Unlucky Number Thirteen
The grassy verge in front of Number Thirteen, Grimmauld Place was getting far too long to be acceptable and Mrs Pamela Canker was unhappy about it. On any ordinary summer day, she wouldn’t have been too worried. In fact, she frequently reminded her girl-friends at the local coffee shop of her unique tolerance of, as she put it, the avant-garde. However, this was not an ordinary summer day; this was the thirtieth of June, the last day of the first half of the year, also known (by landlords) as Eviction Day.
Having moved in scarcely three months ago, in a particularly misty month of March, Mr and Mrs Canker and their two children were commonly regarded as the newcomers to the neighborhood. A tight-knit, close, friendly community you’ll never want to leave, the advertisement had read. A perfect fit for those wishing to settle down and live a quiet, undisturbed life.
The advertisement had proven false in many ways. For one, however “tight-knit” and “friendly” the community of Grimmauld Place claimed to be on the outside, the Canker family had never quite been accepted in. During her morning prowls of the front garden, it was frequent to see Mrs Number Eleven stroll by and have a chat with Mr Number Fourteen, the both of them passing by the new Canker residence as if they couldn’t even see it. Nathan, the younger Canker child, had begun to speculate that their house was invisible to anyone besides the owners; at which point Victoria, the elder (and much wiser and more experienced with her fifteen years of age), would remind her brother of the frequent, nagging visits of their landlord.
No, the gray, overgrown Number Thirteen was not invisible to the unwelcoming next-door neighbors. In fact, the advertisement had been proven wrong yet again: the “quiet, undisturbed life” the Cankers had been hoping for when they moved in was equally far from the truth. At any given moment, there could generally be seen four or five burly, unpleasant-looking blokes dressed in thick black capes prowling about the street, always staring at the otherwise unassuming patch of bricks separating the Canker residence from their next-door neighbors in Number Eleven. This practice, to Pamela Canker’s relief, had come to a sudden and inexplicable end in early May. She had been beginning to worry that her neighbors had secretly blamed her for their presence, as if she had any more reason than them to enjoy the company of such irritating visitors.
It had been shortly after the disappearance of these unpleasant fellows that a rather unusual mood had hit the nation. Her husband, who considered any moment where he wasn’t watching the news to be a wasted moment, had kept her filled in on the recent meteor showers over northern Wales and the unexpected owl sightings all over London.
“Take it from me, Patricia, this isn’t the first time it’s happened either,” Pamela had been told by the elderly woman getting her eyebrows trimmed next to her in the salon one day. “You might not remember, but I do: meteor showers and strange weather and ever so many owls in broad daylight. That was in the autumn of ‘eighty-one, it must have been. At least this summer’s looking like we’ll get more sun than the last two years. Heavens, what an unusual last two years we’ve had, don’t you think?” And, truthfully, Pamela was obliged to agree: the previous two summers had indeed been downright dreary.
She had been hoping for a better summer this year, and a chance to return to her old hobby of taking lengthy strolls by the Thames, but her husband’s sudden unemployment and their landlord’s unyielding temperament seemed to have different plans in store.
A loud thud from behind her pulled Mrs Pamela Canker out of her reverie. She had long since stopped looking at the weedy verge, and for the last few minutes she had been fixated on the streaks of gray that kept cropping up in her hair. Turning around so fast it almost gave her whiplash, she saw her daughter standing above a fallen cardboard box whose contents, stacks on stacks of records accumulated over decades of collection, were spilled over the empty wood floor. “Sorry, mum,” said the girl.
“Don’t worry, Vic,” said Pamela Canker, ignoring the complaints coming from her spine as she stooped low to help return the records to their correct location. “I’ll take this one, you go help your brother.” Lifting the box, she turned away and opened the front door, standing on the threshold a moment to take in the warm summer breeze. Her daughter, already so grown for her age, bounded back up the stairs to grab another box.
Just like the tall weeds growing out there on the verge, every sign that the Canker family had ever made a home in Number Thirteen, Grimmauld Place was about to be wiped from existence. Rent prices had peaked and, though the weather was much improved, the times were still bad, as her husband repeated to her. By this time tomorrow, she thought, there would scarcely remain a trace of their stay in that drafty old house. In the end, the neighbors had gotten their way, and it was with a sickening pang in her stomach that Pamela Canker imagined the joyous welcome party they would throw when the newer, richer tenants moved in.
---
“That should be all of them,” said Edgar Canker hours later, forcing a smile at his wife as he squeezed past her on the way out. With an involuntary grunt he loaded the final box, full of the remnants of his wife’s wardrobe, into the cab of the car between the two kids. “Well, shall we get going? Pamela?”
