The Heart of Gryffindor
by SJR0301
Chapter Five
By common consent, none of them so much as mentioned Dudley's near arrest to Uncle Vernon. He had arrived home fuming about sales figures and bad accounts. Aunt Petunia took one look at him and brought out a bottle of brandy she'd been saving for some special occasion and Dudley slouched out the door as soon as he could. Harry decided he'd escape the other way and he locked himself in his bedroom to write letters to Ron and Hermione.
Harry found himself writing the whole story of the last few days' disasters. But when he read it over, he ripped it up again. He remembered grimly how Hedwig had once been intercepted and had her wing injured and thought that he ought to be especially careful with what he put down on parchment. He started again and asked both of them to "Please send me any spells there are for shaving. Aunt Petunia threw a fit and I had to use a Muggle razor." After a second thought he added, "If I can't find a spell to use, I think I'll have to just skip shaving and let my beard grow as long as Dumbledore's." A faint smile tugged at his lips as he imagined himself with a waist-length beard. He thought that would get Aunt Petunia to throw him out for sure. She'd never be able to stand him growing a beard even if Voldemort was waving his wand outside her window.
He broke down and added plaintively, "When can I get out of here? The Muggles are driving me right around the bend." Harry sealed up each of the letters and tried to think what he was missing. It occurred to him that Ginny would be upset if he wrote only Ron and not her. He took out a new parchment and wrote, "Dear Ginny," and then he stopped. What was he supposed to say to her? Would she expect him to talk about any of the things that had happened between them last year? Would she want to even go out with him again? Did he want to go out with her again? Then it hit him, the real question was, should he go out with anybody, and the answer, he feared, was probably no.
How easily, he thought, Voldemort could turn a girlfriend into a weapon against him. And when he thought about it, hadn't Voldemort done exactly the same thing already? Hadn't he taken Ginny into the Chamber of Secrets to lure Harry down there before? And wouldn't Malfoy have told someone, his Dad maybe, that Harry had gone out to the Forest last year thinking that Ginny was in danger? How soon would Voldemort think to start attacking his friends to get at him? Miserably, Harry tore up all the letters he had written. If he didn't write anyone, nothing could be intercepted. If he didn't write, maybe they would forget his friends and leave them alone.
The next morning, Harry was woken up rudely once more. Only this time, instead of Dudley yelling, it was Dudley pounding a meaty fist on his door and calling out, "Get up, Potter. We're going to the gymansium today."
His head was buzzing dully from having slept quite poorly and his scar was a quiet ache that wouldn't go away. He rubbed his forehead and pulled the covers back over his head. He wondered what Voldemort was getting up to now. As if the thought had broken down the wall in his mind, he felt a surge of anger and frustration that was not his own. His eyes were closed, but he could see on the inside of his eyelids, a circle of hooded men stirring uneasily as they waited for his decision.
"Keep looking!" he spat at them. "Find him! I want him dead. He galls me. He lives, the upstart half-blood, and none of you will help me." A rage filled him, all encompassing. A thing alive that twisted his guts and burned him. His scar burned, a hot wire across his forehead and he tasted the poisonous taste of the potion that kept him alive and tied to the new young body he possessed.
"Potter!" Dudley's voice came again. "Get up already." Harry flung the covers back feeling they were smothering him, grateful to Dudley for perhaps the first time in his life for having been his noisy self.
"I'm coming," he rasped out and he deliberately built the wall in his mind again, stone by stone, until the rage died and the taste of poison with it and all that was left was the taste of fear.
Dudley stared at him when he stumped down to the kitchen and said, "You look sick. You look like a breath could lay you flat." Harry didn't bother to answer. He poured hismelf a cup of coffee and noted that it was only six o'clock in the morning and neither Uncle Vernon nor Aunt Petunia was even up.
"Hey," Dudley said. "How're you going to defend us against that...you know, if you can't even stand up straight?"
Harry summoned up enough energy to glare at him and growled, "What makes you think I can defend anybody against anything?" Dudley didn't answer for a moment. "I saw what you did at the station," he said. "I didn't even know you could do anything like that. You melted the concrete on the platform like it was butter."
Harry shrugged. "Yeah," he said, "but that's nothing compared to what Voldemort can do."
He stared gloomily out the window and tried to think how he could ever get out of his predicament. Would it ever be possible to defeat Voldemort so completely that he couldn't come back? Did he even have a chance? Or was the other side of the prophecy to come true after all? Would Harry end up being killed by Voldemort? He thought it was quite likely and shivered.
"Well, you're not going to do any of us any good if you just sit there wasting away and drinking coffee all day." Dudley looked Harry up and down and shook his head.
"Come on," he said, "You promised to come and teach me." Harry considered telling Dudley simply to bug off, but in the absence of Ron and Hermione and Ginny, he thought, Dudley was at least a human face that was willing to talk to him instead of trying to kill him.
"Right," he said. At least he could get out of the house on Privet Drive and away from his Aunt's fearful gaze and out of the confines of the smallest bedroom.
Dudley led the way for the few blocks that took them out of the streets of tidy houses and over to the High Street where small shops and businesses filled the Little Whinging's oldest buildings. At the end of a strip of old townhouses, he led the way into a doorway and up a stairway to a large open gymnasium. There were heavy weight machines with complicated pulleys that looked like medieval instruments of torture to Harry. And there were several smaller rooms where loud music was already playing and feet were pounding to a thudding rhythm that did nothing for his headache.
Dudley went over to one of the machines and carelessly started pumping a weight up and down so that his arm muscles bulged and flexed with each movement. Dudley saw that Harry was simply standing by doing nothing and grimaced at him impatiently. The look did nothing for Dudley except to make him look like a blond, hairless orangutan.
"Aren't you going to warm up?" Dudley asked. Harry shook his head. What he really wanted to do now was turn around and leave.
"Fine," Dudley said. "It's your problem if you tear a muscle or something." He swung up from the machine and pointed Harry to the corner where a large bag hung from a rope. He tossed Harry a pair of gloves and slid on a pair of his own that he had brought in his bulging carryall.
"All right," he said, "Take a few shots at the bag, then, and don't be afraid to hit it hard."
Feeling like a total git, Harry pulled on the heavy gloves and approached the bag as if it were an acromantula about to bite him. He punched at the bag and Dudley sighed.
"That's pathetic, Potter. You did better than that the other day when you bloodied Piers' nose for him."
"Yeah," Harry said, "but the bag isn't punching at me, is it?"
"Look," Dudley said impatiently, "you have to jab at it this way." He demonstrated, battering the bag with fast, sharp strokes that Harry thought would likely give any poor soul in their way a sure concussion. He wondered how he'd gotten himself into this and how soon he could get out of it without totally annoying Dudley.
So when Dudley said, "Go on. Try again," Harry gave a few more tentative jabs at the punching bag. Dudley sighed some more and said,
"Just imagine the bag is Voldemort's face. Try to smash it. Blot it out. But not wild, you know. Deliberate and controlled."
Harry scanned the room to be sure no one could hear him and said quietly, "Don't mention that here, Dudley."
Dudley stared at him. "You're the one that was always threatening to let the world know about it."
Harry shook his head and said, "Don't be a git, Dudley. You know we keep things quiet. Why else would we be in trouble for practicing out of school?"
Harry had a go at the bag again. It felt still strange and alien to him, to be striking out in this fashion. He tried to think of the bag as Voldemort's face, and the rage he'd felt that morning rose up, so that his headache disappeared and even the pain in his scar. All he felt was the need to pummel something, anything, but preferably, the face of his enemy.
"Whoa," Dudley said. "You'll knock yourself out if you keep that pace up." But his tone wasn't impatient any more. Harry came back to himself and felt both exhilirated and somewhat ashamed.
"You know, Potter," Dudley said, "You might do all right if you could build yourself up a bit. I mean, you're skin and bones. Don't they feed you at that school?"
"Yeah, they feed us," Harry said, feeling quite narked about the insult to his beloved Hogwarts. "It's a bit hard to keep the weight on when you nearly get killed, Dud." Harry regretted that as soon as he said it.
It reminded Dudley of why he had really invited Harry. His blue eyes widened and then narrowed and he said, "Let's just get in a bit of practice with the swords, then. So maybe next time you can run him through instead." He stopped then, when he saw Harry's face.
