When the initial shock of the missing amulet had worn off, everyone plonked down in a circle on the cold stone floor to deliberate what they were going to do next. Neville kept looking over his shoulder in a nervous fashion, and finally Hermione asked him what was wrong.
"Oh, nothing really," he said, "just the fact that there should be a 'monster within' somewhere around here just waiting to be destroyed. Why hasn't it attacked us yet?" His round face shone with fear in the golden glow of the hovering spark cloud.
"It was probably slain when the amulet was stolen. Either that or it died. I mean, this place hasn't been used for ages, it probably just got old and died." Draco said, clearly impatient. He had made his thoughts quite early on in the deliberations that they should just to go Dodgy Alley and try to light a fire without the Amulet.
"Sorry to be a spanner in the works here, but usually magical monsters live for hundreds of years. They wouldn't exactly bother to guard the Amulet with something that would keel over dead in a few years time, and even then, wouldn't we see the carcass?" Harry said, his voice rising near the end from irritation from the calm Slytherin.
"Look, I will say this again. Whatever was here isn't here anymore, so we should just go on and try and find another way. Come on, let's go." Draco stood up, and opened the door in the wall to the maintenance passage. One by one everyone nodded in agreement of this proposition, the floor was cold and wet and their robes were getting a little damp on the underside.
Inside the passage, they again consulted a map, which now placed them outside the Main Labyrinth Chamber, and noted a path that would lead them right back to the Labyrinth entrance. As they emerged back into the round room with garish fountains and the dusty old ticket booth, everyone stretched their arms as though they had just been sleeping.
"Ah, it's nice to be back somewhere you recognise," said Pansy, yawning, "even if that place is an old dusty room with an ugly fountain under a tacky hotel in the north of Scotland."
"Mmm." Harry mumbled, shutting the door behind him. As the 'heroic' one, he had been voted the best person to keep up the rear, just in case the 'monster within' decided to attack them in a most un-friendly manner. But that was not what Harry was wondering about at that moment. He was staring at the door he had just closed.
"Hermione. This is the door I was just about to look at earlier today, and you pulled me away. I would've found this passage before we'd even started, and we would've been in and out by the time you could say 'one two buckle my shoe'." Harry was a little bit annoyed that their journey could have been lessened considerably, but was too fond of his friend to get really angry.
"The past is the past Harry, deal with it." Pansy said, as they filed out of the door and piled back onto the flying carpet.
"Okay then, off to Land's End to see if we can destroy this stupid wand without the use of the amulet!" Hermione yelled as she levitated the carpet into the sky and began the trip south.
"Hey, anyone want some yoghurt?" Neville asked as they were flying over Edinburgh – a bit off course but Hermione's navigation skills weren't quite perfect yet. He pulled a large tub of organic Greek-style yoghurt out of his robes. "It's hazelnut and honey flavour!"
"Sure, I'll have some," Ron said, never the one to turn down free food.
"Ron, what are you going to eat it with?" Asked Ginny, "Don't tell me you're going to try and drink it like you did last summer, and then you had to spend the whole day with it all down the front of your clothes." She edged away from him, scared of getting splashed with yoghurt in her brother's mad feeding frenzy.
"No, of course not. I've got my handy dandy survival kit in here somewhere," Ron rummaged inside the seemingly bottomless pockets of his Hogwarts robes, "Aha, here we are. I just need to get the spoon out." Ron pulled a small, shiny silver spoon out from the wooden box, and Pansy immediately shrieked and shrunk back from Ron.
"No not the spoons, the spoons, they haunt me, they haunts usss, precioussss!" Pansy was now crawling quickly across the carpet, as far away as she could get from Ron. But sadly, even that wasn't far enough to rid her of the spoon paranoia. With one swift movement, probably with the intention of getting even further from Ron, Pansy hurled herself backwards off the carpet, and everyone heard her scream a long, drawn out, "Noooooo!" as she fell from the flying floor covering.
