Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

I recognised the careful hesitation. It belonged with the things I had discovered in my father’s diaries six months earlier, and with the questions Emma had never quite answered.

‘Magic,’ I said. ‘I already know Mum and Dad were wizards.’

She stared at me, one thumb resting against the edge of the box. When she asked how I knew, I admitted I had been searching the attic.

‘You were told not to go through the old trunks,’ she said. The familiar reprimand gave me somewhere easier to begin.

‘I found Dad’s diaries and Mum’s school things,’ I told her. ‘I wasn’t looking for a secret. I wanted to know more about them.’

Emma closed her eyes. I expected anger, but her shoulders dropped, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter.

‘Half a year,’ she said. ‘You’ve known all that time and said nothing.’

‘You were keeping a promise to them.’ I reached across the table and touched her hand. ‘I wasn’t going to make you break it. Whatever they hid, I’m not blaming you.’

Her eyes filled before she could answer. She covered my hand with both of hers, and I waited while she found the words.

‘You always sound older when you say things like that,’ she said. I almost laughed, then thought about what it would cost to try to explain why.

‘Only when it helps,’ I told her. She squeezed my hand once more before opening the box.

The smell came first: old paper, dry wood and something faintly medicinal. Inside lay notebooks, loose sheets tied with string, two wrapped bundles, stoppered bottles and stiff brownish paper cut into narrow rectangles. Nothing glowed or moved. Magic appeared to require a great deal of stationery.

I opened the top notebook and found Ken Mercer written inside the cover. My throat tightened at the sight of his handwriting, but curiosity kept me turning the pages. These were research notes, far less orderly than the diaries I had found in the attic.

Those diaries had already given me the broad history. Ken and Mary had attended Hogwarts and joined the Order of the Phoenix to fight Voldemort. They had survived that war, then died while I was still young enough for most of my memories of them to remain brief flashes.

The names had also suggested what sort of world this might be. Harry Potter had reached my previous life through short summaries, internet clips, jokes and conversations I had only half followed. I had never read the books or watched the films from beginning to end.

I remembered the boy who survived an evil wizard, a school called Hogwarts and friends named Ron and Hermione. Other fragments involved houses, a giant snake and a prisoner. Later events were less useful still; my memory had evidently given sports results priority over information that might one day keep me alive.

Voldemort had attacked Harry as a baby and somehow lost. I was reasonably sure of that, and that the danger eventually returned, but I could not remember reliable dates, causes or even the order of several events. Until Hermione stood in front of me, I had not connected her surname with the girl in those memories.

That was the quality of prophecy available to me. I had spent six months wondering how much to trust it, with Ken and Mary’s diaries providing a further complication.

Neither parent appeared in any summary I remembered, yet their accounts placed them beside people whose names I recognised. Perhaps the summaries had simply left them out. Perhaps this world was different. Meeting Hermione made it harder to dismiss the connection, but it did not supply all the missing pages.

Emma stayed opposite me while I skimmed the notebook. When she asked whether I knew what Hogwarts was, I told her it was a school of witchcraft and wizardry, somewhere in Scotland.

‘Your father loved it,’ she said. ‘Your mother complained about the stairs.’

‘That sounds like useful intelligence,’ I replied. The thought of Mum being cross with a staircase brought back Emma’s smile, and for a moment the school seemed less distant.

I lifted one of the wrapped bundles and unfolded it carefully. My father’s wand lay inside, dark and smooth from years of use. All the questions I had been preparing stopped when I held it.

Nothing happened. I turned it between my fingers, trying to picture the hand that had worn the wood smooth.