‘Yeah,’ said Harry.
‘Jus’ nervous, eh?’ said Hagrid.
‘Bit,’ said Harry.
‘Harry,’ said Hagrid, clapping a massive hand on his shoulder, so that Harry’s knees buckled under its weight, ‘I’d’ve bin worried before I saw yeh take on tha’ Horntail, but I know now yeh can do anythin’ yeh set yer mind ter. I’m not worried at all. Yeh’re goin’ ter be fine. Got yer clue worked out, haven’ yeh?’
Harry nodded, but even as he did so, an insane urge to confess that he didn’t have any idea how to survive at the bottom of the lake for an hour came over him. He looked up at Hagrid – perhaps he had to go into the lake sometimes, to deal with the creatures in it? He looked after everything else in the grounds, after all –
‘Yeh’re goin’ ter win,’ Hagrid growled, patting Harry’s shoulder again, so that Harry actually felt himself sink a couple of inches into the muddy ground. ‘I know it. I can feel it. Yeh’re goin’ ter win, Harry.’
Harry just couldn’t bring himself to wipe the happy, confident smile off Hagrid’s face. Pretending he was interested in the young unicorns, he forced a smile in return, and moved forwards to pat them with the others.
*
By the evening before the second task, Harry felt as though he was trapped in a nightmare. He was fully aware that even if, by some miracle, he managed to find a suitable spell, he’d have a real job mastering it overnight. How could he have let this happen? Why hadn’t he got to work on the egg’s clue sooner? Why had he ever let his mind wander in class – what if a teacher had once mentioned how to breathe underwater?
He, Ron and Hermione sat in the library as the sun set outside, tearing feverishly through page after page of spells, hidden from each other by the massive piles of books on the desk in front of each of them. Harry’s heart gave a huge leap every time he saw the word ‘water’ on a page, but more often than not it was merely ‘Take two pints of water, half a pound of shredded mandrake leaves and a newt …’.
‘I don’t reckon it can be done,’ said Ron’s voice flatly from the other side of the table. ‘There’s nothing. Nothing. Closest was that thing to dry up puddles and ponds, that Drought Charm, but that was nowhere near powerful enough to drain the lake.’
‘There must be something,’ Hermione muttered, moving a candle closer to her. Her eyes were so tired she was poring over the tiny print of Olde and Forgotten Bewitchments and Charmes with her nose about an inch from the page. ‘They’d never have set a task that was undoable.’
‘They have,’ said Ron. ‘Harry, just go down to the lake tomorrow, right, stick your head in, yell at the merpeople to give back whatever they’ve nicked and see if they chuck it out. Best you can do, mate.’
‘There’s a way of doing it!’ Hermione said crossly. ‘There just has to be!’
She seemed to be taking the library’s lack of useful information on the subject as a personal insult; it had never failed her before.
‘I know what I should have done,’ said Harry, resting, face down, on Saucy Tricks for Tricky Sorts. ‘I should’ve learnt to be an Animagus like Sirius.’
‘Yeah, you could’ve turned into a goldfish any time you wanted!’ said Ron.
‘Or a frog,’ yawned Harry. He was exhausted.
‘It takes years to become an Animagus, and then you have to register yourself and everything,’ said Hermione vaguely, now squinting down the index of Weird Wizarding Dilemmas and Their Solutions. ‘Professor McGonagall told us, remember … you’ve got to register yourself with the Improper Use of Magic Office … what animal you become, and your markings, so you can’t abuse it …’
‘Hermione, I was joking,’ said Harry, wearily. ‘I know I haven’t got a chance of turning into a frog by tomorrow morning …’
‘Oh, this is no use,’ Hermione said, snapping Weird Wizarding Dilemmas shut. ‘Who on earth wants to make their nose hair grow into ringlets?’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Fred Weasley’s voice. ‘Be a talking point, wouldn’t it?’
Harry, Ron and Hermione looked up. Fred and George had just emerged from behind some bookshelves.
‘What’re you two doing here?’ Ron asked.
‘Looking for you,’ said George. ‘McGonagall wants you, Ron. And you, Hermione.’
‘Why?’ said Hermione, looking surprised.
‘Dunno … she was looking a bit grim, though,’ said Fred.
‘We’re supposed to take you down to her office,’ said George.
