“So did I,” James admitted. “With Professor Jackson.”
Cedric nodded.
“But I would’ve sworn that Tabitha was involved in the whole Merlin conspiracy. What do you think the real story is with her and her broom?”
Cedric looked at James for a long moment, studying him. “Did it ever occur to you that her broom might be exactly what she says it is?”
“What?” James scoffed. “A ‘Muggle artifact’? That’s just a ruse she came up with, isn’t it?” Cedric shrugged, but it looked more like the shrug of someone who knows more than he intends to tell. “The scariest people in the world are not always the ones who are bent on evil, James. Sometimes, the scariest person is the one who mistakes their own lies for the truth.”
James blinked. “You mean… Tabitha Corsica believes all that stuff she said in the debate? About Voldemort actually being a good guy? That he was squashed by the Ministry and the magical ruling class because they couldn’t have him changing the status quo? She can’t really believe that, can she?”
Cedric looked back at James, and then sighed. “Honestly, I don’t know. But I do know that lots of people do believe it. And she seems pretty sincere about it. That broom of hers may have some scary mojo built into it, but it’s nothing compared to the dark magic someone might conjure if their heart is crooked enough to twist a lie into something they believe is truth.”
As James climbed quietly back into his bed, his mind raced. He had never even considered that Tabitha Corsica might believe the things she said. He had assumed that she was supporting the Progressive Element propaganda because she fully accepted and endorsed their ultimate, dark goals. For a moment, he felt vaguely sorry for her. It was awful to think that someone like her might believe she was morally in the right, and that he, James Potter, and his father, were the evil ones. It was almost unthinkable, but not entirely. Outside, the moon was full and bright. James fell asleep with its beams on his face, pale and cool, his brow still slightly furrowed.
The next day, James, Zane, and Ralph rode the Hogwarts Express back to Platform Nine and Three Quarters. Zane’s parents were there, along with his younger sister, Greer, who watched the gigantic crimson engine with naked awe. Standing near them, James spied his mum and dad, herding Albus and Lily along with them. He grinned and waved. It felt like hardly a week ago that he’d watched them from the train as it had pulled out of the station, carrying him to the uncertainty of his first year at Hogwarts. Now he was home again. Hogwarts was wonderful, he thought to himself, but he was glad to be back, after all. Next year, he’d be accompanying Albus on the train, taking him to his first year. He’d tease Albus endlessly about what house he’d end up in. It was going to be his summer’s project, in fact. But he wasn’t worried about it. Even if Albus wasn’t a Gryffindor, he’d be okay. James knew that if Albus was indeed sent to another house, part of him, James, would even be a little jealous of him. But only just a little.
As he joined the throng exiting the train, James fell in behind Ted. Ted, James noticed, was holding Victoire’s hand.
“You’re going to cause a load of trouble, you know,” James said, grinning.
“It’s a tough job, being this controversial,” Ted said humbly, “but we all have our burdens to bear.”
“My parents must not see us together,” Victoire commanded. “Ted Lupin, don’t you ruin everything. You know they won’t approve. You will keep your mouth shut, too, James.”
“Her accent is much more prominent when she’s harping, isn’t it?” Ted asked James.
James grinned. It was true. James stopped inside the open door of the train, looking about the platform. Through the crowd of returning students, bustling porters and yelling family members, he saw Zane engulfed in the mutual hug of his pretty blonde mother and his tall, proud father. His sister was sucked into the embrace, as if against her will, happy to see her brother again but still enthralled by the crimson train. Ralph met his dad on the platform with a more restrained hug, both grinning a bit sheepishly. Ralph glanced back up at James and waved.
“Dad says we’ll be spending the summer in London! I’ll be able to come and visit!”
“Excellent!” James yelled back happily. And then, as he climbed down, James saw his own family watching for him. In the moment before they caught sight of him, James savored his own happiness. This was indeed home. He ran toward them, patting his jeans pocket to make sure the little doll Madame Delacroix had made of him was still there. It probably wouldn’t mean anything, but there was no harm in it. No harm at all.
“James!” Albus cried, seeing him first. “Did you bring us anything? You promised!”
“What am I? Father Christmas?” James answered, laughing as Albus and Lily nearly bowled him over.
