Chapter 7 'Are we on to something?'

For the longest time nothing happened in Lovegood's head—not that he was conscious of time. Nothingness occupied him sole to dome. He'd not be able to recall why later, but the experience altered him. For the rest of his days—scant though they'd prove—he was aware of a new aspect to his personality that haunted the margins of his thoughts and textured the darknesses between them: a hum or resonance that seemed in sympathy with a looming exterior truth, as though the lacuna between moments had thumped a psychic tuning fork deep in the seat of his soul, as though he'd been dosed a sample of the beyond.

But then in a wink of germination a notion stirred and the nothingness dissolved in an effluence of dreamy image: he is underneath, elemental, a crisis of light and water and extremely old writing: a seed activated. Primordial magic. What am I? seemed a crude question to put to such a simple machine, but the answer emerged easily enough: I am. Life cracks a seed's hull—from one moment to the next an irreversible rupture between states. The husk sprouts tendrils that cleave earth in a sniffing pursuit of water.

What monumental weight this tiny drama contained!

He became excited. The locks dreaming had hung on his eyelids unlatched and fell away, admitting a fuzzy golden aura from which he resolved the unlikely picture of an antique female house elf in a bejeweled turban. Her vast eyelids fluttered, her hands were all over his head, her wide lips softly vibrated over an echolalic current of mumbles.

Lovegood spiraled back into his mind and body.

'Love-good,' she said—perhaps had been saying—over and over, 'come...UP!'

He startled all the way awake. Beyond the overlooming head of the old house elf a flotilla of saucer-borne candles bobbed in air. Stunned, he inhaled a dizzying bouquet of aromas: foreign spices, weird must, rancid sweetness. The nimbus of flickering candlelight illuminated the actors while leaving their stage for the most part in mystery. Occasional movements of the flames suggested that maybe stone walls were decked with drying flowers and bundled herbs, maybe plate glass windows let out on a scape of moonswept clouds. He couldn't be sure. He was too confused to see and think clearly. He lay flat on his back upon a poofy ottoman. The elf withdrew, just, removing her hands from his head.

'Where am I?'

'London,' she said, emphasizing both syllables. She spread her spindly right hand over the chest of her simple yellow dress and Lovegood saw that it had a few too many fingers. 'I is Toucher.' She inclined her head towards him in greeting, turban shifting precariously. 'High Obliviator, Ministry of Magic. Lovegood is on the second floor.'

'Second floor of the Ministry? But—'

Toucher extended a trio of forefingers to quiet him. 'Friends found Lovegood, brought him hence. It has been a time. What is his last remembory?'

Lovegood became aware of his racing heart. He ratcheted up onto his elbows, swung his legs over the side of the ottoman and stood. Was he going to be sick? Nothing since fifth year then twice in two days? It welled up in surges. Sweat greased his forehead. He lurched toward a probable corner, chanced upon a waste bin and heaved for a while, not producing much. When he'd finished he took the hanky Toucher extended. 'Thanks,' he said, trembling.

'His last remembory?'

He cleared his throat, tried to get a hold of himself. 'You say you're an obliviator?'

When she nodded the headdress slid this way and that. 'Memory's a medium,' she said, 'is mine, and his is all at sixes and sevens.' She knocked on his forehead, not gently. 'Someone has been at play in there…'

Oh no, Lovegood thought. He'd managed to keep his 'peculiar correspondent' a secret thus far and had dreaded the day of his discovery.

She enfolded his hand in hers and guided him back to the ottoman. 'Be sat, young one. Now say to Toucher, tell Toucher, give us thy last remembory…?'

He sat and took a deep breath. 'I was in the library with my friends.'

The elf appeared pleased. 'Books in a hive,' she said.

'I saw the Headmistress. We went up to the seventh floor together.'

'Flight of the tall woman!'

'I went to the owlery to send a letter.'

'The sky cats Toucher has seen.'

'Then…then class—Inspector Darby's class.'

Toucher adopted a squeaky, girlish voice: ' "Help me mother, I've fallen for a Slytherin…" '

'That's etched into the table!'

She leaned in. 'Then?'

But this was blurry for Lovegood. 'We had an argument,' he realized.

She sniffed him. 'Yes…?'

'I, I questioned him. I thought I'd found something that disproved his theory.'

'What theory? What disprove?'

'Something about a shoe or, or a boot… We were interrogating objects, and Phineas brought over a busted pocketwatch, and then it was just the two of us—Darby and me—alone in the room. He was yelling. I don't remember—'

The elf put her hands to work again, their dry, numerous digits splaying across his temple, warm against his ears and neck. 'Then?'

'I—I don't remember.' The elf's hands were terribly distracting. 'I think I, I think there was something after. Was I, was I walking down the hall…?'

'Hidden whispers,' said Toucher, breathing sharply through her nose, groping him, eyelids fluttering.

'Yes!' It was slippery as a dream, oiled figments gliding from his grasp the moment he had them. 'People talking,' he said. 'I couldn't see who.'

'What did they say?' She was swaying back and forth, as though to coax the memories out. 'What were they talking about?'

But he'd reached a wall. He let out a pent-up breath. Toucher parted from him. 'I don't know. It's like a, like an abyss. Everything falls off into it.' He looked around. 'Then I'm here.'

Toucher's eyes were eggs of living honey. They held him for a moment, then she lifted one of her unfathomable hands and snapped triply. The floating candles vanished and the darkness evaporated in a flood of lamplight. The ottoman was a stool and the mysterious room a bureaucrat's office hosting an audience of interested men. Looking on were Rupert Brood, Lector Darby, and a short chap familiar to Lovegood. He had skinny legs in pinstriped trousers and a paunch straining his vest, a bulbous red nose, thick, drooping mustache, sly eyes of steel blue and a well-traveled bowler. He idly twisted one end of his mustache while studying Lovegood, eyes fizzing with interest.

