The Strange Places with Strange People
Making his way up the hill that Riddle Manor sat upon, Harry began to wonder what to do from here. He would need to ensure his own safety, and when he thought about it, he realised that his instinctual apparition here of all places was actually pretty smart. They wouldn’t look for him in the muggle world, least of all in a muggle manor house, they were too short sighted for that. He’d also never actually told anyone, including Dumbledore about where exactly the resurrection took place in his fourth year. All he’d said was that they were in a wide-open field and that they had already had Tom Riddle Sr.’s bones, he didn’t say anything about the graves or the cemetery. Looking back, he couldn’t remember why he’d withheld that information, but he was certainly glad he did.
As he came up the driveway of the manor and saw it in all its glory in the morning sunshine, and he became a little hesitant over his immediate happiness with his choice of hideaway. In the light he could see just how downtrodden and unkept the manor was, and he had little hope of the inside being any better.
The front door was two massive, almost ancient looking wooden doors under an archway. It had some of those big heavy looking knockers you sometimes see on the old doors. He decided to bypass knocking, who was going to answer anyway? He opened the door and stepped inside.
He was immediately confused, he took a step back outside, yep, still decrepit and rotting. He turned back to the inside again and was a little sceptical. Straight through the front door was a well-kept grand staircase with a pale green runner going all the way up the first flight then presumably splitting up the two flights on the side to the first floor. The entrance was a big round room with a minimalistic chandelier. The walls were painted the same pale green as the carpet on the stairs. It opened through another huge archway to display the staircase in front and there were two much smaller doors off to the sides.
He was curious about the side doors, but you couldn’t see a staircase like that and not go up it immediately. He had his wand out in case old Voldy left any surprises for trespassers as made his way up the opulent stairs.
He reached the first floor and found a door that presumably led to the rest of the floor while the stairwell continued upwards. He opened the door to find a massive library. The two-storey walls lined with books, with three ladders on rails around the room to reach the books above reaching height. The whole library seemed to take up half of the first floor based on how big the manor looked from the outside. The main portion of the floor was taken by more bookshelves standing alone arranged in seemingly random curves. Harry walked up through the large gap between the two curving bookshelves either side of the door. As he walked further it seemed more and more like the curve was slowly turning back on itself like it was going to make a circle.
Just when he decided going in circles was pointless and he was going to return to the door, he saw the end of the bookshelves he was walking between, there was a raised platform that stood half the height of the bookshelves. He walked up the stairs surrounding the circular platform and looked around. The shelves on the floor seemed to spiral out from the platform he was standing on, he turned in a full circle, he could see there was another door on the other side of the library from the one he had come through, another set of big wooden doors leading to whatever made up the other half of the floor presumably.
The dais he was standing on was carpeted with more of the pale green carpet, honestly did they not have another colour of carpet? Though he did have to admit it was a pleasing colour to look at, no where near as bold and assaulting as the red and gold that made up the Gryffindor common room. There was a large, low sitting, rectangular table with many books open spread across it sitting in the middle surrounded by some comfortable looking chairs.
Harry decided to explore the other doors in the library later and headed back the way he came. He walked back through the doors to the stairwell and continued upstairs. Upstairs there was an opulent master bedroom suite as well as two guest suites. For a manor so big he was quite surprised at the lack of rooms. Other than the bedroom suites, that were admittedly huge, there didn’t seem to be anything else on the second floor.
Harry was wondering whether to keep exploring when a bang from back in the library made his decision for him. He headed back downstairs to the library to explore the other half of the floor, he figured that’s probably where to noise came from since he hadn’t seen anything in the library that would make a noise like that. Unless one of the books fell from the shelves or off the table? It would have had to have been quite high up to make a noise loud enough to be heard on the next floor up.
He made his way back into the library and to the raised dais in the middle, it didn’t seem like there were any books lying on the floor, not that he had a view of even half of the floor with all the bookshelves obstructing his vision. He decided to go check out the other door and see what was through there and if anything behind that door made the noise. When he entered the doors, he found a fairly short hallway with a door on the wall either side. The way the hallway was set, it seemed like there should also be a door at the end, but there wasn’t. Oh well, he thought, he’d check out the doors that were actually there first before trying to find one that wasn’t.
The left door opened to what looked like a study with a huge red wood desk with a matching chair. There was an unlit fireplace with a chaise and two armchairs around it. The room was lined with bookcases except a space that was filled with a map of magical Britain with key places marked.
Upon closer inspection Harry was astounded to not only find the usual Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, the Ministry and other major places but also ancestral manors and homes. Most family manors were impossible to find and the locations of most were only known to the families they contained. It was also strange that there was a magical map in what should have been a muggle house. Riddle must have put it up he concluded, that was why it also contained ancestral homes, he probably demanded the locations from his followers. Regardless, this was probably the most valuable map in the UK. Knowing the locations of almost every pureblood family’s manor? Wizards would and have paid millions of galleons for the locations of individual manors alone, let alone a map of them.
He left the map and the study and went across the hallway to find a potions lab; this didn’t interest him as much. He didn’t know as much about potions, though he had little doubt that the due sheer amount of ingredients, this was a potions lab to be proud of, there were more than double the ingredients in the Hogwarts storage cupboards and those supplied about 1000 students through a whole school year.
He returned to the library. Upon closer inspection of the table he found he recognised the open page of one of the books. He walked over and picked it up. It seemed to be a ritual book, he looked at the open page and almost immediately dropped it at the illustrations. They showed almost the exact set up of the resurrection ritual Pettigrew drew up for Voldemort in the graveyard. He went on to read the description at the top of the page and it baffled him.
Ritual of Resurrected Redemption
The ritual of redemption was devised by Runic Master Randall Aguillard in 1632 after his murder of his best friend, Hector Dieaci. Aguillard was under the mistaken impression that Dieaci committed a crime against his sister and as such demanded rightful retribution, a duel, which resulted in the death of Dieaci. Aguillard soon realised he was mistaken in his belief of Dieaci’s guilt and as such started researching ways to recall a soul of one lost through an unjust or mistaken cause. He devised this ritual to bring his friend back, but the toll was great, and his best friend was bed ridden for years following his resurrection. This ritual is not advised as the circumstances needed to fulfill the necessary components of the ritual are rarely met and modification of the ritual is not advised. The person being resurrected must have been unjustly or mistakenly killed by the performer of the ritual and the performer must have true regret for the killing and truly wish for it to be reversed. I also required that a piece of the deceased remain in the realm of the living to act as an anchor for the returning life. In the first case of this ritual one of Dieaci’s sons was sacrificed to house his father’s life once he came back.
It went on to explain the necessary ingredients and materials needed for the ritual. Most of it was rare and expensive and would have cost a fortune to amass. Clearly Wormtail was either illiterate or imbecilic because this ritual would not have worked. Their situation barely met any of the necessary circumstances to fulfill the ritual let alone the fact that at that point he did not regret his killing of Voldemort in his first year at all.
A scraping noise behind him startled Harry, he had forgotten about the earlier bang in his curiosity over the manor. He turned around with his wand out to face his would-be attacker. There was no one there. This creepy old manor is just probably throwing me off, get it together, he thought. He turned back to the book only to be tackled to the ground. Whoever it was that had tackled him had a hood covering most of his face, enough so that he couldn’t see it even though his attacker was on top of him pinning him to the ground.
He was just about to throw his assailant off when he spoke, in a voice he recognised, even so long after he had last heard it.
“And just what are you doing here darling?"