Lucid
They started as low groans, at first.
Soft sounds, that could easily be mistaken for the moans of wooden beams. Like an old home settling, adjusting to being lived in again. An experience Harrie was more than familiar with after having moved from home to home, after the tragic death of her parents, and soon thereafter, her godfather.
And yet—
While tucked away in her bed, knees pushed against her chest with her head on her pillow, she wondered if that was all it was. If, in the late hours in the evening when she could not get to sleep, there was something more to it.
She’d banished the thought as soon as it came, every time. But Harrie always wondered, eyelids heavy with exhaustion after spending hours moving boxes and trying to make the depilated house livable again, if she was truly alone.
The groans never stopped, but Harrie quickly learned, the sounds had never been the house at all.
Whimpers.
That was what she was hearing.
She knew it now. More certain than ever that, weeks and weeks since moving in, forced awake by the low moaning sounds, that they were sobs.
She’d tried looking for the source. Many a sleepless night roaming the empty hallways, walking past empty boxes and creaking floorboards, in search of that voice, to find no one.
The only person in this house was Harrie.
But still, she searched, with a heavy heart and frantic breaths, to find the source of all this madness.
Until, finally, Harrie stopped.
She gave up on the sound, on getting to the bottom of this mystery. It didn’t matter, really, in the end. None of this all did. The voice was just voice, if it was even there at all.
And—
While caught between the twilight of awareness and sleep, she’d forget that there was a voice at all, lulling her and carrying her adrift in much the same way Sirius had done when he’d been alive.
My beautiful, precious girl...
Sometimes, if she tried hard enough, she could almost pretend it was Sirius still mourning the loss of her parents. That the sobbing voice, murmuring and crying into the late hours, was Remus wounded by the loss of his best friend.
All was well for a time, Harrie’s sleepless nights nebulous and fleeting.
Until, those too, weren’t.
With the paint still wet, the pungent smell of bleach thick in her nostrils hours after she’d finished sorting things in her home, cut her thumb on the thin blade of a box cutter, and stuck two of her fingers together with hot glue, the moans graduated into screams. Into a mountainous, all-encompassing screech that was loud enough to wake the dead, to rouse her from her bed with eyes still crusted with sleep.
Help me.
The words were like shards of glass in her brain. Cutting and chilling, desperate and crude like the drawings of a toddler.
Harrie hadn’t known what to make of it.
Forcing herself out of bed to find the source, to skulk about in the shadows with a bat in hand in case the cause of those horrible screams was hiding in her house.
But she’d found nothing in her midnight stroll, saw no shades in the hallway after she’d switched the light on and peered down the corridor.
There was no one there, but Harrie, at that moment, had the feeling that this wouldn’t be the last time.
The screams didn’t stop.
“Harrie.”
The wail was enough to raise the hairs on her arms, to force her to her feet, sweat beading on her brow. It was a feminine cry. Familiar and yet not. The syllables inscrutable shapes that danced in Harrie’s head, her own tongue tracing its enunciation.
She mouthed them in her head to be sure that it was real.
Harrie.
She began to walk, driven now by some compulsion burning in her gut. The floorboards creaked with her weight, moaning with each step she took. Still, Harrie did not stop, leaving both her bat and her common sense, chasing after the harsh cries in the night.
She hadn’t bothered to check the time. She hardly did these days, her mind in a fog as she tried to make sense of her new life here, to get used to living away from the prying eyes of all the friends and family she’d left behind.
Oh, Sirius.
But it was for the best. It was what Sirius would have wanted.
She left in much the way she had from her bed, stumbling and her mind in a daze.
It was days after she’d buried Sirius, eyes dry and her mouth quivering like two tectonic plates grinding away beneath the earth’s surface. She’d just packed her bags and left everything behind her, slipping between the gaps in Ron and Hermione’s hands.
Alone.
Harrie hadn’t regretted it. Still didn’t. Nothing could ever force her to stay in London after losing everything—
But now, in the stillness of the air around her, she was starting to wonder if it had been a sound decision. If, rather than running away from the monsters lurking in the back of her mind called depression and grief, she should have taken Ron’s, or even Hermione’s, offer to live together.
She banished the thought as soon as it came. There was no point in dwelling on it now, she couldn’t take this back.
Harrie turned through a corridor, the shadowed hallways muted and empty. There were no pictures on the walls, no potted plants or shelves pressed up against its surface. But this was expected. She’d yet to finish unpacking. There wouldn’t be any furniture, any sign that someone lived in this decrepit little house because she wasn’t truly living there.
Not really.
She was here, grounded in the physical world, but she wasn’t at the same time. She’d died the same day her parents had, the moment her godfather had been buried into the ground. Alone.
Harrie’s heart swelled in her chest at being faced with the evidence of just how isolated she was. All she had was herself—
And the cries drawing her nearer and nearer to the attic.
Shoving the thought aside, swallowing back the fresh spill of grief deep into her lungs, she continued to move, eyes following the shadows and the lights oozing through her windows.
She knew this path well, having walked it countless times before when she’d been moving things about and tossing things out of the attic earlier in the month.
A left. A right. Turn the corner here—
And then the attic door would be right above the end of the hallway. A single door in a sea of walls painted a faded blue, the only passable color the local hardware store had had to offer.
Harrie stopped at the sight of it, her knees locking and her breaths coming quicker than they had when she’d been startled awake by the screams. The hairs on her arms stood on end, a coil of fear twirling in her stomach, cresting, now that she was at the source of such a terrible sound.
“Help me.”
