Chapter One:
The Other Secretary
It was early evening and the President was sitting alone in the Oval Office, trying unsuccessfully to finish reading a lengthy report. The report had been submitted by a task force he had appointed some years earlier to study an issue that had been of great interest to the public at the time. By the time the task force had finished its work, its mission seemed irrelevant, the issue pushed off the front pages by more current concerns.
The President was about to call the Prime Minister of a far away country, an ally of long standing. In fact, he would already have called the Prime Minister, but for an unexpected visit from the leaders of his party in the Congress.
When his visitors had left, the President had thought he could quickly skim the task force report so as to be prepared for its release at a press conference the next day.
He now thoroughly regretted that decision, for he'd been unable to focus on the report. Instead, he'd worried about the spate of recent crises across the country and he'd wondered how the Prime Minister would react to several new policy initiatives that involved both countries. Now the more he tried to concentrate on the printed page before him, the more clearly he could see the face of his opponent in the coming election and hear him enumerating the several recent disasters that had occurred on the President's watch.
The President resented the implication that his administration was to blame for these problems. Certainly the government could not have prevented the freak floods that had left several towns in the southwestern desert under water. Nor was it fair to charge him with negligence when that poor woman had been murdered just outside the White House grounds last week. And the terrible train wreck that had released toxic gas over a Midwestern city had been due to the engineer's error, not a government mistake.
Nevertheless the President's opponent had appeared on all the weekend talk shows, telling the pundits with evident glee that the nation had fallen into a "deep malaise" under the current administration.
Malaise indeed! The President fumed to himself. The recent weather could have created a national mood of depression all by itself. He looked out the grand windows of his office at another evening of foggy drizzle. Normally July was sunny, hot and humid in the capital, but it had been cold and damp for nearly three weeks now. The weathermen were comparing it to 1816, which they called the "Year without Summer."
This was not the sort of stage on which the President wished to begin his reelection bid, but with the convention only a few weeks away, there was nothing to be done. He'd just have to smile and exude his well-known aura of confidence to get through it. The President sighed. He'd found it much more difficult to smile or feel confident lately, though he couldn't put his finger on the reason.
Finally he decided to give up trying to read the report altogether. He couldn't keep the Prime Minister waiting any longer, no matter how likely it was that he'd now have to hear just how terrible things were going for his ally as well.
As the President reached for the phone, he heard someone clear his throat nearby. "Hem! Hem!"
The President put the phone down and looked up. He was quite sure he knew what that sound meant, but he surveyed the room in the forlorn hope that he was wrong, that perhaps his Chief of Staff had returned to remind him of an appointment or a point he needed to make to the Prime Minister.
But he was still quite alone. He'd been afraid that was true. He stood up and walked toward the center of the room.
"Hem! Hem!" came the sound again. This time it was clear that it came from an old portrait on the far wall of the office. A tall, somewhat angular man dressed in the customary costume of two centuries earlier was looking out from the portrait at the President with a mournful countenance.
"Greetings to the President of Muggles from Ernest Dithers, Secretary of Magic! The Secretary requests an urgent consultation with the President. Kindly respond at once!"
The President shook his head, both weary and annoyed.
"I'm afraid I don't have any time at present," he said shortly. "I was just calling the Prime Minister of ..."
"The Prime Minister is not available to take your call," the sad-looking man in the portrait intoned.
The President had feared such a response, but he was unwilling to give up just yet.
"Now look here, we've both gone to great trouble to clear our schedules for this call," he said irritably.
"The Prime Minister has just begun a very important meeting," said the portrait. "He now expects you to call him tomorrow night. Please respond immediately to Mr. Dithers."
"Very well, then," the President relented. "I'll see Dithers."
The President walked reluctantly back to his desk and sat down. He straightened his tie and practiced his smile in an attempt to look more Presidential than he felt just now.
