The three boys successfully ducked from the room, laughing uproariously at the ensuing chaos.
By Christmas holiday, James was ready for a break. After lunch on his last day of class, James went up to the Gryffindor sleeping chamber to pack his things. The sky outside the tower window had grown chilly and grey, making him wish for the grand fireplace back at number twelve Grimmauld Place and one of Kreacher’s very complicated hot chocolates, which consisted, at last count, of fourteen unnamed ingredients, including, he had been assured, at least a pinch of actual chocolate.
“Hey, James,” Ralph’s voice called up the stairs, “you up there?”
“Yeah. Come on up, Ralph.”
“Thanks,” Ralph panted, climbing the steps. “I came up after lunch with Petra. She said you’d be here packing. All raring to go, I expect.”
“Yeah! We’re having everyone over to the old headquarters for the holidays this year. Uncles George and Ron, Aunts Hermione and Fleur, Ted and his grandmum, Victoire, even Luna Lovegood, who you don’t know, but you’d be keen on. She’s the weirdest grownup I’ve ever met, but in a good way. Mostly. Grandmum and Granddad won’t be there, though. They’re visiting Charlie and everybody in Prague this year. Still, I think even Neville will be there. Professor Longbottom, I mean.”
Ralph nodded glumly, staring into James’ trunk. “Sounds swell. Yeah, well, I hope you have a happy Christmas and all that, then.”
James stopped packing, remembering that Ralph’s dad was traveling for business over the holidays. “Oh, yeah. So what will you be doing, Ralph? Will you be spending Christmas with your grandparents or something?”
“Hmm?” Ralph said, glancing up. “Oh. Nah. Looks like I’ll just be hanging around here for the holidays. Zane’s not leaving until next week, so at least I’ll have him to hang around with over the weekend. After that��� well, I’ll figure out something to do with myself.” He sighed hugely.
“Ralph,” James said, tossing a pair of mismatched socks into his trunk, “do you want to come and have Christmas with my family and me?”
Ralph tried to look surprised. “What? No, no, I’d never want to impose on your big family gathering, what with all the, you know��� I couldn’t. No���”
James frowned. “Ralph, you prat, if you don’t come home with me for the holidays, I will personally perform a random transfiguration on you with your own wand. How about that, then?”
“Well, you don’t have to get pushy about it!” Ralph exclaimed, then his face broke into a grin. “Your mum and dad won’t mind?”
“No. To tell you the truth, with all the people that’ll be in and out of the place, I’m not sure they’ll even notice.”
Ralph rolled his eyes. “I meant about me being on the��� you know, the wrong side of the debate and everything.”
“They listened to it on the wireless, Ralph.”
“I know!”
“And you never said a word.”
Ralph opened his mouth, then closed it. He thought for a moment. Finally, he grinned and plopped onto Ted’s bed. “I see your point. So you say Victoire will be there?”
“Don’t get any ideas. She’s part Veela you know. She puts the whammy on any guy that gets within ten feet of her.”
“I just wanted to try to make it up to her somehow. You know, about that whole incident in D.A.D.A.”
James slammed his trunk. “Ralph, mate, the less you say about that, the better.”
The next morning, breakfast in the Great Hall was thinly attended. A heavy frost had fallen in the early hours, etching silver fern shapes in the corners of the windows and giving the view beyond a hoary ghostliness. James and Ralph arrived at the same time and found Zane at the Ravenclaw table.
“You’re a lucky stiff, Ralph,” Zane said grumpily, huddling around his coffee cup. “I’m dying to see what a magical Christmas is like.”
“To tell you the truth,” James said, pouring himself a pumpkin juice, “I doubt it’d live up to your imagination.”
“Maybe you’re right. Even at the best of times, I gotta admit, it feels a little like Halloween around here.”
“Hey, Ralph,” James said, nudging the bigger boy, “wait until you see our traditional Christmas parade of ghouls! We’ll have candy cane-stuffed bats to eat and drink hot chocolate out of elf skulls!”
Ralph blinked. Zane looked sour and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a laugh riot. Not.”
“Come on,” Ralph said, finally getting the joke. “You’ll have a great Christmas with your family. At least you get to see your mum and dad.”