“Yes, I suppose we must,” she said, taking her hand out of her hair and sitting in the passenger side, just as her husband landed himself heavily behind the wheel. The car rumbled to life. It would be moments before she would take her last look at that house; even though she had stayed in it for so short a time, she had grown rather fond of it in the end.
They pulled off and began the slow drive to the end of the street, though Pamela Canker’s eyes still remained on the house. But it couldn’t be. She had just seen a disembodied human elbow flash into view, and then disappear again as if it had never been there. She blinked. It must have been a trick of the light. All the same, it hadn’t felt like that…
Then the car turned the corner and she turned away, blinking in the bright sunlight.
---
For the Cankers had not been the only ones moving in and out of Grimmauld Place that day. Mere feet away from where Pamela Canker had just been morosely examining her reflection in the window, a meager seventeen-year-old boy with jet black hair, crooked glasses, and a lightning scar on his forehead had been standing in the threshold of Number Twelve, completely unseen.
Harry Potter held his hand tight to the brass doorknob as if leaning on it for support. It was the first time he had entered the house of his godfather in nearly a year, though in that time everything seemingly had remained unchanged. His eyes raked each surface, letting the summer sun shed light on the dark, dismal interior, trying to find any sign that time had passed since last year, but there was nothing. The cobwebbed lamps were the same, the threadbare doormat was the same, the air as hazy as ever.
He closed the door behind himself without a sound and stepped forward gingerly into the house. After having spent most of the day wandering around downtown London, avoiding doing exactly what he was doing right now, it took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the low light. The first thing he noticed, blinking in an attempt to speed up the process, was the thick layer of dust on the floor. Of course. The dust had once been part of a magical ward to keep intruders out of the house. He remembered vividly the chilling sight of the dust taking the form of Professor Dumbledore just before exploding into an enormous, suffocating cloud. Professor Dumbledore, who was now dead.
And of course that ward had been designed by Mad-Eye. Who else could it have been? Constant vigilance! Mad-Eye, who was also dead. Though the curse that caused new arrivals to be tongue-tied upon entry to the house had long since worn off, Harry still felt an inexplicable tightness in his throat as he took a few unsteady paces forward.
At the end of the hall, there was that umbrella stand, upended. Harry remembered with a dull pain in his chest how Tonks had always knocked that stand over when she came to visit. Tonks, who was dead. He wondered when she had last paid a visit.
Approaching the room where the Order of the Phoenix used to meet, Harry’s eyes fell on a pale stretch of yarn lying on the ground. An Extendable Ear, one that Fred Weasley had shared with him to allow him to eavesdrop. Fred Weasley, who was dead. He remembered seeing the top of Professor Snape’s head from that landing up above as an Order meeting came to an end. Snape, who had been fighting for Harry all along. Snape, who was dead.
Harry’s breath quickened as he turned left to face the stairs to the basement. But he had only made it a few steps down into the pitch-darkness before he realized it would be too much. He could almost make out the kitchen where Sirius had yelled at Kreacher… The cupboard in the side of the wall where the house-elf had guarded his most treasured possessions… The table where Ron and Hermione had sat as they watched him have a row with Lupin…
Sirius, who was now dead. Kreacher, who had died defending Hogwarts. Lupin, who had fallen just feet apart from his wife.
Harry turned and walked right back up the stairs, feeling a strange sensation in his head as he walked up, almost as if he were floating. He leaned against the wall at the top of the stairs for support and looked down to see that his legs were shaking. It was as if each face was appearing before his eyes, reminding him with a jolt of just how many lives had been lost… How had he let them die when it should have been him, Harry, who died instead…
As if in a dream, he turned and walked back along the long, grim hallway toward the front door, holding the wall for support. He had overestimated himself. He couldn’t stay in a house with so many ghosts. It had only ever been a place to hide. Had he lost his nerve? Where was the old Harry, the brave Harry, the boy who had pulled the Sword of Gryffindor like a rabbit out of a hat?
He threw the Invisibility Cloak back over himself, not wishing to be seen by anyone as he carefully opened the front door and stepped back into the bright light. The next-door neighbors of Number Thirteen, who had been loading up their car to move out ever since he’d arrived, were now just pulling away from their overgrown garden. On the threshold, he nearly lost his balance and saw his elbow flash into the sunlight from under the Cloak. Quickly regaining his balance, he looked around to see if anyone had caught that. But the former neighbors were already turning the corner, they couldn’t have seen… Turning on the spot, he once again felt the squeezing, constricting sensation he so hated as he Disapparated from Grimmauld Place.
