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𝐀 𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐒𝐇𝐔𝐅𝐅𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐄𝐂𝐇𝐎𝐄𝐃 𝐀𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐀𝐒𝐄𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 as the group of witches and wizards all awoke at the same time. Their sleepy eyes blinked in unison as they tried to adjust to the torch light reflecting off the walls, but upon seeing one another, they instinctively scrambled back as far as they could go.

"Stay away from me!" Jesse shouted, his hands magnetizing to the wall behind him.

"What the hell just happened?" Jackson cried, her back pushed into the corner of the room.

"Whoever's sick idea of a joke that was better come forward now!" Luc yelled, his knees pressed against the cold, cement floor.

The only one who remained in the middle of the room was Thomas, along with the body of the dead auror. He watched the others in confusion as they pressed themselves flat against the walls and manically snapped their heads to-and-fro.

"Did I miss something?" Thomas asked with furrowed brows.

"Miss something?" Madelynn responded. "Did you not have a nightmare, or-or a hallucination, or whatever the hell that thing was?"

Thomas shook his head no with his mouth pressed into a flat line. "What did you guys see?"

"My whole team was dead on the pitch!" Jackson answered.

"My nanny was murdered!" Luc replied.

"A bomb dropped on my house, killing my entire family!" Willow retorted, holding back tears as the image of flames once more entered her mind. She paused to take a deep breath before saying, "But at least one good thing came out of it."

"And what's that?" Thomas asked.

"I know who the killer is."

Everybody crowded closer in surprise, mindful to keep space between each other and to not allow anyone behind their back. Their eyes were glued to Willow as they waited for her response.

"My nightmare told me not to trust Colonel Mustard," Willow continued, her eyes wide and her mouth set firm.

"What? I'm not the killer!" Madelynn shouted as she threw her hands up into the air in disbelief. Her cheeks flushed red under the heavy stares of everyone else in the room. "My nightmare told me not to trust Miss White!"

"And mine told me not to trust Professor Plum," Penny replied.

"Well, mine told me not to trust Miss Scarlet!" Jesse said next.

"That's funny, because mine told me not to trust Mr. Green," Jackson responded.

"Let me start by saying that I don't trust any of you," Luc added. "But my nightmare told me not to trust Miss Peacock."

"And you guys said you couldn't trust me," Thomas reminded them with a snide smile. "My name wasn't mentioned once."

"I trust you less because you didn't have a nightmare!" Luc retorted, making the smile disappear from Thomas's face.

The group of witches and wizards all began shouting and gesturing madly at each other, their voices filling the tiny space with threats and accusations. Some of them came dangerously close to throwing punches, but they were all still fearful of getting too close to one another.

While the rest of the group screamed themselves hoarse, Penny began investigating the basement. It was clear to her that their "nightmares" had been staged and she aimed to find the culprit. It was difficult to see with the torch light being intermittently cut off by moving bodies, but Penny's eyes eventually caught sight of something in the corner of the room near the stairs. As she leaned down to pick the item up, she noticed that it was a small glass vial. The vial was mostly empty, save a small drop of a pearly liquid that Penny didn't immediately recognize. It wasn't until she brought the vial to her nose that she knew exactly what had happened.

"Guys!" Penny shouted, her small voice surprisingly overshadowing everyone else's shouts. They all simultaneously shut up and turned to look at her. "I think I figured it out."

"Figured what out?" Jackson snapped.

"What caused our 'nightmares'," Penny answered. She handed the vial off to Jackson, who took it hesitantly, careful not to touch Penny's fingers. "Smell this."

Jackson slowly lifted the vial to her nose, her eyes trained on Penny the entire time in case it was some sort of a trick. When her nose was only inches from the vial, a strong scent of lemon, pear, fresh parchment, and wet grass wafted into her nostrils, forcing her lips into a sudden smile.

"Give that to me," Luc demanded, snatching the vial from Jackson's hand. He, too, smelt the vial and was immediately struck by the scent of forest, rain, lavender, coffee, and cinnamon.

The vial was passed around the group until it ended at Willow, who took one sniff and was consumed by the scent of strawberries, chocolate, and and new books. "It's amortentia," Willow announced with a confused look on her face.

"You're somewhat correct," Penny informed her, taking the vial back. "I'm not a potions master, but it seems to be a mix of amortentia and another potion that I can't identify."

