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Yesterday morning one of the grandchildren came to me. Or maybe one of the great grandchildren. It has got hard to remember. In any case she was a dark little slip of a thing, all solemn brown eyes and fragile little bones. She was beautiful in her new Christmas robes, but she looked like a hard wind could blow her away.
She had come to me with some story of a tragic romance. The boy was too poor, too foolish, from the wrong family. All the usual rubbish. Her father had picked out a nice steady boy from a good family. Should she give in and accept a ring from him? Or should she dash off with the mad little artist boy and elope?
The little girl looked at me like I was a sage or an oracle. I had reached that strange age where most people ignored me, but a few people came to me expecting wisdom. I wondered what she could possibly see when she looked at me. Did I look like an expert on mad little artist boys? Did I look like an expert on love?
It’s been years since I chased after boys, and we Zabinis have never been lucky at love. Orphans and widows and pregnant girls no one wants to claim, that was more our style. I could tell her it won't last. It never does. I could tell her the boy will leave her. I could tell her that one day she will wake up and feel nothing for him, or worse than nothing.
But she was looking at me, looking for wisdom, looking for hope. What could I do? Maybe I was an expert on love. I told her the story of the ghost and the werewolf.
Looking at her worried little face, I knew just the parts to tell. I worked carefully to tell it right and give her what she needed. I told it like a fairy tale. You could almost hear the "Once upon a time..."
"Many years ago, when I was a girl at Hogwarts, there was a ghost and a portrait who fell in love. The portrait was of a werewolf, a kind and gentle man who had been despised in life by people who could not see beyond the surface of his illness. In those days it was a terrible thing to be a werewolf. There was no cure and little pity."
The girl had probably never met a werewolf, but I could see her fascination. She was all too willing to accept him as a tragic figure out of deepest history, when such things could not be cured.
The werewolf in my memories wasn’t any noble figure out of tragedy, though. He hung in the Gryffindor common room in a big gilded frame, and he was our good luck charm, our nanny, and our friend. His name was Remus Lupin, according to the brass label on his frame, but most Gryffindors knew him as the Tower Wolf. His clothes always had patches and worn spots, but that didn’t make us like him less. Instead it made him approachable. He was warm and shabby like a small child’s favorite old blanket.
His portrait showed a cozy office, with comfortable furniture and a roaring fire. He even kept what he called office hours. We all knew that the Tower Wolf’s office was a fiction of paint and varnish, but we appreciated him too much to ever say so. Many a homesick first-year stood talking to him late at night; and while he couldn’t offer hugs, he would send word to the kitchen elves to send up tea or hot chocolate, and then he’d sit sipping a painted drink in his portrait while the student drank from their own mug.
Of course, once a month he left us to take what he called holidays. He almost never talked about being a werewolf, though we all knew why he was gone. I think he wanted to protect us from too much truth. Maybe he thought the reality of even a painted wolf would frighten us.
His frame would be empty for a day or two, and then he would come back with shadows under his eyes. But even then, when he looked tired enough to drop, he had time for the first-years’ nightmares and the seventh-years’ love worries.
"The ghost was a stern man, who had rejected his chances at living love. You couldn’t call him handsome, but even as a ghost he had a bitter intensity that drew the werewolf to him."
I was a little afraid of the ghost. He was an especially cold ghost and there was often a faint mist boiling off him or trailing in his wake, the way cold air pours off a slab of ice in summer. The ghost was never civil to anyone. He smiled when children tripped on the stairs. He scowled at anyone who dared to make eye contact.
He never talked to us Gryffindors, but that didn't make him less scary. He had a glare that made you think he could see right into you and didn't think much of what he saw.
He mostly haunted the Slytherin parts of the castle, so we Gryffindors didn't see that much of him. But late at night, he would sometimes drift into the common room and hover sort of mistily in front of the werewolf's portrait. If any students were still up and about he would just nod stiffly to the werewolf and drift off through a wall.
"The two longed to be together. It was, of course, impossible. The ghost could not hold the portrait. The portrait could not leave the frame. All they could do was look at each other and yearn. I doubt anybody even realized they were in love."
I never would have paid much attention to the two of them, never would have noticed their feelings for each other; but I was going through my own bad time and that made me see things differently. I’d taken ill at the start of my fifth year, and my wand no longer responded to my hand. Spells I had mastered two years ago no longer worked, or when they did work were weak and unpredictable.
