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The living are defended by the rich warmth of the flames which keeps that loneliness out. Terrified, they hear the dead tapping at the panes; then they rise up, armed with the warmth of firelight.
Vernon Watkins
How, when the midnight signal tolls,
Along the churchyard green ‘
A mournful train of sentenced souls
In winding-sheets are seen.
James Montgomery
The teacup was on the side table instead of by his armchair. Harry frowned.
“Ginny,” he said. “Did you move my tea?”
At first, Harry hadn't noticed. There were funerals to plan after the war, trials to attend, people to find, and lives to bring back. And the changes were subtle enough, how the ghosts in the ministry tended to follow him, that Nearly-Headless Nick’s face had a faint colour whenever Harry was near. Cold spots, dreams where he felt a distant kind of dread, vague reflections in old mirrors, rattling objects, sometimes hearing a voice he couldn’t make out.
Small things, really.
And then some weren’t so small.
Harry had found a hidden room where several Death Eaters had performed dark experiments, he would come with a fever and chills on an April evening – the same date each year since the war. Some old pathways felt like he was walking through a winter storm despite the warm day, a presence he couldn’t shake in some old homes.
He asked for help.
The Ministry sent him a safety packet. Then they advised him to move.
“My great-aunt Lavinia was haunted,” Ginny said over his shoulder.
The ghostly presence rearranged the vases on the mantle. It threw the one with tulips that Harry liked in the bin. He checked off another item on the packet.
“Wasn’t she the one with the pet bats?” Ron emerged from the kitchen with tea for Hermione. He kissed the top of her head. Hermione muttered something from her pile of books about the studies of thanatology in the English countryside and Victorian treaties on the use of gargoyles in public spaces.
Move to a village, the ministry had advised. A new home could expel the ghost.
But even here, it threw open random cupboard doors. It pushed half-empty moving boxes around the sunny cottage, left shoes scattered on the floor that Harry tripped over, moved Ginny’s quidditch gloves to the top shelves where she couldn’t easily reach, and tore up what meagre garden Harry had started outside.
Harry sighed. He looked out the bay window. He blinked. There was a black hound with its face pressed against the glass, leaving a trail of greenish slobber. He thought it was Sirius for an upsetting moment, but the hound was much larger and was opaque at the edges like Harry was seeing it through a haze of fog. The beady eyes shimmered red like fresh blood.
“Bad dog,” he muttered.
Pitiful, the phantom hound whined.
“What the hell is that?” Ron shouted. Near him, a vase shattered.
The ghost became immensely bored in their new home. It lasted a week before Ginny chased it off with a Beater’s bat and some enchanted silverware. She threatened another with her professional Quidditch broom.
Harry proposed to her right there. Ginny was pleased.
Harry hardly enjoyed attracting the dead and strange.
But he went for a walk after picking up a fresh loaf of bread and some sticky buns for Ginny and Teddy from the village shop. He stayed off the path that smelled strangely of candle smoke, keeping to the shadows of a forest where the autumnal light filtered through the red-yellow and green-tinged orange leaves.
It was a lovely evening. The sun tipped just over the stone wall of the village; the wind carried the scent of leaf mould and bonfires, reminding Harry of Hogwarts when it was near Halloween. Briefly homesick for giant pumpkins and hot cider, he made a note to owl Hagrid to stay for dinner during a weekend.
A branch snapped behind him. Then came the sound of silver bells and the faint clarion call of a hunting horn.
Harry shuffled the loaf under his left arm, reaching for his wand with his right.
First, a white deer emerged from between the trees and ran down the gentle slope at an unnatural speed, even to Harry. It was followed by a series of pale figures passing by Harry in a parade of horses, banners, and hounds. Their leader was a massive man with shoulders as wide as Hagrid’s largest pumpkins. He was dressed in rough furs, and his head was crowned with stag antlers that glowed in the twilight.
“Careful!” one of the ghostly hunters shouted at Harry. She tipped her horn towards him. “The living shall not intrude unless you wish to join us forever!”
“Don’t worry,” said Harry mildly. He raised the bag of sticky buns. “I already have evening plans.”
He avoided the forest after that.
The strangeness grew in the countryside, no longer contained in the cottage, but the dream stayed.
Harry dreamt about the Forbidden Forest, the sharp taste of spring in the air as he walked to his death. A flash of green light between the trees. His parents' spirits, Sirius and Remus, lingered near the shadows. The memory was like a stain he could never wash out.
Ginny gently pressed on his shoulder as she stirred. Half-asleep, he was dimly aware of a sound coming from outside their cottage.