"Wait a second, I remember smelling that in my nightmare," Madelynn said, alighting a series of gasps from the rest of the group as they all slowly came to the same realization. "Why would somebody use a love potion to create something so evil and vile?"

"To lull us into a state of false security," Penny answered. "Am I correct in assuming that your nightmares all started out fairly happy before they took a dark turn?"

"I got to see my sister and my aunt," Jesse said with a nod and a sad smile.

"I got to spend time with my mothers," Madelynn added. "You know, before they tried to kill me."

"But why did they turn?" Willow asked. She drummed her pointer finger against her chin in contemplation. "If there's really a murderer somewhere in the Shack and they did this to us, wouldn't it be easier to just keep us all unconscious?"

"Maybe they don't want us dead," Madelynn offered. "Maybe they just want to scare us."

"I think Colonel Mustard is onto something..." Thomas said, his eyes lighting up.

"Scare us from what?" Jackson asked. "And why do they want to keep us alive if the whole point of this is for the host to meet the last person standing?"

"Maybe the host doesn't want to kill us because they want us to kill each other," Luc suggested. "Some sort of sick entertainment."

"Could be..." Penny replied, her eyes wandering the room as she settled deep into her thoughts. "Think, what happened right before we all went unconscious?"

The room was silent for a moment as everyone pushed their brains to remember. Several minutes later, it was Madelynn who had the answer.

"The initials!" she shouted once the thought struck her.

"A.S.," Jesse whispered as he, too, remembered.

"That's it!" Willow announced, drawing all eyes to her. "We're getting closer to the host. That must be their initials! Why else would they knock us all out and try to scare us? My nightmare didn't go downhill until I started to question where I was and whether it was real. Until I remembered you guys and the initials!"

"That's how mine went too," Penny agreed. "That must be it. But if those are their initials, what is their name?"

"Abraham...Shoe..." Jesse said slowly as he tried to put a name together.

"There's a million names that start with 'A' and a million that start with 'S'," Luc snapped. "We're not going to figure out what it stands for without finding more evidence."

"Oh, is someone finally on board with looking for clues?" Willow teased Luc.

"Only because that piece of shit made me witness my nanny's murder," Luc retorted. There was still a fire in his eyes from when he awoke.

"But what if they have more of whatever potion that was?" Jackson said, creating a chilling silence in the room. "If we keep looking into them, we could end up unconscious in some hellish nightmare again."

Penny once more examined the vial in her hands, pressing her eye close to the glass to peer inside. "If I had my books with me, I could figure out what it is and create a counter-potion for it."

"There's all those books in the parlour," Thomas pointed out. "Maybe they could be of some use."

"No harm in looking," Penny replied with a shrug of her shoulders as she followed Thomas up the stairs.

One-by-one, everyone slowly followed after, leaving Jackson alone with the body.

"Um, guys?" Jackson called up to the group, making them pause on the steps. "What about the body?"

"Might as well leave it there," Jesse answered. "They tend to move on their own anyways."

Jackson shrugged her shoulders and followed the rest of the group up the stairs. She shut the door to the basement behind her, bathing the corpse in darkness.

"We don't actually know any of each other's names here," Jackson heard Luc saying as she joined the rest of the group in the main hallway. "For all we know, A.S. could be one of us."

"But why would the killer knock themselves unconscious too?" Willow asked.

"Not all of us were unconscious," Luc responded, pointing his glare at Thomas.

"I was unconscious!" Thomas defended himself. "I just didn't have a nightmare like the rest of you."

"What did you see, then?" Madelynn asked.

"Nothing," Thomas said with a shrug of his shoulders and an innocent look on his face. "Just blackness until I awoke."

Suddenly, Thomas was struck with a strange feeling that something was missing.

"Where the hell is my cat?" Thomas muttered to himself, surveying the hallway for the black, fluffy creature. "Mr. Boddy!"

After a few calls, Thomas heard the familiar padding of Mr. Boddy's feet and smiled in relief when he caught sight of his feline friend exiting the parlour.

"There you are," Thomas said, rushing to pick Mr. Boddy up and cradle him against his body. As he squished Mr. Boddy to his chest, his eyes caught sight of something that made his face turn completely white.

