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Aurora Areli
IT WAS QUIRRELL.
"You!" Harry gasped.
"Me," he said calmly. "I wondered whether I'd be meeting you here, Potter. And look, you brought a little friend with you."
"But I thought — Snape —" Harry stammered.
"I knew it!" I exclaimed. "It was you trying to curse Harry's broom!"
"Severus?" Quirrell laughed, and it wasn't his usual quivering treble, either. "Yes, Severus does seem the type, doesn't he? So useful to have him swooping around like an overgrown bat. Next to him, who would suspect p-p-poor st-stuttering P-Professor Quirrell?"
Why why why didn't I try harder to convince my friends that it was him? I felt like screaming.
"And little Miss Areli is right, it was I who tried to kill you. Somehow she found out it was me, so she knocked me over at the Quidditch match. Another few seconds and I'd have got you off that broom. I'd have managed before then if Snape hadn't been muttering a counter-curse, trying to save you."
"Snape was trying to save me?" Harry looked astounded.
"Of course," said Quirrell coolly. "Why do you think he wanted to referee your next match? He was trying to make sure I didn't do it again. Funny, really . . . he needn't have bothered. I couldn't do anything with Dumbledore watching. All the other teachers thought Snape was trying to stop Gryffindor from winning, he did make himself unpopular . . . and what a waste of time, when after all that, I'm going to kill you tonight."
Quirrell snapped his fingers. Ropes sprang out of thin air and wrapped themselves around Harry and I.
"You're too nosy to live, Potter, Areli. Scurrying around the school at Halloween like that, for all I knew you'd seen me coming to look at what was guarding the Stone."
Okay, that was new.
"You let the troll in?" I asked incredulously.
"Certainly, I have a special gift with trolls — you must have seen what I did to the one in the chamber back there? Unfortunately, while everyone else was running around looking for it, Snape, who already suspected me, went straight to the third floor to head me off — and not only did my troll fail to beat you to death, that three-headed dog didn't even manage to bite Snape's leg off properly.
"Now wait quietly. I need to examine this interesting mirror."
It was then that I realized this was the mirror Harry and Ron told me about after they found it over the Christmas holidays. The Mirror of Erised. But they never told me what exactly it did.
