Whispers followed Harry from the moment he left his dormitory the next day.
People lining up outside classrooms stood on tiptoe to get a look at him,
or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring.
Harry wished they wouldn't, because he was trying to concentrate on finding his way to classes.
There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones;
narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step
halfway up that you had to remember to jump.
Then there were doors that wouldn’t open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly
the right place, and doors that weren’t really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending.
It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot.
The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor
could walk.
The ghosts didn’t help, either. It was always a nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly
through a door you were trying to open. Nearly Headless Nick was always happy to point new
Gryffindors in the right direction, but Peeves the Poltergeist was worth two locked doors and
a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class. He would drop wastepaper baskets
on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk, or sneak up behind you,
invisible, grab your nose, and screech, “GOT YOUR CONK!”
Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Harry and Ron managed
to get on the wrong side of him on their very first morning. Filch found them trying to force their
way through a door that unluckily turned out to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on
the third floor. He wouldn’t believe they were lost, was sure they were trying to break into it on
purpose, and was threatening to lock them in the dungeons when they were rescued by Professor
Quirrell, who was passing.
Filch owned a cat called Mrs. Norris, a scrawny, dust-colored creature with bulging, lamp like eyes
just like Filch’s. She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one
toe out of line, and she’d whisk off for Filch, who’d appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Filch
knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone (except perhaps the Weasley twins) and
could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated him, and it was the dearest
ambition of many to give Mrs. Norris a good kick.
And then, once you had managed to find them, there were the classes themselves. There was a lot
more to magic, as Harry quickly found out, than waving your wand and saying a few funny words.
They had to study the night skies through their telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learn
the names of different stars and the movements of the planets. Three times a week they went out
to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a dumpy little witch called Professor
Sprout, where they learned how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what
they were used for. Easily the most boring class was History of Magic, which was the only one
taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of
the staff room fire and got up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him. Binns droned on
and on while they scribbled down names and dates, and got Emetic the Evil and Uric the Oddball
mixed up.