James Potter and the Crimson Thread

by G. Norman Lippert

  “This from the person who can’t choose between an entitled, bossy aristocrat and a neurotic criminal sorceress.”

  James drew an annoyed sigh and blew it out. He wanted to argue with Scorpius. He wanted to tell him that he, Scorpius, wasn’t a bad person, exactly, he was just bad for Rose. But there didn’t seem to be any point. He realized, almost clinically, how late the hour probably was. Midnight? Even later?

  His jaw cracked as a monumental yawn overtook him.

  Next to him, Scorpius kicked out one leg and leaned aside, turning away from James.

  James no longer cared. Weariness stole over him, weighing his eyelids down, turning his muscles into sandbags.

  He gave in to it, and time began to stretch out, first dulling every sensation, and then turning minutes into hours.

  He did not dream.

  A sudden hard shudder wracked the ship, and James felt himself falling forward. He flailed in confusion, not sure which way was up, his head still reeling, thick with sleep. A wall of cold, worn wood slammed against him, and he realized, very dimly, that it was the floor of the hall.

  He pushed himself up onto his elbows and pried his eyes open.

  The light was different. Thin pencil-beams of grey daylight lanced down from above, shining through cracks in the upper deck.

  Scorpius groaned in bleary irritation, struggling up from his own prone position on the floor.

  “We fell asleep,” James rasped, his voice hoarse. He scrubbed his face with his hands, raked them through his hair. “We slept through the night. Had to have. Are we there?”

  “I need a loo and a cup of black tea,” Scorpius answered grumpily, pushing himself to his feet and then slumping back against the wall. The ship rocked gently beneath them, accompanied by the distant slap of waves.

  James turned and stumbled back along the hall, still bleary with sleep, but forcing himself to alertness.

  Rose and Zane met them at the stairs, Rose with her hair bushed out in sleepy tangles, Zane blinking and squinting up into the gloomy dawn above. Together, without a word, they tramped up the steps into cool air and drab, stormy daylight.

  Odin-Vann stood on the bow, in front of the wheelhouse. He looked back when he heard them coming, his eyes bright and wary.

  “We’re here,” he announced in a hushed voice, and pointed ahead.

  James moved to join the professor, blinking against the pall of white fog that surrounded the ship.

  “I don’t see anything,” Scorpius said flatly, passing James and peering all around.

  “It’s there,” Odin-Vann nodded. “Just visible through the fog.

  Trees on all sides and there, just ahead, the old dock and the sunken gazebo. James, you’ve seen this place, yes? At least, the decades’ past version of it that Petra can conjure? You recognize it, don’t you?”

  James inched toward the bow railing and peered critically out over the leaden waves. Now that Odin-Vann mentioned it, he could see the shadows of trees, an encircling wood, all shrouded and ghostly beyond the lurking fog. He turned his gaze to the front. The bow did indeed seem to be pointed at a skeletal dock. It swam in and out of drifting grey mist.

  “This is it,” he nodded. “In Petra’s version, the gazebo is still there, at the end of the dock. But the version in our time is broken away and sunken. I don’t know how deep.” He glanced down at the water, but nothing was visible through it. The waves slapped at the hull, reflecting the clot of the sky, turning the lake into a shifting, broken mirror.

  “We’re drifting,” Odin-Vann said, his eyes still on the dock in its mantle of fog. “Scorpius, take the wheel and keep us in the centre of the lake.”

  “I didn’t want to say so last night,” Scorpius replied, tired and terse, “But I don’t think that’s how boats work.”

  “Go!” Odin-Vann said with sudden strength, turning back to Scorpius. His eyes were wide and sharp, either on the edge of panic, or triumph. “Rose, Walker, raise the gazebo. Aim for the water just in front of the broken dock!”

  Scorpius, James noticed, backed up to the wheelhouse but didn’t enter it. From the shadows, his narrowed eyes watched Odin-Vann keenly.

  Rose and Zane approached the rocking prow and drew their wands. Sharing a quick glance, they aimed for the dock, and then dipped their arms slightly, toward the restless waves beneath.

