Right, kids, this is actually where it stops getting complicated. It's all Potter working the problem after this chapter; peak weird is done; Patrick McGoohan has left the building. If you desire explanatory spoilers look to the bottom of the Author Profile page.

Note: I went to all the trouble of timestamping each section and got the timestamps wrong. Fixed! —Ed.

#

I don't want to give a definition of thinking, but if I had to I should probably be unable to say anything more about it than that it was a sort of buzzing that went on inside my head.
— Alan Turing

I met her at the World's Fair in 1900, marked down from 1940.
— E.Y. Harburg¹

#

Interlude: Seeding A Plant, Part Trois.

3:02 PM Saturday, in the Gryffindor common room:

When the Potter, the Longbottom and the Myrtle arrived they found a comfortably tired Percy Weasley crammed into a chair with his feet up on a hassock, armed with tea and newspaper.

"Hello, Potter," said the Perfect Prefect, who looked like he'd had a stone removed from his shoe. "Sorry I was a bit short with you earlier — got dragooned into helping with the school's codex upgrade — scrolls should have been at the rebinders in Ottery St Catchpole last week — everything's been delayed since the floo network glitched and started directing Ottery St Catchpole traffic to Toseland St Agnes." He paused to breathe and then sipped his tea. "Was that self-important? No, it was. So, any luck finding the old esplumeor, then?"

"Ah — yes!" said the Potter brightly, raising an indicative finger. "Yes, found it straight away, but he wasn't in."

"Tch! Isn't that always the way?" said Percy, raising his Daily Prophet into reading position. "Once Dad took me all the way to Devon for a pediatrician's appointment and he was out, too. Oh, incidentally, Fred and George are looking for you. Don't know why, it's safer not to ask. They just went up into your dormitory."

"Ah, my chocolate frogs have come in!" said the Potter. "I shall collect them immediately, thank you."

"I don't think he believed you about Merlin," said the Longbottom as they ascended the stairs.

"Well, no matter," said the Potter over his shoulder. "Probably shouldn't noise it about, anyway; if the world's best wizard does pop back in, he won't appreciate finding his nasturtiums trampled by hoi polloi."

"Who would I tell?" said the Longbottom. "Anyway he didn't have any nasturtiums."

#

2:30 PM Saturday, upside down in a tree in Merlin's esplumeor:

The Potter turned a page, and continued reading aloud from his book of fairy-tales.

Herakles was weeping quietly in a garden grove next to sleeping Omphale when a wizard passed by.

"And what's wrong with you, O muscled mope?" said the wizard, idly tying and untying the ends of a bit of string.

"Blackouts," said Herakles. "How can I enjoy such sweet slavery to the Queen of Lydia when so often I wake up to find I've thrown someone off a building? It's really getting me down."

"You're Herakles," said the wizard, unraveling his bit of string. "You've rescued people from the underworld before."

"As has been said," the hero observed not without bitterness, "Atropos always takes her cut."

"Ah," said the wizard, making a cat's-cradle out of his threads, "but if the Fates are in charge, then the Fates are to blame, not you."

"That is so," mused Herakles. "And yet it is the instrument that is bloodied, not the wielder. I am still entangled; what of the dead?"

"Take them all fruit baskets," murmured Omphale, "and do it now, for Lydia is trying to sleep."

"You should marry that girl," said the wizard.

And thus did taking satsumas to the underworld become the First Voluntary Labour of Hercules.

"Footnote," read the Potter. "Herakles did marry Omphale, and they had a bouncing baby boy named Tyrsenus who later invented the trumpet."

"Is that really what it says?" said the Longbottom.

"I embellish only slightly," said the Potter, and blew fitfully at a butterfly. (He was in a Japanese maple, the yellow-barked kind with pink leaves that draw butterflies like the pink leaves of yellow-barked Japanese maples and basically nothing else.) "Footnote two — originally it was golden apples, but some scholars say apples were actually satsumas in those days."

He tried to flip back to the contents, but the stiff title page didn't want to cooperate, leaving him looking at the dedication and bookplate again—

TO MY PARENTS
All stories are written,
but not all stories are read
and fewer still lived.

From The Library Of
Nicholas Flamel,
DMA, MD, &c.
14 Canterbury Lane
Westward Ho!