"Quick, after her!" Draco shouted, as he took over control of the carpet from Hermione. He immediately pulled the carpet into a speedy nose-dive, chasing Pansy to the ground. Unluckily, he wasn't quite fast enough, and Pansy Parkinson splatted on the ground just seconds before the carpet reached her dead and lifeless jelly-like body.
"Quick, someone cast a spell on her to revive her, now!" Draco yelled, wringing his hands like a worried old lady and then running them through his perfectly groomed silver locks.
"There's nothing we can do," Harry told him, standing up from where he was examining Pansy's body.
"Of course there is!" Draco's voice raised an octave when he shouted at Harry, but Ron intervened.
"Harry should know better than anyone that there's no spell to bring back the dead!"
"Just because his parents died when he was young? Big deal. My cousin just died because she fell off a flying carpet, and two days ago I found out that my mother died when I was eight!" Draco sat down hard on Pansy's body, using the carcass like an old garden bench.
"Didn't you kind of realise when you were eight that your mother was never around anymore? You hadn't seen her for, what, seven years, and you didn't realise she had died?" Ron said sarcastically.
"My father killed her. He's a manipulative arse when he wants to be, and he managed to convince me that she was just away on a long holiday until…" Draco began to explain, but Ginny interrupted.
"Wait a minute, Pansy's your cousin? You went to the Yule Ball with your cousin? Ewww!"
"Yes, right," said Draco, "Anyway, he managed to convince me that she was away on holiday until he could get some random Death Eater to come in and drink a little polyjuice potion to pretend to be her when I came home. It wasn't too hard, since I've been in boarding school practically my whole life."
"I still don't quite get this, you went with your COUSIN? How sick are you?" Ginny said, looking perplexed.
"Shush Ginny, let him carry on. What the hell was that?!" Ron started to quiet Ginny, but two dead bodies suddenly fell out of the sky above them. Harry suddenly heard someone say "Oh crap!" and then poppies began to fall out of the sky, covering Hermione, Ron, Ginny, Neville, Draco, Harry, and the three dead bodies that lay around them.
"Poppies, poppies will put them to sleep." He heard someone say from way up in the clouds, before everyone around him suddenly fell onto the ground in a deep sleep (that is, of course, the ones that were not already dead).
"Who's there? Who are you?" He asked of the sky.
"What? You can hear me? Damn stupid cable guy, I asked for a one way menacing voice-over package, not the interfering busybody two-way character chat. I'll be calling his supervisor!" Whoever it was seemed to forget about Harry for a minute, but then they remembered.
"Ahem. Anyway, this has all been a big mistake. Um, you see, my garbage disposal was on the blink, so I decided to dispose of those bodies there in this clearing, I mean nobody ever actually goes here, usually."
"Excuse me," interrupted Harry, "But why exactly were you dumping those bodies?"
"I'm in the Wicked Witch business, dear, it's just what I do." The voice replied politely. "To cut to the chase, I'll revive your friends if you don't tell anyone what you saw today. I promise I won't dump any more here."
"Well," said Harry, "You do drive a hard bargain, but I think I'll accept it. You also have to promise not to try and kill me in the future, ok?"
There came a mumbled assent from the clouds, and then a giant pile of snow was dumped on top of the bodies in the clearing. Harry had to dig quickly to make sure that nobody died of hypothermia or something else nasty that you get from having a whole heap of snow dumped on top of you.
"Wha, what's going on?" Ron mumbled as Harry pulled him from under one of the bodies. Hermione came out completely aware of her surroundings, and helped everyone onto the carpet straight away, before flying them high up above the clouds to get warm from the bright bright sun.
"So, Harry, why didn't you fall asleep?" Draco asked sarcastically.
"I dunno. I guess it was something to do with my mother dying to save me and all that. Either that or the fact that Voldemort transferred some of his powers into me when he tried to kill me. That stuff is always saving me, you know." Harry replied offhandedly, looking off into the distance over the fluffy white clouds.