  “Wingardium leviosa!” they both called in unison.

  James sensed more than heard the surge of magic which fired into the depths. Nothing happened at first. Then, subtly, a deep groan arose from the deep. Odin-Vann moved slowly alongside Zane, his gaze rapt. James sidled in next to him, thinking hard, a sense of cold trepidation settling over him like a shroud. It was all happening so suddenly, too quickly for anyone to think about.

  And then, a thought that had haunted the back of his mind since the previous night finally pushed to the fore, bringing with it a deepening suspicion.

  “Professor,” he whispered, even as he watched the water at the base of the dock. A surge of dense bubbles pushed the surface into a low swell. “How did you find out that Merlin had hidden Petra’s brooch here? Did she tell you?”

  Odin-Vann’s gaze didn’t flicker from the bubbling disturbance.

  More deep groans and creaks emanated from the cold depths. Zane and Rose frowned in tense concentration.

  “Come, James,” Odin-Vann said, holding out his hand and swinging one leg over the railing. James glanced up at him in surprise.

  “Come!” the Professor said in a commanding rasp. “And look!”

  He nodded toward the waves below the bobbing bow. There, a haze of white solidified a wave, freezing it into a sudden ice floe, which arose silently, like a surfacing submarine. The floe pressed up against Odin-Vann’s boot, supporting his weight. “See? Petra’s power accompanies us. Come. I will need your eyes and courage to accomplish our task.”

  With that, he swung his other leg over the railing and stood atop the frozen, elevated wave. Another crackled into being before him, rising to meet his next step down, forming enchanted, icy stairs. A wintry chill wafted up from them, making James’ breath suddenly puff a visible cloud. He shivered violently.

  “Go, James,” Zane said in a strained voice. “Once this thing’s out of the water we won’t be able to hold it up for long.”

  James nodded worriedly and climbed awkwardly over the bow railing. His foot skidded on the ice step below, and then found purchase. Carefully, nervously, he began to follow Odin-Vann down, moving from frozen step to frozen step. Once James and the professor reached the level of the water, the stairs sank away with a deep gurgle, replaced by a bridge of ice, as thin as paper and brittle as glass, yet somehow strong enough to support their weight as they walked slowly, approaching the rising swell before the dock.

  As James watched, peering around Odin-Vann’s shoulder, he saw the spire of the old gazebo spear out of the gurgling boil. It was made of wood, but rotted and misshapen, barely sheathed in slimy white paint. It pushed upward, and a conical roof began to follow, its old shakes warped, as unruly as a hag’s teeth. Water began to pour down the roof as it widened, unleashing the weight of the depths.

  “Only,” James whispered, more urgently now. “I had a meeting with the headmaster. He told me how he was keeping the brooch because he was hoping Petra would come to him. He had it with him, right there in his office. Did he… maybe… hide it here later?”

  Odin-Vann didn’t answer. He inched closer to the rising gazebo.

  “Ungh!” Rose grunted from behind. “This… is heavy!”

  “Just a little more,” Odin-Vann called back, holding out one hand in a calming gesture. The ice bridge had narrowed as it stretched out, as if its power was weakening. Waves swamped serenely over it, wetting James’ shoes as he turned sideways, edging along in the professor’s wake.

  Beware, foul Donovan, he thought. The words teased him, seemed to nag at him.

  Surely you don’t need me to spell it out for you, Scorpius had
said the night before.

  “Almost there,” Odin-Vann said, almost to himself.

  A long, creaking moan emanated from the gazebo as it rose further into the grey air, casting off its freight of water. It was crooked, turning as it rose, wallowing like a bloated corpse. Slick drapes of seaweed hung from its edges and coated its upright supports.

  James stopped as an awful idea began to form in his mind. The cold of the ice bridge welled up over him.

  Beware, foul…

  The roar of water was too loud to speak over as the gazebo disgorged from the lake, finally bobbing fully to the surface. Its interior was obscured by curtains of limp, slimy seaweed. As it settled, it rocked and turned slightly, groaning against the old pilings.