"Anyone want to hear another one?" he said.

"To be honest," said the Longbottom, who was in a rope swing-seat on the other side of the tree, "I didn't hear all of the last one."

"What are you looking at?" asked the Myrtle, who was floating nearby. It was a rhetorical question; it was very obvious what the Longbottom was looking at.

"With the sun behind you you're all glowy," said the Longbottom. "Like a stained glass window. Except you even make rainbows."

"I hate rainbows," said the Myrtle. "They look like they're waiting to have someone draw eyes over them to turn them into frowny-faces."

"But rainbows don't go just up and down, they go around and around."

"Even worse," said the Myrtle.

"Actually," said the Potter, who was discovering a shameful fondness for pedantry, "they're discs, not circles — not discs, hyperdiscs, well, spheres anyway. They radiate from a center you can't see and they never really stop."

The Myrtle bobbed up and down thoughtfully.

The Potter closed the book—

A Nice and Proper Mythology
For Little Witches and Wizards
by Silvia Eventi

—sat up, grabbed the branch with one hand, dropped one leg and fell gracefully to the ground. "All right, then, if you're not going to pay attention you should go and not pay attention in school, where it's traditional. I don't think Merlin's going to show up anyway, he's probably off on Saturdays.

"Now, where did I leave my socks?"

"In your shoes?" suggested the Longbottom.

"And those?"

"In Merlin's office," said the Myrtle. "Don't you pay any attention to what you're doing?"

"Of course not. Nobody should pay attention to what I'm doing. Oh, and Neville — don't throw those apple cores away. Cores are good."

He ran barefoot through the short and sweet grass back to the hut...

#

12:30 PM Saturday, under an orange tree in a small forest in Merlin's esplumeor:

I want to do something new and exciting, thought the Potter, lazily discarding an orange peel. Something I've never done before...

...I know!

I'll take a nap!

#

11:20 AM Saturday, in Merlin's garden:

"Lunaria annua, Linum usitatissimum, Coreopsis grandiflora," murmured the Longbottom, continuing his ticking-off of the contents of Merlin's garden.

"Coreopsis — isn't that a poem?" said the Myrtle.

"I don't think so...Lonicera periclymenum, Helianthus annuus — Rosaceae caeruleus!"

"Rosawhatsis?"

"Blue roses," said the Longbottom, looking up at the girl overhead. "Jeanette Calvados is still bragging on her Demeter Award for creating blue roses, and they've been growing here since when?

"—Now that's funny..."

At the heart of Merlin's vast garden was something that looked like a radially-sliced cheese sampler, twelve feet wide and made of flowers. In its very center was a blue glass mirror ball: half-silvered, so that when he looked into it, the Potter could see everything: the people who stood behind him, the inside of the ball, and what lay beyond it, all tinted faint indigo.

"I mean, out of season, yeah," said the Longbottom, walking around the flowery disc in puzzlement, "belongs in a greenhouse or a refrigerator, okay, but...huh."

"Define huh," said the Myrtle. "And what do you consider funny? People have strange ideas about funny, I know that."

"It's a flower clock," said the Longbottom. "A Linnaeus flower clock. But it's stopped." He glanced up at the sky. "By that sun, real or not, it's something like half past noon. Passionflower shouldn't be open — the four o'clocks are three hours fast — the evening primrose shouldn't open until six."

"Somebody set the clock ahead?" suggested the Potter.

"The lapsana and prickly sow-thistle should have closed hours ago. I don't even want to think about the night-blooming cereus."

Sounds like a cereus problem, said the Potter, in a test version of reality that didn't go very far. "Ah," said he in the production-ready version. "Well — magic?"

"What's the point of a flower clock magically stopped at every o'clock?"

"We'll ask Merlin, if he ever turns up," said the Potter. "We're running out of places to look. Myrtle, could you give us a bit of the old...above and beyond?" He waved his hands in upwards spirals.

She looked down at him. "What, you want me to go flying?"

"Yeah!"

"Just because I'm a ghost? That's so...ist."

"Ist?"

"Spiritualist is already taken. It's some kind of ist."

"How about superheroist?"

She tilted her head thoughtfully (32 degrees) and then rose decisively up into the air.

