Chapter Text
"Bloody hell," said Nicola almost reverently, looking at the enormous dog that was lying there, drooling gently from three muzzles which all seemed particularly well-furnished with teeth. "Whatever you do, Susan, don't stop playing the clarinet."
"I thought you said you liked all animals except anteaters," offered Lawrie helpfully from the back.
"Right now I'd swap that creature for a three-headed anteater sight unseen," said her twin ferociously. "And it's asleep on the trapdoor, in case you hadn't noticed that, and we need to come up with something before Susan runs out of breath. She's not playing the didgeridoo, you know."
Susan mimed something with her eyebrows and played the first bar of 'Waltzing Matilda'. The dog snored. Lawrie poked hopefully at a floorboard with her foot. The floorboard declined to creak enticingly, flip upwards at one end, or perform any of the other tricks known to floorboards of fiction.
Nicola squinted down the corridor. "There's room for one of us to squeeze past it."
"It's not going to be me, I can tell you that for nothing," said Lawrie prudently. "I'm not running away from that thing. I've got a bone in my leg."
"No - look - you go right to the end, you'll be safe there, once it's off the trapdoor I'll sing whilst Susan drops down the trapdoor, and then once she's down safely she can start playing the clarinet again."
Lawrie fisted hands on hips and glared. "It's not fair. We've got identical larynxes. I don't see why you can sing and I can't," she said, eyeing the dog's sweaty flank with the greatest of scepticism.
"P'raps someone tried to throttle you when you were a baby," said Nicola helpfully. "I can think of any number of suspects. We'd better get on with it, someone's bound to hear the music eventually."
"When I find out which of the Gryffindors did this I'm going to break that harp over their head," said Lawrie. "If I find out this is somebody's rat that the Weasley twins Transfigured, or something..."
"Wouldn't that be better than the other thing?"
Lawrie looked at her sister, then at Susan, then at the dog. It still looked peacefully asleep. Lawrie really didn't want to get any closer and find out. She felt as if someone had cast a Jelly-Legs Jinx on her. She inched, cautiously, a couple of steps closer.
One of the heads shifted fractionally. Lawrie froze, reminded horribly of other things with skulls and teeth that size. Bulls, and lions, and... She managed another step. She closed her eyes and walked another two steps like that, then hastily opened them again when she felt wet, damp breath on her leg. Tears quivered behind her eyelids. Usually, when she said she was scared, that was enough and she didn't have to do it. She had had absolutely no practice in doing it anyway.
Lawrie closed her eyes again, sucked in all the breath she could muster and managed, by dint of imagining what it would be like to have Ginty or Peter or someone turn up and see her like this, to squeeze between the expanding bellows of the dog's flank and the rough stone wall. She pelted for the other end of the corridor, heart hammering, and pulled out her wand.
Susan stopped playing.
Lawrie took a breath. For a horrible moment no sound came out of her throat, only a weak whistling noise. The dog snuffed around. Nick and Susan were far closer to it than Lawrie was... the dog would smell them first...
For a black vertiginous moment, that was a good thing.
Then Lawrie found her breath. "You repellent drooling object," she found herself saying in a slick, greasy voice that only had a very small squeak of terrified laughter at the edges of it. "You misbegotten morlock of the canine breed. If I required proof that three heads are not better than one, I only need glance at Potter and his cronies. I have no need of a demonstration from you."
The dog turned and growled in thirds. It began to stalk stiff-leggedly towards her. The growling shook the floorboards and the stone wall behind her. Or perhaps it was Lawrie herself shaking. She couldn't tell.
"There are already enough dunderheads among my students who don't have the sense not to piddle up the walls. You are entirely surplus to requirements. I am sure that if I asked you to concoct a simple Necrophilus Draft you would bury the bones instead of grinding them..." she improvised in Professor Snape's voice. The dog broke into a run.
And stopped. And laid three heads on two paws, and began to snore again.
"... venite, venite in Bethlehem
Natum videte, regem Angelorum
Venite adoremus, venite adoremus
Venite adoremus, Do - o - minum,"
Lawrie opened her eyes and looked at her sister. Nicola was looking aggravatingly choirboy-like, as she always did when she sang. The dog let out a whuffling sigh and collapsed heavily sideways. Lawrie tiptoed very cautiously back past it.
There was a thump and a papery-sounding scrabble from down the trapdoor, and the light of a torch; and then a triumphant slither of notes on the clarinet that might or might not have been intended for a fanfare. Lawrie peered downward. It sounded like Susan was rather a long way down. Nicola made a small noise indicative of what she thought of sisters who always looked before they leapt, and jumped neatly past her.
The trapdoor shut after them. Nicola shouted some spell or other to cushion their fall. Black and yellow sparks in bubbles raced up past Lawrie, shimmering faintly in the gloom. Lawrie landed and bobbed a few inches above the floor - it felt most peculiar - put her feet on the ground and stood up.
It smelt dank and vaguely greenhouse-like in the darkness. Susan was waving a torch at a very large clump of greenery which seemed to be huddled up in one corner. "Devil's Snare," she explained cheerfully. "There used to be a patch of it at the end of my Granddad's garden. We called it Igor, because you had to break out the torches and pitchforks to make it disgorge the shed."
"We haven't got a pitchfork," said Nicola dubiously. "It seems scared enough of your torch. What are you doing with a torch, anyway? I thought batteries didn't work in the Wizarding World."
"No more they don't," said Susan placidly. "Not for long, anyway. I swapped this one with Hermione for a set of Fingerlights - she wanted them so that she could read in bed."
"Why didn't you just bring the Fingerlights?"
