𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐋 𝐃𝐀𝐌𝐀𝐆𝐄 ¹

25. the deathday party

The passageway leading to Nick's party had been lined with candles, too, though the effect was far from cheerful: these were long, thin, jet-black tapers, all turning bright blue, casting a dim, ghostly light even over their own living faces.

As Harpet shivered and drew her robes tightly around her, she heard what sounded like a thousand fingernails scraping through an enormous blackboard.

"Is that supposed to be music?" Ron whispered and the four of them turned a corner. Nearly Headless Nick stood at a doorway hung with black velvet drapes.

"My dear friends," he said mournfully, "welcome, welcome . . . so pleased you could come . . ."

He swept off his plumed hat and bowed them inside.

It was an incredible sight. The dungeon was full of hundreds of pearly-white, translucent people, mostly drifting around a crowded dance floor, waltzing to the dreadful, quavering sound of thirty musicals saws, played by an orchestra on a black-draped platform. A chandelier overhead blazed a midnight blue with a thousand more black candles. Our breath rose in a mist before them; it was like stepping into a freezer.

"Shall we have a look around?" Harry suggested.

Harper nodded and the four of them set off around the edge of the dance floor.

"Careful not to walk through anyone," Ron warned nervously.

They passed a group of gloomy nuns, a ragged man wearing chains, and the Far Friar, a cheerful Hufflepuf ghost, who was talking to a knight with an arrow sticking out of his forehead. Harper wasn't surprised to see that the Bloody Baron, a gaunt, staring Slytherin ghost covered in silver bloodstains, was being given a wide berth by the other ghosts.

"Oh, no," Hermione said and Harper followed her look, seeing Moaning Myrtle standing by herself in one of the corners. "Turn back, turn back, I don't want to talk to Moaning Myrtle . . ."

"Who?" Harry asked, as they backtracked quickly.

"She haunts the girl's bathroom on the first floor," Harper said.

"She haunts a toilet?"

"Yes," Hermione sighed. "It's been out of order all year because she keeps having tantrums and flooding the place. I never went in there anyway if I could avoid it, it's awful trying to go to the loo with her wailing at you . . ."

"Look, food!" Ron exclaimed.

On the other side of the dungeon was a long table, also covered in black velvet. They approached it eagerly, but next moment had stopped in their tracks, horrified. The smell was quite disgusting. Large, rotten fish were laid on handsome silver platters; cakes, burned charcoal black, were heaped on salvers; there was a great maggots haggis, a slab of cheese covered in furry green mould and, in pride of place, an enormous grey cake in the shape of a tombstone, with tar-like icing forming the words,

Sir Nicholas de Missy - Porpington
Died 31st October, 1492

They watched amazed as a portly ghost approached the table, crouched low and walked through it, his mouth held wide so that it passed through one of the stinking salmon.

"Can you taste it if you walk through it?" Harry asked him.

"Almost," the ghost replied sadly, drifting away.