into the aquarium, setting the new décor into place.
“I found these too,” she added, taking out her bag of minuscule seashells.
She dripped them into the surface of the water so the shells would drop to the sandy bottom like hailstones. The brightly colored fish darted back and forth, out of their way; though Hermione had a feeling they were just excited to have the sudden rush of activity in their tiny, enclosed home.
Taking up a large amount of Hermione’s bedroom space were various cages and tanks of animals. Besides the large fish tank alongside her banister, resting on a low end table at the foot of her bed, sat a currently empty cage that was home to Chunga. Chunga was a lizard whose species had yet to be identified. Hermione had gotten him on sale from the pet store; a very good sale because Chunga had been there for more than a year and still none of the employees knew what he was. Hermione didn’t even know what he ate, but on the first night she had him, he broke out of his cage. Hermione had found him the next afternoon after getting home from school, and Chunga had appeared to be quite well-fed. Ever since then, she had just left the reptile’s cage open for various amounts of time and let him worry about food.
Along with Chunga, there was a hutch tucked in the corner containing a black and white rabbit named Spot-Spot, and beside it, an antique cage containing two lovebirds named Bidgie and Bickie, which Chunga had yet to eat. A lot of Hermione’s friends would joke that she would eventually own her own zoo, the way she collected animals. But she was happy just to have any of her creatures at all. Her parents, both of them so neat and organized, hardly seemed like the types who would allow so many animals running around their house.
Once Spot-Spot had his pellets and the lovebirds had their seeds, Hermione dropped to her bed, suddenly overcome with exhaustion from the miles of bike riding and the hours in the ocean. Her clothes were still wet, and her hair had been dripping still when she had walked into her room. She contemplated changing into something dry before she soaked clear through her quilts, but she couldn’t quite muster the energy to get up.
But then, out of the corner of her eye, Hermione spotted something dancing on the window pane that finally made her force herself up.
It was the Spinny Bug! The one that had been hanging around her home for weeks now, tormenting her with the fact that she could never catch it or any of the others.
Despite the ache in her joints, Hermione pushed herself up off the bed and grabbed her butterfly net from just underneath it.
Of course, it probably wasn’t called a Spinny Bug, but Hermione didn’t have any other name for it. After the first time she saw it, she spent much of the night combing through her own encyclopedias and eventually every reference book in the house.
Hermione had tried to tell her parents about these strange insects, in the hope that they might have an idea as to what they were, but they hadn’t a clue. So Hermione took on the role of naturalist: observing the creature, studying its habits. She had even managed to get a slightly crude sketch of it at one point, but Hermione still couldn't tell what it was. Her only alternative now was to catch one.
From what she had observed so far, the creature had one finely-pointed leg which it would spin on like a top. She never did get a good idea of how many eyes the creature had, because it was always spinning at such rapid speeds. It almost seemed as though it had a series of eyes, each one right next to the other, circling around the creature’s round body.
Hermione opened the window, needing to stick nearly half her body out just to see where the Spinny Bug had managed to spin itself to. It was dancing along the rain gutter and, for once, it didn’t seem to notice Hermione was there. Ignoring the little voice in her head that screamed, ‘Think!’, she pulled the rest of her body out of the window and crawled out onto the roof tiles. It was a good thing the fear of heights did nothing to stop her from the pursuit of science; otherwise, she would have likely been terrified.
Three feet and closing, the Spinny Bug still hadn’t noticed her. Hermione raised her net up, getting ready to snap her wrist down and catch one of the little buggers for good.
At least until the doorbell rand down below, causing Hermione to give an involuntary yelp and for the Spinny Bug to twirl its way down to the ground, escaping from her once again.
The doorbell rang once again in a series, in the manner of an anxiously impatient person who couldn’t wait for someone to answer the door. Hermione backed away from the edge just a bit, at least until she could make sure this woman was not someone who would run to tell her parents that their daughter was climbing on the roof. But this woman was not even remotely familiar looking, and in a small town, that almost always meant a person was a stranger.
