“Of course,” Zane answered, smiling. With only the slightest pause, he put his foot on the first step. Nothing happened. “I’ll be right back, guys,” Zane said over his shoulder, then trotted up the steps. James let out a pent breath and heard Ralph doing the same. Figgle watched Zane tramp up the stairs, then glanced worriedly back at James and Ralph. Ralph shrugged at her and smiled. It was, James thought, a rather ghastly smile. Figgle didn’t seem to notice. She weaved through the furniture, balancing the huge basket easily, and then tipped it onto a large pile near the door.
“James,” Ralph said quietly, “the map.” James nodded and opened the Marauder’s Map again. He looked first toward the upper right area of the map, where a set of neat drawings illustrated the Quidditch pitch and grandstands. Dozens of names were crammed together there, most in and around the grandstands, but a few swooped around the pitch. The Slytherin practice session was still going on, although there seemed to be fewer people on brooms at the moment. They were probably gathered on the ground nearby, talking strategy or something. He glanced over the names ranged between the pitch and the grandstands. There was Squallus, Norbert, Beetlebrick, and a few others James didn’t know.
Figgle raised her hands in the same gesture James had seen the house-elves in the Great Hall use to gather up the tablecloths. The pile of laundry clumped into a large ball and a bed sheet cocooned around it, the four corners tying at the top. Figgle tossed a small puff of pink powder onto the gigantic ball of laundry and snapped her fingers again. The ball of laundry vanished, presumably to reappear in the basements. She looked nervously at the stairs.
“Well?” Ralph asked James in a tight, worried voice.
“I can’t see Tabitha,” James answered, trying to keep his voice calm. “Or Philia Goyle. They aren’t out on the pitch anymore as far as I can see.”
“What? Well, where are they?”
“I don’t know. They seem to be off the map at the moment.” Figgle was looking at them, her eyes wide and alert. She seemed to sense something was even more wrong than it had been a minute ago. James studied the Marauder’s Map keenly, watching the huge blank spots to see if Goyle and Corsica would appear out of them. He kept a sharp eye on the blank spot at the door to the Slytherin quarters.
“Oh, no,” he said, his eyes widening. “Here they come! What are they doing here now?”
“Get rid of the map!” Ralph said, his face going pasty white. “Come on! Zane!” he called up the steps. There was no answer. Figgle’s expression had gone from alarm to raw panic. “Mistress Corsica is coming! Figgle has done an awful thing! Figgle will be punished!” She bolted for the stairs, snapping her fingers as she went. There was that sudden sensation of change, as if an invisible light had popped back on, and James knew that the Boundary Charm over the stairs was in place again. There was a clatter of footsteps and muffled voices both from upstairs as well as from the front door of the common room. James balled the Marauder’s Map roughly and jammed it into his open backpack. Ralph threw himself onto the nearest couch, trying to affect a scene of lazy indolence. The door swung open just as James re-shouldered his backpack and turned.
Tabitha Corsica and Philia Goyle stepped through the doorway. Their eyes fell on James and both of them went silent. Tabitha was dressed in a sport cloak and black capris, her broomstick over her shoulder. Her hair was in a neat ponytail, and even though she had, only minutes before, been swooping over the Quidditch pitch on her unusually magical broom, she appeared as cool and fresh as a tulip. She spoke first.
“James Potter,” she said mildly, having almost instantly recovered from her surprise at seeing him. “What a pleasure.”
“What are you doing here?” Philia demanded, scowling. “Philia, don’t be rude,” Tabitha said, moving into the room and passing James breezily. “Mr. Potter is as welcome among us as I’m sure we would be amongst the Gryffindors. If we don’t have goodwill during these difficult times, what have we got? Good afternoon, Mr. Deedle.”