---
He landed with a soft thud in the tall grasses beside a familiar country lane, one that he had Apparated to countless times before. Putting his hands on his knees, he began to retch. It was not common for him to get sick after Apparating anymore, but this time was one of those times; in fact, ever since the War it had been just a little harder for him. He wondered if this would affect his chances of ever getting an Apparition license, although he had been Apparting from place to place over a year and no one had ever called him out for it.
Getting back up to his feet, he began to walk unsteadily down the lane, surrounded on either side by beautiful orchards covered in miniscule green apples waiting to grow for a few more months before making the big leap to the ground. Following the twists and turns, he finally saw his destination: a tall, skinny, dilapidated wood structure covered in makeshift slabs of faded red wood whose paint was long since peeling. The home of the closest thing he’d ever had to a family. The Burrow.
Opening the creaking gate, he looked towards the garden and saw, among the enormous beanstalks, towering sunflowers, and thick tomato plants, the two whose company he craved most, every second of his waking life, and even, often, in sleep.
“Blimey, Harry! Back so soon?” Ron tossed his pair of gardening shears back in the bucket with the other tools and greeted his best mate with a strong slap on the back, spraying him with bits of dirt from the base of the cucumber plant he had just been pruning. Harry grinned quickly and internally thanked Merlin he hadn’t ruffled his hair with his filthy gardening gloves, as Ron Weasley was prone to doing.
“Is something wrong, Harry?” said Hermione, looking at him with a concerned expression. “You don’t look great.” Leave it to Hermione Granger to know exactly when something was bothering him – it sometimes felt as if she could sense it.
“I’m okay,” he lied.
“Don’t lie,” said Hermione immediately.
He hadn’t been okay for months – for years. None of them had been. It was easier to think of it as if there was a Harry before that night at Hogwarts, and a Harry after that night at Hogwarts, and the two had little in common.
The three of them had stayed at Hogwarts for the following weeks after the battle until the official end of term. Harry had hoped it would bring back a fleeting sense of normalcy for him, being back at the place he had called home for six years, but alas, it had only seemed to reinforce how much everything had changed. The rest of Dumbledore’s Army had stayed there with him until the end, too, and they had been essential in helping repair the scarred castle, but rarely did Harry join them in their efforts. In fact, people tended not to bother him at all; Harry suspected Professor McGonagall to have been behind that. Neville, Dean, Seamus, and the other Gryffindors continued living in their old encampment in the Room of Requirement with the rest of the Army, so the seventh-year boys’ dormitories had been completely empty except for Harry, Ron, and even Hermione, who had moved into Neville’s old bed as she didn’t want to be alone in the girls’ dormitories every night.
“It feels haunted,” she had said the first night, as she crept up into the boys’ dormitory shaking from head to toe just a few minutes after they had parted ways to go to bed. Harry couldn’t blame her. The castle was so dark at night.
It was also possible that Neville and the others had avoided the dormitory due to all the screaming during the middle of the night. All three of them were afflicted with nightmares now, and at almost every hour one of them would bolt upright in the dark, screaming their head off, shaking from head to toe, or drenched in sweat. Harry often heard his two best friends scream his own name in their sleep. He wondered if he did the same, if he called out for Ron and Hermione in such blood-curdling anguish, but then he remembered it hadn’t been either of their lifeless corpses that Hagrid had carried to the front of the entrance hall, surrounded by a horde of jeering, victorious Death Eaters.
The three of them had wasted little time in forming the nightly practice of gradually gathering in one bed by the middle of the night and, by morning, waking up in a tangled heap. Usually it was Ron’s bed, since it was in the middle of the three and the easiest to reach. Inwardly, Harry recognized it was a little strange for him to be sleeping in the same bed as Ron and Hermione, since they appeared now to be an item, but on the other hand, neither of them seemed bothered in the slightest. In fact, most mornings he would wake up with Ron’s arm around him in a protective position, or with Hermione’s face buried into the crook of his shoulder.
The days had gone by, blending into one until Harry couldn’t be sure if the end of term was still months away or tomorrow. By day he was usually to be found collapsed in one of his favorite armchairs in the Gryffindor common room, looking as lifeless as when he had literally died, or else walking the grounds, blinking like a baby in the bright sunlight.
One day, he had stumbled across Luna by the vegetable patch. She had pertinently commented that he looked like an Inferi – that is to say, the wizard version of a zombie – and recommended he drink some essence of Witherbore hoof to lift his spirits. Though he had not taken her up on this recommendation, he had nevertheless returned to the castle in a much more humorous mood than before.
