3 - Availing visit through the Veil
Billie still didn’t understand how they had managed to get her to stand in front of the Veil less than a week later.
It wasn’t that Unspeakables hadn’t explained anything to her, they had; nor was it that the Brightest Witch of her Age was sure of her calculations and any arithmetics she had done; there were a lot and well made ones; it wasn’t that everything was gone over many times and that her health wasn’t taken into consideration, there were two healers from St Mungo’s on standby in the circular Hall of Death. It was just too much, the stares that followed her all throughout the morning, the food in her pockets were there as well as a strong magically enforced rope, a magical bind to her body was tethered to the ginger curse breaker.
It was just a bit much.
It was like this whole event, Billie going into the Veil to drag Sirius out of it, was a show worth centuries. If she hadn’t expressly told the Minister that she didn’t want anybody to hover over her, she was sure that tens more people would be standing around them, notably the entire Wealsey clan.
“Are you ready, Bilswith?” One of the Unspeakables asked her, again Billie sighed. She had asked not to be called by her Surname, and had made a statement by introducing herself as Billie earlier, yet this still happened.
“Somehow.”
Standing a few metres away from the Veil, Billie checked every rope that tethered her to the world of the living. This was it, her ticket out of losing magic. At least temporarily, if you count the time she needed to make Black accept the bond so that she didn’t have to be reassigned (though knowing that before would have been better), and then the fact that he had to accept to participate in the procreation part of the law. Which form the stories she heard of the man, and if he was truly alive, would take some time or none at all, he would reject that and be put exempted from the law. How she wished she could be excused from it as well. But the four letters from the ministry and the sureness of the people currently around her, Billie couldn’t just not participate anymore. Her requests had already been refused time and time again when the law was first put into practice.
This was probably the dumbest thing she could ever have chosen to do. She straightened up, looked back at the few people waiting for her, and then she stepped forward. The Veil pulled at her, a metre away and she was like a magnet to a fridge door. Sucked to it. She closed her eyes as she came in contact with the shimmery pale surface.
It was cold, and did not feel like a fabric.
It felt like nothing. Just cold.
When she didn’t feel the ground under her feet anymore, Billie opened her eyes to see that she had fallen into what looked like an anthill from the inside. Tunnels on every side, wider and thinner, and whatever she had learned about gravity in primary school, here, it was confused. She walked in, rope attached to her waist.
Billie walked. Tried to find the right orientation, but just confused herself even more. Her only point of reference was the rope, laying on the ground at the same place, all the time. But it was at her feet, at her head, to her right, to her left and above her. She just needed to walk around the sides of the tunnels to lose her way. It was nauseating.
Right, now that she was in. She had to think back to what she had talked about with Harry Potter, where Sirius might have fallen behind the veil. From where he had been taken, to where he might have fallen. She had, with William Weasley and Hermione Granger, gone over a few of the calculations and few possibilities of drop. And now, with the weird gravity thing she was in, those were needed. The angle in which he fell in, what pace, which height.
Billie tugged at her rope twice, and waited for the object to be thrown in. Same direction, same speed, same start, more or less. She knew not which tunnel to go in, she hadn’t been there, and maps on paper were helpful only to a certain extent.
She didn’t see the ball of paper come in, but she felt it hit her head with more force than she would have thought possible.
With her stomach in shambles, and now with an aching head, she trudged down the path behind her, tugged again, and waited for the next object, checking the right direction. This time, she caught sight of the ball. She was on the right path. Now, all she had to do was find his body and go back the way she came.
Right. Back on track. Find Black.
In a way that would have gotten a questioning stare from many people, Billie enjoyed the quietness of the place. It wasn’t dark, nor was it very bright, just clear. And a jumble of paths that only followed by instinct. Unlike outside the veil, it was silent. Maybe there was a surface buzzing, something that seemed to disappear the further away from the entrance she got. And it wasn’t cold. Just like the veil in itself, she didn’t feel like she had entered into something, nor was covered in any substance, it was like perfect weather, very pleasant to trudge through.
For what felt like hours, Billie walked down the paths, unknowingly making choices she thought were the best to find his body. It seemed to have just drifted through the place, because nothing was out of place, just clean smooth cavernous walls. She had wanted to check the time, knowing that she had gone after lunch, around three pm, before tea-time. She had wanted, because when she did, her muggle watch had stopped ticking, and any Tempus charms had just ended up being words echoing in the chambers, it felt like hours. But she could not know how many.
Time wasn’t of the essence. Great. Good thing, really. That truly was good, meaning that Sirius Black must still be how he had entered, not having had time to get hungry, dehydrate, sleep or anything. That was a theory, that however long passed in there, was but nothing. Though, from the rope tugging she had done earlier, time still was passing outside. She mustn't forget to eat.
