A Second Wizarding School Adventure
A free parody by LineCrush. Not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone it pokes fun at. Not for sale.
The best thing I got all summer was a sock. I found it in dryer four the night I got home from school, and I've worn it every day since. It's long and gray-green, it comes up past my knee, and it's got a hole in the heel. I don't hold that against it. Your heel needs air. Most socks never think of that.
I'm a second-year at Frogwarts now, so I've got a lot going on. But on Thursdays I still help Nana downstairs at the Sudsy Duck, because a consultant has to stay close to the community. Also, Thursday's when people leave coins in the dryers.
Every Thursday, Mr. Feeney comes in with one load of laundry and one question, and he's been doing it for nine years.
"Has anybody turned in my sock?" he asked Nana.
"That's nice, honey," Nana said.
"It's long," Mr. Feeney said. "Gray-green. My sister knitted it. She darned the heel so many times that the darning wore out and the hole came back."
I was folding towels at the next table. I stood very still, because I was standing on it at the time and didn't want to make any sudden moves.
"That's terrible, Mr. Feeney," I said. "As it happens, I'm a consultant. I find things."
"Do you?" Mr. Feeney said.
"Mostly later," I said. "That's where the money is."
He said there was a reward. It's five pounds. It was three pounds for eight years, and he raised it this spring because of his knees. I told him a case like this needed a retainer, and he gave me a butterscotch out of his coat. Every big case starts with a butterscotch.
The way I see it, the longer a case runs, the bigger the reward gets. If I found the sock today, I'd get five pounds, but if I found it next year, who knows? It could be six. That isn't stealing. That's letting a reward mature.
Mr. Feeney shook my hand and went to get his load. I shifted my weight a little, onto the good heel.
"I'm on it," I said. I was.
Summer's a slow season for wizards in Wendleton, because I'm the only one. So I worked the Muddle market.
I sold Z stickers to the kids on our street, backward, like the one on my forehead. None of those kids had ever heard of Larry Spotter. That made it easier. You can't compare a sticker to the real thing if nobody's told you there's a real thing.
"What's it stand for?" a kid named Dwayne asked me.
"Whatever you want," I said. "That's extra."
I also took over the lost-sock bin at the Sudsy Duck. For years it was just a bin. Now it's under new management. I put up a sign that said, Lost Socks, Ask Dale. People did ask, and I told them about the finder's fee, and most of them decided they hadn't lost anything after all. That's a service too. The bin's never been fuller.
Lightning had a big summer. Back in June I left my letter to Larry Spotter on the windowsill, and Lightning sat on it so it wouldn't blow away. Since then he's moved it two inches toward the edge. That's a lot of mail for a snail. I figured it had arrived, and Larry was playing it cool.
The only owl all summer came on a Tuesday. It flew in the laundromat window and dropped a letter on the folding table, right where Nana was ironing pillowcases. Before I could get there, she'd ironed it.
"Nana, that's mine," I said.
"It was wrinkled, honey," Nana said.
It was from Hollis Brandt. He's a big, serious third-year Slitherwin now, and I owe him forty Gallons for a broom that's mostly fine. He'd know. He's got it written down.
The letter was still warm. It had a sharp crease down the middle, and it smelled like starch. It said, Dear Dale. Balance, forty Gallons. See you on the train. Hollis.
It's hard to be scared of a letter that warm. I kept it in my shirt till dinner. That's the coziest I've ever owed anybody.
"Who's it from, honey?" Nana said.
"A client," I said.
Forty Gallons, ironed flat. It looked smaller that way.
The second-year supply list came on a Wednesday, and I read it out loud to Nana while she folded the fitted sheet. She's six years into that sheet now. I think she's winning.
First it said robes, same as last year. I've grown, so mine stop above the ankle now. That shows off the sock, which is free advertising.
Then came the books. Almost every one was by the same man, Professor Silvaroy Lookhart.
The first one was Ogres I've Outsmarted, So Far. I liked the "so far." It means he's still counting.
Then A Fortnight Among Phantoms.
"What's a fortnight, honey?" Nana said.
"I think it's a kind of phantom," I said.
Then Wrestling the Kraken, and Other Weekends. Then Lookhart Among the Giants. Then Sharing a Cave with a Sphinx, which had a picture on the cover of Lookhart and the sphinx, and only one of them was smiling. Then Hair Under Pressure. I figured that was the textbook.
The last one was Marvelous Me. That's his autobiography. The other six are about him too, but that one admits it.
"That's a lot of books by one man, honey," Nana said.
"Nana, that's genius," I said.
Every second-year has to buy seven books from this guy. Last year I spent the whole year selling things to kids who could say no. Lookhart went and got himself assigned. You can't say no to homework. I've tried. That's a fellow entrepreneur. I decided right then I'd study him. Not his books. Him.
I also decided a new year needed a new name. I'm a second-year now, so I went with Dale the Second. It sounds like a king.
I tried it on Phil through the wall. Phil said it sounded like a king nobody remembers. I told him those are the ones who get the most done, because nobody's watching.
The very last line on the list said, One bar of plain soap.
I didn't take that personally. Somebody up there must've met a lot of second-years. We've got all the soap anybody could want at the Sudsy Duck. I packed three.
The tired witch came for the Muddle-born kids again this year. She told us she's lost five, but four turned up, and she said it the way you'd give the weather.
"Was one of the new ones me?" I asked her.
"I'd rather not say," she said.
That's what you call a lasting impression.
At the Leaky Kettle, the back way through to Diagonal Alley was closed for repairs, so we had to go by fireplace. You throw a pinch of green Flume Powder in the fire, step into the flames and say clearly where you're going. The witch said "clearly" three times, and she looked at me all three.
Phil went first. He said "Diagonal Alley" very carefully, and whoosh, he was gone. A sneeze came back down the chimney a second later, so we knew he'd landed.
Then it was me. I'd bought a toffee from the barman for the trip, because I'd heard fireplace travel makes you hungry. Nobody'd told me that. I'd just heard it, from me. So I put the whole toffee in my mouth, threw the powder, stepped in and said, "Diagonal Alley."
With the toffee in, it came out sounding a lot like "upstairs." The fire did what I said.
It spun me around about forty times, shot me straight up and dropped me out of a little fireplace into an upstairs room, right into a bathtub. The bath was full and warm, with bubbles, and nobody was in it yet. A wizard in a long nightshirt was standing in the doorway holding a towel.
"This is the Leaky Kettle," he said. "Room four."
"I'm aware," I said. I wasn't, but you don't let a man see you're lost in his own bathroom.
The fire had taken me one floor. That's still travel. I've been in an elevator, and it took longer, and nobody gave me a bath at the end.
I climbed out and shook his hand. He didn't shake back. He was looking at his bath, which was gray now.
I had soot from my ears down to my socks. One eyebrow was singed off at the end. My eyebrows were green most of last year and had only just come back brown, so losing a brown one was a fresh start. The toffee stayed in my back teeth till Tuesday.
There was also a rubber duck floating in the bath. I took it. I live above the Sudsy Duck, so a duck like that's basically family.
Downstairs, the witch counted us. She got to six and looked surprised. Then she saw me, dripping and gray and holding a duck, and she counted again.
I kept the duck.
The line outside Flummox and Blots went around the corner and came back, and it was mostly mothers. A banner over the door said Professor Silvaroy Lookhart was signing his autobiography, Marvelous Me, today only.
"That's the man from my list," I told Phil. "He wrote seven of our books."
"I know," Phil said. "They're very expensive."
"That's how you know he's good," I said.
Inside it was hot and packed, and it smelled like a whole lot of flowers at once. That was Lookhart's cologne. Phil sneezed four times before we'd even got past the door. He'd brought pills for owls, cats and wool, but nobody'd warned him about a man.
Lookhart sat at a table at the back, under a huge picture of himself that kept winking. He had wavy golden hair and robes the color of an egg yolk, and he had the best teeth I'd ever seen. I counted them from the back of the line. He showed every one of them, every time, even the ones in the back that most people keep for themselves.
A man with a big camera was taking pictures for the wizard newspaper. Every time the flash went off, it puffed out purple smoke, and Phil sneezed at that too.
Then Lookhart stood up and stared out into the crowd. "It can't be," he said.
I stood up straight. He was looking right at me. Well, near me. He was looking about four people to my left.
The crowd shoved, and a thin kid with glasses and messy dark hair came stumbling out of it. From where I was, behind a tall witch's hat, it could've been anybody. It was probably Larry Spotter. It usually is.
Lookhart grabbed him and pulled him up next to the table, and he told the whole shop the kid was getting a complete set of Lookhart books, free. The mothers went wild. I did the math. That was seven books. I'd have settled for a bookmark.
Then the crowd pushed forward, and I got pushed back. Somebody'd dropped a quill, so I bent over to pick it up, because a quill's a quill. That's when the flash went off and the purple smoke came down over everybody.
So I'm in the picture. I'm in the back, bent over, and you mostly see sock. But I'm in it. Not everybody can say they've been in the wizard newspaper with Silvaroy Lookhart, and most of the people who can are Larry Spotter.
It took an hour to get to the table. By then Lookhart had signed everything in the shop, including the clerk.
"And who's this?" he said, smiling with all of them.
"I'd like my forehead signed," I said.
"Of course you would!" Lookhart said. "Name?"
"Dale," I said.
"Dave!" Lookhart said. He wrote it right across my Z, in big loopy letters. It said, To Dave, with love and best wishes, Silvaroy Lookhart.
I didn't correct him. A man that famous has got a lot of names to keep track of, and he'd gone and picked a new one just for me. He winked, and then the next mother was already there.
On the way out I read my forehead in the shop window. It was backward, but so's my Z. We match.
I'd come in for a book. I'd found a mentor.
Flummox and Blots keeps a bin of bargain cauldrons in the back, for people who need something to carry the books home in. My old one's got a hole in it, from a potion I don't talk about.
I picked a dented one with a lid that didn't match. It was a Nut off for the dent and a Nut off for the lid. Two more things wrong with it, and they'd owe me.
That's when I saw the man with the cane.
He was tall and pale, with long fair hair, and he walked like the floor owed him money. Next to the bargain bin there was a small red-haired girl holding an old cauldron full of secondhand books. The tall man leaned over and poked through her books with the end of his cane. Then he straightened up and walked on.
He'd left a small black book in there, thin and old.
I knew exactly what it was. It was a free sample. Publishers do that. They slip a book in your basket, you read it, and then you need the next one.
"Phil," I said, "they're giving away free books."
"I don't think that's what that was," Phil said.
"Phil," I said, "everything's a free book if you're fast."
I caught up with the man by the poetry.
"Excuse me," I said. "I'd like my free sample."
He looked down at me from a long way up. He looked at my forehead, where it said To Dave. Then he wiped his glove on his coat, though I hadn't touched it.
"I'm a bargain-bin customer too," I said. "I'm eligible."
He didn't answer. He was looking past me at a thin, balding man with red hair who'd just come around the shelf. They knew each other. You could tell, because they both stopped smiling at the same time.
They said some things. I didn't follow it, but the red-haired man's ears went very red, and then they were shoving. Then a shelf went over, and books went everywhere, and a whole row of Marvelous Me hit the floor and smiled up at the ceiling.
Over the shelf I saw a lot of red hair. In the middle of it was the thin kid with glasses, holding his free books up over his head to keep them out of it.
Then a huge man with a wild beard came through the crowd. It was Haggard, the gamekeeper. He took the two men by their collars, one in each hand, and held them apart till they calmed down. That took a while, because their feet weren't touching anything.
"Dale, help," Phil said, so I got down on the floor and helped. I found three coins somebody'd dropped. In a scuffle, money's everybody's.
