Chapter 1: Infanticide
Harry is staring, horrified, at the closed linen closet door in the dining room of his home at Twelve Grimmauld Place. He has suddenly recalled that his baby was born one week ago and that he put it into the closet, closed the door, and promptly forgot all about it. Now, seven days later, he remembers, and he stands frozen with fear, his eyes fixed on the door. No sound comes from within, no hint of motion. The baby must be dead by now, dead and decaying. How could he have done that? How could he have simply forgotten? Aghast, he wishes he could turn time backwards and rescue the baby before it dies, but he realizes with a sickening feeling that it is too late. Now he's afraid to open the closet door and see what is lying on the floor inside, but he knows he must.
Suddenly Harry found himself lying in his bed, surrounded by the deep blackness of night. The bedclothes were soft and warm over him. The vision of the dining room and the terrifying closet door had vanished. He reached sideways with his left arm and felt the rounded mass of Ginny's sleeping form a few inches away. The realization flooded him that the frightening experience of a few moments ago had been a nightmare, yet another nightmare, and his baby was still alive, curled up and warm in the water-filled haven of Ginny's womb, its tiny heart beating strongly and its little arms and legs stretching out from time to time. Harry lay without moving, but his eyes were wide open and he could sense his own heart pounding harder than usual. He considered what to do, and rejected the idea of waking Ginny up and seeking comfort from her. How could he say, "I dreamed I murdered our baby"? That would only upset her, even make her fear for his fitness as a father, not to speak of disturbing her all-too-often-broken sleep. But going back to sleep promptly was also out of the question; his relief at realizing that the baby was safe was not enough to erase the lingering feeling of misery caused by the nightmare.
Harry rolled a little to his right and checked the glowing red numbers on his bedside clock. The time was 4:23 a.m., not too early to declare that the new day had begun. Carefully, slowly, so as to not wake Ginny, Harry slid his legs out from under the covers and sat up cautiously on the edge of the bed. Feeling with his feet in the dark, he located his bedroom slippers and stood up. He rarely walked around the house in his pajamas, so he was not certain where his dressing gown was, but his hands found it hanging on the back of his bedroom door. He slipped it on and walked noiselessly out into the hall, automatically picking up his wand and glasses as he left the bedroom.
"Lumos," he whispered softly, and a dim light shone from the tip of the wand, illuminating his steps down the staircase. Once in the main hall, Harry quietly opened the door to the kitchen stairs and descended the narrow stone steps to the kitchen. It was always cool here, even in the heat of summer. The thick stone walls acted as a heat sink, absorbing heat from cooking or hot weather, and releasing it later, so that the temperature remained even and comfortable. Harry turned on a lamp on the wall to provide a low light to the room and decided to just sit at the table with a mug of tea for a while and regain his equanimity. There was a row of cups and mugs on the dresser, including two cups and saucers recently given to Ginny as a gift from Hermione. They were white with a pattern of delicate pink flowers, and not the style that Ginny usually favored, but she loved them and since receiving them she always chose them for her own tea. Harry wondered if the color and the delicacy reminded her of the baby.
But now the delicate pink cups weren't enough for him. He wanted something bigger, sturdier, more substantial, to help him ground himself in the here-and-now. He reached up and chose a dark blue, straight-sided mug with a handle large enough to easily fit a masculine hand. He had bought it the last time that he and Ginny had visited Bill and Fleur at Shell Cottage on the coast, and they had stopped in at a gift shop in town operated by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The shop was full of pretty little household items, aprons and shirts, books and posters, all for sale to benefit the RNLI, a volunteer organization that rescued people in peril on the sea all around the coast of the British Isles. Harry felt drawn to the brave Muggles who had been risking their own lives in open boats on heavy seas since 1824 to rescue people who would otherwise have drowned, so he had bought this mug, knowing that its purchase would support their work.