Harry stripped the gloves off his hands and stared at them, at the long thin fingers and the knuckles that were still scraped from his fight with Piers and Gordon on Saturday. Killer hands he thought and shivered. And he didn't know whether he wished he had succeeded in really killing Voldemort or not. He knew himself capable of killing now, and that was another thought he wanted to avoid.
Dudley held out a sword that he'd gotten from another room while Harry was occupied with getting rid of the boxing gloves. Harry stared at the sword. It was a practice sword similar to the ones they'd used in the play last year. Dudley had put on padding and he dangled a mask from his hand as well. Harry stared at Dudley and the dangling sword. The last thing he really wanted to do was practice with a sword with anyone.
"Well?" Dudley demanded. "Unless you don't really know a thing about it? Maybe it's just a stupid story, then. Come on, Potter. Show me your stuff." He threw the sword at Harry hilt first and then the mask. Reflexively, Harry caught them. He tossed aside the face mask immediately as it wouldn't fit over his glasses and would restrict his vision, too. Dudley had put his mask on and he looked like an oversized gorilla masquerading as a human.
"Well?" Dudley demanded again. Harry still didn't do anything and his distate for the whole exercise was growing. He felt quite sick really as he recalled the moment when he had stabbed Voldemort, and in doing so, run himself through on Voldemort's blade as well.
"Maybe you're really a coward," Dudley said. "Maybe you're too scared to fight me without you know what." Harry practically growled at the accusation, but he still didn't raise the sword. Dudley took matters into his own hands and stabbed rather wildly but forcefully at Harry. Harry jumped out of the way and parried the thrust almost automatically. Dudley tried again, but in two moves, Harry disarmed him and the sword went flying into a far corner. Dudley gawked at Harry. It was the first time Harry had ever beat him at a physical contest. Harry stared at him ans shrugged fractionally.
"You're way too wild, Dud," he said. "You need to be as controlled and economical with a sword as you are with your fists." Dudley flushed and stared at Harry as if he'd never seen him properly before.
"Can we try again?" he asked. Harry swallowed down the urge to shout, no, and nodded. He had an odd feeling that what they were doing was important after all, though why he couldn't say. He started Dudley with the same basic moves he had learned from Professor Ribisi. He went through the repetition of lunges and thrusts that build up the proper coordination and muscles in sequence. By the end of a half hour, though, he was exhausted and he felt an ache very time he breathed in. Dudley, however, seemed as fresh as when they'd started.
"Let's try a real fight again," he said eagerly. Harry shook his head and sat down on a nearby bench and wrapped his arms around his chest trying to still his breathing
"Wow, Dudley," a girl's voice said, "I didn't know you were into fencing." Harry looked up and realized that the thudding music from the other adjoining rooms had stopped and several girls, women, had poured out of their aerobics class chatting and laughing. The girl who had stopped to talk to Dudley was a tall girl with shiny blond hair and she was dressed in the briefest of exercise clothes.
Without waiting for Dudley's response, she turned to Harry and said, "You're really good at that. Are you teaching here?"
Harry gawped at her and blushed with embarrassment. Girls at Hogwarts did not go around dressed so skimpily. "No," he said, feeling perfectly stupid.
"Aren't you going to introduce us?" the girl said to Dudley.
"Introduce you?" Dudley said. "You know Harry. He was in our class in grammar school. My...erm...cousin, Harry Potter." The girl blinked.
"You're Harry?" Then she looked at him closely and said, "I guess you are. You do still have those glasses and the same messy hair." She stared at him some more and added, "I forgot how green your eyes are though." Harry couldn't think of thing to say. He couldn't remember the girl at all. He suspected that she had changed more since they were ten than he had.
"You don't remember me, do you?" she said.
"Sorry, no," he said. Then he added with a faint smile and as nicely as he could, "You've changed."
"Yeah," Dudley said. "Has she ever. This is Ashley. We...erm..see each other sometimes." Harry looked at the girl in surprise. Of course, he couldn't imagine anyone liking Dudley, but he supposed girls were prone to make odd choices when it came to liking guys.
He stood up and said to Dudley, "We ought to get back."
"You go on," Dudley said. "I'll come along later."
Harry nodded to Ashley and said politely, "Nice seeing you again." He walked off feeling grateful that the exercise was over and wanting nothing more than to wash off and collapse.
The next morning, Dudley woke Harry early again, and the next as well. By the fourth morning, they had collected a small crowd of onlookers during their now regular sword practice. Harry found that this was one arena in which Dudley was a fast learner. He was far quicker than one might expect from someone of his size and bulk and he was ferociously strong. Harry tried to keep most of the "lessons" devoted to practicing specific lunges, thrusts and parries, but by the end of each lesson, Dudley inevitably demanded an actual contest. So far, Harry had no trouble disarming Dudley within a few exchanges, and this morning was no exception. Dudley picked up his sword in annoyance.
"Let's try again," he said. "I think I'm getting the hang of it." Harry would have liked to say no, but he decided it wasn't such a bad thing to stretch his own stamina a bit.
"Right," he said and he saluted Dudley as he had been taught before pacing back off to his side of the studio.
"What's that for?" Dudley guffawed. "Are you planning on giving a demonstration before the Queen?" A couple of the girls watching tittered with laughter.
"No," Harry answered between gritted teeth. "It's a courtesy to your opponent. It's something you'd do at the Olympics, like shaking your opponent's hand before a boxing match."
Dudley said, "Oh," and jumped to attack before Harry was quite ready. Harry knocked his sword away, and they fell into a smoother, more extended bout than they'd had before. Dudley's piggy blue eyes were squinched up in concentration and he seemed to be deliberately using his greater strength and reach to force Harry back and keep pushing at him to break down his defenses. Harry set up a net of impenetrable parries, trying to use his superior speed and agility to offset Dudley's reach and strength. At any other time, perhaps, Dudley would never have come near him, but he was tiring rapidly, and a sudden move behind which Dudley had thrown all of his weight knocked Harry's sword from his hand. Without thinking, Harry somersaulted backwards as Professor Ribisi had taught them and caught the sword, which had been knocked up into the air, as he was landing. Dudley gawked at him in astonishment as Harry charged him back again and disarmed him within seconds.
"I disarmed you," Dudley said accusingly. "The fight should have been over." Harry stared at Dudley grimly and tried to calm his breathing.
"It’s not over, Dud, if you're opponent's still on his feet and can get to his weapon. Never," he added fiercely, "never assume you've beat someone just cause you knocked him down or disarmed him. In a real fight, it's never over so easy." The crowd had oohed when Harry had done his somersault, but now someone in the crowd laughed.
"You think you're auditioning for the Three Musketeers, Potter?" It was Piers and next to him was Gordon. Harry didn't bother answering him.
He looked at Dudley and said coolly, "See what I mean. They always come back for more unless you scare them so thoroughly they won't come within a mile of you, or you get 'em sent down to the lock-up."
"That's what you'd like to do, you copper lover, wouldn't you?" Gordon yelled. The club owner came over and said, "Anybody causing trouble will be thrown out."
"Who cares?" Piers said. "Like we want to be members of your moldy old club for copper lovers anyway." He stepped forward eyeing Harry quite murderously. His nose was still swollen and he'd his eye was fading down from black and blue to yellow.
Harry said to Dudley, "They're your friends. What do you want to do with them?"
Dudley stepped forward and said, "They're no friends of mine anymore. Maybe they never were." Dudley took another step toward Piers and Harry was forcibly impressed with the realization of just how big Dudley had gotten. His arm muscles flexed and bulged as he clenched his meaty hands into fists. Apparently, Piers came to the same realization, becuase he suddenly turned and scrambled for the exit. Dudley moved again far more swiftly than one would expect. He grabbed Piers by the shirt collar from behind and swung him in the air and then dropped him flat.
"Don't come back here," Dudley said. "Don't come near me or my house. And don't you dare tell the coppers again that I've been in on one of your stupid jobs." Piers and Gordon fled, but Harry was afraid that wouldn't be the last of them.
"You think I scared them enough?" Dudley asked generally.
The pretty blond, Ashley said, "Oh, Dudley. I don't think they'll ever dare show their faces here again." Dudley puffed out his chest and said, "I don't think so either."
Harry sighed. For all his occasional delinquency, Harry thought, Dudley was still incredibly naive when it came to understanding how evil people could be. While everyone crowded around Dudley, Harry took the opportunity to put away the fencing equipment and start for the door.
