The Rat's Tale

The Rat’s Tale

Peter had fallen in with a bad crowd.

That’s how some--his parents or his clueless coworkers--might have seen it. Of course, James Potter and Sirius Black, with their pureblood pedigrees and top marks at school, had been called a “bad influence” by the elder Pettigrew and had been the source of endless hand-wringing from Peter’s mum, but that was years ago and they’d changed their minds about James since then.

Oh, it had begun in a small way, an occasional drink after work at the Golden Apple along with the usual grumbling about the bloody awful state of the world, about how purebloods didn’t seem to get much respect these days, about how Mudbloods were running things at the Ministry (yes, you could say those things at the Golden Apple without raising any eyebrows).  His new friends were all purebloods, just a group of working blokes that liked a pint or two after work. Maybe his new friends didn’t make him laugh the way Sirius and James did nor come up with as many daring and ridiculous adventures. In school, the four of them had been free to roam the Forbidden Forest and the secret passages of Hogwarts castle so long as they didn’t get caught. The real world wasn’t like that.

Jack Travers was one of Peter’s new friends, not a complicated or deep person, just a regular guy who liked a drink at the end of the day and a good laugh. Jack was in the trades--he hadn't even gone to Hogwarts--and he worked at the stationer, Alexander & Co., as an apprentice parchment-maker. One of his jobs was to deliver rolls and rolls of parchment to offices like Fishbone, Mullion and Pettigrew.

And they did go through the parchment at the law firm as the solicitors called on Peter and his fellow clerks to copy out version after version of legal briefs. Magic couldn’t be applied to the production of such documents because the Court of Magical Law would not accept an enchanted document as legally binding even if there were only a Copying Spell on it. So when old Mr. Bartelby, Peter’s boss, came sweeping into the clerk’s room in the Deeds and Bequests Department demanding the fifteenth revision of a will, Peter would sharpen his quill and reach for a fresh roll of parchment.

Jack stopped by the office two or three times a week bearing great loads of parchment in his brawny arms. His blue eyes danced restlessly when he dished out sly winks and outrageous compliments, making the female staff blush and giggle. For some reason, he’d usually end up talking to Peter about something or other: Quidditch, or some joke that’d he’d heard, or something one of the girls had said.

Peter hadn’t been at the firm more than a couple of weeks before Jack suggested they go out for a drink after work. Peter had accepted, grateful to be away from the mountains of parchment and rivers of ink, or so he saw the geography of his desk at the end of the day.

“What about England in the semi-finals, eh?” Jack said as he set down two pints of Baddock’s Special Pumpkin Porter on the table. He had pale blue eyes and a round baby face topped with a shock of straw-colored hair. The perpetual five o’clock shadow on his jaw contrasted with his boyish features and could make Jack seem downright sinister, but only on those rare occasions when he wasn’t laughing or grinning.

“Er, well, the Italians, you know,” Peter said, more interested in looking around the pub than in the World Cup standings.

He’d never been to the Golden Apple, the pub located at the end of Diagon Alley and near the entrance to Knockturn Alley. Too near, some said. Peter took a tentative sip of his beer and scanned the room apprehensively.

The landlord, a tall, plump man, presided jovially over a noisy, crowded bar. Quidditch had a definite presence in the pub; team banners, posters and signed photographs of players festooned the walls, giving Peter a rather dizzying feeling as players on broomsticks zoomed in and out of the pictures. For the most part the witches and wizards at the bar or seated at tables seemed normal. Perhaps there were a few too many Slytherins for Peter’s comfort. He recognized Rosier and Wilkes from his Hogwarts’ days, but they didn’t see him, which was a great relief since they had always been keen to give Peter a thrashing at school if they caught him alone.

But Peter wasn’t alone. And he wasn’t a schoolboy any more.

“Damn right, Peter,” Jack said. He took a long drink of thick orange-brown beer and set the glass down with a satisfied thunk.

Peter thought that he’d missed something--Quidditch was never one of his strong points--but Jack grinned at him as if he’d just said something profound.

“The Italians have Volpicelli and Demarco,” Jack went on, “but what have they got for a Keeper, eh? If England had some halfway decent Chasers, there’d be a chance. What about that friend of yours--Potter? Think he’d play for us? He was damned good at Hogwarts.”

“James? James Potter, you mean?”

“Yeah, bloke with the black hair and glasses. I’ve seen him stop by your office, so I thought you were friends.”

“Yes, um, we were friends at school,” Peter answered, suddenly embarrassed for reasons he couldn’t fathom. “But James works for the Ministry now and I guess it keeps him pretty busy.”

It might have sounded like a lame excuse, unless you knew James, who would throw himself into a new enterprise with an intensity that Sirius called “Potter-fection”. Where Sirius would noisily wrestle with a task until he mastered it (even at the expense of a bit of collateral damage along the way), James would quietly focus on attaining perfection. His career as Head Boy had been like that; he never cared much about holding the job when they were younger, but once it had fallen in his lap, James had to be the perfect Head Boy. While this gave the four of them something to laugh about when they managed to sneak out of school for proscribed adventures, in public James was rather insufferable to his friends as well as to everyone else during their seventh year. Potter-fection. There was no other explanation.

“Ah, well,” Jack shrugged, “we could use a couple better Chasers. And a new Seeker.”

“Hungerford’s pretty good,” Peter said, eager to display some knowledge of the game, however meager. “Been playing for the Tornados for what--three years?”

“She’s a Mudblood, Peter,” Jack said loudly with a dramatic shake of his head. “They just don’t have it in them. Quidditch is our sport.  When you get right down to it, how can you expect bloody Muggles to understand it? You just can’t trust a Mudblood in a pinch. They’ll choke every time, mark my words, and Hungerford‘s no exception.”

Peter looked around nervously. If you uttered the word “Mudblood” in the Leaky Cauldron, conversation would stop at all the nearby tables and people would stare. But the other patrons in the Golden Apple gave no sign of having heard. Perhaps that should have been a warning, but he ignored it. Instead, he took a drink and felt a warm glow spreading inside him, a result of the strong beer, the close-packed room, and the grin on Jack Travers’s face. The Golden Apple was starting to seem like a nice enough place in spite of all he’d heard about it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Summer peaked and faded, as did England’s hope for a shot at the Quidditch World Cup. As Jack Travers had foretold, England lost to Italy in the semi-final for lack of scoring. (Italy, however, were upset by Sri Lanka in the final, a four-day mudfest in Kuala Lumpur.) 