When I stood up, there was a book in my own dented cauldron. It'd landed in there in all the flying. It was one of Lookhart's, bent at the corner, with his face on the back, still smiling.
Nobody'd put it in. It came to me.
My free sample. Finally.
Nana packed my trunk on Thursday, because she says I pack like a raccoon. I don't know what that means, but raccoons do all right.
She put in a box of nap sandwiches, the warm milk bread with honey and chamomile, pressed flat with the iron. She packed eighteen, which she said was one for every time I'd need to calm down before Christmas. I said that seemed low.
Then she put in a big paper bag of socks from the lost-sock bin, for the business. None of them match. That's the business.
Lightning packed himself. I found him in the sock bag, already settled in. He must've set out for it in June.
I packed Mr. Feeney's sock myself. I took it off, folded it and put it at the very bottom of the trunk, under everything, for safekeeping. A case that valuable, you don't leave lying around Wendleton. Wendleton's got a laundromat, and socks go missing there all the time.
Mr. Feeney came in for his load just as I was closing the lid. He asked Nana about his sock, and Nana said that was nice, honey.
"I've raised the reward," Mr. Feeney said. "Six pounds."
"Mr. Feeney," I said, "the investigation's going overseas."
"Overseas?" he said.
"I can't say where," I said. "It's that kind of investigation."
He looked very impressed, and he gave me another butterscotch. That's two. The case was really moving.
After he left, Phil came over from next door to help me carry the trunk down. He looked in before I could get the lid shut, and since he's allergic to wool, he looked in sneezing.
"Dale," Phil said, "is that Mr. Feeney's sock?"
"It's evidence," I said. "I'm not at liberty."
Phil looked at the sock, and then at me, and then at the butterscotch.
"I understand," Phil said.
He always does. That's why he's not a detective.
Last year I tested a lot of walls at the big train station in London. This year I went straight at the right one, first try, and I didn't even close my eyes.
I felt like a veteran. I stood on Platform Nine and Five-Eighths with the steam and the owls and the big red train, and I brushed off my sleeves, even though they were clean. A first-year was standing there looking scared, and I gave her a nod. She moved her trunk away from me. That's respect.
"You did it first time," Phil said.
"Phil, I've been doing walls for two years," I said. "You stop thinking about it."
Then a red-haired family started coming through, a lot of red-haired kids, one at a time, all with trunks. One was a small red-haired girl with an old cauldron. There was a thin, balding red-haired man, too, and he's the only grown-up I've ever seen smile at a brick.
Then, from inside the wall behind me, there was a terrible crash.
It was a whole cart's worth of crash, and it came right out of the bricks. You could hear a trunk go over, and something roll, and an owl that'd had enough of everybody. Then nobody came through.
"Dale," Phil said, "I think somebody hit the wall."
"I know," I said. "Isn't it great?"
I knew that feeling. Last year I lost a baby tooth to a wall in this station, and I'd thought I was the only one. It's lonely, testing walls. But somebody was. Somebody was on the other side right now, finding out the hard way, and he wasn't alone. He'd got me.
So I went up and put my mouth right on the bricks.
"It gets easier," I told the wall. "Pick the one everybody else walks into. You'll get it."
Nobody answered. The owl screeched once more, and I took that as a thank you.
"Should we get somebody?" Phil said.
"They'll want privacy," I said. "Nobody wants a crowd while they're learning."
Then the whistle blew, and Phil pulled me onto the train by my robe. I watched out the window as we pulled away. Nobody came out of the wall. I hoped they'd packed a sandwich.
Some people need two years.
About an hour out of London, a car flew past my window.
It was a little blue car, flying low over a field of cows, right alongside the train. There were two faces in the front, pressed up against the glass, and one of them had glasses. Then the car tipped up and climbed into a cloud, and the cows went back to eating.
So that's how the rich kids get to school, I thought. Here I was on a train like everybody else, with a sandwich, and some kids had a car that flew. No walls, no platform. They probably got picked up at their own front doors.
I didn't feel jealous. I just wanted one, and I wanted to charge everybody else to ride in it.
"Phil," I said, "give me your notebook."
He gave it to me, because he's learned it's quicker. Phil's notebook is waterproof, which is important in business, because the best ideas come to you in the bath.
I wrote Tummins Air across the top. Then I drew the car, with me driving and a line of kids on the roof holding their trunks. We'd pick everybody up at home and fly them straight to the castle. We'd charge by the mile, plus extra for owls. By Christmas we'd have a car for every house, and by Easter we'd have a bus.
Then I made a list of what I'd need. I'd need a car, and I'd need it to fly. I'd need to learn to drive, and I'd need to reach the pedals.
I put that down as phase two.
"Dale, that's my homework page," Phil said.
"It's your homework page now," I said. "Before, it was just a page."
I caught my forehead in the window while I was drawing. Lookhart's autograph was gone. It'd come off in the bath, a little more every night, until all that was left was the Z. The ink of a famous man doesn't last. Laundry marker does.
Then the compartment door slid open, and there was Harmony Grainger, the bushy-haired girl from last year. She's the smartest kid in our year, and she's turned down a partnership with me five times. She looked worried.
"Have either of you seen Larry and Lon?" she said. "I've looked everywhere."
"They're outside," I said.
"Dale, we're on a train," Harmony said.
"I know," I said. "They're outside it. I saw them. They went into a cloud."
"Honestly," Harmony said, and she started to close the door.
"While you're here," I said, "I'd like to talk to you about a partnership."
"No," Harmony said, and the door shut.
That's six. I'm not worried. She keeps coming to my door, and every time, she gets a little faster at saying no. We've got a routine now.
"Were they really outside?" Phil said.
"Phil," I said, "I've never been more honest in my life."
It didn't get me a thing. I won't make that mistake again.
Halfway to Frogwarts, I looked down the corridor and saw Hollis Brandt coming.
He was a third-year now, with the same calm face and the same little black notebook, and he was walking down the train looking into every compartment, one at a time. He wasn't in a hurry. Hollis is never in a hurry, and that's what makes him so frightening. A man in a hurry might miss you.
So I ducked into the nearest compartment and shut the door.
There was only one person inside. She was a tiny first-year with her hair in a very neat bun, and she'd laid out a lunch box, a pencil case and a stapler on the seat in a row.
I knew I had to look busy. A guy hiding in a compartment looks like a guy hiding. A guy holding a meeting looks like he's meant to be there.
"Afternoon," I said. "Tummins, of Tummins Consulting. I'm conducting interviews."
"For what?" she said.
"For a position," I said.
"What position?" she said.
I didn't know yet. That's what the interview's for.
Her name was Tilly Grubb. Her mum runs an office-supply shop back home, and she'd brought the stapler to school because she'd read the list three times and it didn't say not to. That's how I read rules too. You'd be amazed what they don't say.
She asked what the title was, and I said Assistant. She asked what the pay was, and I said experience.
"How much experience, Mister Tummins?" Tilly said.
"A lot," I said. "It's a very busy firm."
She thought about it. She was the first person who'd ever thought about anything I'd said. Usually they just leave.
That's when Hollis went by. He stopped at our door and looked in through the glass. He looked at Tilly, and at the stapler, and then back at me. Then he wrote something in the notebook and walked on.
I let my breath out. I'd been holding it since the word position.
"Was that a client?" Tilly said.
"A creditor," I said. "It's like a client, only he's sure."
Tilly took out a sheet of paper and wrote Agreement across the top. Under that she wrote Assistant, Experience and On Trial, and she had me sign it. Then she picked up the stapler, laid the paper on my sleeve and stapled it right to my robe.
"Stapled," Tilly said.
Near the end of the train there was a small red-haired girl sitting by herself with a small black book.
She was the one from the bookshop, with the old cauldron. She was writing in the book and smiling at it. Then she'd stop and wait, and smile again, like it'd said something nice.
A first-year alone on a train is a first-year who needs a Welcome Kit.
"I'd like to offer you a First-Year Welcome Kit," I said. "Compliments of Tummins Consulting."
The kit was one scar sticker, one sock and some advice. The advice is the main part. That's what makes it a kit.
She looked up. She looked tired, and it was only the afternoon. I know tired. I've folded towels till nine.
"No, thank you," she said. "I don't need advice. My diary listens to me." She held up the black book.
I leaned over to look at the page. I'm a consultant, and I like to see what the competition's writing.
It was blank. She'd been writing on it a minute ago, and it was blank.
I didn't say anything. You don't tell a customer her diary's blank. But I thought about it on the way down the corridor. A diary that gives advice is a consultant. It doesn't need a seat or a Welcome Kit, and it fits in a pocket. I tried that once, in Nana's big coat. I don't fit.
So I went back.
"I'd like to buy it," I said. "The diary. I'll give you the Welcome Kit and two Nuts."
She held it closer.
"No," she said, very quietly.
I didn't push. You don't make a hard offer on the first day. I left the sock on the seat next to her as a goodwill gesture. She didn't look at it. She was already writing again.
Back in our compartment, I told Phil there was a new consultant on the train.
"Who?" Phil said.
"A book," I said.
Phil said a book can't be a consultant. That's Phil's trouble. He doesn't take the competition seriously.
I'm keeping an eye on that book.
Second-years don't take the boats. Second-years ride up to the castle in carriages, and the carriages pull themselves.
There's no horse. There's nothing at all up front. They just go. I've seen lazy things, but never a carriage that won't even get a horse to do it. I looked underneath, in case the horse was down there resting. It wasn't.
"How do they move?" I asked Phil.
"I don't know," Phil said, and he sneezed. He's allergic to carriages now, or to whatever isn't pulling them.
The first-years went the other way, down the path to the boats, behind Haggard and his lamp. I saw Tilly in the line, very small, with her bun. She had the stapler tucked under her arm the way a businessman carries a newspaper.
I leaned out the carriage window as we rolled past.
"Tilly," I called. "Lakes are deeper than they look."
She nodded and wrote it down. It's the best thing I know, and I gave it to her for free. That's how you train staff.
From the carriage you could see the whole lake, black and still. Somewhere down there was the giant squid. He works for me now. Last year he gave me back a broom, and I've been waving at him ever since. That's a working relationship.
But you can't wave at a squid from a carriage. He's down there, you're up here, and in between there's all that lake. So I waved at the lake in general. If he was looking, he'd know.
"Who are you waving at?" Phil said.
"Staff," I said.
Then we were in the Great Hall, under the candles, and the strict witch with the square glasses brought out the stool and the old hat. The first-years came in all wet, in a line. I watched for Tilly. When she sat on the stool, the hat came down over her bun and sat there a second. Then it sneezed.
"Snufflepuff!" the hat shouted.
I stood up and clapped, hard. I'd hired her on the train, and the hat had just signed off on it. It's a big deal when the hat agrees with your staffing.
Tilly walked over and sat down across from me, very straight.
"Stapled," she said.
The red-haired girl with the black book went to Gruffindoor. She sat at the end of their table and didn't eat much.
Then I looked over at the Gruffindoor table and counted. There were two empty seats in the middle, right where Larry Spotter and the red-haired kid always sit. Nobody'd sat in them all night.
I knew what it meant. Larry Spotter had been expelled. He'd copied my Z last year, and somebody'd finally noticed.
I didn't celebrate. I felt bad for him. I had seconds, in his honor.
On the first morning back, I went out early to collect sock money, and I found a tree that'd been in a fight.
It was a big old willow on the lawn, and half its branches were broken. Under it there were two dents in the grass that looked exactly like a little car had landed there, and two long tire tracks going off across the lawn into the forest. There was a hubcap in the mud. I picked it up, because it was shiny, and somebody'd want that.
