Harry Potter and the Bookwyrm

Author: Jill D. Weber

AKA Jelsemium

Characters Owned by J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros.

They are used without permission or intent to make a profit.

Chapt. 4 -- The Grim Truth

**** Behind the Bookcase ****

"Revealo," said George for the fifteenth or sixteenth time. He smacked his wand against the wall and said: "Dammitall! Show yourself, you…" he stopped mid-sentence as his wand went through what looked to be solid stone. After a minute, he added: "Found it." He poked his wand through the illusion to show where.

"Finite incantatem," Hermione said, waving her wand.

Suddenly, there was a low tunnel where the wall had been.

"Okay, now we've found it, what do we do about it?" Ron asked, moving up next to George.

The other four crouched next to him and peered into the small tunnel. There was only enough room for one person at a time in it.

"I'm not sure I can fit," Ron said. He moved back as if somebody was going to try to shove him in.

"Harry and Hermione can fit," Fred said, uncertainly. He looked down the tunnel and shuddered. He didn't even want to try to crawl down there.

"I don't think Harry and Hermione want to fit," Harry said. There was something vehemently repellent about the very idea of entering that tunnel.

George looked down the tunnel and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He shook his head. "I don't think it's a good idea for us to separate," he said. "We have no idea what could be lurking in there."

The other four looked at him in shock.

"Finite incantatem," Fred muttered, waving his wand under George's nose.

George glared at him and slapped the wand away. "This is me, I'm not Snape or somebody using the polyjuice potion!"

"Had to be sure," Fred said, unruffled. "That just sounded so unlike you."

"I think there's a spell affecting him," Hermione said uncertainly. "I think the tunnel is enchanted to keep people out."

The boys looked from Hermione to the tunnel. "So, is it a spell that just makes you think you don't want to go in there or is the not wanting to go in there the residual effect of a spell that will do something really nasty and fatal to you?" Ron asked.

"There's only one way to find out," George pointed out. "But it will take a volunteer from the audience."

After a few minutes, it became clear that the collective decision was to not find out.

"Well, at least we know how the Bookwyrm got in," Harry sighed as they went back to the bookcase. "It told me that the opening is near the statue of Godric Gryffindor. Once we get out of here, Filch can block off that entrance."

"At least Sirius Black can't use it to get in here, he's human, too," Ron said.

"But he wasn't supposed to be able to get out of Azkaban," Harry said.

They fell quiet at that thought.

**** With the Bookwyrm ****

Sirius Black stared at the Bookwyrm with those disconcerting pale blue eyes of his. He didn't speak and the Bookwyrm found himself longing for the Boy Who Lived and Chattered a Lot. 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend,' he thought. Then inspiration struck. Maybe he could set his enemies on each other.

"Tender morsel, scar on face. Trapped behind the snake's bookcase. Through the path no man can walk. The Grim may find his prey and stalk." 'There, that should distract him,' the Bookwyrm thought smugly.

Black frowned as he thought this over. The Bookwyrm wondered what he'd take as a forfeit if he defeated Black. He'd just about decided that to go with Potter's option (of not getting killed) when Black rasped out his answer.

"Harry Potter is trapped in the library and the secret passage there can only be used by animals."

"Yes," the Bookwyrm hesitated. Black was still watching him. "Well, go on, you know you'd rather eat him than me."

Black's eyes flickered once, in amusement. The Bookwyrm decided that was a bad sign. "Flies without wings, breathes without lung, takes without hands, sings without tongue."

'Damn, he's determined to keep up the contest,' thought the snake. Aloud, he said: "The wind. I really wouldn't object if you wanted to call this contest a draw."

Black merely stared at him.

'I really should have stayed in bed this morning,' thought the BookWyrm. He gave a hissing sigh and said: "A man goes out drinking every night, returning to his home in the wee hours of every morning. No matter how much he drinks, he never gets a hangover. This drink is very well known, but is rarely consumed, served warm and taken straight from its source. The man is a sucker for a free drink, especially since he can't live without it. What is his favorite drink?"

Black's face held no expression as he thought this over. "Since he's a vampire, the drink must be blood," he said. The Animagus was silent for many minutes and the Bookwyrm began to hope that he'd go for the stalemate.

Finally, Black spoke. "A woman shoots her husband. Then she holds him under water for over 5 minutes. Finally, she hangs him. But that evening, they go out and enjoy a wonderful dinner together. How can this be?"