She did. Every five thousand steps, if she remembered her maths correctly, that would be around four kilometres per hour of normal walking speed, and thus about an hour and four kilometres walked. It was never ending. She wondered how they managed to keep the rope going on their part outside. If they didn’t, then she was lost in there too.
- Though she did forget a few times, as she counted, that she was not in a fun park but a dark undead world in the Ministry of Magic wearing speleological attire and using a battery-operated frontal lamp. And other enchantments she wasn’t sure were still working, since Tempus was null, as was Lumos, basic spells. Billie didn’t know what the magic of the Veil was doing to the rest of the enchantments.
- So Billie walked, strolled through the inners of the Veil, searching for what she wanted, what she needed. Sirius Black, someone she had only seen in photos, half of which were taken from far away and in dimly lit spaces, the others were of his arrest, angry and mad. So, really, what she had to go off of was the descriptions given to her by Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and the Minister for Magic Shacklebolt (Molly Weasley didn’t seem to want to describe the man in any good light).
- And the facts were that he had hair to his shoulders, black, and with a slight wave. He was taller than her (like most people were) and he had a beard. Not a big one but not just a month-long unshaven look either. She was told he cared for his appearance, little details in his clothes, but after a fight against Bellatrix Lestrange (though she had no idea what that entailed) he must have been a little worse for wear, but still in his muggle clothes from the seventies.
- His wand was one that was given to him after his escape, not his own, not very responsive, and ugly. Potter’s words. He said it was dull and felt like it had been made out of driftwood. What she got from that was that it looked and felt cheap. The group outside were waiting with the wand belonging to him before his incarceration (around the time she would have been eight years old).
- Overall, he was said to be debonair in the way he held himself. Except for this description of a pureblood, she didn’t know what to imagine. She had seen too many of those in her lifetime to forget the air of arrogance, the way they held themselves higher than they probably sat, and the long thin faces, and perfect proportions that in a generation or two would start to look incestious. She knew them. She hated them.
“Helga!” Billie slipped on a rock and fell down a few metres. Wait. Where was she? 2864.
Wait. She fell a few metres? That wasn’t supposed to work with the no gravity rule that she had applied since the start. She jumped, just to see how it was going. She did not land where she had jumped from. Either she was going in the wrong direction, or she was doing great. Let’s say great.
2865.
Billie continued.
- Wait, the rock. She hadn’t encountered anything else in the tunnels, everything was smooth. Maybe she truly was going in the right direction. Maybe Black lost something on his fall down and the rock was his rock! She was losing her mind, she knew it. Why would he have a rock with himself while he fought? Actually, that wasn’t that stupid considering the fact that the circular room was made of stone, and with a violent fight pieces of rocks could have broken off and gotten on him before he fell.
No, really, Billie was losing her mind.
3120.
She hit something with her shoes. Looking down she realised that it was not a rock like she had thought at first, but a wand. An ugly one at that. She picked it up, and thought that it might be Black’s because of the sheer lightness of it, and the fact that the wood was used, flimsy and indeed looked like driftwood. It could barely be called a wand, though it was a piece of magical wand wood with a core. But that was it, by definition this pale stick was a wand.
A shape appeared in the distance, her light was starting to fatigue, Billie had already changed the batteries twice before. A shape that was humanoïd enough to probably be her target. She continued going over there. Walking until her light illuminated the figure at the bottom end of the tunnel. The man was palish, a bit, not tanned at all, the skin of a vampire. Not those real ones, the ones in muggle fairy tales. The beard corroborated what she had been told, neat clothing so unlike his younger pictures, and long loosely curled hair. The descriptions she had gotten painted a better portrait. But maybe the dried blood, haggard torn clothes, and bruises on his face took away from his historic beauty.
Billie poked him, sure enough he was unconscious, because she did not want to bear his heavy body back upwards more than tens of thousands of steps, maybe even hundreds of thousands. It was no use. He was unconscious, not not breathing, and not coldish to the touch. He wasn’t warm per se, but cool. Like a cup of tea forgotten for some time, but not cold yet. But that also seemed to be the temperature of the entire place as well.
She wasn’t going to bother herself with those questions, she was not an Unspeakable, and it would bore her in a few hours, she had already gotten bored of numerous problems she had questioned herself on. And The non-temperature and preserving of this body was not one she wanted to research upon.
So, the first part of the mission accomplished. At least, she thought so. Part two - tethering the guy to the line so she could bring him up. Before that, just as to be sure, Billie tried a levitating spell. It failed. Her wand had not worked a single time since she had walked through the Veil.