Darby stood with his back to the wall. He flicked his wand at the waste bin and a flume of orange magic presumably eradicated its contents. That done, he slipped the wand back into his vest. 'I can fill-in one of those blanks.'

Lovegood tried to take the sudden change of scenery in stride. As had become automatic for him over the years when confronting authority at a disadvantage, he asked himself what Duck would do. He'd go with sleepily polite or affronted dignity, probably. He aimed for the former. 'Would someone mind telling me what's going on?'

Brood was calmness and height. 'You were discovered at the foot of the Western Tower. Someone obliviated you. What has "oceans of the stuff"?'

'Excuse me?'

'What's "the stuff", and who is gee oh?'

Clueless, Lovegood smiled. 'I don't understand.'

Brood frowned. Darby addressed Toucher.

'I was leading the class through the mystery of the explosion that killed poor Brodie and Pennyboil in '28. Young Lovegood here decided he knew better. He developed a theory that Murdo Brodie made it out of the Three Broomsticks that day. Escaped.'

The mustachioed man spoke in an odd voice, a high, harsh whisper, as if some accident had befallen his vocal chords. He said, 'On what basis?' and Lovegood instantly knew him to be Richard Robards, the Headmistress's man of business. That was a comfort.

'On the basis that the shoe I had determined to have been worn by Brodie, discovered at the scene, had no memory of a foot.' As Darby went on, Toucher peered up at Lovegood with such avid attentiveness it was difficult for him to concentrate on the Inspector. He was bodily reminded of Briar's gaze at Ollivander's: it was as if—for certain witches—something about him evoked the irresistible allure of the nearly visible. 'He accused me of having leapt to the convenient conclusion that both men died in the blast.'

Robards grunted. 'Is that possible?'

Darby inflated. 'It is not impossible that I was wrong.'

Robards winked. 'Don't get shirty, Lec, only askin'.'

'Who are your enemies?' said Brood, trying another tack.

'I don't have any.'

'Come now. Who makes it seven years at Hogwarts without acquiring an enemy? And you're in your eighth...' His voice trailed off suggestively but Lovegood had no help for him.

'There is more,' Toucher announced, staring oddly at a point between his eyes, 'more amok in the lad's brains than merely the charm…' Her many-fingered hand floated closer and closer to his face, as though compelled. Her greenish finger pads glowed. 'Bewildersome magics…'

He flinched away from her.

'Indeed,' said Brood, 'there is more to this young man than meets the eye. Since finding myself sharing a billet with him I have become intrigued by a correspondence he seems to maintain—' and here he took from an interior pocket of his robe a sheaf of letters '—with himself.'

Bloodheat stormed Lovegood's cheeks and forehead. 'That's private.'

Darby perked, his eyebrows an arch of professional curiosity. He snatched the bundle from Brood and scrutinized it while the Auror considered the objection. 'Someone has practiced a dangerous spell on your person. A crime has been committed. We must exhaust every resource to discover who and why. Do you have anything to offer by way of explanation for what happened to you?'

Lovegood's face was tight as drying clay. 'No.'

'Will you explain this correspondence?'

He couldn't think of an answer that would render the letters irrelevant. Putting himself in their shoes, he'd want to read them too. 'Must so many be present, sir?'

Brood understood. 'As a matter of fact, as witnesses go, the present array is ideal. Mr Robards for Hogwarts, the High Obliviator and myself for the Ministry, Inspector Darby an illustrious and decorated citizen, unparalleled in the field of magical investigations. No, I'm sorry, Lovegood, but the violation of your privacy, howbeit unfortunate, is necessary. Now tell me,' he took the letters back from Darby, 'are they jinxed?'

His tongue was leaden. He shook his head, studied his feet, and heard the sound of Brood's fingers rifling through torn envelopes and withdrawing a folded sheet.

He couldn't bring himself to look but knew what they saw anyway. Pale light falling into space from the page, a spray of silent, fountaining luminosity, unhurried, no color one could name, blossoming, fanning out, drifting down in shimmering clouds, forming gradually into shapes that assembled themselves from the top down: a scene from the most personal inventory he kept, as though projected by his heart.

He used to number the letters as they came in, so it wasn't hard for the Auror to go in sequence. The scene oriented itself towards anyone in the room, meaning that all present in Toucher's office now looked out at the world as if directly from the perspective of a young Linus Lovegood, half-naked in a garden he'd just finished magically weeding with the wand he'd boosted from Aunt Lenora.

Not that they could know that, absent context. They just saw his legs and arms, fatless, filthy with toil, and at their own speed realized that what they were was a child pointing a wand directly at his own face. When the voice came it had a faded quality to it—a small, quavering soprano of no obvious origin, like an echo from a nightmare remembered on waking: 'I must never forget this instant.' A translucent tot of magic appeared on the wand's hewn end and was drawn out towards the eye of the beholder. Its edges shuddered as if in a wind, then, like an iron filing in magnetic thrall, it zipped into the foreheads of all present.

Between blinks the memory vanished. Lovegood looked up. Perhaps his presence would eventually challenge them, perhaps it would become too awkward to go on. For now Brood only returned his stare, intrigued. In his hands the page's luminescence died fading. At length he hmphed and looked round, but everyone was lost in their own contemplation. He returned the first to its envelope and opened the second.

