A loud cracking sound not ten feet from Mandy made her jump, and the black nail varnish she'd been so carefully applying was now smeared all over her left thumb, not to mention on the floor as well.
"SIRIUS!" she cried, glaring up at the visitor, who had once again Apparated directly into the girls' living room. He was already dressed for James' Halloween party, very well costumed as a giant squid.
"Ugh, how many times?" asked Melanie, stepping out of her bedroom half dressed. "Doors exist for a reason." Despite her chiding tone, she was smiling.
"Waiting around outside front doors wastes valuable time that I could spend with you instead." Sirius grinned at Melanie, and she punched one of his squid arms. They both laughed, and Melanie returned to adjusting her silly tentacled hat. Not to be outdone by Sirius' array of arms and tentacles, Melanie was dressing as a Venomous Tentacula.
"We're going to be the best dancers at this party," Sirius told Melanie. "Put together, we have at least twenty arms."
"Except I never know what to do with my arms when I dance," said Melanie. "This will just magnify the problem, won't it?" She shrugged. "Well, the rest of my costume is in my room. I'll be ready in a second."
Melanie ducked back inside her room, and Sirius sat in one of the orange-and-fuchsia beanbags by the low trestle table in the living room – the furniture of the day, thanks to Melanie, but Mandy wasn't fond of them. It was fortunate they'd have vanished by tomorrow, and Mandy could conjure something more classy.
"You two ever going to get real furniture?" Sirius asked Mandy, looking down at the lurid paisley on which he was seated.
"Someday," said Mandy, "but this works for now, and is far cheaper. At least we have furniture now. You do know that Melanie chose these, right? You narrowly avoided having this sort of decoration all over your own flat."
Sirius had asked Melanie to move in with him when they all left Hogwarts, but as Melanie had explained to Mandy later, although the prospect had been appealing, it was a big step, and she wasn't the type to leap headlong into something like that. So for now, the two girls lived together in their small, colourful flat, and Mandy loved that, even if it meant she had to put up with Sirius Apparating directly in whenever he felt like it and criticising their furniture.
Still seated on the other beanbag, Mandy opened her bottle of orange nail varnish, and started painting the remaining uncovered fingernails, so the finished look alternated a festive black and orange, and then accelerated the drying process with a quick spell. Her nails didn't really match the rest of her costume; Artemisia Lufkin, the first female Minister for Magic, was unlikely to have ever sported such flamboyant fingernails, but that detail was easy to overlook in favour of displaying the utmost Halloween spirit. Mandy tucked a few flyaway strands of short blonde hair under her grey wig, and surveyed her reflection in the mirror on the door of the bathroom. She was rather pleased with the way the costume had turned out.
"So, who are you meant to be?" Sirius asked, eyeing Mandy's styled grey wig and old-fashioned, high-collared emerald robes.
"I'm Artemisia Lufkin," said Mandy.
"Cool," said Sirius, and then frowned. "You better not issue any decrees or new laws this time," he warned. Mandy laughed. Sirius was likely remembering last year at Hogwarts when Mandy had dressed as Professor McGonagall and tried to give detentions to him and all his Gryffindor friends.
"Only if you deserve it," Mandy said airily.
"Ready!" said Melanie as she walked into the living room. "I had so much trouble getting all the arms to stay on."
"A Permanent Sticking Charm should do it," Sirius suggested unhelpfully.
"No," said Melanie. "You both ready to go?"
They arrived on James Potter's doorstep in Ipswich in a swirl of robes and tentacles. Sirius yawned while Melanie knocked on the door of number 3B; he had insisted they could just Apparate right in because James wouldn't mind, but Melanie insisted on politeness and tradition. Mandy just stood behind them and watched their bickering with amusement.
The door opened, releasing a rush of warm air that smelt of spiced pumpkin, and Lily Evans stood in the entrance, grinning. "Hi, welcome," she said. "Happy Halloween!" She stood aside, and Mandy, Melanie, and Sirius walked in. James appeared behind Lily, and only then could Mandy appreciate their costumes: James wore the striped tunic of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle, from the popular comic, and Lily had dressed as Martin's nemesis, the villain Wanda the Wacky. She had curled her hair and put loads of spells in it to make it about twice its normal volume, and her black robes were covered in sequins. Mandy loved them.
"You two look great," Mandy enthused.
"Thanks!" James and Lily answered simultaneously, and then laughed about it. Lily continued, "Wait, Mandy, are you Artemisia Lufkin?"
Mandy grinned. "I knew you'd know," she said.
"Brilliant," Lily said appreciatively. "Well, I'm so glad you all could make it here today! There's butterbeer in the kitchen, pumpkin scones… someone's started a game of Apple Summoning with nonverbal spells, if you think you're up to it, but please make yourself at home!"
