James Potter And The Morrigan Web (59 page)

It was her subtle charms that had made the fields flourish, that conjured the spring to irrigate the farm in the midst of drought, that allowed her poultices and broths to keep her family almost preternaturally healthy and strong over the decades.

And it was her unspoken magic that warned her to bury the tin box with its secret dark treasures out in the gully, beneath the stones and spiders and rough yellow weeds. Inside the house, even hidden away in the attic, the gravity of those treasures was just too strong. Helen had sensed it in her bed each night, heard the insistent, silent call. She worried that eventually her children would hear it, and respond to it.

So she buried her dark treasures. Unfortunately, the very magic that compelled her is what drew her young son to follow her, to watch, and to become curious.

And now, almost twenty years later, on the night of Helen’s funeral, Philip returned to the gully. He didn’t know why he moved so secretly, so nervously. He only knew that the pull of his curiosity-- and some other, less definable force-- was too strong to deny.

James instinctively tried to call out to the young man, to warn him back. But of course he had no voice here. He was merely an observer, no more able to alter these events than he could hold back the course of the earth around the sun.

Philip pried up the stone and produced a pen knife from his coat pocket. With it, he began to dig, tossing aside crumbles of wormy earth, until the knife scratched metal. A minute later, he wrenched a rusty tin box from the ground and set it, almost reverently, on the rocks. He shivered as he stared at, fearing the box, but apparently unable to deny its attraction.

He had seen its contents once before, although that time he had left them buried. His mother knew what was best, after all, and if she had buried them, it had been for good reason. Now, however, Philip was a grown man, and his mother (tears pricked the corners of his eyes as he thought this) was soon to be buried herself. Perhaps the magic was broken now.

This was not true, of course. But the rationalization worked. With mud-caked fingernails, Philip pried the lid from the tin box. It came away with a screech, revealing its contents. Both James and Philip peered inside.

Cradled in the rusty box were two objects. James recognized them immediately. One was the pistol that had killed the wizard, Ignatius Magnussen. The other was the head of his wickedly magical cane, its gargoyle’s face leering and unblinking, tarnished black but glinting in the dying sunset.

Philip took both of them, and with that single, swift motion, darkness fell over James again, engulfing him utterly.

Time blew past again. Decades unravelled as Philip aged. He took a wife, had a son of his own, and became an old man. James saw him again in a brief, fleeting moment, laying on his deathbed, his grown son standing by his side. The tin was open between them, revealing the pistol and the iron gargoyle’s head. Philip had kept them, treasured them despite their aura of dark mystery, or perhaps even because of it.

“These belonged to my mother,” he said, his voice weak and rasping. “And now they are yours.”

But James could see that the son was repelled by the strange, enigmatic objects in the ancient tin. He took them, but he did not reverence them. Soon enough, the tin was packed away in the attic of a tidy brick house in Philadelphia, all but forgotten, gathering dust through the cycle of decades.

Until a woman’s hand bumped against the tin, knocking it aside with a clatter. James watched as the darkness receded again, revealing the depths of the attic, much more cluttered and altered by time, lit by the flat brilliance of falling snow outside a single gabled window. The woman was thin, pretty, with a hint of the long departed Helen in her features. And yet she was sad, somehow. Partly it was the task she was engaged in: emptying the house after the death of her oldest grandfather. But that wasn’t all of it. This woman (
her name is Winnifred
, James’ dreaming mind supplied with strange certainty,
but everyone calls her Whinnie
) was living a life of misfortune and heartbreak. Her five year old son, who even now played on the living room carpet two floors below, was weak with some complicated illness, requiring doctors and medicines she could not afford. Whinnie’s husband was no help, having left almost a year earlier, ostensibly in search of employment back east, where he had grown up. Whinnie had not heard anything from him since, and doubted she ever would again. He wasn’t injured, or missing. He was just gone.

