The Other Black Book 4

Chapter 29 - The Pensieve

The door of the office opened.

"Hello, Potter. Hello, Miss Malfoy," said Moody. "Come in, then."

Harry and Aurora walked inside. They had been inside Dumbledore's office once before; it was a very beautiful, circular room, lined with pictures of previous headmasters and headmistresses of Hogwarts, all of whom were fast asleep, their chests rising and falling gently. Cornelius Fudge was standing beside Dumbledore's desk, wearing his usual pinstriped cloak and holding his lime-green bowler hat.

"Harry!" said Fudge jovially, moving forward. "How are you?"

"Fine," Harry lied.

"We were just talking about the night when Mr. Crouch turned up on the grounds," said Fudge. "It was you who found him, was it not?"

"Yes," said Harry. Then he added, "I didn't see Madame Maxime anywhere, though, and she'd have a job hiding, wouldn't she?"

Dumbledore smiled at Harry behind Fudge's back, his eyes twinkling.

"Yes, well," said Fudge, looking embarrassed, "we're about to go for a short walk on the grounds, Harry, if you'll excuse us...perhaps if you just go back to your class -"

"I wanted to talk to you, Professor," Harry said quickly, looking at Dumbledore, who gave him a swift, searching look.

"Wait here for me, Harry," he said. "Our examination of the grounds will not take long."

They trooped out in silence past him and closed the door. After a minute or so, Aurora heard the clunks of Moody's wooden leg growing fainter in the corridor below. She looked around.

"Hello, Fawkes," she said.

Fawkes, Professor Dumbledore's phoenix, was standing on his golden perch beside the door. The size of a swan, with magnificent scarlet-and-gold plumage, he swished his long tail and blinked benignly at Aurora.

Harry sat down in a chair in front of Dumbledore's desk. For several minutes, he sat and watched the old headmasters and headmistresses snoozing in their frames. Aurora paced, that restless feeling back again.

She looked up at the walls behind the desk. The patched and ragged Sorting Hat was standing on a shelf. A glass case next to it held a magnificent silver sword with large rubies set into the hilt, which Aurora recognized as the one Harry had pulled out of the Sorting Hat in his second year. The sword had once belonged to Godric Gryffindor, founder of Harry and Aurora's House. She was gazing at it, remembering how it had come to their aid when she had thought all hope was lost, when she noticed a patch of silvery light, dancing and shimmering on the glass case. Aurora looked around for the source of the light and saw a sliver of silver-white shining brightly from within a black cabinet behind them, whose door had not been closed properly. Harry, it seemed, noticed it too as he looked at Aurora for a moment, glanced at Fawkes, then got up, walked across the office, and pulled open the cabinet door.

A shallow stone basin lay there, with odd carvings around the edge: runes and symbols that Aurora did not recognize. The silvery light was coming from the basin's contents, which were like nothing Aurora had ever seen before. She could not tell whether the substance was liquid or gas. It was a bright, whitish silver, and it was moving ceaselessly; the surface of it became ruffled like water beneath wind, and then, like clouds, separated and swirled smoothly. It looked like light made liquid - or like wind made solid - Aurora couldn't make up her mind.

Aurora looked at Harry as he pulled his wand out of the inside of his robes, cast a nervous look around the office, looked back at the contents of the basin, and prodded them.

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

Aurora bent closer, her head right inside the cabinet. She did feel strange, doing what she was doing, but some hidden part of her felt that Dumbledore wouldn't mind. The silvery substance had become transparent; it looked like glass. She 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 she seemed to be looking through a circular window in the ceiling.