Stag Night

Stag Night

~ III ~

Deeper and Deeper

“Credit where credit is due,” Remus said wryly with a pointed glance to Sirius. “Now that we’ve got that all worked out, what do you say we call it a night? It'll be a long day tomorrow since we have to be off early to wherever the hell James decided to get married--”

“All will be revealed on the morrow.” James smiled, shrugged, and then winced, having forgotten that any movement of his shoulders was likely to bring back the pain. “Remus is right. We could all use some sleep, especially you.” He shot a glance at Sirius. “Can't have you snoring during the ceremony or falling asleep at the reception, now can we? You're on the hook to make the first toast.”

“Hey, don't worry about me.” Sirius pointed to himself with the key for emphasis. “I'll be ready. It's really only last night that I didn't, er, get a lot of sleep because Moody insisted that we re-do all the warding spells at…well, I can't say, can I?”

“Give us a hint, then?” Peter whined, and his face twisted into a bad imitation of a smile.

“You'll find out soon enough,” James replied. “In fact, as ushers, you and Remus will be the first to know.”

Remus stood and gripped the back of his chair like a lectern. “James has his reasons, I'm sure,” he said quietly and looked down at Peter. James opened his mouth as if to explain, but Remus cut James off, clapping Peter on the shoulder and saying in a lighter tone, “Give it a rest, eh? You've been driving us crazy all night and now it's time to go home.”

Sirius frowned and stifled another yawn, while James nodded his head in response. Peter licked his lips, noticing how dry they'd become, how his entire mouth felt dry, his tongue mummified like the carcass of a dead animal baking in the hot desert sun.

“No. Please,” Peter began, wringing his hands while staring at the scarred surface of the table. Geoff loves Elspeth. Wimbourne Rules. Riddle eats it. A few hundred years of graffiti scored the wood. He was worried about surviving the next few hours.

What came first?

There wasn’t one event that Peter could point to, but a gang of them like the gang of boys who had terrorized the country parish where his family went on holidays, the band of tough little shits that had backed nine-year old Peter up to the lip of a muddy, bramble-filled ditch one shove at a time, each shout being accompanied by another taunt and another step closer to the gooey edge until Peter could not escape the jeering wall of boys closing in on him and he finally lost his balance, pitching backwards into the prickly ooze.

If Peter had to stand before some celestial Court of Magical Law and justify his existence, had to beg for mercy and forgiveness, he might bring up last October. It wasn’t his fault. There were circumstances beyond his control, after all.

On the morning of the first of October, a Mr. Wood-Nettle had come to the law firm for the reading of his wife’s will. In addition to her bequest, she had left him with three small children under the age of five. While Mr. Bartelby read out the will, droning on and on through two rolls of parchment, Peter had the job of minding the children. The two older ones were whiny, malicious brats whom he had to chase over and under the clerks’ desks after they escaped from Mr. Bartelby’s office. The youngest, an angelic-looking baby, proved to be far worse than her older brothers when she bit Peter’s finger and then threw up all over his shoulder.

Through it all, Mr. Wood-Nettle seemed barely aware of his surroundings and deaf to the screams of his children, his face pale and haggard. Afterward, Eurydice and Persephone, the other clerks, hinted at some dark end for the late Mrs. Wood-Nettle at the hand of You-Know-Who. Peter didn’t want to know; he wished they’d all go away and leave him in peace.

The afternoon brought no improvement.

“--has to be done.”

“I quite agree--“

Peter, who had been dozing at his desk, woke with a start at the sound of his father’s voice.

“--and we shall see the thing done right.”

He groaned to himself and hoped he wouldn’t be getting another lecture about “Hard Work” and about how lucky he should feel to have a place at the law firm. He peeked out from behind the barricade of his folded arms. It looked as if he’d escape the lecture today because his father was escorting a rather stout witch in a sea-green dress toward Mr. Bartelby’s office. This almost certainly meant more work for Peter. He stole another glance around the room. The other clerks weren’t anywhere to be seen, so he wouldn’t be able to wheedle his way out.

“Pettigrew! If you please!” came the expected call from Mr. Bartelby’s office.