Whinnie pried the tin box open impatiently, and then paused. Puzzled, she held first the pistol, and then the gargoyle’s head up to the wintry light. A thoughtful look passed over her face, but it was much different than that which had appeared on the face of her great grandfather, Philip, almost a century earlier. The year was nineteen seventy-eight, and Whinnie’s life had not prepared her for a sensitivity to magic. It had, however, made her acutely sensitive to the possibility of quick money. She desperately needed it, after all. It was just possible, she mused somewhat hopelessly, that the iron gargoyle sculpture and antique pistol might be worth something. Whinnie pocketed the objects, vowing (albeit guiltily) not to tell her brother about them. He wasn’t desperate like her. And perhaps if he had been more willing to help her (everyone knew he could have, if he’d wanted to) she wouldn’t have had to resort to such petty means.

It was weak justification, and Whinnie knew it. Deep down, she hated herself for it. But self-recrimination wasn’t enough to change her mind. She clumped down the attic steps, calling for her son to put on his coat and shoes.

Another rush of wind carried James with it, but this one was different. It covered mere space, not time, and James knew that what he now observed was only a short while later, across the city, outside a cramped storefront on a windy street corner. Icy snowflakes scoured the store’s windows, blurring the odd collection on display: musical instruments and small Muggle appliances, stacks of cheap books with their page edges dyed yellow or red, antique lamps and cheap glass sculptures. Over the recessed front door were hung three tarnished metal balls, swinging beneath a sign painted with faded red letters:

PAWN SHOP - BUY - SELL -TRADE

Whinnie’s car, a large, strangely evil-looking machine with rust-edged fenders and the word
Toronado
emblazoned on the corner of its boot, sat idling a block away. Whinnie’s son, James knew, was not inside, nor was he with his mother, inside the pawn shop. The boy had been left in the care of his uncle, Whinnie’s brother. None of them had been particularly happy with the arrangement, but (as Whinnie promised) it would only be for a short while.

As James looked at the plume of exhaust puffing into the frigid air from the idling car, then at the storefront a block away, he had a terrible suspicion that Whinnie was quite wrong about that.

A bell jingled faintly as the pawn shop door opened. Whinnie emerged, and the staccato clack of her heels told James all he needed to know. She had only sold one of the mysterious objects, and she had not gotten anything near as much money as she had hoped. Fuming and worried, she stalked toward her waiting car and James, almost against his will, moved to follow her.

A couple was walking ahead of them on the footpath. James saw that they were man and woman, both wearing black, but they were not man and wife. Sister and brother? He thought yes.

Whinnie stalked forward, the cold wind turning her cheeks bright red, and as she approached the couple, angling to pass them, the couple stopped in their tracks.

A thrill of fear ran down James’ spine, for he saw immediately that the couple were magical. American witches and wizards dressed far more like their Muggle counterparts, but the clarity of his dreaming mind was undeniable. The man and woman glanced up at Whinnie, simultaneously and intently. Of course they did, for they sensed the hidden power of what she was carrying, even if they didn’t know what it was.

“Excuse me,” the woman said suddenly, unsmiling. “Might we have a word?”

Whinnie paused only for a moment. “It’s cold and I’m in no mood,” she muttered, brushing past.

“I’m afraid we must insist,” the man said, and his arm snaked out, grasping Whinnie’s elbow in a vice-like grip.

Whinnie snapped backwards like a dog on a leash, her feet slipping on the icy footpath so that she nearly fell-- would have fallen, in fact, if not for the man’s stony fist. Immediately, James glanced about the street in search of help, but the footpath-indeed the entire avenue-was empty, filled only with parked cars, moaning wind and skirls of snow.

“What are you--!” Whinnie exclaimed angrily, righting herself and attempting to pry her arm loose of the man’s grasp. “Let go of me, you lunatic!”

Instead, the man pushed her forward, into the recessed entryway of a closed bookstore. His sister followed, her eyes flashing with bright interest.

“You’re a Muggle!” she said, smiling tightly. “Aren’t you? You’re not even a witch!”

“A wi--” Whinnie stammered, fear beginning to replace her anger. “What are you, crazy? Get out of my face! I’ll call the police!”

“The police!” the man scoffed. “Feel free. None are within five blocks of here. And even if they were right next to us, they would hear nothing unless we wished them to. Now give over your talisman.”

Whinnie blinked at him in consternation. His words made no sense. Instead, she renewed her struggle against the man’s grip.

