The oak front doors stood open ahead of them, light flooding out onto the drive and the lawn. Slowly, uncertainly, dressing-gowned people were creeping down the steps, looking around nervously for some sign of the Death Eaters who had fled into the night. Harry’s eyes, however, were fixed upon the ground at the foot of the tallest tower. He imagined that he could see a black, huddled mass lying in the grass there, though he was really too far away to see anything of the sort. Even as he stared wordlessly at the place where he thought Dumbledore’s body must lie, however, he saw people beginning to move toward it.
“What’re they all lookin’ at?” said Hagrid, as he and Harry approached the castle front, Fang keeping as close as he could to their ankles. “Wha’s tha’, lyin’ on the grass?” Hagrid added sharply, heading now toward the foot of the Astronomy Tower, where a small crowd was congregating. “See it, Harry? Righ’ at the foot o’ the tower? Under where the Mark . . . Blimey . . . yeh don’ think someone got thrown — ?”
Hagrid fell silent, the thought apparently too horrible to express aloud. Harry walked alongside him, feeling the aches and pains in his face and his legs where the various hexes of the last half hour had hit him, though in an oddly detached way, as though somebody near him was suffering them. What was real and inescapable was the awful pressing feeling in his chest. . . .
He and Hagrid moved, dreamlike, through the murmuring crowd to the very front, where the dumbstruck students and teachers had left a gap.
Harry heard Hagrid’s moan of pain and shock, but he did not stop; he walked slowly forward until he reached the place where Dumbledore lay and crouched down beside him. He had known there was no hope from the moment that the full Body-Bind Curse Dumbledore had placed upon him lifted, known that it could have happened only because its caster was dead, but there was still no preparation for seeing him here, spread-eagled, broken: the greatest wizard Harry had ever, or would ever, meet.
Dumbledore’s eyes were closed; but for the strange angle of his arms and legs, he might have been sleeping. Harry reached out, straightened the half-moon spectacles upon the crooked nose, and wiped a trickle of blood from the mouth with his own sleeve. Then he gazed down at the wise old face and tried to absorb the enormous and incomprehensible truth: that never again would Dumbledore speak to him, never again could he help. . . .
The crowd murmured behind Harry. After what seemed like a long time, he became aware that he was kneeling upon something hard and looked down.
The locket they had managed to steal so many hours before had fallen out of Dumbledore’s pocket. It had opened, perhaps due to the force with which it hit the ground. And although he could not feel more shock or horror or sadness than he felt already, Harry knew, as he picked it up, that there was something wrong. . . .
He turned the locket over in his hands. This was neither as large as the locket he remembered seeing in the Pensieve, nor were there any markings upon it, no sign of the ornate S that was supposed to be Slytherin’s mark. Moreover, there was nothing inside but for a scrap of folded parchment wedged tightly into the place where a portrait should have been.
Automatically, without really thinking about what he was doing, Harry pulled out the fragment of parchment, opened it, and read by the light of the many wands that had now been lit behind him:
To the Dark Lord
I know I will be dead long before you read this but I want you to know that it was I who discovered your secret. I have stolen the real Horcrux and intend to destroy it as soon as I can.
I face death in the hope that when you meet your match, you will be mortal once more.
R.A.B.
Harry neither knew nor cared what the message meant. Only one thing mattered: This was not a Horcrux. Dumbledore had weakened himself by drinking that terrible potion for nothing. Harry crumpled the parchment in his hand, and his eyes burned with tears as behind him Fang began to howl.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE PHOENIX LAMENT
C’mere, Harry . . .”
“No.”
“Yeh can’ stay here, Harry. . . . Come on, now. . . .”
“No.”
He did not want to leave Dumbledore’s side, he did not want to move anywhere. Hagrid’s hand on his shoulder was trembling. Then another voice said, “Harry, come on.”
A much smaller and warmer hand had enclosed his and was pulling him upward. He obeyed its pressure without really thinking about it. Only as he walked blindly back through the crowd did he realize, from a trace of flowery scent on the air, that it was Ginny who was leading him back into the castle. Incomprehensible voices battered him, sobs and shouts and wails stabbed the night, but Harry and Ginny walked on, back up the steps into the entrance hall. Faces swam on the edges of Harry’s vision, people were peering at him, whispering, wondering, and Gryffindor rubies glistened on the floor like drops of blood as they made their way toward the marble staircase.
“We’re going to the hospital wing,” said Ginny.
“I’m not hurt,” said Harry.
“It’s McGonagall’s orders,” said Ginny. “Everyone’s up there, Ron and Hermione and Lupin and everyone —”
Fear stirred in Harry’s chest again: He had forgotten the inert figures he had left behind.
“Ginny, who else is dead?”
“Don’t worry, none of us.”
“But the Dark Mark — Malfoy said he stepped over a body —”
“He stepped over Bill, but it’s all right, he’s alive.”
There was something in her voice, however, that Harry knew boded ill.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure . . . he’s a — a bit of a mess, that’s all. Greyback attacked him. Madam Pomfrey says he won’t — won’t look the same anymore. . . .”
Ginny’s voice trembled a little.
“We don’t really know what the aftereffects will be — I mean, Greyback being a werewolf, but not transformed at the time.”
“But the others . . . There were other bodies on the ground. . . .”