One Honest Heart

7. Connection

It might have been all the
repeated mentions of Potter’s magnificent Patronus that first sparked the idea
in my overworked mind. Anyone with half a brain could see that there was a
connection between the Patroni and the Dementors – but no one had wondered
(as far as I could tell) what that connection really was. After all, Muggles
don’t stop their morning procedures to contemplate how the toilet or the faucet
work, nor do Witches and Wizards in general worry about how spells and charms
operate – it is simply enough that they do.

Hence, my editor looked two steps away from pulling
me off the story when I came in muttering about trying to find out how
Patronuses work. He wondered – weighing his words between earnestness and
sarcasm – if I had missed the Hogwarts class when Expecto Patronum was
discussed. ‘Patroni are the embodiment of their casters’ positive thoughts,’
he told me, quite possibly reciting old Flitwick’s lecture verbatim. If I
didn’t believe him, I could check the library - ‘it’s called research.’

Though too tired to argue coherently, I asked him
why those happy thoughts would attack the Dementors and why the latter would
flee before the former. Before he fled from my unfocused, staring eyes and
convoluted reasoning, my editor told me that if I wanted to know why Dementors
feared embodied Happy Thoughts, I should go interview a Dementor or drop the
story.

I did neither, of course. But I did go to the
library, and I did interview, once again, the closest thing I could find to a
companionable Dementor, though the First One would undoubtedly resent the
comparison. My agitated mind simply refused to accept what was, I thought, a
wishy-washy explanation of a spell that might provide an invaluable clue to
solving the mystery of the Dementors.

At first, I thought I would
get nothing but tedious repetition from the First One. The Dementors fear life,
he said. They fear being infected by it. It was only after the interview, alone
in the Pergamentus Library that the First One’s prattling came to make sense.

Ancient scrolls talk of the Empty Ones. Dementor
was a term coined in 1616 by Akil Attenville, a witchdoctor criticising the use
of the beings as guardians of the newly established Azkaban prison. He argued
that a person’s sanity and soul should never be stolen in such a demeaning way,
no matter the crime committed. Attenville meant that these Dementors reflected
the demented attitude of a society gone mad. The Empty Ones dehumanised their
creators and where we once had used mentors to guide people onto a better path,
we now provided de-mentors to destroy a damage already done.

His arguments never quite gripped the conscience of
the Prophet’s readers back when his heated articles were published, largely due
to his highbrow rhetoric. I spent hours deciphering and summarising them for my
first substantial piece in weeks. When my editor saw it, he nearly choked on
the thick scent of controversy. But he published. And the debate was re-awoken,
reaching heights that its long-dead originator could have only dreamed of.