"Apple trees," she said, looking down, "pear trees, orange trees, ponds, lawn, some fences, a little raincloud...and then it just sort of stops. It's like the sky curves d— ow! —own."

"Dowown?"

"I hit my head on something!" complained the Myrtle. Rubbing her head with one hand she ran the other across an apparent surface located some thirty feet above the ground. "How can I hit my head on anything? I'm a ghost!"

"It's a created space," said the Potter. "You didn't hit your head on something, or even anything, you hit it on nothing. It's topologically impossible for you to rise higher."

"What about the sky?" said the Myrtle. "What about the sun? Oh, right, it's like the ceiling in the Great Hall...only with heat. Or is it just my embarrassment I feel?"

"Did you see any people walking around down here? Other than the usual suspects."

"No," she said, and descended.

"Ah, well. Might as well have lunch then." He pointed in the direction of the grove of fruit trees. "Fancy a picnic in the grove? Those apple trees look like they actively want to give a demonstration of gravity, no point in letting them go to waste." Like to ask Merlin about that...gravity: where does he get it? Is is a deliverable? ...how does he pay?

"Fruit won't do me any good," said Myrtle, with just a hint of sulk.

"I'm not sure about that, actually," said the Potter. "If you're a psychic phenomenon, you might actually be able to read minds. You two could try putting your heads together..."

#

11:17 AM Saturday, on Merlin's back porch:

There were crystal merlins — the model-bird kind — hanging from strings attached to the ceiling of the porch roof, twinkling in the apparently perpetual noon.

"I love magic," declared the Potter, stepping out of the hut and giving one of the birds a light touch, sending it swinging back and forth.

"Who doesn't?" said the Longbottom, as though the Potter had professed a certain degree of affection for breathing.

"No, I mean it. These birds? Started out as a sort of modeling clay. Guess what kind of crystal they are now."

The Longbottom contemplated the crystal birds. "Quartz?"

"Bearing wizard psychology in mind?"

"Diamond?" said the Longbottom.

"Excellent guess!" said the Potter. "Exactly the sort of thing a wizard would do — take a bit of polyvinyl chloride and crank it up to 10 on the Mohs scale. Why? Who knows. Good for making unbreakable worse than supertoys that don't last the endless summer long. Excellent guess — but wrong."

"Not diamond?"

"Nope. Rectified lonsdaleite, according to what I just read on a card in there." And of course in some other books he didn't care to admit to having read for fear of being deemed a showoff. "On a scale of 1 to 10: 15.8, possibly much higher. When turning it up to eleven just isn't good enough, call in Merlin. Now, what have we back here?"

Behind Merlin's hut was a very large garden that extended into a grove of fruit trees; to each side of the grove was a body of water edged by ferns. ("Osmunda regalis," said the Longbottom. "I think.")

"Think he's gone fishing?" said the Potter, looking from pond to pond.

"I think we'd see him, unless he's invisible," said the Longbottom. "He might be on his hands and knees in the garden, and I'd like to get a look at that...well, Merlin too I suppose."

#

11:07 AM Saturday, in Merlin's front and only room:

"Blimey," said the Potter, looking around Merlin's office. "Bit of a symbolic narcissist, wasn't he?"

Merlins, merlins, merlins - if merlins were words, there'd have been more than Hamlet would have been able to cope with: birds, welsh ponies, hybrids of the two, painted, sculpted, papier-mache; there was even one made of glued-together lentils, hanging from a string on the ceiling (that one had a sort of constipated look on its face, as though it were trying to lay an egg in midflight, but there's only so much you can do with beans as a medium). On the windowsill a whole spectrum of pony merlins stood, gleaming glassily like water caught mid-ripple.

"Narcissist? Harry!" said the Longbottom. "He was the greatest wizard ever!"

"Didn't say he didn't earn it," said the Potter. "I'm sure he could take a valid criticism rather than offense. Besides, if he turns up burned up I'm wearing a Slytherin tie." He stroked his tie. "Smooths everything out, like the right kind of spats." Mem: get a pair of spats.

There was a big mirror hanging opposite the window, and come to notice it the window was on the wrong wall, relative to where it had been on the outside, but that couldn't be helped. Under the window hung a blue-lacquered banjo. Under the mirror was a desk; under the desk was a utilitarian backless padded and wheeled stool.

