Chapter 2
Reg Cattermole was certainly not happy. Then again, being imprisoned in Azkaban was considered nightmarish at the best of times.
It was bad enough that he had found his wife talking to a man identical to him – Reg suspected Polyjuice Potion – who seemed to be helping his Mary escape, but he had lost her in the confusion and been Stunned by Death Eaters.
After twenty minutes of the Cruciartus Curse, the torturers were satisfied that Reg didn’t know about the mass escape of over three dozen Muggleborns. Let alone where his wife was. Or his children, it seemed, as a Death Eater had been to their house and his ‘Muggle wife’ had used ‘a stolen wand’ against them.
Good for you, Mary, he told himself, but that was the only pleasure he got. He supposed that they might go north to some cousins that she hadn’t seen in thirty years.
That was distant enough for Death Eaters not to be interested. They were abroad as well. He didn’t know if they’d suddenly be willing to let four strangers live with them.
But he had been sent to Azkaban ‘until further notice’. Because of the influx of several new prisoners, nearly all of them Muggle-born, many prisoners had been forced to share cells. It was bad enough that a cell was only eight feet by eight feet with one bunk, cold stone floors (and he was sure that a spell had been cast to make the stones even colder) and iron bars with dancing spikes on, but now two other men had been shoved in with him.
“Wait!” a guard cried out, moving past the Dementor leering at two women in a cell nearby, “I think there’s room in here for two more!”
To Reg’s surprise, two small children were being dragged in by the scruff of their necks. Then when they had been thrown in and he could see them properly in the dim, blue light from a lamp outside, he saw they were little girls.
Bianca and Kelly were utterly terrified. They had been pulled from the Ministry after being subjected to the Cruciartus Curse and thrown in somewhere dark and horrible, where all their worst fears danced through their heads.
As soon as the door shut, Kelly pulled on the bars. As she started shouting, the spikes on the bars started to grow and almost pierced her hands.
“They do that,” the younger of the two other men grumbled, “stops prisoners making a ruckus.”
Kelly slumped to the floor onto her knees, put her head in her hands and howled. Bianca, who had been looking at her, suddenly glanced at the floor, a feeling of hopelessness flooding through, not helped by the looming Dementors outside.
“Hey,” Reg tried comforting Kelly, as if she were one of his kids, “don’t cry.”
But Kelly just edged away from him, unable to bear being touched. Bianca slumped onto the corner of the sagging mattress and wiped her bruised eye on the back of her hand. The old man sitting by her snarled, but he looked broken as well.
“Sixty years I worked for the magical community,” he snapped, “sixty years as a shop owner and what do they do? They lock me away! That was my life they just took!”
“There’s no use complaining about it,” the younger man cried, “you can’t do anything now.”
Reg ignored them and sat beside Bianca. “You all right, miss?” he asked.
Bianca shook her head. “They hurt me. They gave me a black eye. And – I wanna go home.”
Reg didn’t say that he didn’t know when – or even if – the girl would go home.
Bianca grabbed her frizzy hair in her hands and stared towards the floor.
“I don’t know what I did wrong. I proved I was a witch; I did a spell. Why did they lock me up?”
“You did nothing wrong,” Reg explained, “they’re in the wrong.”
“Why?” Bianca asked.
Reg couldn’t answer.
It was about two months before anything happened.
The day was spent the exact same way as always; wake up from either the mattress or the floor, depending on whose turn it was (the younger man had offered the girls his jacket if they ever had to sleep on the floor, but it wasn’t much), then wait for breakfast to be served through the bars at around half-past seven. Breakfast was usually pottage or a loaf of bread if they were lucky. No cutlery.
Then, many hours later, dinner would be served. A couple of slices of bread, a strip of ham, bacon or cheese, maybe a piece of fruit. The lights from the lamps would be turned off (or rather they would extinguish) at about half-past eight at night.
But today, as it turned out, was something different.
It had been the old wizard’s turn on the bed. He was almost skeletal by now and had coughed up blood. Even if the old guy did get out soon, Reg thought to himself, he might not live long.
Kelly stood cautiously by the bars, looking out at the screaming prisoners in the cells in front. That is, her eyes were aimed in that direction. She had scarcely talked since they had been locked up. Bianca wondered if the other girl was even there at all.
Kelly’s bunches, once high and neatly brushed, were shaggy and unkempt, along with the rest of her. She was much thinner and her jaw ached from not brushing her teeth. Bianca’s cheeks were sunken and the happiness had left her eyes long ago.
Then a wizard wearing black robes passed their cell as a Dementor floated next to him. The wizard, holding up a wand with a light at the end, (Kelly remembered that Reg told her this was to keep Dementors at bay) peered inside their cell.
