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It was a Wednesday night when the storm hit, waking Narcissa right to the sound of roaring thunder – and something more resembling grass breaking, or tiles coming loose from the roof. Having been roused from a deep sleep, her body seemed to register the anomaly before her mind fully did – her breath stalling mid-inhale; her sensitive skin turning alert in the dark.
Her fingers reached and skimmed a water glass, then a book, then – the familiar length of her wand. The Lumos hit her sleep-powdered eyes too brightly, but she stood, and, tiredly, proceeded to investigate.
The noise was coming from the East Wing. She hadn’t been in this part of the Manor in months – had no reason to go there, with no furniture left, just empty rooms that needed more repairing than she was currently willing to pay for. She lifted her wand, sweeping it over her surroundings, but both the hallway and its walls were dry.
But when she opened the door to the second-floor sitting room and stepped inside, water soaked her bare feet – freezing cold.
Yelping, Narcissa flew backwards into the hallway, cursing under her breath – but her feet were… dry. And then, curiously, she noticed that the water stopped in the doorway. Just… stopped, as though it was hitting an invisible shield of tension that kept it in place – and made no sense. Frowning, Narcissa stepped all the way to the threshold, then raised her wand higher.
The room was entirely flooded – deep black water reaching several inches up the walls, perfectly, deathly still, despite the storm rattling the window panes. The water’s surface reflected nothing – neither her wandlight, nor the doorframe. Nor her.
“What…” she mumbled, gazing up at the ceiling above – but it was intact. She couldn’t spot a single hole or leak, and she knew for a fact that there were no pipes or plumbing running through the walls around this room. She’d heard glass breaking, and the windows were shaking – but they were fully intact.
The water had no source.
Her first thought was, naturally, sabotage; someone breaking in, casting some elaborate curse meant to destroy the foundation of the house just for sheer contempt or the amusement of it. But the wards would have alerted her – and whoever had designed this would have needed to know the Manor’s layout, its history, which rooms to target. No one except Draco and she had access to that information, anymore.
Narcissa cast a diagnostic charm, and the water’s registration came back as freshwater, not rainwater, with a temperature of four degrees – much colder than the air in the room. Carefully, she knelt down at the threshold and extended her hand towards the surface. Her fingers broke through – and the cold was instant, biting enough to make her joints lock and her breath shudder. She pulled back fast – but like her feet had been, her hand, too, was dry. Completely dry.
This was… water didn’t behave this way.
Biting her lip, she tried again, slower, pushing her whole hand into the water, all the way up to her wrist. The cold sept up her arm – a morgue-like, boreal, dead-things-on-ice cold – but when she withdrew, her skin was dry, as was the sleeve of her dressing gown.
Narcissa swallowed, thickly.
The freshwater wasn’t freshwater.
She raised her wand over the surface again, forcing herself to examine it properly, instead of just reacting – or panicking. And this time, she saw something – a face just beneath, blonde hair floating around the head like a stand of rivergrass in a slow current, bloodshot whites visible all around the irises, mouth screaming open at Narcissa – and Narcissa knew this face, her stomach dropping straight down into her pelvis.
It was Charity Burbage, her face frozen in the moment she’d sobbed and begged for Severus’s help. Now she was screeching soundlessly in the black, palms pressing against the liquid’s surface – drowning, drowning for seven years, still drowning now, trapped in the moment of her own death.
The Manor had kept her here.
The wand slipped from Narcissa’s fingers, the light dropping straight down – into the water that wasn’t water. The glow passed through Burbage’s face on the way down, lighting the veins in her eyes again, lighting the mouth still open. Reflexively, Narcissa’s hand jerked forwards to grab the wand – then, just as quick, she pulled her arm back to her chest. What if the… thing that was Burbage, reached for her – drowned her in her own sitting room?
But she needed her wand.
“Come on,” Narcissa told herself – then pushed her hand through the surface – and the skin of Burbage’s face simply parted, her eyes sliding to either side of Narcissa’s hand like paint being rinsed off in a basin. Narcissa whimpered at the grotesqueness of it – then found the handle of her wand and pulled back so fast, she fell backwards, scrambling on the floor with her chest tight and her pulse racing in her throat.
Shaking, she set her wand down and rubbed her palms over her face – then she rose on unsteady legs – and slammed the double doors shut.
