Begin to Hope

I don't know how long the eleven of us waited there in the tunnel. Minutes? Hours? Days? It felt like forever.

When Klaus finally deemed it safe, when we heard no more noise from above, he whispered to Farley and I, "I'm going upstairs to check it out. If I'm not back in ten minutes, follow the tunnel down, find a way out, and don't look back."

We nodded and he silently slipped out of the passageway and into the darkness of the basement.

A minute later, Penelope softly began to cry.

"Shut her up!" Farley demanded of Annabelle. Annabelle took Penelope onto her lap as if she were a small child and started to rock her back and forth to shush her, muttering comforting words all the while.

A small hand tapped me on the back, and I turned around to face Princeton.

"Kerry, I'm scared," he whispered in his small, little-boy voice.

"You have to be brave, Princeton. I know you're scared; we all are."

"Even you?" he asked, his eyes wide.

I nodded. "Even me." I took his hand, and we sat quietly in the darkness for a few moments longer. Someone coughed, and I could feel Farley growing anxious beside me.

We sat there for quite a long time. I grew impatient myself. What if something had happened to Klaus? I'd never forgive myself for letting him go out there alone.

Finally, when it had been about half an hour, Farley insisted that we couldn't stay there any longer.

"If he'd have found something, he would have come and got us! They must have still been up there when he went up, and they caught him and now he's dead."

"No! He wouldn't have just gone like that – he would have been careful. You're ridiculous, we have to wait for him!"

"I'm not waiting, and I'm taking the children with me." He grabbed Tally and Humphrey roughly and pushed them down the rest of the path, bent-over to avoid hitting his head. Humphrey cried out in pain as he did so.

"You're hurting him! Let go of my brother, Farley. You're not taking him!"

"Yes I am! I'm going to save all of you by taking you out!" He motioned for Annabelle to stand up, and she did, with Penelope still in her arms. They huddled close together, and Maverick and I looked at each other hopelessly. I knew he wouldn't leave me, but I couldn't really stop the others from leaving.

They started to move down the tunnel, but they didn't get very far when we heard a faint cry from outside.

"Kerry! Come out, quickly!"

Immediately Farley turned and ran back to where I was standing. "Did you hear that?" he asked.

I nodded and reached a hand out to open the secret door to find Klaus peering in at me.

"Come on, follow me!"

"What is it?" I asked as I jumped down through the hole.

"It's Trelawney; she's – well, I don't know if she's going to – just follow me!" He led me through the basement and up the stairs. The others were close behind.

"Avoid looking at anything directly," he called behind me. "Everyone is – " He didn't bother to finish the sentence.

We went through our dining area and music room, past a few bodies, and I felt my stomach churning. The horrific thought of it all – that it had happened only a mere hour ago – was more than I could stand.

When we passed Viktor Krum's body, it was more than my heart could take to hear Tally's cry of surprise, and then her pitiful sobbing as she realized she was now an orphan.

I heard the toll it was taking on the others as well. As we passed through each room, gasps of shock and horror at the damage the Death Eaters had done rang through my ears. Annabelle shrieked at the sight of the strewn bodies and nearly fell backward; luckily Maverick was there to catch her and help her back to her feet. Penelope's hand flew to her mouth, and for a moment I was sure she was going to be sick, but I ushered her along and we got past it.

We managed to continue up another flight of stairs to one of the more remote bedrooms, the empty ones no one used. He guided all of us inside, and we formed a circle around Madam Trelawney's body.

She wasn't looking so good. She had collapsed on the floor, beside the bed, and she was breathing hard. Her clothes had been torn, her hair was in disarray, and her eyes were unable to focus. It seemed the effort of staying alive was more than she could take.

"Children. Children. I'm the last alive, am I? Everyone else is gone, aren't they?" She managed to sputter, looking pitiful as she did so.

Klaus nodded solemnly at her.

"I knew it. I knew I would be. I heard them coming, and I just knew I should hide so they wouldn't find me, but they did anyway!" She started to cough violently, and I held her shoulder to keep her steady. "The curse they put on me is working fast. Spreading through my body. I'll be dead soon."

Penelope started to cry again, and Farley told her roughly to be quiet.

"I don't have any strength left, or else I'd get it for you, but children. Get the necklace. The necklace is what you need."

"Necklace? What necklace?"

"The necklace. Get the – oh dear, Minerva must have had it today, you go and check her – but then again, I just don't know – " Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, and she stopped breathing for a second.

"Trelawney! You have to wake up – tell us what necklace!"

"Children… just… get the necklace. Oh, my dear boy… my dear boy!" She grabbed Klaus by the scruff of his shirt and shook him. "You aren't misbehaving in school, are you now, Timmy? You stop that. Be good."