Ron and Hermione stared at Harry, who felt his stomach drop. Was Professor McGonagall about to tell Ron and Hermione off? Perhaps she’d noticed how much they were helping him, when he ought to be working out how to do the task alone?
‘We’ll meet you back in the common room,’ Hermione told Harry, as she got up to go with Ron – both of them looked very anxious. ‘Bring as many of these books as you can, OK?’
‘Right,’ said Harry uneasily.
By eight o’clock, Madam Pince had extinguished all the lamps and came to chivvy Harry out of the library. Staggering under the weight of as many books as he could carry, Harry returned to the Gryffindor common room, pulled a table into a corner and continued to search. There was nothing in Madcap Magic for Wacky Warlocks … nothing in A Guide to Medieval Sorcery … not one mention of underwater exploits in An Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Charms, or in Dreadful Denizens of the Deep, or Powers You Never Knew You Had and What to Do With Them Now You’ve Wised Up.
Crookshanks crawled into Harry’s lap and curled up, purring deeply. The common room emptied slowly around Harry. People kept wishing him luck for the next morning in cheery, confident voices like Hagrid’s, all of them apparently convinced that he was about to pull off another stunning performance like the one he had managed in the first task. Harry couldn’t answer them, he just nodded, feeling as though there was a golf-ball stuck in his throat. By ten to midnight, he was alone in the room with Crookshanks. He had searched all the remaining books, and Ron and Hermione had not come back.
It’s over, he told himself. You can’t do it. You’ll just have to go down to the lake in the morning and tell the judges …
He imagined himself explaining that he couldn’t do the task. He pictured Bagman’s look of round-eyed surprise, Karkaroff’s satisfied, yellow-toothed smile. He could almost hear Fleur Delacour saying, ‘I knew it … ’e is too young, ’e is only a little boy.’ He saw Malfoy flashing his POTTER STINKS badge at the front of the crowd, saw Hagrid’s crestfallen, disbelieving face …
Forgetting that Crookshanks was on his lap, Harry stood up very suddenly; Crookshanks hissed angrily as he landed on the floor, gave Harry a disgusted look and stalked away with his bottle-brush tail in the air, but Harry was already hurrying up the spiral staircase to his dormitory … he would grab the Invisibility Cloak and go back to the library, he’d stay there all night if he had to …
‘Lumos,’ Harry whispered fifteen minutes later, as he opened the library door.
Wand tip alight, he crept along the bookshelves, pulling down more books – books of hexes and charms, books on merpeople and water monsters, books on famous witches and wizards, on magical inventions, on anything at all that might include one passing reference to underwater survival. He carried them over to a table, then set to work, searching them by the narrow beam of his wand, occasionally checking his watch …
One in the morning … two in the morning … the only way he could keep going was to tell himself, over and over again, Next book … in the next one … the next one …
*
The mermaid in the painting in the Prefects’ bathroom was laughing. Harry was bobbing like a cork in bubbly water next to her rock, while she held his Firebolt over his head.
‘Come and get it!’ she giggled maliciously. ‘Come on, jump!’
‘I can’t,’ Harry panted, snatching at the Firebolt, and struggling not to sink. ‘Give it to me!’
But she just poked him painfully in the side with
the end of the broom, laughing at him.
‘That hurts – get off – ouch –’
‘Harry Potter must wake up, sir!’
‘Stop poking me –’
‘Dobby must poke Harry Potter, sir, he must wake up!’
Harry opened his eyes. He was still in the library; the Invisibility Cloak had slipped off his head as he’d slept, and the side of his face was stuck to the pages of Where There’s a Wand, There’s a Way. He sat up, straightening his glasses, blinking in the bright daylight.
‘Harry Potter needs to hurry!’ squeaked Dobby. ‘The second task starts in ten minutes, and Harry Potter –’
‘Ten minutes?’ Harry croaked. ‘Ten – ten minutes?’
He looked down at his watch. Dobby was right. It was twenty past nine. A large, dead weight seemed to fall through Harry’s chest into his stomach.
‘Hurry, Harry Potter!’ squeaked Dobby, plucking at Harry’s sleeve. ‘You is supposed to be down by the lake with the other champions, sir!’
‘It’s too late, Dobby,’ Harry said hopelessly. ‘I’m not doing the task, I don’t know how –’
‘Harry Potter will do the task!’ squeaked the elf. ‘Dobby knew Harry had not found the right book, so Dobby did it for him!’