He'd barely gotten the corners of his mouth turned up into the sincere smile of his public persona when a sudden whoosh came from the fireplace. A bright cloud of green smoke and flame shot down the chimney. Spinning out of the center of the cloud there appeared a square-jawed, jowly man with thinning gray hair, dressed in an absurd plaid cloak and a beaver-felt top hat.
The man stepped out of the fireplace and brushed ashes off his shoulders all over the fine oriental carpet.
He strode towards the desk. The President thought the man's face more careworn than it had been the last time they'd met; then again, the same could have been said of the President.
"Good to see you again, Mr. President!" Ernest Dithers said, pasting a smile onto his face, sweeping off his top hat and stretching out his right hand toward the President.
The President shook Dithers' hand firmly but briefly; as he could not honestly say he was glad to see the Secretary of Magic, he hesitated.
"Yes, well it hasn't been the best of weeks," he said before the pause became embarrassingly long. "So if you don't mind..."
"I quite agree! Terrible week indeed!" Dithers exclaimed before the President could finish. "Unprecedented, I do believe!"
Taken aback, the President asked, "Things not going well for you, either?"
"Well of course not, my good man!" Dithers responded. "I've been having the same sort of week as you...in fact, exactly the same week, to all intents and purposes!"
"I'm not sure I follow you," the President said, but at the same time the shadow of a horrendous realization was forming in his mind.
"Of course you do!" Dithers said impatiently. "The Manzanita flood, the Toledo derailment, the Morrigan murder and...something else, it will come back to me in a moment."
"At least I trust that none of your aides has been going for late night swims in the Reflecting Pool?" the President inquired.
"Ah, that's it of course! Wilbert Dooley!" Dithers exclaimed.
Nonplussed, the President asked, "Do you mean to say that your kind, I mean your people, were involved in some way?"
"Well, of course!" Dithers said grimly. "Haven't you figured out what's going on? I thought you might have called me in by now!"
The President seethed inside. As the leader of the free world, he wasn't accustomed to being lectured like a slow schoolboy. Furthermore, he couldn't imagine any circumstance in which he would willingly summon this strange man to the White House.
The President thought back to a chilly January afternoon over three years previous, when he'd first sat alone in this office during a quiet moment between the inauguration and the celebratory balls. He'd been looking out over the snowy lawns, savoring his victory against long odds one last time before the real work of governing began.
Then he'd heard that "Hem! Hem!" for the first time. He'd turned around, but seeing no one had turned back to the window. The sound had come again and he'd been sure that it had come from that old portrait the First Lady had already decided to send back to the Smithsonian.
He must have imagined it, he thought to himself. He'd been working too hard on the transition. But then the lank, long-nosed man in the portrait looked straight at the President and declared, "Congratulations to the President from the Secretary of Magic, who will be arriving momentarily to introduce himself!"
What sort of practical joke was this? The President wondered.
Within a minute, green flames flared up in the hearth and Ernest Dithers materialized before the President for the first time.
The President's first thought was to summon the Secret Service to arrest this odd man who claimed to be a wizard and the Secretary of a department that did not appear on any of the President's transition charts. But he found that he simply couldn't do it.
Dithers had explained that there were witches and wizards living all over America, but that they concealed themselves so as to avoid any "issues" with the non-magical population. He told the President not to worry himself about this, as the Department of Magic had numerous offices, regulations and monitors whose job it was to ensure that the two communities coexisted in such a way that the non-magical folks had no idea the magical community existed.
The President's jaw dropped further with each of Dithers' reassuring statements.
"You'll never know we're here, most of the time," Dithers said airily. "You may never see me again. But we do think it wise to let you know about us at the start, just in case."
"Just in case of what?" The President managed to ask as he pinched himself again to be sure he wasn't dreaming.
"Ah, well, you know," Dithers said, shifting his top hat from one hand to the other. "Every now and then, there's some little accident that affects the muggle-I mean, non-magical-population in some way. Very rare, I assure you. We've all sorts of safeguards against it."
