Holidays.  Harry had never looked forward to them; when they ended, he would usually be jumping for joy—at least, he would have if his aunt and uncle weren’t constantly watching him like vultures.  They weren’t particularly pleasant individuals; whenever he stayed with them, he’d been half-starved, forced to do all the unpleasant tasks around the house, and then confined to his room whenever he was not wanted.  It had been a small consolation for him to discover, in his fifth year, that far from being the social lions that his aunt had always held them to be, the Dursley family was in fact held in polite contempt by a good number of their so-called friends.  It was a little mean-spirited, true, to feel pleased about it, but Harry had been under their thumb for almost fifteen years at the time, and thus it was unavoidable that he should harbour some animosity towards them.

 

            This year, though, Harry found himself regarding the end of the holidays with not a little wistfulness.  Not a little of this feeling was engendered by the fact that this, the summer of 1997, was the first summer in his life when he’d actually been happy.  This year, instead of returning to the house at Number 4, Privet Drive, he had accompanied his friend, Ron Weasley, back to his family home, the Burrow, a large, rambling structure in which dwelled the diverse and multitudinous members of the burgeoning Weasley clan.  Two of Ron’s brothers had gotten married, and with their wives had taken up residence in unoccupied sections of the Weasley house.  Harry had found himself surrounded with warm, friendly faces.  It was deeply moving, he thought, as he strolled along the grand concourse of King’s Cross Railway Station, to know that so many people cared.

 

            His road had not been an easy one.  He had borne the marks of destiny since he had been a babe in arms.  The Dark Lord Voldemort, for reasons unknown, had come upon his parents’ house in the dark and destroyed it, and them.  The battle had been spectacular; the resulting lightshow had been visible for miles around.  When the great pyre of eldritch energies had finally subsided, the muggle authorities had descended upon the area in force, dispatching police and other emergency personnel to the scene.  They had found the empty, burnt-out shell of a small stone cottage—and the charred bodies of Lily and James Potter.  Harry was nowhere to be found.  He had been taken, unscathed, from the scene of battle by the half-giant Rubeus Hagrid, transported upon the flying motorbike of his godfather, the animagus Sirius Black to Privet Drive, where he was placed upon the doorstep of his mother’s sister’s house, with a note from Albus Dumbledore explaining the situation tucked into his swaddling-cloth.

 

            The whole thing had turned out to be a colossal mistake on the arch-wizard’s part; Harry had been regarded by the Dursleys as an onerous burden and a freak of nature, rather than as actual blood-kin.   Yet try as they might to suppress Harry’s unusual heritage, to condemn him to the life of a drudge instead of the glorious destiny that lay before him, Harry’s mage-blood, and the mark of a lightning-bolt upon his brow, left there by that last failed death-spell cast by Lord Voldemort, had marked him as a person of Fate, around whom great things and monumental events would revolve.

 

            That heritage had come to full fruition upon his eleventh birthday, when out of nowhere mysterious letters had begun to arrive.  Soon, Harry found himself caught up in a world of wizards and witches, of spells and flying broomsticks, and eventually ended up embroiled once more in the machinations of the Dark Lord Voldemort, and had been instrumental more than once in thwarting the evil mage’s plans.

 

            This year, though, the coming of the school term had been marked by dire tidings.  The last week’s attack on Diagon Alley, reported with varying levels of detail and alarm by both the magical and mundane presses, had signaled one thing to those in the know: that the secret war that had been fought for seven long years in the shadows, the war about which in their most secret of councils ordinary wizards and witches had whispered about but hardly dared to believe in; the war had broken out, out into the open.  From now on, it would be waged against all comers, whether magical or mundane, and it would not stop, not until the world entire lay within Voldemort’s grasp, and all within had bent the knee towards him.

