She whispered

by Lucas Chesterton

  ‘It’s the satyrs, sir’, Hagrid sighed in a dispirited way.

  ‘What about them? Have more of those infernal creatures turned up?’

  ‘No, sir’, Hagrid shook his scraggly head and his voice was shaking as he went on, ‘it’s the satyrs we had in ��� well, custody, I suppose. ��� One o’ them died.’

  ‘Really?’ Daysen’s brows shot up. It was quite an unexpected turn of events. ‘When?’

  ‘This afternoon. ‘twas all very quick. He looked a bit green around the nose when I went ter look after ‘em this mornin’, but I thought nothin’ by it. Then one o’ them developed a fever. Progressed quickly, the poor creature was sweatin’ all over, foam at his mouth an’ all, an’ then ���’

  Daysen watched with interest as a large tear formed in Hagrid’s eye. What a sentimental fool!

  ‘��� the other one’s in bad shape, too. It’s like they caught some bug, an aggressive one that is. Madam Pomfrey looked at ‘em, but she can’t make head nor tail of it, either. She said somethin’s funny, though ���’

  ‘Funny?’ Daysen repeated with a sneer, since in his view the adjective was out of place.

  ‘Yeah, she said their skin’s lookin’ strange. Rubbery, like. Professor McGonagall said ter wait fer yeh ter have a look.’

  It appeared as if that break Daysen so much desired would remain a transparent dangling carrot that he was doomed to chase. Why, now they wanted him to play nurse to a sick satyr! However, he saw of course how this complication fell right into his field of expertise, and hence he had no choice.

  ‘Well then’, he sighed, ‘let’s have a look.’

  He took the lead and walked towards the dungeons, Hagrid hurrying after him. The cell in which the satyrs were kept was spacious and clean, but as Daysen came closer a horrid stench invaded his nostrils. He found the living satyr huddled on a cot, wailing pitifully. As Daysen entered the cell, the creature looked up briefly with bloodshot eyes, then turned away, hugging itself. It was obvious that it was in pain, its fierce beast face bathed in perspiration. Poppy Pomfrey stood over it, looking perplexed. She had her kit with her and a couple of opened jars and flasks stood on a small stool, evidence of her efforts.

  ‘Jack!’ Her face brightened when she saw him which was another proof of her plight since otherwise she had not much else for him than a wary eye. ‘It’s good you’re here! I’m afraid I’m quite at my wits’ end ���’

  Stating that Jack Daysen actually liked one of his colleagues would have been an exaggeration. However, he respected Madam Pomfrey for her competence and experience. To hear her say that she was clueless thus worried him more than he would have liked to admit.

  Without a word, he took out his wand and cast a spell on the satyr intended to examine his vitals. However, it only revealed what was already clearly visible: the creature ran a high fever; its breath stank to high heaven and its skin had acquired a strange yellowish colour. There were also traces of a severe infection the source of which, however, eluded Daysen.

  ‘What have you tried?’ he asked Madam Pomfrey, upon which she gave him a concise list of the remedies she had got into the satyr, including an infusion of dittany, powdered fluxweed and knotgrass. No surprises there, Daysen would have chosen the exact same ingredients.

  ‘Nothing takes’, Poppy said grimly. ‘Quite the opposite, he appears to be getting worse.’

  As if on cue, the satyr issued another wail, but it was weak as if the effort of lamenting was too much already.

  ‘Maybe we should fight fire with fire’, Daysen suggested after some seconds’ deliberation.

  Madam Pomfrey looked alert. ‘You mean ��� fire seed?’

  ‘It might be too much. But lacking ideas ���’

  ‘So you don’t have any, either?’

  ‘Not yet’, Daysen murmured, giving the satyr another once-over with his wand.

  Hagrid cleared his throat. ‘Maybe’, he proposed, ‘we should try and find a nymph. It might make ‘im feel better ���’

  ‘This is a school, Hagrid, and not a brothel for satyrs’, Daysen grumbled. In spite of himself, however, and although this creature had tried to attack Elena, he felt an unease that was close to pity. He felt keenly that the satyr knew very well that it didn’t belong here, that it was lost in a hostile environment. Daysen made up his mind and addressed the Hogwarts matron. ‘Try the fire seed. Maybe give him some dragon blood mixed with vinegar, as well, to take off the fever’s edge.’