The desk was neat, in its way, with hinged plates of glass that covered the scattered, largely illegible notes written forward and backwards on various bits of paper in various languages.² To the rear of the hinges, stacked up against the wall, were old highly magical reference books: The Working of Worms by Milton H. Cudworth; Colonel Gardner's Collected Appendices; Raising Flowers Indoors by Eccolo Eccoti; Pippi In Space by Astrid Lindgren; On the Natural Resonance of Crystals by Segreti Svelati; and Asenion Izzard's Encyclopedia of Everything Else (volume 42, Topiary-Topopoeia).

Other than the books, the only object on the desk was a decorative dual-level Lazy Susan, with a merlin (welsh pony type) for a handle, the whole business crusted with eye-poking aquamarines. The Potter took mild affront at this; as a wizard, one should hold out for emeralds in these matters. Maybe it was salvaged equipment, or of sentimental value only: it certainly seemed to be broken, as it didn't rotate when pushed. Its top held various labeled bottles — eye of newt, C. zeylanicum, F. carica, T. praecox — and on the bottom sat a fluid-filled glass jar labeled Gaudeamus. Tucked under the jar was a 5x8" recipe card, which, when untucked, also read Gaudeamus, continuing on the second line with For The Permanent Fixation Of Sophia's Compound and Similar Materials into Rectified Lonsdaleite.³

Opposite the desk was a mysterious cupboard, for which the Potter discovered a strange and terrible affinity. It was a violet shade of blue. Ah, he thought, well then, it's the owner's fault. You can't go around painting your cupboards the actual colour of mystery and then complain when people go poking their pneumatic organs in them, that colour of paint should itself be criminal, resulting in a fine for taunting with intrigue.

At right angles to desk and cupboard was the door to the back porch, through the glass of which could be seen the bright yard and its greenery.

"Maybe he's working out back?" said the Longbottom. He opened the door and moved out onto the porch, followed by the Myrtle.

Oh, thought the Potter, I wish you hadn't gone, now I'm alone with a mysterious seductive cupboard, and me without my handy fingerprint-wiping kit. Hello, mysterious cupboard! Surely you are not irresistible? Non! je suis tout à fait irrésistible! Are you locked? Oui. So you are resistible! Mais non! Bother! You've got two dials underneath your handles indicating combination lock: tarot symbols on the left, astrological signs on the right. This could be difficult! I could give up here — [ twiddle twiddle, sword on the left, Pisces on the right ] — I'll give up now, I really will, if you're still locked, are you still locked, please say yes? Non! Je t'aime! Alas.

The cupboard having been opened, a quick perusal of the shelves inside revealed lots of things. Good, good, wizards need their things, can't do without your things, I personally don't have enough things, I need at least one more thing. Not one of these things of course, that would be unlawful deprivation of thing, they'd haul me off to Scandinavia to stand before a Thing, haha, see what I did there, why am I babbling? what sort of things does Merlin love? Merlin loves a ball and jacks; a pair of binoculars; a porcelain astrolabe; tweezers; a yo-yo; a Klein alembic; a Do Not Disturb sign — aha, so I needn't feel bad about coming in here after all, he could have hung that on the door to keep me out a gold model of a foot on a block of wood with a plate on it reading I am Eudaimonias, Ace of Aces / Look upon my works, ye mighty, and / (continued on next foot); wow, the Golden Helmet of Mambrino; earplugs; a stegosaur with a pencil in its mouth; and, on the floor in the back, a nest mostly of shredded burdock inside a broken crystal ball with a misplaced hybrid merlin in it. Surely the merlin's not nesting in it? No no, smells rodenty, mouse about the house, the rat in the hat, well, the cat's away, and clearly Thing One and Thing Two have been doing a thing, and isn't it a handsome little thing of the merlin persuasion?

He pulled the hybrid merlin from its trap and while he brushed away bits of a raggy travel brochure from scenic Wyoming† found the figure to made of some plasticine-like material. Its theft-provoking handsomeness was confirmed up close, and that wouldn't do. You can't stroll off with people's things just because you like them, or even love them deeply at first sight! It's presumptuous and rude and you might get caught.

Fortunately, he had a fourth-year Ravenclaw at hand.

#

"What is that?" said the fourth-year Ravenclaw, once he'd stepped out onto the porch.