He wondered if the rest of his life would be more of the same:  ten hours a day with only a clerk’s salary to show for it at the end of the week.  When he wasn’t at work, his main occupation seemed to be escaping from work. At school, he hadn’t thought much about what he wanted to be “when he grew up”. If he thought about it at all, he supposed that he wanted the sort of comfortable life that his parents had without having a clue as to how or why.

His school friends didn’t have a clue either, at least as far as Peter could tell. James single-mindedly applied himself to his job at the Ministry and seemed determined to marry his Muggle-born girlfriend.

Remus, poor sod, didn’t seem as if he’d ever find a job. Maybe Peter should have tried to get him a position at the law firm--Remus was certainly capable of clerking and much more--but he cringed at the thought of anyone finding out that he, Peter, knew a werewolf. Of course, Remus wouldn’t want to put him in such an awkward situation, so Peter never brought it up.

Sirius wanted more than anything to be an Auror, but the Ministry had turned down his application. He grumbled about it mightily and spent his days as a hired bodyguard for the rich and terrified, while his nights were devoted to the girlfriend-of-the-week or one-night stands--at least to hear him tell it. Peter wasn’t usually invited on Sirius’s pub-crawling escapades, so he couldn’t tell if those long, frequently bawdy tales were entirely true.

Peter came to feel comfortable at the Golden Apple, more comfortable than traipsing around the countryside with Sirius or spending an evening with James and Lily. Oh, Lily was always kind to him, but she did seem to monopolize James, who was different somehow when he was with her. And James was actually going to marry her--that was just starting to sink in. They were planning the wedding and it made Peter increasingly nervous. He feared for his friend. Love was supposed to conquer all, but how could James ignore what was going on around them? James, who worked at the Ministry, should have seen.

Peter could see what was happening, dealing as he did with the shattered remains of people’s lives every day at work, with the steady stream of widows, widowers and orphans who came to change their wills or to listen to Mr. Bartleby read out the last will and testament of a loved one while they sobbed or hiccupped or moaned and Peter supplied endless cups of tea, handkerchiefs and tins of Haythornthwaite’s Digestive Tablets (“Magical Miracle-Cure for Aches of All Sizes and Shapes”).

Muggles and Muggle-borns were being killed left and right, though no one knew precisely how many. The whole subject was taboo, like the open cesspool at the edge of the village to which everyone contributes but that no one will fix when it backs up and starts flooding other people’s houses; or like the argument between Uncle Horace and Cousin Oswald that simmers below the surface at every holiday gathering and in which everyone in the family must take sides but no one talks about; or like the wounded stray dog that haunts the neighborhood, growling and begging for scraps while growing weaker, until one day it’s not there and no one wants to think about why or where it went.

If you don’t talk about it, will it go away?                                                   

Dumbledore had always maintained that if Muggle-born witches and wizards weren’t accepted and trained, the entire wizarding world would be the loser. Peter hadn’t really given much thought to the question while he was at school, but out in the real world, things were different.  According to Jack Travers and the other regulars at the Golden Apple, all this so-called fairness led to purebloods marrying Muggles.  There were more Squibs today than ever before and it all went back to Mudbloods and how they were diluting the ancient blood of true witches and wizards.

And in the face of all this, James Potter was going to marry a Mudblood.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“We’ll start you off in D&B,” the elder Mr. Pettigrew had pronounced on Peter’s first day at Fishbone, Mullion and Pettigrew. “You’ll learn the ropes there, my boy. Best place for you.”

D&B. You could call it “Deeds & Bequests” or “Dead & Buried.” Take your pick. The latter was what the other two clerks, Eurydice Featherfoil and Persephone Toadflax, called their little kingdom, which consisted of the cavernous clerks’ room, the cramped office of the head of department and a dungeon-like vault in the basement.

Peter’s greatest fear had been that the Deeds and Bequests department would turn out to be utterly and mind-numbingly boring. However, only the Litigation Department had more drama, more tears, more screaming, than D&B. After the first week, boring would have been a blessed relief.

He worked under Mr. Bartelby, the stony-faced head of department, as did the other clerks. With all the work they had, they could have used two more clerks, but none of them ever complained because that brought up the specter of the previous clerk, young Bartelby, who had left the department shortly before Peter joined. “Left the department” was the way that Eurydice would say it, always in hushed tones and never in the presence of Mr. Bartelby.

The blunt truth--which took Peter a week to figure out when he’d first started there--was that Mr. Bartelby’s son had been killed, caught up in the incident at the Prewitt School in which the shadowy supporters of You-Know-Who had attacked a primary school that freely admitted Muggle-born children. Nine witches and wizards had died, some of them bystanders like young Bartelby who had fought to rescue the children and keep the Death Eaters from setting fire to the entire building. It was a shame, but it only served to point up the folly of getting involved with powers greater than yourself. That should be left to those foolhardy enough to work for the Ministry.

If Mr. Bartelby had been affected by his son’s death, he never showed it. But Peter knew--as a result of the after-hours snooping by a certain rat--that their head of department kept a bottle of Firewhisky in his desk and that sometimes at the end of the day he locked his office door, poured himself a large glass from the secret bottle and wept. Peter found it repulsive, and he never told anyone else what he’d seen.

D&B was, therefore, at least one clerk short. In addition to the piles of work they already had, a steady stream of witches and wizards came into the office to change their wills or to make new ones. There were days when Peter wished that he had a bottle in his desk too, days when the pain and suffering of their clients grew to be so much that all he wanted was to hide in some deep, dark place and sleep for a week, days when the sound of Mr. Bartelby’s voice calling, “Pettigrew, step into my office,” was enough to make his head explode.

October the first was one of those days.

In the morning 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 clerk’s 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 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 graduated 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?”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Three, I said, three pints!” Peter shouted at the overworked bartender. He glanced nervously at the other patrons crowded near the bar, feeling too conspicuous. The pub was more crowded than usual, though, and shouting seemed the only way to make himself heard. Harley Baddock, looking harried and unhappy, was busy pouring drinks for other wizards and witches and he didn’t appear to hear Peter.

The bartender’s face looked as grim as one of the carved pumpkins that floated above the bar. Peter didn’t care for the Hallowe’en decorations at the Golden Apple. The flickering candles inside the dozens of floating jack o’lanterns were menacing eyes that followed his every movement. The pub was so different from the Great Hall at Hogwarts, claustrophobic and sinister where the Hallowe’en Feasts at school had been almost cheerful, at least in hindsight.