She stood there, pressing her palms flat against the wood panelling, counting her breaths – in for four, hold for four, out for four – until the shaking lessened and her heartbeat slowed to a manageable pace.
She understood, though, without needing to be told.
The water was a Manor memory that the room had manifested, held onto, refusing to let fade – and Charity Burbage was still inside it.
Still dying. Still screaming.
Trembling, Narcissa returned to her bedroom and snagged the comforter over her shoulders, then tucked it under her heels and spine like she was sealing herself in, so tightly, she might as well have been lying in a feather-down coffin of her own making. Not that she could sleep; each time she blinked, she saw Burbage’s face, there, in her sitting room floor.
By morning she’d decided, the water and its ghost had to go.
—
On Thursday morning, Narcissa returned to the East Wing with her wand, a notebook, and a list of drainage charms she’d spent three hours compiling from Lucius’s library treasures. When she opened the door to the sitting room, the water was there, still black, but now – slightly raised higher up the walls; a good ten inches off the threshold. Burbage’s face was still visible beneath the surface, but Narcissa didn’t look at her directly; if she did, she’d lose her nerve.
She started with the simplest charm, Exinanio, but apart from a neon-blue light shooting from her wand and hitting the surface, nothing happened. She tried Vacuo next, then Purgo, even a banishment curse that should have sent every single cubic-foot of water into the nearest body of water outside the Manor’s wards. But nothing changed, and by midday, her wrist was aching and she’d exhausted the list. So she sat in the hallway with her back against the wall and stared at the open door, at the black water there. Black snow, she thought, built up against a door in deep winter, holding the form without spilling over.
Fine. Muggle methods, then.
She sent for a contractor from Swindon, counting that he wouldn’t ask too many questions if she paid him enough. He arrived in a large van that he parked right at the fromt doors – and with piggly eyes that stared at the Manor like the whole house was an apparition. But then, he opened the back, and started pulling out the hoses.
“Second floor, you said?” He was looking at the ceiling, frowning. “That’s unusual.”
“Yes,” Narcissa sighed, leading him through the house as he dragged the hoses along. “I need it drained.”
“Alright then, love. Let’s have a look.”
Her mouth curled downwards at the ridiculous term of endearment, but she opened the doors to the East Wing sitting room, praying he wouldn’t notice Burbage’s face in just dulled daylight.
“Bleeding Christ,” he gasped, setting his equipment down. “That’s… – what is that?”
Narcissa gave a faux-effortless shrug. “Water.”
“That’s not water, Mrs. Malfoy,” he objected, pointing to where the liquid stopped at the threshold, held against invisible force. “Water don’t sit like that. And it’s freezing in here, innit.” He pulled a thermometer from his belt, and leaned down to dip it into the surface. When he withdrew it, it was dry. He stared at it. “That’s… that’s not possible.”
“Yes, it’s all extraordinarily fascinating,” Narcissa sighed. “I do, however, have to live here. So, can you drain it or not?”
He couldn’t, but not for lack of trying. Diligently, he fed the pump’s intake hose into the water, and switched the machine on. But even though the motor roared and the hose shuddered, nothing would enter the hose. A few times, he switched the entire contraption off to check something Muggle-y, then tried again – with the same result.
Narcissa paid him anyway, sending him off with enough pounds to buy a new machine.
Next, she tried a spell to open all the six tall window casements that looked out over the grounds – and fresh air poured in, cold autumn wind billowing the curtains, but the water didn’t so much as ripple, much less evaporate. By evening, she was exhausted, standing there in the doorway, staring at Burbage’s face beneath the surface – feeling the strange sensation of failure sinking into her bones. Eventually, she closed the doors – and locked them – and ventured downstairs to pour herself a drink, trying not to think about the woman trapped on the second floor, seven years gone.
Narcissa drank her Blishen’s in three swallows, and went to bed.
—
Draco and Astoria came to visit on Saturday afternoon; Narcissa was in the West Wing sitting room, staring at a page of The Twelve-Inch Wand, though she hadn’t read a single word of the little romance in at least an hour.
“Mother,” her Dragon greeted her, kissing her cheek. “You look… tired.”
“I’m fine, darling.”