 

            Harry shuddered.  He had seen the Dark Lord’s mind, during their last encounter, just a few months before as they stood, locked in a duel of sorcerous energies.  The sight had, for a few precious moments, paralysed him with despair.  The sheer monstrosity contained within that human skull was beyond belief.  Harry had seen visions of a world in ruins, cities destroyed, razed entirely to the ground merely for the crime of having been the work of Muggle hands, and last and worst of all, a long line of Muggles, being herded by laughing Death-Eaters into some sort of enclosure, where they were “processed”, reduced from human beings to mere meat-animals, stripped, hunted for sport, bred like cattle and suffered unspeakable horrors and hands of Death-Eaters.  It was not just the sight itself that had horrified Harry—not just that, but the air of vicious satisfaction—of shrieking, gibbering glee almost—that had hung like the smoke of Hell itself over that horrendous vision inside that hideous mind.  The Dark Lord had nursed his hatreds long and well, and his vengeances no less so.

 

            They had almost destroyed him then, as he stood, facing them atop the roof of the Lloyd’s Building.  Only the intervention of the stranger known only as “Alucard”; a man whose acquaintance Harry had struck up as he tailed the Death-Eaters through the sewers to their meeting place, had saved him there and then.  Even so, the Dark wizards had escaped, leaving behind them the still bodies of the muggle security guarding the building.  As Alucard had explained it as they too fled the scene, the building was situated atop a massive vortex of extradimensional energy, the like of which was only rivaled by the fabled Hellmouth.  The Death-Eaters had planned to use this energy, channeled through the great metal-reinforced pillar at the building’s heart, to summon up some…thing.  Harry had only had the briefest of glimpses of whatever it had been, but what he had seen, even more than the contents of Voldemort’s mind, had been sufficient, when he thought about it later to induce in him an uncontrollable shivering fit.

 

            There were rumors, Harry knew, that the wizarding race had not arisen naturally, that it had been created, for their own unfathomable purposes, by vast and unutterably alien beings from beyond the stars.  More, several of the legends involved humans, both wizard and Muggle, coming into contact with these strange intelligences.  Most ominously, no one of these unfortunate adventurers had ever been recorded as surviving their encounters intact.  Inevitably, though they lived through that first, horrifying brush against a reality far vaster and more unforgiving than anything in human experience, they all went mad.  It might take months, or even years, but slowly, inexorably, they each and everyone descended into screaming, raving insanity.

 

            Harry could feel it himself, deep in the darkest corners of his mind: a small voice, gibbering away, screaming at his consciousness about the utter meaninglessness of life—about the insignificance and impotence of the human race in a vast and uncaring cosmos.  He did his best to ignore it.  Thus far, he had been successful; the voice had remained, up till now, just a nagging whisper in his waking moments.  There were times, though in the night.  He would wake up screaming now and then, his mind reeling from the sight of some half-remembered horror, a Thing whose shape he could not describe, yet the memory of which filled him with dread.

 

            He shuddered.  There was a pillar next to him.  He put his hand on it, feeling the comforting roughness of the solid brick under his palm, and leaned on it.  This was real, he told himself.  The pillar was real, and the train station was real, and Hogwarts was real, and all those he knew were real.  Professor Dumbledore, Sirius, Professor Lupin, Hermione, Ron, and everybody else.  Even Draco and Professor Snape, enemies though they were of his.  They were real, and good and evil were real.  That was the truth.  He would not succumb, try as it might, to the hideous wiles of that otherworldly force.  He would not.

 

            He felt a slim hand upon his arm.  He turned.  It was Ginny.  Virginia Weasley, flower of the Weasley clan, the only daughter among the many sons of Arthur Weasley.

 

            “Harry,” she said.  “You don’t look too well.  Is everything all right?”

 

            “Huh?  Oh, yeah.  No, Ginny, it’s all right.  I’m fine.  Really.”  He smiled at her reassuringly, the smile seeming to him to echo hollowly through the caverns of his consciousness.  He certainly didn’t feel reassured.

 

            She examined him for a few moments, staring deeply into his eyes, as if searching for something, some sign of duplicity, perhaps, as if somehow, she knew what had happened to him that dreadful night.

 

            You fool, he thought.  If there is anything worth fighting for in this world, it’s her.  She matters.  Don’t you get it?  Those Great Old Ones can do whatever they like.  I’ll stand against them again if I have to, because of her.  They can’t stop me. 

 

            Tenderly, he took her hand.  “Really, Ginny, I am all right.  I was just thinking, that’s all.”

 

            “About the attacks?” she asked.

