Volume 3: A Tombstone Stained with Sin and Blood Chapter 150 Hallucination
On the first day of the new semester, Hogwarts was not affected by the Dementor attack last night.
According to the schedule, after breakfast, the students went to the classroom to prepare for class and start the new school year.
But even though the course was not affected, it was impossible for students to really treat what happened yesterday as if it had never happened.
At that time, there were only a dozen students who actually saw the Dementors, and most of the other students on the carriage did not even know what Dementors were. This was not the knowledge they were supposed to learn.
During breaks, students who had seen the Dementors described these monsters to other students in vivid detail.
But in fact, in that situation, most of them were shocked by the dead silence. Now, if they were really asked to describe the specific appearance of the creatures they saw, the descriptions would become varied.
Many people can only describe the gray, shabby robe and the tall and thin body. If we break it down further, some say that the Dementor has a monster face, some say it has a skull on its head, and some say there is nothing on the creature's neck and it is a headless monster.
Such remarks were quickly refuted by students whose parents were wizards, who said that if a Dementor was a skeleton or had no head at all, it would be impossible for them to kiss others, let alone suck away the souls of wizards in this way.
As the person closest to the Dementors at the scene at the time, Jon did not join in their discussion.
He had no interest in what the face hidden under the Dementor's cloak looked like. What he cared about most now was his progress in learning the Patronus Charm.
Before he started learning this spell, he had anticipated that the Patronus Charm would be very useful in the future. However, he did not expect that before his third year of student life had even begun, the Dementors had already launched an attack on the carriage.
This attack actually came in a very strange way.
John learned from Lupin that the reason the Azkaban prison break was successful earlier this year was because more than 30 members of the Order of the Phoenix imprisoned there used the Patronus Charm together.
The overflowing positive emotions completely broke down the Dementors' siege , giving them the opportunity to meet up with Moody who had come to support them.
The Ministry of Magic could not have been unaware of such information. More than 30 people in the Order of the Phoenix had learned the Patronus Charm and were able to break out of Azkaban, the base of the Dementors. So how could these monsters that had landed on the British mainland effectively suppress the Hogwarts carriage?
Jon didn't see what happened last night, but even if so many Dementors swarmed in, Dumbledore alone outside the carriage was able to resolve such a crisis. He really couldn't see the point of such an attack that could be described as "harassment".
This is just like instigating Percy to rebel. Apart from giving the students in the carriage some psychological blow, it has no other practical effect.
If this was Voldemort's retaliation for what happened in the first half of the year, then his behavior was more like a face-saving project without gaining any real benefit.
However, the Dementors had no effect on the carriage because the professor and the wizards in the Order of the Phoenix were all proficient in the Patronus Charm. John didn't like the feeling of putting his safety in the hands of others. He urgently wanted to speed up the learning of the Patronus Charm to prevent the situation where one day he would face the Dementors alone and he would not be able to use any countermeasures.
After the last Potions class in the morning, Jon went to the cafeteria with Neville and Hermione to have lunch.
Halfway through the journey, they met Ginny and Luna who had also just finished class, but it seemed like they had come here on purpose.
"Senior Green..."
Ginny, who also had red hair, hesitantly called out to Jon. Jon saw that they had something to say to him, so he stopped and motioned Neville, Hermione, Ron and the others to go to the restaurant first.
"Just call me Jon. I have a good relationship with your brothers. There's no need to address me in such a distant way." He said casually.
"Can I just call you Jon?"
Next to Ginny, the girl with a wooden cork around her neck and carrot earrings in her ears blinked her bulging eyes and asked in an ethereal voice.
She seemed a little familiar, and her voice was vague, but her eyes were serious.
Of course Jon knew the girl's name, and he smiled at Luna.
"Of course you can, you can call me Jon, and I can call you Luna, right?"
The girl with carrot earrings said as a matter of course.
“This is the fairest thing to do.”
"We didn't come to Jon for the name thing, Luna."
Seeing that the topic was in danger of being led off track by Luna, Ginny quickly got back to the point.
"Gabrielle has been in a bad state since she returned to the dormitory last night. We were very worried about her, but we had never seen a Dementor and didn't know how to counsel her. Then when we woke up this morning, we found that she was not in the dormitory, and we couldn't find her all morning."
Jon frowned slightly. To be honest, he originally thought that Dementors should not have such a big impact on ghosts. After all, they were all dead people.
Now it seems that Gabrielle, who drank the water of dead souls, is very different from an ordinary ghost. Moreover, she was the one who had the closest contact with the first Dementor that appeared yesterday.
"I'll go look for her. I should be able to guess where she is. Don't worry, I will comfort her. You guys should go to the restaurant to eat. By the way, please tell Neville to bring me two sandwiches when he returns to the dormitory."
Ginny and Luna naturally had no doubts about his words.
Although Jon is only in the third grade now, the achievements he made at the beginning of this year have already earned him enough respect and admiration from the vast majority of students on the carriage.
This might be the reason why Percy disliked John. He was a student who had only been at the carriage for less than three years, but he possessed prestige that was even greater than that of John, the student president. This made Percy, who already had a strong desire for power, instinctively feel annoyed and jealous.
After watching the two little girls leave, Jon turned and walked towards the end of the corridor.
He came to the door leading to the driver's cabin opposite to Headmaster Dumbledore's office and pushed it open easily.