I figured the tree'd had a big night. Everybody does, the first night back. You don't hold that against a tree.
The broken branches were free firewood, so I started stacking it.
I'd made a nice pile when the tree hit me.
It swung a branch around low and fast and caught me in the back, and I went a long way across the grass. I got up and went back for my pile, and it hit me again. Then it hit the pile.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
I'll be honest, I got homesick. That's exactly the sound the dryers make at the Sudsy Duck at night. When you've been away from home a whole day, that's the sound you miss, so I lay there in the grass for a while and listened.
A third-year walking past looked down at me.
"That's the Thumping Willow," he said. "You don't go near it."
"I can tell," I said. "It's got a lot of personality."
I've got a bruise on my back from the tree and one on my front from the lawn, so it's even. My robe's torn at the shoulder, and there's a twig in my ear that's still there. I lost the hubcap. The tree kept it. But I've had worse from a dryer.
From a safe distance, I gave it a little wave.
"Thanks for the welcome," I said.
At Frogwarts the mail comes at breakfast, by owl, straight down from the ceiling. It lands wherever it lands. I eat with one arm around my bowl. Phil says that's rude. I say it's a roof.
A few mornings after the willow, a scruffy old owl came down sideways and crashed into the Gruffindoor sugar bowl. It dropped a red envelope in front of a red-haired boy, Lon Measley, and then it lay down in the sugar. It'd had a long trip.
The envelope started smoking at the corners. Lon stared at it like it was going to go off, and he wasn't wrong. The kid next to him looked down into his cereal and stayed there. That was Larry Spotter. I'd know the back of that neck anywhere.
Then the envelope opened itself and yelled.
It yelled in his mother's voice, and they'd have heard it in Wendleton. It yelled about a car, and about his father, and mostly about a tree.
"A tree, Lon!" the envelope yelled. "A tree!"
Then it said it was very disappointed, in a smaller voice, and that's worse. Then it burned itself up into a little pile of ash, right on his toast.
Nobody said anything. I didn't either, but mine was a different quiet. I was pricing it. It found the kid, it said the hard part, and then it cleaned up after itself. Nana's been trying to get me to do all three for years.
"Phil," I said, "that's the future."
"That was awful," Phil said.
"For him," I said.
I took a napkin and a quill and walked the tables, taking orders. Three Nuts a yell. Five if you want it to get quiet and disappointed at the end.
A first-year Snufflepuff put up her hand. "Can it tell my mum I'm fine?" she said. "And to stop sending the scarf?"
"It can tell her louder," I said. She took the five.
"How do you even make a Yowler?" Phil said.
"Volume," I said.
At the Gruffindoor table, Lon was still pink all the way up to his ears. I stopped to ask if he'd say a few words about the product. He looked up at me, and then at my forehead.
"It's still a Z, mate," Lon said.
He remembered me. Larry kept looking at his cereal, so I didn't bother him. A man reading his cereal is a man at work.
My first real order came from further down the same table, from one of the red-haired twins. He wanted a Yowler by Friday, nice and loud, with the disappointed part.
It was for Lon.
I'd been back at school a week before I got around to my fans. You can't see every fan on the first night. It looks needy.
Sir Pomeroy Glum was in his frame by the Snufflepuff door, leaning on his painted sword, and behind him his horse was still eating the same gray field. It's a big field, but I worry about it.
He opened one eye.
"Oh," Sir Pomeroy said. "It's back."
Last year I was a person to him. This year I'm a whole thing. That's how you know you've grown.
Then I saw the Z sticker I gave him in June. It was still on the bottom corner of his frame, but it was scratched all around the edges, in hundreds of tiny lines, and there were little flakes of sticker on the tip of his sword.
"Did you polish that?" I said.
"All summer," Sir Pomeroy said. "It won't come off."
"They don't," I said. "That's quality."
Nobody's ever polished anything of mine before. Nana irons my mail, but that's just Nana, and she'd iron a duck if it held still.
I'd brought him something. It was a sock from Nana's lost-sock bin, blue and thick, for the horse. A gray horse in a gray field gets cold, and nobody ever thinks about the horse. I tucked it in the top of the frame so it hung down by his nose.
"He has four feet," Sir Pomeroy said.
"He's got to start somewhere," I said.
The horse kept eating. He's a horse of few words.
Mr. Dibbs's sign said Back in two weeks, and it turns out he meant it. He just didn't say which two.
The sign had hung on the lost-and-found closet all summer. Then one Tuesday in September the door was open, and there he was behind his desk, dustier than ever. He'd been gone three months and come back with more dust. I don't know where he went, but they had plenty.
"Kid," he said, without looking up.
The sign on his desk still said Two Weeks To Go. He'd crossed out the date under it and written a new one, and somebody'd crossed that out too. I think it was him.
That same morning Nana's first box had come by owl. It had six nap sandwiches, pressed flat with the iron, and twenty-two socks from the lost-sock bin. Not one of those socks knew another. I'd been looking at them all through breakfast, so I had supply on my mind.
That's why I noticed the shelf.
Behind Mr. Dibbs there was a long shelf of single socks. Every one was alone. Phil counted them while he sneezed, and there were four hundred, give or take a sneeze.
I live over a laundromat, and I'd never seen so many single socks in one place. It was like walking into a bank. It was the best supply deal I'd ever seen, and nobody was even running it.
"Mr. Dibbs," I said, "I'd like to propose a partnership. You find the socks, I match them, and we split it."
"Split what?" Mr. Dibbs said.
"Whatever comes in," I said. "Probably Nuts."
Then I asked him, very casually, if anybody'd handed in a long gray-green sock with a hole in the heel. I was wearing it at the time. A trunk's no place for an open case. It was under my shoe, where my best things go. Nobody looks at your feet. I kept a Pickle in my shoe all last year, and nobody ever found it, including me.
Mr. Dibbs didn't look at my feet. He looked at the shelf for a while. Down at the end, a sock slid off by itself and landed on the floor, and he let it lie.
"Kid," he said, "everything on these shelves is the most important thing in the world to somebody. Hardly ever the one holding it."
Phil got out his waterproof notebook and wrote that down. Then he underlined it. Then he looked at my shoe, which I didn't care for.
"You know what that means, Phil," I said on the way back.
"I think so," Phil said.
"It means I've been charging too little," I said. "You don't sell the most important thing in the world for three Nuts. You sell it for four."
Phil didn't write that down.
Matched by Tummins went up a Nut that afternoon. Two, for the important ones.
Professor Lookhart's first lesson was a quiz about Professor Lookhart. Finally, a subject I'd studied.
He came in wearing robes the color of a lemon, and he smiled at us for a while before he said anything, so we'd have time to take it in. It's a lot of smile. You can't rush it. There was a little gold award for his smile on the wall behind him, hung at mouth height, so you could compare.
The quiz had thirty questions. What's my favorite color? What's my secret ambition? Which of my books is the best? I knew every answer. I'd studied the brand all summer, off the back covers at the laundromat.
His favorite color was the one he had on. His best book was the newest one. For the secret ambition I wrote down mine, which is to be famous for something and decide what later. That turned out to be right too.
He read our papers at the front while we waited. Then he held one up, and it was mine.
"Full marks!" he said. "Dave Tummins! Ten points to Snufflepuff!"
Everybody turned around. I'd never been given points before, and I didn't know where they'd go. I keep my lost points in one column, and that column's my life's work. So I started a new column for these. It's a small column. It's just the ten.
"He called you Dave," Phil whispered.
"He's still getting to know me," I said.
Phil got twenty-nine. He'd put blue for the color, because it said blue in one of the books. Phil believes anything if it's printed. That's why he'll never be a consultant.
Then Professor Lookhart pulled a sheet off a cage on his desk. Inside were about a dozen pixies, small and blue and rude.
"Be brave," he told us, and he opened the cage.
The first pixie took the ink. The second one took Bernie MacMullet's tie, with Bernie still in it, as far as the window.
Two of them carried the cage door across the room and put it on Professor Lookhart's head. One went up the chimney and came back down black. The lamp came down. Then the bookcase came down, and every book that fell out was about him.
Phil got under his desk. I got under Phil.
"Dale, get off," Phil said.
"I'm protecting you," I said. "From above."
Then a pixie pulled my wand right out of my hand. It flew up to the ceiling, pointed it at the class and waved it. Nothing happened. It waved it again, harder, at Bernie. Nothing. It shook my wand and looked at it, and then it looked at me.
Then it flew down and handed it back, and it sort of patted my hand. "Thanks," I said. It didn't say anything. It'd had a disappointing day. I've never been so proud of my wand. It's subtle, and you can't steal subtle.
Professor Lookhart said this was an important lesson in staying calm. Then he showed us how, by going into his office and locking the door.
Nobody was hurt much. "I've lost my tie," Bernie said, which we knew. Phil lost a page of his notebook and some hair. I lost a Nut, a shoelace and my left ear for the afternoon, because a pixie was living in it.
On our way out, Professor Lookhart opened his door a crack and waved. "Well done, Dave," he said.
Ten points and a nickname, on the first day. Mentor material.
Every growing company needs a secretary. I'd been doing my own filing for a year, and my filing system was a sock.
So I pinned a notice on the Snufflepuff board. It said, Secretary wanted. Tummins Consulting. Pay is experience. Apply by the fire. I pinned it up high, so only serious people could reach it.
I got one applicant. It was Tilly, the first-year from the train who'd stapled her contract to my sleeve. She'd read the notice standing on a chair. That's serious.
She'd been sorted into Snufflepuff, which I'd helped with by clapping.
She handed me a letter of reference from her mum's office-supply shop. It said she'd worked the counter since she was seven and never once lost a paper clip. I've lost a snail. I read it twice and felt underqualified for my own company.
"Thank you for seeing me, Mister Tummins," she said.
Nobody's ever called me Mister Tummins, except teachers, right before points. I liked it a lot better from her.
"You're hired," I said. "On trial."
"How long's the trial?" Tilly said.
"Until I find somebody better," I said.
"And then what?" she said.
"Then you'd be on a longer trial," I said. She wrote that down, which nobody's ever done for me before, except Phil, and he underlines the wrong parts.
Then she took out the stapler.
Nobody in the wizarding world has ever seen a stapler. They've got owls that carry mail and envelopes that yell, but they hold two pages together with string. Nobody'd ever told them. I wasn't going to start for free. Tilly put two pieces of parchment on the table and pressed down, and the stapler went chunk.
By dinner there was a queue out the round door. Seventh-years waited half an hour to watch it bite. A Ravenpaw asked what spell it used.
"It's a spring," Tilly said.
He wrote down Spring and tried it on his homework with his wand. Nothing happened. He came back and paid to have it done properly.
I charged a Nut a staple. Tilly did the stapling, and I did the talking, which is how the big companies split it.
At the end of the night she counted the Nuts into a little bag and put one staple through the top.
"Stapled," she said.
By October, Tummins Consulting had five lines of business and one employee, and the employee was the only part that worked. Here's the whole company, the way Tilly wrote it on the price list.
Matched by Tummins. Two socks that don't match, sold as a pair. Every pair's one of a kind, which is more than you can say for regular socks. I call it matched in spirit. Four Nuts a pair, or five for the important ones.
Stapling. A Nut a staple. We don't do discounts. A staple's a staple, and there's no such thing as half of one, because Tilly checked.
Yowlers. Three Nuts. Your message, delivered to the parent of your choice at full volume. The envelopes won't yell on their own yet, so until I work that out, I write the message very big and underline it twice. Some of the parents have written back to say thanks for the nice letter.
Larry Spotter autographs. One Pickle. I've signed Larry's name so many times now that my own looks forged.