Ralph croaked something from the couch, looking remarkably awkward and uncomfortable. Philia continued to stare hard at James, her expression openly hostile, but she remained silent. “It’s a shame about the Gryffindor Quidditch team,” Tabitha called from a corner of the room as she hung up her cloak. “We always love a Gryffindor versus Slytherin match for the tournament, don’t we, Ralph? I’m sure it pains your friends not to be out scrimmaging with us as we speak, James. Please give them our sympathies. By the way…,” Tabitha crossed the room again, heading toward the stairs to the girls’ sleeping quarters, “I saw several of the Ravenclaw players out at the pitch studying our drills. Interesting that your friend, Zane, wasn’t among them. You haven’t seen him, have you?” She tapped her broomstick on the floor idly, watching James’ face.
James shook his head, not daring to speak.
“Hm,” Tabitha murmured thoughtfully. “Curious, that. Nevertheless. Come, Philia.” James watched, horrified, as Tabitha and Philia began to climb the steps. He thought furiously, trying to invent a quick diversion, but nothing came.
“Sod off!” a pair of muffled voices suddenly squeaked.
Both Tabitha and Philia stopped in their tracks. Philia, on the first step, whipped around angrily. Tabitha, ahead of her, turned much more slowly, a look of polite wonderment on her face.
“Did you say something?” she asked James slowly.
James coughed. “Er, no. Sorry. Got a, uh, frog in my throat.” Tabitha watched him for a long moment, then tilted her head slightly and narrowed her eyes at Ralph. Finally, she turned away and disappeared up the rest of the stairs with Philia following, glancing back furiously. After a few moments, their footsteps could be heard from above. There were no angry screams or sounds of struggle.
“Grotty blighter!” quacked the muffled voices again.
“That crazy loon!” Ralph rasped, jumping up and grabbing his bag. “What’s he doing?”
“Come on!” James said, lunging toward the door. “If he’s still up there, we can’t help him.” They both ran out into the hallway and threaded their way around several random corridors before finally stopping. Panting and hearts pounding, they dug their rubber ducks out of their bags, each examining his own even though they were identical. Two words were scrawled on the bottom of the ducks in black ink: Laundry room!
“That crazy loon!” Ralph said again, but he was almost laughing with relief. “Figgle just took him down to the cellars with the rest of the dirty sheets! I say we leave him there.”
James grinned. “No, let’s go get him before they try to stick him in the wringer. He probably deserves it, but first, I want to know what he might have found out.”
The two boys ran to find the washrooms in the cellars. James stopped only once to ask directions from an annoyingly observant servant in a painting of a gaggle of dining knights.
“I hardly had two minutes to look around before Figgle came up the stairs like a cannonball,” Zane told James and Ralph when they found him in the washrooms. “She threw a handful of pink dust at me, and then pow! I’m down here.”
Ralph was looking around in awe at the enormous copper vats and the clanking machinery of the washers. Elves bustled around them, ignoring the three boys completely as they moved through the hive of their basement work space. Two elves on a catwalk above the vats were dumping wheelbarrows of powdered soap into the frothing water. White flakes filled the air and stuck like snow in the boys’ hair.
“Trust me, this all gets a lot less interesting after two minutes or so,” Zane said tersely. “Especially when the Lollipop Guild here won’t let you leave.” Three elves were clustered around Zane, looking at him with obvious hostility.
“Figgle brings a human down to the washrooms, we keeps him until someone explains why,” the oldest and grumpiest elf said in a gravelly voice. “S’policy. Humans interfering with elf work is against Hogwarts Code of Conduct and Practices, section thirty, paragraph six. So, then, who be you two?”
Ja
mes and Ralph exchanged blank looks. Ralph said, “We’re his… well, we’re his friends, aren’t we? We came to bring him back upstairs.” “Did you, then?” the elf said with a penetrating glare. “Figgle tells a story about this human trying to do her work, she does. Says he was going on about elf welfare and such bilge. She was fair upset. Can’t ‘ave that sort of thing, you know. We gots a coalition agreement with the school.”
