On This Spot 2:Return to the Fog
If Muggles could only see all the
odd things in their world, and wonder...
By magic fenc'd, by spells encompass'd round,
No mortal touch'd this interdicted ground
- Tickell, Kensington Garden
1. Castlespotting.
Remember our last? If not, you may want to read "On This Spot". This is what followed...
Once the wizarding world realised it wasn't the 11th century any longer, and their cloaking of the Hogsmeade vicinity was not sufficient for modern technology, the wizards extended the cloaking to orbital altitudes, and into the ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. Satellites only saw a blurry blank spot. Once more, all was right with the magical world of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade.
Well, almost. There was still the matter of a detailed satellite photo, taken before the recloaking.
The photo wasn't blurry at all. Nor did it show a ruins overrun by critters, and a stinking swamp, as any visual inspection showed.
No, the old satellite view showed a pristine castle, a beautiful lake, roads, manicured lawns, and a little country village nearby. You could even see the dirt road the survey team had taken, running from the single-lane road in the Muggle farm town of Bumpus toward the mysterious village in the woods. If that were not enough, there was also the single-track railway, running from a station near the village to the woods nearby, where the track simply ended. On the track sat a steam locomotive, and five cars. What was a mile-long railway doing in the middle of the mountains?
There it was, all laid out, and absolutely locatable down to the fraction of a meter. The satellite company backed it, Kiki's contacts at the aerial survey company trusted it --
And Kiki Rankin could only post it in an enlargement on the wall directly in front of her desk, where it tantalised her every day. She would sit staring at that photo, tapping her fingertips on the tabletop. Ever so often, she would unroll the huge sheet her graphics man had made from the photo. It was a very detailed map, showing castle towers, bridges, greenhouses, paths, railway, docks, shoreline, forest, and a playing field (for what strange sport?). She knew the exact GPS coordinates of everything, even if any GPS receiver would be useless the moment she walked in.
Oh, no, it was not her playful imagination that made her so willing to believe in this little kingdom!
Here at Rankin & Raven Engineers Ltd., Union Street, Aberdeen, failure was unacceptable -- yet she and her crew of surveyours had left that Kent job site at full speed, their tails between their legs, and told the client to quietly back out of the tax sale.
She knew, somehow, that the whole night of terrors had been staged to chase them away. But who would manipulate them that way? And, more significantly, who could? A ghost had tipped his head and walked through Randall, her survey crew chief. A green witch had circled their campfire on a broomstick at midnight, cackling like something out of Wizard of Oz. All electronics had gone absolutely dead, from the Land Rover's accumulator to the calculator in her own pocket.
She knew far less than enough, and that bothered her logical, methodical, professional mind.
But she knew where her world ended and the connivers' world began, and who stood at the line between. One was the long-time property owner of record, who claimed on their forms that the land was a wildlife sanctuary. Another was an identifiable resident of the nearby farming community, a hunter named Noonan.
How to tackle this conundrum?
Putting Mitch Cameron on the case would be a good start.