“Yeah, sure. An eight-hour flight back to the States with my sister, Greer, bugging me the whole way about life at that crazy magical school. She’ll be disappointed that, so far, the only way I can affect things with my wand is to hit them with it.”
“We’re not allowed to practice magic out of Hogwarts, anyway,” Ralph said instructively.
Zane ignored him. “And then Christmas with the grandparents and all my cousins in Ohio. You have no idea what kind of craziness that always is.”
James couldn’t help asking. “How do you mean?”
“Imagine the traditional all-American Norman Rockwell Christmas scene, right?” Zane said, holding up his hands as if framing a picture. “Opening presents, and carving turkey, and carols by the Christmas tree. Got it?” Ralph and James nodded, trying not to smile at Zane’s grave expression.
“All right,” Zane went on. “Now imagine hinkypunks instead of people. You’ll get the idea.”
James burst out laughing. Ralph, as usual, just blinked and looked back and forth between the two other boys.
“That’s fantastic!” James hooted.
Zane smiled reluctantly. “Yeah, well, it is pretty funny, I guess. The screeches and the clawing, all those tiny shreds of wrapping paper flying all over the place, landing in the fireplace and nearly burning the place to the ground.”
“What’s a hinkypunk?” Ralph asked, trying to keep up.
“Ask Hagrid next Care of Magical Creatures,” James said, still chuckling. “It’ll all make sense.”
Late that morning, Ralph and James said goodbye to Zane, then hauled their trunks out to the courtyard. Ted and Victoire were already there, sitting on their trunks on the top step, framed against the strangely silent, frost-laden grounds. Victoire’s hair had been regrown as well as possible by Madam Curio in the hospital wing, but the new hair was just different enough in texture and color to be noticeable. As a result, Victoire had taken to wearing a rather amazing variety of hats. The hats, if anything, enhanced her appearance, but she complained about them at every opportunity. Today, she had donned a small ermine pillbox cap, cocked rakishly over her left eyebrow. She glared coolly at Ralph as he dragged his trunk out onto the step. A few minutes later, Hagrid drove up at the head of a carriage. Ralph’s mouth dropped open when he saw that nothing, apparently, was pulling the carriage.
“You lot aren’t s’posed to see these until next year, mind,” Hagrid said to James and Ralph. He yanked the brake lever, climbed down, and began heaving their trunks easily onto the back of the carriage. “So be sure to act surprised when yeh sees ‘em next spring, right?”
“Oh, Hagrid,” Victoire said haughtily, “if zese awful things are as ugly as mummy tells me, I’m glad I can’t see zem, anyway.” She held out a hand and Ted took it, helping her rather unnecessarily into the carriage.
There were a few other students crammed into the carriage, all similarly late departures for the holidays. Hagrid drove them to Hogsmeade station, where they boarded the Hogwarts Express again. The train was far emptier than it had been on their arriving journey. The four of them found a compartment near the end, then settled in for the long trip.
“So Hogsmeade is a wizard village?” Ralph asked Ted.
“Sure is. Home to The Three Broomsticks and Honeydukes Sweetshop. Best Cockroach Clusters in the world. Lots of other shops, too. You’ll get to go on Hogsmeade
weekends starting your third year.”
Ralph looked thoughtful, which meant his brow pinched down while his lower lip pooched up, squeezing his entire face toward his nose. “So how do wizards keep Muggles out of a magical village? I mean, aren’t there any roads or anything?”
“Tricky question, mate,” Ted said, slouching on his seat and kicking off his shoes.
Victoire wrinkled her nose. “You will keep zose dirt-kickers away from me, Mr. Lupin.”
Ted ignored her, stretching his legs across the compartment and resting his feet on the opposite seat. “I’m in old Stonewall’s Applied Advanced Technomancy class this semester, and all I can tell you is that places like Hogsmeade aren’t just hidden because Muggles can’t find a road in. It’s all quantum. If Petra was here, she could explain it better.”
James was curious. “What’s ‘quantum’ mean?”
