And those words of Thespis,
Seest not how Jove,—because he cannot lie
Nor vaunt nor laugh at impious drollery,
And pleasure's charms are things to him unknown,—
Among the gods wears the imperial crown?
wherein differ they from what Plato says, that the divine nature
is remote from both joy and grief?

— Plutarch.

...where is the hand that can cure the wounds of unkindness, which our ingenious artists inflict?
— Jane Collier.

My apologies may ring hollow, but they ring frequently. What to do, what to do?
— F.F. Fox.

The best medicine of the ordinary kind can only strike up a tune, and that truly is much; but magnetic medicine can not only strike up a tune, it can lead and join the dance; and that is much more.
— K.C. Wolfart.

Thoughts are dissolvers of fate.
— Emerson.

Sans nous, tous les hommes
Deviendraient mal sains,
Et c'est nous qui sommes
Leurs grands médecins.
— Moliere.

Glenbervie, Glenbervie,
What's good for the scurvy?
For ne'er be your old trade forgot—
In your arms rather quarter
A pestle and mortar,
And your crest be a spruce gallipot, Glenbervie,
And your crest be a spruce gallipot.
— Sheridan.

We used to call quantum physicians something else, and that was witches.
— John Oliver.

#

Westward Ho! (3: In The Waiting Room).

In the pre-dawn damp of a Westward Ho! morning, the Tutor reeled backward at the thought of doing Harry Potter a damage, even for the greater good.

A shot? Harry, I would point out that I'm using your nervous system. Also I'm a total coward. When I tell people to run because monsters it's so they don't get trainer prints up the back. I'm not about to incur any unnecessary needles, especially as a guest.

Long pause. Adrenaline response discontinued, good, interesting, Harry's relatives may not get his eyes checked but he does see his GP, nice to see Vernon and Petunia aren't completely useless, (excuse me — "trainer prints up the back"?) [oh no, you've woken him] (I have NEVER fled the forces of the night!) [yes, yes, there's a good chap, here, take your sword of truth and go back to sleep]).

The long pause ended. { You made up the bit about trainer prints up the back... } said Harry.

Could be, could be, getting some internal accusations of libel, but the rest is true. Totally didn't bring you here for that. I'd have told you.

{ Okay, then why are we here? }

As part of the scientific method, Harry, part of the scientific method. Great invention, the scientific method. Did they cover it in that muggle school of yours?

{ No... }

Scientific method! said the Tutor, and ticked off the steps on the fingers. Take observations, derive a hypothesis, apply for a grant, perform experiments, have your paper stolen by your thesis adviser who publishes it under his own name, arrive at the truth. He looked at the thumb. Pull out a plum. We're in the observation stage.

He lifted the pædiatricians's office sign on its chain and angled it towards the light of the nearly-visible sun, and then that of the street lamp, and ran a finger over its lettering. Do you recognise any of these doctor-names at all?

{ ...um, not offhand, should I? I don't think you've mentioned any of them... }

...Right, sorry, my fault — one of many. I tend to forget that one chap's vital clue is another chap's background detail even when both chaps are employing the same eyeballs.

He let go of the sign and set the Potter legs in motion towards the office entrance. There was a small bench just outside it, near to a cylindrical pedestal that would one day be a memorial to the Smoking Era. While waiting to arrive he took the manilla envelope from inside the jacket, and then removed a Chocolate Frog Card from the envelope. The picture on it was blocked with spellotape just in case the tiny animate image happened to report back to its subject in some way, but the name at the bottom was legible even in the indirect sunlight.

You've seen Professor Dumbledore's card, at least in passing. You may or may not have read the back. He turned the card around and ran an index finger over the fun facts. The second or third most famous wizard who ever wizzed — (that sounds terrible) — known for his work on alchemy with Nicolas Flamel. Whose office you're currently standing outside. Do you notice the peculiarity?

{ Uh... }

Dumbledore, most conspicuous wizard on the planet, known for his work with Flamel — not the other way around! Dumbledore gaining lustre by association with a man whose name trips no triggers with you despite three months at Hogwarts.

{ I'm a terrible student, you know that. ;) }

You're really not. ...Wait a minute, how'd you do that?

{ Do what? }

Never mind. I'm a bad influence. Ever see Nicolas Flamel on a Famous Wizard Card?

{ No. }

Cos he isn't on one.

He plunked the body down on the bench. There were lights on inside the building, it was already open for business, but he wasn't ready to go in yet.