Changing the subject, Dithers said, "You know, you're taking this much more calmly than that fellow you've just sent packing! He was sure I was a hoax, planned by his predecessor's wife!"
"So, you're for real, then?" the President asked, his last hope fading.
"Quite real, I assure you," Dithers said with a smile. And with that, the Secretary pulled a wand out of his pocket, pointed it at the water glass on the desk and turned it into a white rat with a long tail.
The President gripped the side of his desk for support.
"Why haven't any former Presidents told me about this?" he asked plaintively. "There's nothing in any of the white papers, either."
"Now really, Mr. President," Dithers said, chortling. "Are you going to tell anybody about me?"
Then he walked back to the fireplace.
"Well, goodbye now," he said. "If all goes well, I may not be back during your term!"
With that he tossed some powder into the fireplace. The green flames reappeared. Dithers stepped into them and vanished, spinning into nothingness.
The new President sat down and wiped his brow. He knew in his heart that he would never breathe a word of this to anyone, even his wife...especially his wife, now that he thought about it.
He resolved to pretend that the visit had never occurred, although the white rat on his desk made that difficult at first. But he was able to give the creature to his press secretary's seven-year old son, who was delighted to take it away to his home in the suburbs.
Alas, the First Lady's plan to remove the annoying painting came to naught. The Curator of the White House was unaccountably unable to remove it from the wall.
"Doesn't even have security screws," he said, mystified. He called in the Smithsonian's curators, the Secret Service and the White House housekeepers and janitors, but no one could get it to budge.
The President even had the CIA director investigate whether it was a bug left over from the Cold War. But the investigation proved negative.
"It must be one of ours," the CIA director told the President.
With that, the President gave up trying and instead carefully avoided looking at that part of the office. Even so, out of the corner of his eye he sometimes glimpsed the long-shanked colonial stretching or yawning. One morning, when the President arrived in the office early to prepare for an important cabinet meeting, he couldn't help but notice that the man in the portrait was absent from the canvas. A few minutes there was a scuffling noise as he rushed back into the scene, straightening his hair and looking embarrassed. The President steadfastly refused to investigate any of these incidents further.
But Ernest Dithers had not reappeared and for that the President was thankful. A year passed, then two. There were many other matters on the President's mind; he allowed that bizarre meeting on Inauguration Day to fade into the depths of his memory.
Then one fine early summer evening two years ago this pleasant forgetfulness was shattered. As the President sat contemplating the difficulties of getting a health care bill passed with mid-term elections due, he heard the portrait clearing its throat and announcing gloomily the Secretary of Magic's impending arrival. Before the President had even had a chance to assure himself he was hallucinating, Ernest Dithers arrived in a ball of green flame.
The "other Secretary," as the President came to call him, looked a bit more corpulent and considerably more annoyed than on his first visit.
"Good evening, Mr. President," he'd said briskly as he set the beaver top hat down on the desk. "Sorry to bother you. I know you've enough troubles with the Congress, but I do need to touch base."
"Oh, yes?" the President asked, trying to remember what Dithers had said about likely reasons for visits. "Some problem involving...us?"
"Well probably not, at least not directly," Dithers replied. "You see the British Ministry of Magic has been looking for an escapee from their prison for the last year and Fudge-Cornelius Fudge, he's their Minister of Magic-seems to think there's some possibility he's fled the country on a hippogriff and he..."
"Fled on a what?" the President inquired, trying to appear unruffled.
"A hippogriff, you know, head of an eagle, body of a horse, great wingspan," Dithers began, stretching his arms out wide. "That's why Fudge alerted us, since the hippogriff can travel great distances. But they can only be tamed by experts and there's no evidence that Sirius Black-this prisoner-would be able to do it."
"So you've got your own prisons, do you?" the President said, working hard to appear unsurprised by what Dithers had just told him. "Maybe I should find out more, our system's full of problems. Then again, if you have a lot of escapes..."