Old white-haired Professor Longbottom tried to make me feel better. He smiled at me and told me that his family had thought he was a squib when he was little, and that my talent would find its way back soon enough. However, as the weeks dragged on, his smile got more hesitant. There were no more reassurances. Instead, he was mostly quiet when I was around, though he always spoke gently.
Still, Herbology was one of my few refuges. While my pathetic attempts at Charms and Transfiguration made me stammer in shame, nothing had taken away my greenhouse skills. I still understood plants. They hadn’t rejected me.
After two months of misery, the headmaster finally pulled me out of Transfiguration, “Until you feel better,” and assigned me to help Professor Longbottom around the greenhouses. Professor Longbottom said he could use an assistant, due to his advanced age; but it was blindingly clear that the school staff were trying to find me a squib job for my long squib future.
It was kindly meant, and I was glad to know I wouldn't starve or be sent to live among muggles. Still, it hurt to see the other girls pull back like I was contagious. It hurt to know people didn’t want to be around me anymore.
Then they pulled me from Charms, and I knew there was no hope. While my roommates were in Charms I spent Wednesdays and Fridays learning Muggle cleaning techniques from the caretaker. I used to come back to the dorms smelling like furniture polish and floor cleaners, and would cry bitterly in my room before the other girls got back from class.
The Tower Wolf seemed to know how badly I felt. Or maybe he truly liked to spend time with me. Either way he made me feel all right. One day when my eyes were red from crying and everyone else was still in classes, he told me to pull up a chair. He made us a big pot of hot chocolate and got out a mug, then a moment later a house elf handed me my own matching mug. I knew it was just an illusion, but that just made me like him more, to know that he cared enough to pretend. Most people didn't bother to pretend around me. They let me know flat out that I didn't belong.
The tower wolf was the only person who seemed genuinely glad to see me, who didn't see me as a problem to be solved.
"Nobody wanted me here, either," he told me over a mug of hot chocolate. “My parents talked privately to the headmaster and he agreed to take me on as long as I was able to hide my condition. If anybody had found out I was a werewolf it would have been the scandal of the decade. Nobody wasted time educating werewolves."
I started thinking of myself as a sort of secret werewolf, because then I felt less alone. I wished I could hide my own condition. My classmates hardly talked to me at all, and people sometimes went silent when I entered a room.
I began to avoid other people as much as possible. I spent more and more late nights in the common room, working on History or Herbology while my roommates socialized upstairs. Sometimes I fell asleep over my homework. Sometimes I didn’t even pretend to have homework to fall asleep over, but just curled up on a big cushion by the fire after the others had gone to bed.
Nobody asked after me, or tried to get me to go upstairs. So after awhile it was just the accepted order of things that I slept by the fire. Over the night the fire would get lower and lower until it was only black coals with red worms of fire inside. Then the only light would be the dancing fire in the Tower Wolf’s portrait. Sometimes I would watch his portrait through my eyelashes and wish that I could climb inside where it was safe.
Late at night the ghost would slip into the common room and talk to the werewolf. The first couple times that he found me there, he misted off to wherever ghosts go. After awhile, though, he seemed to accept me as simply part of the furniture. And just as he ignored the furniture, he ignored me as I slept or pretended to sleep.
There would be the steady click and thump of chess pieces being moved and then the ghost’s, “No, not that square you flea-bitten rug. The queen, you fool.”
“Here, Severus?”
“No, Lupin. Do you pay any attention to these games? If I could just reach in there and move the pieces myself, I’d have had your king two hours ago.”
“Then it’s good for me you can’t. I enjoy your company.” I could hear the Tower Wolf’s smile clear across the room, as I drifted off to the sound of their steady conversation.
The girl made a soft sound that jerked me back to the present. I tried to remember where I was in the story. Oh yes, the two of them yearning and unable to touch.
It was just as I’d told the girl. The ghost couldn't enter the portrait and the werewolf couldn't step into the three-dimensional space outside the picture frames. The ghost could flow over the picture like a cold mist, but inside the portrait the werewolf was untouched. The werewolf could reach out, but no matter how he reached, his hands never left the picture. Sometimes the werewolf would press his hands flat against the invisible wall that separated him from the human world. Sometimes the ghost would run a misty hand over the portrait. Yet there was always the invisible line between them.
“It was sad.”