The light formed an assemblage of hazy words clarifying slowly amid the spreading ivory waves of a book. The book sat on Linus's knobby, adolescent knees. Beneath a gothically elaborated 'Chapter One', it began: 'The precise instant Hortensia van Toccin's first child screamed its inaugural breath, every last window in Fellwater Estate quite blew out.' After this the sentences became illegible with forgetting.

The current Lovegood looked on, part of the exposé. Only after the text of the first Henrietta Hewlitt novel tilted back to reveal the letter held in the outstretched hand of his mother, Nedda, did he realize that nearly subliminal thumps of her footsteps had preceded.

His young hand reached out and took it. Was it obvious—from the lag of shock, say, between sight and understanding, understanding and action—that this, a letter addressed to him, was a first?

Busy in her own world per usual, Nedda tromped away. The envelope read:

Linus Lovegood

His room

Lovegood House

The unfolded page revealed a flower of rising light that cascaded up and out and transmogrified into: an imperfectly weeded garden; fatless limbs; a wand aimed at his forehead…

Young Lovegood gasped, closed the infernal thing and stuffed it back into the envelope. The reverse side showed:

Linus Lovegood

Da's Garden

Lovegood House

'What age were you then?' asked Darby.

'Ten.'

'And before?'

'Half that, I think.'

Between memories Toucher's eyes didn't stray from him.

The third was Lovegood at 12, making his way through a crowd of crowds. It was the Great Hall of Hogwarts and he'd just been sorted. He threaded through a crush of youths packed and buzzing round banquet tables laden with cornucopias. Off, Vito Warwind intoned names last then first, the Sorting Hat sorted, boisterous youths hoorahed, applauded, jeered and hissed. They arrived at Ravenclaw. A pink-mouthed lad with flouncy hair made a place for them. 'Relax, old boy,' he laughed, clapping Lovegood on the back, 'that hat knows its stuff. You're a Ravenclaw for keeps, I'm Ed Duck, and everyone here's your friend forever.'

A second passed after the scene vanished, then Robards' voice-of-air-and-effort dashed the silence: 'Moments of intensity, what? Is that it?'

Darby said, 'Was that your first magic, in the garden?'

'The weeding was,' he answered. He'd seen his father do it, and Carl Linnaeus—who was often sick—was that day due to come home from St. Mungo's. He didn't feel the need to volunteer this tidbit, however. Let the great Inspector fill in the blanks for himself.

'Then the subsequent spell,' Brood said, as the contents of the fourth letter bouqueted into Toucher's office, 'the charm against forgetting…'

'I made it up,' said Lovegood.

'And ever since you've been receiving magical letters from yourself?'

Lovegood nodded. 'I didn't know what I was doing.'

I still don't, he thought. It wasn't easy, actually, keeping a stiff upper lip while seeing Edwin again as he was that first time. An eruption of nerves drove him from the stool. He turned his back to the jury and pretended to surveil the office of the High Obliviator, helpless against the peculiar magical audio of his memories as Brood resumed the looting of his past.

He sits and does nothing while a classmate is ridiculed to tears.

He flubs his first transfiguration charm—everyone laughs.

It dawns on him he's made a friend.

Winning a tug-of-war match, he tumbles backwards onto Edwin.

Edwin pays him a compliment.

He vomits in Potions with Edwin sitting next to him.

In Dark Arts a Legilimens probes Edwin's mind.

Edwin whisperingly recruits him mid-class to join a raid on Gryffindor—

'I rather think that's enough, what?' said Robards. 'Don't you, Lec?'

Lovegood turned in time to see the end of this memory before it evaporated. Something had caught his ear. History of Magic with Professor Binns. Duck leaned across an aisle to sign him onto the stunt, but Lovegood still had Binns and the blackboard in frame. The elderly scholar's hand slightly trailed his voice, but while the somniferous drone was hard to make out over Duck's more local urging, the writing became perfectly clear as Binns stepped away.

It hung there for a moment in the air before evanescing. Lovegood shivered.

'I don't disagree,' said Brood, off Darby's shrug. 'The last two are quite recent, though. If any of them would have a bearing on the attack… This is the one I found waiting at Shambhala house.' But he paused. Even Lovegood hadn't opened it yet.

'It don't feel right, do it?' said Robards. No one spoke. The little man's eyes twinkled. He was the sort of person who could find any situation amusing, and did. 'What say the lad describes 'em to us?'

Brood's smoky brown eyes rose from the envelope. 'This one seems to have been written from the Windy Wicket?'

'It's a Quidditch tavern—in Hogsmeade, sir,' said Lovegood. Toucher's persistent gaze was hot on his skin.

'What will we find in here, son?'

'It's a bit hazy, sir,' he said, affronted dignity swelling, 'it was last day of term 7th year, and…well, we'd been celebrating, sir.'

'Ah, you see, Dicky?' Darby pipped. 'The boy doesn't recall himself!'

'Not to worry,' Brood slashed open the envelope with one neat swipe of a rather long fingernail. 'We're none of us strangers to firewhisky.'

It was a new memory and startlingly radiant. Of its own volition the page wriggled free and flung itself open. Brood barely managed to hang on as the memory geysered into air, a leaping phosphorescence. In short order the downfalling fluxion of magical light draped round the contours of who but Edwin Duck, arm in arm with our Lovegood, the two of them drunk and singing.