Peter’s ancient desk chair creaked and groaned as he reluctantly got up. He shuffled across the room, still hoping that Eurydice or Persephone would get back from lunch so that he could talk them doing into whatever Mr. Bartelby wanted done.

At the office door, he met his father. The man was not his usual energetic self. His round face, normally florid, had the look of an undercooked dumpling and his moustache hung limply. He even forgot to reprimand Peter for the splotch of regurgitated baby’s milk on his robe and the ink stains on his fingers. Instead, he clapped his son heavily on the shoulder.

“Sad business, what?” Peter’s father muttered while shaking his head and staring down at the floor. He looked up, took a deep breath and said in a firmer voice, “Get on with you. There’s work to be done.”

Peter was practically shoved into the tiny office by his father’s leave-taking, which almost landed him in the lap of the large woman in green.

“Bartelby! What is the--“ the witch spluttered angrily as Peter struggled awkwardly to his feet

Mrs. Longbottom. Peter should have recognized the stuffed vulture on her hat sooner. Mrs. Longbottom--did she even have a first name?--was an old school friend of his mother’s and a frequent guest for tea at his parent’s house. What Peter recalled most vividly were the numerous times as a child that he’d been pinched on the cheek or berated by the woman.

On this afternoon, her face was pale and puffy and her eyes were red-rimmed. Despite the all-too-familiar tone of rebuke, Peter might not have made the connection with the torments of his childhood, but for the hat and the large elephant-shaped wart on the tip of her pointed chin, which had been the source of much sniggering when he was a child, though one was not allowed to speak publicly of its existence.

“Oh, it’s little Peter,” she said, her voice cracking, “and all grown up. I remember when you used to play with Frank and--“

Peter reached instinctively for a handkerchief as Mrs. Longbottom let out a great bellow like a dying rhinoceros. He remembered with a sudden sickening wrench to his gut that Bentley, the second eldest son, had been killed just last week in Shropshire while trying to save a busload of Muggles from flying into a barn. And now Frank, the youngest, was the only one left…and Frank Longbottom was an Auror, not the safest profession these days.

“Watch yourself, Pettigrew,” said Mr. Bartelby sharply to Peter, his long sallow face screwed up into the usual pained expression. Then with genuine concern, he said to Mrs. Longbottom, “Will you have a cup of tea or something stronger, perhaps?”

“No, nothing,” she said curtly and handed the handkerchief back to Peter. “Let’s get on with it.”

After a nod from Mr. Bartelby, Peter brought in quills, ink and several rolls of parchment, and then climbed onto the high stool in the corner next to the large desk that took up half of the cramped little office. Clerks always took notes when clients made wills, which he presumed was the reason for Mrs. Longbottom’s visit. People never stopped by D&B for social calls.

“Let’s get started, shall we?” said Mr. Bartelby, back to a businesslike manner as he unrolled a large parchment ceremoniously and began to read, “Here begins the last will and testament of Diapensia Hicklepin Longbottom, wife of the late Geoffrey Arbuckle Longbottom, daughter of Cleophas and Eunice Hicklepin, also deceased. Whereas the testatrix…”

The afternoon crawled along with the excruciating slowness of a wounded animal trying to drag itself under cover. As Mr. Bartelby read the current will, Mrs. Longbottom alternately barked and sobbed over the minutia of property and degrees of relation of various family members. Obscured by the details, but hanging in the air like a cloud threatening rain, was the simple fact that she had no grandchildren and only one son left. Although he was newly married, Frank Longbottom had no children.

Peter wondered what his own mother’s reaction would have been in such a situation; she’d probably take to her bed for days and cry herself through several hundred handkerchiefs. Of course, she had five grandchildren upon whom she doted and she had already begun to nag Peter about his apparent lack of prospects for producing any. Mrs. Longbottom, on the other hand, had lost her only two grandchildren the previous spring when the house of her son Caleb had been reduced to flinders.

Mrs. Longbottom held up well during the afternoon’s ordeal, although her nose got redder and her temper frayed. Peter, however, found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. When she heaved her large chest, the floppy white lace collar of her dress did a peculiar dance that reminded him of sea foam on the beach, jiggling and burbling as the tide goes in and out. Peter grew inattentive to the notes he was making as he dreamed of a holiday at the shore, preferably in Spain or France or anyplace far from the dreary English autumn.