 

            Harry looked at her.  She seemed…subdued somehow. Scared, almost.  Since his fourth year, almost the entire wizarding world had known about the resurgence of Voldemort.  To most, however, he remained a distant, though menacing figure.  When, after the disastrous events of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, no further threats had emerged for some time, the demands of normal life had shoved any worries about the Dark Lord into the background.  Ordinary men and women still had livings to make.  There were still children to be educated.  The complacency that, in every society, inevitably occurs every time a grave threat fails to emerge had set in.

 

            Only a select few, those who had been involved personally in the struggle against the Dark Lord, had remembered, and held themselves ready, waiting for the day when he would strike again.  Over the past two years, they had fought a shadow war, carrying out the actions against the Death Eaters that the Aurors themselves could not undertake.  In a hundred secret holdings of the Death Eater cult, in the darkness of night, in hidden alleyways and mystical locations known to only a select few powerful wizards, the secret spell-war had been waged.  Harry himself had been a participant in the war, thwarting, with the assistance of his friends, the plots of the Dark Lord within Hogwarts itself for two years running.

 

            Still, though, the covert nature of the cult’s operations indicated that, in all likelihood, its dark master had not the strength at his command to conduct a campaign in the open even against the magical authorities of Great Britain alone.  This sudden change of tactic had been interpreted as a dire sign by several who were knowledgeable in such things.  Surely the Dark Lord had to realize that such an attack, in the middle of an area heavily populated with wizards, and for no apparent reason, would bring the full wrath of the wizarding government down upon his organization.  A powerful wizard Voldemort was, but even he could not single-handedly conquer the world.  Hence, to expose his cult so to such a response, out of the blue, could only mean one thing—that, against all expectations, he had built the Death Eaters to such strength as he believed could take all comers, wizard or Muggle.  And he had done so without betraying at all his organization’s true strength.

 

            There were those among the secret warriors who favored a second explanation: that Voldemort had found allies.  Though there were many in whom whose hearts the Dark Lord’s creed of hatred towards the non-magical folk had struck a chord, yet in comparison to the wizarding population at large, they were pitiably small.  Outside of Europe, the proportion was even smaller.  Though the Dark Lord might gather them all under his sway, yet should they in the slightest attract the attention of the mundane governments of the world, they would not survive.

 

            Thus, the wizards and witches whose task it was to oppose the Dark Lord found the news of the attack ominous indeed.  Even more ominous, though were the reports of what had accompanied the Death Eaters in their latest assault.

 

            Several of the survivors had reported seeing strange      creatures, a weird cross of fish, man and frog, alongside the attacking Death Eaters at Diagon Alley, wielding a type of magic that no wizard had ever seen before.  The slobbering, chanting horrors had set upon the civilians present with death-spell, tooth and claw.  Conventional curses had bounced off them, recoiling on their casters as if they had turned their wands upon themselves.  Even those few with the wit or the daring to essay the Unforgivable Curses upon these creatures had found, to their horror, their castings turned back upon them.

 

            Try as both the Ministry of Magic as well as the cabal to which Harry belonged did to suppress it, the news of these strange new allies of Voldemort had leaked out into the wizarding population at large.  Though it was, as yet, only regarded as a rumor, it had contributed to the general air of tension that for the past week had hung over the wizarding world.

 

            All this passed through Harry’s mind as he considered the young woman whom, he was quite sure, he loved.  She was not aware of the hidden struggle that had gone on behind the scenes of everyday life.  Harry found himself uncertain as to what, if anything, he should tell her.  Should he reveal the existence of that inner society of which he himself was a member, as a means of allaying her fears?  After all her father and several of her brothers were themselves members of that society.  What harm could it do?

 

            No sooner had he asked that question in his mind than he found the answer:  None at all.  Yet the war against Voldemort was a secret initiative.  Had he been working alone, he might have safely revealed all he knew.  But there were others, and to tell any outsider, even one so trusted as Ginny Weasley, could affect the fates of dozens of other wizards who played their own parts in the struggle against the Dark Lord.