"The ghost did not know how to let go, and move on beyond being a ghost. He believed himself broken and trapped in a half existence. And as for the werewolf, he knew he would never leave his painted world."
Of course neither of them ever confessed any such feelings to me. One night, though, when my History lesson was particularly dry, I fell asleep sprawled in front of the fire with bits of parchment scattered around me. When I came to my senses, the two were talking, the ghost and the portrait.
"Severus," said the werewolf in those soft tones of his, "It hurts me to see you like this, half here and half nowhere, like a haunted thing."
The ghost barked out something that must have been intended as a laugh, but made me shiver just the same. "Werewolf, I'm a ghost. It's what we do."
"I just wish I could free you, love."
"If you wish me to leave, Gryffindor, I'm sure I can find pleasanter parts of the castle."
"No, I'm too selfish for that, Severus. I just -- sometimes I wonder if I'm what's holding you back from moving on. I can't bear to think that I might be what's holding you hostage when you should be free.”
"Has it occurred to you, you poor excuse for a werewolf, that I may no longer have an unfractured soul? They are called unforgiveables for a reason. I may be here, not because I am holding back, but because it is the only place I have left."
“I’m sorry, Severus. I didn’t mean to push.”
“No, the fault is mine. I spoke too sharply. You are surprisingly... tolerable... for a lycanthrope. I don’t know what drew my ghost back to this place. Though I do appreciate your company, I have no wish for you to blame yourself for my circumstances.”
"Then one day the two discovered hope. They discovered a portrait of the ghost, or rather of the man he had been."
"Could the ghost somehow enter his own portrait? Could the lovers finally touch? Was this the chance they had dreamed of?"
"Experts looked at the picture. None of them had ever heard of a ghost with a portrait. All they could say was that the ghost must somehow be blocking the vitality of the portrait. For the portrait to wake, the ghost would have to allow it life."
It was midwinter when we found the black portrait. Our Care of Magical Creatures teacher was sick, and the substitute decided to include a section on portraits. A couple of students grumbled that they were just artifacts, but really we were all too glad not to have to go trudging out into the wet snow, looking for some beast that didn't really want to be found unless it could eat us for dinner. Interviewing portraits would be a welcome break.
And me, I was all too aware that I was just this side of a squib. So I was grateful for any assignment that didn't involve a wand.
We all drew slips of parchment paper out of a box. The parchment was blank when I first looked at it, and I worried for a minute that magic was required; but then the paper began to heat in my hand and brown letters formed one by one. The scorched paper said: Headmaster Snape. I had never heard of a Headmaster Snape, and I knew most of the portraits in the castle, except for the ones in private rooms or in other houses’ common rooms. I couldn’t just go knocking on strange doors looking for him.
Finally, I bribed one of my classmates to do a finding spell. I promised her a week’s worth of History homework in return for that one-minute spell and counted myself lucky. I had been afraid no one would do the spell at all.
She looked at me oddly after casting the spell and said, “It’s in the attic of the Wednesday Tower.”
I’d always thought that the Wednesday Tower was one of those mean stories that nasty older students told to the first-years to make them look foolish. One of the more devious Slytherins had once convinced an entire incoming class of Gryffindors that that week’s password to the quidditch pitch was “Slytherin Forever.” He reassured them that Gryffindor would have a turn to choose the password soon enough, but if they wanted to attend quidditch tryouts... It was several days before they realized that the quidditch pitch had never had a password.
I’d figured the Wednesday Tower was the same sort of nonsense. After all it was part of a thousand jokes aimed at new students. Where was the Potions classroom? Why that was right easy to find, first room in the Wednesday Tower, couldn’t miss it. And how did one find the tower? By waiting till Wednesday, of course.
Yet it seemed there really was a Wednesday Tower. I asked one of the house elves to lead me to the Wednesday Tower. I followed him up the stairs of the West Tower, until he paused at an open window just below the Owlery.
“Right out the window, Miss, but only on Wednesdays.” Then he was gone.
My heart sank. Apparently I was still as gullible as a first year. But house elves don’t pull pranks. They just don’t. Confused, I stared out the window. I tossed a knut out the window and it fell out of sight, with no interference from any nonexistent tower.
Well, maybe the rest of the joke was real too. I waited till Wednesday and came back. I looked out the window and saw the same view as always. Then, sighing at my continuing foolishness, I tossed a knut out the window to watch it fall.
