When Brian lifted the covers, every hair on his body stood on end-his quilt and sheets had encountered a human head they should never have encountered in their lives.
Yes, wrapped in the soft quilt beneath which he slept every night was a pale skull. Judging by the size of the bones, it looked very much like a woman's skull. Its empty eye sockets resembled black holes, yet its two tightly clenched rows of teeth strangely reflected a variety of colors.
Blue, brown, bright green, ginger-oh, heavens. Brian finally saw where those colors came from: the differently colored wing cases of the beetles packed inside!
"Good heavens, what on earth is this-" Brian's heart raced.
This thing couldn't be Rita Skeeter's head, could it?
Although that sounded unlikely, magic very much existed in this world. Accounts of people who were alive and well one moment turning into bare white bones the next were common in the books in the Hogwarts Library-where had all these beetles come from?
Brian took a deep breath, pinched his nose, and floated the skull into the air with a Levitation Charm. Sensing their surroundings moving, the beetles beat their wings and scurried everywhere. Their bodies kept colliding and squeezing together, almost spilling out of the skull's mouth!
But the beetles still failed to win their freedom. Brian had already discovered that the skull's teeth were actually made of some special transparent material. Although it looked almost as though nothing was there, it did indeed serve to separate the skull's interior from the outside.
Examining it more closely, he felt that the skull did not seem to be a real head, either. Brian had seen a real human skull in Professor Moody's office, and there were considerable differences between the two. He breathed a sigh of