There are Famous Wizard Cards with alchemists on them — Paracelsus and Agrippa and that — but not Flamel, and do you ever hear anything about alchemy at Hogwarts? It's the flagship magic school, if it were taught anywhere it'd be taught there. Instead — silence. I've found about two textual references to old Nick, and I've been looking. And yet here he is, on a card with limited room for text, aimed at children. Why?

{ No idea. }

And what ought we do when we have no idea?

{ ...Investigate? }

And so here we are at the mouth of the horse.

Now here's the thing: the whole point of alchemy is to fabricate a substance sometimes known as the Stone of the Philosophers. Care to take a shot at guessing what that is?

{ ...I did ask you about it, but you basically just said don't worry about it... }

And indeed you shouldn't. It's a notional thing that produces among other things the Elixir Vitae, a substance which confers immortality. Now, who do you know who has a fixation on staying alive well beyond that of the Bee Gees?

{ Trevor Doom. }

And the only actual confirmed constructor of said Stone — according to exactly one book out of all the hoggy-warty library books I've scanned — isn't Paracelsus, Agrippa or Albus Dumbledore, it's Dr Nicolas Flamel, pædiatrician of this parish.

By the by, if you were wondering why you're not going to get detention for sneaking out of school and why the alarms didn't go off when you left the grounds, our trespasses are completely legal. I just told your relatives that if I-slash-you had a wizard doctor they'd never have to take me-parenthesis-you-close-parenthesis to a GP ever again. Which is technically true. They signed a permission slip to visit an unspecified kind of doctor, I filed that permission with Nurse Pomfrey while identifying that doctor as Nicolas Flamel at this address, and Rupert's your slightly sleazy uncle.

{ Where'd you get his address? Or did it come up in all those letters you've been doing? }

I didn't tell you already?

{ No... } said Harry patiently.

Sorry, I have conversations with you quite a lot in simulation, I lose track of the real ones. Got it from the bookplate in A Nice and Proper Mythology For Little Witches and Wizards, which Professor Dumbledore gave you or me or both of us. And Owl Post bounced my letter to it with a Muggle Address — Undeliverable stamp on.

So. On one hand, immortality seeker Trevor Doom; on other hand, immortality provider Flamel; in between, total absence of cat's-cradle of connections. Here we are to ask why that is. Are we all caught up now? Whys and wherefores neatly matched with becauses and therefores?

{ Good enough for me. }

Splendid! Upward and inward!

And he got up and went in.

Once through the air-gap and past the inner door he found the waiting room, good waiting room, lots of calming blues and greens, in-wall aquarium with a lot of orange clown-fish in, low table with magazines on, chairs, teller-style window to the left, reception desk behind that, young man behind that pouring water into a copper Zen sculpture thing, excellent sculpture thing, very thingy, Hogwarts lobby could use one of those, much much bigger of course.

Manilla envelope to ready, advance to reception desk, do not offer advice on completing Times crossword on top of desk.

"Hello!" he said to the receptionist. "Could you please tell Doctor Flamel that Harry Potter is here? I'm not in the book, may or may not have an appointment but I'm pretty sure he's expecting me regarding the thing." He waved the manilla envelope in a restrained manner.

Always carry a manilla envelope, Harry — could have anything in it. Patient transfer records, test results, private correspondence, anything, nearly as good as a clipboard.

"Er," said the receptionist, focused mainly on not spilling any water on the floor. "Doctor Flamel's not in just yet — but you can have a seat until he arrives."

"Thank you," said the Tutor, and deposited his collective in a chair next to the aquarium.

On the wall opposite him, next to the door, was — not a flat-screen telly, happily decades too early for that — a near duplicate of the Peaceable-Kingdom type painting titled La Fôret des Rêves Bleus near the forbidden hallway, except this one's animals were completely still.

He examined the contents of the table in front of him: plenty of magazines and huzzah none concerned with quidditch, ooh, a ten-year-old issue of Tammy (incorporating Sally, Sandie, June, Jinty, and Misty, presumably you could get them out again by Fourier decomposition), several numbers of Bunty he'd never read, The Man Who Stole The Atlantic Ocean, Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel, and — hellooo book of fairy stories!

I love a good fairy story, if it isn't too dark...!

(11½-year-old-boy)Pick up with disinterest, casually open at random, flip pages to start of next story, begin reading in desultory fashion. Twitch feet.(/11½-year-old-boy)


THE TALES OF BÆDDEL THE BARD
From the Atlantic Apocrypha
Sylvia Eventi, ed.