Kelly shrank back as the wizard eyed the five of them as if they were fruit in a bowl – ready to throw out any that seemed rotten.
“The little girl,” he told someone out of sight, “she looks ready to snap any second. It’s not worth keeping her.”
The door of the cell opened and the wizard came in, his fingers grabbing Kelly’s wrist tightly. Kelly started screaming loudly, digging her heels into the floor as he held out his wand to try and immobilise her.
Almost immediately, the old man staggered to his feet. “Please,” he begged, “have me instead! She’s only a kid!”
The wizard let go of Kelly’s wrist, letting her drop onto the floor. Luckily the jacket broke her fall. She barely had enough energy to crawl away.
The wizard then held his wand out towards the old man, telling him, “One word, Mudblood, and I’ll use the Killing Curse on the lot of you.”
The old man hung his head as he was shoved out of the cell and into the corridor beyond. As Bianca lifted Kelly up and onto the bed, Reg watched through the bars as about half a dozen other witches and wizards, all pleading, were shoved away, some with Dementors almost literally on their backs.
“What’s going on?” Bianca asked, though something inside told her that she didn’t want to know.
Reg shook his head sadly and shared a glance with the young man cross-legged on the floor.
“Why won’t anyone tell me?” Bianca almost demanded. Despite being locked up, her spirit was not quite broken. But Reg didn’t look her in the eye.
“Tell me!” Bianca shouted. Without meaning to, she almost dug her nails into Kelly’s arm. If the smaller girl noticed, she didn't react.
Reg knelt down on the ground to look into Bianca’s dark eyes. “They may have been taken for the Dementor’s Kiss. It’s when – when your soul is sucked out of your body.”
The cell was silent for a brief moment, aside from Kelly’s muffled sobbing.
Then Bianca dared to ask Reg, “What – happens to your soul?”
“I’m not really sure. Some say it is consumed by the Dementor, the way you would consume food. Break it down. Some say it is trapped inside the Dementor forever. They theorise it might be – a different kind of dimension inside, where the soul stays – tormented. Ghosts exist, Bianca. There’s enough proof in the wizarding world that an afterlife exists. That’s what makes the Dementor’s Kiss utterly horrifying and unforgivable. It only happens to criminals who have committed the worst crimes. Until the Ministry of Magic rounded up all the Muggle-borns and anyone else they disliked and locked them up here. Now any of us could have it.”
Bianca didn’t say anything else. She just held Kelly close as the skinny girl wept into her jumper.
But all Bianca wanted was for someone to hold her themselves.
Another month went by.
To Bianca and Kelly, it seemed as if the cell had suddenly become colder. The days passed in a miserable haze, none of them distinguishable from another. Bianca was more aware than Kelly, since Kelly had started murmuring to herself, hugging the threadbare blanket during the day and her pupils darting around.
Kelly must have had a slightly upsetting childhood or event, Reg had told Bianca one day, otherwise she would be a little stronger. The Dementors floating outside, Bianca learned, weren’t just guards. They literally drew happiness from you.
Bianca had begun to feel the effects almost instantly. She remembered being in fights at school, back in Sparkhill, when the older children would stick her head down the toilet for ‘being different’ simply because she had jumped higher than anyone else and seemed as if she had been flying up the trees. When she had gone to the seaside with the class and a local had snapped at them, that the lot of them were 'benefits scroungers' and refused to give them the fish and chips that the class had ordered. When she had broken her leg in Bordesley Green after a shopkeeper threw a dustbin in her way when she was on her bicycle, his excuse being that he thought she had looked at him funny when he had left the mosque. Bianca had actually had the sunlight in her eyes.
Bianca hadn’t thought much about why all of worst memories were surfacing when she arrived, but now it made sense.
The guards had been squeezing more prisoners into nearby cells, Bianca noticed. Men and women of all different ages, shapes and sizes were being shoved into the cells around them. She had seen very few children going past, though, and most of them had been older, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old.
The winter months were definitely here. There was no heating inside the prison (at least, nothing that Bianca could see) and they had heard from a new prisoner walking by that there was snow on the ground.
“I must be twelve by now,” Bianca had told Reg when she found out, “my birthday’s in November.”
Kelly still sat cross-legged on the floor, wearing the oversized jacket, staring into space and mumbling. Bianca had given up trying to talk to her.
Then a horrid noise, like a snake in pain, echoed through the building. Some of the other prisoners were shouting further down the corridor. When Reg called out what was going on, someone replied, “Somebody tried to break out from the dungeons!”
