A Hogwarts Carol
by Grayswandir

3

When Severus awoke again, the fire upon the hearth had burned itself out, and the coals had died; and the room had fallen into such a depth of inky blackness that at first the professor was not certain he had succeeded in opening his eyes. Only after a great deal of purposeful blinking did he satisfy himself that the fault was with the light and not with his vision. Climbing warily from his chair then, he groped along the floor, following the bookcases around the wall, until at last his fingers encountered a slender stick of supple wood, which he gripped fast, as though he feared it might try to fly away again.

“Lumos,” he said, and a light sprung up from the end of the wand, flooding the room with its dim glow. He scanned the scene with a careful glance. The door was locked, and there was nothing about it to suggest that it had ever budged. Next to the old armchair, a book of spells lay open on the floor, like something fallen from the slack fingers of a reader dozing off mid-page. The dusty boards of the floor bore no tire tracks, no residue of moss or mud dragged in on ghostly chains. Everything was in order.

It had been a dream. Severus breathed his relief in a long sigh as he stood, walked to his bed, and lay down. It had all been a dream.

He set his wand on the nightstand beside him, and as soon as his fingers left it, the question shot into his mind: if it had all been a dream, how had he come to find his wand cast away into an empty corner of the room, where no wand ought to be? It had assuredly not crawled there on its own. In the throes of the nightmare, had he tossed it there himself?

He remembered the violent pull of the wand escaping his hand, the feel of the warm polished wood jerked fast through his fingers. His heart raced.

But surely it had been a dream. Sirius Black was dead. And Severus, in his house on Spinner’s End, was quite alone.

From the hall, a melancholy sound broke into the silence: the low chimes of the ancient grandfather clock which his mother had charmed so that it never needed to be wound. It rang out the quarter hour... it rang the half...

Severus remembered what the ghost of Sirius Black had told him, and his blood froze. He listened, full of dread. He told himself that this was folly; no doubt he had been asleep for many hours, and had missed one o’clock altogether—no doubt the terrible fantasy would crumble presently; the clock would strike two, or three, or four...

But at the hour, a solitary bong rang through the house. It was one.

Yet the room remained dark. The night held its silence. Tentatively, Severus raised himself onto his elbows, and took up his wand again.

“Lumos,” he murmured—and immediately he wished that he had not.

A spirit stood beside him at the head of the bed. It was spectral, pallid, as Sirius had been; yet not the same. No taller than a child, the tiny, silvery ghost was obliged to gaze upward to meet Severus’ eyes, although the latter still lay mostly supine upon his mattress. He recoiled and clutched his wand protectively with both hands, though the strange, small apparition made no move to dispossess him of it.

“Severus Snape,” it said. “You seem surprised. Yet I come to you at the appointed hour.”

“Professor Flickwit?” asked Severus, scanning the white-haired little man with amaze. “This is... most... uncustomary... “

The ghost uttered a little laugh. “Flickwit?” he said, in that very professor’s squeaking tone. “No, Severus: I appear to you in the manner in which your mind is prepared to receive me. I am spirit only, formless, fleshless, neither dead nor living. And though you know me well, I’m afraid you have not guessed my name.”

“Then who are you—or what are you?” said Severus, not yet relinquishing his two-handed grip upon his wand.

“I am the Ghost of Hogwarts’ Past.”

“Hogwarts’ Past?” repeated Severus. “Long past? The founding of the school, under Salazar and Rowena—”

The spirit shook its white head. “No, Severus. Your past.”

“And... why have you come?”

“In order that what was lost may be restored to you,” said the spirit. “Take my hand!”

Severus looked at the little ghostly hand extended toward him, and when he did not take it, he found it clasped about his arm, pulling him up from the bed with surprising strength. A moment later he discovered that he had crossed the room to the window, hand in hand with the spirit—and, much to his horror, he had somehow left his wand behind, lying forgotten upon the bedsheets.

“You won’t need it,” assured the spirit, when it saw where his glance had alighted. “Now follow!”

With that, the little ghost jumped straight into the panes of the closed window; but instead of colliding against the glass with a rattle and collapsing to the floor, the ghost passed right through and disappeared, as if passing into some other world—and it pulled Severus along.

They stood together, Severus and the Ghost of Hogwarts’ Past, at the crossroads of two bustling streets.