The Curse of the GateKeeper (James Potter #2)

by G. Norman Lippert

  "That's just it," James said, shaking his head. "It doesn't seem to mean anything unless I'm not thinking about it. Then, all of a sudden, it'll pop into my head, just like it did now, and it'll seem really important. I just can't put my finger on it. It's like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, something that vanishes as soon as you look right at it."

  "Well, I guess if it really is important, it'll come to you when you need it," Cedric said, shrugging. "You said you came down here looking for me?"

  "Oh," James replied, shaking himself. "Yeah. Er…" He sighed, and then looked the ghost right in his semi-transparent eye. "We need your help, Ced. I don't know how else to put it. We're putting together this club, Ralph and Rose and me. Actually, it was Noah, Sabrina, and Damien's idea, but we're the ones that went to Merlin and got permission and everything. Honestly, we're not even the first people to do it. My dad had a club like this way back in his day, although it was after you, you know, er… anyway, we need to learn how to do defensive spells and techniques and our new teacher this year refuses to teach us anything except how to pull a hamstring. We've got permission to officially start the club, and by now, it seems like the whole school already knows about it. Our first meeting's tomorrow, but we don't even have a teacher. That's why I came to find you. When we first talked about it, you were the first person that Ralph, Rose, and I thought of to teach us defensive magic."

  "You can't be serious," Cedric said, smiling a little crookedly. "I'm a ghost, if you haven't noticed. Not only do I not have a working wand anymore, technically, I don't even have fingers. I couldn't Stun a dust-bunny. I have a hard enough time magicking the lanterns out when I do my 'Specter of Silence' routine. And you think I can teach defensive magical technique?"

  "Well, yeah!" James said, warming to the subject. "I mean, you were a great wizard, even while you were still in school! Everybody says so! Even Viktor Krum talks about how you outwitted the dragon and took on the merpeople. You were a natural! Besides, you have actual battle experience, having been all through the Triwizard Tournament. And you learned under Dumbledore, who everybody says was the golden age of Hogwarts. Come on, Cedric! It's perfect!"

  "I don't think so, James," Cedric said, his smile fading. "It's great that you thought to ask me and all, but…"

  "Look, Cedric, this isn't just for us," James said, stepping a bit closer to the ghost. "You said you didn't think there was a place for you here anymore. All your old friends and classmates have moved on. But there are a whole bunch of us who really do need you, here and now. My dad says you were totally excellent with your spellwork and technique, and everybody knows you were a natural leader. I know you still remember it all because ghosts don't experience time the same way the living do. Come on, what do you say?"

  Cedric's ghost was flitting backwards, his face downcast as he shook his head. "I can't, James. Part of me would really like to do it, but I can't. You wouldn't understand."

  "Look, Ced, just try it for a week or two. It'll be great! Everyone will love you and I just know you'll be able to teach us loads of stuff. Besides…"

  James faltered, not sure if he should go on. Cedric stopped and looked back at him. James took a deep breath and continued.

  "Remember the end of last year, that night when we talked in the Gryffindor common room? You told me there was a sense of Voldemort still in the halls here, even though he was dead. Well, Rose and Ralph and me, we saw something. And… I've been sensing things. Something's up, and it has something to do with the old Death Eaters, and Voldemort's grave, and some really scary creature in a cloak that looks like it's made out of swirling smoke and ash. Rose even thinks that the Headmaster is involved, although I don't agree. What I'm trying to say is that there could be a battle coming. Debellows isn't teaching us anything worth using in a real magical fight. We just want to be prepared. We want to be ready. You're from the time when Voldemort was still alive. You know how best to fight these people. You're perfect, and we need you."

  Cedric looked at James for a long, tense moment. He seemed to be struggling with himself. Finally, he lowered his brow and looked away. "You're right about one thing, James. I did have experience with battle. I was killed in my first one. I lasted a total of ten seconds."

  James was flabbergasted. "Ced, you can't mean that. That night in the graveyard… that wasn't a battle. I've heard Dad talk about it. He was there, remember? Pettigrew shot you with no warning. You can't seriously think…"

  "Really, James," Cedric said, looking up. The ghost's eyes were very grave. "Don't ask me again. I have my reasons. I can't, all right?"

