Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince hp-6 Read online

  The whole class looked around at Harry, who hastily tried to recall what Dumbledore had told him the night that they had gone to visit Slughorn.

  “Er—well—ghosts are transparent—” he said.

  “Oh, very good,” interrupted Snape, his lip curling. “Yes, it is easy to see that nearly six years of magical education have not been wasted on you, Potter. Ghosts are transparent.”

  Pansy Parkinson let out a high-pitched giggle. Several other people were smirking. Harry took a deep breath and continued calmly, though his insides were boiling, “Yeah, ghosts are transparent, but Inferi are dead bodies, aren’t they? So they’d be solid—”

  “A five-year-old could have told us as much,” sneered Snape. “The Inferius is a corpse that has been reanimated by a Dark wizard’s spells. It is not alive, it is merely used like a puppet to do the wizard’s bidding. A ghost, as I trust that you are all aware by now, is the imprint of a departed soul left upon the earth, and of course, as Potter so wisely tells us, transparent.”

  “Well, what Harry said is the most useful if we’re trying to tell them apart!” said Ron. “When we come face-to-face with one down a dark alley, we’re going to be having a look to see if it’s solid, aren’t we, we’re not going to be asking, ‘Excuse me, are you the imprint of a departed soul?’”

  There was a ripple of laughter, instantly quelled by the look Snape gave the class.

  “Another ten points from Gryffindor,” said Snape. “I would expect nothing more sophisticated from you, Ronald Weasley, the boy so solid he cannot Apparate half an inch across a room.”

  “No!” whispered Hermione, grabbing Harry’s arm as he opened his mouth furiously. “There’s no point, you’ll just end up in detention again, leave it!”

  “Now open your books to page two hundred and thirteen,” said Snape, smirking a little, “and read the first two paragraphs on the Cruciatus Curse.”

  Ron was very subdued all through the class. When the bell sounded at the end of the lesson, Lavender caught up with Ron and Harry (Hermione mysteriously melted out of sight as she approached) and abused Snape hotly for his jibe about Ron’s Apparition, but this seemed to merely irritate Ron, and he shook her off by making a detour into the boys’ bathroom with Harry.

  “Snape’s right, though, isn’t he?” said Ron, after staring into a cracked mirror for a minute or two. “I dunno whether it’s worth me taking the test. I just can’t get the hang of Apparition.”

  “You might as well do the extra practice sessions in Hogsmeade and see where they get you,” said Harry reasonably. “It’ll be more interesting than trying to get into a stupid hoop anyway. Then, if you’re still not—you know—as good as you’d like to be, you can postpone the test, do it with me over the summer—Myrtle, this is the boys’ bathroom!”

  The ghost of a girl had risen out of the toilet in a cubicle behind them and was now floating in midair, staring at them through thick, white, round glasses.

  “Oh,” she said glumly. “It’s you two.”

  “Who were you expecting?” said Ron, looking at her in the mirror.

  “Nobody,” said Myrtle, picking moodily at a spot on her chin. “He said he’d come back and see me, but then you said you’d pop in and visit me too”—she gave Harry a reproachful look—“and I haven’t seen you for months and months. I’ve learned not to expect too much from boys.”

  “I thought you lived in that girls’ bathroom?” said Harry, who had been careful to give the place a wide berth for some years now.

  “I do,” she said, with a sulky little shrug, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t visit other places. I came and saw you in your bath once, remember?”

  “Vividly,” said Harry.

  “But I thought he liked me,” she said plaintively. “Maybe if you two left, he’d come back again. We had lots in common. I’m sure he felt it.”

  And she looked hopefully toward the door.

  “When you say you had lots in common,” said Ron, sounding rather amused now, “d’you mean he lives in an S-bend too?”

  “No,” said Myrtle defiantly, her voice echoing loudly around the old tiled bathroom. “I mean he’s sensitive, people bully him too, and he feels lonely and hasn’t got anybody to talk to, and he’s not afraid to show his feelings and cry!”

  “There’s been a boy in here crying?” said Harry curiously. “A young boy?”

