A/N: Written for Mountain Biking (founders era) in the Hogwarts Games. Told from the point of view of a Muggle.
)O(
I knew, when the queer folk came into the village, that they were bad news. They dressed like noblemen and ladies, but their clothes were old and faded. They arrived in the middle of the night; no-one saw them come. There was no carriage due in the next few weeks and they had not proper shoes for walking. Really, there was no place they could have walked from. The village was miles from anywhere real civilised.
There were four of them, all different in their differences. A haughty, hairy man seemed to lead them, as shown by his disdainful glares whenever they did anything...odd. But I'll get to that later. At gatherings, he was often elbowed out of the way by a perpetually genial, more muscular man. Whenever they were seen together, the men would balance each other out in their conversation. One would talk loudly, sure of the value of his words and the other would listen to anything he said, proving him right.
The other man wasn't seen around much; he often disappeared for weeks at a time, but whenever he was around, the impression he made was too strong to forget easily. Many had tried.
The two women didn't seem to share their partners' enthusiasm for attention. They would stand in the background of normal conversation and whisper to each other in low voices. One of them, tall and imposing with painfully sharp features, would occasionally saunter towards the bar or table or whatever the centre of the room was and ask for a whisky. She always looked slightly disappointed when it was given to her.
The other woman was a lot more approachable. She dressed more sensibly than her companions, wearing a loose sort of robe instead of their fancy dress. Often, she would come up to one of us and start chatting about the weather or the year's crops. A person could not refuse her companionship whenever she was around; she seemed to exude a pleasant, helpful air. Whoever had the luck to be talking to her would doubtless go away with some good advice and a warm feeling in the pit of their stomach.
If seen separately, they would not have looked like an abnormal lot. They didn't look as if they should belong together.
I said I would talk about their...oddness, so here it is.
Wherever they went, there was an unexplained situation just waiting to be discovered. Why, I remember the last of many of these occurrences.
It was a dark and stormy night and the folks at the King's Leg bar were just saying good night and going off to sleep under the table. It was calm and just as ol' Barry was about to go to bed, he heard strange noises coming from outside.
A clap of thunder tore through the air as the roaring of what had to be a gigantic beast was heard from outside. Unlike the thunder, however, the roaring did not stop.
The folks inside the Leg cowered in fear, slinking back even further under their tables and away from the door. Before any of them could say anything, however, the door burst open. Behind it stood a dog, no, a bear, no, a...well, a really REALLY large dog. A Hellhound from the realm of the Devil himself. It had eyes that glowed red and fur that was matted with what I'm sure was blood. It was dark and smelly as the week-old contents of a chamber pot and gave off the heat of a thousand suns. At least, I'm pretty sure it did. I had been half-asleep when it had come in, but the men who watched it assured me of the validity of their claims.
It pawed at the ground and came as silently as it could into the inn. The only sounds apart from its heavy footsteps were its dank, dirty breaths. It was a horrid animal.
Just when we thought there was no hope for us, just when it had caught sight of 'ol Barry and was walking towards him, just as it had opened its mouth to eat him whole, they arrived.
You couldn't have known it was them unless you had seen them doing their magicbefore. They soared in and took out their wands, waving them about and shouting something horrible. Jets of red and blue and green light went everywhere, scaring the most of us the death and breaking some of the old teacups my wife had set aside special for the visitors.
When the loud noises had stopped however and every man had poked his head out from under where it had been, there was nothing more to be seen. No beast, no guests, no dead 'uns. Most of us thought it might have been a dream.
We never saw the queer folk again. They had disappeared from our memories almost as soon as they had disappeared from our lives. I still remember it because I was sick for many nights after, and needed something to think about to keep myself busy.
No-one knows what they had come for and no-one cared. Our lives just went back to normal.
On one of my uncle's fields where we had sowed wheat a few weeks before, there was nothing remaining. I tried to go there sometimes to see what had happened to the crop, but each time I tried I remembered that the cows still had to be milked or the chickens fed.
That was an odd time of our lives, but at least it didn't last long. No, we sure scared the weird 'uns out for good!
)O(
Fin