The double attack on Anthony and Nearly Headless Nick turned what had been nervousness into a real panic. Curiously, it was Nearly Headless Nick's fate that seemed to worry people most. What could possibly do that to a ghost? people asked each other; what terrible power could harm someone who was already dead? There was almost a stampede to book seats on the Hogwarts Express so that students could go home for Christmas.
"At this rate, we'll be the only ones left," Ron told Arabella and Hermione.
"What do you mean by that, Ron?" asked Hermione,
"Us, Daphne, Draco, Parkinson, Bulstrode, and Davis," said Ron gloomily. "What a jolly holiday it's going to be."
Millicent Bulstrode and Tracy Davis, who always did whatever Pasny did, had signed up to stay over the holidays, too. But Arabella was glad that most people were leaving. She was tired of people skirting around her in the corridors, as though she was about to sprout fangs or spit poison; tired of all the muttering, pointing, and hissing as she passed.
Fred and George, however, found all this very funny. They went out of their way to march ahead of Arabella down the corridors, shouting, "Make way for the Heir of Slytherin, a seriously evil witch coming through..." They would even parade around Lyla when they could yell at the top of their lungs "my word, Georgie! Is that who I think it is?! It is! It's Lyla Potter, the incredibly frightening parselmouth!"
Percy was deeply disapproving of this behavior. "It is not a laughing matter," he said coldly.
"Oh, get out of the way, Percy," said Fred. "They're in a hurry."
"Yeah," said George with a grin, "off to the Chamber of Secrets for a cup of tea with their fanged servant."
Ginny didn't find it amusing either.
"Oh, stop it!" she wailed every time Fred would ask Arabella loudly who she was planning to attack next, or when George pretended to ward Lyla off with a large clove of garlic when they met.
All in all, the sisters didn't mind; it made them feel better than Fred and George, at least, thought the idea of them being Slytherin's heir quite ludicrous. But their antics seemed to be aggravating Pansy and her gang, who looked increasingly sour each time he saw them at it.
"It's because she's bursting to say it's really her," said Ron knowingly. "You know how she hates anyone beating her at anything, and you're getting all the credit for her dirty work."
"Not for long," said Hermione in a satisfied tone. "The Polyjuice Potion is nearly ready. We'll be getting the truth out of him any day now."
At last, the term ended, and a silence deep as the snow on the grounds descended on the castle. Arabella found it quite peaceful, rather than gloomy, and enjoyed the fact that she, Hermione, and the other Weasleys had the run of Gryffindor Tower to themselves. Fred, George, and Ginny had chosen to stay at school rather than visit Bill in Egypt with Mr. and Mrs. Weasley. Percy, who disapproved of what he termed their childish behavior, didn't spend much time in the Gryffindor common room. He had already told them pompously that he was only staying over Christmas because it was his duty as a Prefect to support the teachers during troubled time.
Christmas morning dawned, cold and white. Arabella had hoped for a blissful morning of sleeping in but was saddened when she felt Hermione shaking her violently.
"Wake up!"
"Five more minutes," groaned Arabella, turning away from the loud voice of her friend.
"Merry Christmas to you, too," responded her friend. "I've been up for nearly an hour, adding more lacewings to the potion. I think it's ready."
At that news, Arabella st bolt upright, rubbing the sleep from her eyes horridly and gazing at Hermione in awe.
"Really?"
"Really, now hurry up and get dressed! We've got to tell Ron"
Following orders, Arabella swiftly pulled on her robes and followed Hermione to the boy's dormitories. Inside, Ron was still snoring away.
"Wake up, Ron!" Hermione said loudly, while Arabella pulled back the curtains at the window.
"Hermione—" Ron cried out in surprise, "you're not supposed to be in here —"
"The potion is ready," said Hermione smartly, " and if we're going to do it, I say we do it tonight!
Ron sat up, suddenly wide awake.
"Are you sure?"
"Positive," said Hermione, shifting Scabbers the rat so that she could sit down on the end of Ron's four-poster.
