In Slytherin's underground Common Room, Jerry raced from the Owlery straight to his Dormitory like an arrow loosed from a bow. He carefully examined the package Ms. Rosier had sent him.
Grindelwald had been right. There was little useful information in the package, because Jerry couldn't read most of the manuscripts at all!
Most of the manuscripts were copies the Pure-Blood Party had made of documents left behind at what they suspected was an abandoned Apostles Base. The writing looked like something from another world: obscure pictographs, some of them apparently Hyperborean, a script long since lost. Jerry could understand only a tiny portion of the package, including the account of Agatha Shipton.
That account was a diary written by Serappan Vijay, an Indian police officer who lived in the River Trent valley, south of the Pennines. Perhaps fear and unease had kept him from telling anyone what he had experienced, leaving him no choice but to put the secrets buried in his heart onto paper.
"June 11, 1983."
"The police station where I work received another urgent call for help from local residents. Two more children and a woman had vanished under mysterious circumstances. The locals were convinced the evil witch in the supposedly haunted black Woods to the south was responsible. At first, we paid little attention to such claims. People had reported ghosts in the forest before, and we had even organized several searches."
"Toward evening, the sky was dim and a fine rain was falling. Just as I was about to leave work, several panicked residents burst into the station, claiming they had seen the missing children in the forest. When we learned that several families had already ventured deep into the woods to search for their loved ones, we had no choice but to gather