"Always the way," muttered Draco, as he tried to turn around gracefully and stare blankly into the sun. Instead, what happened was that the corner of the carpet that he was sitting on dipped down, and Draco slipped off the carpet. On his way down, he grabbed out for the nearest thing, which happened to be Hermione. So, in one more of a string of unlucky coincidences in the day, Draco and Hermione plunged from the carpet through the clouds.
"Hermione!" Ginny yelled, and took over control of the carpet. She pulled it into a sharp dive, even sharper than Harry would have liked, but Ginny handled the carpet expertly. They managed to get close enough to the ground to see that Hermione and Draco were not going to splat on the ground like Pansy or Maria, but fall into a pond which looked deeper than deep. They hit the pond with a gigantic splash, but a few minutes later they bobbed back up, gasping with breath.
While Hermione and Draco lay on the muddy side of the pond, gasping and gurgling, Ron instructed them to pull the carpet into a small grove of trees before they could go and help their companions.
"What did we do that for?" Harry asked, "If anyone's watching, they just saw us fly down after two people fell from the sky, one more look at the carpet isn't really going to hurt."
"Them." Ron just said, and pointed at a small platform about fifty metres away from the pond that Harry hadn't noticed before. On the platform stood a number of what were obviously witches and wizards, judging by their robes, holding old-fashioned cameras and wearing souvenir caps.
"Why are they here? They look like tourists?" Harry was perplexed.
"They're here to watch the festivities," Ron said dejectedly, "This is the Mysterious Pond of Love." He sat down on a rock, looking defeated.
"The what? What festivities? Ron what the HELL is going on here?" Harry asked, looking at Ginny and Neville, who had been silent since they landed. They quickly looked away, avoiding his eyes.
"The Mysterious Pond of Love only works for one week a year. Couples jump into the pond at the same time, and when they come out they are either madly in love or completely detest each other. It's sort of like a love test, only if you fail, your relationship is in the crapper. People come to watch couples either have massive fights, or to get warm fuzzies from the people who are meant to be together." Ron explained in a rush.
"The tourists mean that this is the week the pond is working. What Ron hasn't explained is that most people don't bother going into the pond, because one way, it's going to ruin whatever you've got, and the other way, well, the love spell that the Pond casts is pretty potent." Ginny told Harry kindly.
"So what's the big problem?" Harry asked.
"Well, Hermione and Draco jumped in together. That might pose a problem." Neville interjected.
"They didn't jump, they fell." Harry told them.
"Whatever Harry, the Pond doesn't know the difference." Ginny looked at him sternly, telling him not to play semantics with her.
"But so what, Hermione and Malfoy aren't meant to be together. I know it'll probably be hard with them sniping all the time, but I also think Hermione can't hate him any more than she does now." Harry told them. Why were they all being so down about this? It wasn't really a problem.
"Umm, Harry, you might want to take a look." Neville said nervously. Harry looked over at the pond, and what he saw almost made him die of shock.
"Hermione!" He yelled, storming over to the muddy bank. Draco was busy pushing back a lock of Hermione's hair, and Hermione was giggling. "Get your hands off her Malfoy!" Harry shouted, pushing Draco's hand away.
"Don't worry Harry, I won't hurt her. I love her." Draco told him honestly, as he stared into Hermione's eyes. Harry stormed back over to Ron, Neville and Ginny in a mad fit of rage.
"What the hell is going on here?" Harry asked nobody in particular.
"They're in love Harry, deal with it," Ginny said, "I think it kinda looks pretty cool. Neville, you wanna…?" Ginny looked at Neville inquiringly. Obviously she had gone to the Yule Ball with him out of more than just pity. But Neville's eye had already been caught by.. Ron.
"Ron? What are you thinking?" Harry almost laughed at Ron, as Ron began to lead the unknowing Neville towards the pond.
