I dreamed Voldemort was trying to find me, so I was being kept in the Great Hall at Hogwarts. The Great Hall looked a lot like Holy Rosary Church in Hostyn, with very ornate decor. The back of the church was an intersection of two long wings, with the vestibule at their meeting point. There were huge oak doors in the south wall of the vestibule.
Along the inner wall of each wing, between the main corridor of that wing and the church, was a small, narrow, dark corridor, lined with glass cases. In each case was the mummified body of a holy man or woman. There were bishops, abbesses, anchorites, all garbed in velvets and satins with gold lace and embroidery, and all slowly crumbling to dust behind the glass.
A friend and I were being kept there to hide us from Voldemort. We weren’t taking it very seriously. There were two long ceremonial swords, as long as jousting lances, standing in a rack near the altar. We noticed that they each bore our family emblems, so we took them down and went outside. We pretended to menace the great oaken doors.
Then we heard helicopters, and rushed back in and put the swords back. But the secret service agent sent to watch us has seen us, and we got pretty told off. My junior high English teacher came with a class to give lessons in the hall, so we wouldn’t fall too behind. One of the boys started crying because I was getting more answers right than he was.
After class was over, my friend and I went exploring in the hall. We found the door to a hidden passage behind a hanging between the swords and the tabernacle. We debated about telling our government babysitter, because what if Voldemort snuck in from back there? But if we didn’t tell, we'd have a way out to explore and be a little more free, and maybe it would be a good escape if V-man, as we took to calling him, came through the front.
We were still debating when we heard someone coming, so we hurried back out into the church. We grabbed some books to look like we were studying. The agent had brought his little daughter, who thought this must be a library, because of all the books on the benches. But she wondered, after looking at them, why they were all the same.
The book I was “studying” was different from the others. It looked like a big dictionary I had enjoyed looking through when I was little, just learning to read. It had a dark gold sheen to its cover, with a deep green oval on the front where it said “Bible” instead of the title of the dictionary. As I flipped to the back of the book, I realized it was so thick because it had a section in the back that, instead of pages, held a set of compartments. Each compartment was a reliquary, with a small effigy of a saint, made out of mummified saint bits, and clothed in miniature robes as rich as those of the holy men and women in the walls along the corridors.
Only, the Bible was really old, and not in the best repair, and as I opened the section with the compartments, one of the edged split a little, and one of the effigies started to come out. Without thinking, I pushed it back inside, and felt the gritty, slippery dust of it on my fingers like ash. I closed the book and called out to the agent. I insisted he go find the priest.
He came back with a nun who had huge spectacles and flyaway white hair, who said Father was busy, and she’d help until he came. I showed her the crumbling relics in the broken book, and she said she knew exactly what to do. She took the book away from me, and for a while things were boring. The priest came after a bit, and I explained what had happened, and we went to find sister.
She was out in the grounds, which were glistening with snow and ice. There was a miniature holiday train near a grotto, and she was decorating it with holly and some VERY REALISTIC looking ash and soot. Yup. She was sprinkling and daubing saint bit dust all over the train. Thaaaaat was exciting.
The priest and I were pretty horrified. We went back inside, and after inspecting the mummies along the corridors, he decided that some restoration was in order there, as well as with the Bible. He called some specialists. While we were waiting for them to arrive, I told him how I had always thought, when I was little and going tonchurch with Momo, that the mummies were all the popes that had ever been, and they’d lived and died right here at Holy Rosary. We had a good laugh about that.
While restoration was going on, the priest sent my friend and I down the east wing to live in Grandma Berwick’s suite of rooms, since Grandma was away on vacation. My mom showed up about that time, as we all settled in for the night. We had been careful to keep to the downstairs rooms, so when I woke up the next day and saw a television up on the landing was on, I was terrified that Voldemort was hiding up there waiting for me.
I decided I would be brave, darn it, and no one else was getting killed because of me. I tromped upstairs to see a pastel flowered suitcase on my grandma’s bed. This seemed, unominious. Then my aunt Lolly came out of the bathroom. She said she’d been there all night, and had heard us come in late, but didn’t feel like getting up.
The next day my dad came, and drove us around the cow pastures where my mom grew up, which were all around the church. Dad drove really fast up and down the hills, and Mom pointed out where they’d lived when they got married, but the house wasn’t there anymore. Then I woke up.