Nighttime. High Street. Students and graduates everywhere. Booms of spellcast fireworks off, their tracers showering down into frame. 'Our heads could do with filling,' they roared, 'with some interesting stuff. For now they're bare and full of air, dead flies and bits of fluff…!' They float out into the middle of the street and are nearly crushed by a crew of eight Hufflepuffs rowing a floating boat at speed. Their route out of danger gets them almost plowed down again by a team of Gryffindors a length behind. Lovegood's perspective followed the crews a moment, then again homed in on Duck, who was red with joy and spirits and grinning at him artlessly. 'Duck,' said Lovegood—as clear and present as a clapped bell, so clear he felt heads swing his way—and the scene lurched and he was closer, suddenly, so much closer, Duck's face filling Toucher's office five times, assessing five Lovegoods, 'Eddy…' he said, either building up to something or trying to make the word, the name, stand in for a hot mass of less easily articulable ideas.

Lovegood was aware of the term 'a pregnant pause.' The moment squeezed round him like a birth canal.

Duck took a step back. His smile froze and the set of his eyes changed—then he was himself again. Friendly old Duck. 'What hey, Lovegood, that's all right. Come on now. Let's to the 'sticks. I'll stand you a pint!'

Friendly old Duck.

The image obliterated. Lovegood was surrounded by people staring at him.

He examined the floor. His eyes were wet. He started breathing again.

He wanted to disappear, run, kill.

'Not particularly helpful,' Brood muttered, filing the letter away.

'That's enough,' said Robards, jocular, holding out his hand to Brood. 'Give 'em over, Rupert.'

The Auror lifted a bushy eyebrow. 'One remains unread.'

'S'all right. Seen enough. We all have. And it ain't your property, sir.'

Brood hesitated a moment and Robards snatched the letters from his hand. 'Come with me, lad,' he said to Lovegood, extending his arm and wrapping Lovegood under it protectively, chuckling the while. 'I shall brief the Headmistress on the state of our investigation. Now, unless Madam Elf has any objections…?'

Toucher inclined her beturbaned head in acquiescence.

Lovegood was swept along in Robards's gravity. Brood appeared back on his heels, surprised by the directness of the little mustachioed man's actions. Darby attended his pipe, and everyone shifted towards the door.

'I wonder what precisely I have just been shown…' the Inspector said abstractly, fixing the stem between his teeth.

'Surely you jest, Lec,' Robards said (hah-hah!), his steely paw on the small of Lovegood's back, guiding him. 'Surely you're not so removed from youthful enthusiasms as that!'

He opened the door and pushed Lovegood through into an ill-lit corridor. Two men walked in their direction, one chubby and diminutive and pursuing the other, who was lanky and impatient. They all came marginally to a halt together. The chubby one was shabbily dressed in wrinkled garments; the sort of person who looked from a distance like he probably stunk of liquor and, from close range, did. 'I'll use your name in the story, will I, Director Underata?'

'Reggie, have I ever consented to that?' replied the man Lovegood now knew was Uther Underata, the Director of Magical Law Enforcement and one of the most powerful men in Britain. He had long, tea-colored hair parted in the middle over an expansive brow, shadowed eyes, high craggy cheeks, a doorknocker proboscis and a sharp furze of stubble on his strong chin and above his lip. 'Rup,' he said, in a warm, raspy baritone, 'what are you doing here?'

Brood indicated Lovegood. 'Felonious obliviation at Hogwarts, Director. This is Linus Lovegood—the victim.'

'Of the Catchpole Lovegoods?'

'Yes, sir,' Lovegood said.

He rolled his eyes. 'Good luck with that clan, Rup. You don't require me, I hope?' As he asked Darby popped out of Toucher's office and he added: 'Ah good, I see it's well in hand.'

'Ta ta, Uther,' Robards breathed, shuffling Lovegood along. In a darker voice: 'Ta ta, Reggie.' Lovegood connected the dots: the smelly rumpled short chap was Reggie Roundsman, the Daily Prophet writer who had it out for McKinnon.

'Indeed, Director,' Brood was saying, 'I'm well fixed for help. Robards! You and the Headmistress will propose something regarding the final piece of evidence.'

'We will I'm sure, Rupert. Goodbye!'

'Rupert Brood?' Reggie said as they swept past him. 'I say, how convenient…!'

And then there was space between them—Robards and Lovegood and the rest—and with every step there was more.

୫

Robards popped the collar of his waistcoat and dipped his head, then jostled Lovegood down four broad flights of steps. As they descended into what must have been the primary Ministry plaza, an immense statue-in-progress came into view—or rather the privacy tent surrounding it did, from within which churned the racket of work. Lovegood would have very much liked to dawdle a bit and get a feel for the place but Robards tossed him like a dry log into an active fireplace—one of an arcade of them lining the side of a spacious atrium. 'Say skilamalink,' were his only instructions after lofting in a scatter of floo powder.

'Skilamalink?' Lovegood cried, alighting upon a mound of scorching cinders…

…and emerging on the other side hopping from a hearth with whorls of flame licking his shirt. He made noises, batted down the flames; clouds of soot puffed into the air. He wasn't new to the Floo Network but it was nice to be warned. To know one's destination, for instance.

Which, in this instance, could've been anywhere. Skilamalink? The flaring floo light revealed a humble, mostly earthen den. Low ceiling, close walls. A pauper's cottage. A weary armchair adorned a corner with a side table that had a tea cosy on it in the shape of a chicken. Robards stepped out of the fireplace and tied a hanky over Lovegood's eyes.

'Forgive me,' he said. 'None may know the way.'

He clutched the ball of Lovegood's elbow and for many minutes end to end and turn to turn led him through or out of or into some labyrinth.