 

            “Yes,” he said.  He turned, still holding her hand, and walked with her along the platform, towards the station café.  Passing a clock, he glanced up.  It was early still; the train to Hogwarts would not leave the station for another hour yet.  Perhaps, he thought, there would be time to have a drink with Ginny…

 

            Hopefully, it would also give him an opportunity to take his mind off his troubles for a few minutes.

 

            “He’s so much stronger, isn’t he?” asked Ginny, somberly.  “It seems like he’s got so much power now, and for so long, we just forgot he was there.”

 

            Harry shook his head.  “It happens, Ginny.  People don’t like to think too much on these sorts of things—they’re not made that way, actually.  Only when danger’s staring them straight in the face do they get a move on.”  He sighed.  “You can’t really blame them, actually; that’s just the way people are.  Only sometimes it can become so bloody counterproductive.”  He shook his head again, his expression grim.

 

            “We’ll fight, won’t we?”  Ginny’s voice was soft.  Harry felt her hand close just a bit tighter around his.

 

            He smiled.  “Of course we will,” he said.  “I don’t see how we can do otherwise.  I just doubt that we’ll win, though.”  His smile faded as he pondered that grim prospect.  Then, abruptly, he chuckled.  “Of course, one good thing about this whole affair is that the PM’s probably lit a fire under Minister Fudge for letting this happen.”

 

            Ginny chuckled too as they entered the café.  It was crowded; there seemed to be many more people waiting to use the trains on this day of this year than there had been in the past.  Harry’s practiced eye identified almost half of the people within, sitting quietly at tables, sipping tea or lemonade, as wizardly folk.  There were a great many young children, accompanied by anxious parents as they counted out the minutes until the great train from London up to the loch in Scotland over which Hogwarts stood was ready to leave.

 

            Barely days after the attack, Headmaster Dumbledore had issued a statement opening Hogwarts to children under the age of twelve.  The school was, both physically and metaphysically, the most well protected location in the British Isles.  A great many parents had taken him up on the offer.  A war was looming, and the children, who could not as yet lift their hands to take part in this struggle, nor comprehend the motivations behind the belligerents, had to be protected.  Dumbledore’s offer of the school as a sanctuary had been well-received indeed.  Now, every magical child in the United Kingdom was on his or her way north, to Hogwarts, and to safety.

 

            Harry looked around.  He could hear the people talking, both wizard and muggle, filling the café with their voices.  A chance word, overheard here, another there—there was an undercurrent of tension within the conversation, and he could feel it.

 

            He led Ginny by the hand to an empty booth, tucked away in the corner.  A waiter came over to take their order.  They made small talk as they waited, discussing the possibilities of the coming school year, remembering old and mutual friends.

 

            Ron Weasley entered the café, followed closely by Hermione Granger.  Harry waved.

 

            Ron spotted them almost immediately.  His face lit up as he took Hermione by the hand and they threaded their way through the tables to where Harry and Ginny sat. 

 

            “Hallo, Harry,” he said, as he sat down.  “I think you’ve been having designs on my sister.  Good thing we caught up with you just now.”

 

            “Ooh, you’ll suffer for that,” replied Ginny.  “Poke him in the ribs for me, will you, Hermione?”

 

            “With pleasure,” said Hermione, and did just that.

 

            Ron winced.  “Ow,” he said.  He looked around.

 

            “A lot more crowded around here than usual,” he observed.  “If Voldemort were to decide to attack…”  He let the thought trail off.

 

            Harry sighed.  He supposed there was no escaping talk of the war.

 

            Ron was right.  If the Death Eaters were to attack now, with so many wizards gathered in one place; if they could achieve the element of surprise, they might very well wipe out almost all viable opposition to their plans in the British Isles.

 

            As if to confirm his gloomy hypothesis, there was a thunderous detonation outside.  The great glass roof of the train station burst inward, showering the hapless pedestrians below with thousands of razor-sharp shards.

 

            Panicked shouts filled the café.  Harry, Ron and Hermione shot to their feet, wands out and ready.  A few other wizards and witches were already fighting their way to the door, their wands crackling with mystical energy in anticipation of a fight.

 

            As they pushed their way to the door, Harry noticed Ginny, her wand out and ready, following him a few meters behind.  He turned.