Peter felt anything but cheerful as he waited impatiently among the clamoring throng at the bar. Why had he stopped by for a drink when he’d promised to be at James’s party by now? But Harley had been talking for weeks about the Hallowe’en decorations at the Golden Apple and how Peter must see them. Well, here he was, and none too pleased.

“Oy, Pettigrew! What’ll it be?” Harley’s voice boomed through the thinning crowd.

“Three pints,” Peter said as made his way to the bar like a shipwrecked sailor trying to reach a bit of flotsam, “and I’m in a bit of a hurry, so if you could...”

Harley smirked at him and made a big production of slowly pouring out each pint. “Got a date?” he said as he pushed three full glasses toward Peter.

“And I suppose you do?” said Peter shortly. He’d heard too much about Harley’s Muggle girlfriend over the past month. The bartender had adopted him as a sympathetic confidant and Peter had been too timid to tell him to stop.

“Yup,” Harley said smugly. “Peter, this girl is hot, hot, hot, know what I mean? Why, she--“

Peter made a grab for the three pints sitting on the bar and said irritably, “Look, I don’t sodding care about your Mug--”

“All right, Pettigrew,” Harley said loudly with nervous sideways glances up and down the bar. “Get on with you, then. I don’t have all night, y’know.”

Peter struggled to pick up all three pints and managed to slop a fair amount of beer down the sides in the process. His fingers stretched just enough to keep from dropping the glasses. He was so intent on maintaining his grip as he turned away from the bar that he didn’t see the witch barreling toward him until it was too late. He bumped into her, lost his tenuous grip, and the glasses went flying. One shattered and the other two bounced the floor, soaking Peter’s shoes and the hem of his robes.

“For heaven’s sake. Look what you’ve done!” said the witch angrily, glaring down at Peter with her hands on her hips. Her robes were adorned with twinkling stars and tiny comets that zoomed across a midnight-blue background. Now they were also sodden and covered with the foam from three pints of pumpkin lager, making it seem as if the starry heavens had just given a large and nasty belch.

“Er, sorry, sorry,” Peter chanted as he fumbled for his wand and then stuttered his way through a spell to clean her robes as best he could.

“Merlin save us,” Harley Baddock exclaimed as he came around the bar brandishing a broom and dustpan. “You’re a bleeding menace, you are.” He magicked the glasses into the dustpan and said to Peter, “Go on back to your table. I’ll bring you your sodding beers.”

“I wonder that they even serve such…people,” said the witch angrily, staring at Peter as if he were mentally incompetent.

“It’s charity, like,” Harley said, whisking the puddle of beer away into nothingness with his wand. The witch gave a sour look in reply and turned away pointedly.

Peter, his face burning, turned tail and scurried off toward the table where he’d been sitting with Jack Travers and Robbie Nott. Stopping by the pub had been a stupid idea. James and the others would never treat him this way. Sure, they’d tease him, but never in such a humiliating way, never in public. Seeing James earlier that afternoon had reminded him of how much he missed his school friends.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He had been looking for a deed down in the law firm’s basement where the records for the last four hundred years were kept.  They had to depend on the ghosts for anything older, owing to the great fire of 1545.

“Peter!” a muffled voice leaked through the tall shelves crammed with books and magical lockboxes that claustrophobically packed the basement. Peter cringed upon hearing his name. It was horrid enough that Mr. Bartelby and the other clerks in D&B treated him like a house-elf without other people ordering him around too.

“Peter? Where the hell--“

Further inquiry was cut off by a loud crash, followed by the sound of boxes tumbling to the ground. Peter, who now recognized the voice, hurried through the maze of bookshelves, clutching the deed book he’d been searching. As he rounded the corner and came in sight of the accident, he heard a mixture of curses and sneezes, accompanied by ghostly laughter. Peter grimaced and wondered why his great-grandfather’s ghost always turned up at the worst possible moment.

On the floor, a hazy figure struggled under a pile of magical lockboxes that had tumbled off a nearby shelf, which was still rocking ominously. The dust cloud raised by the crash made the torches on the wall flicker and hiss.

“James!” Peter cried. His friend was almost unrecognizable, black hair turned a mottled gray color and glasses covered in dust.

“It bit me!” James said as he got to his feet. “Just reached out and--“

“Moreton,” cackled Pontius Pettigrew, a nattily dressed ghost with thick mutton-chop sideburns and a bushy mustache. “It will not do--no, not at all--to walk too close to the Moreton box. Clerks have lost fingers. Pure carelessness,” said the ghost, gliding over to James while wagging a translucent finger. “See that it does not happen again!”

“Er, right,” James said as he took off his glasses and blew on them, dislodging a cloud of dust. “Thank you…sir.”

“Hmph,” sniffed the ghost with a dubious shake of its head. It glided away, muttering, “Such careless clerks these days. This does not bode well for this future of this firm. No, indeed…”

“Who or what was that?” James said as he tried to brush the dust off his robes. He quickly gave up, though, as this brought on a large fit of sneezing.

“Great-grandfather,” said Peter tersely. The ghost had a nasty habit of eavesdropping on conversations so he didn’t want to say what he really thought. Instead he took out his wand, pointed it at James, and muttered, “Exos Lavanum.”

The cleaning spell removed the dust from James’s robes, leaving him blinking owlishly from behind his black horn-rimmed spectacles

“Thanks, Peter. I probably look a fright,” James said as he ruffled his hair, which was even more untidy than usual, in an attempt to dislodge the dust. “Can I give you a hand with this mess?”

Peter nodded sheepishly and they both fell to working at organizing the pile of lockboxes, watching carefully for the biting ones, and putting them back on the shelves.

James sneezed violently again, and then said, “Work been going well?”

“It’s a job, y’know,” Peter mumbled as he concentrated on levitating a particularly heavy box to the top shelf, grateful for an excuse not to elaborate.

“They working you hard, then?” James said, handing him another dusty magical lockbox. “We haven’t seen you in ages.”

Peter gripped the box tightly and pretended to decipher the label, reminded suddenly that “we” meant James and Lily, where once it had meant the four of them. James refused to see the folly--no, the danger--of marrying a Mudblood. And Peter was expected to be happy for him.

But how could he?

Peter could think of half a dozen girls, all purebloods, who would have jumped at the chance to go out with James Potter when he was at school. Instead, he’d become infatuated with Lily Evans in their seventh year. That was a bit of a scandal, the Head Boy and the Head Girl dating. And Evans had been the first Mudblood in years to be chosen as Head Girl, which was gossip-worthy all by itself.

“Dumbledore’s been asking about you,” James said quietly, breaking the silence between them.