"Come on Harry," Ron said, "You can't honestly tell me that you've lived with four guys for four years and you were never the least bit curious?"
"Yes, I can." Harry said, stoney-faced.
"Oh, nothing really," he said, "just the fact that there should be a 'monster within' somewhere around here just waiting to be destroyed. Why hasn't it attacked us yet?" His round face shone with fear in the golden glow of the hovering spark cloud.
"It was probably slain when the amulet was stolen. Either that or it died. I mean, this place hasn't been used for ages, it probably just got old and died." Draco said, clearly impatient. He had made his thoughts quite early on in the deliberations that they should just to go Dodgy Alley and try to light a fire without the Amulet.
"Sorry to be a spanner in the works here, but usually magical monsters live for hundreds of years. They wouldn't exactly bother to guard the Amulet with something that would keel over dead in a few years time, and even then, wouldn't we see the carcass?" Harry said, his voice rising near the end from irritation from the calm Slytherin.
"Look, I will say this again. Whatever was here isn't here anymore, so we should just go on and try and find another way. Come on, let's go." Draco stood up, and opened the door in the wall to the maintenance passage. One by one everyone nodded in agreement of this proposition, the floor was cold and wet and their robes were getting a little damp on the underside.
Inside the passage, they again consulted a map, which now placed them outside the Main Labyrinth Chamber, and noted a path that would lead them right back to the Labyrinth entrance. As they emerged back into the round room with garish fountains and the dusty old ticket booth, everyone stretched their arms as though they had just been sleeping.
"Ah, it's nice to be back somewhere you recognise," said Pansy, yawning, "even if that place is an old dusty room with an ugly fountain under a tacky hotel in the north of Scotland."
"Mmm." Harry mumbled, shutting the door behind him. As the 'heroic' one, he had been voted the best person to keep up the rear, just in case the 'monster within' decided to attack them in a most un-friendly manner. But that was not what Harry was wondering about at that moment. He was staring at the door he had just closed.
"Hermione. This is the door I was just about to look at earlier today, and you pulled me away. I would've found this passage before we'd even started, and we would've been in and out by the time you could say 'one two buckle my shoe'." Harry was a little bit annoyed that their journey could have been lessened considerably, but was too fond of his friend to get really angry.
"The past is the past Harry, deal with it." Pansy said, as they filed out of the door and piled back onto the flying carpet.
"Okay then, off to Land's End to see if we can destroy this stupid wand without the use of the amulet!" Hermione yelled as she levitated the carpet into the sky and began the trip south.
"Hey, anyone want some yoghurt?" Neville asked as they were flying over Edinburgh – a bit off course but Hermione's navigation skills weren't quite perfect yet. He pulled a large tub of organic Greek-style yoghurt out of his robes. "It's hazelnut and honey flavour!"
"Sure, I'll have some," Ron said, never the one to turn down free food.
"Ron, what are you going to eat it with?" Asked Ginny, "Don't tell me you're going to try and drink it like you did last summer, and then you had to spend the whole day with it all down the front of your clothes." She edged away from him, scared of getting splashed with yoghurt in her brother's mad feeding frenzy.
"No, of course not. I've got my handy dandy survival kit in here somewhere," Ron rummaged inside the seemingly bottomless pockets of his Hogwarts robes, "Aha, here we are. I just need to get the spoon out." Ron pulled a small, shiny silver spoon out from the wooden box, and Pansy immediately shrieked and shrunk back from Ron.
"No not the spoons, the spoons, they haunt me, they haunts usss, precioussss!" Pansy was now crawling quickly across the carpet, as far away as she could get from Ron. But sadly, even that wasn't far enough to rid her of the spoon paranoia. With one swift movement, probably with the intention of getting even further from Ron, Pansy hurled herself backwards off the carpet, and everyone heard her scream a long, drawn out, "Noooooo!" as she fell from the flying floor covering.
