Alan's dissection of the very nature of Quidditch sounded to the Weasley twins and Lee Jordan like nothing short of shocking heresy. To them, this Muggle-born first-year's brain seemed wired so differently that he might as well have been another species altogether.
And yet, it was precisely this strangeness that made them respect him all the more. His mind always cut into problems from angles so peculiar that they couldn't help but feel a kind of awed admiration.
To finally shake off Filch's prowling, catlike vigilance in the dark, and his increasingly unpredictable patrol routes, the four of them reached a consensus: they needed to open up a completely new, absolutely hidden passageway for their nightly wanderings.
Naturally, command of the mission fell into Alan's hands.
Guided by the draft of his "Optimal Pathway Map of Hogwarts," they slipped out of the familiar common room, skirted past two whispering stone gargoyles, and eventually reached the far end of a deserted corridor on the third floor of the castle.
It was damp and cold there.
Moonlight squeezed in reluctantly through the cracks of a high window, casting pale blotches across the dust-caked stone floor. The air reeked of time-worn decay, the scent of something long sealed away.
At the very end of the corridor loomed a door.
It was an extraordinarily thick oak door, not a single inch of its surface smooth. The entire panel was etched with densely tangled, twisted runes of ancient magic. The glyphs intertwined and knotted together, forming a dizzying magical lattice.
There was no handle to grasp, no keyhole to probe.
It simply stood there in silence, like a giant who had slumbered for centuries, refusing all mortal intrusion.
From the thin seam of the shut door, faint magical waves seeped outward—old, vast, and oppressive enough to make one's heart quail.
"Whoa…"
Fred lowered his voice, though his excitement still trembled through his tone. Rubbing his hands together vigorously, he exhaled a puff of white vapor that quickly vanished in the cold air.
"I'd bet my broom there's some grand secret hidden behind this."
Alan ignored his enthusiasm.
He had already stepped forward, his blue eyes reflecting the intricate glyphs carved into the oak.
Inside his mind—the vast supercomputer he called the Mind Palace—a flood of calculations had already begun.
The data streamed at dizzying speed.
The runes' arrangements were bizarre, defying all known grammatical structures of spellcraft. Alan recognized most of the symbols individually, but strung together, they formed no coherent incantation.
It wasn't a spell.
It looked more like… an encryption algorithm.
A program written in magical logic, awaiting decryption.
"Alohomora."
Alan raised his wand and spoke the most basic unlocking charm.
A faint flash of white light struck the door—and snuffed out instantly, not even leaving a ripple.
He tried several more advanced unlocking sequences, tracing precise symbols with the wand's tip. Each glowing sigil fizzled out on contact with the oak, vanishing as though swallowed by water.
"It seems conventional unlocking won't work on this."
Alan's brows furrowed slightly.
His Mind Palace instantly switched computational modes, abandoning spell-breaking in favor of logical analysis.
He began to dismantle the grammar of the runes, trying to dig into the lowest logical layer of the algorithm in search of a flaw.
Time trickled by in absolute silence.
Alan was utterly immersed, savoring the pure joy of unraveling a puzzle—like a master hacker pitting himself against an impregnable system.
But the Weasley twins behind Alan clearly didn't share his patience.
"How much longer, Alan?"
George's voice carried obvious irritation. He paced back and forth like a caged lion, his shoes rasping against the stone floor with every step.
"Why don't we just use, you know… Reducto, and blast it open?"
"That would bring the entire castle running—including Filch and that mangy cat of his, you straw-brained idiot!"
Fred shot back without mercy.
George choked on the retort, his face turning crimson as his frustration hit the roof. He needed an outlet.
He suddenly raised his foot and, with all his strength, slammed a furious kick into the unyielding oak door.
BANG!
The muffled boom echoed down the corridor.
At the same time, one of Mrs. Weasley's favorite scoldings—the phrase she had yelled at them countless times—burst out of George's throat:
"You bloody dirty sock!"
It was just a thoughtless shout, pure venting. He hadn't expected it to do anything.
But at the very last syllable—on the dragged-out tail of the word sock—
Something happened.
Hummmm!
The countless ancient runes carved into the oak flared to life, all at once. A deep, soft blue light burst across the door, bathing their shocked faces in an eerie glow.
"It reacted!"
Lee Jordan cried out in delight, his eyes as wide as saucers.
But the door didn't swing open, neither inward nor outward.
Instead, with a grinding creak that set their teeth on edge, the entire wall—door and all—began to shift backward as one solid block.
A gaping black opening yawned before them, a void that seemed to swallow all light.
It was bottomless, breathing out a chill, rotten stench.
And before they could even peer inside, a powerful suction force exploded from the darkness!
The stone floor beneath their feet suddenly tilted steeply downward.
"AHHHHH—!"
Their screams stretched into the abyss.
They had no chance to grab hold of anything. Their bodies were swept off balance and slid helplessly into the pitch-black tunnel, carried away down the steep slope.
It felt like being thrown onto a twisting, plunging slide that spun them mercilessly, stealing all sense of direction and light.
The world reeled.
Weightlessness and vertigo crashed into their minds.
No one knew how long the fall lasted. But at last, the chaotic ride came to a brutal end.
They landed hard on a pile of cold, unyielding objects. The impact of their bodies against metal clattered through the darkness in a deafening clang-clang-clang.
Alan groaned, forcing himself upright from the heap of icy scraps. His backside felt like it had been shattered into eight pieces. Grimacing, he rubbed it furiously against the pain.
He quickly scanned their surroundings.
They seemed to have fallen into an abandoned storage room.
All around in the gloom, rusty suits of armor lay toppled in crooked heaps. Many were missing arms or legs, their jagged outlines looming grotesquely in the dim light.
Alan instinctively glanced upward.
The sliding tunnel they had fallen through had already sealed itself shut, blending perfectly into the ceiling above. Silent. Seamless.
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