Hermione’s hand flew into the air again and so, to Harry’s slight surprise, did Neville’s. The only class in which Neville usually volunteered information was Herbology, which was easily his best subject. Neville looked surprised at his own daring.
‘Yes?’ said Moody, his magical eye rolling right over to fix on Neville.
‘There’s one – the Cruciatus Curse,’ said Neville, in a small but distinct voice.
Moody was looking very intently at Neville, this time with both eyes.
‘Your name’s Longbottom?’ he said, his magical eye swooping down to check the register again.
Neville nodded nervously, but Moody made no further enquiries. Turning back to the class at large, he reached into the jar for the next spider and placed it upon the desktop, where it remained motionless, apparently too scared to move.
‘The Cruciatus Curse,’ said Moody. ‘Needs to be a bit bigger for you to get the idea,’ he said, pointing his wand at the spider. ‘Engorgio!’
The spider swelled. It was now larger than a tarantula. Abandoning all pretence, Ron pushed his chair backwards, as far away from Moody’s desk as possible.
Moody raised his wand again, pointed it at the spider, and muttered: ‘Crucio!’
At once, the spider’s legs bent in upon its body; it rolled over and began to twitch horribly, rocking from side to side. No sound came from it, but Harry was sure that if it could have given voice, it would have been screaming. Moody did not remove his wand, and the spider started to shudder and jerk more violently –
‘Stop it!’ Hermione said shrilly.
Harry looked around at her. She was looking, not at the spider, but at Neville, and Harry, following her gaze, saw that Neville’s hands were clenched upon the desk in front of him, his knuckles white, his eyes wide and horrified.
Moody raised his wand. The spider’s legs relaxed, but it continued to twitch.
‘Reducio,’ Moody muttered, and the spider shrank back to its proper size. He put it back into the jar.
‘Pain,’ said Moody softly. ‘You don’t need thumbscrews or knives to torture someone if you can perform the Cruciatus Curse … that one was very popular once, too.
‘Right … anyone know any others?’
Harry looked around. From the looks on everyone’s faces, he guessed they were all wondering what was going to happen to the last spider. Hermione’s hand shook slightly as, for the third time, she raised it into the air.
‘Yes?’ said Moody, looking at her.
‘Avada Kedavra,’ Hermione whispered.
Several people looked uneasily around at her, including Ron.
‘Ah,’ said Moody, another slight smile twisting his lop-sided mouth. ‘Yes, the last and worst. Avada Kedavra … the killing curse.’
He put his hand into the glass jar, and almost as though it knew what was coming, the third spider scuttled frantically around the bottom of the jar, trying to evade Moody’s fingers, but he trapped it, and placed it upon the desktop. It started to scuttle frantically across the wooden surface.
Moody raised his wand, and Harry felt a sudden thrill of foreboding.
‘Avada Kedavra!’ Moody roared.
There was a flash of blinding green light and a rushing sound, as though a vast, invisible something was soaring through the air – instantaneously the spider rolled over onto its back, unmarked, but unmistakably dead. Several of the girls stifled cries; Ron had thrown himself backwards and almost toppled off his seat as the spider skidded towards him.
Moody swept the dead spider off the desk onto the floor.
‘Not nice,’ he said calmly. ‘Not pleasant. And there’s no counter-curse. There’s no blocking it. Only one known person has ever survived it, and he’s sitting right in front of me.’
Harry felt his face redden as Moody’s eyes (both of them) looked into his own. He could feel everyone else looking around at him, too. Harry stared at the blank blackboard as though fascinated by it, but not really seeing it at all …
So that was how his parents had died … exactly like that spider. Had they been unblemished and unmarked, too? Had they simply seen the flash of green light and heard the rush of speeding death, before life was wiped from their bodies?