Now he turned the mug around in his hands to look at the RNLI logo on the side of the mug: a flag-shaped design in red, white, and gold. It was comforting to look at the mug and remember his visit to Shell Cottage and the RNLI shop. He placed the mug on the long wooden table, pointed his wand at the teakettle, murmured "Fervio" to cause the water to boil, and proceeded to make tea.
Settled into a chair with the tea mug in his hands, Harry reviewed the events that had brought him to this situation. Dreams, bad dreams, completely unexpected dreams. Ever since he and Ginny had married, Harry had wanted children desperately. He wanted to be, if not the best father in the whole world, at least the best father he could possibly be. And he knew that it was possible,, because he had seen the examples of Mr. Weasley and Mr. Granger. Even bad fathers, such as Vernon Dursley and Lucius Malfoy, were instructive as examples of what not to do. And when Ginny had become pregnant, they had both been overjoyed. Then the dreams began.
Harry was no stranger to bad dreams. After the death of Cedric Diggory in the graveyard of Little Hangleton and his own battle with the newly-embodied Lord Voldemort, Harry had revisited those events in dreams for months. And after the Battle of Hogwarts, the same thing had happened. But those dreams were about events that had actually happened. Then there were the dream-like occurrences when his mind and the mind of Tom Riddle had been connected and Harry had been able to see as if through Riddle's eyes or know what Riddle was thinking. But since the fragment of Riddle's soul that had facilitated these pseudo-dreams had been purged from Harry during Riddle's attempt to kill him with the Avada Kedrava curse, dreams of that sort were no longer possible. Tom Riddle was dead now, for sure, and there were no Horcruxes left. Riddle's body had been transfigured into sand and had been dumped in the ocean, far from shore. No, these new dreams came from Harry himself. Something different was going on now, dreams about something that hadn't happened yet. All unique, but all with the same theme.
Harry is walking outdoors, pushing his baby in a pram, but the pram starts going faster and faster, as if it were self-propelled, so that Harry has to run to keep up with it. He loses hold of the handle and suddenly realizes that they are next to a cliff near Bill and Fleur's Shell Cottage. The pram is about to go over the cliff and drop into the ocean far below. Harry tries to catch up with it and stop it, but he cannot.
The baby is being delivered, but there is no one in Harry's bedroom except himself and Ginny. From her body Ginny expels something that look like a clear round water balloon filled with swirling fluid. Harry realizes that it is the unbroken birth sac, and that his baby is inside, engulfed in the water. He frantically tears at the sac, scrabbling with his fingers, trying to get a grip on the slippery bag and rip it open to let the water out and extract his baby from inside the sac. But the tough membranes won't rip, the seconds tick by, and the baby is drowning in the water.
It is nighttime. Suddenly Harry realizes that there are intruders in his home, shadowy dark figures moving through the rooms. His baby is in another room, alone, tiny, helpless. Harry is afraid that if he makes a move or a sound, the intruders will snatch the baby before he can get to it.
The baby has been born, and to Harry's utter dismay, Ginny has given it away. Harry is heartbroken because his child is gone. Ginny lightheartedly says that they can have another baby if they want, but Harry wants this one. And he does not know where it has been taken nor how to find it.
Harry stared forward, not really seeing the walls or furnishings of the kitchen, lost in thought. He had known from the beginning of Ginny's pregnancy that the nine months of gestation were not all rosebuds, lace, and bird songs. The printed information which the Healers had given to Ginny, and which Harry had also read, had listed the minor discomforts to be expected during pregnancy: nausea, vomiting, heartburn, puffy feet, aches in the hips and back, intolerance of summer's heat, interrupted sleep, and so on. But "persistent dreams about harming or killing the baby" was not on the printed list, and Harry was baffled about what it meant. It was more than baffling, it was disturbing.