“Pettigrew!”

“Yes, sir--Augh!” Peter gasped as he looked down at the parchment where his notes read, house in Surrey to grand-nephew in event of death of sunny and warm ocean breezes warm san--

“Read it back, Pettigrew,” said Mr. Bartelby sharply. “I do not wish to ask you a third time.”

“Er, right, sir. Let me just...find my place here,” stammered Peter, running a finger down the parchment. His other hand flailed in an attempt to jab the quill into the inkbottle and the bottle spilled, spreading a cancerous black blotch across his notes. Ink was dripping into his lap as he looked up sheepishly at the frigid visage of Mr. Bartelby, lips tightly pursed in anticipation of a rebuke, and at Mrs. Longbottom, whose hard, piggy eyes were narrowed in disgust. His mother would be hearing about this.

Things improved a little after that. Mrs. Longbottom departed at four-thirty, having regained her composure enough to thank Peter civilly and send her regards to his mother. But he wasn’t free to go because Mr. Bartelby insisted that the new version of the will be written out and thoroughly checked before he could go home.

It was nearly half-past seven when Peter finished. By that time he needed a drink, maybe more than one. Instead of going home, he headed for the Golden Apple. Where else?

Peter was still thinking of sunny beaches and ocean breezes later that night as he pushed himself down the corridor leading into the public room, inching along like a drunken slug. He grimaced and clutched his stomach. It would be better not to dwell upon slimy things just now.

The drunken part was accurate, at any rate. For the third time that week, he was pissed, so completely blotto that he could barely feel his knees as he stumbled back into the noisy, smoke-filled room. He couldn’t help it, he told himself. Who wouldn’t want to get numb, get sodding paralyzed, with a job like his?

“Watch it!”

“Auuugh!” cried Peter as his nose collided with a tray of dirty glasses. He stumbled backwards as Harley Baddock, one of the bartenders, grunted and swayed in a desperate dance aimed at holding onto the tray while stopping the tower of glasses from tumbling off.

Peter fumbled for a glass that had tipped over the side and was falling slowly, as slowly as if someone had tried a Levitation Charm on it.

“Ooops!” he said as he reached for it, but couldn’t quite get his fingers to connect. After what seemed like many minutes, the glass landed on the worn wooden floor with a thud and bounced under a barstool.

“Butterfingers,” giggled Peter, nearly choking on his own hysteria. Missing the glass was funny; watching the glass roll around on the floor was funny; and the irritated flush on Harley’s contorted face was just about the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

“Here now, here now,” came the gruff voice of the burly landlord from behind the bar. Without bothering to sort out the situation, he reached across and smacked Harley on the back of the head with a towel. “Clumsy oaf! Assaulting customers and dropping the glassware! You hurt there, Mr. Pettigrew?”

“Fine, Mr. Baddock,” Peter called from the floor where he was crawling on his hands and knees to retrieve the errant glass. His head was starting to pound and he couldn’t quite remember why a glass falling on the floor had been so funny.

“You miserable excuse for a wizard,” continued the elder Mr. Baddock to Harley. “What I did to deserve a great stupid git like you for a son, Merlin only knows. Belong in Hufflepuff, you do. Now get on with your work.”

Harley Baddock, whose ancestors had always been innkeepers as well as Slytherins, had shocked and embarrassed the whole family by being sorted into Hufflepuff when his turn came to go to Hogwarts. Even though Harley had finished school last year, the old man had still not forgiven him and was often heard muttering, “Hufflepuff” under his breath when Harley screwed up. In a funny way, Harley seemed to enjoy the attention, though little of it was positive.

As his father went back to the other end of the bar, Harley unfroze with an angry look toward Peter, who was still sitting on the floor. He slammed down the tray and ducked behind the bar where he began dropping glasses into a tub of water, creating an off-key symphony of clinking.