"A merlin," he said.

"No. On your head."

He reached up and felt around. "The Golden Helmet of Mambrino."

"Then why does it say Return To Hospital Wing on it?"

"No idea," said the Potter, and doffed his perfectly good headgear. "Myrtle, I crave a boon. Like Daniel. Observe if you will the excellence of the splendid merlin, perhaps it calls you with some mere trace of its appeal to me—"

"You're going to keep it, are you?" said the Longbottom, presumably having noticed the possessive clutch. "You're going to lose us more house points than exist!"

"Certainly not!" said the Potter. "Theft is naughty and more importantly unnecessary. Myrtle! Multiplicative transfiguration, we haven't learned it yet—"

"You're right," she said. "We haven't."

"Ah. Doubling charm...?" It hadn't been in 1001 Household Charms for some reason.

"That one I know."

"Would you be so kind?"

She sighed. "Oh, all right...put it on the railing there..."

Is this a good time to mention the Banach-Tarski Paradox? said a bit of the Potter's mind. This set off a quick debate that he had a strange feeling he'd heard on many past occasions, and he was momentarily quite glad to be sans memory, so much so he missed the ritual singing response of You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and was left uncertain why so much of him was sighing heavily when his attention returned to the original questioning part just in time to hear it say It never is, is it, just before going off to sulk.

The Potter set the merlin flush left against a pillar. One wand gesture from Myrtle later there were two jolly nice merlins.

"Thank you," he said, and took one merlin in each hand.

"Kind of nice to keep in practice," she said.

He ducked back inside. On his way through the door he thought, Hang about, Sophia's Compound, I remember that, that's not wizard stuff...That's a modeling compound named after Sophie Kruse, known to her family as "Fifi", hence Fifi's Modeling Compound, hence Fimo, registered trademark. Also Sculpey™! That's what this is made of! What these are made of. Merlin, you naughty boy. What were you doing nipping about in the 20th century? Shouldn't you have been bringing Arthur back? He's got more letters to answer than Mr Sherlock Holmes!

Gaudeamus! for the permanent fixation of Sophia's Compound! He paused indecisively, hefting original and duplicate in his hands. Oh, I've got to see what happens. He set the merlins down on the desk, opened the glass jar from the Lazy Susan, and carefully dropped the left-hand merlin into it.

It was brown and clay-like...

...and then it was transparent amber crystal.

Simple as that. Blink and you miss it. Brilliant! doesn't make a lick of sense but I love it anyway!

Belatedly remembering what he'd come in to do, he placed the remaining merlin in the nest in the broken crystal ball, closed the doors, spun the combination dials to their original position, turned around, turned around, set the combination dials to sword-fish, opened the doors, took out the Do Not Disturb sign and hung it on the knob, closed the doors, spun the dials to their original position, turned around, sighed, turned around again, undid everything, gave the duplicate the same Gaudeamus treatment as the original, checked it for defects, put it away, redid everything, picked his new toy off the desk and held it up to the window to admire it.

It was beautiful...

...and it had a crack in it.

An internal crack, invisible in its clayish form, that glittered from the head to the heart. Why didn't the copy have a defect? No, false premise: this is no defect. Look how brilliantly it catches the light. Maybe it's just too fractally-wactally to duplicate...

He tucked the merlin into his inside left pocket next to his heart — just the one? — and bounced toward the door.

I've got an action figure!

#

11:05 AM Saturday, at Merlin's front door:

Mounted to the left of the front porch was a large bell, about four feet wide at the bottom. The Potter reached out and touched it and found it to be vibrating still, even if faintly, and concluded that it was the one that had rung in response to his Alohomoric equivalent to a buzzer press; he couldn't even speculate as to its connection to the actual disengagement of the lock. It had once borne an inscription, but only the letters MDCCLIII remained.

He looked behind himself - the Longbottom was busy inspecting a plant of some kind, and the Myrtle seemed to find it just as interesting. Neither of them was paying attention to him, so he felt free to bend down and give the bell a quick lick. Mostly copper, about a quarter tin, lead, zinc, arsenic, gold and silver — somewhere in his mind a tiny voice objected that he shouldn't be able to do that kind of analysis with a human tongue, but another tiny voice replied "And what about the Fat Lady of Limbourg, eh?" — and with that composition it really shouldn't be as weathered as it was, if 1753 was the date of casting, especially in a closed environment like this. Another anomaly in a pile of anomalies. Someone once said that anomalies tell you what's happening, but he wasn't getting anything yet.

