survivor | HARRY POTTER

-Chapter 4-

Needless to say, life at Hogwarts wasn't quite what Alyssa and Jess were fantasising. In total, there were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: sweeping ones, narrow ones, rickety ones, wide ones, some that lead to a different place on a Friday, some with a vanishing step half way up that you had to remember to jump. Then, of course, there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right places, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid stone walls just pretending. It was also extremely hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around an awful lot. The people in portraits didn't help either, as they kept moving to visit each other, and the two girls were sure that the suits of armour could walk.

The ghost, surprisingly, didn't help either. It was always a rather nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying to open. Nearly Headless Nick, the Gryffindor ghost, was more than happy to point new students in the right direction, but Peeves was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class. He would drop waste paper baskets on students heads, pull rugs out from under their feet, pelt them with bits of chalk, sneak up behind them, invisible, grab their nose, and scream "GOT YOUR CONK!"

Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the school's elderly caretaker, Argus Filch. Most unfortunately, Alyssa and Jess had managed to get on his had side on the first morning of lessons when Filch found them trying to force their way through a door, which just so happened to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. Not that the two eleven year olds knew that, of course. Filch, the old git, reused to believe that they were lost and was certain that they were trying to force entry on purpose and threatened to lock them in the dungeons when they were finally rescued by Professor Quirrell, who was passing by.

Filch owned a cat with the name of Mrs. Norris, ("what a stupid name" Jess had snorted,) a scrawny, dust-coloured creature with bulging, lamplike eyes, most like her owner. She patrolled the corridors alone, hiding in the shadows. Break one rule in front of her, just put one toe out of line, and she'd seemingly vanish into thin air, returning two seconds later with a wheezing Filch at her heels, who seemed to know the secret passageways better than anyone else in the school (except perhaps the Weasley twins), and could pop up as suddenly as one on the ghosts you were trying to avoid. The students all hated him, and it was the dearest ambition of many, including Alyssa, to give Mrs. Norris a good kick where it counts.

More annoying still were the whispers that floated around the castle upon sight of Harry Potter, the famous raven haired Gryffindor. Whispers followed him from the moment he left his dormitory the next morning, people queuing outside of classrooms standing on tiptoe to get a single glance at the boy-who-lived, or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring with gaping eyes and dropped jaw. When Alyssa had asked Hermione what all the fuss was about, the bushy haired beauty had dropped the book she was holding and stared at her in shock for a full minute before launching into the tale of the one year old baby who vanquished the most evil wizard of all time and saved the world as just a toddler. To say she was surprised would be an understatement.

Of course, once you had finally managed to find them, there were the lessons themselves. There was a lot more to magic, which Alyssa and Jess quickly found out, than waving your wand and saying a few odd words. They had to study the night skies through telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different stars and the movements of planets in Astronomy, they had to go down to the greenhouses three times a week to study Herbology with a dumpy little witch with flyaway grey hair called Professor Sprout, where they learned how to take care of all kinds of magical herbs and fungi and found out what they were used for.

Easily the most boring lesson was History Of Magic, the only class taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been extremely old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff-room fireplace and got up the next morning to teach, leaving his body behind. Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up. Hermione seemed to be the only one who could withstand his boring voice, taking notes which would later be passed on to Alyssa and Jess who were sleeping with their head on each other's shoulders in the back of the class whilst Millie doodled little rainbows and unicorns on her parchment, not absorbing a single piece of information the ghost was babbling about in his monotone voice.