Klaus shook himself out of her grip. "She must be hallucinating… Trelawney, come on, snap out of it, you have to tell us what necklace you're talking about. It's me, Klaus, not Timmy, tell us what necklace we have to get!"

"It'll – just – the necklace – OH GOD!" She grabbed her chest and without another word fell backward to the floor, lying there motionless.

I kneeled there, looking at her, completely shocked at her sudden departure from this world. I felt the tears burn behind my eyes, and that's when I realized the hopelessness of it all. Our entire world had come crashing down, and I hadn't realized it until I saw the effects of the Death Eaters work right in front of me – until I saw this helpless woman die at another's cruel hand.

It took a moment, but slowly, ever so slowly, each one of us began to open up and cry. The boys tried to comfort us, but one could see they were trying their hardest not to.

After a few moments of lamenting, Klaus took a bedsheet and covered Madam Trelawney's body with it.

Farley, wiping his eyes on his sleeve, took charge of the situation. "Alright, what with this just happening –" He stopped, took a breath, and began again, his voice rougher and edgier, now that we was sure he wasn't about to cry. "Obviously this old bat was crazy–"

"Don't talk about her like that!" Tally screamed and hurled herself at him, beating him with her fists. Klaus was fast to stop her, but she didn't stop struggling in his arms. "Everyone's dead, and you just talk about Madam Trelawney like – like it's nothing! Everyone's dead!" With one last cry, she stopped struggling and just lay there in Klaus' arms, sobbing hysterically.

"She didn't know what she was talking about!" Farley defended himself. "I–I think we should clean up, and – and take all the bodies away, and then move to a different spot – where someone won't be able to find us. It's now too dangerous to be here, now that the Death Eaters can find us and everything – "

Klaus interrupted him. "Aren't we going to look for the necklace?"

"What good would the necklace do?"

Klaus stroked Tally's hair back away from her face as she sobbed into his shoulder. "I don't know, but it was obviously important if Trelawney, on her deathbed, found it most important to tell us to find it!"

"Look, she was just a crazy old bat; that's why they only put her in charge of mixing the mashed potatoes. Why the hell should we listen to anything she has to say?"

"Why don't we just give it a try, Farley?" I pleaded with him. "Maybe it's nothing... but then again, maybe there is something to it... It wouldn't hurt just to give it a chance."

He glared at me but finally agreed. We all traipsed back downstairs to where Professor McGonagall lay on the floor in the basement, cold and unmoving. Trying to avoid crying again, Annabelle took the four youngest children away to the corner to play a game, a feeble attempt to keep their minds off all the destruction and death in the house, while the remaining six of us stripped Professor McGonagall's body and looked through everything for a necklace of some sort.

After a half hour's worth of searching, we came up empty-handed. We had gone through everything short of taking off her undergarments, which would have been disgusting, but had still found nothing.

"This is useless. I told you there was no necklace. Trelawney was just hallucinating. Maybe she had thought of when she was younger, and hopefully better looking, and she had had a necklace, or something."

"But she said that Professor McGonagall must have had it today, meaning the teachers probably switched it around, always giving it to somebody else, so no one would find it. That suggests it’s pretty important," Kimberly argued. She pulled her hair into a tight bun, a sign that she was thinking hard. "Maybe someone else had it."

"Why wouldn't the teachers have told us about it? If it was so important, why not mention it at some point or another? Did they think they were all going to be around forever?" Farley paced back and forth over the hardwood floor, running a hand through his hair and looking slightly crazed.

"No, they didn't think that, but probably they figured if less people knew about it – then it'd have less of a chance to 'accidentally' slip out and the Death Eaters would know."

"Why wouldn't they have just told us? This is useless. I think we should just give up and go."

"Farley, stop being such a pessimist."

"Where else are we going to look?!?" he snapped at me. "There was nothing on her person – what else do we do?"

"Hey, guys, I found something," Maverick called, pulling on her jacket.

Klaus and I hurried to kneel beside him. "What is it?"

"It was sewn into her jacket sleeve... It's a piece of paper... but I can't get it out."

"A piece of paper... right. How helpful! It's probably a note for some recipe of McGonagall's Great Grandma Fifi's best chicken casserole or something," Farley grumbled as we tore it out.

Klaus held the paper in his hand. "One-sixty-nine," he read.

I frowned at it. "One-sixty-nine? That's all it says?"

Klaus nodded.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Kimberly asked.

We all shrugged.

"It could go to anything! How useless."

"Farley, stop it. We have to find out what this goes to – and soon."