Certain Dark Things || Book Three

xlviii. traitors in the moonlight

Four-year-old Harriet Potter grabbed her aunt's skirts and dragged her feet as they neared the cupboard door.

"No, no, no," she begged through broken, shuddering tears. "Please, Aunt Petunia, please! Don't make me go!"

Harriet dropped her weight to break Petunia's grip and earned a sharp, irritated tug for the attempt. Petunia's cruel fingers tightened and would leave little bruises behind by the morning. "Stop that," she ordered, heedless of Harriet's tears or her terror. "You're to go to your room and be quiet! Quit your hysterics!"

"Please, Aunt Petunia!" The cupboard waited, door opening, the interior swallowed by the thick shadows formed in the hall's bleak, cutting light. "There's a monster in there! I don't wanna go!"

Harriet was a small girl made thin as a bird from too many missed meals—freaks who can't finish their chores don't get supper—so even a woman as slight as Petunia Dursley could lift her by the elbows and swing her forward. Harriet cried when the door swung shut, screamed her aunt's name until her throat burned. "Please!"

The latch slid home, and the vent opened, bars of yellow light slashing across Harriet's blurry eyes. "There's no such thing as monsters," Aunt Petunia hissed before storming off.

But there were. As Harriet hugged her bony knees to her chest and sobbed, she knew the monster was in the dark with her; she'd seen it moving, staring, had felt its attention lingering like a bad spot of sunburn. "Go away," she whispered through her fear. "Go away, go away."

The monster didn't go away. It stayed there in the closed, dusty dark, a palpable presence like a spare bottle of floor cleaner or another spider hiding in the risers, too many eyes looking from too many directions. Harriet could see it—he, maybe—moving, the shape of skinny, masculine fingers splayed in the vent's broken light, and suddenly those fingers disappeared, replaced by different silhouettes, birds and horses and butterflies, little stick-men and castles and long, flying dragons. Little Harriet stared, first in terror, then in wonder, as the monster in the boot cupboard made shadow puppets on the wall, and her fear subsided inch by inch.

She was still frightened; perhaps she'd always be a bit fearful, as all people were wont to be in the face of the unknown, but her trembling ceased, and her tears dried as she watched the shadows play. She startled when she felt the presence at her side but didn't pull away. She didn't flinch when her scar itched and crawled like it was trying to run away off of her flesh. Sometimes Harriet wanted to escape herself too, so she understood.

"Who are you?" she asked the monster. She raised her hand against the light, her shadow just a shadow until it became his, forming a black lily with swaying leaves.

Much later, after the silhouettes blossomed into other flowers that grew and withered and died, after her heavy eyelids closed and she fell asleep huddled against the cold door, Harriet felt a formless mouth by her ear, whispering sounds. Whatever the creature living in the dark with her said, she didn't understand, the noise of it like nothing she'd ever heard before, both terrible and familiar, like the laughter of a loved one lost a long time ago.

In the morning, she recognized one word he'd said as if it'd always been there in her head. One word, a name.

"Set."

x X x

The feeling of a shadowy hand reached into Harriet's chest, wrapped its spindly fingers about her heart—and squeezed.

The pain hit her like an electric shock, wending out from her chest, prickling in her arms and down into her fingertips. Awareness returned all at once rather than in dredges and doses, Harriet's eyes snapping open to the sight of the forest floor moving beneath her, her glasses hanging on by virtue of the Sticking Charm applied to the temples. It took her a moment to realize the pain in her ribs came from pressure applied by a shoulder rammed into her middle, a shoulder belonging to a man running through the underbrush—or trying to, at the very least. He kept stumbling on the roots.