Dudley Dursley and the Gift of the Mesmerist
A taxi pulled up outside number Number 4 Privet Drive, and rose several inches on its springs as the occupant dragged his bloated body out. There was a short and angry dispute with the driver about the tip, then the boy waddled up to the door and rang the bell.
There followed a deep bellow of outrage from Vernon, his father, and a high pitched nervous squeaking from his mother.
Dudley Dursley had returned from his school in disgrace.
" Why have they sent him home, Vernon? Has he been bullying the small boys, or..even..getting too friendly to them?"
Vernon guffawed loudly, "None of those would have him sent home, dear. Smeltings is, after all a Public School. It's just that the boy has become too fat to play cricket."
"Could we not find him a different school, my dear?"
Dudley crouched lower with his ear to the living room door.
It was the same old argument, but this time his parents were close to agreement. He stuffed another double chocolate chip cookie in his mouth but did not begin to chew until he had heard his father speak.
"Petunia, it is the best school money can buy. I will not move Dudley to another merely because he cannot keep from eating for five minutes at a time. "
"But Vernon, Dudley is a growing boy."
"The boy has grown far too much. The school is adamant. They will not let him back until he learns to control his appetite."
"Perhaps a diet?"
"We tried that last year during the holidays. Remember how he even ate that Potter boy's salty porridge and that owl's birdseed? The nasty little beggar went back to that magician school of his with acute malnutrition."
Dudley guffawed quietly. He had drawn the line at the Owl Treats, but only after Hedwig had given him an nasty peck that almost removed his little finger.
"Mrs. Wallace at the hairdressers was saying that she knows a Harley Street hypnotherapist who is very good. After visiting this woman her anorexic daughter began eating again and her husband stopped downloading questionable images from the Internet."
"Well, take the blasted boy to her then. But remember, the school has made it clear they will not have him back until he can enter their front door without turning sideways."
"But Vernon, it is a double door."
"That's why they sent him home, you daft woman."
Dudley flinched as he heard the front door slam behind his father and went up to his blog. He looked glumly at the previous day's entries.
May 23rd.
"McHaggis Quarter pounders: 5. Cakes: 3.
Fags: Bullied two, bugg…"
He would miss school.
"Dudley dear, could you please come with me? We have an appointment with your therapist."
The session was not bad. She lived in a detached house on the edge of the common, a mousy woman in her forties. All Dudley had to do was lie on the couch while she whispered at him.
On the drive home they passed a McHaggis.
Later, Petunia confided in her husband.
"Vernon, I really think that the therapy has started working."
"Rubbish, Petunia, you said he had four quarter pounders."
"Yes, Vernon, he did, but he ordered them one at a time, not all together."
After three days it had begun to work. He was eating only meat, and had even got a track suit and was waddling around the estate at something more than a walk. By Thursday he had had four sessions, and was making it as far as the shopping centre on his "runs".
Now he slowed to a walk and looked into the pet shop.
For some time now he had wanted to buy some mice, but until now he was not able to decide whether he would get more fun from dissecting them alive or from dropping them into the shower while his mother was in there.
He looked around the shop. Two snakes in a glass tank looked at him as he passed, and one commented, "I don't know what that fat boy ate, but he sure as hell must be able to dislocate that jaw to get it down."
Dudley gasped. He thought he could understand what snakes were saying! He must be going crazy.
One of the snakes looked at him, "Hey, the lardball knows what we are saying. Yo, Blubberguts, do us a favour and lift the top off. There is an old nun's home next door and we had great fun there the last time we escaped. Some of the old dears aren't as fast as they were on the Zimmers and they panic real easy."
Jaw slack, Dudley furtively opened the lid and inch and watched them slither through.
As he jogged ponderously home his mind raced. What could this mean?
He felt strange after the next session, and confided in the therapist.
"It is as if there is something powerful pent up inside me. Liked trapped gas, only in my head."
She nodded, "Perhaps it is some pent up childhood problem that is causing you to be a glutton. I am sure it will come out tomorrow."