.
.*.

THE HOLLOW WARLOCK

There was once a young warlock whose friends were themselves equally young; and being young they were quite foolish, falling in and out of love and fighting and weeping and despairing and rejoicing and then despairing again.

The warlock, who had yet to fall in love himself, decided that what he saw could not possibly be worth the pain; he resolved to spare himself, and by means of the Dark Arts, which were all that offered a solution, he removed his very heart and sealed it away in a crystal casket.

His parents saw him in his emptiness and laughed, expecting him to come around once the right maid happened by to catch his fancy, not knowing that without a heart he had no fancy to catch.

Maidens did happen by, and not merely by chance, for a detached man is a challenge that brings out the best and worst — yet neither the best nor the worst touched him, for there was nothing in him to touch; and many a maid departed cursing his arrogance, though arrogance he had none, for arrogance is of the heart.

Time passed, and the warlock's peers passed from the rough shores of passion to its calmer depths, and wed, and brought forth children. The warlock's aged parents died and he buried them, and he took up their estate. His servants (who were, in their way, part of his inheritance) informed him of tasks that were required and he performed them, having no reason not to. One day he overheard them discussing him. One made rude speculations regarding his disinterest in women, the other pitied him, thinking that the loss of his parents must have broken his heart. Their words did not stir the warlock, for he had no heart; he simply continued about his affairs, as he had always done, having no reason to change...

...except in the matter of courting, for the basic form of life itself had learnt to replicate long before it acquired any kind of heart. The organism that dies without reproducing does precisely that; it does not pass on its inclinations. Only organisms that reproduce do that. And so the warlock one day found himself, though still incapable of desire, with a simple intent: to take a wife, that being necessary to produce offspring.

As it happened, that very day a maiden arrived in the neighbourhood to visit her kinsfolk, and this was convenient and satisfactory, and he began to pay her court. The maid found him uncanny. Her relatives found him rich, and made their position clear in an era when that position mattered.

In time the warlock caused to be held a great feast in the maiden's honour, as this seemed necessary to the procedure. It was calculated to be sumptuous and seductive, and to the maiden the warlock spoke romantic words carefully judged, based on his observations of the conduct of other men in such situations, to persuade.

The maiden told him that his wooing was brilliant but heartless, as was he. The warlock informed her that he did, in fact, have a heart.

She said, "I do not believe it." He replied, "If proof is required, proof will be provided."

Bidding her follow, he led her from the feast and down to the dungeon, where he showed her, sealed in a crystal casket, his silently beating heart.

"Oh, what have you done?" she wept — for, disconnected from worldly blood, it had become shrunken and covered in fine pale tendrils that reached for any source of love and hate and happiness and sadness. She continued: "Put it back where it belongs, I beseech you, that you may be healed and once more know love!"

Calculating that this was necessary to the procedure, the warlock drew his wand, unlocked the crystal casket, magically opened his chest and placed the shrunken organ where it had once been, and the maiden embraced him.

The touch of her soft body, the heat of her breath, the scent of her hair: all cut the newly restored heart like razors. The wash of experience after so long an isolation was too much for it, and it burned and died in his breast.

The warlock cried out in agony, briefly, while he was capable of feeling; and when his eyes were empty once more, he turned to her, and asked simply:

"Are you my wife-to-be?"


Well that was a bit creepy, said the Tutor. Hope they're not all like that...

{ What's a warlock? } asked Harry. { I mean, it seems to mean wizard, why not just say wizard? }

It's an Anglo-Saxonism for breaker of his word —wær loga, loga meaning liar and wær meaning covenant or faith out of verus meaning true...

...presumably not to be confused with wær meaning man or price-of-a-man, or wær meaning wary as in taking care, or wær meaning war, or wær meaning fragment. Pretty small word for all those concepts, bit overloaded, but you can see that carelessly breaking a promise would be unwise, untrue to your school and so not even a bit wiz-ard.

{ ...oh. —Hey, is that where they get "wizengamot"? }

Spot on. Variation on witena gemot — meeting of the wise. Which, by the way, shows the remarkable presumption of Barrister Doom elevating himself to a Lordship. You needed a seat on the witena gamot before you could even qualify as an inferior Thane.

And a judicial seat at the burgh gate.