  But Madam Pomfrey frowned. ‘There’s something else that worries me. Did you see its skin?’

  Daysen moved yet a little closer to the satyr, trying his best to ignore the stench that emanated from it in putrid waves. With probing fingers, he touched the creature’s shoulder, evoking a jolt of shock and another weak moan. A deep line appeared on Jack’ forehead. The satyr’s hide didn’t feel like skin at all. It was too tough and had a strange texture, almost like rubber. He tried to remember how it had looked like the night before when he had incapacitated the two creatures. Bluish it had been from the cold outside, but otherwise it had appeared perfectly normal. In all truth, however, Jack hadn’t really paid it any attention then, his mind had been on the impending search of the Forbidden Forest, and something else, as well ���

  ‘Any thoughts on this?’ Poppy asked.

  Jack didn’t reply at once. In fact, something had come to his mind, but it was such a peculiar idea that he was not prepared to believe it yet, let alone share it. ‘Where is the other satyr, the dead one?’ he asked instead.

  ‘We put ‘im in one of the vault rooms’, Hagrid explained, ‘had ter seal it off, because of the stench, it’s bloody hard ter stand ���’

  ‘Show me’, Daysen demanded, then turned to Poppy. ‘You try your luck with this one. Hagrid will have to help me.’

  ‘Help yer doin’ what?’

  ‘You’ll see’, Jack said lightly. No use telling the big oaf that he would have to assist in an autopsy, he would find out soon enough. With an impetuous gesture, Daysen signalled for Hagrid to follow him and left the cell in the direction of the vaults. On the way, he made a short stop in his office to collect his tools that were carefully wrapped up in a leather envelope, as well as a box of vials and jars. Hagrid stared warily at the package, but followed Daysen with no more than a little supressed grumbling.

  The vaults Daysen could never enter without a glum feeling. In the meantime, the portkeys had been removed ��� as Jack saw it, it was the only really useful measure the Ministry had taken in the wake of the Leshnikov affair ��� which left only the pedestals on which they had been placed. So the vaults didn’t represent any danger to Hogwarts students and staff anymore, but the memory connected to the place was still quite vivid. ��� Jack heard Hagrid swear under his breath as he struggled into the low space, hunched. His shoulders almost touched the ceiling and he gazed out suspiciously from under a wild fringe of wiry hair.

  The dead satyr was laid out on a stone block, covered by a white sheet. When Daysen pulled it off, an ugly sight was revealed. The skin was now of a dirty yellow colour with patches of black as if already rotting. A wave of stink rose up, Hagrid groaned and Daysen turned away, holding his cloak up to his nose. He rummaged in his box for a paste of aromatic and gave Hagrid a generous amount before applying it to his own upper lip. He then examined the satyr with he help of his wand, only to ascertain that it was very dead.

  Daysen raised his wand high over the satyr’s body and muttered a range of complicated incantations. They made its skin appear green and the veins and arteries beneath became visible. Another line of incantations followed, and a peculiar tension was forming in the low-ceilinged space, like an increased pressure on the eardrums.

  Hagrid squinted at Daysen with an alarmed look on his fleshy face. ‘That was dark magic, wasn’ it?’ he growled as soon as the atmosphere relaxed.

  Jack sneered. ‘Why, are you going to run off and tell Harry Potter a
bout it?’

  ‘What did yeh do?’ Hagrid asked uncertainly.

  ‘Looked if there were any traces of demon presence.’

  Hagrid swallowed and mumbled darkly while Daysen spread out his envelope of tools. He took a scalpel which he set to the satyr’s skin, carefully scraping off about a square inch; he took another sample, but it was thicker. When he removed it, he found that throngs of a gooey substance stuck to its underside. ‘Merlin’s balls’, he muttered and put both specimens on a silver plate in his box, to be examined later. He then chose a different scalpel, gave the satyr another survey and positioned the blade just below the sternum. ‘I think you should brace yourself’, he said to Hagrid in his silkiest voice to mask his glumness.

  ‘Fer what?’ asked Hagrid through gritted teeth.

  ‘I have no bloody idea.’