The next day he took his place on the couch again and closed his eyes.
A drop of rain on his face awoke him. He was still lying on the couch, but the house had disappeared. Around him was a scene of utter destruction. Fragments of furniture and masonry were spread as far as the eye could see.
For some reason he felt wonderful, as if something inside him had resolved itself, giving him some kind of awesome power.
He looked around.
The therapist was lying in a fetal position in the ground beside him, thumb in mouth, trembling.
A horn sounded, and he turned to see his mother draw the car up on the brick-strewn road.
"What happened, dear?" she asked.
"I don't know, but I feel great."
"Let's get to the hospital then and visit my friend Lucy, and then get home soon. You know your auntie Marjorie is visiting for dinner."
There were several disturbing events on the way.
As he passed the graveyard he saw a pair of skeletons leaning on their elbows on the wall watching the cars pass by. One waved to him. Strangely, he felt no fear, only a sense of astonishment.
Farther on, as they passed a building site, someone fell from a scaffold on the seventeenth floor and hit the pavement by the car with a resounding thump. He saw the foreman flinch, remover his hard hat and hold it over his heart with one hand, while he used the other to clock out the poor bugger who'd fallen.
Fortunately his mother was too busy driving to notice, but when Dudley turned to watch he saw a translucent figure rise from the inert body.
The figure looked down, removed its translucent hard hat and scratched it's translucent head in puzzlement, then began to trudge through the half built walls towards a beam of shimmering light that gleamed through the overcast sky.
At the hospital, while his mother and Lucy discussed Lucy's varicose veins in quite excessive detail, Dudley went for a walk.
Outside one ward a striking woman with red hair in a green robe was caterwauling horribly. Surprisingly, no-one seemed to be aware of her but Dudley. She spotted him and winked at him, still howling.
Suddenly a group of doctors ran up and burst into the room, grabbed defibrillator paddles and shocked the man on the bed back to life.
The woman broke off her keening and remarked to Dudley.
"Bleedin' typical, that's what it is. You have only warmed up you voice when some junior doctor comes along and ruins everything. I dunno why anyone wants to be a banshee any more. It's not as if there is a big audience for our art, only O's and Mac's from auld Ireland and psychic sensitives like yourself, Now I'll be here all night until he goes into cardiac arrest again. Here, lend me your pen."
The doctors came out chatting and walked away, and the banshee crept into the room. As he left, Dudley saw her write a big "DNR" on the man's chart.
At home, a bemused Dudley went upstairs to change.
The doorbell rang. He cocked an ear to hear who it was. Just then his mobile rang.
"Dudley, Elizabeth here."
Dudley perked up. She was the sister of his best friend Piers. He had paid her £20 to do him a certain favour.
"I spoke to Hester for you, but no go. She said she might consider going out with you if you lost fifty pounds and three chins, but otherwise no. She thinks it is extremely unwise to be seen going out with a boy with bigger breasts than she has."
Dudley was beside himself with rage and humiliation. He started down the stairs, pleading as he did with Elizabeth.
"You said you would talk her into coming out with me. You promised, you did."
His mother called, "Dudley dear, your aunt is here. Please come and say hello."
He ignored her.
"I did not promise anything, I said I'd try and talk her into a date."
"You said she would come out. That's why I gave you all that money."
His mother called again, "Dudley, your aunt is waiting."
"No I did not promise anything. If you give me another twenty I can try again. Otherwise I will tell her what a greedy little twerp you really are."
"But that's blackmail."
"Dudley dear, Auntie is waiting, she wants a nice big kiss from her Duddykins."
Something broke inside him, and he turned and roared,
"DAMN THE OLD WITCH TO HELL."
What happened next was rather extraordinary.
A great rift opened in the living room floor, and from it spewed a great gout of flame, smoke and choking acrid fumes.
Two monstrous creatures leaped up from the void and stood poised on the edge on their cloven hooves.