  “Never you mind!” said Myrtle, her small, leaky eyes fixed on Ron, who was now definitely grinning. “I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I’ll take his secret to the—”

  “—not the grave, surely?” said Ron with a snort. “The sewers, maybe.”

  Myrtle gave a howl of rage and dived back into the toilet, causing water to slop over the sides and onto the floor. Goading Myrtle seemed to have put fresh heart into Ron.

  “You’re right,” he said, swinging his schoolbag back over his shoulder, “I’ll do the practice sessions in Hogsmeade before I decide about taking the test.”

  And so the following weekend, Ron joined Hermione and the rest of the sixth years who would turn seventeen in time to take the test in a fortnight. Harry felt rather jealous watching them all get ready to go into the village; he missed making trips there, and it was a particularly fine spring day, one of the first clear skies they had seen in a long time. However, he had decided to use the time to attempt another assault on the Room of Requirement.

  “You’d do better,” said Hermione, when he confided this plan to Ron and her in the entrance hall, “to go straight to Slughorn’s office and try and get that memory from him.”

  “I’ve been trying!” said Harry crossly, which was perfectly true. He had lagged behind after every Potions lesson that week in an attempt to corner Slughorn, but the Potions master always left the dungeon so fast that Harry had not been able to catch him. Twice, Harry had gone to his office and knocked, but received no reply, though on the second occasion he was sure he had heard the quickly stifled sounds of an old gramophone.

  “He doesn’t want to talk to me, Hermione! He can tell I’ve been trying to get him on his own again, and he’s not going to let it happen!”

  “Well, you’ve just got to keep at it, haven’t you?”

  The short queue of people waiting to file past Filch, who was doing his usual prodding act with the Secrecy Sensor, moved forward a few steps and Harry did not answer in case he was overheard by the caretaker. He wished Ron and Hermione both luck, then turned and climbed the marble staircase again, determined, whatever Hermione said, to devote an hour or two to the Room of Requirement.

  Once out of sight of the entrance hall, Harry pulled the Marauder’s Map and his Invisibility Cloak from his bag. Having concealed himself, he tapped the map, murmured, “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good,” and scanned it carefully.

  As it was Sunday morning, nearly all the students were inside their various common rooms, the Gryffindors in one tower, the Ravenclaws in another, the Slytherins in the dungeons, and the Hufflepuffs in the basement near the kitchens. Here and there a stray person meandered around the library or up a corridor. There were a few people out in the grounds, and there, alone in the seventh-floor corridor, was Gregory Goyle. There was no sign of the Room of Requirement, but Harry was not worried about that; if Goyle was standing guard outside it, the room was open, whether the map was aware of it or not. He therefore sprinted up the stairs, slowing down only when he reached the corner into the corridor, when he began to creep, very slowly, toward the very same little girl, clutching her heavy brass scales, that Hermione had so kindly helped a fortnight before. He waited until he was right behind her before bending very low and whispering, “Hello… you’re very pretty, aren’t you?”

  Goyle gave a high-pitched scream of terror, threw the scales up into the air, and sprinted away, vanishing from sight long before the sound of the scales smashing had stopped echoing around the corridor. Laughing, Harry turned to contemplate the blank wall behind which, he was sure, Draco Malfoy
was now standing frozen, aware that someone unwelcome was out there, but not daring to make an appearance. It gave Harry a most agreeable feeling of power as he tried to remember what form of words he had not yet tried.

  Yet this hopeful mood did not last long. Half an hour later, having tried many more variations of his request to see what Malfoy was up to, the wall was just as doorless as ever. Harry felt frustrated beyond belief—Malfoy might be just feet away from him, and there was still not the tiniest shred of evidence as to what he was doing in there. Losing his patience completely, Harry ran at the wall and kicked it.

  “OUCH!”

  He thought he might have broken his toe; as he clutched it and hopped on one foot, the Invisibility Cloak slipped off him.

  “Harry?”

  He spun around, one-legged, and toppled over. There, to his utter astonishment, was Tonks, walking toward him as though she frequently strolled up this corridor.