“You promised! You promised us Licorice Wands from the cart lady!”
“And Cauldron Cakes for Rose and Hugo,” Harry added, grinning. “Wow, word sure travels fast. All right, all right, I’ve got stuff for everybody!” James admitted. He emptied his pockets, filling Albus’ and Lily’s hands with sweets. He pulled the voodoo doll out last and looked at it a bit uncertainly.
“What in the world is that, James?” Ginny said, embracing him and then looking at the object in her son’s hands. “It looks like… well, you!”
James’ face broke into a grin. “It’s for you, Mum. I thought you’d like to keep it when I went off to school next year. You know, to remember me by.”
Ginny looked at it quizzically, and then glanced up at Harry. He shrugged and smiled. “Well, it’s a bit odd, but all right,” she said, taking the doll from him. “If I hug it, will you feel it?”
James shrugged, effecting disinterest as the family began to make their way into the main terminal. “I don’t know. Whatever. It’s… you know, worth a try, I suppose.”
Ginny nodded, smiling and throwing a glance at Harry. She gave it a try. THEEND
If you liked James Potter and the Hall of Elders’ Crossing and wish to support the author (as well as any potential sequels), then you may also enjoy this excerpt of his original novella, Flyover Country.
Flyover Country is available from www.lulu.com in hardcover or as a PDF download.
Copyright © G. Norman Lippert 2008. All rights reserved.
One
Clete was out in east field when the idea first came to him. It was an unseasonably hot day for early May. A restless breeze shushed in the birches and oaks along the edge of the field. When Clete set out that morning, the sun had only been a rosy promise on the lip of a pristine, sapphire sky, still dotted with crisp, morning stars. Now she was a hot diamond directly over his head, her jaunty rays warming his back and careening off the narrow hood of his old Farm-all tractor. The heat buzzed in his old joints, limbering them like oil after the long winter.
Theideajustcametohim,freshandplain,straightout of the clear blue sky. Perhaps it was the sun, beating down on him giddily after so many long, drab months. Perhaps it was just the monotonyoftheplowing. Afterall,anyonewhohasevermowedagood-sizedlawnonahotday knows the imaginative, half-dreaming state that the bored mind can achieve, the interesting ideas it can concoct when left to boil on the back-burner of tedium. Perhaps it had been merely a remnant ofsomeforgottennight'sdreaming. Inanycase,CletusArvilStarcherwasnotnormally a man given to pursuing random flights of fancy. When the idea struck him, it seemed simply plausible and reasonable, perfectly worthy of a quick test. No harm in that.
He braked the Farm-all, joggled the gear-shift into neutral, and lowered
himself to the ground. The earth was broken up in clods of rich brown, crumbling amiably under his Redwing boots. Clete moved a few paces away from the tractor so to escape the chug of diesel fumes, and took a deep pull of the spring air. It was full of the scent of moist earth laid open, and the creek swollen with winter run-off, and tender green shoots along its steep banks. His stomach growled congenially, reminding him of the lunch Rachel was probably cooking right now: pork chops and sweet po
tatoes and canned beets. He half thought he could smell her cooking on the warm breeze, under all the other, earthy scents, but he knew that was impossible. He was half a mile from the house now, in the middle of the east field. He frowned in contentment, reminded himself that idleness was the sport of fools, and got on with what he was doing.
Clete spread out his arms on either side of him, palms flat to the earth, testing the air as if it
were a solid thing, and began to pump them slowly up and down. He studied the broken dirt about eight feet in front of his boots, still frowning with a mixture of thoughtfulness and quiet concentration. The worn flannel of his shirt pulled out of the sides of his overalls, billowing slightly under his arms as they rose and fell, rose and fell. Clete spread his fingers slightly, allowing the midday air to channel through them. He tested the resistance, shifting the distance between each finger until the breeze seemed to press through them like fluid. He began to pump faster, frowning studiously, his eyes locked calmly under the bill of his green John Deere cap, still studying the freshly plowed earth before him. Behind him, the dull red of the Farm-allsoakedupthesun, chugging obliviously. The trees lining the field shushed and busied themselves in the wash of breeze, waving their budded branches as if proud of them. And slowly, deliberately, Clete began to rise from the ground.