“Me?” squeaked Peter and dropped the box he’d been holding.

“He’s a bit worried about… all of us. And we miss you, too. Sirius was just saying that--“

“He misses having a punching bag. I can believe that,” Peter said, as he bent down to retrieve the box from the floor.

“Come on, Peter, you know what I mean,” James said lightly.

Peter looked away hastily from his friend and hunted for the box’s proper spot on the shelf. When he turned around, wiping dusty hands on his robes, James was staring at him curiously.

“We all have to stick together, especially now,” he said carefully and handed Peter another of the magical strongboxes. “Dumbledore’s stopping by tonight. He rarely leaves Hogwarts these days--he’s got enough on his mind as it is--but he wants to talk to a few of us about…” James paused and fiddled with the frame of his glasses. “That is, you’d best come along and hear for yourself.”

“Tonight?”

“Hallowe’en, you know,” chuckled James kindly. “I thought I’d come round and remind you in person since you ignored my owl.”

“Remind me of--oh, yes, I remember now. I--sorry,” Peter said, suddenly very interested in finding the right spot on the shelf for the box he’d been given. “It has been rather busy round here.”

“Too busy for old friends?” said James and put a hand gently on Peter’s shoulder. “We do miss you, Peter, and times being what they are...”

Peter turned to face James and was rewarded by the familiar, open face of his friend, a friend who had been willing over the years to include him on numerous adventures, who had rescued him more than once, who had defended him from attacks by snarky Slytherins and much more.

“Of course,” said Peter with a tentative smile, “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Eight o’clock at my place, then,” James said, his face breaking into a wide grin. “Stop by earlier, if you like. Lots of the old crowd will be there.”

“Sure,” Peter said slowly, aware that he’d been standing with his mouth open for too long. “I have a few things to, er, attend to first, but I’ll be there.”

“Great,” said James with a grin. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

Peter watched his friend’s back recede along the torchlit path leading to the stairs and then went back to work, whistling off-key and feeling strangely buoyant.

His good mood hadn’t lasted all that long. By the time evening came around, he was back in the haze of uncertainty that seemed to haunt him these days.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“You’re cracked! The Wasps deserved it,” Jack Travers was saying loudly as Peter approached the table, with no drinks to show for his trip to the bar. Jack drummed his fingers on the table and looked irritated behind his ever-present smile, but not at Peter.

Peter hesitated for a moment before taking his seat, unnoticed by Robbie Nott or by Jack, who had that deadly serious look on his face reserved for defending his Quidditch team, the Montrose Magpies. Peter slipped into a chair and hoped that neither of them would ask about his soggy robes, which clung to his calves and ankles like a pair of clammy hands.

“Didja see all that blagging? How could you miss it? Not that the referee saw it!” Robby Nott was practically screaming, his round, freckled face redder than usual, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth. “Angus McArdle must be a hundred and ten and if he’s a day, and blind as a bat. He’s not fit to ref!”

Peter looked away, hoping that this argument wouldn’t come to curses, as so many others had. Jack was only slightly more rabid about his Quidditch team than he was about pureblooded wizards and Peter had been his second more than once for an impromptu wizard’s duel outside the pub after some clueless soul maligned the Magpies.

“You can’t blame it on the referee, Nott,” Jack replied coolly, staring at Robbie and rapping his knuckles on the table in an ominous tattoo. “The Magpies are a better team and you know it.”

Peter glanced down at his watch and grimaced, noting the time. Jack and Robbie had been arguing Quidditch for half an hour already and showed no signs of stopping. Peter had figured that if he went to the bar and got drinks, he could make a quick exit without getting too much grief. He looked up, craning his neck to see if he could spot Harley at the bar or anywhere else in the room. The bartender was mad at him, that was plain, and was taking his time about bringing the drinks, if he was going to bring them at all. The pub was full, over-full maybe, with knots of witches and wizards clutching glasses or tankards, chattering madly while overhead the carved pumpkins floated in the smoky air, adding another layer to the Hallowe’en revels.

“Hey, isn’t that Ludo Bagman?” Peter said suddenly, pointing toward the pub’s front door.

Robbie stopped arguing, much to Peter’s relief, and half-rose out of his seat to peer at the crowd forming around a fair-haired man in the familiar yellow and black-striped robes of the Wimbourne Wasps. Without another word, he got to his feet and headed for the door.

“Where’re you going, you big coward?” Jack chuckled at Robbie’s departing back. He noticed Peter and said, “Look who’s back. Hey, I thought we sent you off to get--“

“Shouldn’t send a boy to do a man’s job,” Harley interrupted gruffly. He appeared suddenly and set down three pints of foamy, orange beer on the table between Peter and Jack, saying with a smirk, “Notice how I didn’t spill a drop.”

Jack looked perplexed while Peter’s face grew red with embarrassment. Harley gloated and was about to say something else, no doubt another put-down of Peter who’d finally had enough.

“Don’t you have better things to do,” he taunted with uncharacteristic bravado, “like getting ready for that big date?”

Harley shot him a murderous glance, muttered something under his breath and retreated quickly to the bar.

“What’s gotten into him?” Jack said. “I thought you were friends. Usually he wants to talk your ear off.”

“There was a little accident that…” Peter felt himself reddening further and said quickly, “He’s just mad ‘cause he’s got a ‘hot’ date after work and doesn’t want to go to any extra trouble to help…er, do his job properly.”

Jack laughed and took a sip of beer, his eyes on the crowd at the door where witches were screaming for autographs and throwing themselves at Ludo Bagman.

“Though why he wastes his time with a Mug--“ muttered Peter, checking his watch and wondering how he soon he could leave. He stopped, realizing he’d said too much, and became very interested in one of the unclaimed pints.

“A what?” Jack turned toward him with raised eyebrows. “Are you serious? No, I can’t believe it. That great git has a taste for Muggles?”

“Yes, well, that’s what he says anyway,” Peter spluttered, choking on the beer that he’d been attempting to gulp down. He set the glass on the table and pushed it away from him. “Of course, you can never tell with him. He’s so full of it.” He glanced at his watch again. “Look, I’ve got to run. Sorry I can’t stay, but there’s another party that I--“

“Rushes off to meet a Muggle tart after work, does he? Christ, I’d like to see that,” mused Jack, ignoring what Peter was saying. “It’s just too funny.”

“Yeah, isn’t it? G’night, then,” said Peter absently as he stood up, eyes already fixed on the door.