Silvaroy Lookhart autographs. One Pickle and two Nuts. These sell better than the real ones. Professor Lookhart signs anything you hold still, all day long, for free. He signed a kid's lunch. A real one's everywhere. A forgery takes effort, and people can feel that.
"Is this one real?" a Ravenpaw asked me, holding up a Lookhart.
"It's better than real," I said. "It's mine."
He bought two.
I added a new line under my name on the price list. It said, The Sock Man. Nobody calls me that yet. But nobody calls me anything else either, so it's a close race.
Tilly keeps the books. Last year my books were a sock with some Nuts in it. Tilly's books are an actual book. On the last page she drew a line and wrote a number, and the number was the same as the Nuts in the bag. That's never happened before in company history. I asked her to do it again, slower, so I could see the trick.
Harmony Grainger came past the stapling queue in the library and read the price list. She read the whole thing, the way she reads everything, like it's going to be on a test.
"It's still fraud," she said.
"So is that a no on the partnership?" I said.
"It's a no," Harmony said.
That's seven. "You'll come around," I told her. "Everybody's against socks until their feet get cold." She'd already gone.
On her way past, Harmony had written the word fraud in the margin, very neatly. Tilly pinned the list back up and stapled right through it.
"Stapled," she said.
That's what I pay her for. Experience.
My Yowler demonstration in Transfiguration went great until Professor McBonagle heard it.
The envelope didn't yell yet, so I yelled for it, from behind it. I'd got as far as "And another thing, Mum" when she took ten points from Snufflepuff and gave me a detention. So the demonstration worked. Everybody heard it.
Detention was polishing the trophy room with Mr. Filtch. Mr. Filtch is the caretaker. He's got a dusty gray cat named Mrs. Morris, who follows him around and watches you for him, so he can rest his eyes.
"In my day," Mr. Filtch said, "a detention meant something."
He didn't say what, and then he said it again later, to the ceiling, so I don't think it was for me.
The trophy room's a long room full of cups and plates and shields, every one of them for somebody who isn't me. I polished a Squidditch cup for a while, and then a medal for being good at Potions.
Then, way at the back, behind a big cup, I found a little shield nobody'd polished in years. It said, For Special Help to the School, and under that, T. R. Middler, from fifty years ago.
"Mr. Filtch," I said, "what's special help?"
"Help," Mr. Filtch said, "that's special."
That's the best kind of award. It doesn't say what you did, so you don't have to do anything in particular.
I'd been helping the school all year. I'd matched socks for it, and stapled for it, and yelled for it in Transfiguration. Nobody'd given me a shield.
So I took a nail out of my pocket, and very small, under the name, I scratched, and D. Tummins.
It looked good, like it'd always been there, if you didn't get close. I polished it for a long time so it'd look old.
"You've been polishing that one for an hour," Mr. Filtch said.
"It's the important one," I said.
He looked at the shield. Mrs. Morris looked at me. Then Mr. Filtch said in his day they'd have had me polishing the chimney from the inside, and he went back to his chair.
I kept polishing. Two men, one trophy.
Hollis Brandt sat down at the Snufflepuff table at lunch. That's not allowed, because he's a Slitherwin, but nobody told him. Nobody tells Hollis anything. You wait for him to tell you.
He set his little black notebook down by my plate and opened it to my page without looking, which is how often he's been there. I've got the longest page in there, and I've never even asked for it.
"Forty Gallons," Hollis said.
"Hollis," I said, "how about socks? Matched by Tummins. Every pair's one of a kind. You'd never have cold feet again, in any color."
Hollis wrote something down, and I leaned over to read it. It said, Sock. Then a line. Then, nothing.
"That's what a sock's worth to me," Hollis said.
"That's a very small number, Hollis," I said.
"It's the right one," Hollis said.
Some people just aren't sock people. I've tried with Phil, and he's allergic.
So I tried something else. "Let's make this official," I said. "My secretary will staple it."
Tilly was sitting next to me, eating carrots in a neat row. I nodded at her. She took the bill out of Hollis's notebook, set it on a napkin and stapled the two together. Chunk. Then she handed it back with both hands, the way you'd hand back something important.
Hollis looked at the staple. Then he looked at Tilly, for long enough that she stopped eating carrots.
Then he wrote in his notebook. It was the longest thing he's ever written about me, and he turned it around so I could read it.
It said, Bill, now official. Official bills earn interest. Interest resumes at Christmas.
"Last year you forgave the interest," I said.
"Last year it wasn't stapled," Hollis said.
He took his notebook back to the Slitherwin table. Tilly went back to her carrots. I sat there and looked at the napkin, which was now part of the bill, and which I'd been planning to use.
I'd made it official. It looked great.
The interest was back. It'd missed me.
There's a first-year in Gruffindoor named Colby Cleevey who's about the size of a loaf of bread, and most of that's camera.
He follows Larry Spotter everywhere. He follows him to breakfast and to class and to the owl tower, and once to the boys' bathroom, where he waited outside, because Colby has manners. Every few steps he takes a picture. Then he says, "Hi, Larry!" and takes another one.
"Hi, Colby," Larry always says back. He looks tired when he says it, but he says it. A guy like Larry has to keep his customers happy.
Wizard pictures move once they're developed, so every one of Colby's prints is a little piece of Larry walking down a hall. I saw the market right away.
"I'll take twenty," I told him.
"You can just have them!" Colby said. He's very friendly. He'd say hi to a wall if Larry was standing near it.
"I insist," I said, and I made him take a Pickle. Once you've paid for something, it's inventory.
That night I spread them out on my bed to price them. In every picture, Larry Spotter's in front, looking patient. And in every picture, way in the back, there's me.
In one I'm picking a Nut up off the floor. In another I'm waving. In another I'm eating a roll. In one I'm halfway out of a suit of armor in the Entrance Hall. I don't remember that, but I've seen it about two hundred times now, because it moves, and I keep getting halfway out.
I've picked up that Nut two hundred times too. It's still the same Nut.
"Phil," I said, "look at this. I'm in every one."
"You're behind him in every one," Phil said.
"I'm in every one," I said.
Last year Mr. Dibbs told me the ones who think it's their story usually aren't even in the picture. I'd thought about that a lot. And here I was, in twenty pictures out of twenty, right there in the back where anybody could see me.
Phil said that wasn't the point Mr. Dibbs was making. I said Mr. Dibbs works in a closet and isn't in any pictures at all, so he'd have to take that up with Colby.
I didn't resell them. I couldn't. You don't sell your own history for a Nut apiece. I put them in a folder, in order, with the armor one on top.
Twenty pictures, and I'm in all twenty. Larry's only in the front. I wrote Portfolio on the folder.
The Slitherwin Squidditch team got new brooms this year. Drago Malfoil's father bought the whole team the Nimble Two Thousand and One. That's one better than Larry Spotter's. I respect a man who's one better. That's my whole plan for Larry.
I was down by the pitch on a Saturday morning, selling socks to anybody cold, when the Slitherwins came out holding their brooms up so the sun would hit them. Drago was in front, pale, with his hair slicked back so hard it looked painted on. "One better," he kept saying, to nobody, so everybody heard.
Larry and Lon and Harmony were there too. There was a tall Ravenpaw in front of me who wouldn't hold still, because he was cold.
"Sock?" I said.
"No," he said, and kept shivering, out of pride.
Then Drago said something to Harmony.
I didn't hear it. I was too far back. But everybody near the front went quiet all at once, the way a room goes quiet when somebody drops a whole tray. Harmony's face went very still.
Afterward I asked around about what he'd said. Nobody would tell me. I offered a Nut, then a Pickle. There's a Ravenpaw third-year who'll tell you anything for a Pickle.
"Not for a Pickle," he said, and walked away. That's when I knew it was bad.
Lon Measley pulled out his wand to do something about it. His wand's been broken since the car, and it's held together with tape. It went off backward with a bang and hit Lon instead.
Lon sat down on the grass. Then he burped. Then he burped up a slug.
Then there was another. Larry and Harmony hurried him off toward the gamekeeper's hut, with Lon burping all the way.
I followed at a respectful distance with a jar. They came out about one every ten steps, and I don't let a resource go to waste.
"Dale, what's the jar for?" Phil said, when I got back.
"Friends," I said. "For Lightning."
"Those came out of Lon," Phil said.
"Everybody comes from somewhere," I said.
I'd got eleven. Lightning hasn't made many friends at school. People step around him.
That night I set the jar down next to him and took off the lid.
"Lightning," I said, "say hello."
Lightning didn't even look at them. He kept going the way he was already going, about an inch an hour.
A snail who's been around doesn't mix with slugs. Slugs don't even have a house. Lightning's had his since he was born, and it's all paid off.
He's a professional.
Professor Lookhart gets about a hundred letters a day, and he answers every one with a signed picture of himself. I volunteered to help. A mentor needs a mentee, and a mentee needs to see where the mail goes.
His office was full of pictures of him, all moving and all smiling at once.
"Dave!" he said. "Come in, come in. Do you write neatly?"
"I write like you," I said.
That was true. I'd been doing his signature for weeks, at a Pickle and two Nuts a time. I didn't tell him that part. It's a trade secret, and also it's against the law.
He gave me a stack of photos and a purple quill and showed me how he signs. It's a big loop, then a smaller loop, then a star at the end. I'd been doing the star bigger.
I signed one. He picked it up and held it next to one of his own. He tilted his head one way, then the other, then he held them both up to the window.
"Dave," he said, "this is more me than mine."
"Thank you, Professor," I said.
"Do another," he said. "I want to watch me do it."
Nobody's ever wanted to watch me do anything before. Except Hollis, and he's just counting.
We did about two hundred. Halfway through the second stack I noticed Lightning in Professor Lookhart's hair. I don't know how he got there. He'd been in my pocket at dinner. Lightning goes where the quality is, and that's the best hair in the castle.
Professor Lookhart reached up and felt him.
"Oh, how sweet," he said. "A fan's sent me a hair clip. It's a snail!"
"It suits you, Professor," I said.
"Everything does," he said.
He kept Lightning in all evening, just over his left ear. I didn't say anything. You don't take a hair clip back off a man like that. Also, I wanted to see how far Lightning would get. By nine o'clock he'd made it to the part.
At nine Professor Lookhart handed me back the clip as a tip. He said he had a detention coming in and thanked me for my time.
On the way out I passed Larry Spotter coming in. He had the face of a kid who'd been given a detention, which he had.
"He's in a great mood," I told him.
Larry nodded at me the way you nod at a coat rack you nearly walked into. He'll place me eventually.
Walking back, I decided I'd go by Dave Tummins tomorrow, for one day, to see how it fit. If it fit, I'd keep it. If it didn't, Professor Lookhart would never know the difference.
On the way I put my ear to the castle walls, because people say the old walls here talk. They didn't say anything to me. All I heard was pipes, gurgling, and way off, a long hiss, the radiator kind.
Old castle. Good plumbing.
In Herbology we repotted Mandreeks, which scream. That's all they do, and nobody's ever fired one. I'd take a job like that.
Professor Spout handed out earmuffs, big fluffy pink ones, so you'd keep your lunch and your hearing. Phil's allergic to earmuffs. He sneezed into his the whole class, and since nobody could hear anything, it was the first lesson of his life where his sneezing didn't bother anybody.
A Mandreek's a little wrinkled potato with a face. You grab it by the leaves and pull it out of its pot, and it opens its mouth and screams. Then you shove it into a bigger pot, and it's mad about that too.
Everybody else's screamed. Bernie MacMullet's screamed so hard his earmuffs slid down.