“What’s so funny, Pettigrew?” he muttered angrily. Harley was tall and heavyset with collar-length black hair, a lock of which always fell on his forehead precisely off-center. Add to that gray eyes and sideburns that crawled across his long ruddy cheeks like sinister caterpillars and the total effect was one that made girls giggle for reasons that Peter did not understand.

“Oh, by the way, your nose is bleeding. Serves you right.”

Peter got up and surrendered the glass he had rescued. Sure enough, his nose felt wet. He didn’t want to see, so he wiped his fingers off on his robes and got out a handkerchief while clutching the rail along the bar for support. He couldn’t go back to the table, the usual one where he’d been sitting with Jack earlier; the obstacle course of tables, chairs and pub patrons seemed insurmountable.

Suddenly nothing was funny.

“I need a drink.”

“Hrmph,” Harley said, noisily knocking glasses about behind the bar. “How do you reckon you’ll get home when you’re too pissed to Apparate, eh? Your buddy Jack’s disappeared and I’m not taking you home tonight.”

“Jack left?” Peter turned clumsily to survey the room behind him and nearly lost his balance. “When? Just now? Where’d he go?”

“Just now?” the junior barman laughed hard enough that the glasses momentarily stopped hitting each other. “Dragonsbollocks! He left nearly three-quarters of an hour ago, left in quite a rush, he did, and without settling up at the bar. The old man was cursing him up and down for that. Where’ve you been?”

“Needed some air,” Peter mumbled as he pulled himself onto a barstool. He’d spent some time lying on the cellar floor amidst beer barrels and wine bottles after he had accidentally tumbled down the stairs on his way to the loo.

“D’you know that there’s a lot of rats in your cellar?” Peter said, still clinging to the edge of the bar with the cloth pressed to his nose. The world was starting to spin. “Er, never mind. I’ll have ‘nother pint.”

“I think you’ve had enough, Pettigrew. I already told you that I’m not taking you home this time,” Harley said while he stole a guilty look toward the elder Mr. Baddock at the other end of the bar. “No, sir. Got me a date.”

“A date?” Peter giggled.

“Shhhh. Not so loud,” Harley said.

Peter shook his head woozily and tried unsuccessfully to get off the barstool. The bartender motioned for him to stay, found a freshly washed glass and poured out a pint.

“I’d catch it from him,” Harley went on after he’d set the full glass in front of Peter, “but he doesn’t know, see?”

Peter eyed the beer suspiciously. His stomach was telling him not to be so foolish. He took a drink anyway, though he had to grasp the glass with two hands to keep from dropping it.

“What witch would go out with you?” Peter said, pushing the pint away. He was trying very hard not to think about slugs. The thought of tall, goofy-looking Harley Baddock with a date was quite useful in that regard.

“Ha!” Harley replied and leaned over the bar, whispering, “You’d be surprised, you would...”

“Er, girl with three heads?” Peter said fuzzily, trying to get the bartender’s face to come into focus. “Hang on. I’ve got it. A goblin. You’ve got a date with a goblin.”

“Better ‘n that.”

“Ahhhh,” Peter moaned and laid his head down in his arms because the world would not stop spinning.

Harley must have taken this as a gesture of sympathetic solidarity because he whispered in a still lower voice, “A Muggle.”

Peter opened one reluctant eye and looked up. “Yeah…sure. How’d you meet this M--girl, anyway? She walk into the pub?”

“Well, my Dad’s a nutter about brewing his own beer, y’know,” Harley said in a low voice, eager to unburden himself. “There’s this cooper, see, in a village round about Little Horsted, and he makes these barrels Dad likes. Sometimes he sends me out to pick up ‘em up--I get to drive a lorry and everything--and there’s this girl there that sort of hangs around. I got to talking to her and… You know what they say about Muggle girls, eh?” Harley poked Peter in the arm to punctuate this point. “Eh? Not great bloody prudes like most witches, I can tell you.”

Peter closed his eyes again, not wanting to know more about the mating habits of Muggles nor of Harley Baddock, for that matter. He and his vertigo were left in peace for some time, until Harley said loudly, “And where in the hell have you been?”

