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It was an incredible sight. The dungeon
was full of hundreds of pearly-white, translucent people, mostly
drifting around a crowded dance floor, waltzing to the dreadful,
quavering sound of thirty musical saws, played by an orchestra on a
raised, black-draped platform. A chandelier overhead blazed
midnight-blue with a thousand more black candles. Their breath rose
in a mist before them; it was like stepping into a freezer. "Shall
we have a look around?" Harry suggested, wanting to warm up his
feet. "Careful not to walk through anyone," said Ron nervously, and
they set off around the edge of the dance floor. They passed a group
of gloomy nuns, a ragged man wearing chains, and the Fat Friar, a
cheerful Hufflepuff ghost, who was talking to a knight with an arrow
sticking out of his forehead. Harry wasn't surprised to see that the
Bloody Baron, a gaunt, staring Slytherin ghost covered in silver
bloodstains, was being given a wide berth by the other ghosts. "Oh,
no," said Hermione, stopping abruptly. "Turn back, turn back, I
don't want to talk to Moaning Myrtle -" "Who?" said Harry as they backtracked quickly. "She haunts one of
the toilets in the girls' bathroom on the first floor," said
Hermione. "She haunts a toilet?" |
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"Yes. It's been out-of-order all year because she keeps having tantrums and flooding the place. I never went in there anyway if I could avoid it; it's awful trying to have a pee with her wailing at you -"
"Look, food!" said Ron. On the other
side of the dungeon was a long table, also covered in black velvet.
They approached it eagerly but next moment had stopped in their
tracks, horrified. The smell was quite disgusting. Large, rotten
fish were laid on handsome silver platters; cakes, burned
charcoal-black, were heaped on salvers; there was a great maggoty
haggis, a slab of cheese covered in furry green mold and, in pride
of place, an enormous gray cake in the shape of a tombstone, with
tar-like icing forming the words, Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington
died 31st October, 1492 Harry watched, amazed, as a portly ghost
approached the table, crouched low, and walked through it, his mouth
held wide so that it passed through one of the stinking salmon. "Can
you taste it if you walk though it?" Harry asked him. "Almost," said the ghost sadly, and he drifted away.
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