He had only gotten halfway down the stairs, though, when Dudley called out, "Wait up, Potter."
Large feet thudded on the stairs and Dudley came pelting down followed by Ashley and another girl Harry didn't know. "Let's go," Dudley said.
"Ooh, where?" Ashley asked.
"My house," Dudley answered. Harry trudged back behind Dudley and the girls wishing the summer would end and that he was back at Hogwarts already. If he had to have people coming at him, he thought, he wished he could at least use his wand. And he was tired of Dudley's gang coming after him for no good reason. It was too much really. Death Eaters all year and stupid Piers and the gang all summer. He hoped without hope that this year would be calmer than last. When they got to Privet Drive, Harry raced up the stairs to the bathroom and shut himself in for a long shower. Maybe, he thought, Dudley would have decided to go back out again, and he could get away from his cousin's sudden new interest. He had a shrewd idea that Dudley still had no liking or use for Harry; no, this was all about his fear that wizards would attack and his need to have Harry around to be the true victim and defender.
Dudley, Harry reflected, was brave enough when it came to threatening people smaller and weaker than himself-- like Piers. But when it came to facing something stronger, Dudley showed his true colors.
Harry checked his room before going back downstairs again. Only Hedwig sat in her cage, her white head tucked under a wing as she napped. No other owls had appeared to bring Harry letters or news. He sighed and decided he was too hungry to try to wait for Dudley to disappear, so he slouched downstairs again and went straight to the kitchen. Dudley had taken over the table and the two girls were seated on either side of him. Harry ignored them and poked his head in the fridge thinking he'd grab some bread and cheese and take a sandwich back upstairs.
"Bung the bread on the table," Dudley ordered. "And let's have some ham and cheese and stuff as well." Harry considered bunging the ham in Dudley's face, but he decided the temporary truce between them was worth preserving. He laid out the food and brought out plates and teacups for all four of them, and put up a pot of tea while he was at it. He might as well get a good meal out of Dudley's present friendliness he thought.
He poured out the tea silently as the others chatted and took a place at the other end of the table, where he proceeded to devour his sandwich in record time. He was about to start on a second when Aunt Petunia came in. She took in the mess on the table in single glance and Harry sitting at it eating with another and she opened her mouth to yell. But then she realized Dudley was there with guests and she said in her best hostess voice, "How nice, Dudley. I see you've got guests." Unaccountably, Dudley turned red.
"This is my Mum," he said to the girls. "This is Ashley Smyth and this is Moira O'Reilly."
The girls smiled at Aunt Petunia and said, "Nice to meet you Mrs. Dursley," together. Ashley's tone was enthusiastic and cheery. However, Harry couldn't help noticing that her friend Moira sounded just a bit sarcastic.
He wondered if that was just her personality. He also noticed, that although Moira was rather pretty, she had heavy dark makeup around her eyes and a row of studs going down her ears. Her clothing was all black and peeking out from under the cap of her sleeve there was a tattoo of a strange looking cross. Her blue eyes were almost violet and they had a gleam in them that was nothing like the twinkling amusement one might see in Dumbledore's or the mischievous sparkle in Ginny's. It occurred to Harry that Dudley might be just as bad of judge of girls as he was of his other friends' characters.
"Ashley's dad is the President of the bank," Dudley said boastfully.
"Mr. Smyth?" Aunt Petunia asked. "How lovely," she said approvingly. "Your father knows him quite well, I think." She turned to look at Moira, and her face tightened fractionally with disapproval.
"And your father, Moira," Petunia asked, "What does he do? Have you been in Little Whinging long?"
"Nah," Moira answered, and the satiric gleam in her eye became more pronounced. "We just moved here last year. For Daddy's job. He's a chartered accountant and he wanted to be in a nice neighborhood like this." Her tone mocked the word nice and Harry couldn't help the very faint curl of his lip in response. Nice, after all, could apply to so many things, or to nothing at all. Ashley took a sip of her tea, and Harry noticed she had her pinky raised as she drank, just like Aunt Petunia.
Petunia smiled at the blond girl and said, "I'm so glad you've come, dear. Perhaps your family would like to come for dinner one night?" Harry took a sip of his tea, too, and tried to keep his face straight. Probably, he figured, Uncle Vernon would love to be better friends with a bank president. And clearly Ashley had passed Aunt Petunia's basic social test that determined who was sufficiently respectable and who was not. Moira, he thought, had failed resoundingly, even though dad was an accountant.
As soon as Aunt Petunia had tactfully left the kitchen, Moira turned her wicked blue gaze on Harry and said, "So where did you learn to fence?" She looked Harry up and down and he felt immediately embarrassed.
"School," he said tersely.
"Really? Do you go to Smeltings like Dudley?" she asked, and again her tone was ironic, as if she thought that Smeltings must really be quite awful. Ashley turned to look at Harry curiously as well. Dudley, on the other hand, looked almost panicked. Harry's school was never mentioned by name, or directly at all, in Number Four, Privet Drive.
"No," Harry answered. "I go to a small school way up north. It was my dad's school." He hoped that was enough information to end the conversation. He decided to cut off any more inquiries by asking a few questions of his own.
"So where do you go?" he asked the girls impartially.
Ashley named a rather well-known girls' school and Moira said, again ironically, "Stonewall High. It's a good name for the school, really. It's a good way to describe the students there, too. Your regular brilliant ones like Piers and Gordon." She turned to Harry again and looked at him some more. "Would you mind teaching me fencing, too?"
"I can't," Harry said immediately.
The wicked blue eyes flashed and Moira said, "Not good enough for you, am I? Not public school enough?"
"Nothing like that," Harry said. He was getting a bit annoyed; he hardly needed another person to be offended with him. When she stared at him disbelievingly, he added, "It's just, I'm not a licensed teacher or anything. And I don't actually work at the club or anything. I'm just doing Dudley a favor. I mean, he's teaching me to box a bit, too."
"I saw," she answered.
"Moira does all kinds of martial arts," Ashley said. "She's really good, you know."
"I am," Moira said. "But I've been wanting to learn to use a sword for ages and the club hasn't had a decent teacher." She looked at Harry assessingly again and said, "Maybe they'll hire you."
"I don't think so," Harry said. He could feel the heat creeping up his cheeks again. "I've got to go back to school in a few weeks. And I might go visit some of my friends from school the last couple of weeks before school starts. Erm...so...I expect I'll be gone again..." He trailed off uncomfortably.
"Oh, I dunno," Dudley said. "Maybe you'll just stay for the rest of the summer this year. Mum might be wanting you to, you know." He said this casually. Harry, however, saw through his casual pose to the fear the lay behind. He didn't answer thinking it was far better to let Dudley think he'd just stay, than to provoke a fight just now.
"Well, you'll still be here tomorrow, right?" Ashley said. Harry nodded cautiously.
Ashley said carelessly, with a flick of a glance at Moria, "So you can come to my house tomorrow night, then. A few of my friends are coming. You can come with Dudley." Harry started to say no thanks, but Dudley cut in, "That's brilliant. We'll be there."
Harry sighed. He guessed he was in for guard duty for the rest of the summer. He had an odd sense of reversal at that. After all, he, Harry, was the one whom the aurors in the Order of the Phoenix had so assiduously guarded. Now he was on the opposite end and he felt brief flash sympathy for Mundungus Fletcher, who'd gone off to get his shipment of stolen cauldrons and left Harry to the dementors. Then remembering the dementors, Harry's moment of sympathy slipped away.
Like every other morning that week, Dudley again knocked on Harry’s door at six a.m. and shouted, “Get up, Potter!”
Harry ignored him and pulled the pillow over his head. He did not want to get up and he most certainly did not want to go to the club and box or fence with Dudley again. Like every other morning that week, Harry was forced to sit up and open the window for the brown post owl to deliver his Daily Prophet. He stuffed the Daily Prophet under his pillow and tried to go back to sleep.
Dudley, however, had other ideas in mind. Not being accustomed to being ignored, Dudley simply opened the door, stomped in a hauled Harry right out of bed. “Let’s go,” he said peevishly. It was incredible, Harry thought, how little Dudley had changed since he had thrown a tantrum over having received 36 birthday presents instead of 38.
He considered simply jinxing Dudley into a permanent sleep, but refrained from doing so with considerable effort.