He might have complained but Robards took the opportunity to soliloquize. 'Most peculiar day for you I know, lad. Storms of questions, I've no doubt. Who this, why that, so on. I can reconstruct to an extent. A student tripped over you coming in from luncheon, you see. Danderby? Ellerby? Danderbell? Know her? No, we thought not. A 3rd year, Hufflepuff, big strong chin, a bit bruised now but nothing permanent. Tripped she did on nothing at all at the foot of the steps. Not just obliviated, you see—invisible! Someone put a disillusionment charm on you! That said you weren't shunted off to one side or the other—my goodness you might've stayed there…well, hah hah, it could've been quite tragic indeed. But whomever knocked you down didn't bother moving you from the foot of the stairs, which perhaps was intentional, to make sure you were found, or perhaps they were just in a hurry. Anyhow Enderby or whatever her name is went straight to Professor Verdue, who revealed you. She took you to Nurse Pontefract. Nurse declared you obliviated! And the rest followed in train.

'Of course you understand the Headmistress is uncommon busy at the moment. Roundsman and all. That ponce Morris Longbottom. The new year just begun. She took the news gravely though, I assure you, oh very gravely indeed. "Thank Heavens Darby is here and knows him," she said, "Thank Heavens Brood." Well, we shall have a chat with her at length about these relations of yours, sir, oh yes we shall. And if I may say so myself, sir, one might do well to weigh more carefully in whom one places one's trust. But that is neither here nor there. The Ministry assigned Brood to you and the Headmistress assigned Darby.'

'Who assigned you?' Lovegood asked.

'I assigned me.'

They went up some stairs, down some stairs, stopped to unlock doors, to lock them shut behind. They went outside and in, down cobblestoned roads splashy with pools of rainwater, through stale rooms with rugs underfoot that absorbed sound. He couldn't tell the time of day. Finally they seemed to have settled on a course outdoors. Lovegood smelled smells, nose full of fresh air, skin kissed by it.

'Where are we going?'

'Shambhala, unless there is somewhere else you'd prefer to be.'

How was one supposed to act after being attacked? 'Am I in danger?'

'I doubt it very much. My surmise is that the obliviation quite neutralized you, and that you were left to be found. If you constituted a persistent risk, I doubt very much you'd still be here.'

Lovegood shuddered. 'Do you really think so?'

'Oh, who knows what I really think. Maybe that was my romantic imagination getting carried away. Maybe you chanced into some childish scheme hatched by underclassmen who then prosecuted overzealously. Though the issue of the obliviation charm does militate against it…'

'Why, because it was too sophisticated?'

'Just so, sir. Toucher is the finest obliviator in Britain. She's encountered more than her fair share of shot memories, sir, and she was not unimpressed with the quality of the work done on you. Peerless though our instruction at Hogwarts indisputably is, the work of a student it almost certainly was not.'

'Then a co-conspirator, an adult?'

'That would answer, yes.'

'They didn't make a scene and cancel classes, did they?'

'Oh no, sir, life goes on. My,' he laughed, 'if we canceled classes at the occasion of every magical assault, Merlin's beard, man, we'd never get anywhere.' He remembered himself, cleared his throat. 'Best not to spook the quarry either, if you take my meaning. That is the Headmistress's methodology. She is a most formidable huntress, you know. Ellabel or what have you—the chinny Hufflepuff—she'll have been impressed with the need for discretion, and Hufflepuffs are fierce good team players, as you no doubt know. A circle of faculty will be brought in if they haven't already and inquiries made of artworks and statuary in and around the West Tower and the area of the Inspector's class… We'll have a clearer picture anon, and when we do the Headmistress will set her snares.'

The Inspector, he thought.

An adult co-conspirator, he thought…

…but that was absurd.

'What's my part?' he said, uneasy.

'You have been stunned, obliviated, and disillusioned. Upon coming to you were treated questionably by a gang of so-called adults. None would look askance were you to take a little time to lick your wounds.'

Lovegood mulled this over. He wasn't sure what form wound-licking would take or how much rest he'd get at home, given his fifth-floor roommate.

They walked past a group of people.

'G'day, Richie,' said one, mildly quizzical.

'Hesper, Aloysius,' Robards responded.

After a moment, Lovegood ahemmed, 'Sir?'

'Mmm?'

'The handkerchief?'

'Cracking holly, man, I forgot!'

They stopped. Robards untied the hanky. Lovegood winked dazzlingly back into vision. Midday, cloudy. They were a bit east of town at the crossroads of High Street and Goblin Cove Road. It was a part of Hogsmeade that was all cottages of various colors dwarfed by stands of hazel and alder. Thatched roofs. Uneven cobblestones. Homebound witches and wizards here and there at their leisure and their chores. Crossbills flirted and gossiped from low branches. The cracked, tilting street sign jogged something in Lovegood's memory. 'The Stalwarts live on Goblin Cove, do they not?'

'They do at that, sir. Number 2. Right there.' He pointed to a hat box of a red brick house with a steep roof and prominent chimney, overgrown lawn randomly furnished with simple wooden chairs and desks, colorful flowering hedges wilding at the edges, and a bunch of willows hanging round stirring the shade.

He made a decision. 'I know the way from here. Thank you.'

'Ah-hah. Very well. That's you sorted, then. Here: your belongings.' He pushed into Lovegood's hand the bunch of letters.

Lovegood experienced a conflicted rush of emotions on taking them: relief, resentment, humiliation. Rupert Brood broke into his room for them. He broke into his room. Something about that didn't add up, but he was conscious of being too sideways to think about it plainly. He transferred the letters into his robe, and in so doing felt a difference—one page that was only a page, not an envelope. This he withdrew.

Lovegood, mon ami,

They have oceans of the stuff.

gO

Robards touched his hat, found his wand and made to disapparate.

'Wait,' said Lovegood, his mouth catching up to his thoughts. 'The Headmistress said you play cards with the Malfoys' man.'

