Chapter 16: Life on Hold
In September, when summer was fading from the fields around the Burrow and the first tawny leaves were stealing onto the trees of Hogsmeade, Remus went underground and joined the werewolves. Before departing, he went to St. Mungo's and tried to make an appointment with Healer Bones. Healer Bones's secretary expressed considerable surprise at this. "He's in hiding. He had a death threat. You know his sister was murdered this summer? No wizarding family gave more in the First War than the Boneses did. You-Know-Who sent Death Eaters after their wives, their siblings, their children. Vicious. He hates the Boneses. No, I can't say when Healer Bones will be back. Give me your name and I'll send you an owl."
That was, of course, impossible; owls from St. Mungo's would blow his cover. With a feeling of immense frustration, Remus made an appointment for December 23rd, when he would be visiting the Burrow.
Remus's autumn with the werewolves was a strange and bitter season. A hazy, dreamlike quality prevailed, as one day dragged into another, into a full moon, a waning moon, a waxing moon, a full moon, and round again. His initial sentence—for Remus, after forty-eight hours, quickly came to call it thus in conversations with himself—was a hundred days. After that he would report to Dumbledore.
The good news was that Fenrir Greyback was not, as had been rumored among wizards, assembling an army of werewolves to place at the disposal of the Dark Lord. Greyback had, to be sure, gathered some two hundred followers in the mountains of Wales, but the gang was in no way united in purpose. Few of its members took orders from anyone, even Greyback himself. Few agreed on what their goals were. Some were aspiring Death Eaters, eager to mimic Greyback or outdo him. Others were petty thieves, raiding farmhouses and channeling stolen goods with a lowlife ingenuity that would have thrilled Mundungus Fletcher; Remus could not help but wonder if some patchy illegal network of crime might not link some of his new acquaintances to his old colleague. Some still lived on the margins of the wizarding world, with settled homes, even jobs in a few cases; they appeared intermittently, often at the full moon, "to catch up on the news." Still others were, in Muggle terminology, "clinically depressed." They passed their days drinking stolen whiskey and sleeping in the fields and could barely be roused to conversation.
Indeed, conversing with individual werewolves—the strategy in which Dumbledore had set so much store—was harder by far than Remus had anticipated. Werewolf relationships were not the same as human relationships. Remus, who in wizarding society seldom forgot his condition for five minutes together, was puzzled to discover how poorly he fit in among the werewolves. All were literate; many were educated; a few, at least, were articulate when they chose to be. But the personal interactions of those who made their lives in Greyback's community were conducted in choppy series of insults, rebukes, and threats, grunts, growls, and snarls, a language more troll than human. Those who merely visited the community were, by and large, more conversible than those who made their homes there, and more interested in what Remus had to say, but even they tended to look upon their monthly sojourns with Greyback as a brief hiatus from the complexities of human relationships, the restraints of human decency.
This hiatus took many forms. Violence was the werewolf's natural impulse, and Greyback would gladly have channeled all his gang's energy, untransformed as well as transformed, into tactical violence. His current agenda was biting children and raising them wild. But as the moon waxed and as it waned, many of the werewolf men and women directed their angry energy into other avenues. They hunted animals for food, or killed them for pleasure. They drank and cussed. They fought. Some shot dope. Hook-ups were rife, though lasting relationships were rare. Remus struggled to hide his shock.
His background made it harder. If he had been Muggle-born . . . But Remus had grown up in the nurturing bosom of Britain's ancient wizarding community, a community he knew to be rather straight-laced, even old-fashioned by the standards of the Muggle world.
There were some among Remus's cohort who had ventured out to explore that world—Sirius, for one, especially in the two years after he had run away from home and before he had joined the Order. Remus remembered, as if from another life, the Gryffindor common room. He remembered Hestia Jones, aged about sixteen, tucked in the largest armchair, black leather miniskirt riding up her thighs, slender fingers caressing shapely knees, regaling the company with tales of her Muggle childhood.
"And then he put his hand up my skirt—"
Peter tittered. James wasn't even listening; he was leaning on the back of Lily's chair and trying to put his arm around her.
Lily shook him off. "Come off it, Jones! You were twelve."
Hestia flipped her short black hair and tilted her pretty chin. "I didn't grow up in a suburb," she said haughtily.