The bell had a crack in it. Maybe some adventurous stranger had rung it too hard, or gotten upset to discover for whom it tolled and took it out in tirade.

He turned his attention to the little hut before him (do I like a little hut? I think I like a little hut):: twelve by sixteen feet, white brick, one window in the right-hand side, blue door in the front with small panes of glass in the top arranged in two rows of three, doorknob to the left.

He was standing on a mat that said:

WELL COME
SHOES OFF PLEASE

Behind him, of course, ran thirty feet of stone paving edged with small plants and young trees, leading back to the (now closed) stable entrance door. Or did it? Hard to tell. Maybe the interconnection had automatically disengaged. In any case, the proper direction was now...forward?

He raised his hand and knocked shave-and-a-haircut.

There was no answer by the time the others caught him up.

"Either he's not home or he's lying unconscious on the floor," said the Potter. "Either way I'm going to try the knob."

"I wouldn't," said the Longbottom.

"I accept personal responsibility in the Emperor's name," said the Potter, and turned the unlocked knob and opened the unsecured door - allowing something small and pink to escape.

"What was that thing?" said the Longbottom.

"What thing?" said the Potter, intently examining the interior of the room. "What kind of thing? Animal, vegetable, astral or mineral? Lots of things in the world, ask specific questions."

"Probably a mouse," said the Myrtle.

The Potter doffed his beanie and stepped inside.

Eventually he left his shoes by the door. It's the thought that counts.

#

11:01 AM Saturday, just inside Merlin's esplumeor:

Merlin had traded in his pen for something more sylvan, and quite a lot of it, too; there was a grassy park inserted into the stable.

Just inside the doors was a patio, edged with flowering bushes, with a small fountain in its center. The fountain depicted a hybrid merlin bursting upward from a pool; the effect was driven by water streaming down its sides from invisible downward-directed jets. Rainbows coruscated in its spray. The statue was as transparent as glass, as blue as the sky, and the sun glittered prismatically throughout its interior. On one leg it wore a bell.

On the left ear of the merlin there perched a bird with a fish in its beak; as soon as it saw them it fled, dropping the fish into the pool below.

"There could be a whole river in here," said the Potter, leaning over the rim of the pool to check on the fish, which was apparently none the worse for wear. "Or at least a pond. Or both."

On the base of the fountain was a small brass sign reading Please leave this place as you would wish to find it.

The bird cackled at them from a distant tree.

"Was that a merlin?" the Longbottom asked.

"A kookaburra, I think," said the Potter, "judging by the rude noises. Sometimes called the laughing jackass. I suppose you could count it as a pony, if you want to stretch for a Merlin reference."

"Do you know everything about everything?" asked the Longbottom.

"'course not," said the Potter. "I don't know what this statue's made of, I don't know what kind of plants these are—"

"Maravilha," said the Longbottom, stepping away from the pretty purple flowers on account of the bees.

"—I don't know where the bell is that rang, I really don't know why we haven't been greeted with open arms, shall we go and see?"

"In for a knut, in for a galleon," said the Myrtle.

"At least I think it's a Mirabilis dichotoma," said the Longbottom, walking backwards as they continued past the the rainbow-spraying fountain up the path. "Something odd about it..."

#

12:45 PM Saturday, in an imaginary fluffy white cloud (but actually still under the orange tree)

This is brilliant! I should have tried this ages ago. Napping! it could become quite popular.

Shh. Trying to think. Overlooked something.

But look at the cloud! Think of the polygons! It's all fractally-wactally...

Forget the cloud. Forget the wandering-lonely-as-a. Remember those eye-poking aquamarines in the Lazy Susan? Weren't they a little too eye-poking? Eye-itching, in fact? Suggesting detected magic?

Oh, is this Rhetorical Question Time? okay, I'm ready, go!

What's aquamarine?

Beryl.

And what's beryl?

Silicate of aluminium and beryllium

— and occulting beryllium is used in Time Turners, as your nice Potions Master told you.

