Fourth Year - It's a bad start to the year for Remus, when the full moon means he can't return to Hogwarts on time - and then it's all downhill from there. The new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher seems to have it in for him; Snape is as awful as ever; James has discovered girls; girls have discovered Sirius, and the new "Anti - Darkness League", forming in the castle, has discovered it really hates werewolves. Things are looking more bleak than ever outside of the castle walls, as Voldemort's power and popularity grows. But, when those who oppose him are just as zealous, life inside the castle can become very difficult for a secret teenage werewolf just trying to go to school.

Fourth Year

Chapter One: The Wolfman Murders

The villagers of Much Dark'ness still talked about "The Wolfman Murders", even though they had happened many years before most of them were born. The tiny museum of local history still displayed newspaper articles of the events, though they were yellowed with age now, and curling at the edges, and - in the school playground - children still played "What Time is it Mr. Wolfman?" - screaming at the cry of "Dinner Time!" and scurrying away lest The Wolfman catch them.

And - even though old people had been young when the murders had taken place - they were still a topic that the inhabitants liked to discuss when more recent titbits of gossip were scarce. The story had been picked over so many times, and had been embroidered in so many places, that nobody was quite sure what the truth was anymore. But every version started in exactly the same way, agreed upon by everyone, that it had happened on a warm night, at the height of summer, fifty years ago, when the yellow Buck moon hung full and fat in the sky.

There had not been a breath of wind or a drop of rain for days; the grass was brown and brittle, the flowers had shrivelled up, and the villagers all had their windows flung open, as they lay sweltering in their cottages, hoping to coax in a non-existent breeze. And so they had all heard when the terrible howling started up, and - just behind the howling - there had come terrible screams.

Eiderdowns were thrown back, lamps were lit and - all along the winding street - startled heads had poked out of bedroom windows, necks were craned and eyes tried to pierce the dark of the night to see what the ruckus was all about. But no one quite dared to leave their home and venture out to see what was happening, not while that dreadful howling kept up.

It was not until the first rosy fingers of sunrise began to paint the horizon that all went quiet, and the bravest of the villagers pulled on their boots and went out to see what they could find.

It was at the very edge of the village, just where the fen became the forest, that they found an answer for those terrible screams: a group of three young men, boys really, had set up a campsite a few days previously - but now their tents were in tatters, blood seeped into the dry earth and the bodies…

Arthur Acton was the village butcher, and he considered himself a man of strong stomach but, when he saw what had been done to the boys, he had stumbled away, stomach heaving, and had fallen to his knees, only to be promptly sick on the ground. It was as he looked up, wiping his lips and grimacing at the bitter, acidic taste in his mouth, that he spotted a mysterious figure dashing through the trees, away from the crime scene.

The police were summoned, and the whole of Much Dark'ness seethed with curiosity and ill disguised excitement, gathering on the fens to watch the authorities at work, investigating the grisly scene. No one wasted much breath pretending to feel very sad about the young men. They were outsiders, and obnoxious ones at that; braying public school boys - real Hooray Henry types - who shot grouse even though it was not yet the season for it and made fun of the local accents. They had probably been destined to grow up to be Tory politicians, the villagers all agreed, and - though this was still many years before Aneurin Bevan decried Toryism as "organised spivvery" - they had all voted Labour in last year's election for good reason.

…

The Dark Duck, the local pub, did a roaring trade that night; the whole village had turned out to discuss the attacks, and they were rewarded for leaving their firesides (which they were glad to do on account of the sweltering heat) when the local magistrate's cook arrived dramatically in their midst and announced to the suddenly silenced pub that a boy called Malicius Malidictus had been arrested.

'Malicius!' several people cried. 'He's just a kid!'

'A weird kid,' other's pointed out. And it was true. In fact the whole Malidictus family were strange. Oddballs who kept to themselves and lived in an old windmill with no sails on the far edge of the village. They never came to the pub, grew strange plants in the garden, and, every so often, bright sparks of light could be seen shooting into the air, like fireworks.

And that was before you got to the ruddy owls. Day and night, owls were seen flying to and from the Malidictus house, and Toothless Vinnie swore blind that he had seen them carrying envelopes in their beak. ('Postal owls!' he would tell anyone who would listen, 'I'm tellin' yeh - that's what they are!' But Toothless Vinnie was the village drunk and few people did listen to him - why, he had once sworn blind that he had seen a strange half bird, half horse creature tied up in the Malidictus's garden. 'A bloomin' chicken pony! With wings! I'm tellin' yeh…')

There was a rush to buy the cook drinks and hear more details. 'They arrested him early this evening,' she said, after her fourth sherry. 'And I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner - he's always been a bit of a strange fish, never played with the other kids when he was little, remember?'

'Ah now,' a woman at the bar said, 'he didn't go to school with the rest of 'em. And then his parents packed him off to that far away school and we don't see him from one year end to the next.' (It was true, at the age of eleven - when most of the local children were just about finishing up with their education and heading out to their first jobs - Malicius had been sent away to some distant boarding school in Scotland; though - to his credit - it did not seem to be turning him into a Hooray Henry or a Tory politician.)