“You go without me,” Harry said. He yawned and crawled back into bed and felt about for his wand. Having secured it, he buried his face in the crook of his elbow and tried to go back to sleep.
“You promised,” Dudley said, and despite the bass baritone of his voice, there was the same undertone of a whine that had permeated his spoiled cousin’s speech as long as Harry had known him.
“You’re a big boy, Dud,” Harry answered. “Go without me.”
“Yeah,” Dudley complained, “and what if your Lord Voldyguy shows up? What then?”
Harry cracked open an eye and said, “I’ve got news for you, Dudley, Voldemort could care less about you. You’re safer without me. Really.”
“What about those dementoids?” Dudley said. “What about them?”
Harry sighed. “Dementors, Dudley. And they were after me, not you.”
“How do you know that?” Dudley asked. “They attacked me, too.” He shivered and his piggy eyes were looking fearful again, an odd sight on the hugely muscled teen. So much for sleep, Harry thought. He shivered, too. There had been dementors floating fuzzily in the background of his dreams last night, though what it had been about escaped him just then.
"Dementors attack anyone they can get at," Harry answered. "But they were after me. If you're alone, you're probably in less danger than if I'm with you."
Dudley stared at Harry suspiciously. "You're just saying that to get rid of me."
"I do NOT want to go to the club and practice boxing or fencing or any other form of fighting today," Harry said firmly and slowly through gritted teeth.
"Well, you'd better come with me tonight, then," Dudley said aggressively.
"Fine," Harry said in exasperation. He rolled over away from Dudley and shut his eyes. He'd been up several times in the night with vague nightmares, each time jerking awake when cold seemed to seize his body, while at the same time, his scar burned furiously.
"What's this?" Dudley asked. Harry sat back up again thoroughly out of patience and then consumed with alarm. Dudley had picked up his Daily Prophet and was scanning the paper alternately frowning in puzzlement and gawping in disbelief. "This thing says there's goblins," Dudley said, waving the paper in the air. Harry got up and reached for the paper, but Dudley took advantage of his greater height to hold it way up in the air out of Harry's grasp. Harry thought, please let me get out of here without hexing him and being expelled.
"Dudley," he said with forced calm, "give me my paper."
"But it say there are goblins running a bank," Dudley said. "And something about the Minister of Magic having a fight with them over controlling the bank."
"Let me see," Harry demanded. All thoughts of sleep abandoned, he wondered why the paper was reporting that story again.
Dudley held onto the paper and said, "It says unnamed sources claim that "You know Who" is trying to gain control of the bank through the goblins. What does that mean?"
"That's ridiculous," Harry said. He grabbed for the paper successfully this time and read the story through. He was temtpted to toss the paper out as trash, but then he thought better of it. He looked at Dudley and asked, "Why did you pick that article to look at?"
"I dunno," Dudley said. "Are there really goblins?" Harry looked over his shoulder holding his breath to see if he would get a warning for talking about magic things with a Muggle, but none came.
He nodded briefly and was surprised when Dudley added, "It's just, any time somebody gets control of money, it gives them power. How come they gave all that power to goblins? And who's this You Know Who person anyway?"
"Voldemort," Harry said absently. Trust Uncle Vernon's only son to hit the nail on the head when it came to money. Was this whole thing a fabrication for Fudge to get control of the bank and increase his power, as the Quibbler claimed? Or was Voldemort really angling for the goblins' allegiance, and the control Gringotts along with it? He wondered what Hermione would think of it.
"Listen," he said to Dudley after a moment, "you can't talk about this to anyone. Okay?"
"Why would I want to look like a total git," Dudley replied, "when nobody we know believes in magic or goblins or anything like that? Not real magic, anyway," he amended.
Harry breathed a sigh of relief and said, "All right. I'll go with you tonight. But do me a favor and let me catch up on some rest."
Harry poked at that night's dinner--dry fish and overcooked vegetables--and tried to decide if he could back out of going to the party with Dudley. It was the first and only time he'd ever been to a Muggle party since Dudley's disastrous eleventh birthday, when Harry had vanished the glass of a python's cage and been locked in the cupboard under the stairs for weeks after as a punishment.
"Is that what you're wearing?" Dudley demanded.
Harry rolled his eyes and answered testily, "What am I supposed to wear, full dinner dress?" Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia turned away from the news to stare at Harry suspiciously.
"What's wrong, Diddy?" Aunt Petunia asked. Dudley glowered, but Harry couldn't make out if it was because Aunt Petunia was still calling him by a childhood nickname more suited to a toddler or because Harry wasn't cooperating with Dudley's wishes.
"What's it matter what he wears?" Uncle Vernon asked.
"Well, just look at him," Dudley answered. "We're going to Ashley Smyth's tonight and he looks like a bloody tramp. I mean, his T-shirt doesn't fit and his jean's are too short and he's a right mess. What if her dad sees him that way?" Harry was starting to feel like it had been better being treated by Dudley as a pariah and sometime punching bag than as his reluctant bodyguard and hanger-on.
"Ashley Smyth?" Uncle Vernon said, "Friend of yours? Do I know him?"
"Ashley's a girl," Aunt Petunia said. "She's the daughter of Mr. Smyth from the bank. The bank president. She seems very...nice." Uncle Vernon stopped still, the cup of coffee he'd been about to sip suspended halfway between the saucer and his mouth.
"Smyth? From the bank, you say?" His beady eyes lit up, and Harry could practically see the calculations flying through his brain.
"But why does he have to go? You don't want him going over to Smyth's house," Uncle Vernon said. Perversely, that one statement made Harry determined to go after all. Fortunately, Dudley was the one who argued his case.
"Oh, I need him to just hang around," Dudley answered. "It makes me look good if I have friends with me. And besides," he added with a sidelong look at his dad, "Harry has to be there in case that Voldemort guy shows up. He has to be around when we go out to give us protection." Uncle Vernon immediately turned bright purple at the mention of Voldemort and the reference to Harry doing magic. Then he paled again and stared at Harry.
"Right," he said coldly. "You just better be sure Dudley gets home unharmed. You might as well be useful considering it's on account of you and your abnormality we have to worry about this Voldy whosis at all." He stared at Harry with active dislike and disfavor, clearly working himself up to the brink of tossing Harry out on the street. He turned redder and redder again and said ferociously, "And we won't be mentioning any of this for the next week. Marge is visiting starting tomorrow and I won't have you upsetting her or...or anything!"
Harry blinked and thought in horror, that does it, not her. He'd have to write to Ron and Hermione and beg to be gotten out of there immediately. He wasn't sure how long it would be before Aunt Marge so infuriated him that he did unauthorized magic and got himself expelled for real. Suffering too much of Dudley's company was bad enough. Aunt Marge on top of it was a nightmare. Not wanting to endure another minute of Uncle Vernon's hateful stare, Harry said to Dudley,
"Let's go. Ashley'll be waiting for you." He stood up and stalked out the front door without even waiting to see if Dudley was coming.
The Smyths lived a few blocks away on Acanthus court. Their house was very like Number Four, Privet Drive, except that it was a bit bigger and more lavishly decorated. Aunt Petunia would probably love to go there in her best dress and sip tea with her pinky raised Harry thought.
Uncle Vernon's fears, however, were unrealized, as Mr. and Mrs. Smyth were away for the weekend and Ashley had the run of the house to herself. The moment they stepped over the threshold, though, Harry felt quite shy in a way he hadn't felt in a long time and very out of place. Very loud music was thumping from somewhere and the room Ashley ushered them into was large and quite dimly lit. Perhaps a dozen other people were there, all teens who appeared to be seventeen or older. A haze of cigarette smoke rose to the ceiling clouding the room further and tickling Harry's lungs uncomfortably.
"Hey, Dudley," a few of them said. Nobody said hello to Harry, though, or even asked his name. He shrugged to himself and looked for a place to sit, thinking he'd have a headache by the time the night was over. Dudley had already found a place at the largest sofa and had his huge arm slung around Ashley as if he owned the house and her along with it.
Someone wrapped an arm around him from the back and whispered in his ear, "They make such a cute couple, don't they? So brainless, so perfectly fit, so perfectly...respectable." The sarcastic voice was Moira's. Harry politely slipped out from under her arm and gave her the smallest of grins.
"I was just thinking the same thing myself," he said cautiously. "But don't tell Dudley that. He thinks he's bloody brilliant because nobody's ever dared tell him the opposite except for me." The wicked blue eyes shone with laughter.