“Dungeons?” Bianca asked.
The younger wizard sitting on the bed nodded. “We’re in the low-security cells,” he replied, “because we’re ‘ordinary Mudbloods’, who came for questioning. Ones who were caught on the run, or ones believed to have information that may lead to Potter’s capture, or non-humans, are imprisoned in higher security cells. Usually there’s only one or two people a cell down there. Any more serious prisoners are kept in the isolated cells, always in darkness and only have one meal a day. Barely anyone has ever left those cells alive or able to speak and when they do, it’s described as the closest thing to hell on Earth you can imagine. I don’t know what tortures go on down there. But the ones in your mind are worse.”
“How do you know this?” Bianca asked.
The young man frowned. “My dad spent over twenty-five years bringing prisoners here. Left because he married a Muggle. My mam. And I married a Muggle-born. We tried to escape, get to France. But they caught us. I don’t know where my wife is.”
He held his head in his hands, the closest that Bianca had come to seeing a man cry.
Then the news came about from further down the corridor on the left. Because of the attempted escape, ten random Muggle-born prisoners were going to be given the
Dementor’s Kiss.
The prisoners were chosen quickly, to avoid too much fighting. Three old witches were Stunned, then three men. A small man had been dragged up from a cell downstairs, followed by another woman, who was spitting and swearing.
The door to their cell was opened and Bianca was wrenched out, before any of them could try to help her. She wouldn’t stop screaming as she was dragged away. Just in case, the younger man had managed to shield Kelly from view. But all Reg could do was call after Bianca.
“She’s a child!” he yelled. “She didn’t even know she was a witch until September!”
It was drowned out by other prisoners’ yells and cries.
Bianca held her hands near her face as she saw daylight when they were dragged outside. Soon the ten Muggle-borns (as another was grabbed closer to the outside grounds) were all thrown onto the stony ground. The ones who weren’t Stunned began pleading.
Bianca was simply confused, wondering if she could somehow escape. But they seemed to be on an island, with no way to know which direction the shore was in, or how far away it was.
Then it started. Dementors came closer to the group, who were trying their best to run back inside, even while chained. Bianca ended up being squashed beneath a very heavy witch and pinned to the ground by another chain.
The last thing she saw were the rainclouds above her. She wondered if it actually was going to rain or if it was just magic.
What seemed like an eternity passed for the three prisoners. Reg kept wondering if any of them would be taken for the Dementor’s Kiss. Despite the fact that he and the other wizard had tried fleeing with their Muggle-born wives – or, at least, Mary had fled with the children because of what someone using Polyjuice Potion had told her – they were still considered wizards because they’d been born into this world. Kelly, on the other hand, was now thin and weedy, her hair askew and matted and when she did speak she usually blurted out nonsense. Her blood heritage made it even more likely that she would be given a Kiss.
But then, one cold day at the beginning of February, the light from a Patronus reached their cell. A witch from the Ministry stood outside, looking irritated.
Reg sat up on the bed and got off, walking over to the door.
The witch gabbled quickly, using the same tone of voice you would use if you were talking about a subject you didn’t like during a meeting, but had to address those listening anyway.
“The Mudblood child has reached the end of her six-month sentence. Kelly Ann Millward is to be released to her home in Holt, Norfolk. Come on, Mudblood,” she sneered, “you’re released.”
Kelly only looked up from the floor once her name was spoken. Reg quickly leant down and told her, trying his best to be comforting, “Kelly, I think you’re going home, now.”
“I’m going home?” It was the first comprehensible sentence she’d uttered in days.
She didn’t smile. Reg wondered if Kelly had forgotten how.
Kelly walked outside to where the witch stood, before she was pushed down the corridor, in the opposite direction to where Bianca had been dragged three months before.
When the Ministry witch was in a suitable place to Apparate, she held a firm hand on Kelly’s collarbone, causing the girl to tremble.
The next thing Kelly knew was that she was standing outside her door, in Holt. The witch walked across the gravel and barked at her, “Come on, then!”
Kelly obeyed, but only because she seemed to register that she was home. As she looked up at the woman, the Ministry employee gabbled again.
“Your parents’ memories of you stealing magic have been modified. They believe that you have just been expelled from a prestigious boarding school –“
“Have I?” Kelly queried.
The witch frowned. “Don’t interrupt your elders! Now, to be frank, you were never going to Hogwarts in the first place. You’re a Muggle. You stole magic.”
Even in Kelly’s delirious state this made no sense.
The woman looked about the door, muttering, “How does this work?”
Kelly pointed at the doorbell. The woman tried not to appear somewhat pleased, before gingerly poking it with her wand.
