Death Chamber

The Death Chamber, also called the Death Room, is a room in the Department of Mysteries given over to the study of death, nine levels down in the Ministry of Magic in London. It is large, rectangular and dimly lit, closer to a courtroom than a laboratory, with stone benches stepping down on every side toward a sunken pit some twenty feet deep. On a raised dais at the bottom stands an ancient crumbling stone archway, held up by no wall at all and hung with a tattered black curtain that stirs faintly even though the air in the room is cold and still. Those who work in the department treat the archway as a boundary of some kind, and a few of the people who stand near it report hearing voices on the other side.