They were eight feet tall, red in colour, with horned heads and pointed ears. Long curving tails with arrow-shaped ends hung behind them. They were unclothed and rather obviously of the male gender.
One pointed at Dudley's aunt. They both grinned, seized her by the arms and leaped back into the void which closed abruptly.
Telephone squawking and dangling unanswered from his hand, Dudley stared at the blackened spot on the carpet, unaware of his mother's shrieks and his father's shouts of "Potter, I know it, that little wretch has to be responsible for this."
Just then an owl perched on the table beside him and dropped an envelope by his side before fluttering quietly away.
Meanwhile, in the Ministry of Magic, senior officials checked the chirping pagers at their belts, dropped the piles of parchment they were carrying, and began to run.
An hour had passed, and half of Privet Drive was fenced off by bollards and tape. Passersby would have seen a gas company van and several workers in overalls and yellow helmets. Inside the tape was a Ministry of Magic van, and several wizards in hard hats and hi visibility waistcoats were dumping charred furniture into a skip and carrying a new suite and carpets into the house.
Dumbledore watched with glum acceptance. He hated Enchant-a-Skips. They had the advantages of being bottomless and of sending anything dumped in them furtively by neighbours straight back into the neighbour's beds, but they were ecologically unsound. The thought that the bewildered denizens of some alternate universe were being showered with charred Ikea suites and side tables as he watched did not please him at all.
He went into the house. A senior secretary from the ministry was haggling with the demons. The senior one was holding a clipboard and scratching one of his horns with his pencil.
"Well, it's like this you see, mate. This 'ere is a Level IX Condemnation, as high as it gets unless 'Im upstairs does it."
He nodded upwards and his mate rolled his eyes.
" We can't just pretend it didn't happen. If you lot kept better control of yer wizards we'd find life a lot easier. I dunno how we can keep His Nibs from finding out and there'll be hell to pay when he does. It'll be more than me job's worth."
Dumbledore met the ministry official's eye and reached into his pocket.
The demons counted the Galleons, grinned with satisfaction and said, "We'll see what we can do, Mr. Dumbledore. Always glad to do business with you."
A hole opened in the floor and smoke and fire gushed out. The two demons stepped over the edge and it closed again. Two junior magic department officials sighed and went to the van for more carpet.
Dumbledore went through to the kitchen where there was a strong odour of singed hair and burned tweed.
Petunia was comforting her smoke-blackened sister, who, through her sobs, was saying, "I am not blaming you, Petunia, but every time I come here something dreadful happens. I hoped it would be all right with that nasty Potter child away in school, but this time was the worst, almost as bad as that week we had in Alicante."
He moved on to the hall.
Vernon and Dudley were sitting on the stairs, both in shock. Dudley was holding his invitation to Hogwarts letter.
Vernon stood up, grabbed the letter and glared at Dumbledore.
"I thought you would be behind this. Well, I won't have it, I tell you. One of you in the family is more than enough."
Dumbledore shushed him.
"It is nothing to do with us. It turns out that your Dudley has remarkable powers but has developed them late. The best thing for him is to join an advanced accelerated wizardry programme at Hogwarts to allow him to control his great powers."
"Humph. I suppose it will cost a lot of money?"
"Fees are no more than at his present school. He will need book, robes and equipment, although we do also have an attractive range of Hogwarts baseball caps, hoodies and tracksuits he may choose to purchase. Best that he come with me now and we can loan him what he needs."
Dudley's father watched them leave. It might be a good thing to have a powerful magician in the family. It would keep the brat Potter in his place, and he could teach a lesson to some of his customers when they were late in paying for drills. Turn the lot of them into toads, he would. Besides, robes were about the only option Dudley had left – even his muumuu was looking a bit strained.
Dumbledore lead Dudley into the van. To Dudley's astonishment, the van door led straight into the foyer of a huge office building, not particularly different from any big
Corporate office but for the robes of the wizards swarming about.