The Bookwyrm rolled his eyes. "Please, I am a Bookwyrm. I read a lot of books with photographs in them. I've also read a lot of books about photography. She shot him with a camera and developed the picture. You sure you don't want to call a draw? We're obviously too evenly matched at this."

Black smiled slightly. The Bookwyrm really wished that he'd stayed at home.

**** Behind the Bookcase ****

"Snap!" barked Harry, and he gathered up George's pile. Carefully, so as not to explode anything, he placed the pile with his own. That was the last card to be played and it looked as if he'd won this hand. He looked around and sighed. "Anybody remember how many times we've played?" he asked.

"No," Fred said. He looked down and registered some surprise when he realized that the game was over.

"I don't think anybody is paying attention," said Ron, shivering.

Hermione plucked the tissue paper from the box Fred had stored the cards in and transfigured them into blankets. "We're in big trouble," she said, handing them around.

"Why? Because you're getting farther behind in your homework with every passing second?" Ron asked snidely.

Hermione glared at him. "Just because I'm not lazy and leave things to the last minute…"

"I'm not lazy," Ron interrupted. "I'm… I'm ergonomically efficient." He was very proud of that term, he'd learned it from Dean Thomas.

"Efficient?" Hermione's voice went up a notch. "Do you call rushing about like a headless chicken at the last minute 'efficient'? She wondered where Ron had learned 'ergonomically', but wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of asking.

"Yes." Ron waited for Hermione to ask about the term, but George, Fred and Harry interrupted the quarrel with loud sighs.

"Do they always argue like this, Harry?" Fred asked.

"Oh, no," Harry said, dealing another hand of Snap. "They have an endless variety of ways to argue."

Ron smacked him on the back of his head. "Don't be smart, or Father Christmas will put coal in your stocking."

"That'd be better than anything the Dursleys have given me," Harry said dryly.

"What's taking Dumbledore so long?" Hermione wondered, not wanting to even think about Harry's relatives.

"Maybe he stepped out to do a bit of last minute shopping?" Fred suggested.

Ron laughed. "There, see?" he said to Hermione. "If Dumbledore does things at the last minute, then it must be all right!"

Hermione sighed and rolled her eyes. "Just because Dumbledore is inefficient once in a while, doesn't mean it's all right. Besides, that was just Fred's theory. It's not proven. There are lots of other reasons why Dumbledore hasn't let us out yet."

"Like, maybe he can't get us out," Harry stated flatly.

Ron frowned. "You're nutters. Dumbledore's the greatest wizard of our age! There's nothing he can't do… is there?"

Harry sighed. "He couldn't open the Chamber of Secrets," he reminded Ron.

The Weasleys winced as one, making Harry sorry that he'd brought up that particular memory. It must still give the whole family nightmares to think of how close Ginny came to dying down there.

"That was an entirely different situation," Fred said, once he collected himself.

Ron, Harry and Hermione exchanged looks.

"I hate it when people start giving each other the old 'Do you want to break it to the poor chump or shall I?' look," complained Fred. "Especially when those three start it."

"You think the conditions are the same? Why?" George asked the three.

Ron sighed and slumped to the floor. Then he stood up, grabbed a cushion, and sat back on the floor with his back to the bookcase. "Do you think that the door will only open when the Bookwyrm is here?" he asked Harry, while completely ignoring George.

"I think only the reason the door was here at all is because the Bookwyrm was here," Harry said. "I've been in the library lots of times and I've never seen it before."

"We came through after the Bookwyrm had left," George pointed out.

"Maybe we came through just as the Bookwyrm was leaving," Fred contradicted.

"Small sigh," said George. "I hate it when you get all logical."

Hermione frowned. "There's nothing wrong with logic," she said.

"Fine," George retorted. "Then logic us a way out of here."

Hermione began to pace and pull at her lower lip. "Well, let's start with the premise that the Bookwyrm used magic to create the door. He obviously didn't shut it after himself, because then you two wouldn't have been able to come inside. So leaving the room must be what shuts it off." She paced some more. "No, leaving the castle entirely must be what shuts it off."

"That's not going to get us anywhere," Fred complained.

"Shut up, she's thinking this through logically," Ron said. Ron had a lot of faith in Hermione. He knew that she could think her way out of a dragon's stomach. He also knew he wasn't going to say that aloud any time in the next century.