  “Donofrio Odin-Vann,” James whispered urgently, his eyes widening in horrible, stunned revelation. “Don… O… Vann! ”

  The gazebo shuddered against the dock, and as it did so the seaweed tore loose from its roofline, falling away like a sodden veil.

  Someone was standing inside the gazebo. The shape was barely a silhouette, wasted and skeletal, and yet still, somehow, recognizable by her long, sopping red hair.

  “James,” she said in a chiding, rasping, ancient voice. “I warned you, did I not? On the lake just this past winter, I told you to abandon your Petra. And yet here you are. Predictable… to the last.”

  Ahead of James, Odin-Vann’s arm jerked spasmodically, whipping his wand up and back. James flinched in terror as it seemed to point at him and fire a bolt of blinding blue. The spell sizzled over his shoulder, however, striking a mark further away, back on the boat.

  Scorpius grunted in surprise. James turned in time to see the boy flung back against the wheelhouse, his wand falling from his hand.

  A moment later, he collapsed heavily to the deck.

  James drew breath to yell, but a sudden horrible pressure squeezed the air right out of him. The world spun upside down as he was lifted from the ice bridge and heaved away from the ship, pressed in the grip of a monstrous watery tentacle. A second later, he struck the cold, rotten floor of the gazebo, rolling hard enough to bash against the rear railing, smashing a leg through it.

  “I would not!” Judith called toward the ship, her voice a hoarse shriek but still with the same imperious tone of command. “Drop this structure back into the depths and poor James goes down with it!”

  James tried to struggle up, but his leg was tangled in the broken railing. Judith was standing directly before him. Her once glorious robes were now matted and sodden, rotted threadbare. Beneath them, her body seemed to be all angles, mere bones and tendon. She stank abominably.

  Thirty yards away, Zane and Rose still leaned over the bow of the Gertrude, wands outstretched, straining, eyes wide with shock and fear.

  Between them and the gazebo, Odin-Vann stood on the ice bridge with his wand still raised, pointing back at the boat, but his face looking forward, eyes locked upon Judith. His expression was misty with something very near adoration.

  “Professor!” James called, half attempting to snap the man out of the trance that Judith had cast over him. Odin-Vann dipped his gaze for a moment, blinking at James, and his face hardened. James understood the terrible truth: Judith had not cast any entrancement over the man at all. He was doing this entirely of his own free will.

  “It was you,” James exclaimed with sudden, sinking surety. “You sabotaged the Loom! But why?”

  Judith answered, “The good professor and I have certain mutual interests, James.” As she spoke, she turned to look down at him. Her face, James now saw, was a shrivel of filmy white skin over bone. Her lips were gone, revealing the ivory grin of her teeth. Her eyes were like peeled grapes in the hollows of their sockets. But her hair was still long and red, draping her skull in wet ribbons. “As you can see, I need a new host. Petra has broken from me. Without her, my time in this sphere is nearly over. But Mr. Odin-Vann is more than willing to take her place.

  He is eager.”

  James recoiled from the horror of Judith’s dead stare.

  Trembling, he tore his gaze away from her and focused again on the professor. “But what could you possibly get out of it?”

  Odin-Vann frowned and shook his head, slowly but firmly, as if James had finally confirmed something that he had been suspecting all along.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” he seemed to wonder aloud.

  “Early on, I thought perhaps you would prove different. When you were attacked and humiliated by the little bullies, Edgecombe and his friends. I hoped you might grasp the truth. But now I see that you really are just like all the rest. Too arrogant in your own perceived superiority to understand what it’s like…” He edged toward James, his face contorting into a mask of furious, age-old misery, “to be mocked.

  To be belittled at every turn. To be coddled like a child by those who believe they are good, and beaten down like a dog by those who know they are bad.” He moved forward more resolutely now, homing in on James, raising his chin and speaking with the fervor of long-suppressed rage. “Both of those acts arise from the same, pathetic delusion. That they are better than me. That they are more powerful than me. That I will always be what they believe me to be. A weak, slow, bookish, clumsy little embarrassment! But now the world will see. I used my brain to defeat them first. I made my WAND!”

  He brandished it in his fist, which vibrated with manic tension.