"Quick, after her!" Draco shouted, as he took over control of the carpet from Hermione. He immediately pulled the carpet into a speedy nose-dive, chasing Pansy to the ground. Unluckily, he wasn't quite fast enough, and Pansy Parkinson splatted on the ground just seconds before the carpet reached her dead and lifeless jelly-like body.
"Quick, someone cast a spell on her to revive her, now!" Draco yelled, wringing his hands like a worried old lady and then running them through his perfectly groomed silver locks.
"There's nothing we can do," Harry told him, standing up from where he was examining Pansy's body.
"Of course there is!" Draco's voice raised an octave when he shouted at Harry, but Ron intervened.
"Harry should know better than anyone that there's no spell to bring back the dead!"
"Just because his parents died when he was young? Big deal. My cousin just died because she fell off a flying carpet, and two days ago I found out that my mother died when I was eight!" Draco sat down hard on Pansy's body, using the carcass like an old garden bench.
"Didn't you kind of realise when you were eight that your mother was never around anymore? You hadn't seen her for, what, seven years, and you didn't realise she had died?" Ron said sarcastically.
"My father killed her. He's a manipulative arse when he wants to be, and he managed to convince me that she was just away on a long holiday until…" Draco began to explain, but Ginny interrupted.
"Wait a minute, Pansy's your cousin? You went to the Yule Ball with your cousin? Ewww!"
"Yes, right," said Draco, "Anyway, he managed to convince me that she was away on holiday until he could get some random Death Eater to come in and drink a little polyjuice potion to pretend to be her when I came home. It wasn't too hard, since I've been in boarding school practically my whole life."
"I still don't quite get this, you went with your COUSIN? How sick are you?" Ginny said, looking perplexed.
"Shush Ginny, let him carry on. What the hell was that?!" Ron started to quiet Ginny, but two dead bodies suddenly fell out of the sky above them. Harry suddenly heard someone say "Oh crap!" and then poppies began to fall out of the sky, covering Hermione, Ron, Ginny, Neville, Draco, Harry, and the three dead bodies that lay around them.
"Poppies, poppies will put them to sleep." He heard someone say from way up in the clouds, before everyone around him suddenly fell onto the ground in a deep sleep (that is, of course, the ones that were not already dead).
"Who's there? Who are you?" He asked of the sky.
"What? You can hear me? Damn stupid cable guy, I asked for a one way menacing voice-over package, not the interfering busybody two-way character chat. I'll be calling his supervisor!" Whoever it was seemed to forget about Harry for a minute, but then they remembered.
"Ahem. Anyway, this has all been a big mistake. Um, you see, my garbage disposal was on the blink, so I decided to dispose of those bodies there in this clearing, I mean nobody ever actually goes here, usually."
"Excuse me," interrupted Harry, "But why exactly were you dumping those bodies?"
"I'm in the Wicked Witch business, dear, it's just what I do." The voice replied politely. "To cut to the chase, I'll revive your friends if you don't tell anyone what you saw today. I promise I won't dump any more here."
"Well," said Harry, "You do drive a hard bargain, but I think I'll accept it. You also have to promise not to try and kill me in the future, ok?"
There came a mumbled assent from the clouds, and then a giant pile of snow was dumped on top of the bodies in the clearing. Harry had to dig quickly to make sure that nobody died of hypothermia or something else nasty that you get from having a whole heap of snow dumped on top of you.
"Wha, what's going on?" Ron mumbled as Harry pulled him from under one of the bodies. Hermione came out completely aware of her surroundings, and helped everyone onto the carpet straight away, before flying them high up above the clouds to get warm from the bright bright sun.
"So, Harry, why didn't you fall asleep?" Draco asked sarcastically.
"I dunno. I guess it was something to do with my mother dying to save me and all that. Either that or the fact that Voldemort transferred some of his powers into me when he tried to kill me. That stuff is always saving me, you know." Harry replied offhandedly, looking off into the distance over the fluffy white clouds.