But it didn’t. It didn’t fall. Instead I heard it clink as it landed somewhere I couldn’t see. I tossed my cloak out the window and got the same result. Sure I’d lost my mind, I climbed out the window and into a big stone room. It was mostly empty except for stacks of crates labelled, “Hazardous. Do not open without tongs,” and a half-assembled niffler skeleton. On the far wall was a large black wooden frame. Its copper nameplate said Headmaster Snape in a delicate script, but the picture inside was a deep solid black without a speck of color. It wasn’t the glossy black of black paint, nor even the black of a dark night, but the total airless black of Peruvian darkness powder.
The portrait wouldn’t respond to anything I said, and it didn’t feel like a portrait. I didn’t like it. The frame felt cold, like something wet and dead. Still, I forced myself to pick it up and carry it back to the castle.
I took it to my professor’s classroom and carefully rested one corner of the unwieldy painting in the inbox which the substitute teacher had left there. At least this way Mrs. Grubwell would know I had tried. The painting vanished with a slight sucking sound, and I wandered off to the library to try to compose an essay about a blank portrait that wouldn’t talk.
"Late at night the lovers talked. The werewolf was gentle with the ghost. He told him they could be together in both the Great After and in the painted lands if the ghost would just let go. But if he resisted, they could not be together in either place."
"Finally the ghost agreed to try."
I remember that night. It's been many years since I heard that conversation, but I remember every word. I lay on a big pillow by the fire pretending to sleep. The fire had gone to embers, but another fire danced inside the Tower Wolf's small office and the ghost shone with a pale glow of his own.
"So what's got you overwrought bits of varnish in such an uproar? The paintings in the hall were squeaking like mice caught by a kneazle."
The werewolf leaned on his painted desk and looked a little embarrassed. "I'm sorry. It's you they're afraid of, Severus."
"Afraid of me? I'm hardly in a position to hex anybody anymore. Have they forgotten I'm a ghost?"
"Did you -- did you know you have a portrait, Severus?"
"No, they tried to make a portrait before they knew I had stayed on. It never activated. I'm already here."
"Well, there was a frame with your name on it up in the attic. One of the students found it. Severus, this could be our chance. The staff think your ghost nature is unconsciously blocking the portrait and sort of deadening it. Maybe if you let the painting in, you'll be able to let go of being a ghost -- once you see that it doesn’t mean we have to separate. Will you try for me? I've been the cause of your unhappiness too many times."
“I wonder what would happen if I went on, if I still could go on. Do you -- do you think if I went on, that part of me might still be here in the portrait?" the ghost said, so soft I almost missed it. “Then I might see you truly.”
"If you went on, we could be together in both places," said the werewolf. "In portraits and in the After. Would you truly do that for me?" he asked.
"I would," said the ghost. "I will. Somehow I will let go." There was the tiniest quaver in his voice, gone so fast I almost thought I was imagining it.
The werewolf ran his hands through the portrait air as though he was tracing the shape of his beloved.
"I want to touch you, too," said the ghost.
The werewolf pressed himself forward like he was leaning into an invisible glass barrier and the ghost misted forward so that their hands and faces touched. It must have been an intensely unsatisfying kiss, but they didn’t seem to mind.
“Soon,” promised the ghost.
“And when I came back for the next year, there they were, picnicking in a framed meadow and then clothes were scattered all over landscapes throughout the castle. The other portraits were scandalized. Or at least they said they were.”
“All that year we saw them roaming through the frames together. And late at night they could be seen sitting in front of a fire, arms around each other, leaning into each other with eyes drifting closed.”
"It was beautiful." What was the girl's name? "Girl, it was beautiful."
"It's what can happen when you jump, when you leap off the cliff with your whole soul and trust somebody to catch you."
The girl's eyes were shining as she thanked me. It was everything she had needed to hear: that love was worth risks, that she could be happy.
I was sure she’d take the leap now. She would run off with her artist boy and believe she was in love. I hoped it would be enough. I hoped the story would get her through the long years ahead.
Of course I lied to the girl. No, I didn't tell her anything untrue. Everything happened the way I told it, but any romance is beautiful if you know where to stop telling the tale.
* ~~~~~~~~~~~~ * ~~~~~~~~~~~~ * ~~~~~~~~~~~~ *
The next morning I lay in bed as the house awakened around me. There was shouting and joking and the crash of a trunk dropped on the stairs. I knew it was a trunk because someone was screaming, "Quit throwing the bloody trunk around before you wake up great-gramma!"