Lisa Ballantyne laughed out loud. Sirius's gaze was smoldering. Remus looked away, fumbled in his robe pockets, took out a section of the embryo Marauder's Map, and started drawing.
Remus had worried about Sirius's adventures, knowing that he was, like many purebloods, as innocent as a babe in arms about the practical dimensions of Muggle life. What might he let slip, in an unguarded moment, to any of his score of Muggle girls? Why couldn't he stick to Hestia? Sirius had conducted these adventures alone, for James paid no heed to any girl but Lily and Sirius scorned to be saddled with Peter. Remus had resolutely refused Sirius's invitations to accompany him, though Sirius had once accompanied Remus on an adventure of his own. They had gone to Cambridge, to see an outdoor production of As You Like It in a college courtyard. Sirius, bored, had rolled the program into a fake wand and shot fake spells at the stage furniture as Remus had mooned over Rosalind—or the girl who played Rosalind—he had, at seventeen, found it difficult to distinguish between the two. He had seen As You Like It three more times that summer, alone.
That was not the sort of adventure that anyone in Fenrir Greyback's community could possibly understand. Their nerves were dulled to the finer feelings, the finer distinctions of human life, whether by the constant company of werewolves or by the strain of living a dual life, now in wizarding society, now in Greyback's gang. One of the strangest developments in all that strange season of Remus's life was the emergence of a deep, unexpected sympathy for Severus Snape. Severus, who had lived a double life for fifteen years and who—Remus knew—did it far better than he did or ever would. Who spoke two languages and served two masters. Who bore all the mental anguish and strain of crossing between a world he detested and a world that detested him.
But Severus has an advantage over me, Remus thought hopelessly. Severus has left the Death Eaters, at least to the extent that anyone can leave that wretched organization. Severus had a choice, and he has exercised it. And I—I will always be a werewolf.
It was November—waxing moon—when he noticed a teenager in the camp. A short, scruffy boy, with a snoutlike nose and dank, grubby hair. He lolled under a tree, smoking cigarettes and thumbing a magazine. He looked about fifteen: Ginny's age.
Remus walked straight up and introduced himself. The boy said nothing in return, but he tossed him the pack of cigarettes.
"I don't smoke."
"Oh," said the boy inconsequentially. "I do." He returned to his magazine.
Remus opened his backpack and tossed the child a small bottle.
"What is this?"
"Shampoo."
The boy cocked his head, puzzled. "Will it make me drunk fast?"
"I don't recommend drinking it," said Remus. The boy lost interest. "You use it to wash your hair."
"Why in hell would anyone wash hair?" exclaimed the boy, letting the magazine drop from his hand.
A blush rose involuntarily in Remus's face. It was the hottest porn he had ever seen.
"Women are people, you know," said Remus, picking up the magazine, rolling it shut, and handing it back to the child. "Not objects."
The boy looked puzzled. "I don't know any women who are people," he objected. "All the women I know are werewolves."
"What's your name?"
"Longsnout."
"Your other name," said Remus patiently. "Surely your parents don't call you Longsnout?"
Suddenly, the boy looked embarrassed. "I—well—I think they called me Jonathan."
"And your surname?"
"What's a surname?"
"Your last name? Your family name? The name that you and your parents and your siblings all share?"
The boy looked puzzled. Slowly, he shook his head. He continued to shake it, twitchingly, maniacally, faster and faster. He jumped, he turned, he ran.
Remus was in good training. He pursued the boy, chased him straight across the camp, past the garbage ditch (but garbage was strewn everywhere), and half-way down the muddy creek beside the mountain. The boy lay splayed on the banks of the creek, where he had tripped and fallen. Remus pulled him out of the water and propped him against a boulder to dry in the chilly afternoon sunlight.
"Tell me," he commanded. "I know a lot about werewolves."
"My name is Jonathan Longsnout," panted the boy. "I don't have parents. I don't have siblings. I don't have any other name. I belong here. I can bite!"
Slowly, in the days that followed, Remus pieced together his story. There had been a rash of bites at the very end of the First War. Mostly babies, mostly bitten by Fenrir Greyback. Most of them had died. This must be one of the very few who had survived. Who had been raised by wolves. The prototype for Fenrir Greyback's werewolf army.