The Hufflepuff common room was a pocket of perpetual summer. No matter the October gale rattling the windowpanes, the air inside smelled of warm earth and honeyed wood. Firelight danced across the cheerful yellow hangings, glinting off the brass rims of potted plants and the earnest faces of first-years huddled over a game of Exploding Snap.
Iris Whitmore shrieked with laughter as a card erupted in a shower of gentle sparks, singing the edges of Hannah Abbott’s sleeve. “Pay attention, Hannah!”
“I am!” Hannah insisted, though she was mostly watching a seventh-year braid charms into a friend’s hair. She slapped a card down. It remained stubbornly inert.
“My win, I think,” Iris said smugly, gathering the smouldering pile. The scent of burnt sugar and ozone filled the air. She stacked the scorched cards on her bedside table, a trophy of her victory. Below, the gentle snores of the badger on their house crest echoed the exhausted breathing of her dorm-mates. Sleep came easily in the warren of Hufflepuff House.
The next morning, however, felt different. A thin, grey light filtered through the round window. Iris stretched, her foot bumping the leg of her nightstand. The little stack of cards cascaded onto the floor.
“Right,” she muttered, bending to pick them up. “Rematch after breakfast?”
Hannah, pulling on her robes, looked over with a placidly blank expression. “Rematch for what?”
“Exploding Snap,” Iris said slowly. “I beat you three times running. Your sleeve nearly caught fire.” She held up a card, its edges blackened and curled like a dead leaf.
Hannah frowned, a small crease appearing between her brows. She touched her sleeve, which was perfectly intact. “I don’t remember playing. I think I was finishing my Herbology essay.”
Iris stared at her. “No, you weren’t. You finished that two days ago. We played for almost an hour.”
“Did we?” Hannah’s voice was full of genuine puzzlement. “Funny. I must have been more tired than I thought.” She shrugged, her face clearing. “Come on, or we’ll miss the bacon.”
Iris let her go, a cold knot forming in her stomach. It wasn’t like Hannah to be so forgetful. She was the one who remembered everyone’s birthday and the proper incantation for mending socks. Iris looked at the cards in her hand. Evidence. Proof. But proof of what? That her friend was tired? It felt flimsy. It felt wrong.
In the Great Hall, she saw Susan Bones and asked, “Did you see me trounce Hannah at Exploding Snap last night?”
Susan forked a piece of sausage onto her plate. “Were you playing? I didn’t notice. I was trying to get my toad, Trevor, to stay on the table.”
“No, that’s Neville Longbottom’s toad,” Iris corrected automatically. “Yours is named Horace.”
Susan just stared at her. “Who’s Neville Longbottom?”
The cold knot in Iris’s stomach tightened. Neville was the Gryffindor boy who lost his toad at least twice a day. Everyone knew Neville. They’d just learned how to turn matchsticks into needles with him in Transfiguration yesterday. How could Susan not remember?
“He’s… in our class,” Iris mumbled, her appetite gone. She watched her friends chat and laugh, their faces untroubled. It was like she was the only one who had seen a crack appear in the world. Small things, yes. A game of cards. The name of a boy’s toad. But they were gone. Not misplaced, but scoured clean.
She had to tell someone. The obvious choice was Professor Sprout.
She found her Head of House in Greenhouse Three, wrestling with a pot of writhing baby Mandrakes. Professor Sprout’s face was smeared with dirt and wreathed in a comforting smile.
“Professor?” Iris began, her voice small.
“Just a moment, dear,” Sprout chirped, stuffing a particularly squealing Mandrake back into its soil. “Nasty teething phase. Now, what can I do for you, Whitmore?”
Iris explained it all in a rush—the cards, Hannah’s blank look, Susan forgetting Neville, the unnerving sense that holes were being punched in their yesterday.
Professor Sprout listened patiently, wiping her hands on her apron. “First year can be overwhelming, Iris,” she said kindly when Iris finished. “So many new names and faces, so much magic. It’s no wonder your mind—and your friends’ minds—are feeling a bit scrambled. It’s just nerves.”
“But I have the cards!” Iris insisted. “They’re singed!”
“There are a hundred ways a pack of cards can get singed in a wizarding dormitory,” Professor Sprout said, patting her shoulder. “Get a good night’s sleep. I promise, things will feel much clearer in the morning.”
Dismissed, Iris wandered away from the Greenhouses, her feet carrying her aimlessly. Nerves. It wasn’t nerves. It was a thief. Something was sneaking into their heads while they slept and stealing little pieces of their lives. She walked without thinking, down past the kitchens, her path taking her lower and lower into the castle’s stone belly.