 

            “Ginny,” he called.  “What are you doing?”

            “I ought to ask you the same thing,” she replied.  “Why are you three heading towards the fight?”

 

            “Ginny—“ he began, then broke off.  “Look, it’d take too much time to explain.  Just get to a safe place.  We’ll take care of this.”

 

            There was a sudden surge of people back from the entrance to the café, as a green bolt of light splashed against the doorframe, narrowly missing the wizard who was crouched at its foot, firing off spell after spell with his wand.  The rush knocked Harry off his feet, straight into Ginny’s arms.

 

            She pushed him off.  “Don’t say that to me, Harry Potter.  You want a piece of the fight, and so does my brother.  What is wrong with you?”

 

            Before Harry could answer, he heard Ron’s voice, calling from beside the doorway.  “Harry!  Hey, Harry!  Where are you?”  He turned, and saw a hand waving frantically above the heads of the crowd.  “Help!  We can’t hold all these people back ourselves!”

 

            Harry turned and began fighting his way through the small crowd thronging the café door.  A hand grabbed at his sleeve and attempted to pull him off his feet; a quick fire-spell, and the owner of the hand abruptly withdrew it, clutching his singed appendage as he did so.

 

            At the door to the café, several wizards and witches were attempting to restrain a crowd of panicked Muggles, and not a few wizardly folk, from leaving. 

 

            Ron stood, arms raised, wand waving in sinuous patterns, trying to hold the crowd back with a shield-charm.  Beads of sweat sprang forth upon his face, and the veins stood out upon his forehead as the strain of maintaining the shield told upon him.  Harry and Ginny found themselves pressed up against the shield by the anxious mob.  Pressed between the two, Harry fought hard to breathe.

 

            Abruptly, the doors to the kitchen flew open.  Hermione’s voice, magically augmented, rose over the din of the crowd.

 

            “The kitchen!  Everyone, there is an exit through the kitchen.  THE KITCHEN, EVERYBODY!”

 

            Already an exodus had begun.  Those timid souls who had, upon the first report, taken cover in corners and under overturned tables, had already begun scrambling out through the kitchen door, through the kitchen itself, and thence to freedom out the back door.

 

            The crowd melted away around Harry, as gradually, its members realized that a new avenue of escape had been opened to them.  With a sigh of relief, Ron dispelled the shield—and was immediately tackled by a desperate mother.

 

            “My baby!” she cried, frantically.  “My baby’s out there!  Please, sir, let me out, PLEASE!”  She struggled as Harry, Hermione and Ginny attempted to pull her back, away from the vicious firefight raging outside.

 

            “Excuse me,” said a voice.  A strong hand came to rest on Harry’s shoulder.  He turned.

 

            A tall man stood there, clad in trench coat over a well-cut suit.  He looked expensive, well-groomed, his blond hair coiffed in the latest fashion.

 

            “Is anything wrong?  You seem to be having a problem.”

 

            Harry stared.  There was a pitched battle going on outside, and this man, a Muggle by all the look of him, was standing there calmly, asking questions.  As if to emphasize the incongruity of the moment, there was a thunderous crash outside.  In his arms, the bereaved mother began her struggle anew, calling out weakly for her baby.

 

            “Sir--” Harry began, but the blond man held up his hand.

 

            “That’s all right lad, I know what’s going on out there.  There, ma’am,” he continued, addressing the distraught woman.  “It’s all right now.  Your child’s safe, no fear.  I’ll get him.”

 

            “But,” Hermione spoke up, “Sir, whoever you are you’ll be killed out there.”

 

            The man shrugged and smiled.  “Probably,” he acknowledged, “but most likely not.  I’m more formidable than I appear, Ms…?”

 

            Hermione ignored the implied question of her name.  “Sir,” she repeated, raising her wand, “I can’t let you go out there.  It’s—“

 

            Anything else Hermione might have said was lost as a hideous creature leapt through the door, bowling over the wizards who crouched there firing spells into the hideous melee taking place without.