Harrie winced, her hands clamping over her ears to stop them from ringing. It made her eardrums ache, her molars sit wrong in her mouth like they were someone else’s teeth in her jaw. It was desperate, that voice. Begging and pleading for someone to help them.
To help her, whoever this her was, because it was unmistakable that this was the cry of a woman, desperate and in pain.
Harrie didn’t know what she could bloody do to silence the voice, but she’d do what she needed to, to make this all bloody stop. If that meant helping this woman, if this was even real, then Harrie would.
There’s no going back now.
Sucking in a nervous breath, quelling the whispers of unease and suspicion writhing in her stomach, Harrie walked until she was standing both next to and beneath the attic doorway.
“Harrie.”
Her fingers reached for the strap that would allow her entrance, that with a single tug, would pry it right open. She’d done it many times already, could mimic the precise hand gesture necessary to let her through.
And yet, her fingers still hesitated. Like this was her first time opening that door.
She curled her hand around the string with trepidation, her heart beating wildly in her chest. Afraid.
The screams had come to an abrupt halt at the gesture, and Harrie nearly lost her nerve, another spike of dread spreading through her senses.
She paused, listening for anything in the darkness, for the shadows in the hallway to unveil and reveal monstrous entities that were roaming its walls.
Nothing happened, and before Harrie backed out of this, pulled.
The attic opened with a low creak, a wooden ladder sliding away until it clicked on the floor.
Darkness, deep and oppressive, met her gaze.
It was bottomless, like someone had snuffed out every light source in the room. It was unsurprising, and yet, Harrie in the tiniest corner of her mind, had hoped that she would be able to see into the room without needing to climb inside, be able to peek into the shadows and find the faceless woman screaming her lungs out.
Swallowing, Harrie forced herself to look away from the attic entrance and focus on the stairs, hands curling around the sides.
“Help me.”
Harrie stumbled, hands nearly losing their grip on the ladder. A curse lodged in her throat, but she swallowed it back down before it could erupt from her vocal cords. The voice had come closer this time, clearer.
If Harrie had any doubts before that this was a woman, she was certain of it now.
She didn’t move for some time, hardly breathing at all. She didn’t want to make a sound, didn’t want to make more noise than she already had.
Minutes passed, and when nothing shot out from the shadows, Harrie relaxed, if only slightly.
Harrie gripped the sides of the ladder until her fingers ached and began her ascent, her mind fluctuating between concern and distress in equal measure. She was unnerved by what she might find, even when the air was silent, empty of those screams.
She wasn’t a believer of the supernatural and definitely didn’t believe in monsters. Not the ones that movies often portrayed, anyway. Not the creatures with horrifying teeth and too wide eyes, no.
The only monsters she knew of were in her head. The ones in her dreams and the ones that resembled Sirius’s empty eyes when she’d found him dead in his living room.
Those were the monsters she knew, and for all the adrenaline rushing through her veins, it was plausible that this was a dream and nothing more. Just a vivid nightmare. A psychological manifestation of every trauma she’d experienced as a young girl growing into an adult.
A dream...
Harrie had always been a vivid dreamer, even as a kid. Always wild and piecing together fantastical universes behind her clenched eyelids, even when she wanted nothing more than to wade in darkness.
God, let this be a dream.
She paused just inches from the opening and stared into the nebulous unknown. There was nothing there, but still, she sucked in shallow breaths. A bead of sweat gathering in the nape of her neck that slid from the exposed skin down into her shirt and over her spine.
She didn’t know how long she stared at it. Hours? Minutes? Harrie couldn’t be certain, but at that moment, it didn’t matter.
She had come all this way, had risen from her bed in only a t-shirt and shorts. If there was something there, she would find out right then.
Harrie’s insides clenched at the same time she gripped the edges of the attic doorway, her arms shaking with her efforts to heave herself inside. Her head bowed forward, chin nearly touching her chest with the effort to push, push, and push.
Ice touched her hands in an instant, curling over the backs of her hands like a physical weight.
Harrie froze, mid-lift, eyes wide with dread.
The ice began to move, slide and trail down her hands until they coiled over her wrists, squeezing them hard enough to make her wince.
“Harrie …”
A thrill spiked up her spine, her head lifting almost against her will, as if there were some sort of compulsion urging her to look, to see—
Harrie stopped breathing altogether. A scream died in her throat, her heart fluttering in her chest like the frantic beats of a frightened bird’s wings.
A face stared back at her in the shadows.
Beautiful.
A woman in white.
She was the loveliest creature Harrie had ever seen. Eyes with long, spidery lashes Harrie could count without hesitation, with how close they were. Lashes dark and rich like the strands of hair framing the woman’s head, falling and pooling through the gap in the attic like long and black rivers.
Harrie couldn’t move, possessed.
The woman smiled at her, red eyes flashing dangerously, sharp and white teeth emerging from her lips, like the roots of an ancient tree.
“My beautiful, precious girl…”
Her nails dug into Harrie's wrists, cutting into the skin until something wet came away. Warm and viscous, the moisture rolled down Harrie’s shaking arms like tiny streams.
Still, Harrie didn’t move, couldn’t.
“Won’t you save me?” The woman asked, voice soft and airy, mesmeric. Harrie’s attention dropped to woman’s lips, red and parted, teeth poking from the skin with each syllable the woman said. “Won't you help me?”
Harrie’s mouth parted, but nothing came out. It was as if the words she’d wanted to say had become caught in her throat. Trapped.
“Help me, Harrie Potter—”
Bloody tears welled up in the corners of the woman’s eyes, running like bloody rivers down her pale cheeks. One dripped on Harrie’s cheek, but neither one of them made a move to wipe it away.
“—And I promise, you shall never be lonely again.”