The hat was whipped off his head, and James had actually thought he’d heard the word ‘Slytherin’ still echoing from the walls, actually looked with sudden horror toward the green and silver table to see them applauding, when he realized it was the table beneath the crimson lion that had jumped up and applauded. The Gryffindor table cheered loudly and raucously, and James realized how much more he liked that than the polite, practiced applause he’d gotten earlier. He leaped from the chair, ran down the steps, and was enveloped amongst the cheers. Hands patted his back and reached out to shake his and high-five him. A seat near the front opened for him and a voice spoke in his ear as the cheers finally subsided.
“Never doubted it a minute, mate,” the voice whispered happily. James turned to see Ted give him a confident nod and a slap on the back before settling back to his seat. Turning back to watch the rest of the Sorting ceremony, James felt, so suddenly, perfectly happy that he thought he might split right down the middle. He didn’t have to follow exactly in his dad’s footsteps, but maybe he could start doing things deliberately differently tomorrow. For now, he gloried in the knowledge that Mum and Dad would be thrilled to know that he, like them, was a Gryffindor.
When Zane’s name was called, he trotted up the steps and plopped on the chair as if he thought it was going to take him on a roller coaster ride. He grinned as the shadow of the hat fell over his head, and it had no sooner done so than the hat cried out “Ravenclaw!” Zane raised his eyebrows and rocked his head back and forth in a cheerfully mystified way that brought a peal of laughter from the crowd even as the Ravenclaws cheered and beckoned him to their table.
The rest of the first years made their way to the dais and the house tables filled out appreciably. Ralph Deedle was one of the last to climb up and sit on the chair. He seemed to shrink a bit under the hat as it thought for a surprisingly long time. Then, with a flourish of its peak, the hat announced, “Slytherin!”
James was stunned. He had been sure that at least one, if not both, of his new friends would end up seated next to him at the Gryffindor table. Neither of them had joined him, however, and one of them, the one he least expected, had become a Slytherin. Of course, he conveniently forgot that he himself had almost succeeded in getting sent there. But Ralph? A Muggle-born if ever there was one? He turned and saw Ralph seating himself at the table on the far side of the room, being patted on the back by his new housemates. The girl with the sparkling eyes and the wavy black hair was smiling again, pleasantly, welcomingly. Maybe Slytherin House had changed, he thought. Dad and Mum would hardly believe it.
Finally, Headmistress McGonagall put the Sorting Hat away. “First years,” she called, “your new house is your home, but we are all your family. Let us enjoy competitions wherever we may find them, but never forget where our ultimate loyalties lie. And now,” she pushed her spectacles onto her nose and addressed the crowd over them. “Announcements. As always, the Forbidden Forest is off limits to students at all times. Please be sure that this is not a merely academic preference. First years may ask any older students-except for Mr. Ted Lupin and Mr. Noah Metzker, whose counsel you might wish to avoid on the matter-what they can expect if they determine to ignore this rule.”
James let the rest of the announcements roll over him as he scanned the faces of the crowd. Zane, at the Ravenclaw table, had pulled a bowl of nuts in front of him and was determinedly working his way through it. Across the room, Ralph caught James’ eye and gestured wonderingly at himself and his new housemates, seeming to ask James if it was all right. James shrugged and nodded noncommittally.
“Leaving us with one last order of business,” the Headmistress finally said, to the accompaniment of a few brave cheers. “Some of you may have noticed that there is one empty chair amidst your teachers here on the dais. Rest assured that you shall have a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor and that he is indeed a uniquely qualified and gifted expert on the subject. He will be arriving tomorrow afternoon, along with a full complement of fellow teachers, students, and associates, as part of a year-long international magical summit between his school and ours. I will expect you all to turn out tomorrow afternoon in the main courtyard for the arrival of the representatives from Alma Aleron and the United States Department of Magical Administration.”
