Running Close to the Ground

Chapter Three: The Death Eaters' Drinking and Cynicism Society

They say, eat, drink, and be merry; take the bull by the horns,

I keep seeing visions of you, a lily among thorns.

Everything looks a little far away to me.

- Bob Dylan, "Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart"

Little Hangleton, now Death Eater headquarters, was once an ordinary country village remarkable only for its thirteenth-century church and the elaborately carved Celtic cross in the marketplace. One could usually find a handful of tourists wandering along the High Street on weekends, but that was before we laid powerful Muggle-repelling charms around the borders, encircled the place with dementors, and cut off all contact with the outside world except for a few selected supply routes.

Macnair and the two elder Lestranges wanted to use the Muggles who already live here for sport-hunting, but I pointed out that we'd have to do the cooking and laundry ourselves if we did that. It was also my idea to put the lot of them under long-acting Cheering Charms, which keep them content and uncurious about our presence. Most of them seem to like us well enough. We're good for business. We drink a lot in the village pub, the Hanged Man, and old Joe Miller at the pet shop can't get over the way his trade in exotic snakes has picked up. Of course we haven't told them yet about the part where they all get slaughtered.

To tell you the truth, I almost envy the poor saps. The Cheering Charms keep them from feeling the worst effects of the dementors. The rest of us aren't so lucky. The ones who have spent time in Azkaban have it the hardest; the longer you've been exposed, the worse they affect you. Everybody who gets sent to the island comes out a bit unhinged, but in different and often unpredictable ways, which is one reason the Death Eaters are such a piss-poor excuse for an army.

Rabastan Lestrange stomps into the Hanged Man one evening, demands a pint of beer, and bangs it down on the table. "I've just been trying to disable the wards around Hogwarts with that nutter Travers. Would you believe he made me trek a mile out of our way into the Forbidden Forest so he could commune with a tree?"

Avery blinks. "Do what with a what?"

"So he could throw his arms around a bloody oak tree - which looked exactly like every other oak tree in the entire damn forest, by the way - and try to channel the ancient druid he thought was living inside of it. No joke. Most of the afternoon wasted. I was about ready to kill him."

"Lewis can't help it if he's a bit batty," says Avery. "Had a fifteen-year holiday on the island, didn't he?"

"Bardolph -" I say, catching his arm. He never seems to remember that Rabastan is sensitive about this particular topic.

Rabastan swears and pushes an empty chair over onto the floor. "NOT EVERYBODY WHO'S BEEN TO AZKABAN IS INSANE!" he shouts. "I'M FED UP WITH PEOPLE LOOKING AT ME LIKE I'M ABOUT TO START FROTHING AT THE MOUTH." (Naturally, his own behavior has nothing to do with this phenomenon. Uh-uh.)

"He didn't mean it that way, Rabs," I say. "Pick up that chair and sit down before you catch hell from Roo."

But Ruby Brown, the landlady of the Hanged Man, has already swooped down on us. "Gentlemen - and believe me, I use the term loosely as far as some of you are concerned - there is to be no throwing of furniture on these premises."

"'Pologies, Roo," mutters Avery guiltily, as if he's already forgotten he wasn't the one who knocked the chair over. He hands her a crumpled wad of Muggle money. "'Nother round of drinks for us, an' have one for yourself."

"Don't mind if I do, thank you." Roo never gets really angry at us, because we're by far her best customers, and she's a good-natured soul. She practically qualifies as an honorary member of the Death Eaters' Drinking and Cynicism Society, the only one among us who isn't desperate to be somewhere else. Roo looks like she might be in her late thirties or early forties, although it's always hard to tell with Muggles. She smokes and drinks too much, but she does it with a full-hearted contentment that shows she's not an addict, just someone who enjoys the habit.

"Tell us about this Hogwarts business." Jephthah Nott looks up from his pint for the first time as Roo goes off to get the drinks. "What d'you reckon he's planning?"

"Top secret," says Rabastan. "He hasn't told us anything, and if he did, it'd be as much as my life's worth to repeat it."

"Come on, at least give me some idea when you're going to finish the job with the wards. I've still got a boy up there and I'd bloody well like to know if he's about to get caught up in an attack. I don't trust the Dark Lord to look after any of our own, except maybe Malfoy's son."

"And what's Malfoy done for him that the rest of us haven't, I wonder?" Rabastan grumbles. "Didn't notice him rotting in prison for fourteen years."

"He's got the family tree His Lordship wishes he had," I answer promptly.

"You just said a mouthful, Wormtail." Rabastan downs the rest of his beer and scowls. "Anyway, we're going to finish the outer wards when Travers stops feeling psychic connections with trees, that's when, and not one damn minute sooner. And as for the other defenses, that's up to our inside man. Good luck getting any information out of him."

That means Snivellus. I make a mental note not to volunteer for the front lines on that mission, not that I would in any case. You'd have to be mad to volunteer for anything in this outfit, but fortunately there are enough people around who are mad for me to keep my head low.

* * *

One or another of us generally ends up spending the night with Roo after closing time. She isn't a professional; she just likes men, and her taste isn't bad considering what's on offer in Little Hangleton. We may not be the prettiest specimens out there, but we're about the only people in the organization you'd want to get involved with if you were a Muggle. If she'd been fool enough to choose Lucius Malfoy, for instance, she definitely wouldn't live long enough to bear tales to his wife.

