Chapter Seven: Cave Incantatem
Professor Severus Snape opened the door to his classroom and fixed the students therein with a beady eye. A double class today: Gryffindors, those self-important blusterers; and Slytherins, the spoiled-rotten, arrogant and snotty scions of his own house.
"Ladies and gentlemen, and I use the terms loosely," he murmured, "open your textbooks to Page seven hundred and thirty-two, and please endeavour to follow along as I review the ingredients and methods for preparation of the Hair Restoring potion. I shall use small words of few syllables in the hope that you will be able to keep up."
He turned his back on the class and began to write on the chalkboard in his precise, spiky hand. Behind him, pages turned, and quills scratched on parchment. He turned back to the students.
Whilst the Gryffindors and Slytherins were compounding their potions, Snape seated himself at his desk. He looked over at Weasley, whose tongue was clamped firmly between his lips as he struggled to crumble his lacewings into equal pieces. How ridiculous the prat had looked last night; he had been covered in round pieces of paper of various colours, supposedly in representation of Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans. Potter had draped himself in grey rags and tied a red kerchief around his neck; he wore a grey top hat as an impersonation of Nearly Headless Nick. Or maybe they had been costumed the other way round; it hardly mattered.
Miss Granger, meanwhile, had dressed herself in a historically inaccurate representation of a Salem Witch. He thought of going over to her and informing her that Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, the bearer of the scarlet letter, was only a Muggle literary character and lived at a different time in history than the famous Salem witch trials, but it was not worth the effort. It was all he could do to avoid looking and listening to them, giggling and snorting and acting like asses when they were certainly old enough – fourteen years old was not an infant! – to act with some semblance of dignity.
Instead, he sat in his seat at the Masters' Table and watched the parade of students, Masters and guests. His mouth turned downwards when that Helgarda intruder; a half-giantess, no less, entered the Hall; overflowing bodice and all. Good job he had given Hagrid the potion, or he would have made a worse spectacle of his already foolish self.
However, he noticed, to his even greater displeasure, that Hagrid was fawning over the lady, gawking at her notable bosom, feeding her bits off his own plate – and she was having the time of her life, giggling at his witticisms, blushing when he took her hand!
Sourly, Snape thought to himself, I must check the formulation of that potion. It's not working.
***
Lucius Malfoy crept quietly upstairs and peered into his wife's bedchamber. The lady was abed; a House Elf was changing the lavender-water cloth on her forehead, and she blinked sleepily at her husband as he approached the bedside.
Lucius lifted her pale hand and kissed it. "How are you feeling, dear?" he asked solicitously. "How's your migraine?"
Narcissa sighed. "It's been an awful day, awful, Lucius, my head's exploding. My neuralgia has been so agonising, I'm sure that it brought on this latest attack of migraine. I must go to Salzburg and take the cure as soon as I'm well enough to travel. I think my liver's toxic as well. How was the Hogwarts Ball? I just didn't have the strength to go, Lucius, crowds make me swoon."
"Rest well, sweeting; you didn't miss anything. I'll see you for breakfast if you're up to it." He left the chamber and went into his own suite of rooms. Migraine was today's illness; yesterday it had been neuralgia; it sounded as if liver was on the menu of maladies, as it were, for tomorrow. Yet another day, and another buffet of endlessly painful symptoms. Narcissa was a professional hypochondriac. Ah, well, it gave her something to do…
Lucius took off his clothes and had a bath. He kicked his valet House Elves out of his bedchamber, and wrapped himself in a long green dressing gown. He entered his study, selected a cigar and clamped it between his teeth, then poured himself a snifter of his finest cognac and carried it over to his desk. It was an enormous mahogany relic used and abused by generations of Malfoys for everything from formal dinners to vivisection experiments to creative shagging. Then, he perused his bookshelves, finally selecting two ancient tomes. He took the books to the desk, sat down in his wide, high-backed leather chair, and began to read whilst enjoying his cigar.
An hour later, he was of the opinion that he already knew everything he needed to know, and required no further study of books. It was simple. There she was, that super-sized vision of feminine pulchritude; and here he was, a well-formed, healthy but normal-sized Wizard. The problem lay between his legs: he was well enough endowed, but still, not giant sized.
Lucius unscrewed his wand from his cane and placed it on his desk. He opened his dressing gown, looked down and regarded the family jewels. Never got any complaints, he reflected. Gasps of awe aplenty, screams of pain every now and then and the expected orgasmic moans – but then, he had not attempted to shag a giant before.
Best think this through first, he said to himself. Thinking, he ran a long finger over his penis, lingering on the sensitive spot on the underside. Obligingly, the shaft hardened and lengthened, and he clasped it in his hand. "I've got you a job for you, little friend," he chuckled, stroking the fine, thin skin and moving it up and down over the length of the erection.
Now, he thought, we're ready. "Engorgio!" he pronounced. He felt an odd prickling, and looked down. O gods…his penis had obediently swelled…sideways. It was now about eight inches in diameter and four inches long. The sides of it pressed against his thighs, and his balls ached in protest, squashed down by the width of the enchanted organ.
"Finite incantatem!" cried Lucius, and with the feeling of air being let out of a balloon and the sound of a protracted and explosive fart, his penis deflated to its normal size. His heart was pounding. I didn't have the proper mental picture, Lucius fretted. He took a long swallow of cognac.
He returned to his books, and some time later, he decided to essay a spell again. This one, however, was not a simple swelling charm; it depended on imagery and visualisation. Lucius was sure he knew exactly what he had to produce to please the Princess. He smirked. This time, the proportion was correct; the size right, the shape right. He leaned back in his chair and took his wand in his hand, pointed it at his crotch, pictured the desired result, and said, "Concombris magnus."
Did I do it wrong? At first, he thought he had; nothing had happened. He looked down at his flaccid member, enfeebled from the swelling spell. It looked just the same as it had before: oh, wait a minute…it seemed much paler than usual (well, the blood was not rushing to its head) – no, not pale, pale green, then darker and darker! The ensorcelled phallus rose, hardening and thickening, in perfect proportion. Its skin slowly darkened and thickened until it was dark green and shiny, with a few bumps here and there. Lucius thought he would faint: now he had a cucumber instead of a cock. At least it was the right size... He moved it gingerly; o gods, his balls had become pickled tomatoes…
Two hours later, Lucius would have welcomed death. His genitals had been subjected to one spell after another, and had suffered, after the cucumber and pickles episode, incarnations as a squid (tentacles and all), a Quidditch bat with the lettering, Slytherin Rules, along its side, a racing broom (Nimbus 2004, he figured), and a salami. A nose was bizarre beyond belief, a tongue, no better.
The final effort, on which he had placed all of his flagging hopes, was the worst. He had expected that the Slytherin Snake, sigil of his House and symbol of his power, would rescue him. Instead, the serpent had reared up from the root of his groin, grown to perhaps four feet in length, faced him, opened its huge mouth, displaying fangs dripping with venom, and hissed in his face, spraying his features with the burning poison. Then, it had gone questing all around his body, finally pushing its flat reptilian nose against his anus, horror of horrors! He had just managed to Finite Incantatem the serpent back to whatever rank crevice it had occupied in his imagination before it could violate him.
Exhausted, Lucius closed his books, gave his equally exhausted penis, now wrapped in a cold compress, a furious glare, and crawled into his bed, tossing back a phial of Dreamless Sleep potion. He did not need a haunting of vegetables, sausage, sea creatures, snakes, sporting goods and facial features to make his night hideous; it already was.
A/N: "Cave incantatem" means "Beware of the spell."