Peter groaned. Have I been somewhere, he wondered? The way he felt, anything was possible. When he decided to take a risk and open his eyes, Jack Travers, an uncharacteristically dark look on his face, was standing next to him.

“The old man’s gonna have your hide,” Harley continued with a sneer, “for skipping out without paying.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Jack sneered back. He dug a few Galleons out of his pocket, flung them on the bar, and then grabbed Peter’s nearly full pint.

“This yours?”

Without waiting for a reply, Jack gulped down a third of the beer and sloppily set the glass back on the bar. His hand shook. His hair was tousled and his robes were in disarray, as if he’d been through a cyclone. Wherever he’d been, Peter didn’t think he’d enjoyed himself.

“Drinking your troubles away, Travers? It won’t work.” Evan Rosier came up behind them and gave Jack a hard shove on the back for emphasis. Rosier, a former captain of the Slytherin Quidditch team, was at his nastiest, a sneer of delight splashed across his broad, ugly face. Peter shrunk away from him, though Jack seemed to be his target tonight.

“You should talk, Rosier,” Jack said tightly without turning to face him. “You’re just as--oh, fuck off, will you? I’ve had enough for one night.”

Peter looked in confusion from one man to the other. He didn’t think that Jack knew Rosier well--leastwise not to speak to him on such terms. His alcohol-soaked brain was trying to work through the implications of this, but his drunken speculations were cut short when Jack grabbed his robe and pulled him away from the bar, shoving past Rosier.

“Come on. Let’s get some fresh air.”

Jack dragged him through the crowded public room and out the door. Miraculously, Peter survived the rough passage without retching. Once they stood in the chilly night air, the world stopped spinning.

“What was that about?” Peter said haltingly.

“You needed a bit of air, Peter old sod,” Jack said with a scowl, his face a mask of shadows and unspoken words under the light of the single yellow street lamp. In the next moment, though, his grimace softened into the familiar grin, like butter melting on toast.

“Feeling well enough to Apparate?” he said, slapping Peter on the shoulder.

“Er, I guess so,” Peter answered weakly. Though his head still pounded, his stomach no longer wanted to leap up and strangle his brain, a decided improvement. “I should be getting home and all that.”

“Aw, it’s too early to go home,” Jack said, all traces of his previous dark mood gone. “Let’s have a bit of fun, something I bet you’ve never done.”

“Whah?”

Jack beamed back at him and said, “Car-tipping.”

That was how Peter came to be standing next to Jack on a dark country road somewhere in England. At least, he supposed they were in England. As his eyes grew accustomed, he could make out the shapes of trees silhouetted against the stars. Open fields stretched around them in all directions. Several glowing spots on the horizon hinted at far-off cities. And it was quiet, too quiet. After the noisy pub, there was something eerie and unnatural about the dead silence of a country road.

“Where are we?” Peter asked, his breath puffing into wisps of white. He had cast a Locating Charm that allowed him to follow Jack when he Apparated away from Diagon Alley, but that told him nothing about where they actually were.

“Off the road,” Jack hissed and yanked on Peter’s robes.

They heard a whining sound and then saw the twin lights of a Muggle car, which made clumps of grass and hedges come alive and, by a trick of the moving lights, appear to march ever closer. A bewildered Peter crouched in a ditch at the side of the road. Jack seemed infinitely sure of himself as he watched the car draw close. Then he raised his wand.

“Wingardium Leviosa!”

The car lurched upward, unsteadily at first, and floated over the road.

“Now watch,” Jack muttered. The smallish black car hovered in the air like a giant battle-scarred beetle and then slowly rotated until the front end pointed down and the headlamps glared fiercely at the pavement. Suspended above the road, the car might have been a static illustration in a book: how dragons hunt or famous Quidditch moves explained in several easy-to-understand steps. The Muggle inside was screaming all the while, though the car’s windows muffled the noise, making it sound as if the panicked voice were far away.

“Car-tipping, see? The poor Muggle doesn’t know what’s happening,” Jack laughed through clenched teeth, clearly enjoying himself even while concentrating on maintaining the spell. “Sometimes they think it’s space aliens. Ha! Great bloody stupid Muggles! Can’t you just hear the old rotter?” He went on in a creaky, nasal falsetto, “‘On me way home from the pub, I was, when the car jes’ heaved to, wheels righ’ off the road like summat were controllin’ her. Musta been them space aliens, I reckon.’”

