By the time the trolley witch comes by, they’ve finished two games—Harry lost both of them—and Padma Patil has taken the last empty seat in the compartment. When she saw Harry’s book on cauldrons, she asked him about it, and now they’re happily debating whether the tin percentage in a standard pewter cauldron has any effect on the viscosity of potions brewed in it when the door slides open and everyone rushes to order candies. Harry stocks up on Ice Mice and Susan buys a really alarming amount of Chocolate Frogs.
“Where’s your familiar?” Neville asks, and Harry winces before sharing the story of Hermione’s threat about Bear. This meets with universal disapproval, and Harry gets his trunk out and pulls Bear out of it, much to Bear’s relief. The big dog does a happy dance in the limited space of the compartment, sniffs and licks everyone, and whuffles at Harry for an ear scratch. Harry’s more relieved than he expected to have Bear around and no one else seems to mind him a bit.
Although Padma does ask if he is really a grim. Harry honestly says he doesn’t know.
The rain thickens as the train speeds further north. The group settles down a bit, with Pansy napping against the window, Neville carefully pruning some kind of red cactus, Faye writing in a journal, and Terry, Zach, Padma, and Harry all reading. Susan seems amused by all of them and pulls out a sketchpad and set of charcoals. Bear just naps on the floor.
Harry’s just thinking they’re probably close to Hogsmeade and he should go change out of his blue robe and into the uniform when the train begins to slow. Everyone looks up, confused. “We’re not there yet, no lights,” Terry reports, peering out the window.
Faye nudges Pansy. “Hey, wake up.”
Pansy comes awake easily. She frowns around.
Harry got up and stuck his head into the corridor. All up and down the train, other people are doing the same. “Don’t see anything,” he reports.
The train jolts to a stop, throwing Harry back into his seat. The door slides shut with a bang. Then, very suddenly, all the lights go out.
“Lumos,” says Pansy, and wandlight fills the compartment. Everyone looks anxious in its strange angular shadows.
Terry presses his face flat to the window. “Pansy, put your light out—”
“Nox!”
“I can see something moving out there,” Terry says.
Distantly, someone screams.
“Light your wands,” Harry says. There’s a scramble as people whip out wands and do as he said; even Neville, his hand trembling, gets the lumos charm to work. “Anyone know a locking charm?”
“I do,” Padma says briskly, dousing her wand with a shake and pointing it at the door—
Before she can cast anything, the door slides slowly open.
Standing in the doorway, illuminated by their wandlight, is a cloaked figure that towers to the ceiling. Its face is completely hidden beneath its hood. Harry's eyes dart downward, his stomach contracts. There’s a hand protruding from the cloak, a glistening, grayish, slimy-looking and scabbed hand, like something dead that decayed in water…
But it’s visible only for a split second. As though the creature beneath the cloak feels Harry's gaze, the hand is suddenly withdrawn into the folds of its black cloak.
Bear whimpers. Harry glances at him; the enormous dog is curled into a tiny ball, pressed against the outer wall of the train and scrabbling at the floor as he tries to get further away.
And then the thing beneath the hood, whatever it was, draws a long, slow, rattling breath, as though it’s trying to suck something more than air from its surroundings.
An intense cold sweeps over them all. Harry feels his own breath catch in his chest. The cold goes deeper than his skin. It’s inside his chest, inside his very heart…
Harry's eyes roll up into his head. He can’t see. He’s drowning in cold. There’s a rushing in his ears as though of water. He’s being dragged downward, the roaring growing louder…
And then, from far away, he hears screaming, terrible, terrified, pleading screams. He wants to help whoever it is, he tries to move his arms, but can’t… he’s so cold, too cold, he’s going to drift away in it–
"Harry! Harry! Are you all right?"
Someone is slapping his face.
"W – what?"
Harry opens his eyes; there are lanterns above him, and the floor shakes. The Hogwarts Express is moving again and the lights are back on. He seems to have slid out of his seat onto the floor. Looming over him are the worried faces of Faye, Pansy, and Neville. Bear’s black furry head is on the floor right next to Harry’s, and as Harry starts to move, Bear jumps up and starts frantically licking Harry’s face, his tail wagging so hard it keeps whacking audibly into Zach and Padma’s knees.
Judging by the way Pansy’s shaking her hand, she’s the one that slapped him.
“Ow, Pansy,” Harry rasps, pushing Bear aside and touching his cheek.
“You wouldn’t wake up,” she says angrily, and somehow Harry sees that she’s angry because she was actually afraid.
“What… what happened?” he asks, struggling to climb back into his seat. Bear wedges his shoulders under Harry’s arm and helps lift. That horrible cold is lingering and his body feels weak and sluggish.
They exchange glances. “Well—you sort of collapsed,” says Faye, “and then…”
“B-Bear scared it off,” Neville says in a hushed voice. “H-he st-st-stood up and luh-let out this growl…”
“Scariest thing I’ve ever heard,” Terry says. “Gave me all-over goosebumps, it did.”
“He faced right off with it. Went from cowering in the corner to standing there ready to throw down in about three seconds flat,” says Faye.
“He’s a very good familiar,” Susan says, giving Bear a rub on his head. Panting, the dog leans into her touch. Harry can still feel him trembling slightly. “It just sort of stopped, and then I, uh, I threw a chocolate frog at it—” Terry sniggers, “and then Bear snapped his teeth at it and it left.”
Harry leans down to hug Bear. “What was that thing?” he says into the dog’s—the grim’s—ruff.
Zach looks somber. “A dementor. One of the guards of Azkaban.”
Harry shudders. “It was awful… Who, uh, who screamed?”
“What d’you mean?” says Faye.
“I heard someone screaming…”
Pansy shakes her head. “No one screamed, Harry.”
Great, now they’re all thinking he’s a nutter.
Terry frowns. “I read something about this. Dementors feed on despair and misery—sometimes, if people have a repressed traumatic memory, a dementor can make them relive it. Maybe that’s what happened?”
Harry doesn’t think he has any repressed memories, but how would he know if he did? It’s a better explanation than thinking he’s nuts, anyway, so when Susan shoves a chocolate frog at him and orders him to eat it, he does so after confirming it’s not the one that hit the dementor in the face.
After he finishes the frog, he takes his turn going off to the bathroom to change. Earlier, he packed his dark red button-down, silk school robe, and brown linen trousers to make changing easier. He’s glad now that he did. The cold is still gripping his bones so he leaves on the silk hose and undershirt he wore in the morning beneath his Muggle-style clothes, and pulls out his gloves, too.
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