  James met the ghost's gaze. After a moment, he sighed deeply. "All right, Cedric. Forget it. Sorry to bother you. See you around."

  James turned and began to plod away. He got halfway down the corridor when Cedric's voice said, "Does it hurt?"

  James stopped in his tracks and narrowed his eyes. He glanced back over his shoulder. "Does what hurt?"

  Cedric hadn't moved. He hovered near the trophy case, looking solemnly as James. "The mark on your forehead."

  James' heart skipped a beat. Without thinking, he touched the place where he'd felt the itch and the strange dart of pain outside the Headmaster's office. "You can see it?" he whispered harshly.

  Cedric nodded slowly.

  "What—" James began, but his voice failed him. He cleared his throat. "What does it look like?"

  Cedric's expression didn't change. He knew James knew. "It looks like a lightning bolt, James. Just like your father's. Except it's green. It glows a little."

  James' eyes were wide and his heart pounded. The spot on his forehead felt warm. It tingled a little now that he thought about it. He looked helplessly up at Cedric again.

  "Don't worry," Cedric said, sensing James' question. "I don't think anyone else can see it. Apart from the other ghosts, maybe. It's only been there for a week or so. At first, it was very faint, but now… That's why I asked if it hurt."

  James' thoughts were whirling. What could it mean? Why was it happening? "It does hurt sometimes," James admitted. "But just a little. Mostly, it just itches. Except for one time, right outside the Headmaster's office. Merlin looked at me and it… it stung. But just for a second."

  Cedric nodded once, solemnly. "Pay attention to it, James. It must be there for a reason. But be careful. It might not be trustworthy."

  James nodded, barely hearing. He glanced around quickly, just to make sure no one had approached and heard the conversation. The corridor was still empty. When he looked up again, Cedric's ghost had vanished.

  "Cedric?" James whispered. There was no response. James couldn't be sure whether the ghost had truly left, or just gone invisible. "Cedric, if you're still there, and you change your mind… well, you know where to find me, right?"

  The corridor was utterly still and silent. James touched his forehead again, wonderingly and worryingly. Finally, he sighed, turned, and began to trudge back toward the staircases and the Gryffindor common room.

  As soon as James reached the common room, he told Rose about his meeting with Cedric. She was surprisingly understanding about the ghost's refusal to teach the class, remembering the conversation they'd had in the corridor a week earlier.

  "He'll probably come around," she said, nodding. "We'll just need to find somebody else in the meantime. It's fine, really. None of the students we talked to today knew anything about Cedric anyway."

  "But who can we get to teach in the meantime?" James fretted. "People will be coming tomorrow with some expectations, Rose! We can't just tell them to open their Defence textbooks and start trying out whatever spells they feel like! It'd be a complete mess!"

  Rose looked thoughtful. "We could ask Viktor, maybe. He's going to be here until the end of next week. He certainly knows his stuff."

  "He's too tight with Debellows," James said. "He'd tell him first off and we'd never hear the end of it."

  Rose had been scanning the room idly. Suddenly, her eyes widened. She
glanced back at James, a crooked smile curling her lip. "There is one person already among us who seems to know a good bit of defensive magic."

  "The older years don't want to do it," James sighed. "We've already been through it with them, Rose."

  "Actually," Rose said, looking askance again, "the person I was thinking of is a year younger than you."

  James followed the direction of his cousin's gaze. Scorpius Malfoy sat at a table across the room, idly flipping pages in a textbook. He glanced up, noticing James' gaze, and sneered slightly.

  "Not in a thousand years, Rose," James said flatly, turning back and crossing his arms. "Not in a million years."

  "I'm just saying," Rose said innocently, "you said he was using Stunning Spells on the train against Albus. And the other second-years have been talking about what he did to your headboard, which is, you have to admit, pretty impressive. He knows levitation already, and—"

  "No, Rose!" James hissed, interrupting. "I'll take a term of Debellows and the Gauntlet before I'll ask him to teach me anything!"

  "Are you willing to speak for the rest of the club's members too?"

  "He's not a teacher! He's a stuck-up prat! He probably wouldn't even do it if we asked him! People like him aren't exactly the sharing type."