"Because this is a cool Muggle thing," said Susan and blushed. The plant in the corner tucked up some more outlying tendrils with a rustling sound. Lawrie gave it a dubious look. "What if the batteries give out?"
"Oh, it'll be fine, this one's only a baby compared to Igor," said Susan largely. "Look, there's a sort of stone passageway."
Nicola gave the passageway a narrow look, obviously trying to work out where it fitted in the castle's topography. It wasn't any part of the second floor that Lawrie had ever seen. Perhaps they had all fallen further than they thought. It was hard to tell in the dark. Lawrie told herself firmly that she was never going to read Alice In Wonderland again; though she'd never liked it much, anyway, bits of it were too horribly dreamlike and the poetry sounded like grown-ups making pointless grown-up jokes.
"I think we must be somewhere under the Slytherin bathrooms," Nicola decided finally.
Lawrie hugged herself for warmth. "I'd sooner stay here and have tea with the dog and the Devil's Snare than wade through Goyle's old bathwater," she said, pitching her voice to sound plucky yet pathetic in the hope that someone would take pity on her. Possibly Susan might have some chocolate about her person, she often did, though she usually said 'For medicinal purposes' whilst handing it out in a way that made Lawrie think that Susan's father too was prone to say that about brandy.
"Fine. You stay here on your own, then," said Nicola impatiently.
"I didn't mean it," wailed Lawrie, hurrying after her. Susan propped the torch carefully on the floor facing the plant. It lit a narrow slice of the floor, looking, to Lawrie's unwanted imagination, horribly like the skylight in an oubliette. Lawrie hesitated. The plant shuffled. Above her, she could hear something that was either the dog's breathing or one of the other sounds the castle made at night. Perhaps it was the castle itself breathing. It certainly sounded loud enough.
The stone passageway let out into a high chamber filled with weird tiny metallic birds which clinked slightly as they flew. Lawrie looked up at them suspiciously, wondering whether they bit. Nicola rifled through a pile of brooms. "Yes! Rowan's Cleansweep!"
"Good," said Lawrie, feeling, for once, undeservedly lucky. "Let's get out of here. This place is completely mad. Do you think Dumbledore's planning to open some kind of wizarding theme park?"
Nicola giggled. "They could turn the greenhouses into Professor Sprout's Wild Jungle, and have lots of waxworks in the dungeons of people Snape's poisoned, and a helter-skelter in the Astronomy Tower."
"And a rollercoaster on the roof!"
"A rollercoaster on the roof would be brilliant!" said Susan enthusiastically. "They've got one at the Sleekeasy's factory. It's part of the production line."
Nicola and Lawrie looked at each other, and then at her. "Mad," said Lawrie, again, with feeling. "All of them. Quite mad."
--
"It is weird, you know," said Lawrie to Nicola at the end-of-year feast, as the red and gold banners waved gently overhead and the Fat Friar strolled up and down the table clapping people on the back and pulling crackers with them. "I mean, it was us that got Rowan's broom back so that they won the match, but it was Gryffindor who got the glory."
"Glory," said Nicola scornfully. "Don't be such an ass. We were lucky to get away without anyone finding out."
"And then Gryffindor won the House Cup," said Lawrie, licking a dribble of syrup of the bottom of her spoon as she tried to work it out in her mind. "But Gryffindor were behind us before Dumbledore started giving points to Ron and people. They had three hundred and twelve, we had three hundred and fifty-two, Ravenclaw had four hundred and twenty-six..."
"I know how many Ravenclaw had," said Nicola.
Lawrie eyed her dubiously, supposing Nicola was still feeling excoriated by Rowan's remarks, none of which had included Thank you, dear twins, for getting me my broom back. They had started with You pair of little idiots and got steadily worse. The only good thing that had come out of it, as far as Lawrie could see, was that Rowan hadn't told Karen, which she very easily might have done; and that was only, as Rowan told them, because it was the end of Karen's final term anyway and there was no sense sending her into a flap.
"You're not still sore at Lois, are you?" Lawrie asked experimentally. "Because when you think about the help she gave us with flying..."
"But I don't," said Nicola unanswerably. "I think about the Charms Club outing."
"Well, the Ravenclaws look sicker than mud, anyway, considering that they were second before and they're third now," said Lawrie, casting a glance across at Meg Hopkins, who was looking as if her world had exploded. "But it was us who got the broom back so that Rowan could win that match, and she did, and Gryffindor still wouldn't have come first if Dumbledore hadn't decided to start giving out points for playing chess. Chess! Peter's been playing chess for years and he's much better than you are, and no one gives him points for it,"
Nicola glared at her but did not dispute this, since Peter's being able to play chess better than her was just one of the world's constants like Lawrie being able to ride better. "So what?"
"So Hufflepuff came last," said Lawrie sadly. "Three hundred and fifty-two points, right at the bottom."
"At least Marie Dobson's stopped smirking all over her horrible face," said Nicola. "It was worth cheering Harry Potter and his smug crew, just for that."
"Professor Sprout says we're brilliant eccentrics," offered Susan helpfully from the other side of the table. "Though she said a bit more of the brilliant and less of the eccentric would come in handy next year, if it doesn't strain our little brain cells too much."
"We're still last," said Lawrie gloomily. "If someone had said to me, on the train when we were coming here, because of you Gryffindor'll win the House Cup, I'd have been really pleased. And now I'm here, and it has, and I'm not."
"But no one did, did they?"
"No. But they might have done."
Nicola put her spoon down in her bowl and looked exasperated. "Oh, Lal. Stop thinking about it, can't you?
But Lawrie continued to think about it, right through the rest of that day, and on the train, all the way home.