Squinting, he opened the window and saw a woman with long hair and an old-fashioned white gown edged in mouldering lace. She looked as though she had taken a midnight swim in the nearby river, but when she looked up, her eyes flashed as pale as the moon in the sky.
“Whoever you are, whatever you are, piss off!” Ginny said loudly. “He’s taken!”
The wailing woman sobbed into her pockmarked hands.
London had been too crowded for such things. Here in the country, they spread like blood from a fresh wound.
The villagers noticed the changes unintentionally caused by Harry and Ginny’s arrival.
Garden Gnomes were particularly active; small children reported something tapping on their bedroom windows at night, there were rumours of unrecognizable dragon eggs found in a cave, swirling crop circles had appeared in the fields. A man had gone from door to door and asked to eat the occupants’ sins, Morris Dancers with their shining swords and their pointed ears, whispers that one of the oldest hills had echoed with deep laughter, so much talk about the phantom creatures from myths and legends that had crawled straight from their dreams and into reality.
Harry apologized to anyone he interacted with, ending with, weakly: “But it wasn’t like this in London!”
“As I walked out over London
On a misty morning early
I overheard a fair pretty maid
Crying for the life of her Geordie....”
The fiddler – fiddler-person player? – continued in the village green, much to Harry’s growing annoyance. He was relatively thin with puckish features dressed in earthly greens, a leather cap on his head. His music sounded like splashing lemon juice against a shallow cut.
“Saddle me a milk-white steed
Bridle me a pony
I'll ride down to London town
And I'll beg for the life of my Geordie...."
Ginny tightened her grip on Harry’s arm. The fiddler winked at them.
Cracks covered the side of the antique full-length mirror. Words had been engraved along the edges of the silver frame. They were too faded for Harry to make out in the low light of the attic. The previous cottage’s occupants had left a mess behind, but this was something interesting. The silver frame glinted, and Harry’s hands itched to take down the rest of the heavy fabric covering the mirror.
“I wouldn’t look into that,” Ron said, his tone similar to his dad’s. “Some mirrors get weird with age.”
“Like us?”
Ron ignored this. “One of Mum’s cousins found a compact mirror at an estate sale a few summers back, and all it did was sing threatening rhymes whenever she opened it.”
“Why is there always something strange with your family?” asked Harry.
“I dunno. Sometimes things follow old families.” Ron shrugged. “It could have to do with the red hair. It’s how we got the ghoul.”
Harry laughed.
There was a tap.
Harry and Ron looked in the mirror. The fabric had pooled to the floor as if by an invisible hand, releasing a cloud of dust.
Another tap from inside the mirror. Smokey images obscured whatever it was, but a fleshy palm suddenly pressed flat against the glass. A low sound emitted from behind the frame.
“That’s hardly original,” Ron muttered. He raised the tip of his wand as Harry drew his own. Silver light flashed in the air as they both started the spell. “On this night, on this night, every night and all,” he recited in a wavering sing-song voice. "Hearth and house and candle-light...”
Sometimes the dreams changed.
Harry was in Godric’s Hollow on that Halloween night. It was like looking backwards at a memory, though oddly crisp He could see the animal print on the wallpaper and hear his mother’s muffled cries. The dream tipped and turned, and he was facing Quirrel; he was in the Chamber, reaching for Ginny’s pale hand in the cold and dark. Dementors surrounded him; he was in the graveyard hearing Voldemort telling him to bow to death; he was in the Department of Mysteries with the prophecy growing cold in his hands; he was in the Tower when Dumbledore fell, he was...he was...
And then everything was gone.
Harry always woke to sunlight on his face and the scent of Ginny’s flowery shampoo.
A shadow crossed over Harry, causing goosebumps on the back of his neck. The air suddenly came alive with the scent of sap and fresh blood, the edges of it like the feeling of a storm about to release lightning on the land.
He speared his trowel in the soft dirt and stood, brushing his jeans clean.
There was a green man – his eyes, skin, and beard were all moss-green and peat, his facial hair thick like vines around his round face. He was tall and painfully thin; blue-green tattoos climbed his exposed arms and the sides of his face in faded whorls.
“No,” said Harry.
The Green Man offered Harry a red apple from his cloth sack.
Harry regarded it with a suspicious eye. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Is one bite going to trap me somewhere where my fiancée and friends can’t find me? Because I have been reading those safety packets, the Ministry has sent me.”