 

            It was something out of a decadent’s worst opium-nightmare, an atavistic, slobbering combination of man, fish and frog.  A smell as of rotting seaweed rose from its flabby body.  Its mouth worked as it moved, contorting its already hideous visage into yet more repulsive forms.  From deep within its bulbous throat, a series of horrible, slobbering sounds issued, monstrous in their every syllable.  They spoke of ancient days, of dark things lurking in swamps since before the advent of men, waiting, waiting…

 

            It was perhaps understandable, therefore, that at that very moment, everyone lost their heads.  Hermione’s wand whipped round to point at the horrid beast, her mouth open to speak a curse in the thing’s direction.  Ron cried out, and shook himself free of the mother’s grasp to point his own wand at the slavering monstrosity.  The struggling mother broke free with a shriek from the grasps of Harry and Ginny and retreated into the far corner of the room.

 

            Ron and Hermione both fired at the same instant, twin bolts of the Stupefy charm racing forth from the tips of their wands.  The hexes both splashed into the creature’s slimy hide—and then, rebounded forth, back along their original paths to strike their horrified casters before they could even shout.

 

            Harry was just getting his wand around to point at the creature when the blond man gripped his shoulder with an almost superhuman strength and tossed him aside to land on the floor.  A grunt from the other side of the man told him that Ginny had been treated the same way.  The monster howled.

 

            And then, Harry heard the blond man cry out, in a voice that rebounded of the stone walls of the café:

 

            “KIMOTA!”

 

            And there was a thunderous detonation, a flash of light so bright that Harry, his head turned in the opposite direction, was almost blinded.

 

            And then, silence.

 

            Slowly, carefully, Harry raised his head.

 

            The creature lay there, its neck broken, its head almost severed by the immense force used.

 

            “Wha—what happened?” asked Hermione as she got up.

 

            Ron was staring at the corpse.  “Unbelievable.”  He looked around.  “Where’d that guy get to?”

 

            Cautiously, Harry poked his head out the door.

 

            The station was a shambles.  Great splatters of blood and other bodily fluids marked the walls—including the one that led to Platform 9¾, where the Hogwarts Express waited.  Bodies lay everywhere: Muggle policemen, civilians, a few wizards.  Scattered about were the black-clad forms of the attacking Death-Eaters.  They had not died pleasantly—most of their corpses looked as if they’d been struck by an artillery shell at point-blank range.  One of the great trains had been lifted bodily off the tracks.  As Harry looked, he saw a hand and a foot sticking out from underneath one of the carriages.  A broken wand lay just a few inches beyond the hand’s fingers.  Harry shuddered.

 

            There was a commotion at the end of the concourse.  Harry looked up.

 

            His breath caught in his throat.

 

            “Oh, shit!”  It was not often he swore; he could count only three occasions within the last two years when he had done so.  On this occasion, though, he was so overcome with shock, so utterly dumbfounded by a sight which, prior to this he had believed impossible, that the obscenity seemed the most natural thing to say.

 

            Hermione came up behind him.  “This has got to be a joke!” he heard her say.

 

            Ron looked from one of them to the other.  “Harry?  Hermione?  Give me a clue guys, I’ve got no idea what’s going on here.  Who’re those people over there, with the captured Death-Eater?”

 

            Six people stood, bathed in the sunlight streaming down from the broken roof, at the end of the concourse, holding a struggling Death-Eater in their midst.  Five people out of legend, out of tales so outlandish, so strange that for years they had been dismissed as mere children’s stories, consigned to exist only in the world of four-color inks and cheap newsprint.

 

            The blond man, standing tall above the rest, his muscular form clad in a skintight costume of sky blue, two letters ‘M’, one above the other, emblazoned upon his chest: Miracleman, the science hero, the product of British ingenuity and scientific genius.

 

            Beside him, the broad-chested man with the British flag displayed proudly upon his chest, and upon his head a mask with the same flag down to just above his mouth, his every move speaking of power controlled, and majesty: Captain Britain, the Pendragon, heir to the mantle of King Arthur, his mighty form empowered by the magicks of the great wizard Merlin himself.

 

            In the center, holding the Death-Eater captive with what looked like a very vicious arm lock, another man, clad also in the colors of the flag, though slighter and more slender than the last two: Union Jack, Britain’s champion of the common man since 1942, the man who fought the forces of evil armed only with his wits, his automatic, and his own two fists.