"No, no, this is the first time anyone's made it out of Azkaban," Dithers said. "Frankly, I don't know how he could manage it, miles out in the ocean with the dementors guarding that place."
"Demented guards?"
"Dementors. Nasty beings," Dithers shuddered. "Feed on human happiness, leaving the prisoners with only their worst memories. No wonder most of them go mad. But then, that's the other reason Fudge notified us. Black was already mad when they put him away, killed a streetful of muggles just to get one wizard. Never know what he might be capable of. And they tell us he was You-Know-Who's right hand man."
"So that's why you're telling me, then," the President said. "This man's killed normal...er, I mean, non-magical people. You'll be able to send some of these dementors after him if he's made it over here?"
"Well, no, we don't use 'em at Autongaman, that's our prison," Dithers said. "We have other ways of controlling prisoners. But I'm sure Black's nowhere near the United States anyway. Nothing to get excited about..."
"Very well, I won't get excited," the President said. "Now whose right hand man did you say this Black was?"
"Oh, that's ancient history now," Dithers said, a false note of assurance in his voice. "He worked for a wizard named...well, he was the darkest wizard of the century."
As he said this, Dithers grabbed a pen from the President's desk and scribbled a name down on a note pad and shoved the pad into the President's hand.
"So you think this wizard," the President said, looking at the pad. "This Volde-"
"Don't say his name," Dithers snarled. "Why do you think I wrote it down? He's been gone for more than a dozen years now. No need to worry about him, Fudge assures me. Anyway, I've taken enough of your time. As I said, regulations said we're to pass on information in such cases. I doubt you'll hear any more about it. Goodbye, now!"
With that Dithers practically hurled the powder into the fireplace. It exploded into green flames into which the Secretary disappeared almost immediately, leaving the President quite mystified. Wizard prisons, eagle horses, mad wizards, creatures that sucked the happiness out of life-it was too much to take in.
So the President went back to work on health care. The prospects weren't all that bright, but it seemed manageable compared to worries about unseen magical threats.
And indeed the next several months did not go well for the President. Not only did the health care initiative founder, the mid-term elections turned the President's party out of power in the Congress.
Thus he found it easy to forget about Ernest Dithers and the existence of witches and wizards again. The President rather relished being an underdog and he put all his energy into fighting battles with the new Congress.
Over a year later, he'd had another brief but unpleasant reminder that the world of magic existed. Dithers had simply appeared out of thin air in the Oval Office late on a winter evening, out of breath and looking fit to be tied.
"Hello, Mr. President! Sorry to bother you without notice, but I've had some news I must share with you," the Other Secretary had said after the briefest of handshakes.
"Why, what is it?" asked the President, trying to recall details of his previous visits from Dithers from the depths of his memory. "Madmen on flying horses again?"
"No, not exactly," the Secretary said, unamused. "But the British ministry has reported a mass escape from Azkaban!"
"A mass escape?" the President repeated. "From...that's the British prison, isn't it?
"Yes, you've been paying attention, I see!" Dithers replied.
"But you said that nobody had ever escaped before that Cyrus, erm, Serious fellow last year," the President said, raising an eyebrow. "They must be slipping, eh?"
"I really don't know what Fudge thinks he's doing!" Dithers said, not bothering to hide his exasperation. "Still, they're not likely to head this way-they were all followers of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named back in the bad old days. If they think You-Know-Who's still around, they'll be heading to Albania or some such place-there were rumors years ago that he might have been there."
"But you said that He...Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was gone," the President recalled, drawn into this discussion despite himself. "I thought you meant he was dead."
"Well, we all hoped he was, of course," Dithers said wistfully. "And Hafgan disappeared at the same time and we've had no sign of him in fifteen years either. Fudge insists that anyone who claims You-Know-Who is back is deluded and he's probably right. But some of our intelligence people say that Harry Potter was abducted by You-Know-Who after the Triwizard Tournament last spring but managed to fight him off and escape. And he was the one who defeated You-Know-Who the last time after all, when he was just a baby..."
