Chapter 9: Consequences of Confirmation
[In which everyone is finally convinced that there is a monster on the loose, and our heroines attempt to do something about it.]
Sunday, 8 November – Friday, 11 December 1992 Hogwarts
The only good thing, Mary thought, about the petrification of Colin Creevey, was that Slytherin House seemed willing to set aside its petty argument about whether their founder had been a pureblood in light of the attacks. No one could deny that something was going on, now, and it was bigger than a prank.
The bad things about the latest attack were more numerous. For one thing, even some of the denser Slytherins were giving Mary shifty looks, because she had had a very public argument with Creevey and dragged him up to the High Table just the morning before he was petrified. These increased (along with the antagonism of the rest of the school) as November wore on, despite the fact that she had been in the Hospital Wing at the time of the attack, re-growing her right arm. For another, no one seemed to believe that she was just as angry about the attack as anyone else. Yes, it got Creepy Creevey off her back, but someone was essentially attacking people in her name, since the entire House of Slytherin had apparently come to the conclusion that she was, in fact, an heir of Slytherin, if not the Heir. Never mind that her mother was well-known for being a muggleborn, and the Potters hadn't had a parselmouth in seventeen generations – Mary must be related to Slytherin somehow. And to top it all off, Hermione and the twins were determined to see their Veritaserum Plan through. Lilian was on board, as well, and even Mary could see the appeal in wanting to do something. She wasn't entirely convinced that brewing an incredibly illegal potion and slipping it to every student in the school was the best plan, but it was, admittedly, better than just waiting for the Heir to strike again.
They wasted no time putting their plan into action. The twins, apparently, had taken care of finding a lab space which they and Hermione deemed private enough for their purposes, and gathering equipment.
On the morning of Tuesday the tenth, the night of the full moon, Mary and Lilian were informed that their presence would be required in the Senior Woods, to help Hermione summon a unicorn and petition it for a few drops of its blood, willingly shed. The Slytherins reported, as ordered, slipping out of the castle for the first time all term to meet their Ravenclaw friend in the clearing where the Samhain Revel should have been held. Hermione had brought an incantation, copied out on a scrap of parchment. No matter how Mary and Lilian asked, she wouldn't tell them where she had found it, which made them think it couldn't be anywhere good.
The older girl quickly explained, now that they were away from listening ears of the Castle, that they needed three virgins, the younger the better, to read the spell three times beneath the light of the full moon to summon the unicorn. When it appeared, it would test their purity of heart, and read their intentions from their minds. If they were innocents, and their motives pure, it would shed its blood willingly for them. If not, they would have to find another plan. Mary half-hoped that they would be rejected.
Hermione explained the pronunciation – the spell was Greek, a language they did not often use in class – and they chanted the words together three times. After what seemed like a very long time, but was probably not more than a few minutes, a unicorn stepped gracefully out of the trees.
Mary had seen a unicorn before, but dead from Quirrellmort's attack. It had been beautiful, but broken, and the saddest thing she had ever seen. The live one was like grace and moonlight made solid. Its body was more like a deer than a horse, and it stepped deliberately, each motion flawlessly smooth. It approached them slowly, and Lilian held a hand out, which it ignored. They didn't dare try to touch it.
It arched its neck delicately and laid the point of its horn directly over each of their hearts in turn, sharp and deadly. In the moment of contact, they knew that, had they been found unworthy, it surely would have run them through. It drew only a few drops of blood from each of them, however, before slicing open its own flank and allowing them to collect rather more of the silvery-blue liquid than they needed. The plan would, it seemed, go forward.
They watched reverently as picked its way back into the forest, its perfection somehow unmarred by the wound, which glimmered in the moonlight. Mary would have been angrier at Hermione for dragging her into a life-threatening situation if the situation as a whole hadn't been so incredible and surreal. A unicorn. They had been touched and found worthy by a wild unicorn.
In Lilian's words, magic was so awesome.
Over the next several weeks, in stolen moments away from curious listeners, between classes and the ever-present Quidditch practice, Hermione filled Lilian and Mary (who, as Slytherins, were far more closely watched by the rest of the school) in on their progress. They had procured all of the easy ingredients and made an alliance with Morgana and her friends to obtain the rarer (and illegal) ones.