Harry had been picturing his parents’ deaths over and over again for three years now, ever since he had found out they had been murdered, ever since he’d found out what had happened that night: how Wormtail had betrayed his parents’ whereabouts to Voldemort, who had come to find them at their cottage. How Voldemort had killed Harry’s father first. How James Potter had tried to hold him off, while he shouted at his wife to take Harry and run … and Voldemort had advanced on Lily Potter, told her to move aside so that he could kill Harry … how she had begged him to kill her instead, refused to stop shielding her son … and so Voldemort had murdered her, too, before turning his wand on Harry …
Harry knew these details because he had heard his parents’ voices when he had fought the Dementors last year – for that was the terrible power of the Dementors: to force their victim to relive the worst memories of their life, and drown, powerless, in their own despair …
Moody was speaking again, from a great distance, it seemed to Harry. With a massive effort, he pulled himself back to the present, and listened to what Moody was saying.
‘Avada Kedavra’s a curse that needs a powerful bit of magic behind it – you could all get your wands out now and point them at me and say the words, and I doubt I’d get so much as a nose-bleed. But that doesn’t matter. I’m not here to teach you how to do it.
‘Now, if there’s no counter-curse, why am I showing you? Because you’ve got to know. You’ve got to appreciate what the worst is. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you’re facing it. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!’ he roared, and the whole class jumped again.
‘Now … those three curses – Avada Kedavra, Imperius and Cruciatus – are known as the Unforgivable Curses. The use of any one of them on a fellow human being is enough to earn a life sentence in Azkaban. That’s what you’re up against. That’s what I’ve got to teach you to fight. You need preparing. You need arming. But most of all, you need to practise constant, never-ceasing vigilance.Get out your quills … copy this down …’
They spent the rest of the lesson taking notes on each of the Unforgivable Curses. No one spoke until the bell rang – but when Moody had dismissed them and they had left the classroom, a torrent of talk burst forth. Most people were discussing the curses in awed voices – ‘Did you see it twitch?’ ‘– and when he killed it – just like that!’
They were talking about the lesson, Harry thought, as though it had been some sort of spectacular show, but he hadn’t found it very entertaining – and nor, it seemed, had Hermione.
‘Hurry up,’ she said tensely to Harry and Ron.
‘Not the ruddy library again?’ said Ron.
‘No,’ said Hermione curtly, pointing up a side passage. ‘Neville.’
Neville was standing alone, halfway up the passage, staring at the stone wall opposite him with the same horrified, wide-eyed look he had worn when Moody had demonstrated the Cruciatus Curse.
‘Neville?’ Hermione said gently.
Neville looked around.
‘Oh, hello,’ he said, his voice much higher than usual. ‘Interesting lesson, wasn’t it? I wonder what’s for dinner, I’m – I’m starving, aren’t you?’
‘Neville, are you all right?’ said Hermione.
‘Oh, yes, I’m fine,’ Neville gabbled, in the same unnaturally high voice. ‘Very interesting dinner – I mean lesson – what’s for eating?’
Ron gave Harry a startled look.
‘Neville, what –?’
But an odd clunking noise sounded behind them, and they turned to see Professor Moody limping towards them. All four of them fell silent, watching him apprehensively, but when he spoke, it was in a much lower and gentler growl than they had yet heard.
‘It’s all right, sonny,’ he sai
d to Neville. ‘Why don’t you come up to my office? Come on … we can have a cup of tea …’
Neville looked even more frightened at the prospect of tea with Moody. He neither moved nor spoke.
Moody turned his magical eye upon Harry. ‘You all right, are you, Potter?’
‘Yes,’ said Harry, almost defiantly.
Moody’s blue eye quivered slightly in its socket as it surveyed Harry.
Then he said, ‘You’ve got to know. It seems harsh, maybe, but you’ve got to know. No point pretending … well … come on, Longbottom, I’ve got some books that might interest you.’
Neville looked pleadingly at Harry, Ron and Hermione, but they didn’t say anything, so Neville had no choice but to allow himself to be steered away, one of Moody’s gnarled hands on his shoulder.
‘What was that about?’ said Ron, watching Neville and Moody turn the corner.
‘I don’t know,’ said Hermione, looking pensive.
‘Some lesson, though, eh?’ said Ron to Harry, as they set off for the Great Hall. ‘Fred and George were right, weren’t they? He really knows his stuff, Moody, doesn’t he? When he did Avada Kedavra, the way that spider just died, just snuffed it right –’
But Ron fell suddenly silent at the look on Harry’s face, and didn’t speak again until they reached the Great Hall, when he said he supposed they had better make a start on Professor Trelawney’s predictions tonight, as they would take hours.