"Always the way," muttered Draco, as he tried to turn around gracefully and stare blankly into the sun. Instead, what happened was that the corner of the carpet that he was sitting on dipped down, and Draco slipped off the carpet. On his way down, he grabbed out for the nearest thing, which happened to be Hermione. So, in one more of a string of unlucky coincidences in the day, Draco and Hermione plunged from the carpet through the clouds.
"Hermione!" Ginny yelled, and took over control of the carpet. She pulled it into a sharp dive, even sharper than Harry would have liked, but Ginny handled the carpet expertly. They managed to get close enough to the ground to see that Hermione and Draco were not going to splat on the ground like Pansy or Maria, but fall into a pond which looked deeper than deep. They hit the pond with a gigantic splash, but a few minutes later they bobbed back up, gasping with breath.
While Hermione and Draco lay on the muddy side of the pond, gasping and gurgling, Ron instructed them to pull the carpet into a small grove of trees before they could go and help their companions.
"What did we do that for?" Harry asked, "If anyone's watching, they just saw us fly down after two people fell from the sky, one more look at the carpet isn't really going to hurt."
"Them." Ron just said, and pointed at a small platform about fifty metres away from the pond that Harry hadn't noticed before. On the platform stood a number of what were obviously witches and wizards, judging by their robes, holding old-fashioned cameras and wearing souvenir caps.
"Why are they here? They look like tourists?" Harry was perplexed.
"They're here to watch the festivities," Ron said dejectedly, "This is the Mysterious Pond of Love." He sat down on a rock, looking defeated.
"The what? What festivities? Ron what the HELL is going on here?" Harry asked, looking at Ginny and Neville, who had been silent since they landed. They quickly looked away, avoiding his eyes.
"The Mysterious Pond of Love only works for one week a year. Couples jump into the pond at the same time, and when they come out they are either madly in love or completely detest each other. It's sort of like a love test, only if you fail, your relationship is in the crapper. People come to watch couples either have massive fights, or to get warm fuzzies from the people who are meant to be together." Ron explained in a rush.
"The tourists mean that this is the week the pond is working. What Ron hasn't explained is that most people don't bother going into the pond, because one way, it's going to ruin whatever you've got, and the other way, well, the love spell that the Pond casts is pretty potent." Ginny told Harry kindly.
"So what's the big problem?" Harry asked.
"Well, Hermione and Draco jumped in together. That might pose a problem." Neville interjected.
"They didn't jump, they fell." Harry told them.
"Whatever Harry, the Pond doesn't know the difference." Ginny looked at him sternly, telling him not to play semantics with her.
"But so what, Hermione and Malfoy aren't meant to be together. I know it'll probably be hard with them sniping all the time, but I also think Hermione can't hate him any more than she does now." Harry told them. Why were they all being so down about this? It wasn't really a problem.
"Umm, Harry, you might want to take a look." Neville said nervously. Harry looked over at the pond, and what he saw almost made him die of shock.
"Hermione!" He yelled, storming over to the muddy bank. Draco was busy pushing back a lock of Hermione's hair, and Hermione was giggling. "Get your hands off her Malfoy!" Harry shouted, pushing Draco's hand away.
"Don't worry Harry, I won't hurt her. I love her." Draco told him honestly, as he stared into Hermione's eyes. Harry stormed back over to Ron, Neville and Ginny in a mad fit of rage.
"What the hell is going on here?" Harry asked nobody in particular.
"They're in love Harry, deal with it," Ginny said, "I think it kinda looks pretty cool. Neville, you wanna…?" Ginny looked at Neville inquiringly. Obviously she had gone to the Yule Ball with him out of more than just pity. But Neville's eye had already been caught by.. Ron.
"Ron? What are you thinking?" Harry almost laughed at Ron, as Ron began to lead the unknowing Neville towards the pond.
"Come on Harry," Ron said, "You can't honestly tell me that you've lived with four guys for four years and you were never the least bit curious?"
"Yes, I can." Harry said, stoney-faced.