The Mysterious Heir

Chapter 7, Book 2, "The writing on the wall"

Lockhart stops abruptly in the middle of counting the number of murders he has prevented.

"Not dead?" chokes Filch, looking hesitantly through his fingers at Mrs. Norris. "But why's she all - all stiff and frozen?"

"She has been Petrified," says Dumbledore ("Ah! I thought so!" says Lockhart). "But how, I cannot say...."

"Ask him!" shrieks Filch, turning his blotched and tearstained face to Harry.

"No second year could have done this," says Dumbledore firmly. "It would take Dark Magic of the most advanced -"

"He did it, he did it!" Filch spits, his pouchy face purpling. "You saw what he wrote on the wall! - in my office - he knows I'm a - I'm a -" Filch's face works horribly. "He knows I'm a Squib!" he finishes.

"I never touched Mrs. Norris!" Harry says loudly, uncomfortably aware of everyone looking at him, including all the Lockharts on the walls. "And I don't even know what a Squib is."

"Rubbish!" snarls Filch. "He saw my Kwikspell letter!"

"If I might speak, Headmaster," says Snape from the shadows, and Harry's sense of foreboding increased; he is sure nothing Snape has to say is going to do him any good.

"Potter and his friends may have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time," he says, a slight sneer curling his mouth as though he doubts it. "But we do have a set of suspicious circumstances here. Why was he in the upstairs corridor at all? Why wasn't he at the Halloween feast?"

Harry, Ron, and Hermione launch into an explanation about the deathday party. "...there were hundreds of ghosts, they'll tell you we were there -"

"But why not join the feast afterward?" says Snape, his black eyes glittering in the candlelight. "Why go up that corridor?"

Ron and Hermione look at Harry.

"Because - because -" Harry says, his heart thumping very fast; something tells him it will sound very far-fetched if he tells them he was led there by a bodiless voice no one but he and Polaris can hear, "because we were tired and wanted to go to bed," he says.

"Without any supper?" says Snape, a triumphant smile flickering across his gaunt face. "I didn't think ghosts provided food fit for living people at their parties."

"We weren't hungry," says Ron loudly as his stomach gives a huge rumble.

Snape's nasty smile widens.

"I suggest, Headmaster, that Potter is not being entirely truthful," he says. "It might be a good idea if he were deprived of certain privileges until he is ready to tell us the whole story. I personally feel he should be taken off the Gryffindor Quidditch team until he is ready to be honest."

"Really, Severus," says Professor McGonagall sharply, "I see no reason to stop the boy playing Quidditch. The cat wasn't hit over the head with a broomstick. There is no evidence at all that Potter has done anything wrong."

Dumbledore is giving Harry a searching look. His twinkling light-blue gaze makes Harry feel as though he is being X-rayed.

"Innocent until proven guilty, Severus," he says firmly.