Backslider

Chapter 5

Drained

"I can't hide from you

As all my fears bleed through

No, It's nothing new

You call to me, I run from you

And if you want me

My confidence divides

My heart knows nothing at all

I'm waiting for a sign

I'm drained..."

-Dissonance

Opening on the door was hardly an easy task, as the battle had drained Mercier completely. He struggled and began to pound the door madly for several minutes. Mercier then took a rest on the stone steps and noticed a small handwritten sign saying "PRESS THIS BUTTON." There was a large red arrow pointing to a rectangular button on the far side of the alcove.

Okay... Mercier thought. Stupid, stupid. So he pressed the button. The sign changed to reply to his thoughts, "THAT YOU ARE..." A moment later, it shifted again to add, "IDIOT!" No wonder so many people don't like churches, he thought.Therefore, he casually drew his wand, and prodded the panel. It promptly decided to burst into flames.

There was a loud unlocking of locks (you may know that unlocking locks likely loudly unlock), and then the door opened with a whirr of machinery followed by a loud hiss.

"Neat," Jonathan muttered to himself. "Hydraulic movement system. Haven't seen one of those... ever."

As the huge oak doors whizzed open, he glimpsed Father Laurislair sweeping around the room tirelessly organizing the main hall for anyone who happened to stumble into the empty cathedral. Jonathan thought nothing of his odd behavior though, and put it off to being just another Catholic quirk... Always ready for... anything... Fire, pestilence, plague, levitating mongoose with exploding purple mice stuck in its feathers... (that disaster only happened once, in 1770's, where an illegal Glibbering Yeck ate several early drafts of the Declaration of Independence). Visitors certainly wouldn't have problems finding a seat, though Laurislair's robes tended to billow dangerously.

Ignoring the peculiar man, Jonathan jumped into a nearby confessional, and slid the door shut. Reaching under the seat, he produced a worn dusty bible. He casually leafed through the pages, until he stopped at a gently glowing page.

The things we do for security, he thought. All this magic buzzing around, and we resort to these weird muggle gadgets. This was a... Genelic spanner? Sam said it's a web-like thing that checks your identity. Scans your finger, palm, and... genelic... no, genetic, prints all at once. Really good security, they say, 'cuz Polyjuice only changes your shape, but... so weird...

Mercier heard Laurislair stumble outside and the crash and shatter of breaking glass. He had half a mind to jump out and repair the glass with a few swish-and-flicks, but he knew that the Father would probably resent the act. He liked to keep the cathedral itself as natural ("Muggly," as Laurislair put it) as possible. Firmly choosing against it, he turned his attention to the gently glowing page, and muttered, "Daniel. Twelve. Three."

There was a locking noise and a quiet whirring of machinery as Jonathan's heart leapt into his neck.

About ten seconds later, the confessional doors unlocked once again. He slammed the doors shut behind him as he walked down a short metallic hallway in silence. At the end of the white hall, he touched a featureless silver panel at the side of the door. It flashed green and a long and altogether nasty-looking scanning thingy shot out of the wall. Looking behind him, he saw the scanner reached back at the now-absent confessional booths. It started glowing a hazy blue, then a synthesized voice said: "Identified: Jonathan Mercier. Access Granted. Proceed through the doors... now." He recognized the pointy scanner as a Hawthorne Aurora Magus. Apparently, it could read a person's aura, establishing identity and detecting anyone's conscious deception of the Department's security. He felt quite dizzy and... strangely yellow... whenever a very large HAM passed over him.

At that moment a door emerged from the bare wall. It reminded him of the huge doors they put on bank vaults in some old Western movie he saw earlier that year. He pulled down on a large latch on the left and the door opened with a soft hiss. Slipping inside, the door sealed itself and disappeared into the again featureless wall.

It is now that the Author, in his limitless intelligence, grace, cuteness, and skill, would like to provide the background information of this, the Department of Mysteries. Please hold all questions for the end. Or, better yet, just light them aflame and see how hot you can get your car's gas tank.

As you know, or may have guessed, or haven't, this Department is meant to handle all the nasty thingies no one in their right mind would want to. Of course, most of what they do is totally "hush-hush." Of course, lots of people we don't really like talking about would simply love to get in on the secret. Of course, the Department can't allow that sort of thing. It's just not nice.

And so, twenty-seven years ago, the Ministry quietly built this wonderful little dungeon doodad underneath the Hope Street Cathedral. Now, for the intents and purposes of this story (all of which are both malfeasant and recondite), I assume that religion of any kind isn't really that big of a deal for modern wizards (when I was a kid...), which is why it's just so gosh darned clever of the Ministry to build the Department in the middle of a dangerous, nasty area a couple miles underneath a highly unpopular building. Naturally, there's all sorts of wonderful magical security floating around, but nothing pleases old men more than to buy worthless things they never use.