  He cut into rubbery flesh. A black liquid oozed from the cut. Jack moved the scalpel down in a straight line, then made two quick lateral incisions. With the help of a hook he tore off the thick layer of skin and flesh covering the abdominal cavity. Another wave of stench rose up, surpassing the aromatic. Hagrid retched. Daysen closed his eyes, took a few seconds to steady himself and then looked. He recoiled with a jolt. The abdominal cavity was squirming with black worms.

  Jack swore profusely and obscenely under his breath to counteract the dizziness. Again, he took a few seconds to steady himself. Then he cleared his throat.

  ‘Hagrid, I’m afraid you’ll have to hold a bucket for me ���’

  About an hour later, he sat in his office, mind and stomach calm again, and examined the specimens of skin under an antique microscope. A few of the black worms he had preserved in a jar where they wriggled in a transparent liquid. What he found confirmed the theory that had begun to form in his head during the autopsy. That didn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t puzzled. Actually, what he was looking at here was ��� impossible? preposterous? unprecedented? He couldn’t quite make up his mind.

  Daysen went over to one of his bookshelves ��� order in the office had in the meantime been restored by quietly working house-elves ��� and pulled out one of his more obscure possessions, a treatise on the fabrication of magical creatures. The book was very old, its pages were on the verge of disintegration, but still readable. It described in detail the making of homunculi and other living and breathing entities by means of magical ��� mainly alchemistic ��� processes. Jack took it to his desk and started to leave through it carefully, and as usual he became engrossed in spite of himself and forgot the time.

  A crackling in the fireplace made him look up.

  ‘Jack?!’ A fiery version of his Eileen Daysen’s face appeared in the embers.

  ‘Mother’, he said flatly. It was like suddenly remembering a bad dream.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? You took off last night with that girl and never turned up again!’

  He sighed and closed the book. ‘Something came up’, he explained coolly, ‘a crisis. My presence at Hogwarts was required.’

  Eileen Daysen remained silent for a few moments, but the displeasure was clearly visible even on her fiery face. ‘Won’t you at least come over now?’ she demanded after a while. ‘There’s supper.’

  He noticed only then how hungry he was; the gruesome autopsy had pushed any such need completely out of the way. Now his stomach was grumbling. After a few moments’ deliberation, he got up and clamped the book he’d been reading under his arm. ‘Alright’, he said, ‘I’m coming.’

  He wasn’t too thrilled about the prospect of having supper with his mother. Most of all, he hoped that she had left any kind of cooking to Gilly. Certainly having his dinner at Hogwarts would be the safer bet by far, there was bound to be something left over in the kitchens. However, some residual feelings of filial duty had obviously made it through the storm of the past decade and he thought that after his abrupt take-off the evening before he now owed his mother some attention. He made towards the fireplace, stopped short, retraced his steps and pocketed the jar with the black worms.

  As he grabbed a fistful of Floo Powder, Jack couldn’t quite ignore the fact that spending a few hours at Spinner’s End also meant being closer to Elena. He would be able to risk the occasional glance out of the sitting room window to see if there was light in her room. There was even a remote chance that she might come out and that he would see her. The thought quickened his heartbeat. Before he stepped into the fireplace, he caught his own reflection in the polished surface of a suit of armour standing beside it. It distorted his face and made his nose almost double as large as it really was. Daysen scowled at himself. ‘Bloody fool’, he sneered and took off to Spinner’s End.

  Supper with his mother was a simple and quiet affair. Of course, the scrutinizing looks she gave him across the table were a little hard to bear, but Jack did his best to ignore them. He had, however, a couple of snappy replies ready in his mind in case she’d embark on reproach. But Eileen Daysen was smarter than that. She merely watched him attentively as he ate and only started to talk when he pushed his plate away.

  ‘You’re still a bad eater’, she observed.

  ‘I’m used to not eating much ever since I was a kid’, he replied with a pointed look into the cold black eyes that were an exact copy of his.

  ‘You should be grateful’, Eileen said with a crooked smile, ‘most men start getting fat at your age.’

  ‘Grateful for being constantly undernourished?’ He quirked an eyebrow.