"Conference Room Seven, Mr. Dumbledore."
It was a conventional glass walled room with a table and nine chairs. An official was waiting with strikingly attractive black girl with a really sweet smile and an Asian boy, both Dudley's age. Dudley winked at the girl who blushed and simpered.
Plates with three sandwiches and bottles of pumpkin juice were on the table, along with an old-fashioned leather briefcase.
"Please wait here, Dudley, This is Judy and Hiroji. Have a snack while you are waiting." Dumbledore said and followed the official outside for a quiet chat.
Dudley grabbed a sandwich and crammed it in his mouth. Hiroji reached for one but Dudley instinctively pushed him away and grabbed it.
Suddenly he found himself in a heap in the corner of the room, aching from several unlikely places.
Hiroji bowed and smiled.
"Many people believe that all Japanese are skilled in karate. In this case, alas for you, the cliché is correct."
Judy giggled. Dudley shot her a dirty look.
He dragged himself into a chair and looked out at the two adults. Among his newfound powers was the ability to lip-read.
"I do not see why they have to go to Hogwarts." Dumbledore was arguing.
"Albus, the Ministry has decided that Dark Latents, who develop their magical powers late in life and have an instinct for the Dark Side, are best taken care of in a conventional school setting. "
"Better off sending them straight to Azkaban, " Dumbledore muttered. "That's where they'll end up anyway. They all have instincts towards the dark side. It comes of developing magic powers while your hormones are running amok. Give infinite magical powers to a Goth with a tongue stud and you have to expect fireworks. No doubt they will have webjournals at within the week. Oh, to hell with it, let's get on with it. Who are the other two delinquents?"
The official pursed his lips, "These are 'magically gifted and talented children who deserve the same chance as any normal child'. It is also important that they use their powers for good. The Asian boy is Hiroji from Japan."
Dumbleddore shot him a dark look, "I read about that. The Japanese tragedy. How many thousand dead?"
"We will never know for sure, now that the lava has cooled down .The boy continues to claim that it was an accident, that he thought Mount Fuji was an EXTINCT volcano. The girl is Judy from Haiti."
"Ah yes, I've heard of her," Dumbledore said bitterly. "Zombie Girl. No doubt she will be a great asset to Hogwarts."
"I will admit that she over-reacted when her friend refused to invite her to her party. Turning every body in the Port-au-Prince municipal graveyard into zombies to crash the party was uncalled for. She claims, however, she was not aware of her powers nor that they were so extensive."
"Did they ever work out how many zombies there were?"
"Several thousand I gather. But most of them were so decayed they fell apart before they reached the house where the party was held."
"Hrrrumph. That makes it all right then. Ok, let's get the little criminals on the road."
Back in the room Dumbledore opened the case and took out a battered wizards hat.
"We can carry out the sorting here to save time."
It fitted perfectly over Hiroji's head. "Slytherin," the hat announced in a bored voice.
It suited Judy really well, "Slytherin," it announced again. Next, Dumbledore balanced it on Dudley's vast head, like an inverted ice cream cone on a melon.
" I don't know why you have to bloody well ask," the hat grumbled, "No prizes for guessing this one. Slytherin! All this way to London stuffed in a bag with smelly robes and we always get the same old answer."
Dumbledore coughed, "I think with the pressure of numbers in Hogwarts we may actually move Hiroji to Hufflepuff and Judy to Gryffindor." In a whispered aside to the official he muttered, "It would be suicide to put this lot together in the same house."
He issued them with their robes.
There were immaculate new ones for Hiroji and Judy, and a massive baggy stained object for Dudley.
"We did not have a XXXXL size available at short notice, " Dumbledore apologized.
It had once belonged to someone called Hagrid, Dudley noticed from the tag, and had been cut down to his size merely by hacking some feet of material from the bottom, apparently using a blunt garden shears. He put it on, trying to ignore the barnyard odours.
Hiroji and Judy took a step back.