Hermione did not join in with Harry and Ron’s conversation during dinner, but ate furiously fast, and then left for the library again. Harry and Ron walked back to Gryffindor Tower, and Harry, who had been thinking of nothing else all through dinner, now raised the subject of the Unforgivable Curses himself.
‘Wouldn’t Moody and Dumbledore be in trouble with the Ministry if they knew we’d seen the curses?’ Harry asked, as they approached the Fat Lady.
‘Yeah, probably,’ said Ron. ‘But Dumbledore’s always done things his way, hasn’t he, and Moody’s been getting in trouble for years, I reckon. Attacks first and asks questions later – look at his dustbins. Balderdash.’
The Fat Lady swung forwards to reveal the entrance hole, and they climbed into Gryffindor common room, which was crowded and noisy.
‘Shall we get our Divination stuff, then?’ said Harry.
‘I s’pose,’ Ron groaned.
They went up to the dormitory to fetch their books and charts, and found Neville there alone, sitting on his bed, reading. He looked a good deal calmer than at the end of Moody’s lesson, though still not entirely normal. His eyes were rather red.
‘You all right, Neville?’ Harry asked him.
‘Oh yes,’ said Neville, ‘I’m fine, thanks. Just reading this book Professor Moody lent me …’
He held up the book: Magical Mediterranean Water-Plants and Their Properties.
‘Apparently, Professor Sprout told Professor Moody I’m really good at Herbology,’ Neville said. There was a faint note of pride in his voice that Harry had rarely heard there before. ‘He thought I’d like this.’
Telling Neville what Professor Sprout had said, Harry thought, had been a very tactful way of cheering Neville up, for Neville very rarely heard that he was good at anything. It was the sort of thing Professor Lupin would have done.
Harry and Ron took their copies of Unfogging the Future back down to the common room, found a table and set to work on their predictions for the coming month. An hour later, they had made very little progress, though their table was littered with bits of parchment bearing sums and symbols, and Harry’s brain was as fogged as though it had been filled with the fumes from Professor Trelawney’s fire.
‘I haven’t got a clue what this lot’s supposed to mean,’ he said, staring down at a long list of calculations.
‘You know,’ said Ron, whose hair was on end because of all the times he had run his fingers through it in frustration, ‘I think it’s back to the old Divination standby.’
‘What – make it up?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ron, sweeping the jumble of scrawled notes off the table, dipping his pen into some ink and starting to write.
‘Next Monday,’ he said, as he scribbled, ‘I am likely to develop a cough, owing to the unlucky conjunction of Mars and Jupiter.’ He looked up at Harry. ‘You know her – just put in loads of misery, she’ll lap it up.’
‘Right,’ said Harry, crumpling up his first attempt and lobbing it over the heads of a group of chattering first-years into the fire. ‘OK … on Monday, I will be in danger of – er – burns.’
‘Yeah, you will be,’ said Ron darkly, ‘we’re seeing the Skrewts again on Monday. OK, Tuesday, I’ll … erm …’
‘Lose a treasured possession,’ said Harry, who was flicking through Unfogging the Future for ideas.
‘Good one,’ said Ron, copying it down. ‘Because of … erm … Mercury. Why don’t you get stabbed in the back by someone you thought was a friend?’
‘Yeah … cool …’ said Harry, scribbling it down, ‘because … Venus is in the twelfth house.’
‘And on Wednesday, I think I’ll come off worst in a fight.’
‘Aaah, I was going to have a fight. OK, I’ll lose a bet.’
‘Yeah, you’ll be betting I’ll win my fight …’
They continued to make up predictions (which grew steadily more tragic) for another hour, while the common room around them slowly emptied as people went up to bed. Crookshanks wandered over to them, leapt lightly into an empty chair, and stared inscrutably at Harry, rather as Hermione might look if she knew they weren’t doing their homework properly.
