Moonlight

Chapter Six

Perceptual Prickles



Ted blinked.

Was it possible?

He reread the last few words in the entry he was reading:

...and then James told me to get some rest and called me something I'd never been called before. I asked him what he'd called me, and he said he'd called me, Moony. And then he added with that grin of his, "Fits, dunnit?" Apparently he had come up with the idea right at that very moment. He just called me Moony, right out of the blue, and as an afterthought, decided it was very clever of him. So...now that's all they call me--my friends, anyway.

So...he had read it correctly. James really did just call his father Moony here. He had just nicknamed him, Moony.

But...it couldn't be...the same Moony...as the Moony on that map Harry gave him for his twelfth birthday...could it...?

Ted marked the spot where he'd left off in the "1975" journal, laid it on his bedside table, got up out of bed, and went to his bag, where he dug out the map in question. He returned to his bed with it, sat on it with his legs crossed, and set it before him on the blankets. "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good," he whispered, tapping the parchment with his wand.

The ink materialized before his eyes, as it always did, reading: "Messrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs, Purveyors of Aids to Magical Mischief-Makers, are proud to present, The Marauder's Map."

There it was in enchanted ink: Moony.

It all fit. His father had three best friends. That made four, and here were four mapmakers, one of whom had been called Moony, that one being his father.

And yet, that wasn't enough. Perhaps it was coincidence. He knew of people whose last name was Moony. It wasn't their nickname. They actually were Mr. Moony. Besides, wouldn't Harry have told him if this map had been co-created by Remus?

He wondered if the map was dated. If he saw the date it was made, that might give him some small clue. He didn't see a date beneath the title, so he opened it up and searched for one on the actual map itself.

Then something caught his eye and distracted his mind from his goal: an unfamiliar name....

It was a dot labeled, "Liane Géroux", and it was roaming outside on the grounds.

Liane Géroux...must be French.... He followed the dot with the lit tip of his wand, and saw that she--he assumed Liane was a girl's name--was moving as if searching for something. When she started moving closer to the castle, her course more direct and deliberate, she appeared to have found it. He glanced ahead of her to see where she was headed, and realized that it was Gryffindor tower.

Faintly, the prickling sensation in his nose came back, growing more and more intense...as Liane drew closer and closer to the tower....

Ted leapt off the bed, and, as he rushed to the window, ran smack into the post of his four-poster bed. "Damn...stupid...bloody post..." he muttered, relieved nonetheless that he hadn't woken anyone up. He rubbed the pain in his forehead with the heel of his hand as he walked the rest of the way to the window and peered outside. Even though the moon was a waxing gibbous, the cloudy night meant that the skies had little light to offer to the dark grounds. Luckily there was a lit torch on an iron bracket on the outside wall just below the window. He caught sight of the shadow moving across the stretch of grass within the dim light. It did not move into the pool of illumination offered by the torch's flame, but its silhouette was cast upon it, and it was unmistakably the figure of a woman. But then the silhouette's caster seemed to realize that he was watching her, because the next thing she did once he saw her was dash off in the direction of the Forbidden Forest, and disappear into its obscurities.

Soon after she'd gone, the prickling sensation in Ted's nose went away again.

~

"How late were you up 'til reading that thing?" Rodger asked Ted over breakfast in the Great Hall the next morning.

Ted, so exhausted that he'd laid his head (still pounding from his "run-in" with the post of his four-poster) down beside his bowl of cornflakes as he struggled to transfer bites of it to his mouth, mumbled, "Not too late...." There were bags under his eyes from lack of sleep. After seeing Liane out on the grounds last night, his curiosity about whether his father was really one of the creators of the Marauder's Map had been overpowered by his curiosity about her. The fact that her presence had suddenly provoked his nose to prickle exactly as it had before had to be proof--or at least good hard evidence--that she had been the shadow he'd seen out his bedroom window over the Easter holiday....

"If you even really did see something," Rodger said skeptically when Ted told him this (however wearily). "Easter, you could have been imagining things. And this could have been a coincidence. I know what you're thinking though."

"What?" Ted growled, raising his head from the table and glaring at him with his bleary eyes. His hair was brown again today, though if he were truly angry, and if he weren't so tired, he might have turned it scarlet. "What am I thinking?"