I pulled mine up, and it looked at me. It didn't scream. It didn't do anything. It just looked at me, then up at the greenhouse roof. It had other things on its mind.
Subtle. Like my wand.
At the end of class Professor Spout took her earmuffs off and said that when the Mandreeks are grown, their juice can unstick anybody who's been stuck by anything. I wrote that down. I've been stuck by plenty. Gum, toffee, a whole summer behind a laundromat counter.
Then I went up to her with the earmuffs she'd lent me.
"Professor," I said, "can I interest you in some earmuffs? Lightly used. Broken in. One previous owner."
"They're my earmuffs, Mister Tummins," Professor Spout said.
"Then you know the quality," I said.
She took five points from Snufflepuff and the earmuffs back, both at once, without paying for either.
"Dale," Phil said, "you tried to sell a teacher her own earmuffs."
"She didn't say no," I said. "She said five."
My Mandreek still hadn't said a word. I patted the dirt down around him, and he looked at me again, very calm.
That's the kind you hire.
Frogwarts does Halloween with pumpkins you could live in. I measured one. You couldn't, but a smaller kid could, and I know some.
The feast had bats flying around the ceiling and a pudding shaped like a bat, which I ate wings first, so it couldn't get away. I had a pumpkin pasty in each sleeve for later. I'm a second-year. I plan ahead now.
After the feast everybody went up the stairs at once. Then everybody stopped at once, in a long dark corridor on the second floor, which is how stairs go wrong. The kids in front stopped, the kids behind them didn't, and I was way at the back, behind a whole house of taller heads.
My shoes got wet. There was water all over the floor, coming out from under a girls' bathroom door with a sign on it that said Out of Order.
"What's going on?" I asked the kid in front of me.
"Don't know," he said, and he asked the kid in front of him.
The news came back the way news does at the back of a crowd, one kid at a time, and a little worse each kid.
"Something's on the wall," a kid said.
"Filtch's hat," the next kid said.
"Cat," somebody behind him said. "Filtch's cat. She's frozen."
Then a fifth-year turned around. "Frozen stiff," she said. "Like a statue. Right by the wall."
Up ahead I could hear Mr. Filtch shouting. He was shouting about his cat, and about who'd done it, and his voice kept cracking. Nobody back where I was said anything for a while. Phil grabbed my sleeve and held on.
"It's all right," I told him. "We're at the back. Nothing happens at the back."
Then more news came back. Larry Spotter was up there. So was the red-haired kid, and the bushy-haired girl. They'd been standing right by the cat when everybody came round the corner.
I got up on my toes. Over everybody I could see the tops of three heads, one messy, one red and one bushy, right at the front, in a clearing everybody'd left around them.
Then somebody tall up front read the writing on the wall out loud, and it came back to me kid by kid.
The writing said the Chamber of Secretaries had been opened. It said the enemies of the Heir had better watch out.
Every face in that corridor was turned toward the cat. Mine was turned up at the top of the wall, which was all I could see of it, and it was enough.
A Chamber of Secretaries. I'd been in business over a year. I'd hired one secretary, and she was great, but she was one, and she was on trial. Somewhere in this castle there was a whole room of them. And somebody'd just opened it.
You don't get a notice like that twice. I'd have stapled it to the board myself if it hadn't been a wall.
Then the teachers came, and a prefect turned us all around and sent us back down the stairs. I went, but I walked backward, so I could keep reading. My broom only goes backward, and I've picked up a lot from it.
"Dale," Phil whispered, "the cat."
"I know," I said. "They'll fix her. They fix everything here."
He didn't let go of my sleeve all the way back.
Opened, the wall said. I wrote the date on my hand, so I'd know when they started taking appointments.
Finally, office space.
Somebody at Frogwarts had a problem with hair, and they'd written it on a wall.
A tall Ravenpaw read it out over the crowd. He said Heir. I heard hair. At the back of a crowd, that's the same word.
So at breakfast I checked the Great Hall for grooming problems.
Larry Spotter's hair was the messiest in the castle. It stuck up in the back like he'd slept on it wrong for twelve years. I felt bad for him, because he's lasted through one dark wizard already, and now he's got to worry about a comb.
Professor Lookhart's hair was the best in the castle. It's golden and wavy, and it keeps moving a little after he stops. A man with hair that good isn't scared of any wall. He's got time on his hands, and a quill.
"Phil," I said. "Lookhart wrote it."
"Why would he write it?" Phil said.
"To thin out the competition," I said.
Phil looked up at the teachers' table. "Snipe's hair is greasy," he said.
"Snipe's been warned before," I said. "He's a repeat offender."
After breakfast I combed my hair flat with water, so nobody could call me its enemy. Then I got out my combs. The dryers at home turn up two a week, and I sold them at lunch for a Nut each. A Ravenpaw bought two, one for each side.
At dinner Professor McBonagle said Mrs. Morris would be fine. Once Professor Spout's Mandreeks were grown, their juice would unfreeze her.
On the way back I passed Mr. Filtch's office, and Mrs. Morris's basket was by the door, empty. It looked lonely, so I left a comb in it, the good one with all its teeth.
When she gets back, she'll want to look her best.
Professor Finns teaches History of Magic, and he's a ghost, so he's never going to retire. That's a lot of history.
He comes in through the blackboard every morning, and he's so dull the chalk dozes off. I've seen it. It lies down in the tray and rolls over a little.
I'm a second-year now, so I know how to take his class. You put your head on your arm and face the window, so it looks like you're thinking about history. Phil takes notes for both of us. I call that delegating. Phil calls it unfair, but he keeps doing it, so it's working.
I was having a good nap about a goblin when I heard the word Chamber. I sat right up. In my line of work, you sleep light.
A Ravenpaw girl had asked about it. Finns said legends weren't history, but the whole class was awake for the first time since September, so he sighed and told it.
A thousand years ago, four wizards started the school. One of them was Balazar Slitherwin, and he didn't think Muddle-born kids should be at Frogwarts at all. The other three said they should.
That's three against one. Even I know how that vote goes.
So Slitherwin left. But before he left, he built a hidden chamber somewhere in the castle, with a monster in it. Only his true Heir could open it, and only the Heir could control the monster.
"That's the oldest bad idea there is," Phil whispered. He wrote it in the margin and underlined it twice.
I put my hand up. Finns blinked at me. He said nobody had put a hand up in his class since one of the goblin wars.
"Does the Chamber have a waiting room?" I said.
"I beg your pardon?" Finns said.
"And are the secretaries full-time," I said, "or do they just come in a few days a week?"
"There's no chamber," Finns said. "And there are certainly no secretaries." Then he went back to the goblins, and the chalk lay back down.
I didn't argue. Teachers don't get told everything. Nobody's ever told Finns about the bell, either. He talks right through it.
On the way to lunch I worked it out on my fingers. The Heir opens the Chamber. The Chamber's full of secretaries. So the Heir's the boss of all the secretaries. You don't need a monster for that. You need a desk.
"Phil," I said. "I'm going to be the Heir."
"You can't just decide to be an heir," Phil said. "You have to inherit something."
"I'm inheriting the Sudsy Duck," I said. "You wait, and you check the dryers."
I've been an heir my whole life. I've got experience.
Lightning hadn't moved in three days, and I knew what that meant. The monster had got him.
He was on the windowsill by my bed, right where I'd left him on Sunday, facing the lake. Three days is a long time, even for Lightning. Usually by Wednesday he's somewhere I don't want him, like my oatmeal.
"Phil," I said, "they froze Lightning."
Phil looked at him. "He's a snail," Phil said. "That's sort of their whole thing."
"Not like this," I said.
I held a vigil. I put a candle next to him, not too close, and sat with him in a respectful way.
Then I went to the greenhouses and asked Professor Spout to put Lightning down for some Mandreek juice, when it was ready.
"We don't do snails," Professor Spout said.
"He's very small," I said. "He'd only need a drop."
She said she'd think about it, which is what grown-ups say instead of no. I took it as a waiting list.
That night I wrote a speech for when he came back. It started, Lightning, you were gone, but you were never forgotten. Then it listed all the places he'd been. My shoe. Lookhart's hair. The windowsill at home, on my letter to Larry Spotter, for most of a summer. It was going to make people cry.
"There won't be people," Phil said.
"I'll invite some," I said.
Then on Thursday morning I woke up, and he'd moved an inch. Maybe an inch. It's hard to tell with a snail.
I read him the speech anyway. He walked out during the second page.
The writing had been right outside a girls' bathroom on the second floor, so that's where the Chamber's front office had to be. You don't paint your sign a mile from your door.
The bathroom had a sign of its own. It said Out of Order. I'm not allowed in a girls' bathroom, but an out-of-order one isn't a bathroom anymore. It's just a room with sinks in it. I explained that to Phil.
"I'll wait at the end of the corridor," Phil said. "Or a different corridor. Possibly the library."
Inside it was dark and wet. I didn't mind. A lot of good businesses start in places nobody else wants. Nana's did.
Somebody was crying in the second stall. I knocked, and a girl rose up out of it, right through the door, without opening it. She was gray and see-through, with thick glasses, and she looked at me like I'd kept her waiting for years.
I knew right away she was the receptionist. She had the look.
"This is a girls' bathroom," she said.
"It's out of order," I said. "So it's an office. Good afternoon. Dale Tummins, Tummins Consulting. I'd like an appointment with the secretaries."
She just stared at me. Somebody had scratched Moping Mildred into the paint on her stall door, and she saw me reading it, and her chin started to wobble.
"That's a strong name," I said, to be friendly. "Mine changes every few weeks."
That didn't help. So I told her I could wait, if the secretaries were in a meeting. I said I could come back Thursday. I asked if they took Pickles or only Gallons, and whether there was a form.
She let out a long wail and sank down through the floor of her stall. Every sink in the room overflowed at once. The water came up over my shoes and into my socks. That's a good receptionist. I'd only asked for a form, and she flooded the lobby.
Then I noticed the end stall. Green steam was coming over the top of the door, something inside was bubbling, and it smelled like a boiled shoe. Under the door I could see three pairs of feet around a cauldron. One pair had muddy laces. One had a scuffed toe. One pair was tied very neatly, in double knots.
I knocked.
"Occupied," said a girl's voice. It was quick and bossy, and I knew it right away. I'd heard it say no to me seven times.
"I'll wait," I said.
"Who is it?" said a boy's voice, tired and polite.
"Nobody," the girl said. "Keep stirring."
I didn't take it personally. I didn't have an appointment. That's on me.
I waited about twenty minutes. Nobody came out.
So I took out a business card and wrote Thursday on the back, and I left it on the wet floor in front of the sinks, face up.
They'll call.
Budger Insurance was my best idea since the stapler, and the stapler wasn't even mine.
A Budger's a heavy black ball that flies around a Squidditch match knocking people off their brooms. Sometimes it gets bored and comes up into the stands.
So for two Nuts, I insure you. If a Budger hits you, I pay you three. If it doesn't, you've had a nice afternoon with peace of mind, and I keep the two Nuts for my trouble.
Gruffindoor was playing Slitherwin, and it'd been pouring since breakfast. I sold forty-one policies in the top row before the match even started. That's where the nervous people sit. Phil bought one at the employee rate and then sat behind a post.
Then the match started, and something was wrong with one of the Budgers. It didn't go after just anybody. It went after Larry Spotter, and only him. It chased him up and down the pitch and around the goalposts. When he dove, it dove. When he stopped, it waited.
From the top row Larry was about the size of a Nut. You could still tell which one he was. He's always the one being chased.
I felt bad for him. It's no way to treat a customer, and he wasn't even mine.
Meanwhile not one Budger came near the stands all afternoon. It'd made other plans.