“You always say that,” Astoria noted with fondness, then settled onto the sofa with grace, reminding Narcissa painfully of her own mother. “We brought lunch. From that Eastern place in Diagon you like?”
They ate the crisped basil thunder-shrimp, charred lotus roots, and rice in the conservatory. Draco talked about the wedding, only two months away now, the venue secured; Astoria talked about a new treatment protocol for some distant malady that was now showing promise. Narcissa listened, swallowed, and responded at the right moments; and tried not to think about the East Wing. But of course, after lunch, Draco stood and said, “I want to look at the East Wing.”
Narcissa’s eyes shot up. “Why?”
“Astoria and I have been talking. Once we’re married, we’ll need more space. I was thinking –” He glanced at Astoria, who was smiling. “We were talking, a few days ago… Seeing as we… want children. Not right away, but eventually. And the East Wing has that big room on the second floor, the one with all the windows. It would make a perfect nursery, don’t you think?”
Narcissa’s teacup nearly slipped from her fingers. “I see. Well… Unfortunately, the East Wing isn’t suitable.”
“Why not?” Draco frowned. “We’d renovate, obviously. Fix the floors, paint it, proper heating charms. But the size is good, and the light in that room is beautiful.”
“It needs too much work,” Narcissa muttered, then took a sip of her cold tea.
“I can afford it,” Draco said smilingly, excited in a way she hadn’t seen since… she couldn’t even remember. “Come on, let me show Astoria. She hasn’t seen it yet.”
Narcissa stood up, looking everywhere except at her son. “Draco, I don’t think –”
“It’ll just take a minute.”
He was already heading towards the corridor, Astoria following. Narcissa hurried after them, her mind racing. She could tell him, could explain about the water, about Burbage, about the death that wouldn’t drain. But how would she explain why it was there? Why that room still held onto what had happened in the house during the war. She didn’t want to dredge it all up again, not when he was healed and happy – but then they’d already reached the doors to the sitting room in the East Wing – which she had locked, yesterday.
Draco tried the handles, then turned to his mother. “Why is it locked?”
“Structural damage,” she vaguely gestured. “Just… from the storm.”
“Let me see.”
“Draco –”
He pulled out his wand, cast an Alohomora, and the double doors opened into the hallway.
The water was still there. The windows she’d left open were still open, the curtains swaying in the cold air. Immediately, Astoria’s hand flew to her mouth, while Draco just stared, then barely managed, “What the hell is that?”
Narcissa gently shoved him away from the threshold and pushed the doors shut. “I told you. Structural damage.”
“That’s not structural damage, that’s – that’s water. On the second floor. How –”
“I don’t know,” Narcissa sighed defeatedly, clasping her hands behind her back and leaning against the right-side door. “I’ve been trying to fix it.”
Draco stared at her, his face having gone white-pale. “There’s someone in there. I saw – Mother, there was a person in the water.”
“It’s not a person,” Narcissa said with a shake of her head, keeping her voice steady. “It’s a memory.”
“A memory of what?” Draco pressed.
Narcissa weighed telling him the truth – that he knew who it was – but in the end, she decided not to answer. Draco ran a hand through his hair, looking so much younger, suddenly; uncertain like he hadn’t looked since he was seventeen. “Mother… what’s going on?”
“Nothing that concerns you now, darling.”
“But if there’s a living memory of someone drowning –”
“It’s being handled.” Narcissa pushed off the door, then re-locked everything. “The East Wing is henceforth off-limits. You’ll have to build elsewhere.”
“Where?” Draco scoffed. “There’s no other space in this house that –”
“Then we’ll build a separate structure,” Narcissa said, dismissively. “On the grounds. I’ll pay for it.”
Draco opened his mouth, then looked at Astoria, who quickly nodded, then back at his mother. “Alright. Fine. We’ll just… build something new, I guess.”
Narcissa gave a genuine smile. “Good. Good.”
They didn’t stay for dinner, which was probably for the best; Narcissa couldn’t handle any more questions. But Draco hugged her very tightly before they left, holding on a little longer than usual. “If you need help with whatever’s in there –”
“Fret not,” she murmured against his shoulder, while, upstairs, the water waited, and Charity Burbage kept drowning.
—
Later on, Narcissa startled awake to a sense of bone-chilling wetness. Gasping, she sat up, and instinctively bent to touch the floor beside her bed. The tips of her fingers met four-degree water.