Veritaserum was a multi-stage potion. Its production required the production of three other potions (all of which were finicky, and one of which was illegal all by itself), which would be used as ingredients in the final product. (The antidote was not much simpler.) Then the brew had to be distilled into its final form and allowed to mature for weeks to reach full potency. It had taken a full week to complete the first step of brewing process, successfully managing the first component potion, but they were now ready to begin the second and third.
The next update was somewhat different: When they weren't brewing or gathering ingredients, Hermione and Aerin had been scouring the stacks looking for any sort of monster that could live as long as Slytherin's infamous creature, just in case there was any truth in that myth. They wanted to know if Mary had any suggestions. She didn't, though Lilian had sarcastically suggested they focus on snakes, seeing as it was Slytherin.
After the November Hogsmeade weekend, Hermione reported that Morgana's crew had acquired the most difficult ingredients (aside from the unicorn blood) – Morgana had sneaked off to Knockturn Alley to steal a skein of demiguise silk, while Perry and Adrian went on a mission into the Forbidden Forest to fetch two dozen pentaclover flowers. They ran into an acromantula colony – massive, talking spiders – and barely made it out alive.
Exactly two weeks after the unicorn encounter, on the night of the new moon, Mary found herself outside again, this time with Adrian, who was the only other person in the group who could see thestrals, and Lilian, the only person who had run into them in the wild. They were on a much more dangerous mission out to the Forest to fill another vial with blood, this one forcibly taken.
Fortunately, now that Adrian was well aware of the location of the acromantulas, they were able to completely avoid them. A centaur guard interrogated them, briefly, inquiring as to their purpose in the Forest, but he let them go after Adrian explained that they meant no harm to his people and were simply passing through on a mission to the thestrals. The centaur told them that Saturn was growing bright. Mary promised to pass that message along to someone who might understand it. (Hermione later informed her that Saturn was the titan associated with periodic renewal, dissolution, and liberation, but also time and plenty and peace. It was not nearly so simple as the hint about Mars and war, but altogether more promising.)
On reaching the area Lilian remembered, the mission proceeded smoothly. They subdued the creature with little effort, luring it in with scraps of raw meat from the kitchens and binding it with the Incarcerating Hex, but it struggled and snapped at them even as they cut its haunch, using the Siphoning Spell to collect the spilled blood from its pebbled skin. It was not until they tried to release it that they encountered a real problem: The irate creature chased them all the way to the edge of the forest, snapping at them with its great sharp teeth and batting at them with its wings when there was space. The vicious bite on her shoulder rather settled Mary's guilt over the whole thing. Fortunately, it healed cleanly and she did not need to visit Madam Pomfrey, though it did leave a scar, much like the small cut over her heart from the unicorn's horn.
The rest of that week was relatively uneventful, at least for Mary: The twins had been experimenting, and had discovered a way to cover their tracks, so no one would know they had been questioned. It involved stunning their victims, interrogating them with the truth serum and giving them the antidote before forcing a Befuddlement Draught and a sleeping potion on them (which would essentially muddle the last half-hour of their memories), and then a combination of levitation and reviving charms to get them back on their feet discretely. Perry and Adrian had written a list of questions to ask every person in the castle, based on the questions Professor Snape was asking the older Slytherins, and Hermione had refined it to close all the loopholes she could see. She passed it to Mary and Lilian in the library one evening, and they added several questions of their own.
In the last week of November, Aerin reported that they had narrowed down the creature in the Chamber, assuming it was only one creature, and not a breeding population, to a basilisk, a gorgon, or a temorral. Of these, the gorgon was the best fit, because it was the only one that petrified its victims, but it was also the most intelligent, and least likely to stay cooped up under a castle for a millennium. A basilisk was their second-best guess. Both the basilisk and the temorral were snakes, but the basilisk was far more intelligent and could feed on ambient magic as well as or instead of a physical food source. The temorral required real food, and if it was leaving the Chamber to hunt, surely someone would have noticed it in the last several centuries? Plus the temorral was a rather small snake, no more than two meters in length, which made it a rather sorry prospect as the 'monster' when compared to the so-called King of Serpents, which continued to grow for their entire lives.