'It turned him odd - all that alone time,' the cook insisted. 'Listen to this: there were bloody footprints at the murder scene. The police followed them - and guess where they led back to?'

'Where?' the whole pub leaned in to hear, waiting with baited breath.

'To the old windmill. And there Malicius is, home alone, and trying to clean the blood from his shoes!'

'Weird things did always seem to happen around him,' one man said slowly, 'when he was younger. Remember the time he lost his temper, when the circus came, and suddenly the Big Top just blew away - like it had been snatched up by a hurricane? Took all the clowns with it.'

'We were finding squeaky noses and oversized shoes for weeks…'

By the following morning, hardly anyone in Much Dark'ness doubted that Mailcius Malidictus had killed the Tory-boy campers.

But, over in the neighbouring town of Greater Dark'ness, in the dark and dingy police station, Malicius was stubbornly repeating again and again that he was innocent, and that it was obvious what had happened to the public school boys, if only the muggles would open their eyes and realise what was going on right under their noses, for once in their lives (Malicius had already been cautioned for using made up words - and his repetition of the gibberish "muggle" was not doing him any favours with the local constabulary).

But he would offer no explanation beyond that, and the police had his bloody shoes - had followed his bloody footprints from the scene of the crime right to his house. Arthur Acton, the butcher, had seen him running away. What more proof did they need? They would see him hang for this - and the police had no compunction in telling him so.

And then, just when things were starting to look really serious for Malicius, the report on the boys' bodies came back and changed everything.

The police had never read an odder report. The boys had been torn apart and - from the looks of their injuries - partially eaten. There were great, gouging claw marks down one of the bodies which suddenly seemed to shrink in size and become scratches from human nails, and there were bites - from vicious, canine teeth - that suddenly turned into nibbles from human molars.

There was simply no way, the report concluded, that a human - much less a sixteen year old boy - could have committed the bulk of these attacks, and that the campers must have been attacked by a wild dog. They could not account for the human teeth and nail marks, but there was no evidence to link them to Malicius and - all in all - it seemed likely that the boy, much like the rest of the villagers, had simply gone to the scene to investigate, and had been frightened off by what he found.

What the police needed to be doing, an addendum to the report suggested, was warning the locals that there was a vicious dog (maybe a pack) on the loose, and start hunting it down before it could cause any more harm.

And so the police let Malicius go, the bodies were released back to their families and no doubt buried in far away family plots, and the village of Much Dark'ness settled back down into the sleepy tranquillity they had lived in for decades, and which they would continue to live in for decades more.

Much to their surprise, however, and under a cloud of suspicion, Malicius returned to his windmill and stayed there for the rest of the summer, bold as brass.

'S'far as I'm concerned, he killed them and I don't care what the police say,' Arthur Acton said in The Dark Duck. 'Until they can produce the dog what dunnit - I know what I'll continue to think.'

And, despite an extensive search of the fens, the police never did turn up a slavering and deranged dog - not even one, much less a pack. And, as the weeks went by, more and more people began to believe once again that there never had been any dog - and that Malicius was the guilty party all along.

Malicius, for his own part, could have told the police full well that they were never going to find any dog. The muggle authorities might not understand the significance of the claw mark turning to human nails, the fang marks turning to human teeth, but Malicius had just finished his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he had just received an "Outstanding" in his Defence Against the Dark Arts OWL; he knew that these murders were the work of a werewolf. And he had known as much from the moment he had first heard the terrible howling, and glanced out of the window and seen the full moon.

The rest of the summer proved to be a difficult one for young Malicius. The weight of the attacks seemed to hang over him, he was met with hostile stares and cold shoulders whenever he ventured into the village. He had been courting Ava Acton, the beautiful daughter of the butcher, but now she wanted no more to do with him, and the local children pointed and stared, and threw stones at the windmill.

All in all, it was a relief to return to Hogwarts. His fellow wizards also talked of the murders, but - like him - they too knew a werewolf attack when they read about one in The Daily Prophet. The Ministry even knew the name of the wolf responsible: Torstan Burnblade - the most notorious werewolf living in Britain, though they were having trouble bringing him to justice (mostly because the Magical Law Enforcement squad were too afraid of him to arrest him). And over the year, Malicius was able to forget what had happened, surrounded once again by the world he belonged in, and concentrate on studying for his NEWTs

But Much Dark'ness did not forget, and when he returned to the village, the next summer, it was to find he was still very much considered a murderer. Ava Acton had married a local muggle boy, and the local children still threw stones and stole his dirigible plums. They howled as he walked past, and they had bestowed on him a nickname: The Wolfman.

…

Fifty years had passed since the murders, and Malicius had long since inherited the windmill from his parents. He had moved to London after he had left Hogwarts, and got a job working for the Ministry of Magic in the Department for Control of Magical Creatures - first as a tea boy in the Centaur Liaison Office, and then as a scribe in the office for House Elf Relocation, until an outbreak of dragon pox caused a staff shortage and he was shuffled into wands-on work with the Ghoul Task Force.