Sounds of mingled excitement and derision erupted in the hall as the students instantly turned to discuss this rather remarkable turn of events with their fellows. James heard Ted say, “What is some old Yank gonna be able to tell us about the Dark Arts? What channel to watch them on?” There was a chorus of laughter. James turned around, looking for Zane. He found him, caught his eye, and pointed at him, shrugging. Your people are coming here, he mouthed. Zane clapped his hand over his heart and saluted with the other.
In the midst of the debate, dinner appeared on the long tables, and James, along with the rest of Hogwarts, dug in with fervor.
It was nearly midnight by the time James made his way to the portrait of the Fat Lady marking the entrance to the Gryffindor common room.
“Password,” she sang out. James stopped short, letting his green backpack slip off his shoulder and thump to the floor. No one had told him any passwords.
“I don’t know the password yet. I’m a first year. I’m a Gryffindor,” he added lamely. “Gryffindor you may be,” said the Fat Lady, looking him up and down with an air of polite patience, “but no password, no entry.”
“Maybe you could give me a little hint this time?” James said, trying to smile winningly.
The Fat Lady stared at him levelly. “You seem to have some unfortunate misunderstanding of the nature of the term ‘password’, my dear.”
There was a commotion on the moving staircase nearby. It swung into view and settled, lurching slightly, at the end of the landing. A group of older students clambered up, laughing and shushing each other conspicuously. Ted was among them.
“Ted,” James called in relief, “I need the password. A little help?”
Ted saw James as he and the others approached. “Genisolaris,” he said, and then added to one of the girls in the group, “Hurry it up, Petra, and don’t let Noah’s brother see you.”
She nodded, brushing past James as the portrait of the Fat Lady swung open to reveal the fire-lit glow of the common room. James began to follow her in when Ted threw an arm around his shoulder, turning him around and bringing him back out onto the landing. “My dear James, you can’t imagine we’re going to let you toddle off to bed at such an early hour, do you? There are Gryffindor traditions to think about, for Merlin’s sake.”
“What?” James stammered. “It’s midnight. You know that, do you?”
“Commonly known in the Muggle world as ‘The Witching Hour’,” Ted said instructively. “A misnomer, of course, but ‘The Witching and Wizarding Pulling Tricks on Unsuspecting Muggle Country Folk Hour’ is just a bit too long for anyone to remember. We like to call it, simply, ‘Raising the Wocket’.”
Ted was leading James back toward the stairs, along with three other Gryffindors. “The what?” James asked, trying to keep up.
“Boy doesn’t know what the Wocket is,” Ted said mournfully to the rest of the group. “And his dad’s the owner of the famous Marauder’s Map. Just think how much easier this would be if we could get our hands on that bit of skullduggery. James, let me introduce you to the rest of the Gremlins, a group you may indeed hope to join, depending on how things go tonight, of course.” Ted stopped, turned and threw his arm wide, indicating the three others skulking along with them. “My number one, Noah Metzker, whose only flaw is his unwitting relationship to his fifth-year prefect brother.” Noah bowed curtly at the waist, grinning. “Our treasurer,” Ted continued, “if we ever manage to come across any coin, Sabrina Hildegard.” A pleasant faced girl with a spray of freckles and a quill stuck in her thick reddish hair nodded to James. “Our scapegoat, should such services ever be required, young Damien Damascus,” Ted gripped the shoulder of a stout boy with heavy
glasses and a pumpkin-like face who grimaced at him and growled. “And finally, my alibi, my perfect foil, everyone’s favorite teacher’s favorite, Ms. Petra Morganstern.” Ted gestured affectionately to the girl who was just returning from the portrait hole, stuffing something small into her jeans pocket. James noticed that everyone but him had changed out of their robes and into jeans and dark sweatshirts. “Is everything clear for takeoff?” Ted asked Petra as she met them.
“Affirmative. All systems go, Captain,” she replied, and there was a titter from Damien. They all turned and began to descend the staircase, Ted steering James along with them.
“Should I go change or something?” he asked, his voice shaking as he pounded down the stairs.
