- Chapter three -

"Oh, this is marvellous!" Fred yelled as he put a pink swimming cap on George's head. The blue robes George had been wearing disappeared at once and were replaced with yellow-green striped swimming trunks. Diving goggles materialised in around his head and orange flippers appeared on his feet. George imitated a swimming movement in the air and then grabbed a cowboy hat which he put on Fred's head. The green robes Fred had been wearing vanished and made place for a western outfit: brown leather boots on his feet with matching jacket and trousers, and a blade of grass appeared in his mouth and two rusty pistols in his hands.

"Pow!" he said and he pulled the triggers. Two little flags with Pow! on them shot out of the pistols. George grabbed his chest in a slow motion movement, as if he had been hit, and fell down on his bed with his mouth stretched open in a painful cry, but before he hit the bed he already couldn't stop himself from laughing anymore. Fred sniggered as well and took his cowboy hat off again. His western outfit disappeared and he was once again clad in green. He plumped onto the bed next to George.

"This is our best invention yet!" he said happily, laying his hat on his lap. "And pink does match your complexion lovely, George. Still I am afraid we'll have to get to work now. Obviously our Changing Headgear works perfectly on ourselves, but not all of our clientele has been blessed with our abundant length and our perfect slim figure," Fred made a Gilderoy Lockhart wink, "so we'll have to test our hats on some shorter persons to see if the size of the clothes will adapt. If you take your swimming cap of for a moment, even though I know you're very attached to it, we won't scare our guinea pigs away the second they see us."

"What, with my beautiful well-muscled body?" George said, putting on a fake indignant tone.

"Alas, the sight of our extremely well developed muscles is too much to handle for ordinary mortals," said Fred and he grabbed the swimming cap off George's head, so that his blue robes reappeared. George exaggerated an irritated sigh and got up.

"Let's go and pester our little brother and his friends then. I would like to see Hermione in only swimming trunks anyway…"

"Oh, George, you dirty twat. Don't you go hitting on Ron's future girlfriend."

"Well, maybe this will help them get together quicker," George suggested, trying to sound innocent.

"Ah, they're just a little slow. Ron's never been fast wtih anything," Fred sniggered. He stooped and picked up a bowler hat, sombrero and a crown and stuffed them in the purple Weasley's Wizard Wheezes suitcase along with the cowboy hat and the swimming cap. Fred en George walked out of their bedroom with the suitcase, to Ron's room, but though they found a lot of orange there, none of it was that of Ron's hair. In Ginny's room, where Hermione slept at night now that Ginny was spending the summer at a friend's house, there was no one either. They checked all the rooms but all of them were empty. So then they stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen. Mister Weasley was sitting at the dinner table, the Daily Prophet spread out in front in front of him, and reading very intently. Mrs Weasley was putting the dishes in the cupboard and looked over her shoulder as she heard the twins coming in.

"Hey Fred and George. Leaving for work already?" she asked.

"No, we're looking for Ron and Harry and Hermione. They're not upstairs. Do you know where they are?"

"I haven't seen them since breakfast, I was busy cleaning up. Have you seen them, Arthur?" Mrs Weasley asked her husband, who didn't even look up from his paper.

"No, I'm sorry, guys," he muttered, absentmindedly.

"Oh, but we could use you as well!" George suddenly thought up. "We have some new products for the shop and we need to test them on-" Now Arthur did look up, a scared look in his eyes, and he got off his chair with a start.

"I'll help you look for them," he said very quickly, before George could finish his sentence. He'd seen too many people on who his sons had tested some of their wares leave the Burrow greener than the grass in their garden, or with more limbs than the amount with which they had come in.

"Maybe they went outside. If you look downstairs I'll take a look around the garden." Mr Weasley said and he hurried out of the door. He sighed when the cold outside air crept up his robes. He walked across the lawn, but he didn't see his son with his friends anywhere. When he passed the garage he saw that the door had been left ajar. That was odd, he always made sure to close it. He didn't want his wife to see how many Muggle objects he had smuggled home from work in all the years he'd worked at the Ministry. She had gone absolutely mad when Ron and Harry had taken the car to Hogwarts. He had never seen her that red before or since... Mr Weasley made to close the door but then realised that the kids maybe opened it. He got a little angry; he hadn't locked the door for nothing. Still, if Harry was there, maybe he could tell him something about that radio he was working on… Mr Weasley opened the door. No one was there, but he saw that a suitcase had been taken from a pile. It lay opened on the floor, with a flashlight which was still shining next to it. The beam of light was clearly visible because of all the dust in the air in the garage. The beam shone on a large book. Surely that wasn't…? Mr Weasley stepped a little closer and then clapped his hand over his mouth. It was. From the cover of the book, his son was staring at him. He was wearing shining silver armour, just as Harry, who was standing on his left side. Hermione was standing behind Ron in a golden dress, with her hand on Ron's shoulder. They were standing completely still, as everyone would be who were in a Muggle illustration.

"Oh dear…" Mr Weasley said as he stared at the book. He picked it up and ran back towards the Burrow. Puffing, he entered the kitchen.

"Molly, they're here!" he said, clutching the book with his hands.

"Huh? What do you mean, Arthur?" Mrs Weasley asked, worried and non-understanding, as she had just seen Arthur run inside in considerable state of panic.

"Inside the book!" Mr Weasley knocked on the cover and then held out the book. "Look."