And five hides of your own land...and a church, and a bell-house and a kitchen and blimey, how would you carry it all...?

{ Hardly seems worth it, } said Harry.

Should have changed his name to Earl by deed poll, said the Tutor.

Someone said "Harry?" and he looked up, but no, it was a doctor talking to the receptionist, who was apparently also a Harry. [Naomi's checkup was fine, good for you Naomi.]

He turned the page.


.
.*.

THE WIZARD'S POT

There was once a kindly old wizard who used his magic generously and wisely for the benefit of his non-magical neighbours. For good and sound reasons he gave all the credit to his cooking pot, which was, he said, itself magic, though he was happy to accept compensation in the form of chickens, turkeys, ducks, partridges, quail, pheasants, grouse, geese, puffins, snipes and the occasional woodcock.

When he died he left the pot to his only son, who found hidden inside it a small package bearing his name. Upon opening the package he found a tiny stretchy slipper, and a note reading "In the fond hope, my son, that you will never need to use this." No sooner had he read the note than there was a knock at his inherited front door, from the warty knuckles of an ancient peasant woman complaining of her granddaughter's warts.

"Well they're not my fault," said the wizard's son — rather crossly, having lost a great deal of sleep during his adolescence to non-magical people banging on the door at all hours for assistance.

"Your father used to mix a special poultice in that old cooking pot, you see," she said. "Many generations of our family swear by that wart remover."

"Ah," he said. "Well, here! I am ignorant of poultices, but perhaps you'll remember what he put into them." And he gave her the cooking pot, which he had no use for, being more of a salad bowl aficionado after all the chickens, turkeys, ducks, partridges, quail, pheasants, grouse, geese, puffins, snipes and the occasional woodcock. "Mind you, if your family's making a habit of warts you should probably wear gloves or something to avoid catching them in the first place."

The peasant woman took the pot away and returned it a week later.

"Any luck?" said the son.

"Very much so," she said, indicating the pot, which was now covered in warts.

"Well, that's disgusting," said the son.

"I'd give you a woodcock," she said, "but I sold my catch for some gloves."

"Just as well," he said, and left the magic pot on the porch.

The next morning there was another knock at the door, this time from an old man complaining that he'd lost his donkey. His plaints were accompanied by significant glances towards the cooking pot.

"Surely you don't think I ate it," growled the son.

"Why, bless you no, sir," said the old man. "It's just that all the other times my donkey wandered off, your da mixed up some herbs and spices, and presto, she come running back."

"Well, I know nothing of how to spice donkeys," said the son. "But here, take dad's warty pot, perhaps you'll remember what herbs he used."

The old man took it away and returned it three weeks later.

"Any luck?" said the son.

"Very much so," said the old man, indicating the pot, which had sprouted donkey bits to go with its warts.

"Well, that's disgusting," said the son.

"Matilda, she loves those herbs and spices," said the old man. "I put up a satchet in the barn onc't I remembered up ginger and she ha'n't strayed since."

"Good for Matilda," said the son.

"I'd gi'ye a woodcock, but I ain't caught one in years," said the old man, and went away without another word, and the son again left the magic pot on the porch, hoping that the next person would just take it.

That evening there came a third knock upon the door, and this time upon the threshold the son found a young woman weeping openly.

"My baby is grievously ill," she said. "Won't you please help us? Your father bade me come if troubled."

"Madam," he said, "my father is dead and I am not a healer of any description." Which was completely true; all healers are wizards but not all wizards are healers.

She said, "When my last three babies were grievously ill he mixed up a potion in his—"

"Magic pot?" said the son. "Well, here it is, take it, perhaps you remember what he used, but please don't blame me for the results. Incidentally, if your babies keep getting sick the same way under the same circumstances, you should probably change something about their living conditions. Mother always recommended plenty of comfortably hot water and soap."

The rest of his evening was very quiet, and the next few days, too, but the following Wednesday he went outside and found the wart-covered magic pot with donkey bits back on his porch and overflowing with diarrhœa. There was also a live woodcock, lying on its back overcome by fumes.

"Well, that's disgusting," said the son. Suddenly remembering the tiny stretchy slipper, he put it on over his shoe and tipped the foul pot off the porch and into the rose-bushes — where it remains to this day, for no villagers sought help from it again. Although they did come as far as the cottage gate, where they would meet up and gossip and admire the well-fertilised if whifty rose-bushes and swap problem solutions that they'd worked out on their own. The wizard's son himself eventually took up selling oil soap, kept the woodcock in his bird box and did rather well by it all in the end.


