There are those who have labeled my profession odd, those who would brand people like me as perverts and depraved. I don’t blame them. We are perverts, and we are depraved. We take pleasure in death, even if we don’t consider it edible, like those…Death Comestibles? Death Vittles? Ah, yes, Death Eaters.

But I digress. As you may be able to tell, we coffin makers are a bit removed from the world around us. Yet even we knew the tale of the Boy-Who-Got-Lucky, he who cheated death itself. But no one is immortal, and eventually even that boy died, bringing the Dark Lord with him.

But that boy’s funeral…it was one for the ages, the type of affair everyone in my profession spends their entire lives waiting for. In the end, I held it in a Quidditch stadium; it was the only place with enough room. Half the wizarding world must have been there, all of them anxious for one last glimpse of the Boy Hero.

Yet, there was something odd about the funeral, and it was not until I arrived back home that I realized what it was. Funerals generally act as great uniters; families healing rifts in the name of dear departed Aunt Millie, that sort of thing. This was the first funeral where I had seen a family divided.

They had bright red hair, the lot of them, so garish it was almost orange. I remember thinking that it clashed terribly with the scarlet and gold decorations. They sat with eerie, stone-like stillness, those six boys and their parents; just looking at them made me want to wave a hand in front of their faces and shout “Boo!”

But if their stony silence was extreme, it was nothing compared to what they did when another girl entered. A girl with that same orange hair, who clearly could only walk because a blond, pale-faced boy had his arm about her waist.

Had I only watched the family’s reaction, I might have thought that Satan himself had walked in and torched the stadium. The mother began to cry loudly, screaming incoherent laments into a huge hanky, and her seven men all rushed to comfort her, the lot of them throwing baleful glances over their shoulders at the girl who could only be their sister and daughter.

The child, for her part, seemed not to notice them; it was clearly taking all of her effort merely to place one foot in front of the other. As she and the boy made their painstaking way to their seats, her mother continued to sob half-heartedly, until the effort seemed to have exhausted her.

But the stadium soon filled, and my attention was distracted from the frayed clan. Witches and wizards of every description silently filed in, faces solemn and drawn with grief. Many of them were wearing traditional Gryffindor colors, as if to enforce the decorations already in place. The arena soon morphed into a pulsing mass of scarlet and gold. At the center of it all, suspended high in the air where Quidditch would normally be played, was the coffin. All through the stadium, people gaped at it, and I suspect I even saw a few kisses being blown.

Once all the seats had been filled, people came up one by one to the Trophy Box to make speeches about Harry Potter. By all accounts, he sounded so good as to be boring, not to mention rather moody. Thank God that part was soon over.

As one, the crowd raised their wands to shoot red and gold sparks into the air. I noticed that the girl could not hold up her wand without assistance; the colorless boy had to support her arm, and even then she only managed a few sparks. When the last of the embers had died out, the witches and wizards trooped out as silently as they had come, and then it was over.

+++

The call I was waiting for came much later than expected. Even at Potter’s funeral, I had known that girl was dying, that she had perhaps a week left. But it was a full six months later that the boy’s face appeared in my fire, telling me curtly that he had need of a coffin from me, and that he would take the most expensive of everything, if you please.

I did as ordered, and the girl’s body was brought to me the next day. She had become even frailer in the months since I had seen her at Potter’s funeral. Her skin stretched over her cheekbones with such ferocity that it looked as if it would take a mere jostle to send the bones through the skin, and what few freckles she had kept stood out like chicken pox on her face.

Her funeral was a sorry affair. She needed no Quidditch stadium; indeed, we could have held the ceremony in a broom closet. The boy, I had learned, was a Malfoy, and it was at his family crypt that she was entombed. He was silent as her coffin slid into the stone chamber; silent when the door clanged shut; silent as he shot the requisite sparks into the air.

They said her death killed him too; fragmented his heart. At least, that was the explanation everyone gave when he disappeared the next day without a trace, never to return. But I dismiss this as foolish nonsense. Do not think me cold, but you see I am a maker of coffins. And I know when a tomb has been tampered with. I know when the door has been opened from the outside by a living body. I know what it looks like when that body never came out.