Chapter Text
There is a secret nightly hour, if you know where to look for it. It comes from a time in which there was no such things as clocks or even numbers, and it will come again after everything you know would be but a vague memory. It nestles like a blackbird in the crack between two well-known hours – that is, well-known to insomniacs or poets (or lovers, which are both) – and there are a good number of tricks to find it, and live it.
Evan Rosier knows a good trick. His father taught him, one moon-beamed night when he was five and he never forgot it, and more importantly, he never told anyone. You shouldn’t take it as a personal offense, therefore, that I won’t tell you either. I’m sure you’ll find a way, if you intend it or if it intends it. Here, to prove my good faith, I’ll give you a hint: you have to love it.
Evan loves it. Not like sleepy people love the night, nicely snuggling in easily forgettable dreams, nor like wanderers love nights to conceal their evil or lonely deeds; no, when I say that Evan loves the night, I mean it like some people love music so much they dance into traffic. The smells, the mournful lights, the mysteries keeping to themselves, the blindness all around.
He inhales, slow, ravenous. That sweet, sweet air of deserted places. No one to watch, to judge.
That particular night, the night it all happened, it was raining slightly. Evan can’t see it, but I can: it’s glistening on his blond curls like crunched diamonds, it thickens his lashes and sharpens his green gaze. He is aptly named that boy, pink and velvety like a spring rosebush, evanescent like a ghost you can only grasp for a split second at the corner of your eyes. He’s pretty too, but he doesn’t know it so we’ll have to keep it to ourselves for the time being.
The rain was nothing, the cold barely noticeable. Each shovelful of dirt ignited a nice warmth in Evan’s muscles, and he kept on digging and digging. He would only stop now and then to rest; head thrown backwards in the rain, and breathe in that nice cemetery smell. The earthy perfume clang to him which, among many other things, explained why he never really managed to make friends at his high school. He usually sat at the back of the classroom waiting for time, boring and numbered time, to pass. He lets everything, the corridors and the space and youth in general, to his classmates, judging they were more fit for these things than he was. Waiting and waiting and waiting; until night mercifully falls. He knows some of his classmates wait for night almost as ardently as he does, but for opposite reasons. There are the ones who hate school and run home as soon as the final bell rings to throw themselves into their beds, and there are some who long for the harsh lights and deafening music of the clubs and bars of the city.
The latter was Evan’s biggest pet peeve. There was always a chance that he would meet one of these boisterous citizens of the night on the way to the cemetery. It had nearly happened a few weeks before. On the other side of the streets, sharing one big black umbrella like a bat struggling against the wind over their heads, Evan had seen two of his classmates look his way and elbow each other. He had dunked his head and pulled his hood in front of his face, hearing them whisper drunkenly :
“Hey, isn’t that Rosier?”
“What? Where?”
“Two o’clock, Black. With the big hoodie.”
“Nah… don’t think so.”
“No, just look, it’s him I swear.”
“You wish! C’mon, Crouch. Geez, stop staring…”
They turned at the opposite street-corner, one last look behind their shoulders ablaze in the street-lamp’s light.
For the remainder of the following week, Evan could not shake off the feeling of having two curious eyes glued to the back of his neck. He had promised himself never to be so careless again. Misery might love company, but company never loves it back; best to stay alone anyway.
Evan catches his breath. A white cloud sifts in front of his face. He waves it away. He knows it well by now but somehow, especially on such romantic nights at this one was, he always forgets that digging up a grave is a much more lengthy business than they make it look in movies. He compulsively checks for the hundredth time that the tomb he was happily desecrating was unnamed. That’s one thing his father taught him that he wouldn’t forget in a hurry either. The last thing he needed, – second only to his classmates being nosy little shits (his words, not mine) – was to have the authorities aware of his activities. Not that they were morally reprehensible, you see, they were simply… hard to explain.
One or two minutes of shoveling later, Evan hits something hard. He hits it again, wood. He sets the shovel aside and jumps into the hole. With his bare hands he brushes aside the last handful of moist dirt on the coffin; he likes it a lot more than you and I would.
“That’s strange…” he says to no one in particular.
He fishes his phone in his pocket and struggles with his filthy fingers to put the flashlight on, confirming his suspicion: the coffin is brand new. Just as he readies a fist to knock on it, a knocking sounds echoes in the hole.
Evan freezes. His breathing catches in his throat. He knocks tentatively. A furious knocking answers him, like two first banging on a door. Evan mindlessly thinks of a sentence he’s read in the grimoire his father gave him.
A grave is shaped like a door for a reason. You can’t expect people to use it only one way.
It never occurred to him to be scared, so it came as a great shock to him to realize he had jumped back onto the surface and was now clenching his shovel with shaking hands. In between the banging, he could now hear muffled screams. There was no denying it. This was no corpse.
Evan tried to gain control back. It was more difficult than what he was used to. His body was all tensed-through, impossible to move, impossible to relax the slightest muscle. It took him a great deal of strength to simply unlock his jaw, force himself closer to the coffin and say:
“Hum… Hello?”
“GET ME THE FUCK OUT!” he was answered, with a desperate amount of fist-banging against the wood.
Evan should have thought this through, maybe. I’m sure in this situation, you and I might have run, or start shoveling dirt back into the hole, or maybe we are brave (or deranged) enough to start destroying the cheap coffin to splinters, like Evan did. He made a quick work of it, and just as quickly ran back a few feet from the tomb.
As soon as he turned on his heels, shovel at the ready, the coffin opened like a door, and something walked out. I say ‘walk’ for dramatic effect, and also because that is how it appears to Evan who had at this point an imagination so riled up it could rival any Gothic novelist, but the thing in question rather crawled and stumbled forward. It was tall, dangly, damp and swearing heavily:
“If I EVER catch THAT FUCKING FUCK imma go-” it never got the chance to finish its threat, Evan’s shovel caught it on the back of its head like a good golf-swing.
The dangly thing fell face first into the mud. Evan couldn’t tell you what he is feeling right now, and neither could I. But that’s nothing compared to the Molotov mix of surprise, horror and embarrassment he felt when he turned the thing face-up with the tip of his Wellington and poured some flashlight on it, or rather, him.
Now, in a space between hours, Evan stands in the cemetery under the rain, bloody shovel in hand, staring down at the body of one of his classmates.
***
I wish I could tell you what happened to Barty, but I am not sure he himself knows. His memories, to say the least, are a little fuzzy. You can’t really blame him, he’s had a rough night, ending with a shovel hitting him behind the head. We’ll be lucky if he even remembers his own name when he wakes up.
Yes, I said ‘when’, worry not, he will wake up. Any second now.
All you and I have to do is wait for him to wake up and explains his situation to Evan, who has brought him back home (after long, careful considerations under the thickening rain), and buried him under several covers (which is sweet) and plans to submit him to a series of mildly to utterly unethical tests to determine just how ‘alive’ he was (which is less sweet). That is our only hope, that Barty tells Evan what he was doing that night during the secret hour, buried six feet deep, alive.
But between you and I, I very much doubt we’ll ever know for sure. You probably know this already: Barty Crouch Jr is a liar.