"At long bloody last," she said. "Someone else who isn't impressed with the boring conventional culture of bankers and businessmen." Her blue eyes considered him and she said curiously, "So what are you doing hanging around the Big D. You don't seem to have all that much in common, aside from the exercise thing."
"We don't have anything in common at all," Harry answered, "except for our mothers having been sisters."
Moira led Harry over to a smaller sofa and snagged a couple of bottles of beer from a row of bottles lined up on a table. She handed one to Harry and took a long swallow of hers. When Harry didn't immediately drink from the bottle, she asked,"You don't like beer? Maybe you'd prefer somehting stronger? Ashley's got everything you can imagine. Her dad keeps a complete stock," she said ironically, "just in case some business prospect might visit and need to be properly drunk before he can sign one of Daddy's loans on the dotted line."
"How do you know that?" Harry asked.
She grinned wickedly and said, "Ah, cause my dad keeps the books for lots of them that signed those loans and come crying to him about the amount of red ink his high interest costs them."
"Aren't you going to drink your beer?" she asked again. Harry shrugged and took a cautious sip. It tasted a little bit better than the beer he'd had at the Black Jack last summer. He'd have preferred a butterbeer any day though. The music was still too loud and Moira was sitting way too close. Harry noticed that several of the guests had wandered out of the room and that Ashley had one of her arms wound around Dudley's neck and she was giggling as she felt the swell of his bicep. Dudley had a foolish grin on his face and Harry felt almost sorry for him. He took another sip of his beer because he couldn't think of anything to say and wished that the music was lower or off altogether.
"I can read your mind," Moira announced grandly.
Harry raised his eyebrow and said,"Can you?" He was quite sure that no Muggle who attended Stonewall High could possibly read minds.
"You're wishing you had the more comfortable couch to sit on," she announced. "You wish Dudley and Ashley would just peel themselves off each other and go snog somewhere else." Harry nearly spit out his next sip of beer.
"Cheers, Moira," Ashley said giggling and waving her own bottle of beer at the other girl. "That's what you think, not what he thinks." Ahsley giggled again and said, "Moira's a witch. That's why she always dresses in black and either scares all the men off or..."
She giggled some more as Dudley wrapped a huge meaty hand over her mouth. She pushed his hand away and said, "I forgot. You don't like that stuff, Duddy." Harry gawked. He couldn't believe Ashley had just called Dudley by the same nickname as Aunt Petunia did on occasion.
"You know Ashley," Moira said contemplatively, "I may be a witch, but what you really are is a word that rhymes with it and starts with the second letter of the alphabet." Ashley flushed a bit and giggled again.
She led Dudley off the couch and said more kindly than Moira deserved, "Wish granted, Moira. Just be nice to the poor boy, for once. I suspect he's far too nice for the likes of you." Harry watched Dudley disappear from the room and had a sudden flash of understanding. Dudley didn't want him there to protect him from Voldemort. He wanted Harry there to protect him from Moira.
The thought amused him. Dudley, being afraid of a girl who wasn't a witch really. She just like to play games he figured, fascinated with the idea of magic as some Muggles were. He eased away from her a bit, but she caught his hand and pulled him across onto the larger sofa. That suited him just fine as it was far more comfortable and he didn't have to sit too close to her.
Harry noticed that practically everyone had wandered out of the room now and he took another nervous sip of his beer to have something to do. He realized that the whole bottle was empty and wondered how he had managed to drink an entire bottle of the stuff. His insides were twisting, but he felt quite relaxed and oddly as if he were underwater at the same time. He looked for somewhere to chuck the bottle and noticed that Moira had moved closer to him instead of farther away. She moved closer again and nipped at his cheek and then kissed him lightly on the mouth. He thought he ought to stop her, but he wasn't at all sure he really wanted to either.
"Why'd you do that?" he asked.
"Why not?" she answered. "I think you're cute." The wicked eyes regarded him as if he were a puzzle. "What's wrong with me, then? Most guys are quite happy to cozy up to me. Unless you're as much of a snob as your cousin."
Harry frowned at her. "I don't even really know you," he said after a second. "We only met a couple of days ago. You don't know anything about me, really."
She considered him thoughtfully and said, "I know a thing or two. I know you can fence like a master. I know you think your cousin's a dolt. I know everybody around here thinks you're some kind of delinquent or rebel. And I like the way you look."
Harry started to say, I'm not a delinquent, but she had moved closer again and started kissing him. He was sure he was going to say, this isn't a good idea. Except his brain had simply switched off and stopped thinking altogether. He took a deep breath of air when a new girl's voice said, "Hey Moira, I thought you were bringing your board and everything. Come on, you can snog your newest boy later."
His head was buzzing now from the loud music and the beer, so it took Harry a minute to work out that the words had been an insult to him and to Moira. But Moira didn't seem to mind.
"Don't go away, now," she said. "The fun's just beginning." Moira stood up and stretched in an almost cat-like fashion. Then she moved over to the music system and turned the music off. The sudden quiet brought other faces out to investigate and they all started to drift toward the big table in the adjoining dining room as if they knew what to expect. Moira fished two large black candles out of a big carryall and lit them with a match. Ashley reappeared and the candlelight shimmered off her shiny blond hair and faintly flushed complexion. Ashley drew out a large squarish board with letters on it and started to set it up in the middle of the table.
"What's that?" Harry asked the girl next to him. The girl - she was the one who had insulted Harry and Moira--looked at him as if he were a bit short on intelligence and said, "It's a Ouija board," as if that was supposed to explain everything.
"I've never seen one before," Harry said. Then seeing that the girl wasn't going to explain, he asked curiously, "What's it for?"
The girl again looked at him as if she thought he was an idiot and answered, "It's for trying to communicate with the dead. With spirits who've passed on. They move the marker to various letters to communicate." She stared at him again with something like contempt and added, "You'll get used to it pretty quick if you go out with Moira. She likes to use it because she gets some pretty spectacular effects."
Harry shook his head thinking how pathetic it all was. In six years at Hogwarts, he'd never heard of anyone communicating with the dead. Except for talking with ghosts, of course. But that was different. The girl stirred and said in tones of utmost boredom, "Let's skip the board, actually, and just do the seance." Moira frowned and looked as though she would protest, but Ashley said cheerily, "Why not?"
She turned out all of the lights so that the only illumination in the room came from the two candles, and as they were made of black wax, the flames seemed to float in the air. It was quite a clever effect, Harry had to admit. Moira turned to Dudley, who had emerged from wherever he'd gone and looked quite unhappy with the whole set-up.
"You haven't brought any stash," Moira asked. "It helps me get in the right mood, you know, for communicating."
"Sorry," Dudley said, not looking sorry at all, "I had to go clean, you know. On account of stupid Piers and Gordon." Moira shrugged and sat down at the table. She motioned to Harry to sit next to her. He was tempted to shake his head and simply leave. The whole business was starting to really annoy him, but Dudley gave him a little push and then sats down in the chair on his other side. Sighing silently, Harry sat on the chair between Moira and Dudley and tried to look as though he knew what was going on.
Ashley sat next to Dudley on his other side and then the others filtered in and sat around the table, too. The bored girl was the last to sit as they were one chair short. With a look of silent communication, Ashley glanced at Moria and Moira rose to bring another chair over to the table. There were now six on each side of the table and Moira sat alone at the head of the table.
"Everyone must clear their minds and open their hearts if the spirits are to speak," she intoned. Harry was forcibly reminded of Professor Trelawny in one of her more ethereal moods. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing as he supposed that that would upset Moira and Ashley. And if Ashley got upset, so would Dudley. From somewhere, a slight draft blew through the room and someone laughed nervously.
"Who are we seeking tonight?" Moira asked. The bored girl sat up and said eagerly, "My Gran. I want to talk to my Gran." Moira nodded and reached out to take Harry's hand in hers. She also clasped the bored girl's hand, and everyone around the room now took hands, as if they all knew what to do. Dudely took Harry's hand, and Harry noticed that Dudley's hand was damp with sweat, as if Dudley had just completed some strenuous exercise routine. He wanted to unclasp his hand and wipe it off, but Dudley grasped it firmly and would not release him.
