Honey Bee

Chapter 37

The surface of the silvery stuff inside the basin began to swirl very fast.

"Melissa." Harry said rushing over to the basin with me.

We bent closer, our heads right inside the cabinet. The silvery substance had become transparent; it looked like glass. We looked down into it expecting to see the stone bottom of the basin - and saw instead an enormous room below the surface of the mysterious substance, a room into which I seemed to be looking through a circular window in the ceiling.

The room was dimly lit; I thought it might even be underground, for there were no windows, merely torches in brackets such as the ones that illuminated the walls of Hogwarts. Lowering my face so that my nose was a mere inch away from the glassy substance, I saw that rows and rows of witches and wizards were seated around every wall on what seemed to be benches rising in levels. An empty chair stood in the very center of the room. There was something about the chair that gave me an ominous feeling. Chains encircled the arms of it, as though its occupants were usually tied to it.

Where was this place? It surely wasn't Hogwarts; I had never seen a room like that here in the castle. Moreover, the crowd in the mysterious room at the bottom of the basin was comprised of adults, even I knew there were not nearly that many teachers at Hogwarts.

They seemed to be waiting for something; even though I could only see the tops of their hats, all of their faces seemed to be pointing in one direction, and none of them were talking to one another.

The basin being circular, and the room was obversely square, I could not make out what was going on in the corners of it. We leaned even closer, tilting our heads, trying to see...

The tip of our noses touched the strange substance into which he was staring.

Dumbledore's office gave an almighty lurch - I was thrown forward and pitched headfirst into the substance inside the basin -But my head did not hit the stone bottom. I was falling through something icy-cold and black; it was like being sucked into a dark whirlpool -And suddenly, I found myself sitting on a bench at the end of the room inside the basin, a bench raised high above the others right next to Harry. I looked up at the high stone ceiling, expecting to see the circular window through which I had just been staring, but there was nothing there but dark, solid stone.

Breathing hard and fast. I looked around me. Not one of the witches and wizards in the room (and there were at least two hundred of them) was looking at us. Not one of them seemed to have noticed that two fourteen-year-olds had just dropped from the ceiling into their midst. I turned to the wizard next to me on the bench and uttered a loud cry of surprise that reverberated around the silent room.

We were sitting right next to Albus Dumbledore.

"Professor!" Harry said in a kind of strangled whisper. "I'm sorry - we didn't mean to - Melissa was just looking at that basin in your cabinet - I - where are we?" But Dumbledore didn't move or speak. He ignored Harry completely. Like every other wizard on the benches, he was staring into the far corner of the room, where there was a door.

I gazed, nonplussed, at Dumbledore, then around at the silently watchful crowd, then back at Dumbledore. And then it dawned on me. . . .

I raised my hand, hesitated, and then waved it energetically in from of Dumbledore's face. Dumbledore did not blink, look around at me, or indeed move at all. And that settled the matter.

"Dumbledore wouldn't ignore us like that. We're inside a memory, and this was not the present-day Dumbledore. Yet it couldn't be that long ago . . . Dumbledore is silver-haired, just like the present-day Dumbledore. But what was this place? What were all these wizards waiting for?" Harry said thinking aloud to me.