  “What’re you doing here?” he said, scrambling to his feet again; why did she always have to find him lying on the floor?

  “I came to see Dumbledore,” said Tonks. Harry thought she looked terrible: thinner than usual, her mouse-colored hair lank.

  “His office isn’t here,” said Harry, “it’s round the other side of the castle, behind the gargoyle—”

  “I know,” said Tonks. “He’s not there. Apparently he’s gone away again.”

  “Has he?” said Harry, putting his bruised foot gingerly back on the floor. “Hey—you don’t know where he goes, I suppose?”

  “No,” said Tonks.

  “What did you want to see him about?”

  “Nothing in particular,” said Tonks, picking, apparently unconsciously, at the sleeve of her robe. “I just thought he might know what’s going on. I’ve heard rumors… people getting hurt.”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s all been in the papers,” said Harry. “That little kid trying to kill his—”

  “The Prophet’s often behind the times,” said Tonks, who didn’t seem to be listening to him. “You haven’t had any letters from anyone in the Order recently?”

  “No one from the Order writes to me anymore,” said Harry, “not since Sirius—”

  He saw that her eyes had filled with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered awkwardly. “I mean… I miss him, as well.”

  “What?” said Tonks blankly, as though she had not heard him. “Well. I’ll see you around, Harry.”

  And she turned abruptly and walked back down the corridor, leaving Harry to stare after her. After a minute or so, he pulled the Invisibility Cloak on again and resumed his efforts to get into the Room of Requirement, but his heart was not in it. Finally, a hollow feeling in his stomach and the knowledge that Ron and Hermione would soon be back for lunch made him abandon the attempt and leave the corridor to Malfoy who, hopefully, would be too afraid to leave for some hours to come.

  He found Ron and Hermione in the Great Hall, already halfway through an early lunch.

  “I did it—well, kind of!” Ron told Harry enthusiastically when he caught sight of him. “I was supposed to be Apparating to outside Madam Puddifoot’s Tea Shop and I overshot it a bit, ended up near Scrivenshafts, but at least I moved!”

  “Good one,” said Harry. “How’d you do, Hermione?”

  “Oh, she was perfect, obviously,” said Ron, before Hermione could answer. “Perfect deliberation, divination, and desperation or whatever the hell it is—we all went for a quick drink in the Three Broomsticks after and you should’ve heard Twycross going on about her—I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t pop the question soon—”

  “And what about you?” asked Hermione, ignoring Ron. “Have you been up at the Room of Requirement all this time?”

  “Yep,” said Harry. “And guess who I ran into up there? Tonks!”

  “Tonks?” repeated Ron and Hermione together, looking surprised.

  “Yeah, she said she’d come to visit Dumbledore.”

  “If you ask me,” said Ron once Harry had finished describing his conversation with Tonks, “she’s cracking up a bit. Losing her nerve after what happened at the Ministry.”

  “It’s a bit odd,” said Hermione, who for some reason looked very concerned. “She’s supposed to be guarding the school, why she suddenly abandoning her post to come and see Dumbledore when he’s not even here?”

  “I had a thought,” said Harry tentatively. He felt strange about voicing it; this was much more Hermione’s territory than his. “You don’t think she can have been… you know… in love with Sirius?”

  Hermione stared at him.

  “What on earth makes you say that?”

  “I dunno,” said Harry, shrugging, “but she was nearly crying when I mentioned his name, and her Patronus is a big four-legged thing now. I wondered whether it hadn’t become… you know… him.”

  “It’s a thought,” said Hermione slowly. “But I still don’t know why she’d be bursting into the castle to see Dumbledore, if that’s really why she was here.”

  “Goes back to what I said, doesn’t it?” said Ron, who was now shoveling mashed potato into his mouth. “She’s gone a bit funny. Lost her nerve. Women,” he said wisely to Harry, “they’re easily upset.”

  “And yet,” said Hermione, coming out of her reverie, “I doubt you’d find a woman who sulked for half an hour because Madam Rosmerta didn’t laugh at their joke about the hag, the Healer, and the Mimbulus mimbletonia.”