"That Liane is the reason your nose's been prickling!"

"Well, have you got any bright ideas yet?"

"No, because I haven't had a chance to get to the library yet." Rodger paused, scrutinizing Ted as Ted forced himself to sit up and hunch over his breakfast, commencing to stab moodily at the soggy cornflakes with his spoon.

"Bonjour, Teddy!"

Ted looked around and saw Victoire waving at him as she left the Great Hall with her group of fourth year girl friends. He was only able to manage a small wave, his mouth agape, as he watched her disappear. How perfectly she could speak French one moment, and then English the next, both accents completely impeccable and authentic. He found he was slightly breathless. He swooned and fell right off of his seat, colliding painfully with the hard stone floor.

"You alright there, Ted?" Rodger asked, crawling under the table to him and pulling him to his feet. Straightening Ted out after an accident was something that after so many years of being his best friend, now came naturally to Rodger.

"No, not really," Ted grumbled, sitting back down. He glared around at the surrounding Gryffindors giggling at him. Most of them were first and second years. At his gaze they stopped at once.

Instead of crawling back to where he'd been sitting across from Ted, Rodger sat down beside him. "You're lucky you're not dead, the accidents you have sometimes," he chuckled.

Ted managed a smile despite his mild misery. His backside was aching, and he twisted his face in pain. "I think I'm gonna be feeling this in my arse tomorrow morning."

~

Shortly after classes that afternoon, Ted and Rodger headed down to the library. In ten minutes they had set themselves up at a table with stacks of books and old parchment scrolls. They dived into work immediately, but it was not schoolwork that they were doing. While Rodger looked up reasons as to why Ted's nose would suddenly prickle for no obvious reason, and why it prickled when it did, Ted tried looking up the name Liane Géroux.

"Didn't you say your godfather's scar used to prickle sometimes?" Rodger asked.

"What?" said Ted, looking up from the book he'd been scanning on a history of foreign witches and wizards. "Oh yeah. He told me it did whenever Voldemort was near, or when he was catching glimpses of Voldemort's insight, or something like that. But...it also burned a hell of a lot too. One time he said, after he'd had the vision of Voldemort's snake attacking Victoire's granddad, the pain in his scar when he woke up was so bad he chucked."

"You haven't had any pain in your nose, though, have you?"

"No. Just prickling. The worst of it is just that it prickles faster when...well I guess it has something to do with whatever makes it prickle in the first place. Basically it's the same kind of prickle you get in your foot when it falls asleep. Or your leg. Or wherever."

Rodger nodded and returned to scanning through the book he had.

Ted returned to scanning through the history on foreign witches and wizards. But while even after searching until dinnertime, he found nothing about a Liane Géroux, or even a family with the surname, Géroux.

Rodger's efforts on the other hand, appeared far less fruitless. "Aha!" he said triumphantly. "I think I've got something here."

Ted looked up from the scrolls of old wizarding families of francophone countries that he was examining and leaned forward in his chair. "What is it?"

Rodger handed him the book so that Ted could read for himself. The book was very new and updated to as far back as a year ago.

"What am I reading?" he asked, turning the book around so as to not have to read it upside down, since Rodger had handed it to him that way straight across the table.

"Underneath the section titled, 'Natural-Born Alarm Systems'."

Ted scrolled down to where it said this and read:

Natural-Born Alarm Systems

Just like some people are born with the rare gifts of the Metamorphmagus, some people are born with the rare quality of possessing some sort of signal-giver of sorts. In short, some people are born with natural-born alarm systems. A person like this will experience a prickling sensation, on a certain spot on their body, and only when certain external conditions are met. These said conditions are what the person's internal alarm system is alerting them to.

The most common alarm system among the many different kinds there are amongst this rare and particular gift, is the ability to detect the presence of poison. One person born with this kind of alarm was Severus Tobias Snape (1960-98). In his case, the body part was the tongue. So, if Snape was ever close to poison, his tongue would start to prickle.

This prickling sensation that these alarms emit in their signal, is a type of prickle called a Perceptual Prickle. It is no different from the pins and needles feeling one gets when something like their foot or their leg falls asleep. However, Perceptual Prickles never occur in the feet or the leg. They occur in body parts that are in virtually no position to fall sleep (unlike a leg or a foot, an arm or a hand, or even the posterior). Tongues, on the other hand, are hardly likely to be sat on until the nerves are squashed enough to create the same effect.

