The Witch\'s Hair Shirt

The night wore on, the talisker finally doing his bidding, warming his guts and bringing the sharp drumming in his mind to a slow beating he could bear. The room was buried in shadows and the flames from the fire danced in time to his breathing.

After what seemed like hours spent slumped in the chair, rolling the empty tumbler between his palms, Snape arrived at the place inside his thoughts where he knew that the next step would take him into the memories from that long-ago week. That place was no stranger to him, he recognized its landscape clearly from his other visits, but for the first time he found himself wishing he could return to the memories of Gerda Solveig’s murder with fresh eyes, from an outsider’s point of view. He wanted the pensieve of the Gods to be set before him, a mystic third party observant, which would clearly reveal the terrible course of events tled led to his turning from the Dark Lord and seeking out what had become his reformation.

He had spent years of his life reconstituting the now dry memories from those days. His body had become the waterbath for the brew which he insisted on mixing from the vast stores of his recollections. Each memory, each smell, each touch had become an ingredient as he willed the brew to coalesce into something tangible he could hold in his mind. He wanted to boil away all the material and be left with something hard, something worthwhile, the elusive philosopher’s stone that would transform him at its touch. But, he was missing something, something in the stirring of the cauldron…and the brew would not turn.

Even now, to return to it, with the knowledge that he would be in the presence of a Norn sister within less than twenty-four hours, he could only collect the same memories, brew the same impotent tincture, always lead, always lead.

And yet…

He closed his eyes and stepped back into the house where the witch was held captive, her death less than day long hours from her, her body still fresh, before the torture shattered it, her mind still intact, before the agonizing pain would melt it.

There had been a rumbling in the magical world the moment the Dark Lord succeeded in capturing the Norn. It had felt like tremors in the Earth, a fault in the physical world opening and shifting. He had felt it and whenwas was summoned to the place where she was being held, he found himself staggering from the realization that it had been her abduction which had moved the ground under all their feet.

Voldemort knew that he couldn’t hold the force of her in the magical world, so Snape had found himself in a Muggle place, a non-descript house in a neighborhood of other such houses. Each one alike, each filled with lives that were nothing like his life or the lives lived in his world. At one point, he had inquired about it and been told that they were in a place called Los Angeles. He could feel the despair of all the souls trapped in that place and he wondered at the depravity of humans who would choose to live out their lives in such a manner. Later he would wonder if it was an unseen power of that place - the pain of souls tortured by their own hand – that had turned Voldemort’s plans inside out. The City of Angels, indeed.

The family whose house they were occupying lay in the front room, swimming in congealed pools of their own blood, shredded by Death Eater foot soldiers. The Death Eaters were a concentric entity, building from an outside circle to the center where Voldemort stood. The first circle was a vicious collection of wizards and witches who were little more than murdering puppets, finding their purpose in the more mundane exploits of killing. As each circle tightened closer to the center a depravity of skills grew exponentially around the bull’s-eye of throned horror. Snape knew he stood very near that throne. He was one of the younger Death Eaters, at twenty-one years of age, and the only alchemist among them.

As he strode through the house his nerves stretched painfully under his skin; he would be forced to wait until he was called upon to play his part. This killing field was fresh, far more so than he was accustomed. He was usually summoned by the Dark Lord much later in an encounter, his skills honed for precise extraction, harvesting for the darker brewing, not the brutal felling that occurred in the beginning of an encounter. The eninening smells of fear and blood and slow death were undeniable in this place, he was unused to it and found that he couldn’t stand it. He sought a neutral place.

Over the course of that first day, the small house began to fill with the more powerful players and he realized that this was intended to be one of Voldemort’s triumphs. The capture of this witch was a coup and it had all the markings of dark destiny upon it. Voldemort would not appear until the bitter end, with his hacleaclean, grasping what he insisted be taken.

Snape had found a corner for himself and silently occupied it, ignoring the comings and goings of the crowd. An introvert to the core, he preferred to wrap himself in isolation. He had contained his thoughts by mulling over an idea borne from a dream; he was failing to brew a particular potion because of the way the ingredients were being harvested. Voldemort had encouraged him to explore the darkest aspects of potions-making and he had indeed created brews he would never have been able to discover without the Dark Lord’s permission, this latest struggle, however seemed to be hinged upon the concept that the ingredients could not be murdered for and instead needed to be given.

The hours of contemplation had cocooned around him but when he heard the woman begin to scream, something drove him towards the back room where she was being kept.

He came up to the door, stopping at its threshold. The curdling smell of urine washed over him and he restrained the urge to cover his nose and mouth. Two figures moved aside so that he could see the inner workings of the room. She was there, being held upright by some spell of restraint, her arms pinioned over her head and her hands reaching for the heavens in supplication. The process had begun. The crude physical beating would be first, then the lengthy sexual attack before the curses and finally….he suppressed a shuddered.

She was clothed in the robes of her Coven and still veiled. Snape knew that he wasn’t the only one present who had never been this close to a veiled witch. It felt surreal, these women were the highest order of witches in the magical world and before this moment he had never come close to contemplating one being trussed up for slaughter. His stomach gripped. A figure moved towards her and began to rip at her clothing; each move in protest bringing a brutal blow to her faceen sen she hung naked, her head lolling on her shoulders, the telltale floor length braid of her Coven swinging freely down her back. Blood dripped steadily from her nose and mouth and one ear.

And she was heavily pregnant.

Snape felt his stomach turn over again, he had known that this was what the Dark Lord had wanted, but to be within the presence of it was not what he had expected for himself. From some deep curve in his intestines, his guts convulsed crd cramped and a dry pain surged up into his lungs and around his heart. He had never felt anything like it and as it squeezed his organs, he gasped. His brain recognized this mutiny. He was feeling shame. A heart-twisting shame brought on by his involvement with the torture of this human being and her unborn child.

Suddenly, her head lifted and she looked directly at him. His eyes widened and something passed between them and he was knocked backwards by an invisible blow. His body hit the wall of the hallway and he fell forward onto all fours. He heard her scream out as a Death Eater stepped forward and delivered a terrible blow to her torso. He felt as though he had been the one to receive the pain. He threw up and his vomit covered his hands. Again she was hit and again he retched. Someone reached down for him and he violently repelled them with his voice and wandless magic. “Irae!”

He had to get out of that space, away from her and the screams which seemed to be tearing out of his own lungs. He pulled himself up the wall and shouldered his way through the small group of observers. He stumbled to a door that led outside and quickly altered the wards so that he could step out into a magic place, he fell heavily against the door and twisted the knob and then found himself on the edge of a cliff, the ocean raging below him and the freezing cold of the place shocking his skin. Again, he found himself on all fours and he dropped his head and looked behind him, the door now gone. He fell to his chest on the rocky tundra and welcomed the loss of consciousness.