Kelly’s mother answered the door. She didn’t seem to notice the dishevelled condition her daughter was in, nor did she seem to take in that the woman beside her was wearing a cloak and robes. Perhaps it was magic, Kelly thought.
“Kelly Ann Millward,” her mother reached forward and grabbed her daughter’s frail wrist, “you are in trouble. Get in, now!”
After pulling Kelly inside, her mother tried to smile at the witch, who did not return it.
“I’m so sorry about Kelly,” her mother tried to apologize, “she’s normally such a good girl. I would never have expected her to try to break into a car.”
“It’s quite all right,” the witch edged away from the doorstep, desperate to go back to the Ministry, “sometimes the wrong students end up with us.”
That night, although Kelly slept in a warm bed and had been well fed, she still felt miserable inside.
Far away from Azkaban, the Dementors could not touch her. But she still could barely comprehend that everything had happened. It still felt like a horrible dream. Bad memories and fantasies filled her head and she gripped her pillow in sorrow.
Little did Kelly know that she was lucky not to have died.
Three weeks after she left Azkaban, Reg was interrogated. He had been told his wife had been seen returning to Britain, to a small Muggle village in Wales.
Reg was baffled. They had no contacts in Wales, magic or Muggle. But he was given the Cruciartus Curse for over an hour nevertheless. By the time he was returned to his cell, all he could think of that wouldn’t make him miserable was the thought that his wife had also been seen on a boat not long after, heading towards Denmark.
Maybe, he told himself, Mary was then going to get a boat to Norway. He knew she had cousins up there, cousins he had never met. Maybe that’s where she and the children had been hiding.
The Death Eaters couldn’t touch them in Norway. For the time being.
Another six weeks went by.
Reg and the young wizard were growing thinner and more desperate. The food rations had been reduced again, more random prisoners taken off to be Kissed. Almost all of them had been Muggle-born.
The Dementors had lingered outside the cell. If Dementors could glower, then Reg was certain that they were underneath their hoods.
Now Reg’s head was filled with terrible visions. Of Mary and the kids being found by Death Eaters. Of Mary being tortured, just as he had been, of her being assaulted, her torn clothing lying on the ground. Of the children being forced to watch, before it was their turn.
Of their dead bodies lying in the woods.
He knew it wasn’t real. He knew that they would be okay if they stayed abroad.
But Reg couldn’t help thinking these hallucinations anyway.
So he barely noticed when he had been taken for another torture session. This time, however, about a dozen other prisoners had been taken as well. Reg didn’t understand why they were shoved up against a wall, though.
He let the Cruciartus Curse take over him. Too limp and dazed to give coherent answers, they were quick.
Reg didn’t even fully notice the last words he would ever hear.
“Avada Kedavra!”
When the young wizard noticed Reg Cattermole did not return to the cell, his first thought was that he must have died during the torture. His second thought was that he would now have the bed to himself. And his third was guilt for wanting that.
It was nearly a month later when the prisoners were released. They were lined up in the grounds while photographers from The Daily Prophet took pictures of the spindly, starved wretches.
The young wizard wanted to say that they were being hypocrites for letting You-Know-Who take over them, but he didn’t have enough energy to moan.
He remembered staying in a hospital ward for a while after that. He heard rumours that Harry Potter had killed You-Know-Who during a siege at Hogwarts, that the Dark Lord had definitely died. It was some relief, the young wizard seemed to think.
But his mind flicked back to his wife and his ageing father. He was told that summer that his father had fled to France, that his wife had been reduced to begging in Diagon Alley. Both of them had been told he was dead.
What about Reg, he had asked, and the girls?
Since he was not a relative, he wasn’t given any information. But Mary Cattermole had heard and came to tell him in hospital. If he could tell her about Reg.
So the young wizard had sat up in bed, something he never thought he would do again, saying that Reg had been taken off for a torture session sometime in early April, but never came back.
Mary had nodded and told him that she had learnt Reg was given the Killing Curse once the Death Eaters could get no more information from him.
The young wizard then asked to see the list of those who had been given the Dementor’s Kiss. It had been made public, although a trial – a much more reasonable one – was being held for the Inquisitors.
The queue to see the list in St. Mungo’s was so great that the nurses only gave out information if a friend or relative was on the ward. The list was kept locked away in an office.
But when the young wizard was well enough to walk, sometime in July, he and a few others broke into the office to have a look.
To his relief, he didn’t see Kelly’s name on the list. She really must have gone home.
But then he saw Bianca’s name with the words ‘Dementor’s Kiss’ next to it.
The young wizard had not cried since he was ten, but he did now.