The only problem with the basilisk was that they were supposed to kill with a glance, not petrify. Aerin dismissed this, though, because the creatures were so little studied. The only thing the references they found really agreed on was that they could be killed by the crowing of a rooster (which would explain why Hagrid had been complaining to Aerin about having to replace his cockerel earlier in the term), and had the most venomous bite known to wizards. The only known antidote to basilisk venom was freshly-shed phoenix tears, and Mary didn't want to think about how that particular discovery must have been made. Everything else, up to and including where they came from, was up for debate: they might be hatched from a chicken's egg by a toad; created in some dark ritual involving a parselmouth and the sacrifice of scores of other snakes or through the modification of some already-living viper; or perhaps even have evolved naturally in Southern India. It was also unclear why its gaze would be so deadly, especially since they apparently didn't need to kill for food, and had no known predators.
After much discussion, the group concluded that if there was a monster, it was probably a basilisk, regardless of the minor inconsistencies, but they would wait and see if they could find more evidence before they started spreading the word. The fourth-years began practicing transfiguring roosters, just in case.
Another week, and the second and third component potions were ready.
Finally, on the last day of November, Hermione and the twins began the first steps of the second stage – actually creating the Veritaserum itself (and the antidote, of course, which was apparently created from the remains of the penultimate step of the truth serum). The brewing, which required several very long simmering periods, would take a full two weeks, but they would be easier weeks than those of collecting the ingredients.
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At the end of the first week of December, a new notice appeared in the Common Room: A new club was to be formed, its first meeting set for eight o'clock on the following Thursday. Mary and Lilian, free for the moment of any responsibilities to the Veritaserum project (which had taken up a fantastic amount of free time in the month of November), decided that they would go, though Hermione declined, citing a crucial step in the brewing process. They nodded understandingly, feeling a bit sorry for her – after all, who wouldn't want to attend a Dueling Club?
On Thursday evening, Mary and Lilian arrived in the Great Hall to find that the dining tables had vanished, and a golden stage had been placed along one of the long walls. Most of the school seemed to be present, milling around, wands out.
"Have you heard who's supposed to be in charge of this?" Lilian asked.
Mary realized belatedly that she hadn't. "Flitwick, maybe? He used to duel, right?"
"Oooh, that's right! I hope it is him!" Lilian said, just in time for her hopes to be dashed, as a plum-robed Gilderoy Lockhart swanned his way onto the stage. "Never mind," she groaned.
"No wait," Blaise pointed out, materializing from the crowd with Daphne and Theo. "Professor Snape's joining him, look!"
"Ha!" Mary exclaimed. "Maybe it will be good, after all." All the Slytherins were aware of Professor Snape's reputation, and none of the former Death Eaters were poor duelists – if they had been, they would have been dead.
The 'professor' waved an arm for silence. "Gather round, gather round! Can everyone see me? Can you all hear me? Excellent! Now, Professor Dumbledore has granted me permission to start this little dueling club, to train you all in case you ever need to defend yourselves as I myself have done on countless occasions – for full details, see my published works.
"Let me introduce my assistant, Professor Snape," Lockhart continued, flashing a wide smile. "He tells me he knows a tiny little bit about dueling himself, and has sportingly agreed to help me with a short demonstration before we begin. Now, I don't want any of you youngsters to worry – You'll still have your potions master when I'm through with him, never fear!"
Professor Snape was giving Lockhart a class-A sneer. Mary looked around. Every Slytherin in sight, and most of the Ravenclaws and Gryffindors as well, looked delighted at the prospect of seeing Lockhart publically humiliated. A few Ravenclaw and Gryffindor upperclassmen girls, along with most of the Hufflepuffs, looked somewhat concerned for the ponce's safety.
The two teachers turned to face each other and bowed. Lockhart's was, like the man himself, flamboyant, with much twirling of hands. Professor Snape simply nodded, his irritation clear. They raised their wands like swords before them, in what Lockhart called "the accepted combative position" and on Lockhart's count of three, Professor Snape blasted him across the room and into a wall with a grossly overpowered Disarming Charm.
