Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“The Room of Requirement,” repeated Harry. “Were you trying to get in there?”

“I—well—I didn’t know students knew about—”

“Not all of them do,” said Harry. “But what happened? You screamed… it sounded as though you were hurt…”

“I—well,” said Professor Trelawney, drawing her shawls around her defensively and staring down at him with her vastly magnified eyes. “I wished to—ah—deposit certain—um—personal items in the Room…” And she muttered something about “nasty accusations.”

“Right,” said Harry, glancing down at the sherry bottles. “But you couldn’t get in and hide them?”

He found this very odd; the Room had opened for him, after all, when he had wanted to hide the Half-Blood Prince’s book.

“Oh, I got in all right,” said Professor Trelawney, glaring at the wall. “But there was somebody already in there.”

“Somebody in—? Who?” demanded Harry. “Who was in there?”

“I have no idea,” said Professor Trelawney, looking slightly taken aback at the urgency in Harry’s voice. “I walked into the Room and I heard a voice, which has never happened before in all my years of hiding—of using the Room, I mean.”

“A voice? Saying what?”

“I don’t know that it was saying anything,” said Professor Trelawney. “It was… whooping.”

“Whooping?”

“Gleefully,” she said, nodding.

Harry stared at her.

“Was it male or female?”

“I would hazard a guess at male,” said Professor Trelawney.

“And it sounded happy?”

“Very happy,” said Professor Trelawney sniffily.

“As though it was celebrating?”

“Most definitely.”

“And then—?”

“And then I called out, ‘Who’s there?’”

“You couldn’t have found out who it was without asking?” Harry asked her, slightly frustrated.

“The Inner Eye,” said Professor Trelawney with dignity, straightening her shawls and many strands of glittering beads, “was fixed upon matters well outside the mundane realms of whooping voices.”

“Right,” said Harry hastily; he had heard about Professor Trelawney’s Inner Eye all too often before. “And did the voice say who was there?”

“No, it did not,” she said. “Everything went pitch black and the next thing I knew, I was being hurled headfirst out of the Room!”

“And you didn’t see that coming?” said Harry, unable to help himself.

“No, I did not, as I say, it was pitch—”

She stopped and glared at him suspiciously.

“I think you’d better tell Professor Dumbledore,” said Harry. “He ought to know Malfoy’s celebrating—I mean, that someone threw you out of the Room.”

To his surprise, Professor Trelawney drew herself up at this suggestion, looking haughty.

“The Headmaster has intimated that he would prefer fewer visits from me,” she said coldly. “I am not one to press my company upon those who do not value it. If Dumbledore chooses to ignore the warnings the cards show—”

Her bony hand closed suddenly around Harry’s wrist.

“Again and again, no matter how I lay them out—”

And she pulled a card dramatically from underneath her shawls.

“—the lightning-struck tower,” she whispered. “Calamity. Disaster. Coming nearer all the time…”

“Right,” said Harry again. “Well… I still think you should tell Dumbledore about this voice and everything going dark and being thrown out of the Room…”

“You think so?” Professor Trelawney seemed to consider the matter for a moment, but Harry could tell that she liked the idea of retelling her little adventure.

“I’m going to see him right now,” said Harry. “I’ve got a meeting with him. We could go together.”

“Oh, well, in that case,” said Professor Trelawney with a smile. She bent down, scooped up her sherry bottles and dumped them unceremoniously in a large blue and white vase standing in a nearby niche.

“I miss having you in my classes, Harry,” she said soulfully, as they set off together. “You were never much of a Seer… but you were a wonderful Object…”

Harry did not reply; he had loathed being the Object of Professor Trelawney’s continual predictions of doom.

“I am afraid,” she went on, “that the nag—I’m sorry, the centaur—knows nothing of cartomancy. I asked him—one Seer to another—had he not, too, sensed the distant vibrations of coming catastrophe? But he seemed to find me almost comical. Yes, comical!”

Her voice rose rather hysterically and Harry caught a powerful whiff of sherry even though the bottles had been left behind.

“Perhaps the horse has heard people say that I have not inherited my great-great-grandmother’s gift. Those rumours have been bandied about by the jealous for years. You know what I say to such people, Harry? Would Dumbledore have let me teach at this great school, put so much trust in me all these years, had I not proved myself to him?”

Harry mumbled something indistinct.