Harry and the Pirates
Chapter 08
A Little Prep.
As soon as they could, the four friends headed up to the third floor. It was a quiet day; the older students were mostly in Hogsmeade. With Ron and Dudley on watch to ensure that they wouldn't be interrupted, Hermione and Harry squatted before the door.
"Locked." They nodded. That was no big surprise. "Let's have a go with the brace-and-bit."
Harry nodded, taking the tools out of the bag they had brought along. He fit a bit into the hand drill and began drilling, taking his time. Hermione carefully gathered up every bit of sawdust; they didn't want to leave traces of their activities.
After a surprisingly long time, the bit was through, and Harry gently worked it out of the hole they had made. Harry and Hermione grinned at each other, as Hermione held up a small object. "That was a brilliant idea, Hermione," Harry whispered, as Hermione screwed the peephole lens into the hole they'd made. With it, seeing through the hole became much easier. And the beauty of it was, it was completely non-magical, so any spells set to detect unauthorized magic use would not be set off.
"Look! What do you see?" Hermione peered through the peephole. Then she turned to Harry, with a wink.
"Wonderful things!" At Harry's amazed look, she explained: "That was what the first man to get a look into King Tutankhamen's tomb, in Egypt, said when they'd made a hole into the tomb." Harry snorted, and Hermione went on: "It's a three-headed dog, all right. It's sitting in front of a trapdoor."
Ron and Dudley came for a look, as Harry and Hermione went to take up the watch. After they'd had a good look at the dog, they moved away, and Hermione put a patch of duct tape over the peephole. "It's dimly enough lit here, nobody should notice that. Besides, it's down low enough that it's easy to overlook."
Back in the Slytherin dungeons, the four friends put their heads together.
"Okay, first thing we need is some sort of source of music that'll put that bloody dog to sleep," Harry said. He looked around. "Any ideas?"
Ron smiled. "We have a wind-up music box at home. Once it's going, it keeps going for over an hour at a time. I'll owl Mum to send it to me."
"Great idea, Ron!" Dudley slapped Ron on the back and Hermione gave him a surprised look.
"I never would have thought of that," she said in a small voice. "I'd have been thinking in terms of magic. Just a simple music box would never have occurred to me."
"Don't feel bad, Hermione," said Dudley. "I would have made the same mistake. I'm still so new to magic that I tend to think it can do almost anything." He grinned. "Except take down a troll. Right, Harry?"
"Right, Dudley!" All four of the friends smiled reminiscently. The boys from Roanapur had made Hogwarts history with their exploit, and currently basked in Snape's favor.
"Well, between us, we should be able to get past that dog and find out just what it's guarding that's so important! It can't be dangerous, after all. What sort of idiot would keep something dangerous in a school full of children?" asked Ron. All four of them agreed on the last point. It would take a total maniac to do something like that!
Back at the Slytherin common room, Ron wrote out a letter asking for the loan of the music box, and the quartet headed on up to the Owlery to send it. Pixie the cat tagged along. She apparently didn't fear owls; instead, she seemed to see them as professional colleagues and allies in the eternal war on mice and other small rodents.
When the letter was sent out, Harry and Dudley went to their room and opened their trunks, going through the "implements" that they had brought along from Roanapur. "Thank Merlin, Professor McGonagall was able to distract HM Customs," Harry said, going over a set of lock picks to make sure they were all in good working order.
"Do you think we should pack guns?" Dudley looked over the firepower they had.
"I'm not sure. After that debacle with the machine gun, I'm leery of this ammunition." Harry cast a dubious look at the boxes of cartridges they had been sent. They were discolored, and the brass was not the shiny gold color that Harry expected to see. They had sent an owl to Roanapur with a detailed account of the Troll Incident, describing exactly what had gone wrong with their machine gun, but had not heard back yet about what had come of it. Balalaika had merely said that she would look into it when they had asked her, over the Christmas holidays.
"We're reasonably checked-out on offensive spells," Dudley mused, pulling out his wand. It was true; Slytherin House had a sub-rosa system where promising younger members were tutored in more advanced offensive, and defensive, spellcasting than their schoolmates got in the standard curriculum. "Ever since the fall of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, we've labored under a cloud of suspicion," Snape had explained to them, "and there are people out there who react to any member of our House as though we were all Death Eaters."
"Even me?" Harry had asked.
"Frankly, Mr. Potter, nobody knows what to make of your Sorting. Quite a few people, I am told, were surprised that you didn't Sort into Gryffindor."
In any case, the four friends were all well up on combat magic. Hermione took to any extra learning with a frightening avidity, and the look in her eyes when she learned a particularly effective offensive spell sometimes made Harry wonder about his friend. Had she been bullied or mistreated before getting to Hogwarts? He didn't quite know how to ask.