Across the street, a bedraggled man peered out of an alley. James saw him, saw his bleary, red-rimmed eyes and scraggly beard. He was a bum, huddled pathetically against the cold, but curious at the raised voices.

“For your own sake,” the sister declared impatiently, “quit fighting and answer our question. You have no right to whatever it is you’re holding. Did you think we would not sense it? It’s useless to you anyway. What could you, a Muggle, hope to do with it? Hand it over and we’ll be on our way.”

“I have no clue what you’re blabbing about!” Whinnie cried furiously, finally wrenching her arm loose and stumbling backwards between the bookstore’s dark display windows and toward its closed security gate. It rattled as she fell against it. “You’re both completely crazy! Get out of my way so I can get home to my son!”

“Your son will grow up without a mother unless you give us what you have, Muggle,” the man replied with vicious confidence. His hand dipped into his coat and withdrew a long, black wand. His sister raised her own, fingering it with relish. Whinnie stared at them, at their extended wands, and shook her head in confusion.

“Look, you’ve obviously mistaken me for someone else. I don’t know what you want. I’ve got almost nothing on me. Here.” She fumbled in her purse, producing a small, thin wallet. “Here’s the twenty bucks I got for that stupid little sculpture. That’s all I have but you can take it. Take it and let me go.” She tossed the wallet toward them, but the brother and sister simply let it fall to the cracked tile floor of the alcove.

“You think it will protect you, don’t you?” the sister said suspiciously. “Is that it? Surely you cannot be so stupid. You don’t even know how to use it. We do. We can smell its power, whatever it is. We don’t care how you found it, or where it came from. Just give it to us. Give it to us and you can go. Refuse us…” she shrugged with one shoulder and gestured with her wand. “Refuse us and you will die, and we will have it anyway.”

“I don’t know what you mean!” Whinnie screamed, pressing back into the security gate, making it rattle again. She did not know what the wands were, but somehow (James gave her credit for this) she sensed they were dangerous.

“It is very powerful,” the brother breathed, stepping forward, his nostrils flaring.

His sister nodded. “But what is it? We must have it.”

Their shadows crept over Whinnie as they advanced on her, their wands pointing at her heart. Whinnie shrank back, cringing, and then, suddenly and desperately, she rammed her hand into her purse again. She grasped something, yanked it out, and flung the purse away.

“Back off!” she screamed, raising her trembling fist. In it, shaking wildly, was the antique pistol, its round barrel glistening blackly in the pale light.

Across the street, the observing bum gasped and hunkered behind a trash can. James’ sharpened, dreaming senses saw it all.

The sister and brother stared at the weapon in Whinnie’s hand. Then, happily, the sister began to laugh. “Muggles and their weapons,” she shook her head. “My dear, that antique pop-gun cannot hurt us. You’re wasting time, and our patience is running thin. Give us your talisman. Do it now, or we will take it from your corpse.”

Whinnie locked her elbow, holding the pistol full length. She had never held a gun before, was not exactly sure that she could pull the trigger, even if she knew it would fire, which she did not. She pointed it alternately at the woman, then the man.

The sister lunged. James saw it, saw the sudden, almost bestial litheness of it, and he once again tried to call out a warning. This time, however, his voice would not have been heard even if he’d had one, for a loud, flat
BANG
struck the air, momentarily drowning out every other sound. A split-second later, silence fell, layered only with the senseless moan of the wind and sand-like scurry of blowing snow.

The sister stepped backwards, out from the beneath the bookstore’s awning. She lowered her wand and looked down at herself in the wintry daylight. Drops of blood pattered the icy pavement between her feet. A moment later, she crumped to her knees, looked up in shock, and keeled forward onto her face.

“You…” the brother breathed, his eyes wide and shocked as he looked over his shoulder, his wand still raised in his own fist. “You killed her.” His voice was filled with wonder. He repeated himself, as if he could scarcely believe his own words. “You
killed
her!”

“I didn’t mean to!” Whinnie pleaded, lowering the smoking pistol. She stared at it in her hand in horror, as if it was a small, vicious monster. “She made me! She was going to--”