After about an hour, a Ravenpaw tapped me on the shoulder.
"I want my two Nuts back," he said.
"For what?" I said.
"Nothing happened," he said.
"That's the product," I said. "Nothing happening is what you bought."
"Then I want a refund on nothing," the girl next to him said.
"Me too," said the boy next to her.
Soon the whole top row was holding out their hands. I held mine out too, so they'd see I was on their side.
Then everybody jumped up screaming. Down on the field, Larry had caught the Glitch. He was lying in the mud holding it up in one hand, and his other arm was hanging off him in a funny direction, the wrong one.
Professor Lookhart ran out in sky-blue robes and knelt down and rolled up his sleeves. He waved his wand at the arm. The arm went soft. From the top row I watched it flop over, all the way, like a sock with nothing in it.
I leaned way out over the rail to see better. I'd need to know if it was a Budger injury, for the paperwork. The rail was lower than I'd figured. I went over it and down two rows onto a Ravenpaw.
The damage was minor. I had a twisted wrist, a scraped chin and a bruise on my side in the exact shape of a Ravenpaw. The Ravenpaw had my elbow in his hat.
On the way out, a Gruffindoor said I owed Larry three Nuts, since nobody's ever been hit worse.
"He's not a policyholder," I said. "Read the fine print."
"There's no fine print," Phil said. "It was a napkin."
"Then he should've read the napkin," I said.
Then I went up to the hospital wing myself. I wasn't insured.
For the second year in a row, Madam Comfrey put me in the bed next to Larry Spotter. I think she likes to keep the famous ones together.
She fixed my wrist with one tap of her wand and a look. She said the bruise would go down on its own. I asked if it'd keep the shape, and she said she hoped not.
Larry had it worse. His arm didn't have any bones in it. Lookhart had taken them all out at the match by accident, while he was fixing it. So Madam Comfrey poured Larry a big glass of Bone-Again, and he had to drink the whole thing and grow them back overnight.
Larry held his nose and drank it, and his face did several things.
"How is it?" I said.
"It tastes like a hot puddle," Larry said.
"I'll write that down," I said. I didn't. But you say that to a man.
People had sent him candy again. There was a whole pile of it on his table: Chocolate Toads, Every Flavor Beans and a cake somebody's mum had made. Last year I'd screened all his candy for him, as a service, and it'd been mostly safe. But this was a new year, with new threats. So I screened it again.
I started with the Chocolate Toads, because they're the most dangerous. They jump. Larry watched me eat one. He didn't say anything. He's very polite, and also he couldn't reach.
Then Madam Comfrey put the lamps out and told us both to sleep. In the dark, Larry's arm made little crackling noises, growing. You can't sleep through that. It's a very busy arm.
Then, very quietly, Larry said, "My feet are cold."
He wasn't saying it to me. He was saying it to the ceiling. But a businessman doesn't wait to be addressed.
"I can help you there," I said.
I always keep socks on me. Before bed I'd taken off my own pair, my best ones, and stuffed them in my robe pocket with the stock, so they wouldn't get hospital on them. Now I reached in without looking. A businessman knows his stock by feel. I came out with one short yellow sock and one long one, worn very soft, with a little hole in the heel for air.
"That's a matched pair," I said. "Matched by Tummins. They're matched in spirit."
"How much?" Larry said.
"For you," I said, "one Chocolate Toad."
He pointed at his pile with his good arm, and I took a Chocolate Toad out of it. That was fair. I knew right where they were.
I passed the socks across in the dark. I heard him put them on, slowly, one-handed. Then he sighed, the good kind of sigh.
"Thanks," Larry said.
"Pleasure doing business," I said.
It was, too.
I woke up in the night because somebody was whispering, and in a hospital wing that's usually me.
There was a gap in the curtain between my bed and Larry's. It was wide enough to pass a sandwich through, which I'd checked earlier. Through it I could see Larry in bed, and next to the bed, on the floor, something small.
It came up about as high as the mattress. It had large ears and big round eyes that caught the moonlight, and it was wearing an old pillowcase. It was talking to Larry in a squeaky, polite voice, very fast, about going home. Larry should go home, it said. It wasn't safe here. Would Larry please, please listen this time. It said sir a lot.
At first I figured I'd been dreaming. Bone-Again fumes do things to a guy, even from one bed over. Then I figured it was a lamp. Then the lamp said sir again, and lamps don't.
I wasn't eavesdropping. Eavesdropping's when you hide. I had my whole head through the curtain. I was listening for business.
And there was business. The little gentleman's feet were bare on the cold stone, and he was shivering a little. He looked cold. In my line of work, cold's an opportunity.
So I leaned out through the gap, very politely, and held up some socks.
"Excuse me, sir," I whispered.
He jumped and spun around. His ears went straight up.
"Socks?" I said. "Matched by Tummins. First pair's half off."
He looked at the socks. People have looked at my socks before, mostly to say no. This was different. He looked at them like they were a door somebody'd left open, with the whole outdoors on the other side. He took one step toward me, and then he stopped himself.
"Oh, no, sir," he whispered. "Nobby mustn't, sir. He mustn't take clothes from just anybody. But thank you. You're very kind, sir."
Then there was a loud crack, and he wasn't there anymore.
"Sir?" I whispered at the empty floor. "We do layaway."
I lay back down. I'd come on too strong. You never hard-sell a gentleman in the middle of the night.
On the other side of the curtain, Larry lay very still, the way you do when you want somebody to think you're asleep.
"Friend of yours?" I whispered. He didn't answer, so I knew they were close.
A while later the doors banged open, and the lamps came up a little. Professor Bumblemore and Professor McBonagle came in carrying somebody on a stretcher. "Over here, please," Bumblemore said quietly.
I couldn't see who it was. The curtain was in the way.
"Cleevey," McBonagle said, very low.
"Oh, the poor boy," Madam Comfrey said.
Through the gap I saw a hand above the stretcher, holding up a camera, very still.
They pulled the curtains around a bed two down, and the lamps went low again.
I didn't try to sell anything else that night. Nobody was buying.
In the morning Madam Comfrey said my wrist was fine and I could go. I went two beds down instead.
It was Colby Cleevey, the little first-year with the camera. He was frozen stiff like a statue, still holding the camera up, ready. The curtain was half open, and nobody else was there yet.
I sat in the chair by his bed. I'm not great at visiting. When I visit somebody, it's usually to sell them something, and I hadn't brought anything.
"Hi, Colby," I said. "It's Dale. From the back of your pictures."
He didn't say anything, so I kept going.
"The portfolio's safe," I told him. "It's under my mattress, in a sock."
That part was true.
"And the prints are selling great," I said. "People want more. A Ravenpaw asked for a signed one."
That part wasn't true. I hadn't sold one. Every time I got one out to sell, there I was in the back, and I'd put it away again. You don't sell a man's portfolio. Especially when it's yours.
But a guy in a hospital bed wants good news, so I gave him good news. In business, that's called a forecast.
His pillow looked flat. I fluffed it very carefully, just the edges, without bumping anything. Then I straightened his blanket and squared it up with the bed.
Madam Comfrey came by with a tray. "Mister Tummins," she said, "you were discharged an hour ago."
"I know," I said. "I'm keeping his chair warm."
She let me stay ten more minutes. I kept it very warm.
After Colby, the whole school got scared. When I get scared, I buy toffee, so I figured there was a market.
The rumor was that the monster only went after Muddle-born kids. I'm Muddle-born. So's Phil, and so's Tilly, and so's Dustin Flinch-Fletchley, who sleeps two beds down from me and says good morning to everybody, even the ceiling.
When I heard about the list, I was flattered. The only list I'd ever been on before was Hollis's, and I'm the whole list. Now here I was, on the most exclusive list in the castle, and I hadn't even applied.
"Dale, it's not a good list," Phil said.
"Phil, nobody makes a list of nobodies," I said.
So I launched Anti-Freeze. It's a lucky sock, tied in a knot. You keep it in your pocket, and it protects you from being frozen, guaranteed, or your money back from whoever's left. I don't know how it works. That's the beauty of it. If you knew how it worked, you'd make your own.
Tilly wrote out a guarantee for every one and stapled it to its sock. We did sixty the first night.
"Stapled," Tilly said at midnight, and went to bed.
Dustin bought three. "Gosh, thanks, Dale," he said, and he put one in each pocket and one in his shoe. That's a customer. With forty Dustins I could own the castle.
Phil didn't buy one. He wouldn't say he was scared. But he'd started walking down the middle of every corridor, away from the walls, and he read the wizard newspaper every morning with his whole face. So I gave him one at the employee rate.
"What's the employee rate?" Phil said.
"Half," I said.
"I'm not an employee," Phil said.
"Then it's a gift," I said. "At half."
"I understand," Phil said. He paid. He tied it to his notebook, and he checked it was still there about every ten minutes, which is all you want from a product.
On Tuesday in Transfiguration I had a few out on my desk, just displayed, not even selling. Professor McBonagle came down the aisle and swept every one of them into a sack. She took twenty points from Snufflepuff for trading in class.
"That sock won't stop a sneeze, Mister Tummins," she said.
"It's not for sneezes," I said. "That's a different product."
She didn't get my personal supply. I had three on me, one in each pocket and one tied around my ankle.
I'm not taking chances. I'm on a list.
Professor Lookhart started a new club, and he named it himself. It was called the Drooling Club. I brought a pillow.
"It's not that kind of club," Phil said. "It's for fighting, Dale. There'll be wands."
"It says drooling," I said. "In his own handwriting."
It did, too, with a big curly D. I've studied that handwriting closer than anybody. If he'd meant fighting, he'd have curled an F.
Lookhart stood on a long stage in the Great Hall in brand-new plum-colored robes. That's a man who takes drooling seriously.
"Gather round!" he said. "Tonight I'll show you how to defend yourselves, with the help of my assistant, Professor Snipe!"
Snipe didn't look like anybody's assistant. Nobody had asked him how he felt about it, and you could tell.
They bowed to each other and held up their wands. Then Snipe flicked his, and there was a bang, and Lookhart flew backward off the stage and landed flat on the floor.
He lay there a second. Then he waved from the floor with one hand, so we'd know he'd meant it.
"An excellent demonstration," he called, "of exactly what not to do! I could've stopped it at any time!"
"See, he planned that," I told Phil. That's a mentor. He'll fall off a stage just so you can learn something.
Then we paired off. I got Phil. I put my pillow down first, in case.
We bowed. Phil pointed his wand at me and said, "Droppio," very clearly, the way he says everything.
My wand jumped out of my hand and went clattering across the floor and under a bench.
"Sorry!" Phil said.
This made no difference to my wand. It does nothing in my hand, and it did nothing under the bench. I left it there a while, in case it did better on its own. It didn't, so at least it's not the hand.
Phil's was the only spell in our row that worked first time. I count that as a team win. He did the spell, and I stood there and let it happen. You need both.
Then something happened down at the front, and the whole hall went quiet.
A tall Ravenpaw was in front of me, so I got down on my knees and looked through his legs.
There was a long black snake on the floor. Drago Malfoil was standing back looking very pleased, so I figured it was his. The snake had its head up, facing Dustin Flinch-Fletchley, and Dustin was standing very still.
Then Larry Spotter walked up to the snake and hissed at it.
"What's he saying?" I whispered.
"I don't know," Phil whispered. "Nobody knows."
It came out as hissing, but you could tell there were words in it. The snake listened. Then it put its head down and turned away from Dustin, slow and easy, like it'd been made a fair offer.
Then everybody stepped back from Larry at once. The whole hall took one big step, and the Ravenpaw in front of me stepped back onto my hand.