That was unexpected. 'So I do, every chance I can.'

'She said she'd ask you to put me in touch with him. Did she mention it?'

Robards went to work on his mustache. 'Must have slipped her mind. But it certainly makes no difference to me. Munificent Barnes. Jolly apt name, too—you couldn't imagine a kinder man at poker. T'isn't even gambling, really… The family estate's in Wiltshire, and Muni's known to take a tot at the Stoned Henge weekdays at sundown. Is that all?'

Lovegood stared at him a moment. 'About those so-called adults,' he said, 'and my memories…'

'Ah.' Robards averted his eyes. 'It's nothing to me, sir.'

'It's just,' his heart fluttered, 'Eddy Duck and me…'

'You seem very good friends, sir—not that it's any business of mine. But,' he glanced up, 'friends keep secrets for each other, don't they? And isn't that exactly as it should be? Ta ta, Lovegood.'

Robards twirled and was gone with a crack.

୫

As Lovegood approached the house an old man came around the side pushing a wooden cart on creaky wheels. A sparse garden of white hairs stood up from his mottled pate. His baggy fern-green eyes regarded Lovegood with an air of shock that appeared permanent. What mass he had (it wasn't much) was draped beneath an archaic pale blue banyan that fell to midshin. He had on one desiccated old slipper and one lady's boot of pink leather with a column of hearts sewn in and false rubies studded here and there. The cart had nothing on it.

'Good day, sir,' said Lovegood, to no response. He pointed to the front door. 'Is this where the Stalwarts live?'

'Who wants to know?'

'Sorry, sir. Linus Lovegood, sir.'

Head tilted: 'Sir Linus, is it?'

'No,' he chuckled, 'just Linus.'

Nod of satisfied understanding: 'Sir Just Linus.'

'Well…actually…'

The old man set off pushing the cart round the house.

Lovegood was only a stride from the door. A goblin-head knocker depended from a much-dented strike plate. The word Stalwarts had been etched into the top above a painted seal of Hogwarts. The seal was funny: where the capital-H traditionally sat in the center, its corners taking bites from the animals of the four houses, was a black Manx cat instead.

The old man completed his circumnavigation amazed by Lovegood's presence.

'I'll just knock then, will I?'

The door was ajar and floated open right away. 'Hello?' he called, creaky cart squeaking on behind him.

'Welcome!' someone answered, as if expecting him. 'Do come in!'

It shouldn't have surprised Lovegood that the house was larger on the inside. He walked into a tastefully appointed parlor with several rooms off and three walls of packed bookshelves. A heatless, magical fire played in a slender corner hearth. Sprawling Oriental rug, pile smothered with age. A little terrier with big, pricked ears peaking up from a curtain of silvery topcoat panted gently on a fainting couch next to Antonia Antiquarius, who sat behind a canvas-loaded easel.

'Impeccable timing, young man. Please sit.'

She waved a long, gracefully swooped wand and a chair hurtled against the back of Lovegood's knees. He sat in a heap. Another wave and a heavy-bottomed facet-cut wine glass whooshed into his left hand, followed closely by a crystal decanter that unstoppered and glugged him out a liberal portion.

'I'm Antiquarius. Don't bother introducing yourself; I couldn't possibly remember another thing.' The years had wicked away at her, and it was a wonder she still had foundation enough to uphold her bursting crown of iron gray curls. Nevertheless there she sat in a well-loved cream taffeta robe, eyes blearier now than he recalled but still sapphires in the soft, wrinkled down of her face, small head honing to a tapered chin, nose warting a bit: a witch twelve decades in the making.

'I was in your class, ma'am.'

'I doubt that,' her smile revealed an out-of-synch chorus line of browning teeth. 'You are too young to have been in my class.'

'1689, I meant, ma'am.'

'You insult me, sir.'

'No—sorry—that was the name of the class you taught me. Around, oh, must have been five years ago, ma'am.'

'Too many numbers! Shall we begin?'

'What are we doing, ma'am?'

'Portraiture!'

'Oh, I couldn't—' he rose to a half-stand.

The terrier emitted a single decisive yap.

'Sit, sit! Don't get Bobby worked up, please, or we'll never hear the end of it.' She signaled with her wand to a closed door over her left shoulder, and as she did a man emerged there from a faintly glowing room alive with roiling smoke. He had starchy red-gray curls under a tasseled fez, an eyepatch, and a confusing waistcoat stiff with gold braid.

'Madam,' he said, rouged with ire, 'if you cannot silence your beast, I shall kick him into the air! INTO THE AIR!' He slammed the door and a rectangle of smoke whoomfed out through the edges.

'Never mind the Admiral,' said the Professor, addressing the terrier's underchin with her free hand. 'Always threatening Bobby.' The pink of Bobby's tongue cleaved the screen of topcoat. 'The admiral's all fronts, isn't he, Bobby? Now then…' she squintingly studied Lovegood for a moment, wand poised over canvas, then addressed it with a bold introductory swipe.

Lovegood sat.

The cart continued its squeaky circuit round the house.

It was a superb and delicate red, actually. Italian, he guessed.

'Did you enjoy my class, sir?' Antiquarius asked, after a moment. She wasn't interested but Lovegood was relieved by the chance to talk.

'It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life, ma'am. Gave me direction.'

'Did it? How stunning.'

'Actually I came here today hoping to talk to you.'

'Doing quite well so far, aren't you?'

'Only I recently discovered that you were a Secret Chief, ma'am. I'm one myself. Am I correct that you spent some time in Shambhala's attic, ma'am?'