"Follow me," Dumbledore snarled and they crossed the foyer to a room strangely empty but for several enormous fireplaces. He led them into one, flung some dust on the floor and muttered something, and in a flash they were in a different fireplace.
"Welcome to Hogwarts."
He led them into his office, opened his case and dumped the hat on a shelf where it said, "About bloody time," and began snoring.
There was a knock on the door, and a tall grumpy looking master with long dark hair entered.
"This is Mr. Snape who will begin your induction. Afterwards you will be introduced to your Houses. Goodbye."
Snape said nothing, but gestured to them to follow him.
Dudley looked back on the way out, and before the door closed he saw Dumbledore take a bottle of Scotch and glass from his drawer and slump into his chair.
Induction took the whole afternoon. Snape gave them a map of few those parts of Hogwarts they were allowed access to. Each was given a wand, but told not to even remove it from its box unless a teacher was present.
A hefty loose leaf binder marked, "Regulations for the Governance of Ye Practycyoners of Magyc" was given to each of them.
Lunch was served in the classroom, steak, chips and three vegetables for Judy and Hiroji, and a Ryvita cracker and a glass of water for Dudley.
The afternoon classes focused on the junior wing of Azkaban, and how easy it would be to find oneself there by breaking any of the Regulations. It appeared to differ from the adult wing only insofar as that the Dementors in the junior wing were younger and more enthusiastic about their work.
At six there was a knock on the door, and three first years were there to guide the new students to their houses.
Dudley got many strange looks as he followed the brat along terrifying moving staircases, endless corridors and infinite steps.
"A bit breathless, are we?" the young swine commented at the top of one especially steep flight, and got a clip on the ear for his trouble.
The sniveling brat led him to his bed and disappeared.
His luggage had arrived so Dudley stuffed a large bar of chocolate into his gob and flung himself on the bed. Some of the Slytherins were watching with unconcealed curiosity so he pulled the curtains closed around him.
Suddenly the curtains were flung back. "Mr Dursley, I take it?"
The speaker was a handsome blonde youth his own age, accompanied by two plug uglies. A lifelong connoisseur of bullying, Dudley recognized a kindred spirit.
His mouth full, Dudley nodded.
"I am Draco Malfoy. No doubt you will have heard of me. I am not sure if I should welcome you to Slytherin. From what I hear you are a mudblood. You are also a cousin of that pest Potter. Neither of those facts does you any credit at all. On the other hand I hear that you have devoted your life to persecuting Potter, and that you have already been bullying the younger boys here, so there may be some hope. I must warn you that you will be tested, and if you do not fit into Slytherin we will make your life here a misery."
The curtains were pulled shut.
Dudley sat and sulked. The evil boy was clearly a powerful figure. Whether he needed to be sucked up to or swatted down was the problem. Better to be careful for now, he decided.
Dudley needed to go to the toilet. He got out of bed, noticing many eyes watching him, and out into the corridor.
Half way down the corridor a small creature with big eyes and ears and a long nose, dressed in an old duster, was bent over mopping up some malodorous object Mrs. Norris had deposited in the corridor, its back to Dudley.
Suddenly all his built up frustrations expressed themselves in a short waddle and a magnificent kick that sent the brute almost the length of the corridor, where it bounced twice on it's head, then staggered to its feet and scuttled away.
Immediately Dudley was surrounded by cheering Slytherins, and Malfoy was shaking his hand.
He called down the corridor, "How long was the kick, Goyle?"
"Twenty two metres. I am afraid he has broken your record, Draco, and on his first attempt!"
A cheer went up.
Malfoy smiled ruefully.
"I see I will have to start training again. Welcome to Slytherin, Dudley. We set great store by our Elf kicking, and you are clearly going to make your mark in Hogwarts."
Dudley grinned back at him and pumped his hand.
At that moment a dreadful scream of anguish and disbelief echoed from some distant quarter of the school.
Draco smiled, "I think Dumbledore has told Potter of your arrival. Let us go and have a Butterbeer and make some plans."