Peter had to laugh, in spite of the panicking Muggle bottled up inside the car. Funny thing, but his headache had slipped away without him even knowing, like a drunken party guest who finally sobers up enough to realize that he’s overstayed his welcome.

“Come on, Peter,” Jack said, wand held rigidly and eyes fixed on the floating car, lest the spell break, “conjure up a bit of light and give the bloke something to look at.”

“Er, let me see here,” Peter said slowly as he frowned in concentration. Finally, after marshalling what little wits remained to him, he pointed his wand and said, “Pyrosphericae.”

Multi-colored blobs--yellow, green, blue, purple--emerged from the tip of his wand, ballooning into pulsing balls of ethereal fire the size of his head as they drifted toward the car, The Muggle stopped yelling when fireballs began to circle the car like enormous drunken fireflies. Peter could see the face awash in shifting colors, the eyes wide, the mouth hanging slackly open. A terrified old man, he thought.

Suddenly it wasn’t so funny.

Peter was almost at the point of speaking, almost about to say that they had gone too far, almost about to do something, anything, when--

--screech!

Tires squealed on pavement. Where they had been alone in the dark, save the captive car, there was now another set of headlamps glaring at them and the high-pitched whine of another engine. Another car, small and sleek, roared into view, going far too fast for the darkness and the quality of the road.

Peter dropped his arms in surprise, as did Jack. The fireballs winked out of existence and the floating car lunged heavily downward, becoming painfully reacquainted with gravity in one ear-splitting crash followed by a brief series of metal-groaning and glass-breaking noises.

Time crawled. Trapped in an adrenaline-induced limbo, Peter saw the second car skid sideways across the road in an attempt to avoid the other car. It veered away just in time to avert a crash. But it did so by driving off the road and up a tree, flipping over while continuing to plow into a second tree. Something had to give. The tree cracked and fell forward onto the car just as the petrol tank ruptured, lighting a fireball that was a hundred times brighter than anything Peter had conjured.

“Son of a Squib,” muttered Jack angrily. “Bastard son of a fucking Squib. Let’s get out of here.”

“But there might be someone al--and shouldn’t we tell someone?” Peter stammered.

“Tell someone?” Jack laughed harshly. “You want to tell the Muggles and get laughed at, or someone from the Ministry and end up in Azkaban? No thanks.”

Jack got up, eyeing the black car warily. When it had fallen, the car had partially rolled over and it now poised precariously on its side. From where they stood it was impossible to see if the driver was alive.

“But-but what if someone finds out?” Peter gasped, struggling to his feet.

“Muggles have accidents on country roads,” Jack shrugged. He stood surveying the scene, his pupils turned a brilliant, eerie white by the raging fire and his impassive face coloring red-into-orange-into-yellow from the flickering flames. After a moment, in which the fire crackled and roared, he said thoughtfully, “You have a point, though. We ought to take a look.”

They both approached the nearly unrecognizable black car cautiously, staying out of sight of the driver’s side, which lay at the bottom of the heap. As they came around the end of the car, Peter saw a flicker of movement from inside. The Muggle, his face and hands lined with rivulets of blood, was trying feebly to get out of the car through the shattered window on the passenger’s side.

The Muggle saw them and stopped struggling.

“Pl-please,” croaked the old man, reaching a hand through the shattered window, “please help…”

Even from the shadowy grotto of the ruined car, Peter could see the pleading look in the old man’s eyes and heard--or imagined he heard-- whispered words begging him to…do something. But what could he do? What should he do?

Peter raised his wand, hand trembling.

“Obliviate!” he cried.

Jack jerked him away, out of the Muggle’s line of sight. He frowned at Peter briefly, but then shrugged away whatever troubled him.

“Not what I had in mind, but it’ll do, I suppose,” Jack said. He threw an arm casually around Peter’s shoulder, saying, “Time to get on home, eh?”

-v-v-v-v-v-v-v-v-v-v-