Ted gave him an appraising look. “No, I don’t think that’ll be necessary in your case. Relax, mate. You’re going to have a blast. So to speak. Jump just here, then. You don’t want to step on that step, mind you.” James jumped, his backpack swinging from his shoulder, feeling himself pulled along partly by the group’s enthusiasm, but mostly by Ted’s grip on his elbow. He landed on the floor of a long, torch lit corridor and stumbled to keep up. At the end of the hall, the group met three more students, all standing in the shadow thrown by a statue of a gigantic, hunchbacked wizard wearing a very tall hat.
“Good evening, fellow Gremlins,” Ted whispered as they all clustered together in the shadow of the statue. “Meet James, son of my godfather, some guy named Harry Potter.” James grinned sheepishly at the new faces, and then did a double take at the third face in the group. “James, meet our Ravenclaw chapter, Horace, Gennifer, and young whatsisname.” He turned to Gennifer. “What’s his name?" he asked, gesturing at the boy on the end.
“Zane,” Gennifer said, throwing an arm around the smaller boy, who grinned and let himself be playfully shaken. “Just met him tonight, but he’s got a little something that says Gremlin to me. I’m thinking there might be some imp in his lineage somewhere.”
“We’re gonna play Hunt the Wocket!” Zane said to James in a stage whisper that carried along the entire corridor. “Sounds iffy to me, but if this’ll make us cool, well, I figured we might as well get it out of the way straight off!” James couldn’t tell if Zane was joking, and then he realized it didn’t really matter.
“Raise the Wocket,” Noah corrected.
James decided it was time to impress himself upon the conversation. “So where is this Wocket? And why are we all crammed into a corner behind a statue?”
“This isn’t just any old statue,” Petra said as Ted shimmied as far between the statue and the wall as he could, apparently looking for something. “This is St. Lokimagus the Perpetually Productive. We only learned his story last year and it led us to a rather amazing discovery.”
“Led you, you mean,” Ted said, his voice muffled.
Petra considered this and nodded. “True enough,” she agreed matter-of-factly.
“Back in your father’s day,” Noah said as Ted scratched around behind the statue, “there were six secret passages in and out of Hogwarts. But that was before the Battle. After that, a lot of the castle was rebuilt, and all the old secret passages were permanently sealed off. Funny thing about a magical castle, though. It just seems to grow new secret passages. We’ve only found two, and those only because of Petra and our Ravenclaw friends here. St. Lokimagus the Perpetually Productive is one of them. It’s all right there in his slogan.”
Noah pointed to the words engraved into the statue’s base: Igitur Qui Moveo, Qui et Movea.
Ted made a grunt of triumph and there was a loud click. “You’ll never guess where it was this time,” he said, puffing from beneath the statue. With a grind of moving stone, the statue of St. Lokimagus straightened up as much as his humped back would allow, stepped carefully off his plinth, and then walked across the corridor with a slightly bowlegged gait. He disappeared into the door opposite, which James saw was a boys’ bathroom.
“What’s his slogan mean?” James asked as the Gremlins began to duck hurriedly into the low doorway on the back of St. Lokimagus’ plinth. Noah grinned and shrugged. “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”
The passage led to a short stairway with rounded stone steps. The Gremlins pounded noisily up the steps, and then shushed each other as they reached a doorway. Ted creaked the door open a fraction, peering through the crack. A moment later he pushed the door wide and motioned for the rest to follow him outside.
The door opened inexplicably out of a small shed near what James recognized as the Quidditch pitch. The tall grandstands rose into the moonlight, looking bleak and imposing in the silence.
“The passage only works one way,” Sabrina explained to James and Zane as the group ran lightly across the Quidditch pitch toward the hills beyond. “If you go into it without having come through St. Lokimagus’ tunnel first you just find yourself in the equipment shed. Pretty convenient, since it means that even if we get caught, nobody else can chase us back through the tunnel.”
“Have you gotten caught yet?” James asked, puffing along next to her.
“No, but this is the first time we’ve tried to use it. We only discovered it at the end of last year.” She shrugged as if to say we’ll see how this turns out, won’t we?