"Hold tight to each other," Moira intoned again, "and we shall all be guided safely through our journey. But break your hold, and evil spirits may come through, or we may lose our contact altogether." Once again, Harry felt like laughing. He wished Ron were there. He wished he were somewhere else; back in Hogwarts, where magic was real and ghosts were friendly a nobody sat around trying to contact the dead in the dark.
Moira's head dropped back and she groaned softly. Harry could feel Dudley stir next to him. Nobody else moved, though, and the silence stretched weirdly in the dim light. The flames still seemd to dance alone in the air, and Harry was starting to feel quite sleepy, perhaps because of the late hour, or perhaps because he'd drunk more beer than he was accustomed to. A funny sound came, like the scratching of violins out of tune. Someone breathed quickly and loudly as though they were about to panic. Harry turned his head and saw with annoyance and amusement that the stereo was playing. The green light blinked at the corner of the grid, and if you listened carefully, you could hear the very faint whirr of the tape in its deck.
"Come, spirits," Moira intoned, "come and bring comfort for those who must be chained to this mortal plane." She began to breathe loudly, too, and Ashley said, "Come and join us. The vessel is ready."
Harry felt a faint shiver at the notion of a person as a vessel for another spirit. He thought idly that they might be fooling with something they oughtn't. The only thing, maybe, that protected them, was their total lack of talent. A faint greenish light appeared between the two dancing flames and then assumed the shape of an older woman's face. The face had bright blue eyes and silver-blond hair and on top of its head, her head, was perched a bright purple hat with a feather poking out of its rim.
The head didn't move. A faint voice spoke and said, "Jillian darling, beware of the red haired man."
Harry looked around and tried to figure out where the voice had come from. Dudley's hand was slick with sweat and Harry thought he might be ready to bolt.
Jillian, the bored girl, said, "Oh, Gran, I miss you." Harry looked around again. It was dificult to see where the voice had come from, but he was quite sure the voice hadn't come from the image in the middle of the table. When ghosts were near, the temperature dropped precitpitously, and they all should have been feeling the cold if the "ghost" had been real. Not to mention that genuine ghosts were silvery transparent and had no color at all. The face disappeared and the candles went out, so that everyone cried out.
Someone turned on a light and Jillian said, "Oh, she's gone. I wanted to talk to her more."
Ashely said calmly, "I guess she's said what she had to say tonight. Maybe she'll come again if you come back next week."
She seemed to hesitate, and then she lit the candles again. Next to him, Dudley stirred restively and said, "Let's call it quits for tonight, Ashley."
Moira said, "Oh, not yet, Duddy dear. We've got something special tonight." Her wicked blue eyes surveyed her slightly shivery audience and she announced dramatically, "I've brought a few special things that belonged to my Nan. She was a gypsy, you know."
Ashley tossed her shining blond hair and said cheerily, "Go on, then. I think it's brilliant what you've done." Then she seemed to hesitate and she said as if she were thinking better of it, "But maybe you're too tired. Even bringing one spirit to this plane is exhausting for the true medium."
Moira contrived to look droopy and weak, but her blue eyes flashed when another one of her audience said with disappointment, "Oh, no. We want more. We're paying you, aren't we?"
Moira sighed wearily and said, "But of course, dear. I shall try to tell you everything you want to know."
There was a general sigh of pleasure, as if they were all quite entertained or happy with the whole performance and Harry wondered if any of them really believed it was real. He was rather shocked himself at the mention of money. So Moira and Ashley were pulling off a con game right in Ashley's so tidy and so respectable suburban neighborhood.
A con game no different than the one Black Jack Crowley had played on his poor customers. And the victims, Harry saw, had one thing in common: they were all, rich or poor, quite willing and eager to participate in their fleecing, so anxious were they for that little bit of comfort or excitement. Dudley said softly to Harry, whispering so that Ashley couldn't hear, "Now you see why I wanted you here."
Harry said just as softly, "You'd have done fine without me. This whole thing is a fraud and your friend Moira is no witch. She wouldn't know a ghost if it sang "Rule Britannia" to her."
Dudley seemed to relax visibly and he said in something like his old malicious manner, "She's not my friend. But she'd like to be yours. And I have to admit," he added, "She looked like she was giving you a fair snog there." Harry felt the heat climb up his face, but he said nothing.
Dudley added, "It's good to know you've gotten turned around to liking girls."
Harry glared at him as the implication sank in. "It's a good thing for you I promised to protect you," he said.
Dudley's eyes widened and then narrowed again. "You wouldn't anyway. You wouldn't want to get thrown out of that school of yours, would you?" Harry glared at him again and so he was surprised when he heard the faint clunk of something striking the table. Moira had rolled out a pile of things from a black velvet sack right onto the table.
One was a fairly large crystal ball. One was a deck of cards - tarot cards, he saw. One was a long wooden stick that looked just like a real wand and the last was a silver knife engraved with serpents and blackened in places with what might have been blood. Harry gawped at the things and felt a shiver run down his spine. The fine hairs lifted on the back of his neck and he saw that Moira was looking eagerly at the things as though she could hardly wait to touch them. Dudley noted the change in Harry's demeanor.
"I thought you said this was all fake," Dudley whispered to Harry.
Just as softly, Harry answered, "It was. But those things aren't."
He stared suspiciously at Moira and Ashley and said, "Where did you say you got those things from?"
"From her gypsy Gran," Jillian said coolly. "Come on, Moira," she said. "Look in the crystal and tell us our fortunes." Moira reached out and her hand hovered over the table.
"Ah," she said, "the crystal and then the knife. Or maybe," she said with her brow knitted, "the knife and then the crystal."
Harry watched her eyes cloud over and her hand hovered as though magnetically attracted to the knife. Alarm bells rang in his mind, and he saw with consternation that a very faint light seemed to emanate from the knife. And this time, it wasn't fake, because the chandelier was still on. Even as the thought surfaced, the chandelier flickered on and off, and from the adjoining room, all the lights flickered as well. The others were all staring at Moira and the table, their gaze fixed on the objects in front of them as if they, too, could not bring themselves to look away.
Harry tried to think what to do. At least one of the objects there was the kind that got sold in Knockturn Alley, and maybe all. If he simply left, the Muggles there would fall under the spell that already crept out to touch them. And who knew what would happen? He thought he ought to try to contact Mr. Weasely, but he was sure there wouldn't be enough time, even if he had the means, which he didn't. He could send Hedwig, of course, but Hedwig as sleeping in her cage at the Durlsey's house and she'd not return for a day even if he sent her. By then, it might be too late. Moira's hand seemed to reach for the knife of it's own accord. Harry reached out and grabbed it and stopped her reach.
"Don't touch it," he said sharply.
Dudley stared at him and said, "What is it?"
"Nothing good," Harry answered. "There's blood on it. Can't you see it?"
"Don't be silly," Moira said. "It's a ritual knife. They use it in Wicca for spells and divination."
Harry stared at her and said, "Whatever it is, it isn't anything as innocent as that."
"How would you know?" Jillian asked snottily.
Ashely smiled with satisfaction and said, "Oh, Harry's a kind of a witch himself. Dudley told me." Jillian hooted and Moira glared at her.
"He is," she said dreamily. "I was sure of it, the minute I saw him. You were right Ashley," she added, "he's got green eyes, too, like a cat's. Witch eyes. They're quite nice." Harry turned to Dudley and saw that he was turning quite red.
"That's a secret!" Dudley said furiously. Harry couldn't help feeling that everything was spining out of control. Moira reached for the knife again and he said even more sharply,"Don't touch that." This time they all stared at him.
"Why not?" Ashley asked curiously. Harry felt, with something like despair, that nothing could ever go right in his life.
"It's cursed," he answered angrily. "Where did you get it?"
"I told you, from my Gran," Moira answered. Harry could tell by the way her eyes traveled quickly to Ashley and back again that the answer was a fib.
"Try again," he said impatiently. "I need to know where you really got it." Moira gaped at him and it seemed as though she would refuse to answer.
Ashley, however, said frowningly, "Well, we bought it from an antiques stall in Portobello Road. The whole lot of it. They said it was from an estate that had all sorts of stuff like that."
"Did either one of you actually touch that knife with your bare hands?" Harry asked. He was especially worried about Moira. She was eyeing the knife again with fascination and he needed to find out as much as he could before she fell under its spell altogether. Ashely shook her head. We got it this afternoon and we haven't opened it since then. She stopped and looked at Moira, "You didn't, did you?" she asked sharply.
