The Disappearances of Draco Malfoy

Chapter 6: The Lost Diadem

Three-foot-long plume quills as soft and fluffy as trails of smoke, their nibs planted into vases like the stems of flowers. Networks of spiderwebs so thickly draped with dust that they looked like the most finely spun lace. Towers of bookshelves, and dated chairs with upholstered backs, and accordions of curtains falling ten, twenty, thirty feet to the floor, cataracts of brocade. Cool light emanating from a source impossibly high above, from an uncertain ceiling, as if the moon were hidden behind several layers of thick paint.

Hermione was wide-eyed. It was impossible to take in everything at once, and soon her neck was sore from how many times her head swiveled upon it. Harry, who had been inside the Room of Hidden Things once before, was striding determinedly ahead, scanning for the Horcrux, but Malfoy, who had spent cumulative weeks in the Room last year, had his hands deep in his pockets, and his eyes were flicking from side to side only reluctantly.

"This place is unbelievable," Ron whispered.

"I know," Hermione whispered back. It felt wrong to speak at any real volume, like they were in a library full of ancient books.

Harry glanced back at them. "Hermione, anything?"

She leapt. The Marauder's Map was held in her limp right hand. She'd been tasked with keeping an eye on Snape, since Harry had seen the Horcrux before and would be more use trying to find it undistracted. But at the sight of the Room, the Map had slipped her mind.

She scanned it. "All clear," she said, hurrying to catch up with Harry and Malfoy. "He and Hagrid are still in the middle of the Forest."

"I don't get it," Ron said, jogging up behind them too, frowning up at the mountains of objects. "How can You-Know-Who really have thought he was the only one to know about this place, when it's full of stuff?"

"Well," Harry said, glancing around a corner at yet more towers of objects, "you can find it without understanding what you've found. Fred and George and Dumbledore all found the Room by accident. I'd bet all this is from students who only came in here once and then couldn't find it again."

"That doesn't explain this," Ron said, pointing at a 4x4 stack of faded yellow sofas that crisscrossed up like logs at a bonfire.

"Oh, honestly, you two." Hermione sighed. "Students didn't do this. Didn't you read any of the literature I wrote for S.P.E.W.?"

Harry and Ron exchanged a guilty look. "Er," Harry said.

"Well, if you had read the pamphlet I distributed in September of last year, you would know that the Hogwarts house-elves are responsible for repairing, maintaining, and disposing of all objects that have been misenchanted, disenchanted, hexed, or otherwise magically discombobulated, even at—even at!—great risk to their own physical safety."

"Right," said Ron. "And that means... what, exactly?"

Hermione saw, with a hot jolt of irritation, that he was trying not to grin. Ron had gotten much better about house-elves over the years—he'd grown fond of Dobby, at any rate—but whenever they'd visited headquarters over the summer, he'd still treated Kreacher little better than Sirius had, and he still acted like this sometimes.

"It's not funny, Ron," she said hotly. "I'm saying that all this—" She waved around at the mountains of objects— "represents hundreds of years of enslavement. Look at all this work, and not a single Knut paid for any of it, not even a thank you or a word of recognition. It's just one more way that it's all shoved out of sight, so wizards don't have to think about what they've done—what they're still doing."

Harry looked slightly troubled, Ron, undecided.

Malfoy, on the other hand, finally stopped feigning deafness and said, "Granger, would you stop sermonizing? House-elves don't even want freedom." He jerked his pointed chin at the surrounding piles of objects. "You couldn't get this lot to quit if you offered them all the money in Gringotts. They love serving wizards."