“Leaving so soon? You’re going to miss all the fun, Peter.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“…the worst in years, the worst that I can remember. Don’t leave the door open, Peter! The draft is killing us.”

Eurydice Featherfoil looked down her nose at him through her batwing-shaped spectacles. She was huddled next to the small fireplace in the clerk’s room with Persephone Toadflax, engaged in the morning ritual of gossip.

“Sorry,” muttered Peter. He wished that he could think up a snappy comeback as he wrestled with the heavy door. A combination of too much drink and too little sleep had robbed him of both strength and wit this morning.

“Worst, eh?” Persephone sniffed. She was plump and round where Eurydice was angular and gaunt, but they shared a passion for gossip. No rumor was too far-fetched for them to hash and rehash. “Only seven, that’s what I heard. Last year’s count was ten.”

Peter shuffled over to the table in the corner that held the tea things. Tea wasn’t going to fix his pounding head, but it wouldn’t make it worse either, and it meant a delay in beginning the day’s work of staring at pointless black squiggles marching across pointless pieces of parchment.

“Ooooh, Peter. We’d love a cuppa, wouldn’t we?” Persephone called out. “There’s a love.”

“Seven?” Eurydice shook her head. “Eleven. The Daily Prophet only reported seven, it’s true, but my sister told me…”

Peter stopped listening and concentrated on opening the tin of tea. His hand shook as he ladled leaves into the teapot. He’d had too much to drink last night at James’s Hallowe’en party, but that wasn’t the only thing making his stomach churn this morning.

Dumbledore’s words and the memory of those sharp, blue eyes troubled him as much as the hangover. The old wizard, his face more grave than Peter could remember, had told the assembled crowd of witches and wizards how the Ministry struggled to gain the upper hand against the Death Eaters and Lord Voldemort. Had he meant that the Ministry was losing the war? Peter had never considered the possibility before and the thought of it drove sharp quills of panic deep into his gut. Dumbledore had gone on to tell them that their help was needed, not in an official capacity but as a sort of irregular corps. Peter wasn’t clear on the details. The others had listened intently, but he hadn’t been able to focus on the words after a while, the roaring in his ears so loud that he found it nearly impossible to make sense of what Dumbledore was saying.

Most of the dozen or so wizards and witches seated in James’s parlor had remained silent, although Mundungus Fletcher had been as daft as ever, interrupting ten or twenty times with shouts of, “Hear, hear!” and, “Smack ‘em, I say!” Sirius had jumped up and begun pacing the room as if he were ready to battle You-Know-Who single-handedly then and there. James had kept to his seat, holding Lily’s hand and occasionally whispering to her intently.

All the talk had been confusing to Peter. In the end, he hadn’t been able to figure out what was being asked of them, though the others seemed to understand. All Peter knew was that he wanted to get good and drunk in hopes of quieting the feelings that gnawed at him like wild dogs chewing away at the carcass of a dead cow.

And he had gotten drunk, very drunk (surprising even Sirius), which was why he felt so rotten this morning. He managed to boil water and steep tea, major accomplishments both. Shakily, he poured the tea into three of the department’s mismatched cups. Persephone and Eurydice paid no attention to him as they continued their morning tête-à-tête. No item was too trivial for the two of them to pick apart.

“...and that couple over in Little Horsted makes eleven,” pronounced Eurydice triumphantly. “Oh and such a tragedy, too. Star-crossed lovers, snuffed out-- “ She lowered her voice dramatically. “--by You-Know-Who.”

“Are you sure?” said Persephone as Eurydice dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

“The Dark Mark was seen,” she whispered, “plain as anything.”

Peter strained to hear the details as he conjured a bit of milk. He picked up two of the full teacups and, mustering all the concentration that his pounding head would allow, teetered across the room.

“Well,” said Eurydice huffily, “my sister’s husband works in Magical Law Enforcement, as you know, and he said that those two were found in a very compromising position...”

“But I heard from Mrs. Witherspoon, my neighbor, whose daughter works for the Accidental Magical Reversal Squad,” replied Persephone archly, playing a hidden trump card, “that the girl was actually a Muggle.”

“I don’t see wha--“ began Eurydice, but she was interrupted by a loud crash as one of the cups that Peter had been holding fell to the floor and shattered. She looked at him disapprovingly and said, “Peter, do be more careful! There’s only so many times that a mending charm can be applied to our poor cups.”

“Sorry,” Peter mumbled. He thrust the surviving teacup at the clerks and scurried back across the room to retrieve the third cup. As he handed it to Eurydice, he said, “Here...I didn’t want any. Erm, by any chance do you know the name of this wizard that got…that was, you know, at Little Horsted?”

“Braddock, wasn’t it?” said Eurydice sipping her tea. She made a face. “Sugar?”

Peter, unable to say or do anything coherent, pointed vaguely at the table behind him. She raised her wand and used a summoning charm to make three sugar cubes shoot through the air and plop themselves into her cup.

“No, no,” said Persephone. “It was Baddock. Mrs. Witherspoon’s daughter told me herself.”

On hearing the name--the name he’d suspected, the name he’d dreaded--Peter stumbled backward. His feet crunched on fragments of the broken cup and he slipped on the puddle of tea.

“So,” said Persephone with a satisfied smirk, “that girl was a Muggle and that means only ten wizards killed at Hallowe’en and not eleven.”

He managed to grasp a chair and steady himself to avoid meeting the same fate as the teacup. The women shook their heads and tut-tutted him, but immediately resumed their gossip. Peter, however, had to get out. He dragged himself to the door and pulled it open.

“Oh, honestly--” Eurydice broke off, annoyed. “Peter? Where are you going?”

“Got some filing to do down in the basement,” Peter stammered, standing in the doorway and clutching the door for support. “Been meaning to get to it for weeks and there’s no time…like the present.”

“And I suppose you expect us to clean up your mess for you! Come back--”

Peter crept down to the basement, where he managed to stay holed up for the next week. There were several decades’ worth of deeds and wills that needed filing and Mr. Bartelby did get most upset when a record couldn’t be found.

He couldn’t hide forever, though. He knew that. He met up with the dreaded aftermath of Hallowe’en one evening as he emerged furtively from the law firm’s basement and crept up the stairs. The little-used back door led directly up into a narrow passageway between two buildings. A single ever-burning candle shone from a wall bracket above the stairwell, casting a small circle of light at his feet. He raised his wand and mentally prepared to Apparate.

“Peter! Where’ve you been hiding?”

A dark form melted out of the shadows, coalescing into Jack Travers. He sauntered casually towards Peter, a smile on his face and hands stuck into his pockets. In the dim light of the little alley his eyes appeared empty and his face grimmer than usual.