‘What?’ said Harry. ‘But you don’t know what the second task is –’
‘Dobby knows, sir! Harry Potter has to go into the lake and find his Wheezy –’
‘Find my what?’
‘– and take his Wheezy back from the merpeople!’
‘What’s a Wheezy?’
‘Your Wheezy, sir, your Wheezy – Wheezy who is giving Dobby his jumper!’
Dobby plucked at the shrunken maroon sweater he was now wearing over his shorts.
‘What?’ Harry gasped. ‘They’ve got … they’ve got Ron?’
‘The thing Harry Potter will miss most, sir!’ squeaked Dobby. ‘And past an hour –’
‘–“the prospect’s black”,’ Harry recited, staring, horror-struck, at the elf, ‘“Too late, it’s gone, it won’t come back …” Dobby – what’ve I got to do?’
‘You has to eat this, sir!’ squeaked the elf, and he put his hand in the pocket of his shorts and drew out a ball of what looked like slimy, greyish green rat tails. ‘Right before you go into the lake, sir – Gillyweed!’
‘What’s it do?’ said Harry, staring at the Gillyweed.
‘It will make Harry Potter breathe underwater, sir!’
‘Dobby,’ said Harry frantically, ‘listen – are you sure about this?’
He couldn’t quite forget that the last time Dobby had tried to ‘help’ him, he had ended up with no bones in his right arm.
‘Dobby is quite sure, sir!’ said the elf earnestly. ‘Dobby hears things, sir, he is a house-elf, he goes all over the castle as he lights the fires and mops the floors, Dobby heard Professor McGonagall and Professor Moody in the staff room, talking about the next task … Dobby cannot let Harry Potter lose his Wheezy!’
Harry’s doubts vanished. Jumping to his feet he pulled off the Invisibility Cloak, stuffed it into his bag, grabbed the Gillyweed and put it into his pocket, then tore out of the library with Dobby at his heels.
‘Dobby is supposed to be in the kitchens, sir!’ Dobby squealed as they burst into the corridor. ‘Dobby will be missed – good luck, Harry Potter, sir, good luck!’
‘See you later, Dobby!’ Harry shouted, and he sprinted along the corridor and down the stairs, three at a time.
The Entrance Hall contained a few last-minute stragglers, all leaving the Great Hall after breakfast and heading through the double oak doors to watch the second task. They stared as Harry flashed past, sending Colin and Dennis Creevey flying as he leapt down the stone steps and out into the bright, chilly grounds.
As he pounded down the lawn he saw that the seats that had encircled the dragons’ enclosure in November were now ranged along the opposite bank, rising in stands that were packed to bursting point and reflected in the lake below; the excited babble of the crowd echoed strangely across the water as Harry ran, flat out, around the other side of the lake towards the judges, who were sitting at another gold-draped table at the water’s edge. Cedric, Fleur and Krum were beside the judges’ table, watching Harry sprint towards them.
‘I’m … here …’ Harry panted, skidding to a halt in the mud and accidentally splattering Fleur’s robes.
‘Where have you been?’ said a bossy, disapproving voice. ‘The task’s about to start!’
Harry looked around. Percy Weasley was sitting at the judges’ table – Mr Crouch had failed to turn up again.
‘Now, now, Percy!’ said Ludo Bagman, who was looking intensely relieved to see Harry. ‘Let him catch his breath!’
Dumbledore smiled at Harry, but Karkaroff and Madame Maxime didn’t look at all pleased to see him … it was obvious from the looks on their faces that they had thought he wasn’t going to turn up.
Harry bent over, hands on his knees, gasping for breath; he had a stitch in his side that felt as though he had a knife between his ribs, but there was no time to get rid of it; Ludo Bagman was now moving among the champions, spacing them along the bank at intervals of ten feet. Harry was on the very end of the line, next to Krum, who was wearing swimming trunks, and was holding his wand ready.
‘All right, Harry?’ Bagman whispered, as he moved Harry a few feet further away from Krum. ‘Know what you’re going to do?’
‘Yeah,’ Harry panted, massaging his ribs.
Bagman gave his shoulder a quick squeeze, and returned to the judges’ table; he pointed his wand at his throat as he had done at the World Cup, said ‘Sonorus!’ and his voice boomed out across the dark water towards the stands.