“No,” she whispered, and lit her wand – to find water covering the entire floor of her bedroom in a thin film, barely two inches up the walls, but there. It reflected nothing, like the water in the East Wing.
Narcissa’s heart propelled itself against her chest. She threw the covers back and stepped onto the floor. The water was so cold, it stung her through her soles, but she had to cross the floor; to get to the hallway outside – which looked worse. There, water covered the floor in a layer thick enough to be three inches, moving – slowly – down the corridor, towards the stairs. She practically ran to its source, where she found the double-doors still locked – but water was seeping from underneath them in a steady flow.
Stop stop stop, she thought, and cast the strongest barrier charm she could onto the gap under the doors, but the water sept through, without slowing. Next, she tried a solidifying congeal-charm to freeze the flow, – but that, too, the water merely absorbed and ignored. And standing there in her thin slip, with her wand raised and ice-cold water creeping over the bridges of her feet – reality illuminated itself.
The room couldn’t have been haunted by Charity Burbage alone. It had to be haunted by all of them, for this – every single person who’d died at Malfoy Manor during the war. Every single prisoner, kept in the cellar. All the Muggleborns tortured and burnt, all the Order members the Dark Lord had questioned and murdered – the Manor had soaked up their deaths, holding onto them, storing them in its walls and floors and ceilings, for –
We were talking, a few days ago… Seeing as we… want children.
Narcissa covered her mouth with her hand – for now that Draco wanted to bring children here, wanted to fill the rooms with new life,… the deaths were waking up.
They were pushing back – claiming the territory of their own annihilations.
The water was spreading like mould under the wallpaper, because it wanted the whole house – wanted to drown everything in the terrible past that wouldn’t stay buried – and Narcissa lowered her hand, looking, helplessly, around herself.
Knowing she couldn’t stop it. She could – at most – try to contain it, before it filled her whole house and took her with it.
—
The following morning, after barely a wink of sleep in one of the guest rooms of the Manor’s highest floor, Narcissa sent an owl to a warding specialist up in Inverness. A squat man in his sixties with light grey hair and fingers stained black arrived by Apparition three hours later. His name was Glenn Carrow. No relation to the Death Eater pair though, he assured her at the door – different family entirely, Ma’am – so she led him up to the East Wing, both of them wading through ankle-deep, freezing water that was now showing fleeting faces flowing past; faces Narcissa didn’t altogether recognise, but she knew they must have died in the house.
Carrow kindly didn’t remark upon the living dead. He only insisted on seeing the room where everything had originated, even as the water had now spread throughout the second floor, as well as trickled down to the first – and begun to creep upwards, to the third. “How long’s it been like this, Ma’am?”
“Since the storm on the night between Wednesday and Thursday,” Narcissa replied, impressed he wasn’t shivering from head to toe like she was. She’d tried a warming charm, last night, then a water-repelling charm; neither, of course, had worked.
“And it’s not draining,” he stated.
She clicked her tongue, “No.”
He crouched, to touch the surface with one finger, and withdrew it, dry. “This isn’t water. I’d say residual death magic, if anything. Something traumatic must have happened here. Considering –”
“Several things happened here,” Narcissa sighed, refusing to stall on any given one.
Carrow glanced up at her, but his expression remained neutral, despite her admission – and thankfully, he didn’t pry now, either; though, she suspected he knew well enough what the Manor has served as for the Dark Lord.
“I can try to seal the room,” Carrow offered, pronouncing each word with consideration while carefully watching her face. “Return the water inside it, then craft a ward barrier strong enough that nothing inside will get out. But you must understand… it won’t remove the water. It’ll just trap it.”
“That’s what I want.”
“It’s expensive, Ma’am. And permanent. Once the wards are set, breaking them would destabilise the magic inside. Could cause a backlash, even… worst case, kill anyone in the vicinity. Do you understand?”
Narcissa looked down at the black water they were standing in, then glanced into the room; feeling a sting in her heart at permanently thwarting her son’s dream of this space and its beautiful windows serving as his child’s – her grandchild’s – nursery. Still, Narcissa nodded at Carrow.