“Hiding? Me?” said Peter and dropped his wand in surprise.

Jack reached the wand in two long strides, picked it up and put it in his pocket. “I haven’t seen you in a week,” he said in a calm voice that Peter did not find reassuring. “Every time I stopped by the office, the girls told me you were off somewhere and couldn’t be found.”

“Been really, really busy,” said Peter, backing away until he could feel himself teetering on the edge of the top stair. “We’re so behind on all our filing that I…”

“Oh?” said Jack, stepping closer. “Too busy for your friends? You haven’t stopped by the pub since Hallowe’en. I was afraid you were ill.”

“Ill, yes. Actually, er, my mum’s been sick,” stammered Peter, “and I’ve been looking after her, y’know.”

“Sorry to hear that,” said Jack knowingly, a glint in his ice-blue eyes. “She getting better?”

“I suppose you could say…I mean…” Peter replied, too caught up in his lie to know how to answer.

“Good. Then I’m sure she can do without you for a bit,” said Jack and wrapped his fingers tightly around Peter’s upper arm.

Peter gave a strangled squeak. Jack ignored his obvious distress and pulled him toward Diagon Alley, not relaxing his grip as they squeezed through the narrow passageway.

I’m dead, Peter thought, because Jack Travers is a Death Eater and he’s going to kill me next.

The inescapable conclusion had settled on him painfully the morning after Hallowe’en like a dragon landing on a spindly-legged chair, which is to say that the certainty of how and why Harley Baddock had been killed was crushing him, making it hard for him to breathe every hour of the day and keeping him awake at night with visions of black-cloaked demons looming over his bed. In the mornings he’d wake up drenched in sweat, unrefreshed and fearful.

As they emerged into the brighter lights of Diagon Alley, Jack relaxed his grip for an instant and then linked arms with Peter casually in the way that schoolboys might do, though his grip was firm and anything but casual. Around them witches and wizards strolled, some alone and some in little knots heading home or to the pub. Late shoppers bustled about finishing errands before the close of business. Peter, his face slick with sweat, his limbs going numb, was sure that no one else on the street felt the same gut-wrenching panic that he felt.

“I expect you’ve heard about Harley,” said Jack nonchalantly. His eyes roamed over the street and he occasionally smiled or said a word to an acquaintance as they slipped through the crowds.

“Too bad,” Jack went on. “A senseless waste, wouldn’t you say?

Peter got as far as a choked gurgle, but terror had rendered his tongue as stiff as a board. Jack turned to him, smiling, and said, “I’m sure you tried to warn him. Didn’t you? You tried to tell him what a mistake he was making…of course.”

“Wh--well,” said Peter thickly, “I might have, y’know, said something like that, yes.”

“Obviously, he didn’t listen,” Jack said with a shrug, turning his attention back to the street. “Not your fault, though.”

“I s’pose when you--when you put it like that--“ Peter broke off because they were just outside the Golden Apple. His heart pounded as if it were trying to punch through his ribs and he laughed shrilly. “You might have said that you wanted me to come for a drink without being so mysterious about it.“

“No time for that now,” said Jack curtly, not smiling anymore. “Perhaps later...”

By this time, he’d steered Peter around the corner from the pub, away from the lights of Diagon Alley and down a short set of worn stone steps that were poorly lit by a pair of sputtering torches. They turned another corner and entered Knockturn Alley. Peter’s heart hammered as the emotional roller coaster crawled to the top of one final high that was certain to be followed by a dizzying descent into death.

“Where?” was all Peter managed to croak. He had no thought of struggling or of trying to escape. If Jack Travers was a Death Eater and Peter was marked for death, what would be the point of running away? Could his old friends--even Dumbledore, if it came to that--save him?

“Three…four…”

Jack had taken out his wand and was counting the doorways on their left, oblivious to the glares and mutterings of some of the wizards on the street. Others simply ignored them, brushing by with faces averted or hoods pulled down.

“Seven…eight…”

The street was irregular and dirty, as were the buildings that housed shops selling potion ingredients, books, and other things that Peter couldn’t or didn’t want to identify. They passed Hengis’s Herparium where Peter couldn’t seem to take his eyes away from the large display window that was filled top to bottom with snakes. Peter faltered. He was hypnotized by the seething mass of reptiles that looked like an alien monster composed of hundreds of tails and heads and forked tongues all bound together in a mysterious and repellant way. The eyes were the most horribly fascinating part; the black slits opened and closed, like doors to--

“Ten…Looking for a pet?” Jack said, giving Peter a sharp tug to get him moving again. “I don’t think those are right for you. Come on. We’re almost there.”

“Almost where?” whispered Peter.

“Eleven…twelve…”

Jack slowed down and then stopped, pulling Peter close so that they both stood a handsbreadth away from a piece of wall adorned only with peeling paint and torn handbills.

“This should be it.” Jack tapped his wand on the wall in three different places while murmuring an incantation. In the blink of an eye, a door appeared before them, a door no less faded and scarred than the wall had been. Swiftly, Jack opened the door and gave Peter a shove. He landed on a flight of wooden stairs opposite the door, clawing at the steps in an attempt to scramble to his feet. He looked up to see Jack close the door and then his world went dark.

“Lumos,” whispered Jack hoarsely.

In the light from the wand, Peter first saw the tense line of Jack’s jaw, and then he saw that the door had vanished, replaced by a blank wall. They stood in an alcove barely two meters on a side, a landing at the bottom of an unlit stairway, a dark passage to…where? Peter’s brain had frozen and refused to churn out any more thoughts.

“Up,” Jack said and pointed his wand toward the shadowy staircase.

Slowly, Peter’s feet found the stairs, his steps oddly light; soon he’d be dead, he reckoned, and free from the terrible, gut-wrenching anxiety of the past week.

At the top of the stairs, he expected to find a crowd of Death Eaters, like the ones that haunted his nightmares, but there was only a large, empty room with a high ceiling, bricked-up windows and peeling wallpaper. He stumbled into the center and stared up at a formerly elegant embossed tin ceiling and the huge chandelier that hung from its center. In wandlight, the many arms were like those of a frozen squid casting tangled shadows on the ceiling.

“Nox,” said Jack, and the world went dark again.

Before Peter had time to blink, Jack spoke again in a harsh voice that echoed off the walls.

“Morsmordre!”