Mary and Lilian joined their cohort in cheering for their Head of House.
The shaken celebrity rose unsteadily to his feet, hair standing on end as though he had been electrocuted. He babbled something about how he could totally have taken on Professor Snape if he had wanted to, and retrieved his wand from a Gryffindor girl who rather looked like she wanted to keep it.
"Enough demonstrating!" Lockhart announced, diving into the crowd and matching up partners. Mary and Lilian paired off, as did Blaise and Daphne. Theo was stuck with Millicent. Crabbe and Goyle were matched with each other, and Pansy with Tracy. This left Draco, of all people, as the odd man out. Snape raised an eyebrow at him as he suggested, "Mr. Malfoy, with Mr. Weasley." Draco smiled broadly as Ron blanched.
"Face your partners!" Lockhart called, "And bow!"
The Slytherins nodded politely at their partners, not looking away from their wand-hands.
"Wands at the ready! When I count to three, cast your charms to disarm your opponents – only to disarm them – we don't want any accidents." The 'professor' conveniently ignored that none of them had been taught the Disarming Charm officially, or at least not in this Dueling Club. Mary supposed many of the older students might have covered it in DADA or Charms. "One… two… three!"
The instruction to disarm was, therefore, promptly ignored. Mary dodged Lilian's stunner, and shot a Silencing Charm at her friend. Lilian blocked it and returned a Stinging Hex. Mary blocked that in return, and sent a Tongue-Sticking Jinx to follow it. Lilian dodged.
"I said disarm only!" Lockhart shouted "Stop! Stop!"
It was at that point that Professor Snape took over, cancelling all the spells in progress with a massive Finishing Charm. Mary looked around to see that there was a greenish haze over the room, and Millicent and Theo were trying to disentangle themselves from a muggle-style wrestling match. One of his feet seemed to be stuck in her pocket. The Little Weasel was on the ground, struggling to sit up, and Draco looked bored.
Lockhart was fluttering around, looking concerned. "I think I'd better teach you how to block unfriendly spells," he said. Mary prepared to tune out for this. Catherine had taught her the Basic Shield Charm over the summer. As far as she could tell, all of the other second-year Slytherins knew it, too, though they'd never covered it in class. "Let's have a volunteer pair – Longbottom and Finch-Fletchley, how about you?"
"A bad idea, Professor Lockhart," Professor Snape objected. "Longbottom causes devastation with the simplest spells. We'll be sending what's left of Finch-Fletchley up to the Hospital Wing in a matchbox." Mary could just make out Neville going very red through the crowd. "How about Malfoy and Weasley?" It wasn't really a question. Draco nodded and headed for the stage, the red-head trailing behind him reluctantly.
Lockhart attempted to demonstrate a complex wand-movement to Weasley, which was not at all the proper movement for a Shield Charm, and dropped his wand. Professor Snape whispered something to Draco, who smirked.
"Just do what I did, Weasley!" Lockhart said merrily, cuffing the tall boy's shoulder.
"What, drop my wand?" Ron asked, very loudly.
Lockhart ignored him as the crowd tittered. "One, two, three, go!" he shouted.
Malfoy immediately conjured a snake, a black adder, Mary thought, poised and ready to strike.
Weasley looked like he was about to piss himself. Even if he had managed a shield spell, it wouldn't have stopped the conjured snake.
The crowd was screaming and pushing away, leaving Mary suddenly much closer to the stage.
"Don't move, Weasley," Snape said lazily. "I'll get rid of it."
"Allow me!" Lockhart barged in. He brandished his wand at the snake, and it flew through the air with a loud bang, falling back to the floor with a loud smack. It slithered toward the nearest student, an unlucky Justin Finch-Fletchley, furious and ready to strike again.
Stop! Mary called, rather desperately. Leave the younglings! They will not hurt you!
The snake, clearly curious, let itself fall back to the floor, staring intently at Mary. Speaker? it asked, uncertainly.
Before Mary could answer, however, Professor Snape vanished it with a puff of black smoke.
"What do you think you're playing at?" Finch-Fletchley shouted, and stormed out of the hall before Mary could explain.