Ted shrugged. “It’s a joke in A.A.T. When in doubt, just say ‘quantum’.” He sighed resignedly, gathering his thoughts. “All right, imagine that there are places on the earth that are like a hole in space patched with rubber, see? You can’t tell anything’s different from the top, but it’s maybe a little bouncy or something. Then, say, some wizard comes along who really knows his quantum. He says, ‘Gor, here’s a place where we can put up a smashing wizard village.” So what he does is he conjures something sort of like a huge magical weight, but it’s really, really tiny, right? And the weight drops into the bit of rubbery reality and pulls it down, down, down. OK. So the weight punches that rubber reality right out into another dimension, making a funnel in the shape of space-time.”
“Wait,” Ralph said, frowning in concentration. “What’s space-time?”
“Never mind,” Ted said, waving dismissively. “Doesn’t matter. It’s all quantum. Nobody gets it except for crusty old parchment-heads like Professor Jackson. So anyway, there’s this funnel in space-time where the weight pushes down on the rubber reality. Muggles, see, can only operate on the surface of reality. They don’t see where the funnel dips down into this new dimensional space. To them, it just isn’t even there. Magic folk, though, we can follow the funnel down off main-space, if we know what to look for and share the secret. So we build places like Hogsmeade there.”
“So Hogsmeade is down in some sort of funnel-shaped valley,” Ralph said experimentally.
“No,” Ted said, sitting up again. “It’s just, you know, a metaphor. The landscape looks just the same, but dimensionally, it goes out through the other side of space-time, where Muggles can’t go. Lots of wizard places have been built that way. We breed magical creatures in quantum preserves. Whole mountain ranges where the giants live, all buried in quantum, off the Muggle maps. That’s pretty much how unplottability works. Simple as that.”
“Simple as what?” Ralph said, frustrated.
Ted sighed. “Look, mate, it’s like the Cockroach Clusters in Honeydukes. You don’t need to understand how they make them. You just need to eat ‘em.”
Ralph slumped. “I’m not sure I can do either.”
“This bloke’s a real barrel o’ laughs, isn’t he?” Ted asked James.
“So if Muggles can’t get in,” James replied, “how’d that Muggle get onto the school grounds?”
“Oh yeah,” Ted said, leaning back again. “The mysterious Quidditch intruder. Is that what people are saying now? That he was a Muggle?”
James had forgotten that not everything he knew about the intruder was common knowledge. He recalled now what Neville Longbottom had said about the wild rumors surrounding the mysterious man on the Quidditch pitch. “Yeah,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant, “I heard he may have been a Muggle. I was just wondering how a Muggle could get in, what with all this stuff about, you know, quantum.”
“Actually,” Ted said, squinting out the window at the brightening day, “I guess even a Muggle could get in if they were accompanied by a wizard or led in somehow. It’s not that they can’t get in, exactly. It’s just that, as far as their senses are concerned, the spaces don’t even exist. If a magical person led them in, though, and the Muggle pushed through what their senses were telling them��� sure, it’d be possible, I guess. But who’d be stupid enough to do such a thing?”
James shrugged, and looked at Ralph. The look on Ralph’s face mirrored what James was thinking. Stupid or not, somebody had indeed led a Muggle onto the Hogwarts grounds. How or why that had been arranged was still a mystery, but James intended to do his best to find out.
The four of them lunched on sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, taken from the Hogwarts kitchens that morning, then settled into companionable silence. The day became hard and bright, with the sun shining like a diamond over the marching fields and woods. The frost had burned away, leaving the ground raw and grey. The skeletal trees scoured at the sky, standing on carpets of dead leaves. Ralph read and napped. Victoire flipped through a pile of magazines, then wandered off in search of a few friends she suspected were somewhere on board. Ted taught James to play a game called ‘Winkles and Augers’, which involved using wands to levitate a piece of parchment folded into the shape of a fat triangle. According to Ted, both players used their wands—the winkles—to simultaneously levitate the folded parchment—the auger-each one trying to guide the paper into their designated goal area, usually a circle drawn on a piece of parchment and placed near their opponent. James had gotten marginally better at levitation, but he was no match for Ted, who knew just how to undercut James’ wandwork, bobbing the auger out of range and swooping it onto his goal with a resounding smack.