The door to my room opened and somebody looked in, but my eyes were closed. I was remembering the ghost. I was remembering the werewolf.
There were shushing noises in the hall. I ignored them. I was back in the common room by a too-hot fire...
I think about them often, the werewolf and his lover. I like to remember them sitting together in his office late at night, drinking wine and cuddling. I can see them so clearly in my mind.
The werewolf was done in a very realistic style and you could see the patches and worn spots in his robe. I always wondered why anyone would paint him like that instead of giving him shiny new robes. And then I thought maybe it was a sign of love, that someone had cared to paint him exactly as he had been in life.
If I am ever painted they are welcome to paint me young and beautiful in expensive clothes. A little white lie never hurt anyone.
But whoever had painted the werewolf hadn't felt that way. Instead they'd carefully painted each frayed thread, each patch. He must have patched his own clothes in life. No woman would have used that dark purple thread on a brown robe.
His lover was painted in quite a different style. Someone had slathered on the paint in thick strokes, like they were painting with a knife. They had painted a mood more than any precise features. His face said, keep away. His face said, I don't like you. His face said, do you really need to be looking at me?
But when he was in the same frame as the werewolf his whole face shifted. His eyes softened. I swear his eyes were smiling, though maybe that was just a trick of the light. And the way he looked at the Tower Wolf, well, I hoped someday somebody would look at me like that. It was a good place to end the tale, with both of them happy and showing it.
I made it through the rest of my fifth year. The Tower Wolf’s steady encouragement was a big part of why I didn’t give up, but his lover gave me another reason to keep trying. When I almost took the headmaster’s offer of a note excusing me from all my Owls due to disability, it was the ghost’s voice that stopped me from accepting. I remembered the tiny hidden quaver in his voice the night he promised the Tower Wolf he would let go of being a ghost. I thought how much bravery that must have taken. I couldn’t bear to hear that in my memory and still let myself take the easy way out. All the rest of that year, whenever I thought I couldn’t make it in the world of witches and wizards as a mere squib, I told myself I had as much courage as any nasty old ghost.
And I guess I did find some kind of courage. I started looking my classmates in the eye again, whether they wanted me to or not. I was even able to sit the Owls for Herbology and History.
There was a grand castle inventory started that summer. I and a couple other orphans stayed to do the work. I’m sure they thought they were doing me a kindness by including me in the group. I decided I was going to show them a thing or two about measuring a person’s worth by their magic.
I might be nearly a squib, but I was going to be damned if anyone was going to think that’s all I was. So I glared the others students into letting me organize our efforts. That let me assign myself tasks I knew I could complete without magic. It also made it clear to everybody that I wasn’t anybody’s charity case.
The afternoon I found him I had assigned myself a count of the rooms in the dungeon section. I entered a suite of rooms that was marked on my map as “previous staff quarters.” The entry room was dark and dusty and smelled like mildew. I held up my lantern but the light couldn’t reach the far corners.
I felt something cold. At first I thought it was a draft. Then I saw him.
For the first time in my life I wasn’t afraid of the ghost. He was sitting alone on the stone floor. There was almost no light left in him. His usual pearly glow had faded to a dull blue that sputtered like a candle being blown out. But it was his eyes that were terrible.
When he looked up at me he had the look of a broken thing. I want to say it was the look of an animal in a trap. But it was much worse than that. I’d trapped my share of mice over the years. And like anyone I’d sometimes found one still alive in the trap. It would be terrified and hurt and know it had no way out. But even that wasn’t so bad because you could promise the mouse an end. You could end its pain.
This. This was the pain of a trapped animal that could not die. He looked at me and I looked back. Then the ghost said the only words he has ever spoken to me.
“Don’t tell him.”
The next time I went by that hall, the door was gone as though there had never been a door there.
And I didn’t tell. I will never tell anyone that Headmaster Snape’s ghost was unable to move on. I am an old lady now and soon I will be dead. Then only the ghost himself will know that he still lingers on somewhere in the depths of the castle.
Sometimes the only gift you can give someone is knowing when to stop talking. That’s not necessarily a tragic thing. Silence has let me cherish happiness in some dark places. There’s an infinite supply of happiness in the world if you just remember the secret behind happy stories. The secret is this: every story has a happy ending if you know where to stop the telling.