“Enjoy yourself,” said Harry irritably.
“I will,” said Hermione. “And the first place I’ll look,” she shot at him, as she reached the portrait hole, “is records of old Potions awards!”
Harry scowled after her for a moment, then continued his contemplation of the darkening sky.
“She’s just never got over you outperforming her in Potions,” said Ron, returning to his copy of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi.
“You don’t think I’m mad, wanting that book back, do you?”
“Course not,” said Ron robustly. “He was a genius, the Prince. Anyway… without his bezoar tip…” he drew his finger significantly across his own throat, “I wouldn’t be here to discuss it, would I? I mean, I’m not saying that spell you used on Malfoy was great—”
“Nor am I,” said Harry quickly.
“But he healed all right, didn’t he? Back on his feet in no time.”
“Yeah,” said Harry; this was perfectly true, although his conscience squirmed slightly all the same. “Thanks to Snape…”
“You still got detention with Snape this Saturday?” Ron continued.
“Yeah, and the Saturday after that, and the Saturday after that,” sighed Harry. “And he’s hinting now that if I don’t get all the boxes done by the end of term, we’ll carry on next year.”
He was finding these detentions particularly irksome because they cut into the already limited time he could have been spending with Ginny. Indeed, he had frequently wondered lately whether Snape did not know this, for he was keeping Harry later and later every time, while making pointed asides about Harry having to miss the good weather and the varied opportunities it offered.
Harry was shaken from these bitter reflections by the appearance at his side of Jimmy Peakes, who was holding out a scroll of parchment.
“Thanks, Jimmy… hey, it’s from Dumbledore!” said Harry excitedly, unrolling the parchment and scanning it. “He wants me to go to his office as quick as I can!”
They stared at each other.
“Blimey,” whispered Ron. “You don’t reckon… he hasn’t found…?”
“Better go and see, hadn’t I?” said Harry, jumping to his feet.
He hurried out of the common room and along the seventh floor as fast as he could, passing nobody but Peeves, who swooped past in the opposite direction, throwing bits of chalk at Harry in a routine sort of way and cackling loudly as he dodged Harry’s defensive jinx. Once Peeves had vanished, there was silence in the corridors; with only fifteen minutes left until curfew, most people had already returned to their common rooms.
And then Harry heard a scream and a crash. He stopped in his tracks, listening.
“How—dare—you—aaaaargh!”
The noise was coming from a corridor nearby; Harry sprinted towards it, his wand at the ready, hurtled round another corner and saw Professor Trelawney sprawled upon the floor, her head covered in one of her many shawls, several sherry bottles lying beside her, one broken.
“Professor—”
Harry hurried forwards and helped Professor Trelawney to her feet. Some of her glittering beads had become entangled with her glasses. She hiccoughed loudly, patted her hair and pulled herself up on Harry’s helping arm.
“What happened, Professor?”
“You may well ask!” she said shrilly. “I was strolling along, brooding upon certain Dark portents I happen to have glimpsed…”
But Harry was not paying much attention. He had just noticed where they were standing: there on the right was the tapestry of dancing trolls and, on the left, that smoothly impenetrable stretch of stone wall that concealed—
“Professor, were you trying to get into the Room of Requirement?”
“…omens I have been vouchsafed—what?”
She looked suddenly shifty.
“The Room of Requirement,” repeated Harry. “Were you trying to get in there?”
“I—well—I didn’t know students knew about—”
“Not all of them do,” said Harry. “But what happened? You screamed… it sounded as though you were hurt…”
“I—well,” said Professor Trelawney, drawing her shawls around her defensively and staring down at him with her vastly magnified eyes. “I wished to—ah—deposit certain—um—personal items in the Room…” And she muttered something about “nasty accusations.”
“Right,” said Harry, glancing down at the sherry bottles. “But you couldn’t get in and hide them?”
He found this very odd; the Room had opened for him, after all, when he had wanted to hide the Half-Blood Prince’s book.
“Oh, I got in all right,” said Professor Trelawney, glaring at the wall. “But there was somebody already in there.”
“Somebody in—? Who?” demanded Harry. “Who was in there?”
“I have no idea,” said Professor Trelawney, looking slightly taken aback at the urgency in Harry’s voice. “I walked into the Room and I heard a voice, which has never happened before in all my years of hiding—of using the Room, I mean.”
“A voice? Saying what?”
“I don’t know that it was saying anything,” said Professor Trelawney. “It was… whooping.”
“Whooping?”
“Gleefully,” she said, nodding.
Harry stared at her.
“Was it male or female?”
“I would hazard a guess at male,” said Professor Trelawney.
“And it sounded happy?”
“Very happy,” said Professor Trelawney sniffily.
“As though it was celebrating?”
“Most definitely.”
“And then—?”
“And then I called out, ‘Who’s there?’”
“You couldn’t have found out who it was without asking?” Harry asked her, slightly frustrated.
“The Inner Eye,” said Professor Trelawney with dignity, straightening her shawls and many strands of glittering beads, “was fixed upon matters well outside the mundane realms of whooping voices.”
“Right,” said Harry hastily; he had heard about Professor Trelawney’s Inner Eye all too often before. “And did the voice say who was there?”
“No, it did not,” she said. “Everything went pitch black and the next thing I knew, I was being hurled headfirst out of the Room!”
“And you didn’t see that coming?” said Harry, unable to help himself.
“No, I did not, as I say, it was pitch—”
She stopped and glared at him suspiciously.
“I think you’d better tell Professor Dumbledore,” said Harry. “He ought to know Malfoy’s celebrating—I mean, that someone threw you out of the Room.”
To his surprise, Professor Trelawney drew herself up at this suggestion, looking haughty.
“The Headmaster has intimated that he would prefer fewer visits from me,” she said coldly. “I am not one to press my company upon those who do not value it. If Dumbledore chooses to ignore the warnings the cards show—”
Her bony hand closed suddenly around Harry’s wrist.
“Again and again, no matter how I lay them out—”
And she pulled a card dramatically from underneath her shawls.
“—the lightning-struck tower,” she whispered. “Calamity. Disaster. Coming nearer all the time…”
“Right,” said Harry again. “Well… I still think you should tell Dumbledore about this voice and everything going dark and being thrown out of the Room…”
“You think so?” Professor Trelawney seemed to consider the matter for a moment, but Harry could tell that she liked the idea of retelling her little adventure.
“I’m going to see him right now,” said Harry. “I’ve got a meeting with him. We could go together.”
“Oh, well, in that case,” said Professor Trelawney with a smile. She bent down, scooped up her sherry bottles and dumped them unceremoniously in a large blue and white vase standing in a nearby niche.