 

Standing by his side, her silvery hair blowing in the wind, clad in leotard of gold that reflected the sun’s rays, turning her into a living sun herself: Spitfire, the speedstress of World War II, able to outrun airplanes and catch speeding bullets before they ever found their targets.

 

            On the other side of the couple stood a grim-faced man, clad head to toe in black armor.  Upon his shield, a great star blazed forth, brilliant against the background so black that no light ever reflected off it, while his sword glowed, even in the day, with an uncanny light: The Black Knight, last scion of a line of proud heroes, stretching back to the days of the Round Table.

 

            Last of all, there was a girl, blonde hair tumbling to her waist, carrying a jeweled scepter and clad in white, all white, looking for all the world like a fairy-tale princess come to life: Sailor V, pretty champion of light and justice the world over.

 

            Harry clapped his hand to his forehead; he felt as if he’d fallen into one of Dudley’s comic books.  “This can’t be happening.  I must be hallucinating.  I must be hallucinating.”  He turned to Ginny.  “Ginny, tell me I’m not seeing this,” he pleaded.

 

            “Um, Harry, no,” she replied.  “I can see them too.”

 

            Harry groaned.  He took off his glasses and pinched his nose.  “Days like these, I wonder if anything’s real anymore.”  He sighed.

 

            Ron looked at him as if he’d gone mad.  “Will someone clue me in as to what’s going on here?  Who are these people, and why are you and Hermione so upset about seeing them here?”

 

            “They’re superheroes, Ron,” said Hermione.

 

            “What’re superheroes?”

 

            Hermione sighed, and closed her eyes for a few moments.

 

            “Superheroes, Ron,” she said, in a tired voice after she opened her eyes, “are fictional characters.  They’re from a genre of Muggle literature where people with marvelous powers dress up in funny costumes and go out to fight crime.”

 

            “Kind of like Aurors, then,” said Ron.

 

            Harry leaned back against the solid stone wall of the train station and laughed, hysterically.  “Yeah, something like that.  Except that they’re fictional.  Only thing is,” and he jerked his head at the six figures standing over the struggling Death Eater, “That lot are characters from one of the most popular Muggle comic books now on the newsstands.  Do you see what’s wrong with this picture now?”

 

            “Yet some stories, young Harry, may have a basis in truth.  And that of Excalibur, the Defenders of the British Isles, is among them,” said a voice behind them.

 

            From out of the shadows emerged Albus Dumbledore.  Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny started.

 

            “Professor Dumbledore!”

 

            The old wizard nodded fondly at the four of them.  They were, when all was said and done, his favorite pupils, his protégés in the secret war against the Dark Lord.

 

            “Hello, Harry,” he said.  “Ron, Ginny, Hermione.”  He nodded at each of them as he spoke their names.

 

            “Professor, what’s going on here?” asked Harry.  “Who are those people?”

 

            Dumbledore smiled.  “Them?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the superheroes.  “They, Harry, are exactly who they appear to be.  No more, no less.  Us wizards and witches are not the only things hiding in the shadows of this strange world.”

 

            Miracleman walked past, bearing in his arms a sleeping child.  He went into the café.

 

            “He did save her baby,” breathed Hermione.  There were tears in her eyes.

 

            Dumbledore smiled again.  “Yes,” he agreed.  Then he sobered.  “There is a proposition for you, young Harry, and also for your friends, if they so desire.”

 

            “What is it, Professor?” asked Harry.  The war had demanded a great many things of him since it had begun; he had a feeling that this would be another.  No matter, he thought.  Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.  I’ll see Voldemort defeated if I have to die to do so.  “What is it?”

 

            “Well, Harry, first, I must remind you: as I said, some stories do have a basis in truth.  Do you understand this?”

 

            Harry nodded.  What was all this about?

 

            “Good.”  And Albus Dumbledore turned, and gestured to a figure standing behind him, and a tall, thin, man, aquiline of face, with a high, intelligent brow and piercing grey eyes stepped forward and extended his hand.

 

            “Hello, Mr. Potter.  I’m Sherlock Holmes, and I’ve come to help you in your war against Lord Voldemort.”

 

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