"Master Potter?" called Harry the Receptionist. "The doctor will see you now."

{ Master? } said Harry.

Another overloaded word, said the Tutor, and hopped to the up. "Be right there!" he said aloud, and continued silently: In this case, form of address to a young gentleman, though I suppose a case could be made for "controller of a familiar spirit or other supernatural being". He set the book down with one hand and picked it up again with the other, tucked it under his arm, took it away from himself and set it back down and was about to turn towards the inner office door when there was a flash of movement where there shouldn't have been any.

A dog (white, fluffy) had run into the frame of La Fôret des Rêves Bleus. It was followed by a girl in a dress (pinkish white) and a hat (pink, satinish, ribbony). She chased it around the non-moving animals, and when she saw him staring at her, pressed her finger to her lips before grabbing the dog and hurriedly carrying it out of the picture.

Well, that's jolly interesting, he thought, but the door next to the reception desk was already opening, so he scampered over to it and then through it, and was ushered into the first office in a hallway of offices. The receptionist closed the door after him.

Hop up on paper-covered examining table, scan room: glass-fronted cabinet full of the usual small bottles, boxes and packets, next to a blacktop desk on which rested copies of the British National Formulary and the Physicians' Desk Reference and a book titled Phenokleic Sepsis-Lepsis Techniques: Ana, Meta, Para and Pro with its place marked with a pamphlet on Proper Handwashing. There was also an awkwardly-shaped metal chair that looked as though it might have once been something completely different that had for some reason exploded and then fallen back together, coincidentally as a chair. Also, cuckoo clock on the wall stopped at 6:42. Mirror on back of door, hop off examining table again, check out provisional self in mirror on back of door: no breakfast remnants in teeth, eyes gleaming, hair now so long it doesn't even stick up (weird little interior twitch from H. Potter there, ask about it later, approaching footsteps in hallway). Hop back up on examining table.

The door opened, and a man came in, a man small, slim, distinguished, apparently on the youngish end of his sixties, with an alert and enterprising eye and a neat and jaunty goatee, and a plastic tag on his white lab coat reading DR FLAMEL, but that was all completely unimportant, because he was wearing a green bow tie and the Tutor raised hand to throat because clearly until now his life had had a large piece missing.

Noting the Tutor's interest Dr Flamel said, in a pleasant gravelly voice, "Strangulation by grasping infants is a standard occupational hazard for a paediatrician." He closed the door behind him. "New patient? Or are you here for a...special consultation?"

The Tutor said, "A little of both, I think."

"That's enigmatic," said Flamel, swinging the metal chair between them and leaning over its back. "Do you like riddles?"

"If they're good."

"Here's one, you tell me," said Dr Flamel, rotating the chair and sitting down in it. "Which came first, the phoenix or the lack of an egg?"

Well, that one would keep Harry out of the Ravenclaw common room, and after a moment the Tutor said as much.

"I told it wrong," said Flamel. "But if you know Ravenclaw, you are in fact the Harry Potter. It would have been quite the muggly coincidence otherwise, but one never knows. How is Professor Binns, by the way?"

"You know Professor Binns?"

"I've known several teachers at your school, though rarely under the name Flamel. I knew Professor Binns when he was alive." The alert and enterprising eye went slightly reminiscent. "...I knew him when he was interesting."

The Tutor said, with uncalculated surprise, "Really?!"

"Oh yes. Indiana Jones with a bookmark instead of a whip. Petered out a bit after he became a teacher — all the more after he died, of course, very sad — although apparently he's perking up a bit now. I just had a letter from him, taking up his old inquiry into the W.T. mystery."

"W.T. mystery," echoed the Rupert.

"You don't know that one? One of the old questions, lost by the wayside. Hogwarts — takes its name from the founders. H G R and S. But who were W and T? Nobody knows — but with Dusty Binns on the trail, the truth will out. Probably."

"Ah. Well, good. He seemed happy enough the last time I saw him." In response to an internal prompt from Harry, he added, with a cock of his head, "Are you related to Mr Ollivander the wand-maker? You look strangely familiar."

"There's a distant relationship," said Flamel. "Upstream of both of us. But setting aside all the chit-chat for a moment, you weren't sent by Professor Dumbledore — he'd have told me you were coming or at least given you the password to that riddle, so how is it that you are, in fact, here? You must have worked something out, what was it?"

