Chapter Seven: A Troll in the Dungeons

The broom arrived on a Thursday morning, and Electra Lucia Malfoy knew what was in the parcel before it had landed, because she had been looking at brooms in catalogues since she was six and because nothing else in the world is that shape.

Six screech owls brought it in and dropped it in front of Harry Potter at breakfast, and the whole Gryffindor table went up, and Electra sat at the fourth seat from the end with a piece of toast going cold in her hand.

A Nimbus Two Thousand.

She had wanted one for fourteen months. She had asked for one at Christmas and had been told she was too young, and had asked again in June and had been told that there was no point as first years were not permitted brooms, which had been the single most reasonable thing her father had ever said to her and which she had been unable to argue with and had therefore resented for the entire summer.

And a boy who had never been on a broom before the second week of September had just been sent one by the school.

She got up.

She crossed the hall at a speed that Pansy described later as a charge, and she intercepted the parcel in the entrance hall, and she snatched it out of his hands before she had worked out any part of what she was going to say.

"That's a broomstick," she said.

The thing about this, as she reflected afterwards with her face in a pillow, was that it was unarguably true and contained no insult of any kind and had been delivered in a tone of pure outrage, and that she had essentially shouted a fact at a boy in a corridor.

"You'll be in for it this time, Potter, first years aren't allowed them," she said, recovering at speed, and then she undid all of it by turning the parcel over in her hands and feeling the weight of it and saying, before she could stop herself, "It's a Two Thousand."

"Yeah," said Harry.

"It is a Nimbus Two Thousand!"

"I think so."

"You think so," said Electra Lucia Malfoy. "You think so. Do you have the faintest idea what you are holding? The braking charm on this is three years ahead of anything else on the market, and it has an aerodynamic beech handle, and they only made eleven hundred of them in the first year, and my cousin had to put his name on a list in February to get one in August, and you have been given one in a corridor by six owls because somebody somewhere decided that you ought to have it."

Ron Weasley, arriving at speed with his ears already red, said, "Jealous, Malfoy?"

"Yes!" said Electra.

There was a pause in the entrance hall.

"I m-mean no!" said Electra. "Obviously no. I mean that it is an outrage, and that first years are not permitted brooms, and that I shall be writing home about it, and that my father will hear about this, and that the entire thing stinks of favouritism, and that I would not be seen dead on it."

She handed it back.

She handed it back with considerable care, in fact, with two hands, in the specific way that a person hands over something expensive, and Harry Potter took it and said, "Thanks," and she said, "Do not thank me," and went off down the corridor at a pace that left Crabbe and Goyle genuinely behind.

Professor Flitwick, who had been standing beside them for the final twenty seconds of this, said nothing at all, because he had been teaching for a very long time.

The next three weeks were, in the private and unwritten assessment of Electra Lucia Malfoy, extremely productive.

She established, by means she declined to examine, that Harry Potter was the new Gryffindor Seeker. She established that he was practising five evenings a week with Oliver Wood on the far pitch. She established the times. She established a route from the greenhouses back to the castle that passed within sight of the far pitch and added four minutes to the walk, and she took it eleven times, and on each occasion she made a remark about the weather.

"You take the long way back," said Pansy, on the eighth occasion.

"I like the view."

"It's a hedge."

"I like the hedge, Pansy."

She also, during this period, developed a sustained and detailed programme of insults, because a person must do something with their hands. 

She said that he had bought his way onto the team, which was the opposite of true and which she knew was the opposite of true. She said that Seeker was the easiest position on the pitch, which was so far from true that Theodore Nott looked up from his book about fish. She said, once, in front of a substantial audience outside the library, that the only reason he had been given the broom was that the school had decided it would be a bad advertisement if their celebrity fell off a Shooting Star in front of four hundred people.

That one was funny. It got a very large laugh, including from two Ravenclaws, and she repeated it twice over the following week.

She was lying in bed on the twenty-eighth of October when she worked out, with the sudden awful clarity that arrives only at eleven at night, that she had now spent six weeks constructing an entire public identity around a person who did not appear to think about her at all between encounters.

"I need a hobby," said Electra, out loud.

"You've got one," said Pansy Parkinson. “It is Pottah~”

"Pansy, I will end you."

Hallowe'en was a Thursday.