"I wouldn't think that the Bookwyrm's mere presence would trigger the door into appearing," Harry said.

"Why not?" Fred challenged.

Harry shrugged.

"It doesn't matter," Hermione said. "If that's the trigger, there's nothing we can do about it. We have to propose a course of action that we can actually follow." She continued pacing. "So, what do we know about the Bookwyrm?"

"It's a snake," Ron said. "A really big snake!"

"Which tells us what?" Hermione pressed.

Ron frowned, but he could tell that she wasn't being sarcastic, so he mulled the question over before answering again. "Well, it doesn't have any hands, so it can't use a wand."

"No, it can manipulate things without hands," Harry said. "It handed me my glasses." He paused. "Erm, so to speak. They fell off and it gave them back to me." Another pause. "But I never saw him use a wand."

"Nonhumans don't generally use wands," George pointed out. "I think there's a law against it, even."

"I'm fairly sure there are laws against killing and eating people, too," Harry said mildly. "I don't expect the Bookwyrm to care worry much about breaking human laws."

"Good thing it follows some sort of law, or we'd be somewhere in its digestive tract," muttered Ron.

"Will you hush? You're not helping!" Hermione was rubbing her forehead as if attempting to massage thoughts into their proper places. "Harry didn't see a wand. It's not likely the Bookwyrm used a wand. So any magic it cast on the bookcase was probably a spoken charm."

"We tried all the spoken charms we know to open things," Fred said.

"But only in English," Hermione said. "What if the Bookwyrm was speaking in Parseltongue?"

"Brilliant!" George said in delight. "Then all Harry has to do is say the spell in Parseltongue and we're out of here!"

"There's one problem," Harry said. "I can't do it."

Author's Notes: Thanks for the reviews, everybody!

Acknowledgements I should have put in earlier: The Hobbit was written by J. R. R. Tolkien and several of the riddles besides "A box without hinges, key, or lid. Yet golden treasure inside is hid" were taken from the contest between Bilbo and the Gollum.

Other riddles in the contest between Harry and the Bookwyrm came from http://www.riddlenut.com and http://members.tripod.com/~riddles/ sphinx.htm. The riddle of the fishermen of Ios is from those worthy fishers. (There are several alternate answers, such as lice. Same idea, though.) The Sphinx's riddle came from the Muses, as does all artistic inspiration. Several riddles in the contest between Sirius and the Bookwyrm came from my own demented mind, and I am quite pleased with them.

nerium oleander: Hm, a crossover with Big Guy and Rusty? I did have an opening for that. Picture this scene -- Rusty is on patrol over New Tronic City when suddenly he spies a UFO, which turns out to be this boy on a flying broomstick. Now, if I could only figure out what Harry's doing up there…

Hi, Chary! Sorry, Harry and Sirius won't get to interact in this story. I hope you like my epilogue, though! Thanks for the kind words on my characterizations! I try to keep them 'true to Rowling.'

Hi, SiriusBPadfoot! Thanks, I wasn't sure how to continue this story, until Mr. Black kindly volunteered to deal with the Bookwyrm. I had a lot of fun writing the Bookwyrm's reactions to Padfoot! Love your way of getting around the fifteen limit on the favorite stories page. I may adopt that idea!

Hi, Ozma! Glad you liked the update. Got another surprise for you coming in the mail grin I tried to imagine how Hagrid would react to the Bookwyrm, and it just seemed logical that Hagrid would try to adopt him.

rose_gal -- Thanks so much! I'm glad you find the characters are 'exactly right!'

wellduh... Yes, Sirius is very bright, isn't he?

Hi, Karin! I'm so glad that you like my story! Your English is very good! I'm glad you like my handling of the characters. 'Wyrm' is an old fashioned term for 'dragon'. Bookwyrm is sort of a play on words. A bookworm is a worm that eats books. A bookwyrm is a dragon that reads books.

A shrimp is a small sea creature. Calling somebody a 'shrimp' implies that he (or she) is small. (It is not really a polite thing to call somebody, but it can be used affectionately as well as insultingly. Ron called Harry a 'midget' in one of the books so I figured that he might call him a 'shrimp', both terms refer to a small person.)

If I were able to read German, it would take me a long time to figure out a play on words. I am glad that my story is worth thinking about for so long!

I plan to keep on writing. I have always loved to make up stories and I am so happy that other people like to read them!