  His eyes blazed.

  “Slow, was I in the past? Now, I am the fastest wizard alive!

  Weak? Now I have the power of instantaneous strength. I have finally programmed my wand with every counter-jinx, every protective charm, every repulsion hex in the Caster’s Lexicon! Thus primed, it can sense and deflect any spell that anyone dares attack me with!” He drew a huge, firming breath and held it. “With this tool finally perfected, I knew I was unstoppable. But I also knew that it was not enough. I needed not only to silence those who had tormented me, but to stand up against all who cling to the pathetic illusion of their own superiority. All of those who bumble through this life so convinced of their own goodness, their own virtue, their own idiotic delusion of right! And then… Judith found me.”

  He looked aside at her, finally stepping up onto the warped floor of the gazebo and joining her.

  “She found me,” he said with sudden, soft rapture. “And she helped me to understand. Petra, my old school friend, would come to me. Judith divined this directly from Petra’s thoughts, for as yet they are still, if barely, connected. And when Petra did come to me, I would assist her. Judith helped me to see that it was my duty. I must help Petra to rid herself of her curse once and for all. I must do this, with Judith’s help… by ending her.”

  “No!” James exclaimed, straining to extricate his leg from the broken railing.

  “It’s the merciful thing,” Judith agreed in her cracked, swampy voice. “Secretly, even Petra herself desires her death. And then, with her out of the way, Donofrio will become my new host. Thus fully restored and once again rooted to this realm, we can finally rejoice that power will be in the hands of those who truly deserve it, and who are unafraid to use it.”

  “Because, James,” Odin-Vann said, looking down at him now with a sort of benevolent sadness. “Judith really is right. It isn’t just some people who stumble through this life under the delusion of their own rightness. It’s all of them. And they are all… every one… fatally, insultingly, wrong.”

  His voice grew leaden as he spoke the final words, and raised his wand, pointing it at James.

  “Oh, bugger this!” a voice said from some distance away. James glanced up and saw that it was Rose. She jerked her wand upright, releasing the levitation spell.

  “Swim, James!” she shouted desperately. Next to her, Zane staggered, suddenly supporting the gazebo entirely with his own wand.

  He grunted, gasped, and broke his spell as well.

  The gazebo dropped precipitously, struck the water, and began to roll over, immediat
ely capsizing.

  Odin-Vann stumbled, fell past Judith, and struck a side railing, smashing it and following it into the water.

  A bolt of brilliant red struck the waves where he had fallen, exploding in a burst of steam. Rose was firing attacks from the ship, aiming for both Odin-Vann and Judith. Zane gripped his wand to join her.

  Judith whirled. In a blink, she transformed into a cyclone of stinking black water, her force tearing the gazebo apart all around.

  Writhing tentacles uncoiled and scooped Odin-Vann from the water.

  His body was borne up into the throat of the waterspout, which roared, circled James with fury as he thrashed amidst the ruin, and then fled away out over the lake, bypassing the Gertrude and vanishing into the dense pall of fog all around.

  “James!” Zane called, stabbing out his wand again. Breathlessly, he repeated the levitation spell. James, along with a messy assortment of broken railing, floor planks, and destroyed roofing, rocketed up out of the waves with breathtaking speed, streaming water in a corona.

  “Yikes!” Zane gasped, grabbing onto his wand now with both hands. “You’re a lot lighter than that crazy gazebo. Hold on while I rein it in a little!”

  Clumsily, trembling with exhaustion, he bobbed James, along with his entourage of sodden debris, over the deck and set him down.

  James stumbled as his feet met the planks.

  “We have to go after them!” he gasped, grabbing onto a railing for support.

  “None of us even knows how!” Rose cried helplessly, dragging a still-woozy Scorpius to his feet. “We don’t know how to sail this ship!”

  “How hard can it be?” Zane said, stuffing his wand back into his pocket. “We watched Hagrid do it, didn’t we? All we have to do is set the destination lever back to Hogwarts. Down we go and we’ll be on our way back!”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be quite that straightforward,”

  Scorpius said, pushing fully to his feet and nodding toward the deck near James’ feet.