Harry thought with interest that Ashley was a lot smarter than she seemed on the surface. Much smarter than Dudley, that was certain. Moira shook her head, but her eyes didn't leave the knife. Harry saw that there were several others who were looking at it, too, and decided the time had run. He needed to defuse the situation now. He'd reckon with the Ministry later.
"Back off. Everyone," Harry said, as much like Dumbledore did when he wanted instant obedience, as he was able. He was gratified to see that they all did. And many of them were staring at him instead of the knife now, which did nothing for his temper at all.
"Do you mind if I check out all if this stuff?" he asked Ashley.
"What's wrong with the rest of it?" she replied.
"Well, I don't know yet, do I?" he answered testily. "I want to make sure none of the rest of it is jinxed or cursed either. I'll leave the knife to the last cause it's going to be the most difficult. Just, everybody stay back. Okay?"
Dudley stirred then and said, "You can burn the whole bloody lot of it, as far as I'm concerned." Harry stared at him in surprise and Dudley said, "I paid for it. Ashley wanted it, so I bought it for her."
His face turned bright red right up to his hairline and Ashley looked momentarily victorious. She nodded, too. Harry moved back to the table and reached for the pack of cards. It was still wrapped in plastic, but he had heard enough stories about all sorts of things being jinxed, like the exploding toilets in Bethnal Green, to be quite wary.
He picked up the package and looked at it carefully. It didn't feel wrong and could easily have been sold in a Muggle bookstore as in a shop like Borgin and Burkes. He unwrapped the plastic and fanned the cards looking for unusual markings or any indications that they'd been tampered with. There were none. He shuffled them smoohtly and they felt like they were brand new and had never been used.
Absently, he began laying them out in cross-shaped fashion, looking to see if their faces shifted when they were laid out, but they sat there quite innocently, their colorful pictures glowing up at him. It was quite a nice deck, really. The Lovers sat, their hands entwined in perpetual unity. Then there were the Magician and the Heirophant, poised in opposition. The King of Swords and the Queen of Pentacles, the Jack of Cups and the Fool seemed to float in the dim light.
"Are you going to tell our fortunes?" Jillian asked. Her voice was no longer snotty. Instead, she looked eagerly at Harry as if she'd forgotten the whole reason why he'd jumped in to begin with. Or maybe, he thought sourly, she thought all of it was a performance, staged to bring them to this point exactly. She he was rather more short with her than he might have been.
"I don't do fortunes," he said irritably.
"Does that mean you won't or you can't?" Ashley asked. Harry gave her a scathing look and didn't bother to answer.
Moira, on the other hand, said dreamily, "That's not a bad hand really. A bit of romance, a bit of a challenge, and a change in fortune."
"Oh," he ansered grouchily, "It's positively freindly for me. No death card." Moira reached over and turned up the last card in the formation. There it was. Death. He stared at it in annoyance and everyone who could see the name on it gasped.
"It doesn't mean you're going to die," Moira said. "It means the end of something. Like a passage. A change in your life, somehow." Harry shrugged and didn't bother to answer. He swept the cards up and said, "Those look all right."
He moved next to the crystal, which was quite large and had a silver tripod stand with winged dragons for its feet. He picked up the crystal and simply felt it. The glass was cool to the touch and perfectly clear. He looked at it from all angles to see if there were any hidden flaws or images that might signal something was wrong with it. But there seemed to be nothing.
He set it on its stand, took his hand away and looked into its depths. Obediently, its center filled with misty white clouds, exactly like the ones in Trelawny's class. Again, everyone said ah and ooh under their breath and again Harry ignored them. He had never actually seen anything in a crystal before and he didn't expect to now. The shimmering mists were vague cloudy shapes and appeared to take on the form of the winged dragons on which the crystal sat.
"That one's okay, too. I think," he said. "And it's quite a good one. You might be able to get some good money if you sell it off."
"What do you mean, you think?" Dudley asked. His piggy eyes were looking fearful again and he kept darting glances at the knife and the wand as if they might rear up and bite him.
Harry held onto his patience. "I mean, it looks okay on first inspection. It probably ought to be stripped down by an expert to be certain." He turned to Ashley and added, "If you don't mind, I'll take it with me and return it to you after I have someone check it further."
She nodded and stared at him with as much fascination as she had looked at the knife earlier. For the first time, he realized that there truly was a good reason for keeping the reality of the wizard world secret from the Muggles. Harry picked up the wand next. Everyone continued to watch as if Harry were providing them with the greatest entertainment. Except for Dudley, who had started to sweat again the moment Harry touched the wand. Dudley alone had an inkling of what a wand might do if used by the right person.
Harry's mouth went dry. He had never heard of a wand being jinxed or cursed before. Wands were far too important and valuable for that. Unless the reason why the wand's owner had given it up was that the wand had somehow backfired on him. He turned it around and noted that it was made of mahogany and that it looked like an Ollivander. It was a long one, too: almost fourteen inches.
One of the others watching, Jillian's boyfriend, laughed suddenly and said, "What are you going to do, wave it and turn us all into frogs?" He laughed some more and so did several others.
"Then Jillian can kiss you and break the curse," someone else joked, and there was more laughter. They had all forgotten already that this might be serious.
"Go on. Turn the blighter into a frog," someone jeered.
Harry gritted his teeth and answered, "I don't think you'd like it if I did. And kissing a transfigured person won't put him back to his original form. Only the correct counter-spell will do that." Some of them snickered again, but Moira stared at him in wonder. Or was it fear?
"What are you going to do with it?" Dudley got out. Harry considered it thoughtfully. He wished he could make the thing talk, so he could find out whose it was or had been, and how it had ended up in a secondhand junk stall on Portobello Road. Then it occurred to him that there was a way he might be able to find out a thing or two.
He looked at Dudley and answered him directly, "I'm going to try to find out whose it was and what was done with it last. If the knife belonged to the owner, it might tell us something of what the curse on it might be."
"This is all a load of tosh," Jillian's boyfriend said. "A clever performance for you all to drag a bit of money out of poor Jill."
Harry considered him with sympathy and said, "I wish it were. But you can leave if you think that's the case. In fact, it might be a good idea if you all left. Then nobody'll get hurt if this backfires."
"Leave?" someone said, "this is the most fun we've had since Dudley went clean last year and stopped bringing us the good stuff."
Dudley turned pale at that and Harry stared at his cousin. He hadn't realized that Dudley had been into anything worse than the occsional shoplifting or terrorizing the neighborhood kids.
"Well, go on," Dudley said nervously. Clearly, he wanted to change the subject from his former crimes even if that meant encouraging Harry to do magic. Harry reflected that Dudley must now be more afraid of going to jail than he was of being turned into a pig. Jail, he thought though, might well be safer than the wrong kind of magic.
Sighing and putting out of his mind how he was going to explain to the Ministry why he had done so much magic in front of Muggles, Harry drew his own wand and took up the other in his left hand. The room went quite silent as perhaps the onlookers felt a premonition that their comprehension of the world and its rules was about to change. Harry held the tip of his own wand to the tip of the other and said the incantation as best as he could recall, "Priori Incantatum!"
A shadow of a vast glittering skull rose up in the small space of the dining room. Out of the skull's mouth protruded the shape of a snake. Icy fear swept through him, and for the first time that night, Harry considered that what he was attempting to do might be well beyond him. He broke the wands' contact and gasped, "Deletrius!" and then he cursed quite violently, so that Dudley, in particular, stared at him.
"What is it?" he asked fearfully. The others, of course, had not the slightest clue, but were staring at Harry now with unease. This had gone beyond the usual sort of ouija board readings or seances that they had dabbled with. One of them went to turn on more lights except that they wouldn't work.
Harry said to Dudley only, "It's the Dark Mark. It's Voldemort's mark. He and his Death Eater's use it when they've killed."
Dudley looked pale and asked, "Is it HIS, then?"
Harry shook his head. "No. One of his followers, I'd guess." Dudley didn't look much relieved. Harry didn't feel better either.
"What's wrong with the lights?" someone asked. "The CD player's gone dead, too," another person added. They all stared at Harry.
"What'd you do? What kind of game is this?" Jillian's boyfriend asked. "This is going a bit far. Too far," he said angrily.
