Dark Pasts { A Harry Potter Story }

Chapter 108 - The Secret Passage

"Neville!" Harry exclaimed.

I let out a small, relieved laugh, but frowned as I noticed how awful he looked. One of his eyes was swollen yellow and purple and there were gouge marks on his face.

"Neville, what happened to you?" I asked.

"What? This?" he said. "This is nothing. Seamus is worse. You'll see. Shall we get going then?"

Neville helped us climb up the mantelpiece and into the tunnel, but Harry turned to Aberforth.

"I don't know how to thank you. You've saved our lives twice," he said.

"Look after 'em, then," Aberforth said gruffly. "I might not be able to save 'em a third time."

Harry clambered up into the tunnel and we followed Neville.

"Don't remember this on the Marauder's Map," Ron said as we walked through the narrow tunnel.

"That's because it never existed till now," Neville explained. " The seven secret passages were sealed off before the start of the year. This is the only way in or out now."

"How bad is it with Snape as Headmaster?" Hermione asked.

"Hardly ever see him," Neville said. "It's the Carrows you need to watch out for."

"Those two Death Eaters who teach here?"

"They do more than teach," Neville said. "They're in charge of all discipline. They like punishment, the Carrows."

"Like Umbridge?"

"Nah, they make her look tame. The other teachers are all supposed to refer us to the Carrows if we do anything wrong. They don't, though, if they can avoid it. You can tell they all hate them as much as we do.

"Amycus, the bloke, he teaches what used to be Defense Against the Dark Arts, except now it's just the Dark Arts. We're supposed to practice the Cruciatus Curse on people who've earned detentions —"

"What?" The four of us said as we stared at him, aghast.

"Yeah," Neville said. "That's how I got this one," he pointed at a deep gash in his cheek, "I refused to do it. Some people are into it, though; Crabbe and Goyle love it. First time they've ever been top in anything, I expect.

"Alecto, Amycus's sister, teaches Muggle Studies, which is compulsory for everyone. We've all got to listen to her explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drove wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them, and how the natural order is being reestablished. I got this one," he indicated another slash to his face, "for asking her how much Muggle blood she and her brother have got."

"Blimey, Neville," Ron said, "there's a time and a place for getting a smart mouth."

"You didn't hear her," Neville said. "You wouldn't have stood it either. The thing is, it helps when people stand up to them, it gives everyone hope. I used to notice that when you did it, Harry."

I smiled slightly to myself as he said that.

"But they've used you as a knife sharpener," Ron said.

"Doesn't matter. They don't want to spill too much pure blood, so they'll torture us a bit if we're mouthy but they won't actually kill us."

The casualness of his tone made me wince slightly.

"The only people in real danger are the ones whose friends and relatives on the outside are giving trouble. They get taken hostage. Old Xeno Lovegood was getting a bit too outspoken in TheQuibbler, so they dragged Luna off the train on the way back for Christmas."

"Neville, she's all right, we've seen her —"

"Yeah, I know, she managed to get a message to me," he said and pulled out of the fake Galleons we used for Dumbledore's Army in our fifth year. "These have been great," he said, beaming at Hermione."The Carrows never rumbled how we were communicating, it drove them mad. We used to sneak out at night and put graffiti on the walls: Dumbledore's Army, Still Recruiting, stuff like that. Snape hated it."

"You used to?" Harry said.

"Well, it got more difficult as time went on," Neville said. "We lost Luna at Christmas, and Ginny never came back after Easter, and the three of us were sort of the leaders. The Carrows seemed to know I was behind a lot of it, so they started coming down on me hard, and then Michael Corner went and got caught releasing a first-year they'd chained up, and they tortured him pretty badly. That scared people off."

"No kidding," Ron said as the passage began to slope upward.

"Yeah, well, I couldn't ask people to go through what Michael did, so we dropped those kinds of stunts. But we were still fighting, doing underground stuff, right up until a couple of weeks ago. That's when they decided there was only one way to stop me, I suppose, and they went for Gran."

"They what?" we said together.

"Yeah," said Neville, panting a little now, because the passage was climbing so steeply, "Thing was," he faced us, grinning,  "they bit off a bit more than they could chew with Gran. Little old witch living alone, they probably thought they didn't need to send anyone particularly powerful. Anyway," Neville laughed, "Dawlish is still in St. Mungo's and Gran's on the run. She sent me a letter," he clapped a hand to the breast pocket of his robes, "telling me she was proud of me, that I'm my parents'son, and to keep it up."

"Cool," Ron said and I smiled.

"Yeah," he said happily.  "Only thing was, once they realized they had no hold over me, they decided Hogwarts could do without me after all. I don't know whether they were planning to kill me or send me to Azkaban; either way, I knew it was time to disappear."

I frowned. "But, aren't we heading straight back into Hogwarts?"

We turned a corner and saw that we had reached the end of the passage. There was a door much like the one behind Ariana's portrait. Neville pushed it open, climbed through and spoke to people we could not see.

"Hey, listen up, you lot," he said. "I brought you a surprise."