“He won’t do it again,” James soothed. “He meant well, but he’s a bit dim about such things, isn’t he? I’m sorry. He got out of our hands for a minute. Won’t happen again.” Zane acted offended, but stayed wisely silent. The head elf scowled thoughtfully at James. James was used to elves being subservient and meek or at least politely surly. Here, in their working realm, the rules appeared to be quite different. The elves had a coalition agreement with the school, the head elf had said. It almost sounded like they’d unionized, and that an essential rule of the elf union was that only elves did elf work. Perhaps they viewed it as job security. James wasn’t sure if Aunt Hermione would view this as an improvement or a setback.
Finally, the head elf grumbled, “I’m going against my better judgments, you know. The three of yous are on probation. Anymore interference with elfish protocol and I’ll ‘ave you before the Headmistress. We gots a coalition agreement, you know.”
“So I hear,” Zane muttered, rolling his eyes.
“But you don’t even know our names,” Ralph pointed out. “How are we on probation if you don’t know who we are?” James elbowed him in the ribs.
The head elf grinned at his fellows, who smiled back a bit disconcertingly. “We’re elves,” he said simply. “Now off with yous, and let’s hope we don’t see you again.”
The corridors leading out of the washrooms were, not surprisingly, small and short, with half-sized steps that forced James, Zane, and Ralph to mince carefully as they climbed them.
“I don’t know whether to congratulate you or kick you,” Ralph said to Zane. “You almost got us caught by Corsica and Goyle.”
“But I did get into the Slytherin girls’ sleeping quarters,” Zane pointed out with a grin. “How many people can say that?”
“Or would want to?” James added.
“Be nice or I won’t tell you what I found.”
“It better be good,” said Ralph. “It’s not,” Zane sighed. “The girls’ quarters have big wooden wardrobes alongside each bed. Only one of them was open, but I got a peek inside. Let’s just say I’m not wondering where Tabitha keeps her broom anymore.”
They reached a larger door at the end of a flight of miniscule stairs. James pushed it open, thankful to be out of the heat and noise of the washrooms. “What do you mean?” “Well, they’re magical wardrobes, of course, although they don’t lead to any fairy wonderlands. The one I looked into looked like a combination vanity and walk-in closet. Seemed like a boutique had exploded in there, to tell you the truth. One of those really froofy ones, but with a gothic-vampire flair to it. There was a bottle of vanishing cream on the vanity, and from the looks of it, I don’t think the vanishing part was a metaphor.”
“All the girls have a wardrobe like that?” Ralph asked.
“Sure looked like it.”
James frowned. “Our chances of getting into the Slytherin girls’ quarters again are pretty much zero. And even if we could, how would we even know which wardrobe was Corsica’s, much less even get it open?”
“I told you this was going to be right impossible,” Ralph reminded James.
“Smelled like my grandma’s dresser in there, too,” Zane said. “Will you let off with the details?” James exclaimed. “This is serious. We still don’t know where the Hall of Elder’s Crossing is or when Jackson and Delacroix are planning to bring the elements together. For all we know, it could be tonight.”
“So?” Ralph said. “Like you said, they can’t do anything without all the relics.”
Zane sighed, turning sober. “Yeah, but if they try it and nothing works, then they’ll hide the rest of the relics and we’ll never get to them.” Ralph threw up his hands. “Well? There’s got to be another way, then. I mean, she has to take the broom out of her wardrobe sometimes, right? We saw her with it today. What if we nick it somehow during a Quidditch match or something?”
Zane grinned. “I like that. Especially if we can do it when she’s a hundred feet or so in the air.” “Impossible again,” James said in frustration. “Ever since my dad’s day, there’ve been protective spells all around the pitch to keep people from interfering with matches. There were a few instances where dark wizards tried to use spells to hurt him or throw him off his broom. Once, a bunch of Dementors swarmed right onto the pitch. Ever since, there’ve been boundary areas set up by the officials. No spells can get in or out.”
“What’s a Dementor?” Ralph asked, his eyes widening.
“You don’t want to know, Ralph. Trust me.”