He could feel the air as it whipped around him, flicking like the tail of an affronted lion. It streamed through his fingers first like running water, then like heavy cream, and finally like syrup. At first he found that it was easier to stand if he allowed his heels to lift off the crumbly dirt. He balanced easily on the steel toes of his worn leather boots. An observer might have thought he looked like a novice ballerina, toe-standing for the first time, flapping her arms to keep her balance. That observer, had there been one, might have laughed out loud at the sight, since Clete, in his overalls and work shirt, with his old man's face and wire rimmed glasses under the curved brim of his mesh cap, was about as close to a ballerina as Jupiter is to a Junior Mint. The illusion, however, would have been short-lived, for after only
five seconds of tentative balancing, Clete's toes gently but unmistakably left the ground. A scatter of dead leaves swirled beneath him, retreating along the length of a deep furrow. Clete was still frowning with calm concentration, still staring at that section of plowed dirt, now one foot lower than it had been. In his carefully ordered old farmer's mind a mild voice commented that it was working. 'It' was apparently the simple act of flying. The voice commented on it the way one would comment about a light unpredicted rain or an unseasonably hot day in May. Then another voice, still in his mind but entirely different than the first, rang out stridently. Clete thought it was the voice of his long-departed mother. Cletus Starcher! Just what do you think you're doing up there? Come down this instant!
And the spell- if that was what it was- broke. Clete's arms flailed instead of flapped. His fingers clawed the air and lost their tenuous grip. That strange, fibrous quality of the breeze vanished, and in an instant the plowed field leapt up to reclaim him.
He landed smartly, his boots in two parallel furrows, and his knees popped like a double barreled cork-gun. He straightened slowly and stared at the distant, heat shimmery horizon. What had he just been doing? He answered himself with the simple, unabashed honesty that had been the standard of his life so far. He had been flying. He frowned again, more animatedly, and raised his eyebrows.
"Who'd a thought it?" he remarked to himself. After a moment's slightly distracted rumination, he turned back to the Farm-all, climbed up to the metal seat (which had soaked up a considerable amount of sun since he left it), stepped on the clutch and shifted back into gear.
Twenty minutes later he headed back to the house for lunch. Clete didn't say anything to Rachel about the flying incident at lunch. In fact, by that evening,thethoughtofattemptingtoexplaintheeventtoherhadhardlysomuchascrossedhis mind. This wasn't because he thought she'd call him crazy. It wasn't even because he thought she wouldn't believe him. Neither of those considerations had occurred to him. Clete was a simple man. He hadn't told her because, basically, it didn't concern her. Perhaps if she had been his wife, he’d have mentioned it. Wives have a much more vested interest in the attitudes and lifestyles of a man than sisters do.
If Anne had still been alive, he would have told her. He probably wouldn’t have said anything at lunch, in the middle of the day. She'dhave had enough on her mind then, what with watching little Dennis and handling the laundry and thinking about dinner and all. But he'd have told her about it that evening, certainly. And most assuredly, he'd have told her before he made any attempt to try it again, as he was now. He'd have wanted her to know what he was doing before she saw him there on the south porch, flapping his arms like a scarecrow in a twister. It’d just be common courtesy.
Rachel, on the other hand, was different. Not different-bad, of course. Just different. Any man who has ever had a sister would know. Clete didn't tell Rachel. He stood on the porch and looked contemplatively out over the fields and the scrubby trees beyond his barn. The great red structure was one of the secret prides of his life. It stood fifty-six feet tall from its cobblestone foundation to the beak of the wrought iron weather-cock, and it was just as straight and red as the day it had been built, back before Clete himself had even been born. The structure had four peaks, one on each side, and at the apex of those peaks, dead center above the building, was an old-fashioned vent-house reached only by a hand-made circular stairway at the edge of the hay loft. A few years back, the barn had even been featured in a magazine called Country Living. Clete remembered the photographer who had come out after the magazine people had called. He'd been a wiry young man with glasses, and his camera had been nearly as big as him. "So wecanzoomrightonuptothat delightful bit of architecture at the top," the young man had explained. Clete offered to take the man up the winding stairway to the vent house, but the man had declined somewhat hastily. Didn't like heights, Clete figured.