The President's brain was dangerously close to overload again-wizard spies, abductions, a Triwizard Tournament, fighting infants. All he managed to say was "Hafgan?"
"Oh, yes, he was You-Know-Who's main follower over here...never really had much more than a foothold. Our aurors squelched his lot pretty well at Table Mountain and rounded up the rest after You-Know-Who went."
The President lapsed into confused silence. Dithers looked at him sharply, and then changed his tone.
"Well, as I said, I had to let you know about the escapes-it's all down in international wizarding law, you know. But I'd say you won't have to worry about it at all. The dementors should round them up quickly."
"Oh, did they find that other fellow-the mad man?" the President managed to ask.
"You mean Sirius Black?" Dithers answered. "No, apparently not! I've been assured that they're still working on it and that he's not in our neck of the woods. That's all I can say for now. Good night, now!"
With that, Dithers vanished just as quickly as he'd appeared.
Now the President had his faults, but he was a keen student of politics and politicians. Despite Dithers' assurances at their first meeting, the President had now seen enough of the Secretary to recognize him as a fellow traveler. He'd also realized that Dithers only showed up in the Oval Office with bad news; indeed, the news each visit had been worse than the last. Furthermore, the President recognized that Dithers had always attempted to put the best possible spin on the situation, a tendency the President was rather fond of himself.
But on this July evening of an election year, Dithers had dropped the pretense that all was well. The President knew that this had to be a sign of a true crisis.
As he tended naturally to empathize with those in trouble, the President might have commiserated with Dithers under normal circumstances. But the Secretary's clear implication that the country's current woes were connected to wizardry had made him furious. Dithers' tone of condescension offended him further.
"Well out with it then!" he demanded. "Tell me how you've managed to give me floods, train wrecks, murders and nervous breakdowns all in the same week!"
"It's not me!" Dithers said, wringing his hands. "It's all Fudge's fault! I'll never trust the British again!"
"What do you mean, Fudge's fault?"
"He gave me his personal assurance this could not happen! But it has. It's He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named! He's back!"
The President thought hard for a moment.
"You mean the one you said was the darkest wizard this century?"
"The same," Dithers said with a shiver.
"Well, he must be positively superhuman if he can cause floods in rivers that have been dry for hundreds of years," the President said skeptically.
"Well Fudge tells me there's not much human left in him, not that he did a very good job of explaining what he meant by that," Dithers said. "But it's his allies, Mr. President, that I worry about."
"Allies? You mean like that Black fellow?"
"Heavens, no!" Dithers exclaimed. "Black's dead anyway, murdered right in the Ministry of Magic in London. And it turned out he was wrongfully convicted in the first place. No, I mean giants, dementors, trolls of various sorts. Hopefully he won't manage to involve flying heads!"
This explanation rendered the President speechless for a long moment.
"Gi-giants?" he finally whispered, opening the lower drawer of his desk and drawing out a bottle of bourbon that he kept for especially stressful moments.
The President took out two glasses and gestured at the bottle. Dithers nodded affirmatively, and then spoke again.
"Yes, we suspect they're responsible for redirecting the water flow out west. That was no earthquake, you know!"
The President nearly spilled the contents of the glass that he was handing to Dithers. They drained their glasses quickly.
"Hmm, not firewhiskey but not bad!" Dithers said approvingly. "Now let's see, where was I?"
"I suppose a troll derailed the train in Toledo?" the President asked as he refilled their glasses.
"No, that was probably a windigo. We sent dozens of memory modifiers to the area just after the incident and that was their conclusion," Dithers said. "But the worst part was losing Elvira Morrigan, my Deputy Secretary for Magical Law Enforcement."
"But that happened just down the street," the President remarked. "It was all over our papers. They just said she was a middle-aged single mother, a victim of a random street attack."