"Saving your life, git," she grumbled under her breath as Lockhart awkwardly dismissed them all, the club a total failure. Though she did not say it aloud, she did rather wonder if it was possible for this situation to get any worse.
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The following day, Mary realized that it could always, in fact, get worse. The Hufflepuffs, who, before, had only been pretending that she didn't exist, shifted gears to actively insulting her and baiting her, much like the Gryffindors. This didn't seem especially smart – if she was the one attacking everyone, she wouldn't have wanted to piss her off, but, as Lilian pointed out, they were Hufflepuffs, not Ravenclaws.
Mary spent most of the day grumbling about so-called Hufflepuff friendliness, anyway.
During their free period, while Mary was working on her last transfiguration essay of the term, Lilian appeared with a message from Hermione, via Aerin. Apparently they needed to venture into Gryffindor territory and remind the twins that they had agreed to build her a distillation apparatus by the end of the week, and it was already Friday. Why Hermione, or even Aerin could not do this themselves was never explained. Mary half-suspected that it was just an excuse to give her something to do other than brood over stupid Hufflepuffs.
She heaved a sigh, making it clear that this was a terrible imposition on her plans of hiding in Slytherin all afternoon, and followed Lilian out of the dungeons.
They were almost immediately intercepted by Hagrid, who was stomping into the Entry Hall wearing an enormous, snow-covered balaclava and swinging a dead rooster idly in a gloved hand.
"All right, Hagrid?" Lilian greeted him. Mary was still reluctant to associate with him after the idiocy he had displayed in their first year. She waved.
"Hullo, girls! Why aren't yeh in class?"
"Free period," Lilian explained. "How's the weather?" she added with a cheeky grin.
They had been weathering a blizzard all day. The upper floors of the castle were dreadfully cold and drafty, and there had been no light from any of the windows all day. It was part of the reason Mary had decided to lounge around in Slytherin: the second dungeon level was always comfortable, blizzard or no blizzard.
"Mite chilly a' tha'," the giant said, his eyes crinkling in a grin. "Thoug' I'd come up an' talk ter the 'eadmaster abou' this," he added, holding up the limp rooster. "Secon' one killed this term. It's either a Blood-Suckin' Bugbear, or foxes, an' I need 'is permission ter charm the coop either way."
The girls made noncommittal noises and continued up the stairs ahead of the enormous man, who was almost immediately waylaid by one of the older Gryffindors, who was saying something about the Care of Magical Creatures professor retiring at the end of the year.
They were halfway down the second-floor corridor when Mary tripped over something heavy lying in the middle of the corridor. Lilian, who just barely avoided the same fate, helped her to her feet, ignoring her swearing about idiots leaving powers-knew-what lying around. This particular passage was darker than most – the torches had been blown out by a particularly strong draft, and so it took them several seconds to realize what they were looking at.
It seemed to hit them at the same moment, because they turned to each other with identical looks of shock. Mary said, "Bugger," just as Lilian said "Shite."
Justin Finch-Fletchley was lying on the floor, rigid and cold, a look of fear frozen on his face, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. The Gryffindor ghost, de Mimsy-Porpington, was hovering beside him, horizontally, six inches from the floor, black and smoky-looking, instead of pearly-white and transparent. His head had fallen half-way off, and his expression was identical to Finch-Fletchley's. Lilian reached out to poke the fallen ghost, but Mary grabbed her hand.
"Don't bollox up the evidence, Lils!" she said. Not that she knew what the 'evidence' would be good for, but they still oughtn't be poking at it. It was bad enough she'd tripped over the boy. Was the ghost dead? Again?
"Do you think we should tell someone?" Lilian asked, clearly frightened.
"We have to, don't we?"
Before they could reach a decision, however, Peeves the Poltergeist came shooting out of a nearby door with a bang.
"Why it's potty wee Potter!" he cackled, "And little loony Moony! What's the snakelings up to? Why's snakelings lurking?"
He stopped, halfway through a mid-air somersault. Upside down, he spotted the two petrified (dead? Re-dead?) victims, and before either of the girls could say anything, he sounded the alarm, screaming the attack at the top of his lungs.