Mandy was happy to see that several of her friends from Hogwarts were there – at least, the Gryffindors from their year, and a couple of Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs. There were no other Slytherins besides herself and Melanie, but she hadn't really expected there to be.
Most of the noise in the room was coming from the back where people were Summoning apples out of a tub, and more often than not hitting themselves in the face with the apples, to the amusement of the onlookers. Melanie and Sirius walked off with James to join the group, and Mandy headed straight for the food in the kitchen, instantly striking up a conversation with some people she'd never met but had seen before at Hogwarts, and who happened to love scones as much as she did.
As the amount of available butterbeer and Firewhisky decreased, the amount of noise and laughter increased, and eventually Melanie and Jia (who was dressed as an Acromantula) reeled Mandy in to dance with them, despite that she didn't have near as many arms as the two of them.
"May I have this dance?" said a familiar voice behind Mandy, who turned around to see Lily Evans. Except it wasn't Lily; it was Remus Lupin disguised as Lily, auburn wig and all.
Mandy laughed as she turned to dance with him. "Remus, this is really quite convincing, it's kind of alarming. Have you managed to fool James yet?"
"No," said Remus. "Lily thought it was a hilarious costume idea, James not so much."
"I think it's great," said Mandy. "Where's Peter? I haven't seen him, but I thought for sure he'd be here."
"I'm not sure if his costume is the most obnoxious or the most brilliant. He's just… invisible."
"He's invisible?" Mandy repeated. "So… so that's who has been tapping me on the shoulder every five minutes? I thought someone was just really fast at getting out of the way when I turned around."
"That was me," confirmed Peter Pettigrew's head, which had just materialised out of nowhere. He must have just used James' Invisibility Cloak as his costume.
She continued dancing with Remus, while Peter's head floated around nearby and startled other dancing people. And then she flitted into another conversation elsewhere in the room. For Mandy, the party was like a leap back in time, to the Gryffindor common room parties back at Hogwarts (which she and Melanie had managed to sneak into on various occasions in their seventh year). The room echoed with laughter and joy, and the voices of so many friends; it had been months since she'd felt so light.
The crowd started to thin out after a few hours. Mandy walked through the kitchen to find James, Sirius, Remus, and Peter gathered at the worktop, laughing raucously, an open bottle of Firewhisky between them. The four of them had been inseparable since probably their first year at Hogwarts, so Mandy was unsurprised to see them sticking together like Spellotape. At the table, Carol Whitby, Caradoc Dearborn, and Maurice Zeller were partway through a game of Exploding Snap. In the living room, on the other hand, the party had calmed down somewhat. Someone had switched the wireless to a station broadcasting the music of the Leaping Toadstools, and Melanie, Lily, and Mary Macdonald were over in the corner, sitting on the floor and passing some sort of odd-smelling cigarette back and forth while deep in conversation. Mandy walked up and squeezed in between Melanie and Lily, and Lily handed the cigarette to her.
"Thanks," said Mandy, taking a drag and passing it on.
"Do you ever think about whether our lives are determined by fate or free will?" asked Lily, leaning against the pale sofa behind her. "And what brought the four of us right here, right now."
"Well, nothing else interesting is happening in the house," said Melanie, looking around. "The boys are reliving their golden years at Hogwarts, and over there at the table is the increasing possibility of spontaneous combustion. And you lot are my friends. That's what brought me here."
"But you mean, like, forces that govern our lives," said Mary, who had the joint at this point. "I've always thought it was down to just choices that we make. Everything that happens to us is a result of our own actions."
"So you think free will," said Lily.
"I agree," said Melanie. "I like to think we have the power to change things."
"I think we have that power too, but it's more than that," said Lily. "Some things happen that you'd never really choose or expect to happen, it's like it was always meant to happen. I suppose I see it as more of a combination between the two, but I'm more on the side of Fate."
Mandy could see the sense in both arguments; personally, she was inclined to believe in fate as well, because exercising her free will never seemed to change anything. After all, this war was still going on and Muggle-borns were still in danger and Mandy hadn't been able to do anything about it, and she said so.
Melanie scratched her head. "I took Divination for a few years at Hogwarts, but it always seemed so imprecise to me, just sort of guessing. There was a lot about fate, especially when we talked about prophecies. Would you consider a prophecy the same thing as fate? Because often they weren't true. What's real is your actions, what you do."
"Well what if a prophecy did come true?" asked Mandy. "What would have made that happen? Maybe your free will, or what you think is free will, is actually decided by fate."
"But what you're describing sounds a lot like… a divine plan or something, like the role of a god," said Mary. "To you, is fate a religious concept, or is it a separate thing?"