The hall was done properly, which Electra had been told to expect and which she had declined to be impressed by until she walked into it, at which point she was impressed by it, which she concealed. A thousand live bats fluttered from the walls and ceiling and another thousand swooped over the tables in low black clouds, making the candles in the pumpkins stutter, and the feast appeared on the gold plates all at once the way it had at the start of term.

Electra ate four roast potatoes and a quantity of treacle tart and said two very funny things about Hufflepuff costumes, and she was approximately halfway through the second one when she noticed the gap at the Gryffindor table.

Two of them. There were two of them and no Granger.

She had an entire theory assembled within nine seconds, because she had been in three lessons that day and had seen what happened in Charms, which was that the Weasley had said something about Hermione Granger in a corridor on the way out and the Granger girl had gone past them with her face wrong, and Electra had seen her face from ten feet away and had recognised the expression instantly and completely, because it was the one she practised in the mirror for use at parties.

"Where's the bushy one?" she said.

"Who cares?" said Pansy.

"Nobody," agreed Electra, and looked at the doors.

Professor Quirrell came through them at a sprint.

He came in with his turban askew and terror on his face, and he reached Dumbledore's chair and slumped against the table and gasped, "Troll. In the dungeons. Thought you ought to know."

And then he sank to the floor in a dead faint.

The hall went up.

It went up properly, four tables of screaming, and it took several purple firecrackers from Dumbledore's wand to stop it, and then there were instructions, which were that prefects should lead their Houses back to the dormitories immediately.

Electra stood up with everybody else.

And then, in the middle of four hundred children getting to their feet at once, with the noise enormous and the bats going mad overhead, two thoughts arrived in her head in rapid succession, and they were these.

The first was: the Slytherin dormitory is in the dungeons.

The second was: she is not in the hall.

She looked across the churning hall, over the heads, through the bats, and found the Gryffindor table, and found two red and black figures at the end of it with their heads together, and watched them duck sideways out of the stream and go up the staircase on the right, which was the wrong way, which was away from the tower.

"Everybody follow me!" shouted Gemma Farley, the Slytherin prefect. "Stick together, first years!"

"The dungeons," said Electra.

"What?"

"Our dormitory is in the dungeons, and you have just been told that there is a troll in the dungeons, and you are proposing to lead thirty children into the dungeons."

Gemma Farley stopped dead with her mouth open.

"Oh," she said.

"Yes," said Electra Lucia Malfoy, "oh," and that was the sentence that was repeated around the Slytherin common room for the next four days and that resulted in her being, by the first week of November, a person whose opinion was consulted, which she pretended to find tiresome.

They were rerouted to a classroom on the ground floor and sat in it for a considerable time.

Electra sat on a desk with her feet on a chair and her arms folded and her jaw set, and she lasted eleven minutes.

Then she got up and went to the door.

"Where are you going?" said Pansy.

"The lavatory."

"There's a troll."

"The troll is in the dungeons, Pansy, which is precisely why I am going upstairs."

"Electra—"

"If anybody asks, I was here the entire time and I was extremely dull," said Electra Lucia Malfoy, and went out into a corridor in a castle containing a mountain troll, in her school robes, with her wand in her hand and absolutely no plan of any kind.

Later, when she had the leisure to be honest about it, which took approximately four years, she would identify this as the first genuinely stupid thing she ever did, and also as the moment at which she discovered that she was capable of doing them.

She went up the staircase on the right.

The castle was horribly quiet. Her shoes made a noise on the stone that seemed to her to be audible in Hogsmeade. She went along the first-floor corridor with her back to the wall and her heart going like a bird in a box, and she passed two suits of armour and a tapestry and she was telling herself, continuously and with great conviction, that she was going to the lavatory, and that if she happened to encounter anybody she would say something cutting.

Then she smelled it.

It was an appalling smell, a sort of thick warm stench of old socks and public toilet, and it came round a corner at her like a wall, and Electra stopped.

And then, from somewhere ahead and to the left, there was a crash, and a scream, and a sound like a wardrobe being thrown at a wall.

She ran.

She ran towards it, which she maintained afterwards had been a navigational error, and she came round the corner into the corridor outside the girls' bathroom at full speed and stopped so hard that she skidded.

The door was off its hinges. There was water coming out across the flagstones. Inside, through the wrecked doorway, she could see a thing about twelve feet tall with grey skin like a boulder and short legs like tree trunks swinging a club the size of a bench, and in front of it, pressed back against the wall with the sinks smashed to powder along the floor, with her hands over her mouth, was Hermione Granger.