  Rose smoothed her robes primly. "Well, you can't know unless you try. Really, James. Do we want a teacher or not?"

  James shook his head. "We want a teacher, not a smug little twit who's learned a few tricks. If you want him to teach, you ask him."

  "I might just do that," Rose replied breezily. She collected her bag and walked away. James watched her, but she merely climbed the stairs to the girls' dormitories. If she meant to ask Scorpius to teach the new Defence Club, she apparently wasn't planning on doing it tonight. After a while, James climbed the stairs on the opposite side of the room.

  As he got ready for bed, he thought carefully about the conversation he'd had with Cedric's ghost. He should've known that Cedric would refuse to lead the club, and yet it really had seemed like part of Cedric wanted to do it. And what could it possibly mean that Cedric was seeing a glowing green lightning bolt scar on James' head? As James finished brushing his teeth in the tiny washroom, he leaned in, examining himself in the mirror. As far as he could see, his forehead was completely unmarked. And yet, even now, he could feel that tiny, telltale tingling. Often, James had seen people pointing at his father, recognizing him by the famous scar, and James had thought it would be cool to have such a mark. Back then, James hadn't understood the price his dad had paid for that scar. Even now, he couldn't completely understand it, but he understood it enough, especially now that he'd lost grandfather Weasley. He knew enough not to want such a thing for himself anymore. For a while last year, James had struggled with expectations of following in the footsteps of his famous father. Now, James knew those footsteps were far too big for him. More importantly, James had his own path to travel, and it was unique to him. It wasn't just a replay of what his father had done. He'd learned that lesson, hadn't he? So why was he experiencing this phantom lightning bolt scar? What was it trying to tell him? And could he trust it?

  There was no point in worrying about it. And yet it was hard to let it go. Eventually, as he climbed into his bed, James distracted himself by trying to think of someone else who might possibly serve as teacher for the new Defence Club. He couldn't think of anyone, and he certainly wasn't going to ask Scorpius, but it did take his mind off the mysterious tingling on his forehead. Finally, eventually, James drifted to sleep.

  There were voices, echoing indistinctly, or perhaps it was only one voice, but the echoes made it sound like more. James couldn't understand any of the actual words, but the sound of the voice was both soothing and maddening, like scratching a poison ivy rash. It was dark, but there were flashes of something, like glints of light on the edges of blades scything the air. Beneath the voice was the clank and rumble of ancient machinery and a tinkling of water, all echoing disorientingly. Footsteps rattled on stone and the voice grew closer. James could hear words, but they were disconnected and strange. Light bloomed, flickering as if through water. It was green, and there were faces in it. A man and a woman, beckoning, smiling sadly, hopefully…

  "James, you're dreaming, you big div. Wake up!"

  A bag of laundry whumped James' head and he jerked upright, blinking.

  "S'bout time," Graham muttered sleepily. "I been trying to get you awake for a solid minute. You always talk in your sleep?"

  James looked blearily at Graham. "How would I know," he muttered grumpily, "if I do it when I'm asleep?" The dream circled his head like a swarm of gnats, but he couldn't remember much of it. Dawn light seeped into the room as Graham slid out of bed.

  "Well, we might as well get up anyway," Graham said. "I can smell bacon all the way up here. Let's go get a plateful before Hugo gets down there and wolfs it all."

  The day brightened to a wonderfully warm autumn afternoon. The morning's classes droned by and James hardly noticed, distracted in turns by thoughts of the previous night's strange dream, fretting about who could lead that afternoon's first Defence Club meeting, and Cedric's worrying words about the phantom scar on his head. At some point, James connected the dream with the scar, remembering that his father's scar had once been a sort of gateway into the thoughts of Voldemort. But Voldemort was long since dead. His father's scar hadn't hurt him in two decades. Whatever the phantom sign on James' forehead meant, it couldn't be a link to any resurgent Dark Lord, for his dad would surely have felt it first.

  Unless, James thought with a start, it was connecting him to the Bloodline, the secret successor of Voldemort that the tree sprite had told him about last year. James shuddered as he knelt on the grass at Hagrid's Care of Magical Creatures class. How could he possibly be connecting to the Bloodline? His father, Harry Potter, was the one with the scar, not James. Why him?