The words were unfamiliar, but there could be no doubt that this was a powerful spell. A sickening green light exploded into the room. Peter looked up and gasped; his frantically beating heart almost stopped right then as he beheld the image of a giant skull nearly two meters across that floated overhead, swallowing up the chandelier and obscuring the ceiling. A skull with a snake emerging from its mouth. The Dark Mark.

Peter fell to his knees and closed his eyes, more certain then before that the end was near. He never knew how long he knelt there on the dusty floor as the green light washed over him, head down and clutching his knees, gasping each breath as if it were his last and waiting for death, or worse.

Suddenly the light was gone. He knew it without opening his eyes, just as he knew that he and Jack were no longer alone.

A presence. He felt the arrival of someone or something else, though he didn’t hear a sound other than his own labored breathing.

“Leave us, Travers,” said a cold, high-pitched voice, a voice that might have been childlike and comical in another time and place.

“Master,” was all Jack said in a peculiar tone that Peter barely recognized. He knew that the word wasn’t meant for him, but for the newcomer.

“Return when we are finished,” the voice continued, this time coming from a different spot than before.

Peter turned his head slowly, straining to hear some hint as to the location of the voice. But all he heard were heavy footfalls as Jack slowly descended the stairs. He sniffed, but smelled nothing except the faint sweetness of mold and ancient dust. He scanned the surrounding darkness in hopes of seeing something. Once or twice he thought he saw glimmers of light. But were they eyes in the dark or just tricks of the mind?

“Peter Pettigrew.”

The words came from everywhere and nowhere, bypassing Peter’s senses and planting themselves directly into his head. Each syllable was drawn out, as if the presence were dissecting him, peeling back layers of skin and muscle, worming into every organ and bone.

“Incendio!”

Light flared from the chandelier above and Peter stifled a cry of surprise. He opened his eyes cautiously, but dared not look up. He concentrated on the dusty wooden floor before him. There were bloodstains on it.

“Good of you to come…” said Lord Voldemort as if Peter has just dropped by for tea and cucumber sandwiches.

“Please--please--“ said Peter breathlessly, raising his eyes enough to see the hem of a black robe a mere arm’s length in front of him. “If it’s about Jack and--and what happened on Hallowe’en, I haven’t told anyone--I won’t tell…I swear it.”

Peter caught movement at the edge of his vision and couldn’t help but look up to see long ghostly white fingers moving fluidly, pointing a wand in his direction. Something dragged his gaze further upward until he was trapped by a pair of red, slitted eyes like a rat about to be swallowed by a snake, knowing it will be eaten but not able to do a damned thing to free itself as long as the unblinking eyes hold it fast. The Dark Lord lowered his wand. Peter dared to breathe and felt himself lose control; his trousers and robe suddenly hot and wet as a result of his bladder giving up in fright.

“You think you were summoned for punishment?” said Lord Voldemort, the cold voice tinged with amusement, as he moved behind Peter. The heavy black cloak swished softly across the floor, but otherwise the Dark Lord was a silent as an anaconda gliding up a tree.

Peter didn’t want to end then and there in a soggy heap of tears, sweat and piss. Perhaps it was being out of the terrible gaze of You-Know-Who or perhaps there was wildness inside Peter that had lain hidden, but something prompted him to whisper fiercely, “I don’t want to--deserve to… die.”

A cold, shrill laugh erupted from behind him and echoed off the ceiling and walls. Peter ducked his head and clapped his hands over his ears. It did no good, though; the sound had wormed its way inside him so that he would hear that laughter forever after.

“Oh, do get up. Had you been marked for death,” said the Dark Lord casually, completing his circle and standing once more before the trembling heap of Pettigrew, “your life would have been over by now. No, Lord Voldemort merely wanted to meet you after all that Travers has said.”

Pop! The Dark wizard conjured a chair that winked into existence so suddenly that Peter gave a start.

“Sit.”

“Said? About me?” stammered Peter squeakily as he scrambled to his feet, grasping the chair for support. He sat down gingerly; his pants were still wet, adding to the bubbling cauldron of new sensations that were overwhelming his brain. “Erm, whatever it was, well…I…”

“--deserve to be commended, naturally,” the Dark Lord said smoothly.

“Ple--excuse me?” said Peter incredulously.

“Yes,” hissed the other, the eyes leaving Peter’s face for a moment and traveling upward to stare at something beyond the chandelier above, beyond the room itself.

Without those fiery red eyes fixed on him, Peter had the chance to appraise the pale face. The white skin and slit-like nostrils were more reminiscent of a china-white snake than anything human. The flat planes of the face seem sculpted, not the product of some sordid coupling of human parents but of the deliberate hand of an alien craftsman. At that moment, it seemed to Peter a majestic face. Later, he would come to see it as a monstrosity, a cruel joke, but that first time it held him in awe.

The eyes blinked and were upon him again, the black slits enlarging suddenly and then contracting, drawing Peter into the inky blackness inside.

“So few wizards have the wisdom to see the immediate danger to our kind…as you do, Peter Pettigrew.”

The sound of his name uttered by the Dark Lord once again sent a jolt up Peter’s spine.

“Well, I…” whispered Peter hesitantly, trying to discount what he’d heard, indeed the evidence from all his senses. “Me?” He swallowed painfully. “You can’t think that I’ve done…anything, can you?”

“Do you think it strange that Lord Voldemort should want to reward those who are useful?” Another shrill laugh reverberated in the cavernous room. “No doubt you have heard all the usual lies from that Muggle-loving Albus Dumbledore and his misguided followers.” After a snort of contempt, he continued, “Do not believe what you hear. Lord Voldemort is trying to save the wizarding world.”

Peter gasped, having realized all of a sudden that he’d been holding his breath. The sound of that name, the name that was never spoken, the rightful name of the terrible and awesome presence that loomed over him, still rang in his ears.

“Does that surprise you? Wizards are in great danger, more than in centuries past. Can you guess what threatens us?”

The pregnant silence had struck Peter dumb. Curiously, he found himself longing for the voice to continue.

“Muggles,” came a venomous hiss from above his left ear, so close that he flinched and ducked his head as if dodging a blow. From behind him, the Dark Lord continued.

“They are killing us…slowly, so slowly that many foolish people cannot see. The idiots at the Ministry make rules to ‘protect’ Muggles. Hah! Mere folly that weakens us all. Why, you would think that wizards were pitiful, helpless creatures hiding in places like this, afraid to venture out into the world, afraid to take their rightful places.”