Thusly, magic/muggle technology was born! Most notably, and more recently, the folks at the Department decided to install some of these magic/muggle hybrids, such as the HAM you read about just earlier, or totally muggle things like the DNA scanning bible. "Why" you ask? Well, would you ever expect a professional Evil Overlord such as little Voldemort to know the first thing about genetics or what have you? Of course not. After all, the Death Eaters hate everything muggle. What would they know about science? (There is the problem of muggle things not working around big amounts of magic, as explained by Hermione in the Goblet of Fire. My excuse is that the amount of muggle science and magic isn't different enough to screw each other up. OK? Thank you)

There's five hallways, branching off of the main chamber, including the entrance through which Mercier arrived, the weapons locker and shooting range, the dormitories, an apparition lobby (where supplies and personnel can be apparated to and from most anywhere in the world), and the infamous infirmary. Moving on, the Department of Mysteries is rather... Hogwartsian for lack of a better term (which is why I made it up just now). That is, the underground building seems to be simple enough... but isn't. Rooms and hallways shift, and some only appear when one's bladder is, as Dumbledore once said, exceptionally full. And now, back to the story.

At that exact moment, thirty-seven and a half feet to the northeast, Hieronymus Bode firmly concluded that the world had gone, to put it as professionally as possible, absolutely nutters. And he hated it. In fact, had anyone peeked into his brain cavity at that moment, they would have known that Hieronymus Bode hated quite a lot of things. He hated his house (because it was too small, and he hated the wallpaper Mrs. Bode had picked out). He hated having to refer to his wife as "Mrs. Bode" in his internal monologues (since his brain had a mind of it's own, apparently). He hated the alarming number of internal monologues he was having while he was busy hating things (after all, hateful people hate having their hating halted by harmful histrionics). Most of all, however, he hated alliteration with large words (he desired to give onomatopoeia a nice solid thwump! bowf! and shplggt! over the head a few times with a heavy mallet). He did, however, like golf (for obvious reasons).

Suffice it to say, then, that Hieronymus was not a likeable man. He was tremendously short, with a long, pointy nose and a ridiculous name (even by wizarding standards). He rarely spoke, never smiled, and habitually made people squirm by standing in front of their desks, while peering at them with a blank face and abnormally wide eyes. He was fat, and pale, and had a nasty private sneer that he was quite proud of. He used it often, especially when he was finding new things to hate. He was using it now, for Hieronymus Bode had found something new to hate, bringing the list to an estimated 978.

Precisely thirty-seven and a half feet to the southwest, by the entrance to the main chamber, a figure in torn black robes stumbled through the main entrance, asked for a glass of panda, and proceeded to topple over. Anyone who cared to listen on his way down might have heard him mumble a report that a giant purple rabbit had transfigured his mother into a bucket of paint. To this day no one has sufficiently proven otherwise.

Nonetheless, there were shouts of alarm from all over the enormous circular chamber. As concerned onlookers flocked from their desks from all parts ofthe room to see what the upset was, the Department Directors be seen standing at their windows or doors at the sides of the marble space.

Bode slid off his specially raised chair in a swift movement that knocked a number of telephone books he'd found a few weeks earlier to the floor. Shuffling to the outermost fringes of the gathered assembly, he bellowed, "Tocar Signum!" with volume surprising for such a tiny fellow. With a crack, black smoke fountained from the tip of his wand, which was nearly as long as he was tall. The smoke itself was not remarkable, in itself. It simply billowed near the ceiling a few feet above the heads of his herded underlings. What it did next was, however. A horrific and piercing scream poured down on the gathered as the smoke erupted in hideous red flame, reaching down like the many fingers of some revolting monster. Not one witch or wizard in that place was left standing, excepting Mister Hieronymus Bode and a grimace several sizes too big for his face. He either kicked or walked over most of the people there, shouting certain creative words that would give many a frail grandmother cardiac failure.

"GET UP YOU FLAGITIOUS CARAPACES!" he screamed. When most remained on the floor, he took to lighting their robes on fire. Once everyone was finally one their feet, he extinguished the flames (somewhat like a child who's been ordered to clean up all his toys.