A half an hour later, the three had made their way into the common room bringing all their gifts down. Her Christmas presents were very satisfactory. Hagrid had sent her a large tin of treacle fudge, which Arabella decided to soften by the fire before eating; Ron had given her a book called Flying with the Cannons, a book of interesting facts about his favorite Quidditch team, and Hermione had bought him a luxurious eagle-feather quill. She opened the last present to find a new, hand-knitted sweater from Mrs. Weasley and a large plum cake. She read her card with a fresh surge of guilt, thinking about Mr. Weasley's car (which hadn't been seen since its crash with the Whomping Willow), and the bout of rule-breaking he and Ron were planning next.
The Great Hall looked magnificent when dinner time came around. Not only were there a dozen frost-covered Christmas trees and thick streamers of holly and mistletoe crisscrossing the ceiling, but enchanted snow was falling, warm and dry, from the ceiling. Dumbledore led the small group of remaining students in a few of his favorite carols, Hagrid booming more and more loudly with every goblet of eggnog he consumed. Lyla, Daphne, Draco, and Blaise all choose to dine at the Gryffindor table, and gawked openly as Percy, who hadn't noticed that Fred had bewitched his prefect badge so that it now reads "Pinhead," kept asking them all what they were sniggering at.
Lyla and Ron had barely finished their third helpings of Christmas pudding when Hermione grabbed Arabella and Ron.
"I've just remembered something," she said with a sigh of exasperation. "Come on, you two, I need your help!
After making it out into the deserted entryway, Hermione stopped.
"We still need a bit of the people you're changing into," said Hermione matter-of-factly, as though she were sending them to the supermarket for laundry detergent. "And obviously, it'll be best if you can get something of Millicent and Tracy since they're always hanging around Pansy. She'll tell them anything. And we also need to make sure the real Millicent and Tracy can't burst in on us while we're interrogating her. I've got it all worked out." She held up two plump chocolate cakes. "I've filled these with a simple Sleeping Draught. All you have to do is make sure Tracy and Millicent find them. Once they're asleep, pull out a few of their hairs and hide them in a broom closet."
Arabella and Ron looked incredulously at each other.
"Who am I supposed to be turning into?" Ron asked dubiously.
"Yes, of course," said Hermione. "You see, I thought that if you could, get Crabbe or Goyle by themselves and hex them, put them in a closet and no one will be none the wiser about all this."
"Hermione, I don't think—" began Arabella.
"That could go seriously wrong —" added Ron, looking almost purple.
But Hermione had a steely glint in her eye, not unlike the one McGonagall sometimes had.
"The potion will be useless without the hair," she said sternly. "You do want to investigate Parkinson, don't you?"
"Oh, okay then," said Arabella.
When Hermione had bustled off to check on the Polyjuice Potion again, Ron turned to Arabella with a doom-laden expression.
"Have you ever heard of a plan where so many things could go wrong?"
But to Arabella and Ron's utter amazement, stage one of the operation went just as smoothly as Hermione had said. They lurked in the deserted entrance hall after Christmas tea, waiting for Tracy and Millicent who had remained alone at the Slytherin table, shoveling down fourth helpings of trifle. Arabella had perched the chocolate cakes on the end of the banisters. When they spotted the two girls coming out of the Great Hall, Arabella and Hermione hid quickly behind a suit of armor next to the front door.
"How thick can you get?" Arabella whispered ecstatically as Tracy gleefully pointed out the cakes to Millicent, Grinning stupidly, they stuffed the cakes whole into their large mouths. For a moment, both of them chewed greedily, looks of triumph on their faces. Then, without the smallest change of expression, they both keeled over backward onto the floor.
By far the hardest part was hiding them in the closet across the hall. Once they were safely stowed among the buckets and mops, Arabella yanked out a couple of hairs from Tracy's blonde head. There was a huff and Ron came into sight dragging an unconscious Crabbe.
"Alright, I've got the hairs," he said disgustedly, shoving the large boy into the closest. "Now what?"
"Grab their shoes," instructed Hermione, tugging at Millicents.
Once finished, the three sprinted up to Moaning Myrtle's bathroom.
"Good, good," said Hermione. From a bag hidden inside her robes, she pulled three extra and bigger robes. "sneaked these spare robes out of the laundry, we'll all need bigger sizes once we've transformed.