"Oh, there was nothing random about that murder," Dithers said grimly. "Elvira was targeted by Death Eaters and ambushed on the way to a meeting with the British liaison for international wizarding crime. She put up quite a fight, but there were too many of them. It's a terrible loss!"
"Death Eaters?" the President asked as he finished his second glass of bourbon.
"That's what You-Know-Who calls his followers," Dithers explained, downing his own glass.
"So they're foreign terrorists?" the President asked. "Can't you demand that Fudge control them? Where are his dementors?"
Dithers' face darkened.
"The dementors have gone over to You-Know-Who. They've left Azkaban and it's clear that a fair number of them have migrated to the States. That's why the weather's so odd...this mist means they're probably breeding."
"Well what is Fudge doing about this?" The President demanded.
"It's not up to him. He's been forced to resign. They've named old Rufus Scrimgeour as Minister of Magic. He has a background in law enforcement. A good choice, in my opinion."
"So will this new man be able to apprehend Lord V-oh, alright, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?" asked the President.
"I'm sure Scrimgeour's making every effort to do just that," Dithers said, quailing at the thought. "Not that it'll be easy. Better him than you or me!"
Dithers held out his glass and the President filled it once again.
"Oh, yes, that reminds me!" Dithers continued. "Wilbert Dooley!"
"I'm giving him a long leave of absence," the President said. "Send him back to Missouri 'til after the election, play golf, barbecue, get back in touch with the family."
"That would not be wise," Dithers interrupted. "We believe he's been tampered with by the other side."
"Oh, come now, he's just stressed out from four years in Washington," the President said incredulously.
"Well, we think it's more than that," Dithers insisted. "Probably an Imperius curse cast by someone who's not very careful. He was examined by a team of forensic healers from the Bureau of Magical Investigation at the Reflecting Pool that night and he tried to drown three of them. I wouldn't trust him around his family or around you."
"He'll be all right, though?" the President asked, looking shocked.
"We'll see," Dithers answered doubtfully. "I've instructed the BMI to place him in the secure ward at MagiClinic South in Atlanta. If anyone can sort him out, they can. And we'll be keeping rather a closer eye on you given the state of things."
"The Secret Service does a fine job of that, thank you very much," the President bristled, annoyed at the thought of Dithers or some team of wizards dropping in on him on any regular basis.
"Well, they don't have much experience with dark wizards, so I've arranged to have some Aurors added to their ranks. We'd all be in a fine pickle if the leader of the free world was Imperioed by one of You-Know-Who's henchmen, wouldn't we?" Dithers said matter-of-factly. "Don't worry, you won't notice anything different from normal. Well, I really must be going. I have to get back to hear the BMI's latest progress report."
It had finally dawned on the President that his own fortunes in this election year might rest with this odd man with the propensity for appearing with bad news at the most inconvenient times. This thought frustrated and infuriated the President.
"Now look, Dithers, you've got to round up all these...these creatures, all of them-and soon! You can do that, can't you?"
"The BMI's working around the clock on it," Dithers said. "I'm told that they've already got several promising leads on the giants. And the windigo's probably back up north by now...there was that mining accident up in northern Ontario yesterday."
The President had too much experience listening to the false confidence of bureaucrats to find Dithers' assurances very convincing. His heart sank when he thought about the effect of further disasters on the electorate. The possibility that dementors were roaming the country sucking the optimism out of the voters depressed him further.
"I expect you to clean up this mess pronto," he enjoined Dithers, but a tone of desperation had crept into his voice. "It should be easy! You can use magic after all!"
As Dithers stepped back towards the fireplace, he gave the President a rueful smile.
"Ah, yes, but don't you see," he said sadly. "The bad guys use magic too. Good day to you, Mr. President and good luck!"
At that Ernest Dithers bowed, top hat in hand, tossed powder into the fireplace and disappeared into the roaring green flames.