A sudden loud explosion from the table rent the air, making Melanie jump and Mandy spin her head around towards the source of the noise; she'd entirely forgotten about the card game happening over there, or really about anything else in the room aside from what was right in front of her. Caradoc was panicking over his singed eyebrows.
The girls all laughed, and Lily watched intently until the smoke cleared over the card game. "What were we talking about, again?" Mandy finally asked.
"I don't remember, but look at that spider on the wall."
Mandy turned to look at it – it was tiny, but it stood out, dark against the pale wall. She spent at least the following half hour watching it creep diagonally up towards the ceiling.
Some time later, when her mind was a bit less hazy, and Caradoc, Maurice, and Carol had already left, Melanie tapped Mandy on the shoulder and mentioned she might head home, and Mandy agreed it was about time for that. She didn't want to be the absolute last person who let the party; she'd leave that honour to Sirius, Remus, and Peter. Probably Peter, as he was currently passed out on a sofa.
Mandy and Melanie said their goodbyes and thanked James for hosting the party, and then headed out, walking down the steps from the flat to the pavement arm in arm. "Merlin, I have so much work to do tomorrow," Melanie lamented.
"Why are you thinking about that now?" Mandy asked. "Let the fun of a Halloween party soak in for just a little longer before you start being practical."
"Okay," said Melanie, and kicked a nearby pile of crunchy brown leaves at Mandy. At almost the same moment, a loud, terrified shout penetrated the night, and Melanie gripped Mandy's elbow. "You hear that?" she whispered, squinting off into the thick darkness.
"It's Halloween," said Mandy, trying to convince Melanie as much as she was trying to convince herself. "People are always scaring each other on Halloween."
"That didn't sound like kids holding up wandlight under their chins and pretending to be ghosts, it sounded like… I don't know. Something's not right. Let's Apparate out of here."
But then a loud rustling of leaves across the street drew their attention, and the voice was audible again. Mandy got her wand out of her pocket and looked silently at Melanie, who sighed and drew her wand out of her left sock. The girls performed two quick Disillusionment Charms, and then together they tiptoed as quietly as they could towards the source of the noise, hand in hand.
They stopped behind a tree at the side of the road, where Mandy could see and hear the commotion perfectly. A man lay on the ground, kicking his feet and trying to move his arms, which were bound behind him. Standing in front of him was someone in a blue cloak with the hood up, asking him just where he was going at this time of night with the large suitcase and the broom that lay at the base of a nearby tree. The man said nothing but continued to struggle against the spell that trapped his arms.
"You're being taken to the Census Commission for failure to respond lawfully," said the woman's brisk voice from within the hooded cloak.
"I was just out riding my broom!" the man protested. "You've got the wrong person!"
"No I haven't. You're Stanley Peakes."
"I – you have no right! No—"
"Silencio."
In the dark, Mandy could see Peakes still trying to shout, but no sound came out. The woman leant down to grab hold of him, and the two of them disappeared in a whirl of robes, the echo of a soft crack in the air the only indication that they had been there at all.
Mandy heard Melanie's sharp intake of breath next to her, and then the air was once again still. "What's going to happen to that man?" Melanie whispered. "Should we have done something?"
"I don't know," Mandy breathed back. She was still too scared to move. "I don't know if our interference would have helped." At least that was what she wanted to tell herself. As terrified as she'd been, perhaps she and Melanie could have won against that hooded witch. And that was an even worse thought, because of the guilt that came with being a bystander. "Let's go home," she said, and Apparated. Melanie followed a second later.
Mandy tossed and turned most of the night, unable to forget what she'd seen. And not even the new day could let her start afresh as she'd wanted; an owl came with the newspaper in the morning, a headline of a front-page article staring out at her.
THE DAILY PROPHET
Wednesday, 1st November 1978
MUDBLOODS POSE THREAT TO STATUTE OF SECRECY
Yesterday night, three criminals were apprehended by the Ministry Census Commission for their failure to comply with the Registry Act. A Mudblood in Ipswich was caught attempting to escape on a broom, not only ignoring the lawful summons of the Commission, but also endangering our very society as a whole by potentially compromising the Statute of Secrecy. As well, a married Muggle and wizard in Reading tried to take an illegal Portkey out of the country. Both parties have been sent to Azkaban for their flouting of the laws.
Mandy felt ill. She should have done something before that man was captured, but by the time she and Melanie had noticed him, it was too late. Clearly, people were trying to get out; there had to be others. Maybe the others didn't have to meet the same fate as poor Stanley Peakes.
Was she fated to witness that kidnapping last night, and then the article first thing in the morning? Or was it free will sparking her to make a decision on the spot? Whatever it was, she knew right there and then that her role in the war would be to stop this sort of thing from happening before it ever happened: she was going to help Muggle-borns and others in danger escape from the war.
Disclaimer: The chapter title is from the song of the same name by the Talking Heads.