"Well, it was mostly a coincidence. Professor Dumbledore loaned me a book with your bookplate in it, and I happened to mark my place with a Chocolate Frog card with your name on it, and then you turned up again in a book I borrowed from a friend of mine —"

"Really?" said Flamel. "I rather thought I'd been expunged from that library."

"Well, it was on the book sale rack..."

(It was a deaccessioned copy of Alchemy, Ancient Art and Science by Argo Pyrites, and he'd not exactly borrowed it, really just made off with it from Hermione's book fort in the common room, which only served her right for hogging that copy of Merlinimue, although that book really was one of the great weepies and he could see why she'd hung onto it.)

"And I didn't really get it even then, but then I found you in the Anglo-Atlantic Cyclopedia of Magic, and that said outright that you were the sole creator of the—"

Flamel raised a cautionary finger. "I know what I did. But why does that bring you here?"

"Because of Trevor Doom," said the Tutor. He paused and then continued after Flamel gave him the eyebrow raised and fixed. "That's what I call Voldemort cos people don't like that name and You Know Who could be anybody.

"Anyway, Professor Dumbledore had said beforehand that Trevor Doom wanted to live more than anything, which is why I've got this scar —"

"Yes, what exactly did Dumbledore tell you? The last I heard, which was some time ago, he was on razor's edge, spill the beans or keep you in the dark because pointless."

"Welllll," said the Tutor...

...and after delivering a potted summary of Dumbledore's lecture, concluded "—And, well, if you've got what he needs, if you've had it for hundreds of years, why'd he ever waste his time on me?" (Flamel just looked grim at this point, so he carried on:) "And then I remembered that whole business with Gringotts and the Mysterious Break-in, and I'd sort of had my attention called to the removal of the Mysterious Object, you know...there's all this hinting going on, why not just ask you what's doing?"

Flamel folded his arms. "Why not just ask Professor Dumbledore?"

"Wwwwell, when he was talking to me —" rub Scar — "it sounded an awful lot like everything's going to be fine. When grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine..."

"Get a second opinion. And an MD might actually tell you the unvarnished truth. Hah. Well, you'll get it, no worries. Not here, though — it's a private office. but not private enough.

"And Pear would never forgive me if I didn't bring you round the house."

"Pear?"

"My wife. Perenelle. I've got a car parked round back. Give me a few minutes to sort out my schedule for the day and I think I can give you a rather good lunch."

"All right," said the Tutor. "Only thing — before we go, could I have a note? In case no one believes I was visiting my doctor."

The alert and enterprising eye regarded him. "Well, if you're getting a note," said Flamel, "you're getting a checkup while you're here."

He stood up, and there followed the usual ballet of actions with the stethoscope and otolaryngoscope and the rubber hammer and the wobbling of the joints.

"I'd inquire about your vaccination records," said Flamel, "but St Mungo's laughs at diphtheria."

"I didn't drop by due to a lack of sharp pointy things in my life, I'll say that."

"Knees fine, any trouble with your right shoulder?"

"No. But why are you using all the standard equipment instead of a wand?"

"I break that out only in dire circumstances, i.e., when I'd have to resort to sharp pointy things." Flamel turned away to write on a pad on his desk and then handed over a professionally illegible doctor's note. "Needles are needless to a wizard. When it comes to an absence of crying children I'm the envy of everyone else in my practice. —Oh, yes, that reminds me..."

Flamel stepped up on a rubber-topped stool and took the stopped clock off the wall. "A useful distraction," he explained, stepping down again, "but it's not counting properly, I think one of the teeth of the escape wheel has gone. I've been meaning to fix it. Now, let us be off."

"You're not going to reparo it?" (I like reparo...)

"Where's the fun in that?" said Flamel, dismayed. "I built it the hard way, I can fix it too."

#

On the reception desk behind the window was a ceramic Pinocchio head; behind the desk were two chairs, one empty, the other occupied by a woman rattling the keyboard of an Amstrad PCW at about two hundred words per minute (using only two fingers, amazing).

The Tutor directed the attention to the Pinocchio because 11½.

"Lollies for those in need," explained Flamel, lifting the hat off Pinocchio. "There's a dentist one street over. Are you in need?"

"No, I'm fine."

{ Hey! }

Sorry, Harry, make it up later.