In addition to tongues, other possible body parts that can emit the Perceptual Prickle in someone with a built-in alarm system are: ears, eyeballs, navels, and noses. However, just because someone has the ability to detect poison does not necessarily mean they will feel the Perceptual Prickle in their tongue, like Severus Snape. They could feel it in any of the other four body parts listed.

If a person possesses this kind of inborn ability of detection, the only way to figure out what it is they can detect is testing it on different things. Severus Snape, shortly after being given the post of potions master at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, discovered that poisons were what he could detect, when he quickly noticed that every time he neared his store of poisons, his tongue prickled like mad, but stopped as soon as he was far enough away from them.

The Perceptual Prickle, of course, grows more intense on the condition that whatever's being detected comes into closer range, and or the amount of it increases in number. So, Perceptual Prickles can get at their most intense peaks where the person with the detection ability is at close quarters with a vast amount of whatever they're detecting (hence Snape's tongue simply prickling "like mad" whenever he neared his large store of various poisons).

But poison isn't the only thing that can be detected by a natural-born alarm system. Other such systems include ones that detect the presence of the cadavers of murder victims, the presence of pure gold, the presence of a specific breed of dark creature (note: this excludes dementors, since they can be sensed by other means by anyone--even Muggles), the presence of someone guilty of treachery, the presence of Animagi in their animal forms, or the presence of someone under the influence of some form of invisibility. (For a full list of all the different kinds of natural-born alarm systems, refer to a copy of another one of my books, Sourcebook on Rare and Common Inborn Abilities.)

Ted raised his eyes from the page and stared at Rodger, who had leaned back in his chair across from him, his arms folded, and his mouth curved in a satisfied and triumphant grin. He frowned slightly, set down the book but leaving it lying open, and gazed out the dark window beside them, seeing his own reflection faintly as the skies outside gradually darkened. His head swam with thought.

It was possible. It was very possible. And it all appeared to fit. His nose's prickle had to be the Perceptual Prickle of an alarm system with which he had been born. Both times that he had felt the Prickle he had seen something: a shadow, a shadow that Ted had come to realize was that of a woman's. He was convinced that she had been present both times his nose had prickled, even if Rodger continued to be skeptical. But then that was typical Rodger. However, Ted's theory would not be swayed by Rodger's skepticism. If not a woman, it was definitely something in a person that he was able to detect. Now, what exactly was that something?

At first he thought that because it was a person, this automatically ruled out gold...but then, he thought, the person could have been carrying gold. But then he ruled it out again when he realized that if it was gold that he could detect, he would have had this prickling thing happen to him at home whenever he got close to where ever it was that his grandmother kept money--the gold Galleons were obviously what would have set it off.

Unless the person was an Inferus (he shuddered at the thought), it couldn't have been a murder victim's cadaver. The more Ted thought it through, he felt sure it couldn't, because Inferi couldn't move with the swiftness that the mysterious woman had.

It couldn't be the one about Animagi in their animal forms. He would only have the Prickle if the woman was in her animal form--if she was even an Animagus at all. So, that one was definitely not a possibility. She also hadn't been invisible. He hadn't needed a Perceptual Prickle to know she was there. He'd seen her for himself--mind, the most he'd seen so far was her silhouette, but that in and of itself indicated that she hadn't been under the influence of some form of invisibility.

That left the presence of a specific breed of dark creature, or someone guilty of treachery. But then, he reminded himself, the list he'd just read was only an immensely abridged one. He'd need the full list if he wanted to winnow it down accurately.

He sensed Rodger stretching and yawning and then rising to his feet to start collecting books and parchment scrolls to put them back where they'd gotten them. "Wait, Rodger, before you do that," he said, turning away from the window, "do you happen to have this sourcebook they mention here?"

"The one on rare and common inborn abilities?" Rodger asked. "Oh...yeah...it's right here." He picked up a small leather-bound book and handed it to Ted.