The three of them into the cauldron. Close up, the potion looked like thick, dark mud, bubbling sluggishly.
"I'm sure I've done everything right," murmured Hermione, nervously re-reading the splotched page of Moste Potente Potions. "It looks like the book says it should... once we've drunk it, we'll have exactly an hour before we change back into ourselves."
"Now what?" Ron whispered.
"We separate it into three glasses and add the hairs."
Hermione ladled large dollops of the potion into each of the glasses. The potion hissed loudly like a boiling kettle and frothed madly. Altogether, they dropped the hairs into the potion. A second later, it had turned a sick sort of yellow.
"Urgh— the essence of Millicent Bulstrode," said Ron, eyeing Hermione's glass with loathing. "Bet it tastes disgusting."
Arabella's had turned a nasty hue of vomit green, while Ron's turned a murky brown.
"On three?" asked Arabella.
"One– two– three–!"
They all drank. It tasted like overcooked and rotted cabbage.
Immediately, Arabella's insides began writhing as though she'd just swallowed live snakes—
"I'm gonna be sick," gasped Ron.
All three of them bolted into separate stalls. Doubled up in pain, Arabella wondered whether she was going to be sick too. And then a burning sensation spread rapidly from her stomach to the very ends of her fingers and toes— next, bringing her gasping to all fours, came a horrible melting feeling, as the skin all over her body bubbled like hot wax— and before her eyes, her hands began to grow, the fingers thickened, the nails broadened, the knuckles were bulging like bolts. Her shoulders stretched painfully and prickling on her forehead told him that hair was creeping down toward his eyebrows— her robes ripped as her chest expanded like a barrel bursting its hoops— her feet were agony in shoes four sizes too small.
And as suddenly as it had all had started, everything stopped. Arabella lay face down on the stone-cold floor, breathing heavily. With difficulty, she kicked off her shoes and stood up. So this was what it felt like, being Tracy Davis. Her large hands trembling, she pulled off her old robes, doing her best not to look too closely as she dressed herself.
"Are you two okay?" she asked as Tracy's pitched voice issued from her mouth.
"Yeah," came the deep grunt of Crabbe from her right
Unlocked her door and stepped in front of the cracked mirror, Arabella couldn't help but stare. Tracy Davis and all her ghoulishness gazed back. She scratched her ear. So did Tracy. Ron's door opened and Crabbe came out. They stared at each other. Except that he looked pale and shocked, Ron was indistinguishable from Crabbe, from the pudding-bowl haircut to the long, gorilla arms.
"This is unbelievable," said Ron, approaching the mirror and prodding Crabbe's flat nose.
"Unbelievable," repeated Arabella.
"We'd better get going," huffed Ron, "we've gotta make it down into the Slytherin common room before things get suspicious.
"You don't know how bizarre it is to see Crabbe thinking," said Arabella with a high-pitched snicker. She banged on Hermione's door. "C'mon, we need to go —"
An inhumanly high-pitched voice answered her.
"I — I don't think I'm going to come after all. You go on without me."
"Hermione, we know Millicent Bulstrode's ugly, no one's going to know it's you—"
"No — really — I don't think I'll come. You two hurry up, you're wasting time —"
Ron looked at Arabella, bewildered.
"That looks more like Crabbe," said Arabella with a snort. "That's how he looks every time a teacher asks him a question."
"Hermione, are you okay?" said Ron through the door.
"Fine — I'm fine — go on —"
Arabella looked at her watch. Five of their precious sixty minutes had already passed.
"We'll meet you back here, all right?" she said.
The two transformed friends opened the door of the bathroom carefully, checking to make sure that the coast was clear, and set off.
"Don't swing your arms like that," Arabela muttered to Ron.
"Eh?"
"Crabbe holds them sort of stiff..."
"How's this?"
"Yeah, that's better..."
They went down the marble staircase.
"Oh no," said Arabella, smacking Tracy's forehead. "I haven't got a clue where the Slytherin common room is. Lyla's never told me."
"The Slytherins always come up to breakfast from over there," said Ron, nodding at the
entrance to the dungeons. The words had barely left his mouth when a girl with long, curly caramel-colored hair emerged from the entrance.
