As he came into the window it was the sound of a crescendo

[spindleform]

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[batshitscary]

*A click is all it takes. At first it's small, a thin sheet of murky green spilling forward, trickling down the wooden sill and creating deep, dark trails across his silk-patterned walls. Like all things insidious and hidden-away, it can only grow. Pressured streams pushing in like invasive fingers between the clasps, the limb attached to it a vast, drowned London. Bodies bob along the streets beyond, the muggle neighbours, the ones he's never known and barely seen, floating eerily like suspended apples.

It hits before he can see it coming - a water muted thump of loose flesh against glass that bursts hinges and sends a square of rushing cold charging inwards. Riding it is a lorry driver, dead, writhing and hungry.*

[spindleform]

*He is repelled from the window with a cry, landing in a crouch with his back against the side of his mattress, at the very least too horrified to notice how much like a child or a cornered animal he resembles. The bed and the stretch of floor he has just flung himself over are both quite dry, but his hands fumble in fear as he grabs for the hanging edge of a sheet, as though it might save him or help to sop up the imaginary ocean. Though he sees his room, as tidy and kept as ever, what he knows in his mind is the roar of water and the splash of things now free to push along the floorboards, their passage eased by the tide.*

[batshitscary]

*Like something tender and freshly barbecued, the skin of its fingers hangs only tentatively to bone. The water is lapping at his elbows now, so cold that the blood in his veins pump ever slower, preparing for the inevitable - preparing for those reaching, sloppy fingers. They want to pull him closer. The lorry driver's mouth droops hopefully, battered teeth on display, even half submerged in the muck.*

[spindleform]

*In a scramble of desperation in the dark, Regulus twists around to grab at whatever he can reach, for help. His hand lands on the lump of Barty's unmoving ankle through the blanket, and though he tries to pull himself, up with it as his anchor, he is half frozen in fear as he stares over his shoulder at the face of a dead man whom his logical mind still knows has no reason to be made into the Dark Lord's monster. Nor, indeed, to be in his bedroom.*