"What's wrong, Mr. Wadsworth?" Madelynn asked, catching the expression on Thomas's frightened face. Everybody's attention turned to Thomas, their faces mirroring confused and worried looks.

"I think you had better see for yourselves," Thomas said, his words coming out in a whisper.

The witches and wizards all immediately rushed for the parlour, cramming against each other in the doorframe to get a look. They had already been accustomed to seeing dead bodies during their day and a half in the Shrieking Shack, but they weren't prepared for this. Jesse turned away, covering his mouth with his hand to hold back vomit, and Jackson leaned against the doorframe to prevent herself from fainting.

Three bodies were splayed around the parlour; two boys and one girl. One of the boys was lying on his back on the floor, his face battered in to the point that it was nearly unrecognizable. A lead pipe drenched in blood laid next to him, with remnants of brain matter stuck to the end of it. The girl was hung from the ceiling by a noose, her body slowly twisting with the rope, like a puppet on a string. Her neck was contorted so badly that they could see the top vertebrae of her spine.

The most gruesome of all, however, was the second boy. He laid not far from the first, with a pair of garden shears firmly embedded in his neck. His entire face and chest were painted with his own blood, and his head sat a little farther from his neck than it should have. Nobody dared to venture close enough to check, but it looked like somebody had attempted to decapitate him.

"Looks like the killer was busy while we were asleep..." Jackson muttered with wide eyes. Her flushed cheeks were a huge contrast from the rest of her pale face.

"That's six bodies total now," Madelynn sighed, her eyes flickering around the room to avoid staring at any one body for too long.

"Does anybody know who any of them are?" Luc asked. He tried to examine the bodies for any signs of familiarity, but like Madelynn, it was difficult for him to stare at them for more than a couple seconds.

"I recognize the boy with the...the, um...the boy on the left," Willow began to say, a wave of nausea overcoming her when she tried to describe the boy with the garden shears in his neck. "He was a Ravenclaw prefect. His name was Lee."

"And the girl was a Gryffindor," Jesse added. "She sat in my compartment on the Hogwarts Express during first year. I never really saw her much after that, but I remember she was nice."

Due to the state of the other boy's face, it was hard for the group to surmise his identity. After a prolonged silence in which the group played a mental game of "not it", Thomas set Mr. Boddy down on the ground, sighed, and stepped forward to investigate.

Thomas tiptoed around the carnage, careful to duck when he came to the girl's body, and knelt down beside the boy with no face. After taking a deep breath and wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead, Thomas began to turn out the boy's pockets for any signs of identification.

"Have you found anything?" Willow called, pushing herself on her toes to see over the rest of the group.

"No, not yet," Thomas answered, but as he said this, something caught his eye. The boy's left sleeve was pulled up to his elbow and something black on his forearm peeked out from underneath. Thomas slowly lifted the sleeve higher, turning the boy's arm to get a better look. "Holy shit, he has a Dark Mark."

"A Dark Mark?" Jackson repeated. "Like the Death Eaters have?"

"Yeah, he must be one of them," Thomas answered, turning to look at the group with his hand still holding the boy's wrist. When he met their faces, he was confused to see the terrified expressions they held, and even more confused when he realized that they were slowly backing out of the room. Thomas was about to ask what was wrong when he felt something grab his arm.

Turning back to face the body, Thomas was terrified to see that the hand he had been gripping onto was now gripping onto him. He was even more terrified when the body began to sit up, its eyeless face staring directly into Thomas's soul. Frozen to his spot, Thomas could hear other movement in the room and he instinctively knew that it wasn't the witches and wizards in the doorway.

The girl hanging by the noose began to frantically kick her legs back and forth, the rope fraying under her weight until she eventually dropped, landing with a sickening thud on the floor. The nearly-decapitated boy lifted himself from the ground, his hands holding tightly onto his head to keep it in place as he rose to his feet.

Within seconds, Thomas was surrounded, and the only thing that could be heard within the Shack was a collective scream from the witches and wizards watching, "INFERI!"

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AN: And the gang is back together again! The way I held out from ending that chapter with, "Holy crap, Leonard's a zombie!"...(if you get that reference, you're even cooler in my book than I already consider you to be). Grad school started up for me again so updates will likely still be slow, thanks in advance for your patience and hope you guys are all having a good start to your school year if you're in school!

Any new theories on the killer(s)?