The carriage was passing through a city that looked very beautiful. The low red-roofed houses kept moving to the left and right to make way for the carriage. It looked funny if you watched it for a long time.
But in the driver's seat, Gabrielle, who was supporting her chin with both hands, was obviously not paying attention to this.
Jon could guess that Gabrielle would come here. Even though she could freely pass through most of the doors on the carriage as a ghost, after learning the school rule that students were prohibited from entering rooms without house numbers privately, the little girl consciously never violated the school rules that other students on the carriage had to abide by.
Although she is young, she understands some principles. If she wants to integrate into a group as quickly as possible, she must abide by the same rules as the group.
But Hagrid is an exception. Normally when he is driving the carriage, Hagrid is very bored alone. Now that he has become familiar with Gabrielle, he finally has a child who does not need to go to class to talk to him.
When Jon arrived, Hagrid was holding a cup of hot tea in his hand and discussing his experience in raising magical animals such as horses with Gabrielle.
But it was obvious that the little girl was not paying attention. She sat on the wooden cabinet in front of Hagrid which was usually used to store small items, shaking her white and transparent legs with the slight bumps of the carriage. No one knew what she was thinking about.
Hearing Jon coming over, she was half a beat slower than Hagrid to come back to her senses. Hagrid happily poured Jon a cup of black tea and handed him a plate of his favorite signature rock cake.
Jon took the cup of black tea, took the plate of rock cakes, and put it on the wooden cabinet without leaving any trace.
"Isn't today the first day of school? How do you have time to come here?"
Hagrid and John were also very close. Usually when it was not appropriate to practice spells in the dormitory, he would come to Hagrid. Over time, the two had become good friends.
"Ginny and Luna asked me for help." Jon was looking at Gabrielle when he spoke. Hagrid must be unfamiliar with these two names. "They said you were still unhappy after you went back home last night, and they couldn't find you when they woke up early in the morning. They were very worried about you, so they asked me to help find where you are."
Gabrielle lowered her slender eyebrows and spoke weakly.
"I'm sorry, I forgot to tell them this morning."
No matter how thick-skinned Hagrid was, after such a whole morning, and now that John had come to see her specifically, he could tell that Gabrielle was not in a good mood.
He also knew that it was this little girl who had the closest contact with the Dementors last night.
"Are you still thinking about those Dementors from yesterday? Those things were only scary when you first saw them. You didn't stay and so you didn't see what happened to them. Dumbledore drove them all away with just one spell!"
Hagrid soothed.
But his words didn't seem to have any effect on Gabrielle, she was still in a depressed mood.
"I miss my parents and sister." She whispered, "I wonder where they are now and whether they are doing well..."
Up to now, four or five months have passed since Gabrielle was taken over from Madame Maxime, but there has been no response at all.
Before leaving, the former headmaster of Beauxbatons promised to contact Dumbledore and bring Gabrielle to her family after finding her parents.
But it has been so long and there is still no news.
But for some things, no news is the best news.
Jon looked at her and spoke.
"If you miss your family, don't hide it in your heart. Many students here may be older than you, but they have the same experience of separation from their families as you. Even your parents and sister at least remember that they have a relative like you, but their parents don't even know who they are."
Such a comparison would undoubtedly resonate with Gabrielle, an emotional little girl. She had been in this carriage for so long that she naturally knew a lot about the situation of the students on the carriage. She knew very well that compared with her current situation, there were many people who should be more sad and sorrowful than her.
Her original sadness subsided a lot, and she just looked at Jon hesitantly, as if she wanted to say something.
"I felt very uncomfortable last night, so I wandered around in the carriage..." She said softly, "Then when I was crying alone, thinking about my parents and sister, I didn't know if it was a picture I imagined or if I really saw a person..."
Jon keenly noticed the important information in Gabrielle's words and raised his eyebrows slightly.
"Who? A student or an adult?"
"He's an adult. I... have seen him at my home before. He came to my house and discussed something with my father alone." Gabrielle seemed to be trying hard to recall the scene in her memory. "But my father was very unhappy that day. He finally kicked that man out of the house. My sister and I have never seen him so angry."
Jon turned and looked at Hagrid.
They all clearly felt that this was very important information!
"Where did you see him, Gabrielle?"
"I, I don't remember." She shook her head and said, "I actually feel like I didn't see him at all. It's just that I missed my parents and sister so much that I remembered seeing the image of that person, but... I'm not sure..."
Gabrielle's description was vague and her tone was unconfident, making her sound unreliable.
But neither Hagrid nor Jon took the matter lightly.
Jon stood up from the driving seat of Hagrid and said solemnly.
"Whether you really saw this person in the carriage or not, we must tell Dumbledore about this. This may be an important clue."
He never thought about conducting any investigation on his own or doing the hero's psychology alone.
The danger now faced by the carriage concerns the lives of many people. Jon consciously knows that after the professors know more, they will definitely make a more correct decision than him.
Without hesitation, he left the driver's seat with Gabrielle. After returning to the car, he went straight to the door opposite and knocked on the door of the principal's office.
Dumbledore was writing something with a quill in his office. After entering the room, John didn't say anything else. He asked Gabrielle to repeat what he had said to Dumbledore again.
After listening quietly to Gabrielle's unconfident narration, Dumbledore couldn't help but frowned, and he said softly.
"Can you describe to me the specific physical features of this adult wizard you are talking about?"