The neighbours complained a little. The dangled iron charms above their thresholds, kept wreaths of laurel and amaranth, grew vervain in their gardens, and knew not to answer their doors between midnight and dawn.
“We’ve always been a little strange, even for us wizarding folks. Something about the land is layered,” one of them said. “But let us know when they bother you too much, boy. We villagers have our ways.”
Her partner thrust a handful of bundled herbs over the shared garden fence. “Like calls to like,” she said. “These are for your dreams.”
“I would say we should move again, but these things have a way of finding you,” said Ginny over tea. They sat outside and watched Teddy play in the garden, his chubby fists pulling at the rosemary Harry had planted earlier. He could at least breathe easier knowing that Hermione had touched up the garden fence with runes and iron-forged charms and Ron with an armful of protective enchantments he had learned from his parents.
“I’m very special,” Harry agreed. “Who knows, maybe they’ll all rest during the winter.”
Ginny raised both eyebrows. “Mhm.”
“Am I in denial?”
Ginny sipped her tea.
Strangely enough, Harry liked the village.
He liked the valleys that grew gorse with their yellow petals, the dark lakes with the small wooden bridges Teddy loved, the familiarity of the pub, and the people who hosted the wizarding trivia night. Ginny liked that she had a quiet place to come home to after an exhausting match, that Harry finally picked up a few hobbies. They’d go for morning runs together down the village green, later sharing a glass of wine at night in the garden. Soft moments. A peaceful life.
Aside from the wailing White Ladies, depressing fiddlers, and restless dreams, Harry grew to love their cottage and all its eccentricities. He wondered what it would be like to raise children here.
But they’ll carry your blood, he thought. He recalled the story of The Three Brothers, how they had allegedly met with Death and paid the price for doing so. Could that be the reason why this was all happening? Was there something ancient curdling in his veins? They might be just as haunted as you.
A late autumn rain pattered against the kitchen windows. Leaves swirled in the wind, taking strange shapes in the gloomy weather.
“How do you know so much about this?” Harry asked his neighbours. Susan and her partner Jane appeared as old as McGonagall. Tall Susan wore spectacles and had natural black streaks in her long hair, while Jane was much shorter and had freckles dotting her round cheeks and her white hair done in cheerful curls.
Jane poured him tea. Perfumed steam engulfed her features. For a moment, the only spot of colour was the blue-green gem that she wore on a chain around her neck. “There are cracks in the land, stories overlapping each other. We’ve told you; this village is old. ”
Her partner looked up from scribbling in her poetry book. Ink stained her elegant fingers. “Old things have strange hungers.”
Harry suspected he was somehow back in Divination class. He politely drank his tea.
“Not uncommon for one of us to do the church watch on St Mark’s Eve with a candle and book, even if they rarely appear,” Jane said over the delicate rim of her teacup. “We’ve had our fair share of restless spirits, sometimes an old sleeper stirring during the change of seasons. But none like this, I tell you.”
Susan hummed in agreement. She looked at Harry; her black eyes were almost too old for her face. “What makes you so different?”
“Sorry,” Ron told the creature when he opened the door. “This is a private party.”
Harry swallowed a shout. Out in the winter evening was a tall man with the head of a horse skull. Sackcloth was draped over the man’s body, giving it the appearance that the skull floated above the snowdrifts. Red, green, and blue streamers twirled in the wind.
“Huh, Hermione told me about you,” Ron continued, oblivious to Harry’s growing exasperation. The Christmas party continued behind them. “You’re Mary – no. Mari Lwyd. Shouldn’t you be in Wales this time of year?”
The horse nodded.
“Here for Harry, I ‘spect?”
The horse nodded again.
Ron chewed on his lower lip. He side-eyed Harry. “You know we have to feed it to make it go away, right?”
“Give it the treacle tart,” Harry moaned.
“Could you check?” he asked.
Hermione visibly stifled a sigh. “I doubt you have some mythic inheritance. The whole thing sounds like a dreary fantasy novel.”
“Things from fantasy novels currently haunt me.”
She worriedly twisted her wedding band, all gold and patterned with roses. “It does make you wonder where the line is drawn...after everything we’ve seen....”
Harry propped his chin in his hand. “Should I also ask Luna?”
She gave him a withering look.
A ghost with long hair and nails crawled out of the old well, gripping the icy stones with ease.
“Come along, Teddy,” Harry said with his voice high. He picked his godson up. “Let’s finish this walk on another day.”
“Fend!” Teddy shouted. He waved at the drowned ghost.
“No,” Harry said. He quickened his pace. “It’s not a friend!”