A Time Turner? Strange thing to leave lying on your desktop. I mean, in the kitchen, yeah, instant three-minute eggs with a twist of your spice rack, wait, no, that's ridiculous...either way there'd be too many accidents.

Remember the decorative merlin on top? It had a bell on one leg.

It did?

Yes, just like the one on the merlin on the outside of the stable we used to get in, indicating a locking mechanism.

...wait...Lazy Susan?

What about it?

Something about combining a Lazy Susan with a Time Turner seems strangely—strangely famil

{ Yahh! }

What? Is someone screaming in my daydream?

Harry? is that you?

{ Um...yeah. Who else would be screaming in your head? }
{ Or is it my head? }
{ Our head. }

Oh, it's like the Polyphonic Spree in here some nights. You don't know the Polyphonic Spree, never mind. What's up?

{ That's what I want to know. What just happened out there? }

Out here? What, you don't see my cloud? I'm in the cloud. I'm having a daydream, never had a daydream before, thought I'd try something new: other dreams and better like the fellow said. What do you see?

{ I'm in a library. Same as before. }

If memory serves, the last time we spoke you said, quote, { "During the day it's like you're a dream I'm having. And then at night I wake up just long enough to say hello. And then things get complicated." } If you think libraries are complicated you need to spend more time in them.

{ No, the complicated part comes first. }
{ Everything goes all geometrical. }
{ Like one of the screen savers on Dudley's computer. }
{ Not the one with the toasters.}
{ Honeycombs first, and a spiraling tunnel, and lots of colours... }

Those are probably what are called "form constants" — you're sort of looking at your own brain from the inside: your visual cortex is responding to a no-signal condition by interpreting and displaying artifacts of its own structure.

{ ...Oh. }
{ That's really weird. }

Fun, though! You can get the same results from staring into crystal balls. The stuff dreams are made on. You could look it all up as long as you're in the library. Or maybe not, if the library is just a reasonable idiomatic-symbolic interpretation of the interior mind. What's it like?

{ It's a big mess. }
{ The floor's covered in burned papers and ash. }
{ The shelves are mostly empty. }

...That doesn't sound good. What about the books that are still there? Tell me about them.

{ I can't read any of them, they're just pictures...patterns I don't recognise. }
{ Except one I found on the floor. }
{ Sort of like Malfoy's Dragonskine but with a blue cover. }
{ All the pages are blacked out. There's one line I can read. }

...

{ It's on the last page. Do you want to know what it says? }

No.

...No. One line of a library is about as out of context as you can get...why are you asking what happened out here? Did something happen in there?

{ That's why I yelled. }
{ A big light just came on. }
{ It's shining up the staircase. Should I go see what it is? }

Yes.

Yes!

#

11:00 AM Saturday, outside Merlin's esplumeor:

The Potter looked at Merlin's chocolate frog card again, at the picture of the well dressed man with a beard.

He looked up.

"Now this is something like."

#

SUNDAY: in bed.

Sunday the Potter slept in, holding a crystal merlin close to his chest.

He had only the one dream, of floating over Glastonbury Music Festival in a balloon...

#

{ It's humming! }

#

...attached to a big blue box with a light on the top, while below Brian Wilson played an encore of "Good Vibrations."


¹ Or possibly Irving Brecher, but definitely not Ray Bradbury.

² [Just in case you wondered what Merlin's notes to himself look like:]
A uniform matrix contains no information
C'est le temps d'aller voir l'éléphant à vapeur
nooschisis: the two mirrors that can see each other
homo similis: pretending man, or perhaps homo dissimilis: man who is unlike himself
tacet - si quis habet aures audiendi audiat
des ténèbres vers la lumière ohe saxosae cuniculus ex nihilo fit
0 γ 1
Σ→γ :: τ→∞
εχΘ = ΘΣ
εχ = Σ
τ=∞ ∴ εχ = γ — Q.E.D.
N.B.: Θ = ΔΕ (agitatio)
[There will not be a test.]

³ Ingredients: oleander leaves, oil of peppermint, extract of foxglove, coffee beans, sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate, cobalt chloride, gold flakes, and mineral oil. Contains no chemistry.

† "Protruding from the rolling prairie that surrounds the Black Hills region, Devils Pyre is a monolith of uncommon igneous rock (phonolite, or sounding stone)..."