Chapter 166
Chapter 166
At the sight of the familiar greasy hair and the gloomy face untouched by sunlight, Suer relaxed and put away his wand.
Whatever Snape might be like as a person, he remained a professor at Hogwarts and enjoyed Dumbledore’s trust. That meant Suer could trust him as well.
Besides, they were old acquaintances.
Suer had spent a considerable portion of the second half of his second year with Snape.
Snape could be as cold as he pleased, and Suer could keep talking as he pleased; in Suer’s mind, they were still good friends.
Unfortunately, Snape did not respond to Suer’s wave. He simply turned away and slammed the window shut.
Suer took no offence and jogged towards the final house in the alley.
The old door opened with an unpleasant creak. Suer stepped inside curiously and found himself in a narrow, pitch-black corridor.
Other people’s entrance halls were spacious and bright. Snape’s looked like the set of a gloomy horror film. Empty cobwebs hung in the corners, dust covered the dark red wall panels, and patches of dark green grime stained parts of the surface. Suer would not have been surprised if a monster — no, a ghost — had suddenly appeared.
Without lingering, Suer passed through the space that even a horror director would have praised, though it was difficult to tell whether it was a corridor or an entrance hall. He arrived in a cramped area that they might, for convenience, call a sitting room.
Snape apparently used it as a study. The walls of books taking up most of the available space made that obvious.
Unlike the corridor, where cold draughts rushed constantly down one’s neck, this room did possess a source of light: a candle lamp hanging from the ceiling behind a glass shade so filthy that it was nearly opaque.
For some reason, Suer found the room even more frightening than the corridor. It resembled a padded cell.
In a horror film, the protagonist would emerge from the cold darkness outside and relax slightly here, because this room held the light human beings needed, faint though it was.
That was precisely when the indescribable creature should appear — covered in blood, its hair greasy as though it had not been washed in years, and something’s soft, wet entrails hanging from its hands…
That was exactly the impression Snape gave Suer now. He emerged from a concealed door in one of the bookcases and stared at Suer darkly, a trace of surprise in his eyes.
Was he surprised that Suer had crossed several streets alone and reached the house alive?
Snape looked Suer up and down several times, making his skin crawl.
“Fortunate,” he said with a soft snort. It was impossible to tell whether the word was praise or sarcasm. “Come upstairs, Mr Bones.”
Suer did not know what Snape meant by “fortunate”, but he did not ask. He knew Snape would never answer.
“Do you want me to skin these toads, Professor?”
After climbing a long staircase and turning a corner, Snape led him into a room between the two floors. It contained a worktable, countless glass bottles, and stores of potion ingredients.
A dead toad stared at Suer with enormous, unseeing eyes. Several living ones waited in a glass tank nearby.
Suer asked only as a formality. He expertly took a toad from the tank and killed it swiftly and painlessly. Then he collected its blood in a glass bottle, set aside the organs that could be used in other potions, pressed the dead toad against the worktop, and began peeling away the skin from the top.
If Neville witnessed that smooth series of movements, he would probably faint on the spot.
Suer had long since mastered the preparation of all kinds of potion ingredients. Throughout the previous school year, he had always been required to prepare ingredients for Snape before his training could begin.
The timely arrival of Suer the convenient labourer clearly pleased Snape. A Potions master usually kept several apprentices to handle tedious dissection work, leaving the master free to focus entirely on brewing the potion itself.
Snape said nothing and showed no change of expression, but silently passed Suer a collection of simple yet laborious tasks. He then fetched a cauldron and began brewing.
Thus, each attended to his own duties. The little brewing room fell silent except for the occasional bubbling of the potion in the cauldron.
Suer could tell that Snape was preparing an exceptionally complex potion, for the quantity of ingredients he had to process was enormous.
He prepared the simpler ingredients first and sorted them into separate containers. Among the remaining ingredients, Suer discovered several highly poisonous substances: a red beetle patterned with green lines across its shell, and a purple fruit of which a single drop could fell several elephants.
Was the professor making a poison?
Suer had no doubt that combining all those ingredients into one potion would produce something terrifyingly toxic.
“Professor…” Suer spoke timidly. “How should I prepare this beetle?”
He swallowed. Although he had handled similar shelled creatures at school, most had been harmless.
This one he had seen only in books. If it bit him, even Merlin could not save him. It did not need to draw blood; the slightest break in the skin meant death, faster even than Avada Kedavra.
Snape glanced over and paused. He took a pair of thin, transparent gloves from beneath the worktable and tossed them across.
“Put those on. Hold the beetle by its horn. I require only the flesh; the shell and horn are useless.”
He turned back to stir his potion, showing no concern whatsoever that Suer might be bitten and die in his house…
Suer stood frozen beside the worktable for a moment, swallowed again, and put on the gloves. He carefully picked up the strangely coloured beetle. But when he pinned down its horn and prepared to remove the shell as Snape had instructed, the beetle suddenly struggled free and sank its teeth into Suer’s finger.
“I’m finished…” Suer instinctively tightened his grip and closed his eyes to await death.
“What are you doing?” Snape’s mocking voice reached him. “One beetle is enough to terrify you? I thought you were brave. You dared to burn the Forbidden Forest, yet you cannot handle one little insect?”
“Er… I… I’m not dead?” Suer murmured instinctively. He had clearly felt the beetle bite his finger. The sharp pain had been entirely real.
Snape heard him and gave a derisive snort. Yet when his gaze passed over the beetle, which Suer had crushed until its insides burst out, he still frowned in distress.
“These are a treasure.” Suer stared in amazement at the place where he had been bitten, ignoring Snape’s verbal venom. He was accustomed to being mocked whenever they spent time together.
The gloves Snape had given him had perfectly stopped the beetle’s sharp teeth.
“I wonder what they’re made of…” Now that he knew he would not be poisoned, he could relax.
“Perhaps I should slip them into my pocket once we’re finished…” Suer quietly made up his mind.