She was smartly dressed, though too warm for a midsummer afternoon. She had a great amount of bushy brown hair hanging loose around her shoulders. In her hands, she gripped one small suitcase. Hermione couldn’t help but feel a bit puzzled. There was no strange car parked anywhere near the house, and she hadn’t heard a taxi drive up. Her parents most certainly weren’t expecting company, that was for sure.
“G’day!” she shouted quite loudly from the rooftop. She’d had enough of curiosity and now she wanted answers.
The woman on the ground startled and looked all around her, clearly somewhat at not being able to see who was calling out to her.
“Up here!” Hermione called out to her. The woman’s eyes shifted upward, confused, at least until she finally did notice Hermione.
“Who on earth are you?” she shouted up at the younger girl.
“Who the heck are you?” Hermione asked her back. “This is my house. You tell me first.”
“My name is Hermione Weasley,” she called up to Hermione, although she still seemed a bit confused about having a conversation with someone on a rooftop. “I’m looking for the Wilkins’. Do they still live here?”
“Hermione Weasley?” Hermione asked, giggling in amusement. “I’m Hermione Wilkins! Isn’t that something?”
Hermione laughed about it a moment longer, before trailing as she noticed something puzzling: the older Hermione wasn’t laughing. Hermione realized that sharing the same name as someone else was hardly an aspect to make a comedy around, but the way this woman was reacting didn’t seem right either. She had gone sort of pale and almost sick-looking.
“My parents aren’t here right now; they’re both at work,” Hermione told the visitor. “But if you give me a moment or two to get down, you can come in for something to drink while you wait.”
But Hermione never did get an answer from the strange woman.
“Hermione Wilkins, what are you doing on that roof?”
Hermione cringed slightly before finally looking towards the source of the voice. It was the neighbor lady, Mrs. Foster, the woman whose house Hermione was supposed to be staying at while her parents were at work, wandering about the garden and happening to see the little girl crawling on the roof. She stood looking up over her side of the fence, donning her wide-brimmed hat and long-sleeve shirt; pushing seventy and still fearing the dangers of skin cancer. Hermione had always wondered why on earth would she stay in Australia if she was so afraid of the sun?
“Hermione!” the old bat screamed once again.
“I wasn’t going to stay for very long, Mrs. Foster,” Hermione tried to reason with her neighbor. “I was talking to the lady…”
Her voice trailed off once her eyes fell back to where she had been speaking to the other Hermione before. She wasn’t there. There wasn’t a trace of her; not her hat, her too-small suitcase, or anything else that might suggest another person had been there moments before.
“Get back in the house!” Mrs. Foster shrieked.
Heavily distracted by her own confusion over the strange lady, Hermione found it easier not to argue. Climbing back in through her bedroom window, she slowly made her way down the stairs and to the front door where Mrs. Foster was waiting for her. Hermione had no idea how the woman had managed to move so fast.
“Get into the kitchen!” she ordered, stepping into the house without being invited. “You can bet your parents are going to hear all about this…”
Hermione nodded along with Mrs. Foster’s ranting lecture, but found herself distracted. She continued to stare at the spot where she was certain she had seen a woman also named Hermione talking to her from her spot on the roof. She wandered out further to inspect the rest of the driveway and the yard, on the off chance the woman was just hiding somewhere. It was a ridiculous-sounding idea, when Hermione thought about it further, but she couldn’t think of any other explanation for what had happened. There wasn’t any real way she could have escaped from where she was, not without drawing attention.
None of it made any sense at all. And this is what Hermione thought to herself the whole while Mrs. Foster was dragging her back to her house so Hermione could call her parents and tell them herself what she had done.
Hermione by OliveOil_Med
Chapter Notes: Hermione run through the city of Wonthaggi, far too curious for her own good. She sees many things that no one else see, so when she gets caught climbing on the roof and tries to explain it was to talk to a strang woman who was also called Hermione, it is no surprise that no one believes her.
Thank you to the lovely betas I know as Haylee and Riham.