Having proved himself handy with a ghoul, he wrangled himself a sideways shift into the Werewolf Capture Unit, which is where he had always wanted to be ever since that fateful summer night in 1924. Rising through the ranks, he had gained promotion after promotion until he found himself the Head of Department at just 36 years old, and every full moon he and his men had chased Torstan Burnblade, and his most vicious disciple - Fenrir Greyback, across moors and through forests and up mountains.

But they had never had any luck. Bodies were left mangled, families torn apart and innocent people were bitten - becoming monsters themselves - and still the werewolves rampaged through the land, with Malicius always two steps behind.

And before long, it became clear that Greyback was even worse than Burnblade. He had a predilection for children, had vowed revenge on the Wizarding World which hated him and - when even his werewolf father expressed doubts at his wicked ideology - Greyback had raised a rebellion among the younger wolves and chased Burnblade out of England and into Continental Europe.

As Malicius approached fifty, with the bogeyman of his youth now deposed and exiled, and with a touch of rheumatism creeping into his knees, he retired from active werewolf hunting and instead took a post in the Werewolf Registration Department, writing laws to better catalogue and restrict the movements of werewolves; to keep them clamped down even if he could not stamp them out; to give them no quarter - and to ensure they could not slip into decent society, present their human face - wear it is as a mask and pretend to be normal.

In the years that followed, he made enemies among the bleeding hearts - like Albus Dumbledore and Lyall Lupin, but he kept people safe . And that was what was needed.

With the death of his parents, he returned to the windmill in Much Dark'ness and began to compile all his research - decades upon decades of notes on werewolves - and started writing articles, papers, treatises on these darkest of creatures; their natures and the best way to deal with them.

Little had changed in the village since he had left, though a world war had come and gone and Ava Acton had gone from being a beautiful girl to a young bride, to a mother at war, working the land, and was now a rather stout grandmother of six. But Much Dark'ness itself was still the same collection of cottages along one road, in the middle of the fens surrounded by a forest. The sun still rose every morning over the spire of the Norman church, the children still went to the tiny village school (though instead of going to work at eleven, they now went to the comprehensive school over in Greater Dark'ness until they were at least 16) and The Dark Duck still served pints of warm ale to locals, after a hard day out in the fields.

And - for all the years that had passed, and all the work he had done - he soon found that his reputation in the village was as unchanged as everything else (certainly more unchanged than Ava Acton). He was still "The Wolfman". He was still a murderer, in the eyes of the villagers. They still skirted him in the street, gave him a wide berth in the tiny shops. He felt their eyes follow him down the road, heard the whispers - and grew bitter.

He wrote more papers, published more articles, passed more laws to make wizards safer and werewolves' lives harder. He was feted in the Wizarding World, as a dark creature expert - called upon to give lectures over the WWN, to advise the Wizengamot and write opinion pieces for The Daily Prophet. But in his own home village, he was still very much "The Wolfman", the oddball who ate the Tories, one summer's night in 1924 - and the local children still howled under his windows.

Tonight was another such summers' night, with no breath of wind, days without rain and the grass parched and brown and crackling under foot. The night the Buck Moon rose marked fifty years exactly since the night of the murders, fifty years since his reputation had been destroyed among the people he had always lived beside, fifty years since Ava had decided she wanted no more to do with him.

And right now, her youngest grandson, Nigel, was howling underneath Malicius's window, his chubby little face smeared with the stickiness of stolen dirigible plums. Sighing to himself irritably, Malicius pulled himself out from behind his desk, where he was preparing another speech on the dangers of werewolves, crossed to the window and slammed it shut - cutting the howling off once and for all.

He caught sight of the moon, yellow and round and bobbing above the distant treetops - and was reminded of all the monsters who would transform, this evening, under its soft light; of how the human masks would be ripped away, the pretence abandoned, and their true faces would show - and they would raven across the landscape, blood thirsty and evil, leaving destruction and death and ruined lives in their wake.

More monsters might even be made tonight - if one of their kind got lucky, managed to bite without killing, then another human life would be over and a dark creature would live in their place.

He cursed his twinging, rheumatic knees - and wished he were still young enough to be chasing the beasts down, bringing them into justice, stopping the spread of their evil. He had never got Burnblade. He had never got Greyback. But how he wished he could get just one more, snuff out the life of one more monster before his own was over. And failing that, he hoped that every single werewolf in the land suffered the most terrible agony this night - no matter who they were or where they might be.

…

200 miles away, in a dark basement, in a little house, not far from Chester, a fully grown werewolf hurled itself at the bars of its cage, over and over, snapping and snarling and desperate to get free. The night drew on, the moon began to sink and in the early hours of the morning the wolf froze, it began to shake and judder, and then its bones broke and reshaped, its fur shrunk back into its skin, its paws unfurled and became hands and feet once more … And a boy called Remus Lupin woke up, gasping, on his cold, cellar floor.