“Please get up.” Billie moaned as she tried to get him to wear the harness tied to the end of the rope. It failed, yet again. He hadn’t responded to any of her pleas for the last ten minutes, or was it half an hour? Billie didn’t know. And that was starting to aggravate her. She wasn’t hungry but she wanted to eat. She wasn’t tired but she wanted to sleep. She wasn’t fatigued but her muscles still ached when she tried to lift him up to wear the harness! She wanted to just walk away and be done with him already.
“Calm down.” She told herself, standing up to stretch her legs, drink a bit of water, and think back to the start. She was doing this for her magic. Getting this man alive so she could marry him and thus keep her magic.
One thing at a time. Current thing - getting him out of there. “Come on little Alice, let’s get you out of the Rabbit Hole.” She thought back to the movie as she tied the man up, and remembered the scene where Alice just floats down the Rabbit Hole to end up in a room upside down, having fallen through the ground to the ceiling. Or something like that. She remembered watching the movie and having nausea just by watching the animated character. How she hadn’t yet vomited? She didn’t know. Magic, probably.
Fingers crossed and mentally drained, Billie tugged on the rope three times. And waited. Either she was going to wait and have to bring the body back up herself, or the others were going to-
She looked down, Sirius Black wasn’t by her feet anymore.
-pull the body up.
The body was now in between the weird no gravity space the walls didn’t seem to hold over the centre of the tunnel. She walked back beside the man, munching on a bar of cereals.
- And will probably go on for some time.
At around two thousand steps, the pulling stopped. She paused beside the man, waiting for it to continue, though when she waited she did check that every attachment was alright. They were. She waited, nothing. She tugged, and then the tugging started again. Slower this time. But it didn’t stop until they were around six thousand steps in total. They had lasted twice as long. And Billie had eaten twice as many cereal bars.
- They took a break from pulling, Billie took a break. For what felt like a never ending trekking through nothing but empty tunnels, she walked, they tugged, Sirius Black levitated in the middle.
Taking a break from counting the steps, Billie decided to count the number of times she could walk around Sirius Black. Though after seventy times her stomach wasn’t allowing her to do it anymore. She wanted to vomit, yet she couldn’t. Just like she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t feel the ache that should come to her muscles, just like she couldn’t hear anything but her own voice. Not even the sound of her steps could be heard. But the distant and ever closer hum of the Veil.
13 836. If she counted correctly. Steps that is. From the time she found Black.
Her light dimmed again, the batteries really having a hard time staying alive. She had one more chance (one battery left), and then it was going to be walking in darkness, and silence. At first it had been nice to have this break of silence, a break from all of the things that hurt her eyes and a break from people. But now it was unnerving.
17 392. She was already starting to lose her mind. She had gone through the two CDs of Queen's Best Of in her head, and then out loud since no one could hear her but maybe the man hanging bizarrely in front of her. It went from A kind of magic, to Under pressure, followed by Radio Gaga. I want it all was the fourth song, then I want to break free, Innuendo after that, a song she forgot, Breakthu, Who wants to live forever if she remembered correctly, and then The miracle, Invisible man followed, her favourite, and Hammer to fall, Friends will be friends came after, then The Show must go on. Billie forgot how many songs there were, but she always wished that song was the last on the album. It wasn’t, but she never played the one after that.
Counting the missed songs, the times she forgot the lyrics, the moments she sang the song twice or forgot a verse, Billie guessed that she had come to the actual length of the album. Only an hour and a half. Or about eight thousand steps more. 26 013.
The young woman paused, watching the body still being pulled away. Hadn’t she been much closer to zero when she had found his body? She had been. She jogged up to catch up the distance she had missed.
26 037. She had, she was right. But she had also started counting after many other things were done to keep herself company. However, she did allow herself to agree to the fact that the way back was feeling much longer than the way down.
Billie didn’t want to count any more. Singing had been a nice thing to do. What other albums did she have when she was a kid playing on loop in her bedroom? Abba? She did have a record of the best of, maybe two, one had been scratchy now that she thought about it. The order was not something she remembered. The Queen CDs had lasted much longer.
There was only one song that Billie knew by heart. Laughing on her own in the quiet and dark tunnels she started singing. She really was losing her mind, her focus, and energy to look sane. But she was on her own with an unconscious man drifting in front of her. No one could judge her.
I wasn't jealous before we met
Now every woman I see is a potential threat
And I'm possessive, it isn't nice
You've heard me saying that smoking was my only vice
But now it isn't true
Now everything is new
And all I've learned has overturned
I beg of you
Don't go wasting your emotion
Lay all your love on m-
The Veil came into view. Above her.
Billie wasn’t going to question it anymore, she had clearly left it with it on her right, not above. But whatever was to happen. She just wanted to leave. To get out.