"Cheers," said Ted, stowing it in his bag. He closed the book Rodger had handed him to read from still lying open in front of him. Upon closing it, he caught sight of the cover, which read: Wizarding Genetics and Heredity by Michael Corner. He reopened and flicked through it, and saw with keen interest that there was a chapter devoted to the study of Metamorphmagi. Being quite ignorant of the scientific nature of his own--and what was also his mother's--power of metamorphosing, he decided to check this book out of the library in addition to the sourcebook. He loved reading, and he read quickly, so he wasn't too concerned about any extra reading in these two books on top of what he had to read to study for his finals and the rest of his father's journals that all together covered roughly the last twenty-seven years of Remus Lupin's life.

And then thinking of the journals reawakened his curiosity to know if his father's being nicknamed Moony meant that he had been the same Moony whose name appeared in the title of the Marauder's Map. So, that night, when all the other boys were asleep in the dormitory, Ted was wide awake in bed with the "1975" journal opened to where he'd last left off as he continued reading it through by the light of his wand.

Unfortunately, Ted was so tired from the night before that he'd barely read a page in the journal before realizing that he was reading the same line over and over out of ill-focused exhaustion. Heaving a sigh, he stowed the book away in the ANSWERS box and turned the box back into a gold Gobstone before burying himself beneath his blankets so that only his brown hair peeked out. He curled up into a ball, and as he made the crossing into the world of dreams, he faced a restless night filled with the anguished voices of men and women, the incessant prickling of his nose....

And then his old stuffed wolf Rory was talking to him as a small child before becoming a real wolf and inviting him to run with him and the rest of the pack and howl at the moon...and Ted did...and as he ran, he fell onto all fours...his body was covered in fur...he howled at the bright, white circle glaring with the reflection of sunlight in the midnight skies...and he saw Rory and his other fellow wolves tear at flesh: the flesh of rabbits, the flesh of deer, the flesh of people...no, not people...they couldn't be...werewolves tore at human flesh, but not real wolves...wolves couldn't even be found in the British Isles anymore...but then maybe he wasn't in Britain....

Rory approached him, his muzzle laced with blood. He had something rectangular in his mouth. He was getting blood and saliva all over it. He dropped it at Ted's feet. Ted sniffed at it with his own long wolf's nose, and realized it was the picture of his parents that he kept on the table beside his bed at home....

He looked up at Rory in disbelief. "Rory, what've you done? You've ruined it! That was important to me! I told you that!"

And Rory's lupine eyes filled with horror. He spoke to Ted in the voice that Ted had always imagined him to have: boyish and slightly hoarse. "Teddy, Teddy, I'm so sorry! Oh, God, what have I done? Forgive me, Teddy, please!" Before Ted's eyes, Rory transformed into his father, exactly as he appeared in the photograph.

"Dad?" Ted breathed.

His father looked down at him, still pleading with him. There was no longer blood on his face, but he acted as if it had remained. Ashamed he turned away from Ted and spoke in a lower timbre version of Rory's voice. "I'm so sorry, son. I never meant for this...." His voice broke and shook, and Ted tried to speak to him, to tell him everything was alright, but now all of a sudden he couldn't speak human. He could only bark and yip like a young wolf.

His father turned to face him again.

Another wolf from the pack came over to them, and stopped beside Remus. She transformed into Ted's smiling mother. She reached down and scratched him behind the ears.

Ted whimpered for his father to scratch him too.

Remus' melancholy visage brightened as he smiled, all sadness gone without a trace, and he too reached down to scratch Ted behind the ears.

The rest of the pack howled and disappeared into the darkness of the forest.

Remus looked over at Nymphadora. "We have to go, love."

Now Ted perceived sadness in his mother's face. "Goodbye little one," she whispered in a younger, smoother version of his grandmother Andromeda's voice. Her eyes gleamed with tears as she took Remus' hand.

Remus gave Ted one last scratch behind the ears. Despite the despondence in his own eyes, he managed a fragile smile as he said, "Chin up, Ted," and then turned away with Nymphadora, to walk hand in hand alongside her, following the pack of wolves into the forest.

Ted loped after them. But when he tried to follow them into the trees, there was some kind of barrier that prevented him from entering. In the shadows he saw them face him one last time, waving at him, wearing doleful smiles before fading away into nothingness.

When they had disappeared the prickling in his nose ceased

Ted howled mournfully at the pale full moon above him....