Staring around the room, trying to think of a kind of misfortune he hadn’t yet used, Harry saw Fred and George sitting together against the opposite wall, heads together, quills out, poring over a single piece of parchment. It was most unusual to see Fred and George hidden away in a corner and working silently; they usually liked to be in the thick of things, and the noisy centre of attention. There was something secretive about the way they were working on the piece of parchment, and Harry was reminded of how they had sat together writing something back at The Burrow. He had thought then that it was another order form for Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, but it didn’t look like that this time; if it had been, they would surely have let Lee Jordan in on the joke. He wondered whether it had anything to do with entering the Triwizard Tournament.
As Harry watched, George shook his head at Fred, scratched something out with his quill and said, in a very quiet voice that nevertheless carried across the almost deserted room, ‘No – that sounds like we’re accusing him. Got to be careful …’
Then George looked over and saw Harry watching him. Harry grinned, and quickly returned to his predictions – he didn’t want George to think he was eavesdropping. Shortly after that, the twins rolled up their parchment, said goodnight and went off to bed.
Fred and George had been gone ten minutes or so when the portrait hole opened and Hermione climbed into the common room, carrying a sheaf of parchment in one hand and a box whose contents rattled as she walked, in the other. Crookshanks arched his back, purring.
‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’ve just finished!’
‘So have I!’ said Ron triumphantly, throwing down his quill.
Hermione sat down, laid the things she was carrying in an empty armchair and pulled Ron’s predictions towards her.
‘Not going to have a very good month, are you?’ she said sardonically, as Crookshanks curled up in her lap.
‘Ah well, at least I’m forewarned,’ Ron yawned.
‘You seem to be drowning twice,’ said Hermione.
‘Oh, am I?’ said Ron, peering down at his predictions. ‘I’d better change one of them to getting trampled by a rampaging Hippogriff.’
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit obvious you’ve made these up?’ said Hermione.
‘How dare you!’ said Ron, in mock outrage. ‘We’ve been working like house-elves here!’
Hermione
raised her eyebrows.
‘It’s just an expression,’ said Ron hastily.
Harry laid down his quill, too, having just finished predicting his own death by decapitation.
‘What’s in the box?’ he asked, pointing at it.
‘Funny you should ask,’ said Hermione, with a nasty look at Ron. She took off the lid, and showed them the contents.
Inside were about fifty badges, all of different colours, but all bearing the same letters: S.P.E.W.
‘“Spew”?’ said Harry, picking up a badge and looking at it. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Not spew,’ said Hermione impatiently. ‘It’s S – P – E – W. Stands for the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare.’
‘Never heard of it,’ said Ron.
‘Well, of course you haven’t,’ said Hermione briskly, ‘I’ve only just started it.’
‘Yeah?’ said Ron in mild surprise. ‘How many members have you got?’
‘Well – if you two join – three,’ said Hermione.
‘And you think we want to walk around wearing badges saying “spew”, do you?’ said Ron.
‘S – P – E – W!’ said Hermione hotly. ‘I was going to put Stop the Outrageous Abuse of Our Fellow Magical Creatures and Campaign for a Change in Their Legal Status – but it wouldn’t fit. So that’s the heading of our manifesto.’
She brandished the sheaf of parchment at them. ‘I’ve been researching it thoroughly in the library. Elf enslavement goes back centuries. I can’t believe no one’s done anything about it before now.’
‘Hermione – open your ears,’ said Ron loudly. ‘They. Like. It. They like being enslaved!’
‘Our short-term aims,’ said Hermione, speaking even more loudly than Ron, and acting as though she hadn’t heard a word, ‘are to secure house-elves fair wages and working conditions. Our long-term aims include changing the law about non-wand-use, and trying to get an elf into the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, because they’re shockingly under-represented.’
‘And how do we do all this?’ Harry asked.
‘We start by recruiting members,’ said Hermione happily. ‘I thought two Sickles to join – that buys a badge – and the proceeds can fund our leaflet campaign. You’re treasurer, Ron – I’ve got you a collecting tin upstairs – and Harry, you’re secretary, so you might want to write down everything I’m saying now, as a record of our first meeting.’
The Goblet of Fire Page 19