"You will get back to work," he commanded with surprising calmness. As the group took their seats, and the distracted scratch of quill to parchment resumed, he added, "The next person to leave their seat will win a private lesson from me on why the Americans meant by 'cruel and unusual punishment.'" Somewhere, someone coughed. "YOU! WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?" he shouted at an old man seated nearby. The old man looked up from his papers as his quill exploded, squirting black ink over the pile. He ignored this, however, as he was quite distracted by a pair of venomous eyes and a surly frown situated three feet above the ground. The fellow had the appearance of a man who just found his wife in bed with the neighbor--and his mother. "GET THIS MAN TO THE INFIRMARY!" Bode gestured in Jonathan's general direction. However, as there was only one pile of snoring wizard, specific directions were not necessary. The elderly gentleman hobbled over to the heap of robes, strained downward at the waist, and slowly scooped the sleeping wizard over his shoulder. Turning around, he saw Bode's face contorted in repressed rage, and ran down a nearby hallway with surprising speed. Hot in pursuit, Bode took the time to publicly embarrass several people, poison the office's coffee supply, and sweep everything off every desk along the way.

Nonetheless, Bode could do these things very quickly and was soon on his way to the Pit of Ceaseless Horror and Pain also known as the Infirmary.

Walking into the infirmary, one would immediately note it's total lack of weirdness. In fact, it was an astonishingly organized and clean room, with spotless white tile floors, and colorless walls molded into a plethora of drawers, sinks, and beds. The closest thing to alarming was the icy cold that pervaded every surface of that place. The beds were warm enough, but a barefoot wanderer would be greeted by the freezing ground. It wasn't particularly evil, just kind of... disquieting and uncomfortable. Nonetheless, it was into this room that Bode and a feeble gentleman strode into. Though Bode would linger for quite some time, the unnamed man unloaded Mercier into one of the many empty beds and galloped out again without a word.

"Jonathan... I'll have you know that you are a lazy, stupid, fool." Bode whispered in Jonathan's ear. As you would expect, he didn't respond. "Sound good to you?"

For the next five minutes, there was hardly a sound, besides the drip, drip, drip of a broken faucet. To break the uncomfortable silence, Bode wheeled over a short stair and proceeded to slap Mercier across the face 148 consecutive times. If anybody asked, he knew he could say it'd been part of whatever assault had put him in this condition. If only people would FILE THE DAMN REPORTS like they're supposed to, he thought, these things wouldn't happen... The most puzzling thing was why Mercier would have come alone. Croaker must have asked him to come, but he would have been with Christophell. They should have come together. Oh... by the Jorglefish's Left Nostril... Croaker wouldn't have... But Bode knew, as well as anyone, that Lien Croaker's obsessions run more than deep enough to make him do incredibly stupid things. Thankfully, for Mercier's left cheek's sake, Mindy Presh decided to make her entrance at that precise moment.

"Finally! What took you so long? Too busy 'treating' that fellow from the weapon's wing to do your job?" Bode grinned demeaningly.

"Oh, shut up, Bode. Don't give me that crap. Some idiot decided to go and splinch himself in the Apparating Lobby--right into the cafeteria's food shipment. Peaches and cheeses in places I didn't even know existed. Well, now I do." Mindy shuddered. It goes without saying that Miss Mindy Presh was the sort of person who wears brown micro-fiber elastic robes with six pockets and a black drawstring about 5/8 inch in diameter. What that meant no one knows exactly. However, it is certain that Miss Mindy Presh greatly enjoys cheddar and broccoli soup, simply because it reminds her of camp food. She enjoys brushing her black hair at all times of day, and wearing lipstick colored like those red crayons people use to draw lips. When she thinks no one is looking, she enjoys wearing men's pants on her head and impersonating Hieronymus Bode. She's one of those sexy yet aloof, patrician yet peasant, attractive yet repulsive, sensual yet innocent, girl next door yet girl next door (if one lived next to a mansion), uptown yet down to earth, selfish yet endearing, naughty yet nice, obedient yet rebellious, ice tea yet Jack Daniels, intelligent yet unknowledgeable (wink, wink), new wave yet old-fashioned, vixens.

"I believe you know Mister Mercier..." the tiny man lifted Jonathan's head up by the hair to help her see. "It seems he's decided to get himself nice and cursed. I've tried all the... usual measures."

"Criminal abuse?" Mindy shifted her weight to her other foot. "That's my job. Let me have a look." Tall, blonde, and ridiculously pretty, one might not be one to greatly enjoy the pain and suffering of others. But she did. That's why she and Hieronymus Bode got along so well. As they say, "sadism is the stuff that binds us..." She pushed her boss out of the way, reached into her robes and produced a tiny red stone on a thin golden cord. Muttering under her breath, she swung the pendant over his body, pausing now and again to prod a knee, or flick a foot, or scratch gently at his hand. "Aurum fosep hajeneh woes keem gwehveal... Oh... bollocks..." Horribly

"What?" Bode asked. He was standing on his toes, with a sort of I-hope-it's-profoundly-deadly-and-let's-not-forget-the-unbearably-painful demeanor. "What's happened?"

"Well, I can tell you that he's been in a fight..."

"Grand. Now I know why you work here... nothing gets by you."