  Ron scowled.

  22. AFTER THE BURIAL

  Patches of bright blue sky were beginning to appear over the castle turrets, but these signs of approaching summer did not lift Harry’s mood. He had been thwarted, both in his attempts to find out what Malfoy was doing, and in his efforts to start a conversation with Slughorn that might lead, somehow, to Slughorn handing over the memory he had apparently suppressed for decades.

  “For the last time, just forget about Malfoy,” Hermione told Harry firmly.

  They were sitting with Ron in a sunny corner of the courtyard after lunch. Hermione and Ron were both clutching a Ministry of Magic leaflet: Common Apparition Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, for they were taking their tests that very afternoon, but by and large the leaflets had not proved soothing to the nerves. Ron gave a start and tried to hide behind Hermione as a girl came around the corner.

  “It isn’t Lavender,” said Hermione wearily.

  “Oh, good,” said Ron, relaxing.

  “Harry Potter?” said the girl. “I was asked to give you this.”

  “Thanks…”

  Harry’s heart sank as he took the small scroll of parchment. Once the girl was out of earshot he said, “Dumbledore said we wouldn’t be having any more lessons until I got the memory!”

  “Maybe he wants to check on how you’re doing?” suggested Hermione, as Harry unrolled the parchment; but rather than finding Dumbledore’s long, narrow, slanted writing he saw an untidy sprawl, very difficult to read due to the presence of large blotches on the parchment where the ink had run.

  Dear Harry, Ron and Hermione!

  Aragog died last night. Harry and Ron, you met him and you know how special he was. Hermione, I know you’d have liked him. It would mean a lot to me if you’d nip down for the burial later this evening. I’m planning on doing it round dusk, that was his favorite time of day. I know you’re not supposed to be out that late, but you can use the cloak. Wouldn’t ask, but I can’t face it alone.

  Hagrid

  “Look at this,” said Harry, handing the note to Hermione.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, scanning it quickly and passing it to Ron, who read it through looking increasingly incredulous.

  “He’s mental,” he said furiously. “That thing told its mates to eat Harry and me! Told them to help themselves! And now Hagrid expects us to go down there and cry over its horrible hairy body!”

  “Its not just that,” said Hermione. “He’s asking us to leave the castle at night and he knows security’s a
million times tighter and how much trouble we’d be in if we were caught.”

  “We’ve been down to see him by night before,” said Harry.

  “Yes, but for something like this?” said Hermione. “We’ve risked a lot to help Hagrid out, but after all—Aragog’s dead. If it were a question of saving him—”

  “—I’d want to go even less,” said Ron firmly. “You didn’t meet him, Hermione. Believe me, being dead will have improved him a lot.”

  Harry took the note back and stared down at all the inky blotches all over it. Tears had clearly fallen thick and fast upon the parchment…

  “Harry, you can’t be thinking of going,” said Hermione. “It’s such a pointless thing to get detention for.”

  Harry sighed. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I s’pose Hagrid’ll have to bury Aragog without us.”

  “Yes, he will,” said Hermione, looking relieved. “Look, Potions will be almost empty this afternoon, with us all off doing our tests… Try and soften Slughorn up a bit then!”

  “Fifty-seventh time lucky, you think?” said Harry bitterly.

  “Lucky,” said Ron suddenly. “Harry, that’s it—get lucky!”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Use your lucky potion!”

  “Ron, that’s—that’s it!” said Hermione, sounding stunned. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of it?”

  Harry stared at them both. “Felix Felicis?” he said. “I dunno… I was sort of saving it…”

  “What for?” demanded Ron incredulously.

  “What on earth is more important than this memory, Harry?” asked Hermione.

  Harry did not answer. The thought of that little golden bottle had hovered on the edges of his imagination for some time; vague and unformulated plans that involved Ginny splitting up with Dean, and Ron somehow being happy to see her with a new boyfriend, had been fermenting in the depths of his brain, unacknowledged except during dreams or the twilight time between sleeping and waking…

  “Harry? Are you still with us?” asked Hermione.