"Ow," I said. Nobody looked. They were all looking at Larry.
I knew what I'd seen. Larry Spotter had negotiated with a snake, in public, in its own language. He'd closed the deal in about four seconds, with no contract, and the snake had walked away happy.
I've been trying to close a deal with Harmony Grainger for two years.
Some guys even get the snakes.
Bernie MacMullet called a meeting in the common room that night. He calls one about once a week, standing on the good chair by the fire, and usually it's about noise. This one was about Larry Spotter.
"You all saw it," Bernie said. "He talked to a snake. That's Parsleytongue. Only the Heir of Slitherwin can do that. Everybody knows that."
I didn't know that. But I nodded, so people would think I did.
Parsleytongue. I sat there and turned it over. Parsley's a cooking herb. Nana puts it on top of things so it looks like you got more. So the whole Chamber business was about cooking, which made sense. An office full of secretaries needs a lunch.
Then I thought about what it meant. The Heir's the boss of the Chamber. So now Larry Spotter was the Heir, on top of everything else. He already had the scar and the broom and the fame. Now he was getting the secretaries too.
I stood up. "Point of order," I said. "I'm the Heir."
The common room went quiet. Dustin Flinch-Fletchley took one of his Anti-Freezes out of his pocket and held it.
To prove it, I got Lightning out of my pocket, held him up and hissed at him. I hissed a long time. Lightning didn't do anything, which is how a snail listens.
"He's under my command," I said.
Then I told them what had really happened at the Drooling Club. The snake had come at Dustin. I'd stepped forward. I'd looked the snake right in the eye and talked it down, calmly, in its own language, and Larry had only been standing near me, picking up tips.
Phil was by the fire with his notebook. "That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
"You were looking for your wand," I said.
"I was looking for your wand," Phil said. "You were under a Ravenpaw."
Bernie said the meeting was over. Several people went to bed early.
The next morning I told it again in Transfiguration, with more hissing. Professor McBonagle took fifteen points from Snufflepuff for claiming to be the Heir of Slitherwin in her classroom.
"It isn't funny, Mister Tummins," she said.
"It's not supposed to be funny," I said. "I'm the Heir, not a comedian."
That night Sir Pomeroy was waiting by the Snufflepuff entrance. He lifted his visor with one painted finger.
"The Heir," he said. "Marvelous."
He doesn't give out marvelous to just anybody. I've walked past that painting every day for a year, and that's the first one I've gotten.
So I've decided to go by The Heir Apparent. It's got Heir right in it, and apparent means everybody can see it.
I've always been apparent.
Sleeves the poltergeist found them first, so everybody found out at once. He went shooting up and down the corridor yelling, "Frozen! Frozen again! Two of them!" and he got louder every time he passed a door.
I was at the back of the crowd, so I got the news one kid at a time.
"Somebody's frozen," a Ravenpaw said over his shoulder.
"It's a student," said the girl in front of him.
"It's a Snufflepuff," said somebody else.
"It's Dustin," a second-year said, and then nobody said anything for a bit.
And Mostly Headless Mick was frozen too, right beside him. I didn't know you could freeze a ghost. People at the front said Mick had gone gray and smoky and stopped in midair, and Dustin was stiff as a statue on the floor underneath him.
Then the next piece came back. Larry Spotter was there. He'd been found standing right by them. Sleeves started yelling Larry's name, over and over, and Professor McBonagle told him to stop, and he didn't.
Through a gap between two Ravenpaws I saw the top of Larry's head, very still. Then McBonagle walked him away.
Dustin had three Anti-Freezes. I'd sold them to him myself. One in each pocket and one in his shoe.
When the teachers came with a stretcher, the crowd thinned out, and I got up close. Dustin's shoes had come off. His feet were just in thin school socks on the cold stone.
I took off my own socks. They're a good pair. I put them on over his, both feet, quick, before anybody could tell me not to. Professor Spout saw me do it. She didn't say anything. Then they carried him off.
Back in the dorm, I took the little sign off my trunk that said Anti-Freeze, Two Nuts, and I put the rest of the stock under my bed.
"Are you closing it?" Phil said.
"I'm pausing it," I said. There's a difference, and I needed there to be one.
Dustin's candy was on his bed, a whole tin of Every Flavor Beans. I put it under my pillow for safekeeping. Somebody had to keep it safe, and I'm the one with the experience.
I'd always wanted to be on an exclusive list. That night, lying on Dustin's beans, I started to think this one was getting a little too exclusive.
I didn't eat any. Not that night.
Nana went on the laundromat owners' cruise again this Christmas, so I stayed at school. It's a big week for them. They sail around some islands and compare dryers.
Phil stayed too. His aunt had gotten a new cat.
"I can sneeze all Christmas at my aunt's," Phil said, "or I can sneeze all Christmas here, where nobody makes me wear the sweater."
After Dustin, hardly anybody else stayed. The Snufflepuff dorm was just me and Phil and a lot of empty beds. I slept in a different one every night, to keep them all broken in.
Tilly went home to her mum's shop. Before she left, she gave me a box of staples. The label said, in her handwriting, Staples, for Mister Tummins, not for use on Professor Snipe.
Nana's box came on Christmas Eve. There were nap sandwiches, ironed flat, and forty socks from the lost-sock bin, and a card that said, Merry Christmas, honey. People lose more socks at Christmas. They're distracted.
Then a second owl came. It was from Hollis Brandt, who'd stayed for Christmas too. He'd sent it by owl from the dungeons, which is about a two-minute walk. That's a man who wants a record.
It said, Forty Gallons. Interest restored. Merry Christmas. And under that, smaller, it said, I mean the merry part.
"Phil," I said, "Hollis is softening."
"It says interest restored," Phil said.
"Read the bottom," I said. "Most bills don't wish you a merry anything."
Phil's present was a sock. It was the best of Nana's forty, green, with a little reindeer on it. I wrapped it in Hollis's bill. It was the only paper I had, and it already said Merry Christmas.
Phil opened it on Christmas morning. He read the wrapping first, front and back.
"Dale, this is your bill," Phil said.
"He means the merry part," I said.
Phil put the sock on right away. He's allergic to wool, but it's mostly not wool. Then he folded the bill up very neatly and handed it back. That's Phil. He'll take your sock, but he won't take your debts.
I've asked.
On Christmas Day, two of the biggest boys in the castle asked me for directions, and I charged them. It's the season of giving, and they gave.
I was down in the dungeon corridor after lunch, looking for a quiet place to eat Phil's pudding. Phil had given it to me himself. He said he was full, but I think he'd seen my face.
Grabb and Boyle came around the corner. They're Drago Malfoil's two friends, and usually they walk two steps behind him, in case he needs something carried. Today they were on their own, and they looked lost.
"Excuse me," Boyle said. "Do you know the way to the Slitherwin common room?"
That's how I knew something was off. Boyle has never said excuse me. Boyle has never said anything to me except "Move."
Also, Grabb was wearing glasses. They were small and round, and he kept pushing them up with one finger and looking surprised every time.
"New glasses?" I said.
Grabb took them off very fast and put them in his pocket. "Reading," he said.
I'd never seen Grabb read, either. It was turning into a big day for him.
I don't know where the Slitherwin common room is. Nobody outside Slitherwin does. But you don't let a little thing like not knowing get between you and a customer.
"Directions are two Nuts," I said.
They looked at each other. Then Boyle dug in his pocket and paid me, two Nuts, no arguing, no holding me upside down. I'd known Boyle a year and a half, and he'd never paid for anything except by looming.
"Down," I said. "Keep going down. Then left at the damp bit. If you smell the kitchens, you've gone too far."
"Thanks," Grabb said.
Thanks, from Grabb. I nearly dropped the pudding. When you hand Grabb something, he just looks at it until it's his.
Then Drago Malfoil came around the corner and asked where they'd been, and he led them off the other way. It was down and to the right, so I'd been close. If you go down far enough in a dungeon, you get everywhere eventually.
I sat on a step and ate the pudding and thought it over. That's what Christmas does to a man. You can be a grump all year, and then one morning you get some new glasses and you're saying excuse me to strangers.
About an hour later, two big boys came sprinting back up the corridor past me. One of them had a little red hair coming in at the edges. I figured he was trying a new look for the holidays. First Grabb's glasses, now this. It was going around.
"Merry Christmas!" I called after them. "I'm hiring! Both of you! Pay is experience!"
They didn't stop. I put them down as a maybe.
Two of the worst boys in Slitherwin had turned decent, and I'd been paid for it.
Peace on earth. Two Nuts.
Harmony Grainger spent Christmas in the hospital wing behind a curtain, which is a great way to avoid being pitched. Luckily, I've pitched through a door before.
Madam Comfrey said Harmony wasn't seeing visitors. I told her I wasn't a visitor, I was a business associate. She said that was worse and went off to get blankets, so I let myself in.
Phil came too. He'd made Harmony a get-well card with all the homework she'd missed written inside. That's what Phil thinks people want, and with Harmony, he's right.
The curtain around her bed was pulled tight. "Harmony," I said, "it's Dale Tummins. I'm here about the partnership."
Nothing. Then something poked out under the bottom of the curtain. It was a tail, brown and fluffy, and it flicked twice and went back in.
Then, through the gap at the side, I saw a whisker, just one, long and white.
I knew right away what was going on. You can't have pets in the hospital wing. Harmony knows that rule better than anybody, so it had to be a really good cat.
"Harmony," I said, "I see the cat. I won't tell. But you're busy being sick. Tummins Consulting offers cat-sitting, two Nuts a day. I'll feed it, I'll brush it, and I'll tell it all about you."
"No," said the curtain.
That's eight. It's a lot of no's, but each one's been shorter than the last, so she's running out of reasons.
Phil sneezed. Then he sneezed again and backed away holding the card out in front of him.
"I'm allergic to cats," Phil said.
"I know," I said. "That's why I'm handling it."
He set the card on the end of the bed and went to sneeze by the window. The tail came out from under the curtain and pulled the card in.
She was warming up to us.
I keep a list of every point I've cost Snufflepuff, because nobody else will.
Five from Professor Snipe, in September, for stapling my potion notes to his desk. I was only showing him the stapler. He went very still, which with Snipe is how you know it landed.
Ten from Professor McBonagle, for the Yowler service demonstration in Transfiguration. The envelope still won't yell on its own, so I was yelling for it, from behind it. I only got as far as Mum.
Twenty from McBonagle, for selling Anti-Freeze in class. That's my biggest single loss of the year, and I'm still proud of it. One of my customers was halfway into a teapot, and he still wanted one.
Fifteen from McBonagle, for telling everybody I was the Heir. She took it very seriously. You don't take fifteen points off a guy who isn't a threat.
Three from a prefect, for the slug jar. The slugs were guests of my snail, and I said so. The prefect said guests don't go on the common room mantelpiece.
Five from Madam Pooch, for flying backward into the Thumping Willow at Snufflepuff practice, which I was helping with from the air without being asked. My broom only goes backward, so as far as the broom's concerned, I was going forward. The willow hit me once each way.
Five from Professor Spout, for trying to sell her back the earmuffs she lent me. I gave her the teacher price.
Ten from Snipe, for selling Budger Insurance in his dungeon. "Nobody's ever been hit by a Budger in Potions," I told him. "That's a perfect record."
The ten Professor Lookhart gave us for my quiz go in a different column. It's a small column, but it's very clean.
I read the whole list to Phil in the common room. He wrote the numbers down as I went and added them up twice.
"Seventy-three," Phil said. "That's bad, Dale."
"Last year I was only at forty-eight by now," I said.
"That's worse," Phil said.
"That's more," I said.