She warmed some at the cavalcade of details pertinent to her life. 'You are.'

'Did you ever happen to encounter a ghost there?'

Though she'd been looking at him more or less intently the whole time, something in her posture changed: amused suspicion flitted in. 'Fishing for a graduate focus, are we?'

Lovegood hoped the smile had more winning in it than hopeless. 'Desperately.'

She did a curt nod and returned to painting. 'They called him Finbar, but I don't believe that was his name.'

'He told me he'd only ever revealed himself to one other—'

'Lies,' Antiquarius snapped. 'He told everyone the same thing.' She dropped into a masculine register: ' "You have the smell I like. All my family were born with it." '

She had the smell I like, Finbar'd said. She was born with it. She made that mark.

'They can't smell, can they?' he asked.

'Oh I doubt it, but who finally is to say? Is smelling a part of taste and touch, which they can't do? Or is it something else, like talking and hearing and seeing, which they can? Anyhow, I don't think he was being literal. I think he thought we were related.'

'As in blood relations, ma'am? Did you look? Did you find a family connection?'

'The awkward truth is we've actually just a thimble of a pool when it comes to magical family lines, dear. If not for mudbloods and halfbloods we'd all be intermarried to imbecility within a few generations. As a consequence, it's harder to prove that someone isn't a cousin than that someone is. And my own blood has borrowed at one time or another from most of the great names in wizardry—not to brag, sir, I assure you. We are most of us descended from the same mighties. But there's just no telling with ghosts. They lie.'

What she was born with you're just borrowing—or something to that effect. That's what Finbar told him. What had he been doing? What could Finbar have meant by that?

He'd just come back from the Forbidden Forest, just parted from Gerry…

'Forgive me for prying, ma'am, but have you any Ollivander ancestors?'

'Only masses of them, love. Mother Antiquarius was born Gertrude Ollivander. Her father, Gerald, was kin to the Ireland Ollivanders who established in Cork. Look down again.'

'Ma'am?'

'Look down, please.'

He did.

She said: 'Unfortunately the records of the Irish Ollivanders are a mess.'

Lovegood swirled an eddy into his wine. 'There's a quotation on the attic ceiling—'

She halted a brush mid-stroke and closed her eyes. ' "I've in mind a land that's washed away." '

A sustained grumble of thunder unpacked itself just over Hogsmeade. Lovegood tried to contain his excitement. 'Was that you, ma'am?'

The professor opened her left hand and a wine goblet arced into it from a side table. 'I only wrote it. The sentiment was expressed by the warlock Nightless Day.'

'Professor, do you know what that referred to? That quotation? Could it have anything to do with the artist Andrew Vandal's False Dawn?'

The goblet gentled itself back from whence it came and the professor resumed painting. 'Have you come here to make me instruct you again, Linus Lovegood?'

He hadn't quite heard her. 'Ma'am?'

'With the possible exception of Merlin, and I do not say this lightly, Britain's never made a wizard more powerful than Nightless Day. There's a story that when he first got to Hogwarts, a boy of 11, he was asked, "But where is your wand?" ' She smiled. 'He said he'd already finished with wands. No longer had any use for them.' She sunk her free hand into Bobby's ruff; his tail thwapped the couch. 'Imagine that,' she said to the dog.

'I heard he obliviated all London, ma'am. Could that possibly be true?'

She shrugged. 'If anyone could…' She took a short breath, straightened and returned to the canvas. 'Actually it's rumored he had a rival, but the name's been lost to history. When I was studying him—a century ago, I suppose—that kept popping up. A rival, a nemesis, a foe. But,' her cloudy eyes smiled, 'I gather he won that round, too. In the end, only Day could finish Day.'

'How do you mean, ma'am?'

'He went mad. Didn't you know?' She pointed her wand towards a wall of bookshelves and a slim volume wriggled free and sailed to Lovegood.

At first he thought she'd made a mistake, and he boggled at how a flimsy, hysterically illustrated penny dreadful could've found its way into the Stalwarts library. But then he saw the title: The Long Night of Nightless Day, in silly, dripping, dramatic type above a close-up woodcut of a wizard howling in a straitjacket, insanity gleaming his eyes, hallucinatorily agape mouth an aperture into some endless, unimaginable horror. Printed 1830 by Q.E. Mouse & Sons, no author listed.

He turned to the first page and encountered a great block of prose beginning thus:

The start ever has the finish in it and the finish isn't ever over. More's hid in light than dark. Gove in the trees never did touch the, show me Gove, can you? Get off don't if you loved me you wouldn't— Oh bring us a dog, a mean cur to munch the cats. Its awful nested lives. Find me a Gove in the trees, bring us some tea, catch me up, hold on. I am a married man. Please douse the lights, please, please, won't you douse them?

'What is this?' He looked up and caught the Professor leaning in towards him as her wand blurred over the canvas. Some aspect of his perplexity had captured her.

'The ravings of an original mind ripping itself apart.'

'Who…compiled it?'

'Alas, the publisher sold in '51—to a Muggle outfit, of all things. Binned most of the catalogue, did the Muggles. So…an orderly at St Mungo's seems as good a guess as any. But no telling now, and I am too old to investigate…'

'Professor,' Lovegood scooted up in the chair—

'Avast the forward motion!'

He belayed, slid back. 'Does the name Ann Susurro mean anything to you? Or the word Brindlestick?'

She paused, spelunked into the vast cavern of her memory, and returned with a blank shake of the head.