Zane’s voice came out of the darkness behind James, conversationally. “What if St. Magic Buns gets done with the loo before we all come back through his hole?” James shuddered at Zane’s turn of phrase, but admired his logic. It seemed like a question worth asking.
“That’s definitely a question for a Ravenclaw,” Noah called back as quietly as he could, but nobody answered.
After ten minutes of skirting the border of a scraggly, moonlit wood, the group clambered over a wire fence into a field. Ted pulled his wand from his back pocket as he approached a patch of rambling bushes and weeds. James followed and saw that there was a low barn hidden among the growth. It was ramshackle, bowed and buried in vines.
“ Alohomora,” Ted said, pointing his wand at the large rusted padlock hanging on the door. There was a flash of yellow light. It bloomed out of the lock, and then resolved into the shape of a glowing, ghostly arm that snaked from the padlock’s keyhole. The arm ended in a fist with the index finger pointed in the air. It waggled the finger back and forth reprovingly for a few seconds, and then vanished.
“Protective charm’s still in place, then,” Ted announced happily. He turned to Petra, who came forward, pulling something out of her jeans pocket. James saw it was a rusted skeleton key.
“That was Gennifer’s idea,” Horace, the second Ravenclaw, said proudly. “Although I had wanted it to be a different gesture.”
“Would’ve been a nice touch,” Zane agreed.
“We figured any magical types that tried to break in here wouldn’t think to try anything as boring as a key,” Noah explained. “We put up Disillusionment Charms to keep the Muggles away, but they don’t come out here anyway. It’s abandoned.”
Petra turned the key and pulled away the padlock. The doors of the old barn swung open with surprising silence. “Creaky doors are for novices,” Damien said smugly, tapping the side of his pug nose.
James peered inside. There was something large in the shadows, its bulk blotting out the rear of the barn. He could just barely make out the shape of it. More than anything, it looked like somebody’s very antiquated idea of a flying saucer.
“Cool!” Zane cried happily, understanding dawning on him. “Raise the Wocket! You’re right, James. There was nothing like this in The Wizard of Oz.”
“The Wizard of what?” Ted said to James out of the corner of his mouth.
“It’s a Muggle thing,” James replied. “We wouldn’t understand.”
Frank Tottington awoke suddenly, sure he’d heard something out in the garden. He was instantly alert and angry, throwing off his covers and swinging his legs out of bed as if he’d fully expected such an annoyance.
“Hmwah?” his wife mumbled, raising her head sleepily.
The screen door squeaked open and clapped against the outside wall as Frank barreled out. “All right, you hooligans! Drop those tomatoes and step out here into the light where I can see you!” He raised the shotgun in one hand, pointing it warningly at the star-strewn sky.
A light popped on over his head, illuminating him in a blinding white beam that seemed to hum faintly. Frank froze, his shotgun still held barrel up, pointing up into the beam of light. Slowly, Frank raised his head, squinting, his stubbly chin casting a long shadow down the front of his robe. There was something hovering over him. It was hard to tell the size of it. It was simply a round black shape, with dim lights dotting the edge. It was turning slowly and appeared to be lowering.
Frank gasped, stumbled and nearly dropped his gun. He recovered and backed quickly away, not taking his eyes from the gently humming object. It lowered slowly, as if cushioned by the beam of light, and as it came to rest, its hum deepened, throbbing.
Frank boggled at it, his knobby knees bent in a sort of alert crouch. He chewed on his dentures fretfully.
Then, with a burst of steam and a hiss, the shape of a door appeared in the side of the object. It was outlined in light, and the light brightened as the door unfolded, forming a short ramp. A figure was standing framed in the light. Frank gasped and raised his shotgun, socking it to his shoulder. There was a blast of red light and Frank jumped. He made to pull the trigger, but nothing happened. The trigger had changed, become a small button instead of the comforting loop of metal. He glanced down at the shotgun, and then held it out in front of him in shock. It wasn’t his shotgun at all. It was a small, ratty umbrella with a fake wooden handle. He’d never seen it before. Recognizing he was in the presence of something truly otherworldly, Frank dropped the umbrella and sank to his knees.
James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing Page 4