‘Well, all our champions are ready for the second task, which will start on my whistle. They have precisely an hour to recover what has been taken from them. On the count of three, then. One … two … three!’
The whistle echoed shrilly in the cold, still air; the stands erupted with cheers and applause; without looking to see what the other champions were doing, Harry pulled off his shoes and socks, pulled the handful of Gillyweed out of his pocket, stuffed it into his mouth, and waded out into the lake.
The lake was so cold he felt the skin on his legs searing as though this was fire, not icy water. His sodden robes weighed him down as he walked in deeper; now the water was over his knees, and his rapidly numbing feet were slipping over silt and flat, slimy stones. He was chewing the Gillyweed as hard and fast as he could; it felt unpleasantly slimy and rubbery, like octopus tentacles. Waist-deep in the freezing water he stopped, swallowed, and waited for something to happen.
He could hear laughter in the crowd, and knew he must look stupid, walking into the lake without showing any sign of magical power. The part of him that was still dry was covered in goosepimples; half-immersed in the icy water, a cruel breeze lifting his hair, Harry started to shiver violently. He avoided looking at the stands; the laughter was becoming louder, and there were catcalls and jeering from the Slytherins …
Then, quite suddenly, Harry felt as though an invisible pillow had been clapped over his mouth and nose. He tried to draw breath, but it made his head spin; his lungs were empty, and he suddenly felt a piercing pain on either side of his neck –
Harry clapped his hands around his throat, and felt two large slits just below his ears, flapping in the cold air … he had gills. Without pausing to think, he did the only thing that made sense – he flung himself forwards into the water.
The first gulp of icy lake water felt like the breath of life. His head had stopped spinning; he took another great gulp of water and felt it pass smoothly through his gills, sending oxygen back to his brain. He stretched out his hands in front of him and stared at them. They looked green and ghostly under the water, and they had become webbed. He twisted around and looked at his bare feet – they had become elongated and his toes were webbed, too; it looked as though he had sprouted flippers.
The water didn’t feel icy any more, either … on the contrary, he felt pleasantly cool, and very light … Harry struck out once more, marvelling at how far and fast his flipper-like feet propelled him through the water, and noticing how clearly he could see, and how he no longer needed to blink. He had soon swum so far into the lake that he could no longer see the bottom. He flipped over, and dived into its depths.
Silence pressed upon his ears as he soared over a strange, dark, foggy landscape. He could only see ten feet around him, so that as he sped through the water new scenes seemed to loom suddenly out of the oncoming darkness: forests of rippling, tangled black weed, wide plains of mud littered with dull, glimmering stones. He swam deeper and deeper, out towards the middle of the lake, his eyes wide, staring through the eerily grey-lit water around him to the shadows beyond, where the water became opaque.
Small fish flickered past him like silver darts. Once or twice he thought he saw something larger moving ahead of him, but when he got nearer, he discovered it to be nothing but a large, blackened log, or a dense clump of weed. There was no sign of any of the other champions, merpeople, Ron – nor, thankfully, the giant squid.
Light-green weed stretched ahead of him as far as he could see, two feet deep, like a meadow of very overgrown grass. Harry was staring unblinkingly ahead of him, trying to discern shapes through the gloom … and then, without warning, something grabbed hold of his ankle.
Harry twisted his body around and saw a Grindylow, a small, horned water demon, poking out of the weeds, its long fingers clutched tightly around Harry’s leg, its pointed fangs bared – Harry stuck his webbed hand quickly inside his robes and fumbled for his wand – by the time he had grasped it, two more Grindylows had risen out of the weed, had seized handfuls of Harry’s robes, and were attempting to drag him down.
‘Relashio!’ Harry shouted, except that no sound came out … a large bubble issued from his mouth, and his wand, instead of sending sparks at the Grindylows, pelted them with what seemed to be a jet of boiling water, for where it struck them, angry red patches appeared on their green skin. Harry pulled his ankle out of the Grindylows’ grip and swam as fast as he could, occasionally sending more jets of hot water over his shoulder at random; every now and then he felt one of the Grindylows snatch at his foot again, and kicked out, hard; finally, he felt his foot connect with a horned skull, and looking back, saw the dazed Grindylow floating away, cross-eyed, while its fellows shook their fists at Harry, and sank back into the weed.
The Goblet of Fire Page 42
