IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTES: This story is the third part of a three-part story. The other two parts, both completed, can be found on my profile. If this is your first visit to my Lost trilogy, you may have to read the other two parts first: all the same, welcome, and I hope you enjoy it.

If you've already read part one and two, welcome back. It's great to see you again. Now, onwards!

Lost: One Godson, Answers to Harry

--------------------------------

There was an old house on a hill in the village of Little Hangleton. They called it the Riddle house, even though the Riddle family had not lived their for many years, because of a mysterious murder that had taken place there about five decades before.

Frank Bryce was the man who kept the gardens in order at the old house. Not because they needed to be kept in order but because he had been the gardener there for over fifty years, and at his age there was not much room for adaptation.

One day, Frank saw a man coming through the garden to meet him. This was an unusual occurrence in itself, as no one lived in the old house and the owner only came to inspect it about once a year. But there was something about this man that struck Frank as unusual. Perhaps it was the unnatural sheen of his silver-blonde hair, tied back from his face with a black ribbon. Perhaps it was the paleness of his skin, the cold and calculating look in his eye, or the undeniable sense of wealth that radiated off him. Perhaps it was the long black cloak he wore overtop of his crisp green suit. But Frank did not think him in the least bit ordinary, nor did he think he liked this man in the slightest.

The man, who introduced himself only as Malfoy, told Frank that the house was now under his ownership – he had purchased it the day before – but he would not be living in it, merely keeping it in reserve for future use. In the meantime, Frank would be allowed to keep his job as the gardener of the Old house.

"A caretaker will now be living in the house to keep it in good order," he said to Frank in a condescending voice. "And I am having a wall built around the estate to protect my privacy. Your cottage will be within these walls and I do not expect you to allow anyone in or out of them without the prior approval of the caretaker. Apart from that, nothing will change for you. You will continue the gardening just as you have always done, to keep up appearances, you see, and, as always, you will receive your pay once a week, from the caretaker."

And then, with a faint sneer that might have been intended as a smile, the man turned on his heels and left. Frank leaned on his spade for a few minutes to ponder this new adjustment, then he went back to his digging. He made an effort that week to encourage the roses blooming along the front path, but, as the man had promised, nothing seemed to have changed at all.

Indeed, the only disruption was that in the early hours of every morning, a number of dull-looking men came to the estate and then disappeared by the evening. They were labouring to build the wall that would encircle the Riddle house and the gardens, but they never spoke to Frank, and he did not invite their conversation while he tended to the hedges nearby. In less than a month, the wall was built, a long stone barrier that snaked across the horizon, making Frank feel strangely claustrophobic because it blocked his view of the village. But there was no one to complain to and he did not fancy complaining anyway, so he tried to ignore the wall.

As for the mysterious Mr Malfoy himself: Once the wall was complete, Frank never saw him again.

The caretaker that Frank had been told about appeared in due time. Frank never saw him arrive – he was simply there one day, just after the wall had been finished, as if he had always lived in the old house. He was a small, balding man with a pointed nose and of all the changes that had taken place, Frank liked this one the least. The caretaker's name was Mr Pettigrew and he rarely left the Riddle house, for which Frank was very glad, because Pettigrew made Frank very uncomfortable. Petttigrew kept all the curtains in the house shut tight, and peered out between them, watching the old man limping across the lawn, carrying his gardening bag under his arm.

A month went by, and Frank got used to the wall around the Riddle house and the prying caretaker. In the village of Little Hangleton, talk was abound about the Riddle house's new owner, and Frank was invited for drinks for the first time in nearly fifty years in the hope that he could provide details about the absent Mr Malfoy. Frank, however, told them nothing, and the villagers eventually got bored and stopped pestering him.

Two months went by, and then three, and it was in the fourth month since Mr Malfoy had purchased the Riddle house that Frank looked up from tending to his roses and saw the boy.

It was a cold, clear afternoon, and though there was no breeze, a crisp chill was making Frank's old bones ache. It was on the cusp of autumn and the long winter ahead, and Frank was pruning the dead hips of his roses, which would not bloom until spring came again, and he paused for a moment to give his strained back a rest. As he did so, he happened to glance up at the Riddle house.

There was a tall window in the top story of the Riddle house, which was where Mrs Riddle had had her bedroom all those years ago when the Riddles had still lived there. Frank had not seen the curtains of this window opened since Mr Pettigrew the caretaker had moved into the house. But this day, they were pulled right back, and a boy was standing in the window, looking down at Frank.

Frank stared at the boy. He could make out very little from this distance: just a white oval of a face beneath an untidy black fringe, and a pair of wide, round spectacles. Behind the boy, the room was dark, so that he seemed to be hanging in space, watching Frank with expressionless concentration.

Frank realised that the rose he was trying to stake up was in danger of falling over again, and quickly bent to straighten it. When he looked up at the window again, the curtains were drawn and the boy was gone.