The air grew cold. The cheerful torchlight of the upper floors gave way to a damp, green-tinged gloom from lights that burned without flame. A constant, low drip echoed from somewhere deep in the walls. The dungeons. She had taken a wrong turn.
A profound chill swept over her, raising goosebumps on her arms. It was a cold that had nothing to do with the damp stone, a deep, unnatural iciness that seemed to press in on her from all sides. In the pearlescent light of a nearby ghost-light, a flicker of movement caught her eye—a tall, shadowy shape that seemed to glide through the wall at the far end of the corridor. It was gone before she could properly see it.
Shivering, she turned to flee, and ran straight into something solid.
She bounced back, stumbling, and looked up into the sourest face she had ever seen. Professor Snape loomed over her, his black robes blending into the shadows so perfectly he seemed conjured from them. His sallow skin, hooked nose, and greasy black hair were exactly as frightening up close as they were from the back of the Potions classroom.
“Watch where you are going, you foolish girl.” His voice was quiet, yet it cut through the damp air like a shard of glass.
“S-sorry, Professor,” Iris stammered.
His black eyes narrowed. He was not looking at her face, but at a point just over her shoulder, as if searching for something in the empty corridor behind her. “And what, precisely, are you doing in the dungeons, Miss…?”
“Whitmore, Professor. Iris Whitmore.” Her name sounded foreign and clumsy on her own tongue. “I was lost.”
“Lost.” He drew the word out, making it sound like a pathetic excuse. “Hufflepuffs. Prone to aimless wandering and cheerful idiocy. Ten points from your house.”
Tears of frustration pricked at her eyes. No one would listen, and now she was losing points for it. The injustice of it all burst out of her.
“It’s not fair!”
Snape’s eyebrow arched. “Life, Miss Whitmore, is not fair. A lesson you would do well to learn sooner rather than later.”
He made to sweep past her, a dark ship sailing through a narrow channel. Desperation made her bold.
“Professor, wait!” she cried out. “Something’s wrong. People are forgetting things.”
He stopped, turning his head slowly. The movement was so minimal, so reptilian, it was more unnerving than if he had spun around. “Elaborate.”
“My friends,” she said, her voice trembling. “They’re losing memories. Small ones. A game we played last night. A boy in our class. They don’t just not remember—it’s like it never happened for them. Professor Sprout says it’s nerves, but it isn’t. I know it isn’t.”
Snape was silent for a long moment, his gaze analytical. He seemed to be dissecting her, searching for the tell-tale signs of a liar or a hysteric. “Memory Charms are imprecise. They leave traces. Confusion. Headaches. A sense of loss.”
“There’s none of that,” Iris said immediately, seizing on the opening he’d given her. “That’s what’s so scary. They’re fine. They’re happy. It’s like the memory was never there to begin with. Like someone reached into their heads and just… scooped it out. Clean.”
The word hung in the air between them. *Clean*.
For the first time, a flicker of something other than contempt crossed Snape’s face. It wasn’t sympathy. It was a cold, sharp-edged curiosity. The look of a master craftsman examining a strange and intricate device.
“They remember nothing?” he pressed, his voice a low drawl. “No shadows? No gaps?”
“No. It’s a perfect blank. But I remember. I remember for them.”
He stared at her, his dark eyes unreadable. He looked once more down the empty, chilling corridor from which she’d come, then his gaze snapped back to her. He seemed to come to a decision.
“Idiotic first-years and their flights of fancy,” he murmured, though the words lacked his earlier conviction. The insult sounded automatic, a matter of habit. He took a step closer, forcing her to crane her neck to look up at him.
“You will go to your next class,” he commanded, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. “You will speak of this to no one else. Not your puddle-brained friends, not the ever-doting Professor Sprout. No one. After your final lesson, you will come to my office. You will bring your… evidence.” He gave the singed Exploding Snap card she was still clutching a look of deep disdain. “And you will write down every single thing you remember that others have forgotten. Everything. Do you understand, Miss Whitmore?”
Iris could only nod, her throat tight with a terrifying mix of fear and relief.
“Do not be late,” Snape added, and with a final, withering glance, he swept away, his robes whispering over the cold stones until he was devoured by the gloom.
Iris stood alone in the corridor, the unnatural chill slowly receding. She had found someone to believe her. It just happened to be the most frightening teacher in all of Hogwarts.