"Well, I'm taking one," said Flamel, and did. He used it to point down the hall at the rear door with the EXIT sign. "I'm parked out back. Mine's the old one. —Miss Pommel, I'm taking this boy home so he won't be late. I may be some time, so I need to make some adjustments."

The Tutor made his exit while Flamel was arranging to turn the Boltzmann twins over to Dr Brice, and pushed through the exit door to find the sun now enthusiastically up and smiling down upon a small parking lot containing half a dozen tastefully upscale generic modern cars, mainly silvery, and a rust-coloured 1947 Drake-Chevalier Mockingbird, licence BWV 185, which was obviously the old one. He bounced over to it and inspected the cream-coloured interior.

Spiffing! Do you know what a Jowett Jupiter is, Harry?

{ No. }

How about a Jowett Javelin?

{ No. }

Well, this is like a hybrid of both. Hardtop, but sporty. ...I had a car once...what was her name? Rusted iron but solid gold to me...Betsy? No...

Behind him the office door banged shut, as Nicolas Flamel stepped out to regard the day.

"Bright weather, bright soul, bright heart!" said the doctor. "I'll put the top down. Think fast!" He tossed the clock to the Tutor, who let the golden-snitchy fingers do their stuff; the clock went brrt and ran backwards to 5:05 and a pink elephant in a bow tie popped out of the cuckoo hole, looked surprised, and popped back in without saying anything. The cuckoo itself cuckooed, thought the Tutor. Occupy Cuckooland!

He stepped back to watch Nicolas Flamel lower his roof, which strictly shouldn't have been able to be lowered, but arrangements had obviously been made. "How do people type that fast using only two fingers?" he asked.

"Amazing, isn't she? And they say muggles don't have magic. She can read my handwriting too, there's no explaining that. A positive treasure, Fifi is. Thank goodness for misdialled telephone numbers or I'd never have gotten her. Hop in!"

The Tutor scrambled over the top of the passenger side door and landed on top of a magazine. There was a tooth dangling from the rear-view mirror that looked a bit like one that had been snapped at Harry Potter before. "Is that a dragon's tooth?"

"In a sense," said Flamel, getting in and applying key to ignition. "I extracted it from a young animagus a very long time ago, and happy he was to be rid of it too, it was putting him off his food."

The Tutor burbled with silent delight. Magic dentistry! Magic dentists! Do they do Floo calls?! Do they pop out of the fireplace waving a buzzing wand and say Hello, I'm the Dentist! and everyone goes jumping out the windows?

He dialled the enthusiasm down 90%. "What, you're a dentist too?"

"Oh, I dabble, I dabble," said Flamel, working the shift. "I respect professional divisions these days, however. I was a G.P. until I got bored prescribing emerod tablets. And what better specialty than pædiatrics? Doctors don't make people better, they just clear things out of Nature's way. Healers give Nature its marching orders. And children need all the help they can get."

Out of the lot and onto the street they went, turning away from the ocean and towards the river.

"Hmm," said Flame. "I assume you've got your wand with you?"

"Yes?"

"Well, since we're in public and you're skiving off, don't use it, not that you were going to. There's a thing called the Trace. Complicated bit of magic established as part of the Statute of Secrecy, works in conjunction between your school and your wand."

"Is there?" There was nothing in the Blue Book about that.

"Oh yes. Right up until your contract with your school expires, any observed magic done with your wand, or in some cases even near it, will set off a detector circuit, and out comes the cleanup crew."

Ah, so that's the fine detail of the Underage Magic business. "Okay," said the Tutor, tugging at the magazine he was sitting on. "Shouldn't you not be telling me this?"

"Probably," said Flamel.

The Tutor looked at the magazine he'd pulled out. It was the Quibbler.

"You read the Quibbler? — in public?"

On the cover was a still photograph of a young witch in whortleberry earrings who was holding a crystal ball that contained a bonsai oak. The caption read

Harmony Linne Moon Speaks:
"Wizards Are Simply The Way Trees Cast Spells!"

"Oh, the Quibbler," said the doctor. "I love the Quibbler. They don't use wizard photography, so you can leave copies lying around and any muggle who picks one up just thinks it's a New Age Weekly Midnight Star. Not that I concern myself with the Statute of Secrecy very much. But hold that thought.

"Also," added Flamel, steering onto the main road, "take this lollipop. I could tell you really wanted one."

The Tutor took the lollipop.

Now this, he thought, is a proper doctor.


Old sorcerers never die. They don't even fade away!
— Steve Gerber.