'I have a memory of Professor Binns mentioning a Susurro during lecture, and a fellow Secret Chief recently discovered in a very old Japanese text a mention of a witch by the name of Ann Susurro who'd come from what the author called the fifth house of Hogwarts, which he called Brindlestick. This was in Day's day—his time, that is—and the story, what little we've gleaned of it…well it isn't possible no one knows about it, ma'am. Not if it's true.'

Antiquarius frowned. 'Japanese, you say?'

'Yes,' Lovegood expelled a sigh he hadn't known he was keeping in. 'And it's entirely possible there are translations errors galore.'

'There usually are… Did you say Binns?'

'As in Cuthbert, ma'am, professor of history.'

'Is it Wednesday?'

'Yes.' Lovegood drained the wine. 'No, Thursday.'

'Good, Cutty plays draughts with the Admiral Wednesdays.'

'But it's—'

The Professor pinched Bobby's nearest ear, eliciting a solitary yap.

Commotion ensued behind the door aft Antiquarius, which swung open, flinging a quantity of tumbling smoke. The Admiral's face was red hot. 'MADAM!'

'Oh Cutty!' she sang. A chair groaned its complaint across a floor, the Admiral mopped his livid brow, and a stooped relic of a gentleman appeared in the doorway. He had half-moon glasses perched on his nose and an abundant fringe of white hair beneath a bald cone of head. The Admiral begrudged a step into the parlor to make room.

'Lovegood,' Binns acknowledged, expressionless, 'how are you.' His eye fell at once to Antiquarius's painting—the artist's wrist from Lovegood's perspective a frenzy of tiny strokes.

'Cutty,' said the artist, 'the boy here tells me you once lectured about a Susurro or a witch named Susurro. Does that ring a bell?'

The hunched old fellow engaged in a blinking and thinking routine that involved adjusting his posture a few times and hemming sounds. Outside, a strong wind molested chimes and, from one moment to the next, rainfall declared itself. 'History of Magic 17th Century,' he said at last, 'Yes, I remember. The lad was in third year, no doubt.'

'The question isn't if you remember teaching him, Cutty, it's if you remember what was taught?'

Professor Binns smiled disbelievingly. 'But surely the lad took notes.'

'Of course I did, sir,' Lovegood assured him. 'Only I don't have them just to hand. Could you refresh my memory, please?'

Binns' visage froze. His eyes did some work. His smile hardened in the other direction. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked to the ceiling. He gave his old man's throat a juicy clearing. 'History of Magic, 17th C. Chapter F., International; section 3, Trends & Rumblings; subsection iv, the Subcontinent…' as it became clear that Binns had been activated the Admiral exhaled steamily through his nose and found a seat in the parlor. Lovegood saw as he cleared the couch that he wore an actual sword. Antiquarius winked at Lovegood and stroked Bobby. Bobby purred huskily, tail thwapping. The creaking of the orbiting cart had stopped or been masked by the weather.

'Found in the great Thar Desert of India, 1623, by the Vedic sorceress Yamuna, a world-traveler, graphomaniac and cartographer of ley lines: a carcass said to possess a remarkable affinity to quote Susurro, that most powerful of England's witches unquote. News of which reaches England by way of Potions Tourney, 1624. Novel because who is Susurro. Educational merit: who is Yamuna; what is Vedic; what are deserts? Mystery because who is Susurro. Mentions elsewhere: none. Body: deceased. Cause of decease; unknown. Time of decease: unknown. State of corpse: pristine.' He stopped the pacing he'd not realized he'd begun, looked confused for a moment to not find a blackboard nearby, then turned and lifted his eyebrows at Lovegood.

'Poppy's Japanese source came for the Potions tourney,' he said, lodging elbow on knee and chin in hand, 'but in 1554.' After a moment's reflection he lifted up his empty glass, but the decanter didn't oblige. He looked up.

Antiquarius had stopped painting. 'Day went to India in 1624,' she said. 'No one knew why. The trip was undertaken in haste, in secrecy, and he didn't stay long. When he came home,' she shifted her gaze to the Admiral, 'he started going mad.'

Lovegood felt a tingling thrill open in him like a secret book—one he wasn't supposed to have, one nobody'd ever read. He watched the old people do significant looks. The Admiral wanded a tome from the shelves and opened to a particular page. 'Toni,' he said, 'Nightless Day judged Potions '24. What if some traveler from India… What if this Yamuna herself competed? What's this mean?' He plucked the eyepatch back, revealing an ordinary brown eye. 'Are we on to something?'

'But it doesn't work,' Lovegood said. 'Poppy's source said Susurro was burned for corruption by English wizardry years before—in 1554!'

None of the shock and disbelief that attended this detail in the Shambhala dining room met it here. Rooms full of historians, Lovegood figured, weren't as a rule caught off guard by barbarity.

'Is it possible he's the one who had her burned?' he asked.

'We weren't so official, then,' Binns intoned. 'Castlemore headed the Council in '54. The decision would have landed on him, but I daresay he'd not have done without Day's blessing. Hogwarts, then as now, is its own power center, and Day had Hogwarts. Come to think of it, that may even have overlapped with his tenure at the Wizengamot… On the other hand, how could this have happened and we not know? A burning, even? Goodness, it isn't as if the Castlemore regime was a hole in wizarding history. We know the names…or at least I thought we did.'

Bobby yawned and hopped from the fainting couch to the floor to the Admiral's lap.

The Admiral removed his fez and the red-gray curls went with it, revealing the standard issue mottled bald pate of an old man. He pet the dog.

'You burn a witch,' said Antiquarius. 'Your life-long rival, maybe. Your nemesis. You burn her for corruption and—somehow—erase the record, then seventy years later discover her body in pristine condition half a world away. Do you know? I might go crazy too.'

The cart-pusher crashed through the front door.