“You’re sure, Ma’am? Because if you’re planning to fix this up later –”
“I’m not planning to fix it,” she snapped, then held her fingertips to her lips and took a few deep breaths. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, lowering her hand and looking up at him pleadingly. “I won’t be doing anything with this space, neither will anyone else. I just need it contained, please.”
He nodded too, not without empathy in his clear eyes. “Alright. I’ll need ’round two hours. And you’ll need to evacuate the Wing. No one inside the boundary ’part from me when I set the wards, or they’ll be trapped too.”
She thanked him, and left him to work.
—
When Narcissa returned, her heart leapt in her chest with sheer, unfiltered relief – at finding the stairs and the hallway drained. Carrow had drawn runes across the sitting room’s doorframe, down the walls on either side, and along the floor in perfect lines; when Narcissa craned her neck, looking at them from a particular angle, she thought she could spot flashes of glowing red. The black water was now back at the threshold, high enough to reach her chest – but it stayed within the threshold boundary he’d created, smoothly pressed against the invisible barrier, but not leaking over.
“It’s done,” he smiled at her, and she smiled back, holding a hand to her heart; grateful, so so grateful, grateful beyond words. “The ward will hold as long as the Manor stands, Ma’am. Nothing inside that room will get out.”
Without a second thought, she paid him twice his rate – even bowed her head in earnest gratitude – and wished him a safe Apparition back to Inverness, then she returned to the East Wing hallway to stand outside the sitting room. There, she stared at the closed doors, thinking of what they’d sealed inside; Charity Burbage, frantically beating against the surface – still drowning. Endless amounts of Muggles whose names Narcissa had never bothered to learn. Children – no, it was over. She would not revisit them again, would not give the trauma the attention it sought through its insistence to drown her house in blackness just as she’d managed to let in some light.
With finality, she turned away from the East Wing sitting room doors, and went downstairs to write her son. A fresh start. We’ll build something new. New life, separate from the Manor’s history.
Separate from what’s still living within those four walls.
—
That night, Narcissa climbed the stairs to her bedroom in serenity, with her sketches tucked under one arm, smiling at the aftertaste of rosemary chicken. Jolly had outdone herself tonight, and Narcissa felt satisfied in a way she hadn’t in ages. The plans she was carrying were quick-rough plans for the Manor’s renovations, excluding the East Wing; where to break walls down to create larger rooms and passages connecting old and new for when Draco and Astoria would move in permanently. Narcissa had spent a full two hours after dinner sketching different configurations, imagining her grandchild sleeping in a room filled with light; then, imagining the sound of small feet running through these very corridors. The Manor would be lively again – alive again with living life – and Narcissa couldn’t help but hum a little under her breath.
She reached the second-floor landing – and icy wetness flooded over her foot, soaking through her heel, seeping between her toes with a cold so absolute, it made her scream and drop the rolls.
Water – spreading across the landing in a thin but steady sheet.
“No,” she gasped, quickly bending down to pick up the plans. They came away dry and unsmudged, but – no, no, no.
Serenity and rosemary gave way to pure, terror-laced adrenaline, and she sprinted through the hallway that connected her Wing to the East Wing, running faster than she perhaps ever had, each step a harsh splash of black drops – to find water seeping through the cracks all around the sitting room’s doorframe in thin lines of trauma tracking down the panelling – coming through.
The ward must have been holding some of the water back because the doors hadn’t broken under the pressure – but the wood was old, the door was warped, and the cracks were wide enough that liquid could find its way through.
And it had.
The water was testing the boundary – looking for weaknesses.
Narcissa stood there, her pulse pounding in her ears – watching the water trickle like pooling blood from a wound that wouldn’t clot no matter what; watching the Manor digest and defecate its own history, and she – she was powerless to stop the soilage from spreading through the walls she’d spent half her life maintaining.
And while it might take time, at this rate – days, maybe weeks – eventually, even if the doors didn’t crack under the pressure, the dark water would find a way to claim everything. Everything.
Fighting the burn in her eyes, Narcissa held her trembling palm flat against the wood. On the other side, Charity Burbage was still drowning. And all the others were, too, waiting, patient, ready to spread through the Manor the moment the seal would break. Narcissa had only bought herself some time, with her efforts.
She hadn’t stopped anything.
Nor – she understood, clutching the precious plans of the Manor’s future to her chest – would she ever be able to.
She might still have been alive, but her home belonged to the Dead now.
- end -