"Shut up you sex-deprived troll," she shot back with a haughty smile. "He was in a fight..." she cast a poisonous glare at Bode. "A good one, I think. He definitely won... well, I think... but... whomever he was fighting did something nasty to him," She squinted at Mercier as though she was able to see something no one else could, which, of course, she was. "He was paralyzed by something first... then..." Over Mercier's forehead, the pendant turned black. Quite possibly for theatrical effect, so did most of the room. The lamps flared, and their flames went dark with a pop. A faint, but otherworldly howl coursed throughout the room. The shadow of that pendant became tall and menacing... and then boiled away. They stood for a while, staring at each other, and the air tingled. Mindy's eyes remained bent on Bode. Slowly, her hands relaxed, and she trembled.

"He's Draining," she said, sitting down on the edge of a nearby bed, poised as if readying to run out the door. "As you'd expect, it's a terrible and ancient curse."

"There seems to be a lot of those... I remember that back in the day people (referring to himself) would simply transfigure their enemies into pink watering cans. Painless, effective, and ecologically sound." Bode said gravely, eyes fixed on Jonathan. He had a big collection back home. "What does this one do?"

"Well, if you think of life as a muggle battery. You're familiar with them, right?" Bode nodded. His muggle-born wife, Mrs. Bode, had a vault filled with empty batteries at Gringotts for reasons she would not explain. Mindy Presh continued, "All the time, it's losing more and more of it's energy. Eventually it goes dead. That's Dreinen in a nutshell."

"And so do you..." Bode stated thoughtfully. "What can we do, then?"

"Nothing..." she shrugged. "Actually, the Drain doesn't kill you... not for a while anyways. Right now, for example, Jonathan's simply unconscious. Over the next few hours, his condition will worsen. He'll go into a coma for a few days. But after that..." she trailed off.

"He'll die?" Bode seemed puzzled by Jonathan's seeming resoluteness to continue living.

Mindy walked over to a bookshelf, peered at the various resources to choose from, and decided on an untitled one bound in black. She leafed through the pages, and squinted at one in the back of the book, nodding. "It says, 'Dreinen, also known as the Draining Curse is an unblockable attack that absorbs the energies necessary for life over the course of five to six hours. At the end of that time, the Cursed will enter a comatose state. This curse cannot be treated by any known means; Potions, Counter-Curses, and Magical Artifacts have been shown to have no effect."

"So, what can you do?" Realizing he sounded concerned, he covered hurriedly. "We've blown a million galleons training him--it's be a shame to let one curse to be the end of him."

"Hold on..." She scanned the next few pages. "Aha! 'Dreinen possesses numerous side effects, most notably the...this is odd... permanent distortion of the Cursed."

"What the hell does that mean? He'll be horribly scarred? We're in luck--I doubt anyone will know the difference."

"Be quiet, you insufferable sea-squid. I'm trying to concentrate," she said distractedly. Distort... "Well, this might not be so bad after all!"

"What?" Bode asked.

"Well, this book was written back in the 1950's just after Grindelwald was defeated. Now, Grindelwald was best known for..." she asked invitingly.

"DISTORTION!"

"Very good! Here's a cookie." She conjured a badly burnt cookie and lobbed it at his head. It missed, but she pretended it hadn't. "Now, Distortion, of course, is very specific, very difficult to learn, and very illegal. You know why?"

"Because... let's see... it..."

She made a buzzing noise. "ERNNNK! So sorry, your time is up. A Distortion is a type of curse that changes the very core of something, or someone, most commonly. Voldemort was evil enough, you know, with his Death Eaters, and massacres, that crazed obsession with death, and, supposedly, boxers adorned with little pink bunnies, but Grindelwald." Apparently, Mindy noticed something quite interesting on the wall, and proceeded to stare at it, but continued distractedly. "If the public knew half of what he did... that any of those rumors were true, well... he'd make Voldemort look like a tiny chihuahua, wouldn't he? Anyways, back to the point. Evil cannot create; it can only corrupt. Trolls and Ogres, for example, were Trees once. Great Trees, Distorted by old curses and confusions He resurrected. The Death Eaters too... He couldn't make new things, only ruin and twist them. Vampires, Werewolves, Bodachs and Hags. All are humans corrupted by various kinds of Distortion."

"Oh damn." Bode looked downcast.

"My dear, Hieronymus, you look positively despondent!" Mindy Presh grinned widely.

"I know! I just ran out of silver bullets and stakes!" he exclaimed. Mindy picked him up by his robes and pressed him against the wall.

"One more word out of you, and I will make you wish you had never been born," she whispered pointedly.

"Actually, Miss Presh, wishing you had never been born would make more sense." Bode found himself thrown into the hallway.

"AND DO NOT COME BACK!"

"Must be PMS," Bode shrugged stomping back to his office.