One Honest Heart

2. Lost and Found

January 5, 2003

It
began as rather an odd story that no one quite believed in – a quirky tale of
dubious origin. The kind of thing they usually assigned to me. (Sometimes I think
they saw me as a quirky oddity, out of place at the Prophet, and they
tried to find stories that fit me. Did they expect me to thank them, I wonder?)

A Dementor had gone missing – or, as the story
stood when they dumped it on me, had allegedly disappeared from Azkaban
prison. This, I quickly found out, was alleged by an inmate. He did use that
exact wording when I interviewed him (breaking into Azkaban, I learnt, was only
marginally easier than breaking out of that hell-hole – and Lucius Malfoy
and Sirius Black were at least spared the paperwork). ‘I allege,’ he said,
‘that one of ‘em ‘as gone jawohl!’

And
there went my story, and half my pay check, being part freelance still. But, as
always, I stuck to it. There was little else to do but sip vile coffee at the
Prophet and fail to speak to everyone.

My
source (while The story might have been gone, I hoped - as always - to find A
story somewhere in the wreckage of the first) was, they told me, the oldest
resident of the Azkaban facility. No one knew what he had been convicted of. No
one knew how long he had been there. Some speculated wildly that he had been
there since before the actual prison complex was built. They called him the
First One and he was both a mascot and a curse.

He
claimed he had grown immune to the Dementors. He certainly appeared
happy (one of my first notes was: ‘personnel v. disturbed by inmate’s blatant
happiness’). If the other prisoners hadn’t been so far gone, they might have
looked to him as an inspiration, proof that there was, at least, a merrier kind
of madness.

I
never did ask him if he knew Black.

‘I can hear them whisper in our mind,’ he said. At
the time, I thought he’d taken to talking about himself in the plural - a
kingly madness. How wrong I was.

He said one of them was fading, going mad. One of
the Dementors, he claimed, was dying. I asked him where it was, why no one else
had noticed, why no one even knew it was missing. He told me the ‘human folk’
no longer kept track of Dementors unless they became a bother, that they could
come and go as they wished so long as they ‘didn’t make no fuss.’ A quick dig
through our archives seemed to me to verify this claim. It was only when the
Dementors were angry, when they ‘made a fuss,’ that the story of their Azkaban
absence hit the headlines. There was not a single small notice, only headlines.

It was when I widened my research that I caught the
scent of a story again, when I realised that what we had all been taught about
Dementors, through school and media, were mostly a bunch of canonized theories.
No one even knew where they had come from. No one seemed to think it worth
mention these days that they were (so the older reports claimed) immortal.

I went back to interview the First One (he never
gave me any other name) several times, despite the depression the visits
brought me. One time, he stopped his prattling to regard me, almost solemnly,
for a long, worrying moment. ‘It’s them,’ he said, and his voice terrified me
because it was not the one I had come to know and loath, but the deeper, wiser,
articulated tone of a man to whom madness is merely an entertaining pastime.
‘It’s them,’ he said. ‘Not even the solid rock can shield you from them now.
This room used to be much too far away for visitors to feel even the slightest
whiff of our hellish world. But they are afraid, my dear. They call out. One of
theirs has never faded before and they fear that something worse will happen
next. The unknown scares them. They are single-minded creatures, animals with
an insatiable thirst but innocent as children. They have never known death, nor
feared it, for they have never been alive. This terror awakens something in
them. Life.’ His eyes as they stared into mine were beyond my simple powers of
description and I wanted to flee but couldn’t move a muscle. To this day, I
feel I wouldn’t have remembered a word he said if he hadn’t inscribed them on
my very mind. (And let me tell you, it hurt like hell.)

The very last thing he told me was this: ‘They are
afraid that they will come alive and devour themselves.’ Then his stare
shifted, he cackled insanely, and shrieked: ‘Well, aren’t I jus’ th’patron o’
th’place, m’dear? Patron, I! Patron, us! Paterfamilias! Paternoster! Paternal
otter! Eek, eek, eek!’

And then I knew I had a story; a difficult,
dangerous one, but definitely a story.

That was when the news broke about the other story,
the one I would eventually be the only one left to cover.

The only one left alive.