Harry Styles and the Sorcerer's Stone

Chapter 8: The Potions Master

"There, look."

"Where?"

"Next to the kid with the brown hair."

"Wearing the glasses?"

"Did you see his face?"

"Did you see his scar?"

Whispers followed Harry from the moment he left the dormitory the next day. People lining up outside classrooms stood on tiptoe to get a look at him, or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring. Harry wished they wouldn't, because he was trying to concentrate on finding his way to classes.

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that had somewhere different on a Friday, some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that couldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure that coats of amor could walk.

The ghosts didn't help, either. It was always a nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying to open. Nearly Headless James was always happy to point new Gryffindors in the right direction, but Chris the Poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you ware late for class. He would drop wastepaper baskets on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk, or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose, and screech, "GOT YOUR CONK!"

Even worse than Chris, if that was possible, was the caretaker, Mark Consuelos. Harry and Shawn managed to get on the wrong side of him on their very first morning. Mark found them trying to force their way through a door that unluckily turned out to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. He wouldn't believe they were lost, was sure they were trying to break into it on purpose, and was threatening to lock them in the dungeons when they were rescued by Professor Wesley, who was passing.

Mark owned a cat named Mrs. Norris, a scrawny, dust-colored creature with bulging lamplike eyes just like Mark's. She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, and just one toe out of line, and she'd whisk off for Mark, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Mark knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone (except perhaps the Pattinson twins) and could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated him, and it was the dearest ambition of many to give Mrs. Norris a good kick.

And then, once you had managed to find them, there was the classes themselves. There was a lot more magic, as Harry quickly found out, then waving your wand and saying a few funny words.

They had to study the night skies through their telescope every Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different star and the movement of the planets. Three times a week they went out to tnt greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a dumpy little witch called Professor Tisdale, where they learned how to to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what they were used for.

Easily the most boring class was History of Magic, which was the only one taught by a ghost. Professor Cott had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff room fine and get up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him. Cott droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates, and got Karan the Evil and Drake the Oddball mixed up.

Professor Tomlinson, the Charms teacher, was a tiny little wizard who had to stand on a pile of books to see over his desk. At the start of their first class he took the roll call, and when he reached Harry's name he gave an excited squeak and toppled out of sight.