  Eileen rolled her eyes. ‘Hecate, Jack! Is this the only thing you can talk about? The past, and how horrible your childhood was, and that I neglected you ���’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ But in fact, he was a little surprised himself that he kept bringing it up. Every time he saw his mother, he was transported into the past, and that brought up a bunch of unsavoury memories.

  ‘But that’s where your comments are headed!’ Eileen argued heatedly. ‘You’re constantly trying to rub it in what a bad mother I was!’

  ‘If the shoe fits ���’

  ‘For your information, I never wanted to have a child’, she hissed sharply. ‘It just so ��� happened.’

  The revelation bothered him more than he could have expected and made him twitch violently. Eileen realized her mistake and put her hand on his.

  ‘I didn’t mean ��� it doesn’t mean that I wasn’t happy when I had you’, she said eagerly, ‘you were such a darling baby, never gave me any trouble, not when you were little, anyway. You didn’t become difficult until later, after you’d shown ���’

  Jack shot an angry look at her. ‘So I became difficult?! Didn’t it, perhaps, have something to do with my charming father suddenly realizing what he’d invited under his roof? He didn’t know you were a witch until I showed, did he?’

  Eileen shifted on her rickety kitchen chair. ‘Not my fault’, she stated eventually, ‘Tobias was a little slow on the uptake. I gave him loads of hints before we got married ���’

  ‘Nonsense, you did nothing of the sort. ��� And he wasn’t stupid, not in that way!’

  ‘Oh, so suddenly you’re defending him!’

  ‘I’m just saying that he wasn’t the idiot you’re making him into. I saw that he wasn’t, in his last days. Remember those?’

  Eileen issued a deep sigh. ‘Not again ���’

  ‘Mother, I haven’t even started on that one!’

  Abruptly, Eileen Daysen got up from the table. ‘It’s about time I had a look at that scar of yours. Let me just dash down to the cellar to get that solution I’ve made for you ���’ In no time, she was out of the door and left her son at the kitchen table with a bitter grin on his face.

  Jack sat very still and stared at a point suspended in mid-air. A memory had suddenly surfaced, one that he had pushed under for years, but now he saw it as clearly as if it was yesterday. His father’s sweaty face, his heavy, ragged breathing and wide fear-filled eyes. ‘She’s killi
ng me, son, I know it. She’s giving it all back, and I’m not going to survive it if you don’t help me ���’ And something else, repeated over and over, like a mantra; ‘You can help me, Jack, can’t you? And you will, won’t you?’ He could smell it now. Of course, it was only his imagination, but he remembered the mix of sour sweat and something else ��� sharp and sickly sweet at the same time ��� with astounding clarity. ‘Won’t you, son?’

  He shook himself. Not a minute to soon, because his mother came back with a large glass vial in her hands and a false smile on her face, commanding him to take off his scarf and shirt. He followed suit and let her carefully remove the bandage on his neck. When she saw what was beneath, she inhaled with a hiss.

  ‘Is it always that bad?’

  ‘Not always. Only when I’m exhausted.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart ���’ Her voice was soft and gentle now, but he guessed that she put on the motherly behaviour only to distract him from the earlier topic. Eileen unplugged the vial and with a soft piece of cloth applied a generous amount of the solution to the wound. It prickled, then burnt a little. ‘I’ve already started on the healing potion’, she informed him. ‘Like I said, it takes a few days to brew, but I’m sure it’ll come off nicely.’

  ‘I tried any kind of healing potion’, he said sourly, ‘doesn’t get better than this.’

  His mother looked sly. ‘Ah, but my potion has a twist in it ���’

  ‘Dark magic?’ He sneered. ‘Just how many cats did you slaughter for it?’

  ‘Come on, Jack, you can’t expect to cure a wound from a Horcrux snake by straightforward white magic!’

  Jack grunted and was on the verge of telling her to keep off the black cat next door. However, knowing his mother he decided against it as it would only have provoked her into doing the exact opposite. Instead, he made a mental note to warn Elena to keep an eye on Lux.

  ‘Certainly, you aren’t going to tell me that you’re not interested in dark arts anymore?’ Eileen murmured while she continued to tend to his raw and bloody scar. When he looked at her askance, she pointed to the book on the table. ‘Pretty black stuff, from what I can tell.’