And standing between them, eleven years old and approximately four feet nothing, was Harry Potter.

He had hold of the troll's neck from behind. He had got on it somehow, he had jumped, and his wand had gone up its nose, and the troll was roaring and swinging and he was hanging on with one arm and his glasses were sideways.

Ron Weasley was shouting a spell at it and missing.

Electra Lucia Malfoy stood in the doorway of a wrecked bathroom with her wand in her hand.

She would spend a considerable portion of the rest of her life trying to reconstruct what happened in her head over the following two seconds, and she never managed it, because nothing happened in her head at all. There was no decision. There was no weighing. There was an eleven year old boy about to be hit with a club the size of a bench, and there was a spell she had learned out of a book in July because she had wanted to show off at Christmas and because her mother had told her it was the only one worth knowing before second year.

She said it.

The club went out of the troll's hand.

It did not go far. It rose about four feet and hung there, turning slowly, while the troll looked up at it with an expression of absolutely perfect confusion, and then Ron Weasley, who had been shouting the same spell from the other side of the room and who had been getting the wand movement wrong for approximately forty seconds, got it right, and the club came down on its owner's head.

The troll fell over.

The sound of it hitting the floor was enormous. Dust came down from the ceiling. Water went across the flagstones in a sheet and soaked everybody's shoes.

There was a very long silence.

Harry Potter picked himself up off the floor and took his wand out of the troll's nose and wiped it on the troll, which was the single most disgusting thing Electra had ever seen a person do, and looked up.

Their eyes met across a wrecked bathroom.

"You're here?" he said.

"I am not," said Electra.

And she turned round and walked away up the corridor at a brisk pace, and then at a run, and she was round the corner and three corridors away before Professor McGonagall arrived, and she got back to the ground floor classroom through a shortcut she should not have known about and sat down on a desk nine seconds before the all clear came, slightly damp.

"Where were you?" said Pansy.

"Lavatory."

"Your shoes are soaking."

"The lavatory," said Electra Lucia Malfoy, with enormous dignity, "was flooded."

In the hospital corridor forty minutes later, Professor McGonagall awarded five points to Hermione Granger for her honesty, which was in fact a lie, and five points each to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley for sheer dumb luck, and three first years went off to Gryffindor Tower in a state of mild shock to discover that they were now friends, which is a thing that can happen very fast under certain conditions and almost never happens at all under any others.

"That was a Levitation Charm," said Hermione, on the stairs.

"Yeah, I know, it was mine," said Ron.

"Yours was two seconds late."

"It was not two seconds late."

"Ron," said Hermione Granger, "the club left his hand before you finished the incantation. I was looking directly at it. I was four feet away from it and extremely motivated."

Ron stopped on the staircase.

"Well, whose was it then?"

And Harry Potter, who had been quiet since the bathroom, said, "Malfoy's."

"Don't be stupid."

"She was in the doorway."

"She was not in the doorway."

"She was in the doorway for about four seconds," said Harry, "and then I said you're here, and she said I am not, and she legged it."

There was a pause on the staircase.

"That," said Ron Weasley, "is the single weirdest thing I have ever heard in my life."

"Yeah," said Harry.

Hermione Granger said nothing, because she was conducting an extremely rapid review of approximately six weeks of data, and because she had arrived at a conclusion that was going to take her until about March to find the courage to say out loud, and because when she did eventually say it out loud Ron Weasley was going to fall off a chair.

Down in the dungeons, under the lake, Electra Lucia Malfoy got into bed with her hair still damp and lay on her back in the dark.

"You went to the troll?!" said Pansy Parkinson.

"I went to the lavatory?"

"You went to the troll because Granger wasn't at the feast and you'd seen her face in the corridor after Charms, and you knew exactly where she'd be, because you cried in a bathroom at your aunt's house in July."

Electra lay absolutely still.

"I never told you that," she said.

"You told me on the boat," said Pansy. "You said the boats reminded you of it. You said it in a really bored voice and I nearly missed it."

The lake moved against the windows.

"Pansy," said Electra Lucia Malfoy.

"Yeah."

"You are a great deal cleverer than you let on, and if you ever let on, I shall deny this conversation."

"I know," said Pansy Parkinson, happily. "Night."

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