The Dark Lord stopped abruptly and then reappeared in front of Peter, who did not have the ability to look away from the scarlet eyes as the black slits opened and closed, like doors to--

“I, Lord Voldemort, am trying to save wizards from slow and shameful extinction at the hands of Muggles,” raged the Dark wizard. Abruptly, he looked up toward the chandelier and pointed his wand at some unseen enemy. “Those misguided, Muggle-loving wizards must be stopped. But Lord Voldemort cannot do this alone. No. I have gathered together those who will listen, my loyal friends. Of course, those who do not join us will eventually be crushed.” He waved a hand dismissively and then fixed his gaze on Peter once more, saying more softly, “Ah, someone with your talents and… connections could be very…valuable.”

“M-me?” Peter whispered, “You must be mistaken. I’m not anything--that is, I’d prefer a rather quiet life, you know, away from the--out of the--”

“There can be no hiding, Pettigrew. You will find that Lord Voldemort offers protection and rewards to his loyal servants.”

“Rewards?” Peter blurted out. “But, what can I--Wh-what do you want?”

“Information, merely information that will help our cause. And in return…”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Click. Click… Click.

The sound of his heels striking the floor echoed sharply in the large empty room. He stopped, waiting for the sound to die away.

That wouldn’t do.  The silence made him more nervous and he resumed pacing around the perimeter, passing by without really noticing the tall, bricked-up windows framed with tattered velvet hangings. His boots raised the dust that lay thickest near the walls of the long-abandoned room. He avoided the bloodstained floor in the center. He now knew many ways that those stains might have gotten there. In the past six months since his initial encounter with the Dark Lord, he had twice been in this room when fresh blood had been spilled: once when an Auror had been brought before the Dark Lord already dazed and near death so that it was a wonder he still had so much blood left in him; and once just last month when one of their number, a Death Eater that he didn’t know, had been… made an example to the rest.

The rest. The inner circle of You-Know-Who. The shadowy black-cloaked figures universally feared by wizards. The Death Eaters.

Peter Pettigrew now counted himself as one of that lot. Was it inescapable fate or random chance that had brought him here, had caused him to be pacing the cavernous ex-ballroom off a door that didn’t exist on a street that most sensible wizards avoided? He couldn’t have said--or didn’t want to.

Information. That’s all that had been asked of him, just as the Dark Lord had said at their first meeting. He reported on the comings and goings of this wizard or that witch, not really secrets but merely when Agatha Bones left work at the Ministry every day or who Sebastian Quirke met at the pub.

And there were rewards. In this very room he had learnt the Cruciatus Curse, which proved surprisingly easy. After what they’d told him at school, he thought it would be a difficult spell to master. Dead easy, that one was, even for Peter. And the thrill he’d felt as the power flowed out of him was indescribable.

Peter absently rubbed his left forearm, still tingling slightly from the Dark Lord’s summons. The Master will pleased with the information, he thought as he took the list from his pocket, turning the parchment over in his fingers.

This assignment had cut a little close to the bone, though. From the start, he’d told himself that he wouldn’t endanger his friends; maybe he could even persuade them to give up their foolhardy ties to Dumbledore, or at least protect them when the inevitable happened. Protect? Peter Pettigrew protect them? That would be quite a turnabout, wouldn’t it?

He pushed aside the unease that he felt about it and tried to concentrate on what reward might be his; perhaps he would finally learn the Imperius Curse, as promised.

“What have you brought me?” hissed a voice behind him.

Peter dropped the piece of parchment, startled by the silent arrival of You-Know-Who. He fell to his knees and scrambled on the dusty floor to retrieve the list.

“This, Master,” he said kneeling before the Dark Lord and holding out the folded piece of parchment. His arm trembled, causing the parchment to flutter and dance like a moth seeking a flame. “The list of guests for Ja--for Potter’s wedding.”

“Ah,” came the reply as the Dark Lord took the parchment and unfolded it. “Most impressive guest list…interesting that so many of our foes will be there,” he murmured as he read. “This is complete?” He refolded the parchment and tucked it away in a pocket, and then gave Peter an appraising stare.

“Yes, my Lord.” Peter said, still on his knees. “I volunteered to help write the invitations, you see, and that gave me the opportunity to--”

The Dark Lord silenced him with an impatient wave of his hand.

“And where will the wedding take place, hmmm?”

Peter could feel the sweat trickling down his shoulder blades, pooling at the bottom of his spine. He looked down at his trembling hands, unable to meet the Dark Lord’s gaze.

“I…still don’t know, my Lord,” he whispered.

“You saw the invitations, yet don’t know where the wedding will be?” said the Dark Lord sharply.

Peter raised his eyes enough to see that the Master was fingering his wand. Jolts of phantom pain tingled in his arms and legs as he knew that the Dark Lord wasn’t going to like his answer.

“The invitations are all Portkeys, you see, charmed to work on the twenty-first of June, but that’s weeks away and until then… ” whined Peter.

“Who does know?”

“Er, James and Lily. Dumbledore, I suppose, as they’ve been talking with him a lot…and Sirius, I think,” Peter said, looking down at his hands again, trying to avoid the terrible red eyes of the Master for as long as possible. “Oh, and Moody, too. He’s been doing something about… about security.”

“Alastor Moody? What a prize,” said the Dark Lord. “How I should like to catch him after all he’s done.”

The Dark Lord was silent for a moment and Peter dared to look up, only to be snared by the scarlet eyes.

“You must find the location!” spat the Dark Lord, the black slits in those terrible eyes widening ominously. “Surely these friends of yours will tell you, Pettigrew.”

“I’ve tried, my Lord, really I have. I even offered to help Lily with the Portkey charm, but she didn’t… and James and Sirius, we’ve hardly had a chance to talk. They seem very busy with all of this and--“

“But you will find out. You will not fail,” hissed the Dark Lord, raising his wand. “Perhaps you need reminding about what awaits those who fail me?”

“No. No, my Lord,” whispered Peter.

Too late. The Master flicked his wand almost casually in Peter’s direction and intoned, “Crucio!”

Peter gasped as his head hit the floor. The twin tastes of blood and dust mixed on his tongue, becoming a third, indescribably sharp taste. The pain that chewed through him, ravaging his insides and setting every nerve to singing, transformed into something else. Perhaps it could be called pleasure, this white-hot throbbing that had become the focus of his consciousness.

If there was pleasure for the prey in having its flesh ripped out by the victorious predator, tasting in the blood-victory while crying out in helpless agony, then that was close to what Peter felt. The pain bought him a taste of the Dark Lord’s ultimate triumph, which would surely come.

And Peter Pettigrew would be part of that victory.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~