The whole incident had lasted less than thirty seconds. Frank scratched his grizzled chin and began to nip the dead hips off the rose, wondering why he felt so uneasy, and why the word 'ghost' had floated unbidden into his mind and hung there, heavy and troublesome.

He did not ask Mr Pettigrew about the boy. For starters, Frank did not enjoy talking to the caretaker about anything if he could help it. Also, Frank did not like children in any shape or form, and he hoped that if he forgot about the stranger, he would not see the child again. And besides that, he did not want to think about the possibility that the boy at the window was nothing but his imagination. That was rather a horrifying possibility to Frank: that age and senility was finally catching up on him. So he kept the experience to himself and tried to forget about it, but the pale face behind the glass occupied his thoughts more often than he would have liked.

But Frank saw the boy again several times over the next month. Always in the top windows of the house, always simply standing and looking down over the gardens. Each time, Frank felt his knees shake a little, but each time, he found the boy a little less frightening. At last, about six weeks after he had had his first glimpse of the boy, he plucked up the courage to raise his hand at the boy and wave. And, after a moment, the boy raised his own had in reply.

This settled it for Frank. The boy was real, not a hallucination or anything else of the like. Yet Frank had never seen him leave or enter the house, and a small beat of curiosity began to keep time in Frank's chest. It convinced him to suppress his dislike of Mr Pettigrew and ask the caretaker about the identity of this mysterious child.

He approached Pettigrew the next time the caretaker came wandering out into the garden, and breached the topic as casually as he could. All the same, the effect was immediate and alarming. Mr Pettigrew shuddered as if Frank had said something particularly distasteful: his eyes grew wide, and he began to wring his hands and pluck at the air around his face as if fiddling with invisible whiskers.

"There isn't any boy, I don't know what you mean," he said in a nervous and singularly unconvincing squeak. "Perhaps you've been, er, imagining, Mr Bryce. Certainly, there is no boy living in the house."

When Frank insisted that he had seen the child several times now and he was quite sure he was real, Mr Pettigrew became even more nervous.

"My nephew," he blustered, "sometimes comes to visit. That's the boy you must have seen. Shy child, you know – doesn't come out of the house – " and with that, he made some excuse about having something in the oven and positively fled before Frank could question him any further.

Frank disliked being lied to. It made him rather angry, that he, who had tended its gardens dutifully for over fifty years now, should now be shut out of the secrets of the old Riddle House. He decided he would ask the caretaker no more questions, but he was patient. Sooner or later, he was sure, something new would be revealed to him, and then he would decide what to do about Mr Pettigrew and his lies.

Winter came heavy and brutal, leaving the trees of the Riddle estate as thin skeletons and the beautifully kept lawns frozen and choked with mud. Christmas passed unnoticed by Frank, who had no one to celebrate it with, and January arrived with all its bitter cold. Snow smothered his roses and forced Frank to retire into his cottage for days at a time. Through the window, he watched Mr Pettigrew struggle through the snow, swearing and sneezing, to go down to the village and buy groceries. He always bought a lot of groceries – he seemed to eat enough for a man twice his size.

At last, the snow melted, and Frank began to potter about in his empty flower beds, turning over the frozen earth and doing his best to cover up the plants against the frost. One morning, he came out of his cottage, a ragged old scarf wrapped tight around his face and a thick coat shrugged over his shoulders, and found that his good spade was missing. He had left it leaning against the outside of the shed door the evening before, he was certain of it: and now it was gone!

Muttering curses to himself, Frank stomped across the muddy lawn, wondering why on earth someone would have the audacity to climb the wall of the Riddle estate just to steal an old man's spade. However, it seemed the spade had gone wandering about of its own accord, because just then Frank saw it lying across a freshly-turned empty flower bed, as innocent as you please. Grumbling, he went over and picked it up.

And as he bent and took a hold of the handle, he stopped and stared. The rich earth of the flower bed had been disturbed. Deep grooves had been furrowed into the soil, and the grooves formed two words, plain and clear as day:

HELP ME

Frank stared at the words, long and hard, for several minutes. He found his hands were clutching the handle of the spade so hard that his knuckles were white. He relaxed his grip, straightened up, looked at the words one last time. Then he took the spade and smoothed them over so that not a trace of them remained.

----------------------------------------

TBC

A/N: Thanks for everybody's patience since the end of Part Two. My exams went okay, although not as perfectly as I could have hoped, but I have serious doubts about my country's education system anyway so it can't be helped.

I've posted chapter one because I hate leaving everyone in suspense, but I know it has revealed very little and probably left you just as annoyed as you were before. Chapter two has been sent for beta-reading (thanks, Liz!) so I don't know when it will be back. I will probably post Chapter two in a few days no matter what, and in the meantime, you can all cheer me up by sending lots of lovely reviews complaining about how late part three is. Because I'm an unscrupulous character and I do enjoy them.

---

Next chapter: Lupin and Sirius come to terms with the loss of Harry from their lives.