"Yeah," someone else said. "Fix the lights. What, did you have them all on a timer or something?" Harry felt uncomfortably that this was getting out of hand fast.
"I haven't touched the lights," he said sharply, hoping his voice alone would stop them.
"He hasn't," Ashley said abruptly. "He's never been here before. He wouldn't know where anything is. But," she added slowly, "Why'd they go off? And how did you do that? That's the best effect I've ever seen."
Harry stared at Ashley in annoyance. He would have liked, right then and there, to simply walk out and leave them all to their fate. But he knew he couldn't. He understood, too, just how hard it must be to believe that magic really existed for perople brought up in science and computers and televisions. Every one of them was sure, even Ashley herself, that magic was really a joke, an illusion. Only Dudley really knew better because he'd seen it, experienced it directly.
Dudley, in fact, looked ready to bolt. "The lights went out because he did use magic."
Harry stared at him in surprise trying to figure out how Dudley knew that. Then it occurred to him that Dudley was remembering the dementors and how not only the streetlights had gone out, but how the very stars and moon had seemed to disappear.
"Turn 'em back on," Dudley said. "We want some light."
Harry sighed and said patiently, "I can't turn the electric back on. But I can give you some light."
He scanned the room for something to use and settled on lighting the fire in the fireplace, which thankfully was a real one and not electric. He flicked his wand, and the logs, which had very likely been there for show only, exploded into fire and began to burn merrily. The sudden light illuminated eleven faces, all astonished, all beginning to be rather frightend. And then there was Dudley, who was already very frightened.
Moira moved again and said dreamily, "It's quite a show, isn't it? Let's just see how this baby works. It's magic, all right. The kind that'll send you right into eternity."
Her blue eyes were cloudy and her pupils were hugely dilated. Harry grabbed her hand once more as it crept toward the cursed knife. He said grimly to Dudely, "Hold her, will you? She's been affected by the curse."
Dudley backed up like he wanted to run and Harry said impatiently, "It won't harm you, just hold her back. You're strong enough to hold back one small girl." Dudley swallowed nervously, the big Adam’s apple bobbing inside his thick neck, and laid a meaty hand on Moira's shoulder. She tried to pull away and reached for the knife again, but at Harry's nod, Dudley simply wrapped one huge arm around her shoulders and held her away from the table.
"What is it?" Ashley asked nervously. Harry sighed.
"I'm still not a hundred percent sure," Harry answered. "I think it's a murder curse. The spell causes the affected person to take hold of the object, in this case the knife, and use it to kill anything and anyone in sight. And if no one else is there, the cursed person will kill himself."
"So what are you going to do?" Ashley asked with reluctant fascination, "break the curse?" Harry stared at the knife and thought. Too bad he couldn't get a hold of Bill Weasley. The oldest of the Weasley brothers worked as a curse-breaker for Gringotts and would probably know exactly what to do. But looking at Moira, Harry knew he'd taken too much time already and he still couldn't think of a way of reaching him fast enough. He thought ironically, that wizards needed a magic form of a mobile phone.
He nodded and said, "Yeah. I'll try to disarm it. And if I can't, it'll have to be destroyed."
"Destroyed?" Ashley asked, "How? And it looks quite valuable and old."
Harry felt his mouth go dry and he said simply, "If the spell can't be lifted, we can't afford to leave it alone. It'll have to be destroyed because then the spell won't have a physical object to attach itself to and it'll dissipate."
"You make it sound almost like science when you talk that way. Like radiation or something," someone said.
"It is rather," Harry answered. "You can't see radiation either, can you? But you know it's there because you can measure its effects." He scanned the room again and said "Stand back," once more.
This time, they all backed away, all the way to the walls, and watched him as if they were waiting for the curtain to rise on the next scene in a bad horror movie. They had the same look of pleasurable fascination and disbelief and unease. Not knowing exactly how he knew what to do, Harry cupped his hands together and opened them, making a small sphere of golden light like Lupin had done on the Hogwarts Express when the lights had gone out because of the dementors. He waved his hand and then light travled over to the knife and surrounded it.
Immediately, a lurid green glow sprang back from the knife, forcing Harry's light back and illuminating the dark stains on the blade. Moira gasped. Harry concentrated on closing the golden light around the knife as he had once concentrated on forcing the beads of light away from himself and toward Voldemort between their wands in the graveyard three years ago. The golden light closed in again, but then the green light flared back up and Harry thought, this is no good. I don't know what I'm doing, really. He seized his wand again and banished the knife to the fireplace where the flames now burned suddenly higher and acquired a green cast.
Harry ignored the stares and murmurs of the watching Muggles and flung fire at the knife both from his wand and from the logs. The temperature rose as the fire grew hotter and hotter until the knife began to sizzle and the silver turned a glowing red-white and began to melt. The green light danced among the flames and wrapped around the knife as if it were alive and thinking, as if it could protect the knife.
Harry fllicked his wand again and made the flames hotter still. The silver metal began to run in molten streams about the logs, wrapping them in streaks of shining white-hot metal, all run through still with the strange greenish light. The logs were nearly consumed into ash, but still the fire blazed and Harry forced it to grow hotter still. The silver continued to break down into a small river of molten metal and then to sizzle in a rising steam as it melted into thin air and all that was left were the flames and the green light. Then the green light winked out and Harry let the fire die down into nothing.
"What the devil are you doing, Dudley?" Moira said into the absolute silence. "I thought we were going to do the ouija board." She pushed at Dudley's big arm and Harry nodded for him to let go. The others gawped at her.
"We're not doing that tonight," Ashley reminded her. Harry heaved a sigh of relief and considered simply slipping away. He looked around waiting for the Ministry to come and get him. Where was the owl to give him notice he'd be expelled or have a hearing? He pushed his damp hair off his sweaty forehead and breathed in gratefully as someone threw up a window and a cool breeze blew through lowering the temperature, which had shot way up as Harry had melted the cursed knife. A glass clunked and Harry saw that Ashley was pouring a clear liquid into a cup.
She tossed it back in a single gulp and said, "Whew. That was one of the scariest things I've ever seen." Then she looked at Harry and said, "So Dudley wasn't telling stories. You really are a witch." For some reason, that one comment made Harry feel more narked than anything else that had happened the entire night.
"Women are witches," he said coolly. "Men are wizards. I am a wizard. A fact which all of you are going to forget."
"How could we forget that?" Jillian asked. "What you did was...incredible. It was either real magic, or the most amazing act I've ever seen in my life."
Harry would have liked a swallow of beer himself. His mouth felt as dry as if he'd been inside a desert dust storm. He looked at all the Muggles and thought; I've got to fix this mess somehow. He lifted his wand once more, and everyone stopped to stare to see what the next entertainment would be. Quickly, without a pause, he went up and down and said, "Obliviate," and each of the faces turned vague and forgetful.
Harry swept the tarot cards, crystal and wand into the black velvet bag and said calmly, "Dudley, I think you ought to check the electric. Looks like you've had some kind of power surge."
Dudley gave Harry a terrified stare and coughed. Then he said, "Erm...Ash, where's the electric box?"
"Downstairs," Ashley said dreamily. "I'd beter call the repairman. Daddy won't like it if we can't put up the Christmas lights tomorrow."
Harry breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently, his memory spell had worked. He looked at Dudley and said, "I'm ready to go."
He strode toward the door and noticed that several of the people had wandered back to the adjoining to lounge to grab some more beer. He let himself out the front and found that Dudley was only a step behind him.
"What did you do to them?" Dudley asked fearfully.
"I made them forget," Harry answered. "If they can't remember, maybe I won't get into as much trouble for doing magic," he said.
Dudley looked at him sidelong and asked, "So how come you didn't make me forget?"
Harry smiled grimly and said, "Well, I might need a witness to help keep me getting expelled. I need you to tell them what happened, so they know.
Dudley opened the door to Number Four, Privet Drive and led the way in through the kitchen. Harry saw on the glowing dial of the clock that it was past two in the morning. He followed Dudley up the stairs still waiting expectantly for an owl or warning of some kind. Then it hit him. At midnight, the day had turned from July 30th to July 31st. He'd been seventeen for two whole hours. And whatever he'd done was no longer a question of underage magic. He felt a swooping feeling of relief as he went into his room and dumped the black bag onto the desk.
Then he jumped as a voice said from behind him in a very loud whisper, "
Where have you been? And what have you been up to, Harry Potter?"