“Well, then, looks like we’re back to square one,” Zane said dourly. “I’m all out of ideas.” Ralph stopped suddenly in the middle of the corridor. Zane bumped into the larger boy, stumbling backwards, but Ralph didn’t seem to notice. He was staring hard at one of the paintings lining the corridor. James noticed it was the one they had stopped at earlier to ask for directions to the laundry room. The very observant servant in the rear corner of the painting had caught James’ attention on the way down, but only as someone they could get directions from. James had become almost inured to the random, watchful characters in the paintings all over Hogwarts. The servant stared sullenly out at Ralph as the knights in the painting hoisted their tankards and turkey drumsticks, slapping each other happily on their partially armored backs.
“Oh, great,” Zane said, rubbing his shoulder where he’d run into Ralph. “Look what you’ve done, James. Now Ralph’s obsessed with every fifteenth painting. And not even the good ones, if you ask me. You two are the weirdest art lovers I’ve ever met.”
James took a step closer to the painting as well, studying the servant standing in the shadowy background with a large cloth over his shoulder. The figure took a half-step backward, and James felt sure that it was trying to blend further into the dim recesses of the painted hall. “What, Ralph?” he asked.
“I’ve seen that before,” Ralph answered in a distracted voice.
“Well, we just stopped at this painting not ten minutes ago, didn’t we?”
“Yeah. It looked familiar then, too, but I couldn’t place it. He’s standing different now…” Ralph suddenly dropped to one knee, flinging his backpack onto the floor in front of him. He unzipped it quickly and dug inside, almost frantically, as if worried that whatever inspiration had struck him would flee before he could confirm it. He finally produced a book, gripped it triumphantly, and stood up again, riffling toward the back. Zane and James crowded behind him, trying to see over Ralph’s broad shoulders. James recognized the book. It was the antique potions book his mum and dad had given Ralph for Christmas. As Ralph flipped through the pages, James could see the notes and formulae that crowded the margins, crammed alongside doodled drawings and diagrams. Suddenly, Ralph stopped flipping. He held the book open with both hands and slowly raised it so that it was level to the observant servant in the background of the painting. James gasped.
“It’s the same dude!” Zane said, pointing. Sure enough, there, in the right-hand margin of one of the last pages of the potions book, was an old pencil sketch of the observant servant. It was unmistakably the same figure, right down to the hook nose and the sullen, stooped pose. The painted version recoiled from the book slightly, and then crossed the hall as swiftly as it could without actually running. It stopped behind one of the pillars lining the opposite side of the painted hall. The knights at the table ignored it. James, watching intently, narrowed his eyes.
“I knew it looked familiar,” Ralph said triumphantly. “He was in a different position when we first came across him, so I didn’t place it straight off. Just now, thoug
h, he was in exactly the same pose as the drawing in this book. Now, that is weird.”
“Can I see?” James asked. Ralph shrugged and handed the book to James. James bent over it, flipping back to the front of the book. The margins in the first hundred pages were filled mostly with notes and spells, many with sections scribbled out and rewritten in a different color, as if the writer of the notes was refining his work. By the middle of the book, though, drawings and doodles began to crowd in with the notes. They were sketchy, but quite good. James recognized many of them. Here was a rough sketch of the woman in the background of the painting of the king’s court. A few pages later he found two quite detailed drawings of the fat wizard with the bald head from the painting of the poisoning of Peracles. Again and again, he recognized the sketches as the characters in the paintings all over Hogwarts, the secondary figures who’d been watching James and his friends with avid, unconcealed interest.
“Amazing,” James said in a low, awed voice. “All these drawings are from paintings all over the school, you see?” Ralph squinted at the drawings in the book, then back at the painting again. He shrugged. “It’s weird, but not all that amazing, is it? I mean, the guy who owned this book was probably also a student here, right? Sounds like he was a Slytherin, like me. That’s why your dad gave me the book. So whoever he was, he liked art. Lots of art lovers sketch from paintings. Big deal.”
Zane’s brow furrowed as he looked back and forth between the drawing of the observant servant and his painted equivalent, who was still skulking near the pillars in the background. “No, these aren’t just sketches,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “These are the originals, or so close it’s impossible to tell the difference. Don’t ask me how I know. I just know. Whoever sketched these drawings was either a master forger… or he was the actual artist.”
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