"Um, excuse me," said Ron, hurrying up to her. "We've forgotten the way to our common room."
"I beg your pardon?" said the girl stiffly. "Our common room? I'm a Ravenclaw."
She walked away, looking suspiciously back at them.
Arabella and Ron hurried down the stone steps into the darkness, their footsteps echoing particularly loudly as Crabbe's huge feet hit the floor. Arabella had the feeling that this wasn't going to be as easy as they had hoped. The labyrinthine passages were deserted. They walked deeper and deeper under the school, constantly checking their watches to see how much time they had left. After a quarter of an hour, just when they were getting desperate, they heard a sudden movement ahead.
"Ha!" said Ron excitedly. "There's one of them now!"
The figure was emerging from a side room. As they hurried nearer, however, their hearts sank. It wasn't a Slytherin, it was Percy.
"What're you doing down here?" said Ron in surprise.
Percy looked affronted.
"That," he said stiffly, "is none of your business. It's Crabbe, isn't it?"
"Wh — oh, yeah," said Ron.
"Well, get off to your dormitories," said Percy sternly. "It's not safe to go wandering around dark corridors these days."
"You are," Ron pointed out.
"I," said Percy, drawing himself up, "am a Prefect. Nothing's about to attack me."
A voice suddenly echoed behind Arabella and Ron. It was Pansy Parkinson strolling toward them, and for the first time in her life, Arabella was pleased to see the girl. Behind her was her Goyle, who was looking somewhat put off.
"There you are," she drawled, looking at them. "Have you two been away snogging in a dark broom closet or something?"
She stared at the two, clearly waiting for a response.
"I– I don't know what you're talking about," said Arabella with a snarl she hoped sounded convincing. "I was in the ladies' room if you must know. Stomach was feeling a bit–"
"I don't care," interrupted Pansy, looking disgusted. "I've been looking for you two for ages; I want to show you something really funny.
She glanced witheringly at Percy.
Percy looked outraged.
"You want to show a bit more respect to a school Prefect!" he said. "I don't like your attitude!"
Pansy sniggered and motioned for Arabella and Ron to follow her without another glance. Arabella had almost said something apologetic to Percy but caught herself just in time. She and Ron hurried after the bully, who said as they turned into the next passage, "That Peter Weasley —"
"Percy," Ron corrected him automatically.
"Whatever his name is," said Pansy with a disgusted hand gesture. "I've noticed him sneaking around a lot lately. And I bet I know what he's up to. He thinks he's going to catch Slytherin's heir single-handed."
She gave a short, derisive laugh. Arabella and Ron exchanged excited looks. As they walked, Ron fell in with Goyles lumbering pace.
"You haven't seen Millie anywhere, have you?" asked Pansy.
"No clue where she could be," answered Arabella airly.
"Perhaps she's had a sugar crash," mused Pansy thoughtfully, pausing by a stretch of bare, damp stone wall.
"What's the new password again?" she said to Arabella.
"Er —"
"Oh, yeah— I remember now," Pansy interrupted once more. "Pure-blood!"
And a stone door concealed in the wall slid open. Pansy marched through it, and Arabella, Ron, and Goyle followed.
The Slytherin common room was a long, low underground room with rough stone walls and ceiling from which round, greenish lamps were hanging on chains. A fire was crackling under an elaborately carved mantelpiece ahead of them, and a few identifiable Slytherins were silhouetted around it in high-backed chairs.
Lyla, Daphne, Draco, and Blaise all seemed to be in a moment of bliss from outward appearance, laughing and showing off one another's gifts with excitement. The minute Pansy walked in, however, the four looked over with distaste. It was odd to be on the receiving end of Draco's cool gaze.
"Wait here," said Pansy to Arabella and Ron, motioning them to a pair of empty chairs set back from the fire. "I'll go and get it my father and mother just sent it to me—"
Wondering what she was going to show them, Arabella slowly sat down on a leather couch. Goyle made no motion to sit, and Ron, after a moment, decided to follow the others' lead. It was odd trying to act like they were somewhere comfortable, and Arabella sincerely hoped her group of Slytherin friends would mind their own business for the remainder of the night.
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