Ron combined a talent for spellwork with a keen strategic brain. When they got together to study in the evening, he often had incisive comments to make about the mistakes made by both sides in great battles of the past, and he complained bitterly that their History of Magic teacher was so inadequate.
"How can we learn from the past if the teacher we're given puts us to sleep?" he asked. Ron also dominated the intra-House chess scene, despite being a first-year. He had explained: "I may be a pureblood, but the rules of chess don't change between wizards and Muggles. Dad subscribes to some Muggle chess magazines, and we study them together. We follow the chess tournaments that way."
"So tonight's a go on 'Operation Cerberus.'" Harry said. They had found out that a three-headed dog figured in Classical mythology, as the guardian of the gates to the underworld. "Let's hope that we don't meet Hades."
"From your mouth to the gods' ears," commented Ron. Ron had come in while the cousins were getting ready, and his eyes went wide at what they were bringing along.
"You sure you've got enough blades there?" he asked. Harry looked at the array of knives and throwing stars he had chosen.
"Better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them, mate," Harry said. "We don't know just what we're going to be facing down there, after all."
That afternoon, they heard that Professor Dumbledore was planning to be away from the school, and they looked at each other and winked. The perfect opening!
After they were supposed to be in bed, the four friends forgathered in the Slytherin common room. Ron held up the music box. "I tested it earlier, and it'll play for an hour once it's fully wound up."
"Good," Hermione said. "That dog doesn't look like anything I'd want to deal with. If we can neutralize him, this'll be a lot easier."
"What'll be easier?" came an unexpected voice. The four friends turned, and groaned in unison as Draco Malfoy emerged from hiding. "Why are you going out? We're supposed to be in bed!" His pale eyes narrowed. "You're going to get us all into lots of trouble! I should tell Professor Snape!"
"Draco," Harry said soothingly, as though to a frightened animal, "we're doing this to help Professor Snape. He's looking for something in the castle, and we think we know where it is. Just relax, okay? We know what we're doing. Didn't we take down that troll?"
"Yeah, but that was different! I'm going to go get a prefect!"
"Oh, are you?" Hermione smiled a rather nasty smile, and her wand was suddenly in her hand. "Petrificus Totalus!" The blond boy toppled over, stiff as a board. Hermione bent over him, her eyes suddenly full of sorrow. "I'm sorry, Draco, but we really do think we need to do this thing. You'll understand once it's all over."
Cautiously, the four friends slipped out of the Slytherin common room, into the dark corridors of the castle. With their greater experience in stealth and staying hidden, Harry and Dudley took the lead. One of them would go ahead to the next corner, and only when he signalled the "all clear" would the others come up to join him. They were all wearing soft slippers, and made almost no noise.
The familiar school corridors looked different at night, almost ghostly with the moon shining in through the windows and painting things in a pearly white light. They moved forward down the halls, communicating only in sign language; the portraits they passed were all sleeping, but they knew that if the inhabitants of the paintings knew they were near, they could easily set up an alarm that would get them caught.
At one point, Dudley peeked around a corridor and signalled urgently for all of them to freeze. They hid in the deepest shadows they could find as Peeves the poltergeist floated by, snickering to himself about some nastiness or other that he'd pulled on some Hufflepuffs earlier that day. Only when the mischevious spirit had been gone for several minutes did they move on, and Harry felt cold sweat all over his body at the close call they'd had. He mentally blessed the training that Balalaika had put him and Dudley through, training that he'd tried to pass on to his friends.
At length, they got to the door they wanted, on the third floor of the school. Harry had looked at the lock on the door earlier, and had decided that the modern-style lock tools they had smuggled in were not suitable to deal with the odd old-fashioned lock that held the door shut. "All that we'd do," he had told the others, "would be to break our tools, and jam the lock shut. Not to mention telling the next person to try that lock that someone had been at it."
Instead, he pointed his wand, whispering "Alohomora!"Sure enough, the door opened, with a groan from the unoiled hinges that was swiftly suppressed with a hissed "Silencio!" from one of his friends.
The dog was lying there asleep, but at their entrance, one of its six eyes began to open. Then all six eyes snapped open and the dog was on its feet, growling threateningly.
Ron pulled out the music box, put it on the floor and hit the key to start it. The first notes of Music Box Dancer began to play, and the dog's eyes went wide, before drifting shut again. In a few minutes, three rumbling snores told them that the dog was safely asleep. They approached the trap door in front of it cautiously, not quite trusting the music to keep the dog under.
The trap door opened soundlessly, and Harry pulled out a rope, making it fast to one of the pillars in the corners of the room. "Dudley and I will rappel down first," he said, "and once all's clear, we can float you two down with our wands."
As the cousins made ready to go, Ron said wistfully: "I kind of wish my dad had taught me more about how Muggles do things. Depending on magic all the time's not always the best way, I'm finding."
END Chapter 13