Then the Hogwarts Express came. As usual, Harry, Ron, and Hermione had found a compartment to themselves at the back of the train, trying to ignore the unabashed stares of the younger students. It was with a jolt of grief and regret that he saw some of the more daring-looking students still sporting scars and bruises of their own from the Carrows’ punishments. Ginny, Luna, and Neville had joined them halfway through the train ride back to London for some games of Exploding Snap. Though he and Ginny had not gotten back together, despite their previous intentions, she was still there looking out for him, making sure he, Ron, and Hermione were still taking care of themselves. And he was grateful for that.
A few hours later, they had arrived back in King’s Cross station, as full of color and sound as it always had been. Parting ways with the others, Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny had gotten in a Muggle taxi to take them to the town of Ottery St. Catchpole. Apart from the four of them, the only inhabitants remaining in the Burrow were Mr and Mrs Weasley, as well as George, who had yet to return to the joke shop in Diagon Alley.
In fact, it was rare to see George outside of his room anymore. Most days he didn’t leave at all, and someone would be obliged to leave his breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a tray sitting outside his door, which also sometimes became a hazard for those travelling up and down the skinny stairwell.
For the week since they had returned from Hogwarts not much had changed – in fact, the only difference was that now, instead of eventually congregating in one bed by the middle of the night, Harry, Ron, and Hermione had begun skipping that step and simply falling asleep in the same bed. Fortunately, since this habit took place in Ron’s room, two floors above Mrs Weasley’s room, she was none the wiser.
And then one day, precisely June the twenty-ninth, it had occurred to Harry that he should no longer be living like that with the Weasleys. Merlin knew they had been struggling financially for decades now, and though Mrs Weasley would never admit that he was a burden, Harry was all too conscious that he was another mouth to feed. On top of that, he had his own place in London, lying empty and unused. Better to get out of the Weasleys’ way sooner rather than later.
Ron and Hermione had both protested, of course. But that was always going to happen.
So, that morning, that thirtieth of June, that last day of the first half of the year, Harry had set out to reclaim the house of his late godfather. And the rest is history.
---
“I said I’m fine, Hermione,” said Harry, gritting his teeth a little and causing Ron to look up from his cucumber cuttings once again.
“Might as well tell the truth, mate,” he said reasonably, squinting up at the two of them in the bright sun. “She’ll get it out of you soon enough.” Hermione crossed her arms at Harry with a most Hermione-ish look on her face.
“Fine,” said Harry, lowering his voice a little. “I just couldn’t live there now, not alone, not with all the… all the…”
“All the memories?” Hermione finished for him, putting her hand on his arm with a sympathetic squeeze. “Yes, I thought that might happen. It’s okay, Harry. Like I said, I’m sure Mrs Weasley doesn’t mind.”
“She doesn’t,” interrupted Ron loudly. “None of us do, mate, really, you’re family. And it’s not like Mum’s not used to having lots of people in the house. Just imagine how much more chaotic it was for her when we were all still kids, when Fred and George used to –” He cut himself off, and whatever it was that Fred and George used to do remained unsaid.
“Exactly, Ron,” said Hermione, filling in the silence that had risen so suddenly between the three of them. “Though, I must admit, I can’t pretend I don’t understand where you’re coming from, Harry. Actually, I’ve been thinking,” she said quickly, before either of them could interrupt, “Maybe we ought to start considering… our careers.”
“Blimey, Hermione,” said Ron. “We were just in a war. Don’t you think we deserve a break?”
Harry, however, was not as surprised as Ron. He had been expecting Hermione to spring that question on them one of these days, and in the meantime had been valiantly attempting to come up with an adequate answer. His attempts had been in vain, though, because deep down, he quite agreed with Ron.
Harry bit his lip and made a decision. “Hermione’s right. We’ve been through a lot, but we can’t just stay here forever.” After all, perhaps getting a job would reduce some of the guilt he felt about living under Molly Weasley’s roof.
Hermione looked relieved. Ron squinted up at them both for a few seconds, considering. At last, he said, “All right, I’m on board, on one condition. If it starts getting bad for either of you, you’ll quit without hesitation. Deal?”
“Only if you agree to that same principle,” said Hermione.
“Deal, then,” said Ron, tossing his shears back in the bucket and standing up with a groan to brush soil off his front. “But let’s go back inside, it’s sweltering out here and I’m sick and tired of this damn cucumber plant.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Harry,” said Hermione in a low voice as Ron marched off to the tool shed with the bucket of gardening supplies. “But it’s not true. Not being able to live in Grimmauld Place, after all we’ve been through, doesn’t make you weaker than anyone else. You just have to be patient with yourself.”
Harry said nothing as he followed her into the cool interior of the Burrow, but idly wondered to himself if Hermione had some sort of sixth sense to always know exactly what was on his mind.