Me, on the other hand - she could do worse. I don't hurt anyone I'm not ordered to hurt, and I know how to treat a woman. With my looks, I had to learn early in life how to be charming. That's why Bertha Jorkins went out for a moonlit walk with a man who was supposed to be dead without a moment's hesitation.

Don't think about Bertha Jorkins.

I never meant for her to die. He should have Memory Charmed her. Then I wouldn't have her blood on my hands.

"Let's go for a walk," I tell Roo, gulping down the last of my drink and taking her by the arm before any of the other lads can claim her for the evening.

I keep seeing Bertha's face in the moonlight, although Roo doesn't look anything like her. She's brown-haired and rather pretty, and the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth suggest she has always been quicker to laugh than worry, even before the Cheering Charms. With me it was always the other way around, even in my school days.

I charm a bunch of lilacs out of thin air and hand them to her with a bow. Maybe, I think feverishly, if I can do right by this woman I'll be forgiven for Bertha.

"How did you do that?" she asks.

I shake my head and smile. "Can't give away trade secrets." I've told her I used to be a stage magician. The trick to living a lie is to keep it as close to the truth as possible.

And then she laughs and looks much younger than her years, almost like Lily for a moment, taking away my breath and my composure. Easy, there, I tell myself, are you turning into Travers, mistaking every trick of perception for a sign from beyond?

She kisses me, her breath hot on my mouth, and begins to lead me back toward the pub. And then there are no more tricks of moonlight, no more shadows of the dead, only the rhythm of flesh on flesh and the taste of sweat and tangled hair.

Much later, as we're lying upstairs from the Hanged Man, I tell her about my life on the road as a street conjuror. I would like to sketch the curve of her hips, to capture the light in her eyes with a fine-pointed quill or a stick of charcoal; but I can't do that any more, so I make up stories for her instead. It's a poor brand of false enchantment, but then again, perhaps there's more honesty in it than in the sort of magic most of us spend our days studying, the spells and potions that can be used only to destroy.

"Magic is about misdirection," I explain. "You can do just about anything right under your audience's noses, and they won't see it because there isn't one person in a hundred who knows how to look properly." My eyes fall on a hat with earflaps that is sitting on top of her wardrobe. "So, for instance, if I told an audience I was going to wave my wand, here, and turn that hat into a rabbit when I said the magic word, they would look at the wand or the hat..."

Roo, determined not to be caught, looks everywhere except at the wand and the hat.

"Cuniculustransfiguro!"

Transfiguration was never my best subject. The hat turns into a rabbit with unusually round and floppy ears. The poor creature resembles a beagle, but Roo applauds anyway. The nice thing about Muggles is, they're easily impressed.

I set the rabbit on the floor and he hops about in circles, disoriented at being brought into existence so suddenly.

Roo picks him up and strokes his fur. "He's real," she says wonderingly.

"Of course he's real. You can keep him if you like."

"I'm going to call him Snoopy. No, Hat-Trick. I think I'll go downstairs and get him a bite to eat."

"Seriously," she says when she returns with a carrot and some alfalfa sprouts, "what happened to my hat?"

"I told you. I turned it into a rabbit."

She throws her head back and laughs, a warm deep sound that fills the room. "You're as good as a program on the ... the ..." Her forehead wrinkles as she tries to remember something that keeps eluding her.

Our pictures are plastered all over the Muggle media now, so we vanished all the televisions and newspapers in the village when we made it our headquarters and cast a Confundus Charm on the locals so they wouldn't remember these items had ever existed. But Roo seems to know something doesn't quite add up, and I can see that it troubles her.

She shivers a bit, as if the Cheering Charm were wearing thin, and no wonder. One of the dementors is passing underneath the window. I can feel its presence like a cold chill about my heart.

Lucius Malfoy published a twenty-five page scholarly monograph with footnotes and diagrams proving all Muggles were intellectually inferior to the dimmest wizards, but I don't believe Ruby Brown is a stupid woman. It takes a sharp intellect to cut through the mental fog of our charms, even a little.

"Your hands are shaking," she says.

"It's n-nothing. Nerves."

"Smoke?"

"Please." It's a filthy Muggle habit, but a highly addictive one, and it does help with the tremors and the stammering.

She hands me the packet of cigarettes, lights one for herself, and stretches out on the bed. "Sure you're all right, Peter?"

"Fine. Say that again."

"What?"

"My name. I like the way you say it."

She rolls over and chuckles. "You're a strange one, Peter."

Peter. I rarely hear that name now, and I do like the way it rolls off Roo's tongue, as if there were some real affection behind it.

She's a whore, you idiot. Well, not exactly, but the next closest thing. And you and your colleagues are going to kill her, remember?

I fight back a surge of guilt and tell myself there's no harm in both of us having a bit of fun. She's doomed whether we do or we don't. But it feels all wrong, just the same.

I drift off to sleep trying to shut out more thoughts of Bertha, closing off human instincts and human conscience, training myself to sleep like an animal in a man's body.