Susan and Jane cornered him in the market. They took one look at the shadows under his eyes and his rumpled appearance, tongues clucking sympathetically. He and Ginny had spent the night chasing Punch and Judy away with several tricky hexes and protective enchantments.
“Ach,” Jane said. “A good talking-to might do the trick.”
Near the fountain, the fiddler continued to play another mournful ballad.
“Come down, come down, you sailor boy
I think you tarry long
The salt sea’s in at my coat neck
And out at my left arm
Come down, come down, you sailor boy
Tis here that we must die....”
“My heart bleeds not to hear his music,” Susan added dryly. “Do it tonight, boy. St Mark’s Eve should be powerful enough to quiet the others.”
Harry sat in the shadow of an old church, waiting, waiting for the dead.
The thought came suddenly. Have you noticed that it’s St Mark’s Eve and you’re not sick? Cold prickled down his spine. In his rush with the hauntings, he never had the time to check the calendar to see if this was the date he usually felt ill. Like someone’s stepping on your grave.
The church bells tolled.
There was a soft sigh in the air around him, a murmur, a voice.
“Why me?” Harry asked the spirit who appeared between one blink of the eye and the next. It moved with a strange stillness, its short hair flowing in an invisible breeze, its features smoothed over like a river stone. The presence it gave off was nothing like the wild cheer Peeves had or the air of scholarly boredom like Binns from Hogwarts; being near this spirit was like brushing his feet over an impossibly high ledge.
The spirit took a moment. It passed a translucent hand through a tombstone. “Death...death knows you came back....”
“Yes,” said Harry. “I’ve realized that.” He had been able to put together enough pieces with his friends to know this. In the end, there was no grand birthright, no ancient destiny, nor old blood that could be passed down to his children. It was just because he had dared to survive, nothing more, nothing less.
He considered his next question carefully. He looked around the graveyard; his eyes immediately focused on the cottage that was well beyond the crumbling church wall, the windows glowing brightly from within. “How...how I do make sure you all rest peacefully? I’m sure you must be exhausted following me around everywhere.”
The spirit flickered in the moonlight. “Peace?”
“Isn’t that what you want instead of trying to convince me to go with you?”
Shapes grew in the shadows: The Wild Hunt with their stag-crown leader, phantom hounds that waited for their masters, a fiddler with gleaming eyes, a giant man who had vines and thorns that grew around his face, white women in their lace dresses and damp hair, a horse skull that somehow smiled, poltergeists and ghouls, ghosts, and phantoms. Harry’s presence, what had happened in the forest between him and Riddle, had struck something ancient in the heart of the making of the world, a crack big enough for something old to bleed out.
“You know I won’t come with you to the land of the dead,” Harry said. “Not now, at least. When I’m ancient and grey with my last breath near, I will follow you down the old roads. You can rest now, knowing I will one day join you.”
“Why should we trust this agreement, our sleep, for your eventual death?” The spirit appeared more solid, its features gaining rough details, a gaping mouth, scarred skin. Something terrifying pulled at the edges of Harry’s mind, the feeling that he was about to fall. A harsh wind roared in his ears. “You are flesh and blood, but you know how to evade us.”
Harry remembered spending dinners with Ron and Hermione, Riddle anchoring himself with his Horcruxes, Teddy laughing in the garden, Dumbledore telling him not to pity the dead, Sirius falling through the veil, Ginny sleeping next to him, his parents’ graves at Godric’s Hollow, summoning the spirits of his loved ones before he died ... Death was already so tangled in his life that there was no escaping it if he tried. The memories steeled him against the cold and dark, gleaming brightly in his heart like a talisman.
“Because I am not afraid to die,” he said at last. The taste of blood grew in his mouth. “Because I know there is no point in hiding from my death.”
The spirit was nearly physical. It had a thin, angular face and a scarred forehead. Black hair shone in the moonlight, highlighting the intensity of his green eyes and the stubborn line of his mouth.
“I will come for you,” the echo of Harry’s death said in a low voice.
“And I will not be afraid,” Harry promised.
The mist in the graveyard faded.
Harry was alone, shivering in the night.
When he returned, Ginny wrapped him in one of her mum’s green quilts. She pressed her warm cheek to his cold one, holding him tight on the threshold of their home. “How was it?”
“It’s quiet now.” Harry tenderly touched the soft swell of her stomach. “I think we’ll be fine here.” He kissed the inside of her wrist, breathing in the scent of her skin.
With the sun rising behind him, he closed the door and slept in her arms.