From the rear of the barn,hecouldhearthepigsintheirpen,snortingandcomplaining over their dinner. Waves of stored warmth baked off the face of the house behind him, even as the sun dipped over the horizon and left the sky pale and sullen.
Hehadfinishedplowingtheeastfieldthatday,andhadgottenagoodheadstartonthe big loop that doglegged into Strecker woods as well. The Farm-all was now put away in the barn, along with the tiller, and the barn was neatly closed up. The swine had been fed, as had been the horses and Clete's lone milk cow, Bethel. Rachel was inside preparing an early dinner, listening to the local news on her ancient Philco transistor radio. Clete was satisfied that the time was right. He stepped away from the house and looked up.
The south porch was really just a patio, added by Clete’s and Rachel's father some sixty years ago as a place to barbecue hogs for their occasional family reunions and Sunday School picnics. The brick barbecue had long fallen into an obscurity of hyacinth vines thankstooneofRachel's beautification stints, but the patio itself had been claimed as one of Clete's personal evening areas. He had purchased a small redwood chair for the patio, and kept his pipe and tobacco in a small teak box beneath. Two and a half stories above the patio the peak of the roof protruded against the evening sky, tipped with a modest corner of white gingerbread. At the apex of the house's face, just under the old gingerbread, was a lit circular window. Clete had just come down from the attic and had purposely left the light on.
He turned back to the yard and dropped his gaze to the corner of the smoothed flagstone floor of the patio. Slowly and deliberately, as he had done in the field earlier that day, he stretched his arms out and began to move them. Up and down, up and down, first slowly and then with an increasing rhythm. Again, he felt that strange, perfect assurance come over him, just as it had in the eastfieldwhentheideafirstcametohim. Itmadeperfectsense. Itwassosimplethathewas amazed he’d never thought of it before. One wasn't surprised, when he worked the pump lever, to see water stream out, was he? Or to find that the earth moves
under him when he moves his feet in a walking motion? Of course not. So how could he have missed this before? This elementary, physical phenomenon of moving one's arms and achieving flight?
Yet he knew that it wasn't only physical. As he tested the air, feeling it like ephemeral harp strings under the musician's practiced hand,hecouldsensepartofhimselfopening. Itwaslike learningtowhistle,orwiggleone'sears. Hefeltstrangeactivityinhisbrain,asifhewasusing mental muscles that he had never before known how to flex.
And again, he felt the air thicken between his scissoring fingers. He felt it billow and fold under his cupped palms. He lifted tremulously to his toes and hovered there, his arms pumping swiftly, strongly. Air swirled in the bald vines of Rachel's hyacinth. He didn't know precisely how it was working, but he could sense the knowledge of it in the back of his mind, huge and phantasmic. He could grope around the edges of it. It had to do with the friction between his arms and the air. And static charges. Not the kind that poked him when he climbed out of his truck on a dry autumn day, zapping between his fingers and the metal door, but an entirely different kind of static charge. One he could create. He created it by flapping, by producing that sort of humming resistance between the air and his fingers, but he created it also by thinking. Or not by thinking, exactly, but by exercising that odd, slippery, mental muscle in his brain. The one he was exercising now, carefullyanddiligently,frowninganoldman'sfrownthatwouldlookmoreathomeovera crossword puzzle or a misbehaving child.
Clete's feet scraped slightly on the sandy-smoothsurfaceoftheflagstonesasherosefrom the patio. HeachievedthesameheighthehadearlierthatdaynexttothechuggingFarm-all, and then began to rise higher. His shadow separated from him and spread away into the yard, cast by the small yellow porch light. Clete knew instinctively that he must not look down, must not give notice to the distance between himself and the patio below. He had nearly sprained both knees earlier that day, falling only a distance of two feet. If hewere to lose his concentration now, rising slowly past five feet, he would most certainly break one or both of his legs. The threat of this struck him only vaguely, however. He was flying. And strangely enough, as he arose past the glow of the porch light, he found it was becoming easier. He was approaching the second story of the house. The lights were off inside, but he could see just over the sill of Rachel's sewing room window. A pair of sharp-beaked sewing scissors and a spool of black thread sat on the sill, blue in the light of the evening sky.
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