Godric's Hollow was said to be haunted with alarming regularity.
And at this moment, Iain had clearly encountered a ghost in the ordinary, non-metaphorical sense.
He did not feel afraid, however, because he himself was the culprit behind the haunting, the necromancer responsible.
"Those eye sockets are pretty big."
Iain even reached in and poked one of them.
The little skeleton was lying on the floor, both hands covered in dirt, its head covered in dirt, its whole body covered in dirt. The tattered nightdress it wore, one that looked as though it had been worn for years and years, was just as filthy.
"And the soul-fire inside is actually warm..."
This was the first time Iain had ever rummaged around inside a skeleton's skull, and he found it rather surprising. Perhaps his behavior had made the little skeleton uncomfortable, because it shrank back a few steps.
Then,
it stood up inside the room.
Click.
With a soft sound, the locked door was opened from the inside by the skeleton.
The hinges gave a faint creak, like a joint that had not been moved in years. The door slowly swung inward, revealing behind it a figure somewhat shorter than the handle itself.
A glossy-eyed little skeleton.
It was noticeably shorter than one-meter-sixty-eight Iain, probably only around one-meter-fifty-eight or so, like an underdeveloped teenage skeleton.
"So you're the one that slipped through the cracks and didn't crawl out of your grave to help fix the house today!"
At that moment, Iain had already figured out who it was.
The little skeleton tilted its head, its jaw moving once with a soft click. There was no fear, no hostility, not even any extra movement. It simply stood there with its head tilted, looking at Iain with those two dark hollow sockets, as though trying to work out who he was.
"I hereby name you Lazy Little Skeleton! How exactly did you sneak into this room to slack off?"
Something in Iain's brain suddenly connected.
He pushed the little skeleton gently aside, not roughly, just enough to move it out of the way, and then rushed into the locked room that had apparently been sealed for who knew how many years.
The room was not large.
A single bed.
A wardrobe.
A writing desk.
A chair.
The curtains were floral, somewhat similar to those in the room next door that Iain had chosen for himself.
The bedding had been folded neatly, the pillow plumped up soft, as though someone came to straighten it every now and then.
"So it didn't get in through the window?"
Iain inspected the firmly latched window, then searched the entire room from top to bottom. The little skeleton just stood quietly beside him and watched until Iain pulled up the bedspread and crawled underneath the bed.
"Aha! Found it!"
Iain discovered a hole beneath the bed.
The floorboards had been chewed through into an uneven circular opening, the edges jagged and messy, as though something had gnawed away at them bit by bit.
Peering down into the hole, he could see a tunnel descending below. The walls of the passage were covered in marks.
Not claw marks.
Finger-bone marks.
Dense.
Layer upon layer.
Like someone had dug underground for a very, very long time using all ten fingers.
"No, wait. You can dig like that? Better than the succubus I keep in my dream?"
At last, Iain understood why the revived little skeleton had not crawled out of its grave like the others.
Yes.
The spirit sleeping in the grave his so-called senior sister had told him to hire first had not failed to awaken at all.
It had awakened early.
Its first act simply had not been crawling out of the grave.
Its first act had been tunneling.
It had dug its way from beneath the grave all the way here.
Heaven only knew how much this little skeleton had loved digging when it was alive.
"But that still doesn't make sense! This is the second floor! How did you skip the first floor and dig straight to the second?"
Iain stared into the bottomless-looking tunnel, baffled.
This thing had digging skills on the same level as the succubus from his dreams.
"Click?"
The little skeleton tilted its head at the fussing Iain, its jaw moving again with a small click. Unfortunately, skeleton language was not something a young wizard could understand.
"I get it now! It's not scientific and it's not even pseudo-scientific, but it is magical. You're a magic skeleton!"
Iain slapped his super-brain and achieved instant enlightenment on the spot.
At that, the little skeleton's upper and lower jaws parted, closed, then parted again.
This time it did not make just one sharp click.
It made a series of rhythmic clattering sounds, as though trying to produce some sort of proper speech.
Sadly, nobody could understand it.
"I have to take you back to the graveyard!"
Iain explained that this little thing should really be returned to the eternal home of the dead. After all, skeletons sleeping in graveyards definitely did not count as wild skeletons you were allowed to take home.
That was far more serious than abducting cats or dogs.
"Clack! Clack!"
At once, the little skeleton reacted. It placed one hand on Iain's arm.
Then both hands.
Its finger bones hooked around Iain's forearm.
Not tight.
But not loose either.
The gesture looked exactly like a child afraid of being abandoned, clutching at an adult's sleeve, not speaking, not crying, just holding on.
Iain's heart softened.
Only for a second.
"Damn it! I can't resist a pet that's this niche and this adorable!"
He squeezed his eyes shut hard. It was clear he was deeply conflicted.
"Listen to me. It's not that I don't want to take you. It's that the school won't allow it. Really. Even if I brought you there, Filch, the future caretaker at my school..."
"He's vicious. He'd definitely throw you out of the castle."
"That man panics if someone so much as keeps a baby dragon. What do you think he'd do if he saw a skeleton walking around the school corridors?"
"Filch would absolutely tell Professor Dumbledore! And Professor Dumbledore is very strict when it comes to school rules!"
Iain tried to reason with the little skeleton, intending to come back for it after graduation. No necromancer worth the name could refuse the idea of a magical skeleton as a pet.
"So just stay here peacefully. Then when I graduate, move into Hogwarts, and become Supreme Commander of Hogwarts, I'll come back for you and make you my Grand Marshal of Hogwarts. How does that sound?"
Iain began painting a glorious future, gently prying the little skeleton's hands off his arm, talking and persuading and unleashing every bit of eloquence he had in an effort to tempt it.
However,
the little skeleton's jaw moved once.
Click.
Then it put both hands back on Iain's arm.
"Oh, come on. You're making this really difficult for me."
Just then, Iain's waistband loosened slightly.
The diary slipped out from where it had been jammed behind his belt, nimble as an eel wriggling free between fingers. Iain lunged to grab it and missed. The diary had already floated up into the air, opened itself, and begun flipping through its pages with a dry rustling sound, despite there being no wind indoors.
Ink emerged on the blank page.
It formed slowly, one stroke at a time, as though intentionally showing off the birth of every single word.
Hahaha, this is far too amusing. Little one, as a matter of fact, Hogwarts does allow students to bring certain unusual pets to school!
As long as they are not on the prohibited list!
Toward the end, the diary's handwriting could not hide its excitement at all, like an enthusiastic spectator who had found a spectacle to its liking and was now actively tempting a young wizard newly arrived in the magical world.
"Prohibited list?"
Iain's eyes lit up.
He immediately felt as though he had found a loophole in the rules.
The logic was simple.
It was entirely true that Iain was a rule-abiding person.
That did not mean he was not equipped with a pair of eyes very good at spotting the gaps between those rules.
As a wizard,
it was perfectly normal for Iain's eyes to have ideas, thoughts, and even a moral philosophy all their own.