  Your father's battle is over, the tree sprite had said, yours begins.

  "James," Hagrid said, glancing at him over the other students, "something wrong with yer Eel den?"

  James looked down at the muddy, slimy mess in front of his knees. He plunged a hand into it, feeling for the Mucous Eel he'd just planted. "No, no, it's great, Hagrid. Slimy as can be. Really, it's great."

  "This is completely repulsive," Ralph said, mucking his hand in his own excavation. It slopped and slurped disgustingly. Suddenly, he lunged and pulled, yanking the tail of his Mucous Eel out of the muck.

  "Very good!" Hagrid called heartily. "Ralph's got 'is turned upright. As soon as the Eel's face-down in its den, it goes limp. Jus' rub its belly nice an' slow. That'll make it hibernate. Then we can harvest the Eel's slime. Very useful stuff, Mucous Eel slime."

  Graham grimaced and flung ropes of slime from his fingers. "So is this thing a plant or an animal, Hagrid?"

  "Well, what class are yeh in, Mr. Warton?" Hagrid asked in reply.

  "Care of Magical Creatures," Graham answered in a monotone.

  "Then since this isn't Professor Longbottom's Herbology class," Hagrid said, grinning, "I s'pose yeh can assume the Slime Eel is a magical creature with some unusual planty tendencies, can't yeh?"

  "Professor Hagrid!" Morgan Patonia suddenly called, struggling to keep her voice even. "I think I pulled my Eel too hard!"

  Everyone looked. Morgan had leapt to her feet and was holding her Mucous Eel at arm's length, cringing away from the flailing, meter-long creature. Fans of greenish slime flew from the Eel, splattering Morgan's robes and the ground beneath it.

  "Don' let 'er go!" Hagrid cried, throwing up his hands. "Lower 'er back to 'er den, but don' let go! She'll wriggle down to the lake an' we'll never see 'er again, an' those Eels are right dear! Just lower 'er carefully head-first into the den, that's the way, Miss Patonia."

  Ralph watched Morgan dip the wriggling Eel back to the mess of slimy dirt. Her face was a mask of utter disgust. The Eel's arrow-shaped head touched the mud, and the body lunged forward, trying to bu
rrow into the den.

  "There yeh go, then," Hagrid sighed, relaxing. "No harm done. A good lesson for us all, in fact. Keep the head in the den. Better safe than sorry, eh, Miss Patonia?"

  Morgan smiled gamely, looking as if she was, in fact, plenty sorry. Slime glistened in ropey slashes across her robe.

  "Before I found out I was a wizard," Ralph said wistfully, staring at Morgan's robes, "I was planning to attend the Byron Bruggman School for Boys. I bet they don't do anything with Mucous Eels there."

  "Just think what you'd be missing," Graham said, smiling ruefully. He flicked a fingerful of slime at Ralph.

  Later that day, James was making his way through the crowded halls, glancing surreptitiously around, as if worried he was being followed. The afternoon free period had been co-opted by Professor Curry's drama auditions, and James was on his way to the Muggle Studies classroom. At a cross-corridor, James met Rose and Ralph, who were talking animatedly.

  "What are you two doing?" James asked, stopping and glancing at each one in turn.

  "Well, I was coming to watch Petra audition for the role of Astra," Rose replied, "if that's all right with you, cousin."

  "And I'm just going along because the alternative is to go start my Charms homework," Ralph replied. "Rose says she'll help me with it if I wait until tonight. It's a no-brainer. What about you?"

  "Me?" James said, his voice squeaking guiltily. "Nothing. Really. I just… Same reason. Come on, let's go then."

  As they entered the Muggle Studies classroom, James' face was beet red. He walked quickly to the front of the classroom, hoping Ralph and Rose wouldn't follow him. He angled into the second row, and was annoyed to see that both of them were filing in after him.

  "What's with you, James?" Rose asked, sitting down and frowning at him curiously.

  "Did you find a place for the Defence Club to meet?" James replied, changing the subject.

  "Yeeaahh," Rose said slowly, still studying James' face. "The gymnasium isn't being used in the evenings, so I've gotten us permission to meet there. It's all taken care of."