“It’s all about practice, James,” Ted said. “I’ve been playing this since my first year. We’ve had as many as four people on a team sometimes, and used augers as big as the bust of Godric Gryffindor in the common room. I’m personally responsible for the fact that his left ear’s been glued back on. Didn’t know the Reparo charm back then, and now we’ve come to rather prefer him that way.”
By the time the train pulled into Platform Nine and Three Quarters, dusk had begun to turn the sky a dreamy lilac color. James, Ted, and Ralph waited for the lurch as the train came to a full stop, then stood, stretched, and made their way out to the platform.
The porter took their tickets, then produced their trunks with an Accio spell, sucking each trunk rather roughly out of the baggage compartment and plunking it at its owner’s feet. Victoire caught up with them as they piled their trunks onto a large cart.
“I’m to escort you all to the old headquarters,” Ted said importantly, drawing himself to his full height. “It’s close enough, and your parents are pretty busy tonight, James, what with everyone else arriving, and Lily and Albus just getting out of school today as well.”
They filed through the hidden portal that separated Platform Nine and Three Quarters from the Muggle platforms of King’s Cross station.
“You don’t drive, Ted,” Victoire said reproachfully. “And you’ll hardly fit the four of us on your broom. What do you expect to do?”
“I suppose you’re right, Victoire,” Ted said, stopping in the center of the concourse and looking around. Muggle travelers moved around them, hurrying here and there, most bundled into heavy coats and hats. The huge concourse echoed with the sound of train announcements and the tinkly din of recorded Christmas carols.
“Looks like we’re stuck,” Ted said mildly. “I’d say this is an emergency of sorts, wouldn’t you?”
“Ted, no!” Victoire scolded as Ted raised his right hand, his wand sticking up out of it.
There was a loud crack that echoed all around the concourse, apparently unheard by the milling Muggles. A huge, purple shape shot through the doors framed in the gigantic glassed arch at the head of the concourse. It was, of course, the Knight Bus. James had known to expect it when Ted had made the signal, but he’d never known it could travel off-road. The enormous triple-decker bus dodged and squeezed through the oblivious crowd, never losing speed until it squeaked violently to a halt directly in front
of Ted. The doors shuttled open and a man in a natty, purple uniform leaned out.
“Welcome to the Knight Bus,” the man said, a bit huffily. “Emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. You know this is the middle of effing King’s Cross station, don’t you? Seems like you could’ve at least made it to the front step.”
“Evening, Frank,” Ted said airily, hoisting Victoire’s trunk up to the conductor. “It’s this bad leg of mine again. Old Quidditch injury. Acts up at the worst of times.”
“Old Quidditch injury my topmost granny’s last molar,” Frank muttered, stacking the trunks on a shelf just inside the door. “You try pulling that gaf one more time and I’m going to charge you a Galleon just for being a nuisance.”
Ralph was reluctant to get onto the bus. “You say it’s close? This headquarters place? Maybe we could, you know, walk?”
“In this cold?” Ted replied heartily.
“And with his bad leg?” Frank added sourly.
Ralph climbed on and had no sooner crossed the threshold when the doors slammed shut.
“Corner of Pancras and St. Chad’s, Ernie,” Ted called, grabbing a nearby brass handle.
The driver nodded, set his face grimly, gripped the steering wheel as if he meant to wrestle it, then punched the accelerator. Ralph, despite James’ advice, had forgotten to grab onto something. The Knight Bus rocketed forward, throwing him backwards onto one of the brass beds that, strangely enough, seemed to occupy the lowest level of the bus instead of seats.
“Hmmph?” the sleeping wizard that Ralph had landed on muttered, raising his head from the pillow. “Grosvenor Square already?”
The bus performed an inconceivably tight hairpin turn, circling a group of tourists who were staring up at the departures board, then rocketed across the concourse again, whipping around businessmen and old ladies like a gust of wind. The glassed arch loomed over them, and James was certain the Knight Bus couldn’t possibly fit through the open doorways, large as they were. Then he remembered that the bus had, indeed, come in through those doors. He braced himself. Without slowing, the bus squeezed through the door like a water balloon through a mousehole, popping out onto the crowded street and swerving wildly.
James Potter and the Hall of the Elders' Crossing Page 27