Mrs Weasley stepped towards him and then let out a small scream as she saw her son and his friends on the book in a Medieval setting. "But Arthur, how is this-"

"Mum! What's up?" Fred and George had come hurrying in when they heard their mother's cry. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, yes, I am," Mrs Weasley said, though there was so little colour in her face that Fred and George doubted that, "but Ron, Harry and Hermione… They're in here!" She grabbed the tea-towel and sobbed.

"What? Where?" George asked, confused, looking from Mr to Mrs Weasley and back. Mr Weasley swallowed and laid the book on the dinner table. "Here," he said, "they have landed inside the book."

Fred and George looked at the book with a non-understanding frown on their foreheads as they saw who were on the cover. "In there? How is that possible?"

Mr Weasley bowed his head and suddenly felt very hot. "It's erm… it's a bewitched Muggle book," he said very quietly.

"Arthur!" Mrs Weasley said and she no longer hid her face in the tea-towel but looked at her husband with great anger brewing behind her eyes. "Where did they get that book?"

Mr Weasley turned his head away from his wife. "That would be in erm… my garage," he said, nearly inaudible.

Now Mrs Weasley turned to a shade of red which reminded Mr Weasley very much of how she had looked when his son had laid hand on another Muggle object of his: the flying car. "How could you! Now my baby's in there! And Harry, and Hermione!" Mrs Weasley screamed. She breathed heavily, trying to come up with the right insult, but Fred spoke before she did.

"But… can they get out?" he asked.

"Yes," Mr Weasley said quickly, hoping that this would somewhat lower his wife's temper. Mrs Weasley and twins gave a relieved sigh.

"How? And how did they get in in the first place?" George asked. Mr Weasley dared to look up again and faced the others to tell what he knew about the book.

"The book is bewitched. At first it was a normal Mugglebook, but then a wizard ran across it." Mr Weasley searched his brain for the details of this case. "It happened long ago. I'd only just started at the Ministry…" he continued, and then the story started to come back to him. "We found the book in a Muggle library. There had been a report of a librarian who'd seen a brother and sister disappear into the book. There were quite a lot of eyewitnesses really, there was a lot of fuss erasing all of their memories… Anyway, later it turned out that a wizard had gone to the Muggle library, because he found it very funny to observe Muggles, and stumbled across the book there. Apparently, he found the title very amusing, a stereotype thing for Muggles to say about wizards, and the contents of the book even more so. He thought it would be funny to show the Muggles some real magic and put a spell on the book," Mr Weasley said.

"What kind of spell?" Fred asked.

"On the first page is an illustration, and if you look at it, it makes you go into the book and take the place of a character in the story," Mr Weasley continued. Mrs Weasley had almost returned to her normal colour by now and only looked very worried.

"How can we get them out of the story then, Arthur?" she asked him.

"They have to act out the whole story. From the beginning to the end. Only after that can they leave the book. I remember last time, we had it sent to another department. They were busy all day, reading the story out loud," Mr Weasley said. "The other figures in the book can only come to life when the story is read out loud," he explained. He opened the book, careful to skip the first page with the illustration, to demonstrate what he had just said. The pages of the book smelled very old, after all the years they had spent in the dark suitcase in the garage, and were yellowed, but still perfectly intact. They were filled with writing in black ink and on the upper half of the right page was an illustration of royal looking people sitting at a long table.

"Look," he started as he wanted to show the others how the book worked, but he was answered from a direction he did not expect.

"Mr Weasley?" he heard someone say uncertainly. It had been Hermione's voice that had spoken the name and the words resounded from the page. "Mr Weasley?" she repeated, more urgently now. Mr Weasley saw the figure with brown hair and a golden dress in the illustration turn her head and look around the illustration.

"We're inside the book! Can you hear us too?" she called out.

"Yes! I can even see you!" Mr Weasley said. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, we're fine," Hermione answered him. Mr Weasley saw his son and Harry look around too, but apparently they couldn't see him like he saw them.

"Do you know how we can get out of here, Mr Weasley?" Harry asked. "It seems that we have become characters in this story!"

"Yes, that's how the book works." For a moment, Mr Weasley considered getting mad at his son and his friends for rummaging around his stuff, but then he remembered Molly was standing next to him and that it would be unwise to repeat that this book had been among his stuff. "We can get you out, but it will take some time. You will have to play your roles in the story to be able to leave it. Throughout the whole story," he said.

"But no one except for us is even moving here! And how are we supposed to know our roles?" Ron commented.

"The story will come to life when it's read out loud," Mr Weasley said.

"Then who's going to read it?" Harry asked.

Mr and Mrs Weasley gave each other and Fred and George a questioning look. The twins were looking each other in the eye enthusiastically. "We will read it! Can we read it, dad?" Fred and George said greedily. "We'll take it with us to the shop and read in turns!". The twins were making little jumps.

"Well… yes, of course," Mr Weasley said, surprised with the sudden excitement.

"Ha! I'd love to make Ron ride a horse and sword fight because my voice is telling him too!" George said. "This is going to be so much fun!" Fred added and both twins were rubbing their hands. Protesting noises started to rise from the book, but George interrupted them.

"What characters are you guys?" he asked.

"We think Ron and me are princes, and Hermione a princess," Harry said.

"Ron's a prince?" George whistled. "Does that mean he's going to be king?" he added enthusiastically.

"Well, I guess-" Harry started, but the rest of his sentence wasn't heard because Fred en George broke into loud singing.

"Weasley is our king! Weasley is our king!" they sang, performing a little dance. In the illustration, Mr Weasley saw Hermione, Ron and Harry look at each other as if Hagrid had just entrusted a Blast-Ended Skrewt to their care, and collectively the four of them heaved a very deep sigh…