The image came to his mind of Professor Trelawney's Divination classes in her tower classroom at Hogwarts. In Harry's fifth year she had attempted to teach Harry and his classmates to predict the future by recording and interpreting their dreams, but Harry and Ron had scorned the whole process, especially because Professor Trelawney had invariably predicted disaster for them, and they had made up fake dream diaries as a joke. Although Harry had always considered Divination, and Professor Trelawney herself, as a harmless fraud, he could not forget that two or three times in her life Professor Trelawney had made a genuine prediction, and this memory nagged at his impulse to dismiss the whole idea. But even if these nightmares about the baby were not predictive of his future behavior, what did they say about his natural tendency as a parent?
Harry glanced down at his teacup. It was almost empty now, and some loose tea leaves were resting lightly on the bottom under a thin layer of tea. He shook the cup gently and the tea leaves swayed back and forth. Harry smiled, thinking of the tea-leaves divination that they had tried in Professor Trelawney's class in his third year. The random blobs of the tea leaves in the bottoms of their cups could have resembled anything or nothing, and they had amused themselves by suggesting what each blob looked like when viewed from various angles. He resisted the impulse to upturn his mug over a saucer and see if the leaves formed any recognizable shape. What if it turned out to be an unmistakable baby rattle, or the Grim?
Harry glanced up at the blue and white ceramic clock which he and Ginny had installed in the kitchen as part of their redecorating of the house. The time was 5:00 a.m., an hour before his usual getting-up time. Suddenly there was a creaking noise behind him. He turned his head in the direction of the noise and saw the door of the boiler cupboard opening. This was the cupboard in which Kreacher, his elderly house elf, slept, and a moment later Kreacher's wrinkled face appeared around the edge of the door, a look of surprise on his face at seeing a lamp lit and Harry sitting at the table in his dressing gown with a tea mug in his hands.
Kreacher came out of the boiler cupboard and shut the door behind him.
"Master Harry is up earlier than usual," he said. "If Master Harry had asked, Kreacher would have made the tea for him."
Harry knew that he could not say "I didn't want to bother you," because Kreacher's only purpose, in his own mind, was to serve Harry and his family, so Harry said, "I couldn't sleep, and I came down here to be alone with my thoughts. But," he added, "I have been alone with them for half an hour, and now I'm ready to go back upstairs."
"Will Master Harry be wanting breakfast earlier than usual?" asked Kreacher, holding his hands together in front of his chest as if ready to spring into action.
"No, thank you, Kreacher," answered Harry. "Although I got up early, I'll just keep to my usual morning schedule." The normal schedule on work days was breakfast at 6:45 a.m. for Harry. He arose from his chair, leaving the empty mug on the polished wood table top. "See you a little later," he said as he climbed the stone steps out of the kitchen.
Kreacher's voice followed him up the stairs. "Master's breakfast will be ready."
As Harry went up the main staircase to the second floor, he considered whether to go into the bathroom and take a shower or just go back to bed. He hoped that Ginny was still asleep and had not noticed his absence because he did not feel ready to reveal to her that her husband was either going crazy or else revealing his true unfitness as a parent. He longed to ask her if she too dreamed about the baby, but he did not dare, because he knew she would ask him if he dreamed about the baby, and then what could he say?
He thought about the promise he had given her: "no more secrets", but that rule did not necessarily negate the other maxim of "think before you speak". Maybe the dreams would stop. And wasn't it true that describing your dreams to other people was generally considered boring, not good conversation? He shook his head as he climbed the stairs and said softly to himself, "I've got to figure this out." But right now he did not know what to say because he did not know what to think. Upon reaching the landing he peeped into the bedroom. Although the room was still dark, he could see through the window that the sky was starting to lighten up just a little. Ginny appeared to be sleeping. He turned and went into the bathroom to shower and shave.
The Baby in the Closet by Oregonian
Story Notes:
The characters that we know and love from J. K. Rowling's stories are all her property. The stray Muggles whom you never met before are mine. I couldn't have done it without the invaluable help of my great betas Emma and Elaine. Thank you!