Cut From the Sky

Chapter 12: Haunted House

While Malfoy certainly had shown quite the range in his reactions to Harry, Emerence remained steadily the same. She always greeted Harry with a golden-toothed grin. She always made him coffee. She explained, and demonstrated, and explained some more and was happy to let Harry's interests in her work lead the way.

"This is incredible," Harry said, pointing at a drawing room in a haunted house. There was a set of muddy green couches, torn at the seams and spilling out cushiony upholstery. A toppled over wineglass, leaving a plum-coloured stain on the dusty rug under the coffee table. Letting her binoculars fall to her chest on a string of pearls, Emerence came to stand next to him by the display case. She pulled a small key from a pocket in her dress and opened up the scene.

"Where would you look?" Emerence asked.

"Huh?"

"If you came into this house and you wanted to understand what had happened. Where would you look?"

Harry looked. Plant soil and jagged shards of porcelain around a clump of wilted ivy on the floor. Stocky white candles lining the mantle. A stack of yellowed newspapers on a chair with a broken leg by the kitchen table. Spiderwebs over spiderwebs.

"Oh!" Harry pointed at a cabinet behind one of the couches, empty, doors ajar, splattered with dust and grime. Emerence had scratched the wooden floorboards in front of it, indicating it was often dragged from its position by the wall, and then pushed back into place.

Emerence reached into the scene. Picking up the cabinet, she uncovered the wall behind. The pale floral wallpaper was mottled and waterlogged, peeling off the stone behind. There wasn't much to see. Then she pushed the cabinet under Harry's nose. The wood in the back was scratched open, 'run', it read and 'don't drink the wine'. There were tally marks too, a cluster of them, stretching from one end almost all the way to the other.

"Do you like horror, Harry?" Emerence asked. She often tagged his name onto her questions and Harry loved her for it. He'd taken to always telling her his name within moments of meeting her.

"Uh," Harry said. He looked at the loud pattern of fruit on her dress and didn't think of any part of his life, nothing outside her cluttered atelier. "No. No, I don't."

She hummed, putting the cabinet back into place.

"But how did you make this?" he asked.

"Which bit?"

"All of it."

Emerence laughed. "Alright," she said, and indicated for him to follow her over to the workbench. She pulled a rattan basket from underneath the counter and set it in front of him. It was overspilling with little bottles. "This is weathering powder and AK interactive pigments," she explained, tapping a crimson nail against a small white bottle, "it creates the dusty effect. And this is over here is a chipping medium, I use it on the walls. Many people prefer using liquid latex, but I'm telling you, the chipping medium is everything. Look at the texture it achieves!" She pulled a handful of disjoined walls from deep within a drawer, ghosting her fingers over cracked paint on the plaster. She showed him spider serum – "It gets everywhere though, be careful with this one", black weathering power – "the best for achieving these mouldy patches", green and brown washes – "look at the effect on the greenhouse over here!" and a rust texture "I put this on pretty much any golden antique, isn't it just gorgeous?"

"We could make something, if you have time," Emerence said once the counter was lined with small bottles and the basket was still almost entirely full.

"I have time," Harry said because he already had confunded his daily allotment of Ministry employees, then lain on his hotel bed feeling dismal for a while. And he couldn't face Malfoy today. He simply couldn't. "What could we make?"