Phil drew a box around the seventy-three. You don't put a box around a number you don't respect.
Seventy-three, and it's only January.
My appointment with the Chamber of Secretaries was still pending in January, so I went to follow up. If you don't follow up, they lose your card. Sometimes they lose it on purpose.
Halfway down the second-floor corridor, I saw Hollis Brandt coming the other way with his notebook out. So I went into the out-of-order girls' bathroom faster than I'd planned, got in the first stall and stood up on the seat so my feet wouldn't show.
The floor was flooded again, and I'd splashed through it on the way in, so I added my shoes to what Hollis owes me.
"Hello, Mildred," I said. "It's Dale Tummins. I left my card last term."
Moping Mildred came up out of the next stall, very slowly, so I'd see how sad she was. She said she hadn't seen any card. She said somebody had just thrown a book at her.
"A book?" I said.
"Right through me," Mildred said. "Nobody ever thinks about my feelings." Then she went back down with a big splash, and more water came under the door.
I made a note that the receptionist was having a hard week.
Then the door opened, and two pairs of shoes came splashing in. One pair was worn at the toes, and the other was a size too big, with a red-haired voice on top of it.
"Leave it, Larry," the voice said. "It's soaking."
A hand came down and picked something up off the floor. It was a little black book, dripping. All I could see of him was a sleeve, but I'd heard the name, and you don't get two Larrys.
He kept it, and they splashed back out.
I stepped down into the water and thought it over. That book had been lost, and lost things come with a finder's fee. I'd been in the room with it ten minutes before Larry got there. That's seniority.
So I went straight to lost-and-found and reported it to Mr. Dibbs.
"A small black book, wet," I said. "Found by a finder. I witnessed it. A witness usually gets ten percent."
Mr. Dibbs didn't look up from his socks. "Things turn up, kid," he said.
I waited for the rest of it. That was the rest of it.
I left him my card anyway. That's two cards out now, so word's getting around.
Tilly came back from Christmas with a new ribbon in her bun and the quarterly report, which I hadn't asked for, because I didn't know we had quarters.
She read it to me in the common room, standing up, with the stapler under her arm.
"Socks matched, eighty-one pairs," Tilly said. "No two alike."
"Staples used, four hundred and twelve," Tilly said. "Two of them in Professor Snipe's desk."
"Those were promotional," I said.
"Yowlers sent, nine," Tilly said. "Yowlers returned, three, with the spelling corrected."
"That's a loyal customer," I said.
"Anti-Freeze, paused," Tilly said. She said it very gently, because she knew about Dustin.
"Paused," I said. "Not stopped. You don't stop a product like that. You let it rest."
"Balance," Tilly said, and she turned the page around so I could see it. "Six Pickles and four Nuts. In the black."
I'd never been in the black before. I'd been in the red so long that I thought it was just the name of the room. I had her read that line three times. Then Phil came over, so she read it a fourth, for the witness.
"Last item," Tilly said. "Inventory. One sock, long, gray-green, hole in the heel. Property of a Mr. Feeney, of Wendleton." She looked up. "Missing."
I went upstairs and turned out my trunk. I checked my pockets, all my robes and inside my shoes. I even checked Lightning, who was in my sock drawer, and he wasn't hiding it, though with a snail you can't completely rule it out.
It was gone, and that's the most valuable sock in the business. Mr. Feeney's reward had gone up every Thursday since June, and I was the only one who knew where his sock was. Now there wasn't anybody.
So I opened the Case of Mr. Feeney's Sock. It's the most important case of my career. It's also my first, but I can tell.
Tilly made up a case file, three pages and a cover sheet, and I paid her a Nut of overtime to staple it. She did it in one clean bite.
"Stapled," Tilly said.
I bought a detective hat off a third-year for a Nut. It's a regular hat, but I wore it low over one eye, and I walked into a lot of things. I called myself Detective Tummins for the whole case. I said it to myself in the mirror, and once to Phil, who said, "Who?"
First I made a wall of clues over my bed, the way detectives do. It had a drawing of the sock in the middle and an arrow pointing at Hollis. That was all the clues I had, but it looked very official, and it kept Lightning off the wall.
I started the interviews with Phil, because he was closest.
"Where were you on the night the sock went missing?" I said.
"Which night?" Phil said.
"That's what I'm asking you," I said.
Phil had an alibi. He's allergic to wool. Also, Phil's never taken anything in his life. He apologizes to doors.
Next I interviewed Lightning.
"Where were you on the night of the sock?" I asked him. He didn't say anything, which is his right. I put him on the windowsill, and he stayed there all afternoon, which is how an innocent snail acts. A guilty snail would've run.
"I've been in this frame all year," Sir Pomeroy said, "and I've seen nothing but you. It's been plenty." I wrote down "fan" and moved on.
"Nobody ever asks me anything," Moping Mildred said. Then I asked her about the sock, and she cried so hard the sinks went over, which isn't a no.
I didn't interview Hollis. I suspected him instead, which saves time, and you can do it from the other end of the castle.
Then I went where the real clues are. The real clues are always low. Socks live on feet, and feet live under tables, so I went to the library and crawled.
It's very interesting under the library tables. There's old gum and a lot of quills that rolled off. I found three Nuts and a note that said, Don't tell Snipe. I'm not going to. I don't know who it's about.
Then, under the next table across the aisle, I saw two feet I knew. I've spent most of my life looking at Larry Spotter from low angles, and you learn the shoes.
The left sock was short and yellow. The right one was long and gray-green, with a hole in the heel.
My heart stopped for a second. Then I worked it out. Gray-green must be in style this year. If Larry Spotter's wearing it, half the castle will be wearing it by Friday.
I noticed the yellow one too. Short yellow with long gray-green is a bold pairing. Somebody had sold him those as a matched pair. I know that move. It's a good move.
But it was terrible news for the case. When a style floods the market, one sock looks like any other, and Mr. Feeney's could be on anybody now.
A Ravenpaw looked under the table at me. "What are you doing down there?" she said.
"Following a lead," I said, and I crawled out backward, went back to the dorm and wrote it all up. Then I drew a second arrow on the wall, pointing at everybody.
The case stays open. That's where the money is.
Hollis Brandt came to collect on a Tuesday, and for the first time in my life, I had somebody to send to the door.
Tilly had set up an office at the far end of the Snufflepuff table at breakfast. It had a sign, a jar of staples and a little bell. Nobody'd ever rung the bell, and Hollis didn't either. He just sat down across from her, opened his notebook and waited.
"Do you have an appointment?" Tilly said.
"I've got a bill," Hollis said.
"That'll do," Tilly said, and she held out her hand for it.
I've known Hollis Brandt for more than a year, and I've never once seen his figures. Tilly saw them in about four seconds, because she asked.
She read the bill out loud, like a waitress reading back an order. Forty Gallons, principal. Interest, from Christmas. Then she asked for his figures, and Hollis gave her his figures. I'd never seen Hollis give anybody anything.
Tilly went down the interest column with her finger. Then she went down it again.
"You've carried the one twice," Tilly said. "That's a Pickle in Mister Tummins's favor."
Hollis looked at the column. Then he looked at Tilly for a very long time. Hollis doesn't blink much, but neither does Tilly. She's got a very steady face for an eleven-year-old. It's from the shop.
Hollis took the bill back, crossed out a number and wrote a smaller one. Tilly stapled her correction to it.
"Stapled," Tilly said.
I took full credit for the training. I'd been trying to get Hollis's number down for a year and a half. I just never thought to check his adding.
Then Hollis turned to a fresh page and wrote something down, and he held it up so I could see. It said, Secretary, sharp.
Snufflepuff was finally playing Gruffindoor, and I brought Anti-Freeze back for one day only, because a crowd that size is a crowd that size.
The rumor was still that the monster only went after Muddle-born kids. I'm Muddle-born, so I'd been on that list since Colby. It's not a list everybody gets on. Phil's on it too, but he'd read about it in the wizard newspaper, and he wasn't enjoying it the way I was.
"It's an exclusive list, Phil," I told him.
"It's a list of who's next," Phil said.
I wore three Anti-Freezes and walked up and down the stands with a tray and a sign, and I sold eleven before the teams even came out.
"Do these work?" a first-year asked me.
"Look at me," I said. "Am I frozen?"
He looked at me for a while. Then he bought two.
By then I was selling toffee too, because people get hungry when they're nervous, and I'd made them very nervous. The teams came out. Our Seeker waved at the crowd, and I waved back. I had the toffee, so I'm fairly sure it was me he was waving at.
Then Professor McBonagle walked out onto the pitch, all by herself, without a broom.
"There'll be no match today," she said. "Everyone back to your common rooms. Now, please."
I looked down at my tray. I'd been loud. I'd been very loud, and I'd had a sign. I figured she'd heard me from the staff seats and decided enough was enough. It's not the first event I've shut down, but it's the biggest.
On the way out, between two Ravenpaw scarves, I saw McBonagle steering Larry Spotter and his red-haired friend away from the crowd, toward the castle, the hospital wing way. I figured they'd been selling something too.
Then the news got to the back, where I was. "Near the library," somebody said in front of me. Two people had been found there, frozen stiff. One was a Ravenpaw prefect. They'd found a little mirror on the floor next to them.
The other one was Harmony.
I didn't say anything. I put the tray under my arm and walked back with everybody else, and I didn't sell anything on the way, not even to a first-year who asked. Phil walked next to me and didn't sneeze once.
Phil says I didn't talk all the way to the common room. That's about four hundred steps. I've never gone that long.
When I got to the dorm, I took off all three socks. Then I put them back on.
Harmony Grainger has turned me down eight times, so when I went to see her in the hospital wing, I brought new material.
She was in the bed by the window, frozen stiff like a statue. Madam Comfrey had tucked a blanket over her and put a book on the table next to her, in case. I thought that was very thoughtful. Harmony would want something to read the minute she got back.
Phil came with me. He stood at the end of the bed with his hands in his pockets. He's Muddle-born too, and he'd been quiet all week.
I gave her the pitch. Not the short version, either. The whole thing, with Tilly's report and the balance in the black, and a part I'd been saving about expanding into Ravenpaw.
She didn't interrupt me once. Usually I don't get past my own name.
And when I got to the end, she didn't say no.
I waited a long time to make sure. Then I counted it as a yes.
"Dale, she's frozen," Phil said.
"She's a silent partner," I said.
I'd already sent a note to Tilly about the letterhead. Now it says, Tummins Consulting, Dale Tummins, President. Harmony Grainger, Partner. Tilly Grubb, Secretary, on trial. It's the best the letterhead's ever looked.
Before we left, I took out the best sock I had. It was a thick red one with a bobble on the toe, and I'd been saving it. I put it on the blanket by her hand. I didn't tie a knot in it. It isn't for anything. It's just warm.
She didn't say no to that either.
Tooth is the only customer at Frogwarts with four feet, and I'd never sold him a single sock. That's a gap in the market the size of a dog.
So one evening I took a bag of four socks down the lawn to Haggard's hut. They were matched in spirit. Tooth wouldn't know the difference, and if he did, he couldn't tell anybody.
There was a light in the window and a lot of voices inside, so I didn't knock. You don't barge into a meeting. You stand in the bush under the window until it's over.
Haggard was at his table, looking very large and very worried. Across from him was a short man in a bowler hat, turning the hat around in his hands like he was looking for the front. Bumblemore was by the fire, looking calm.
"It's a precaution, Haggard," the short man said. "That's all. A precaution."
He said it four times. I know that word. Nana's got it on a sign over dryer six. It's about lint.
Then the door opened, and in came the tall pale man with the long fair hair and the cane, the one from the bookshop. He had a piece of paper, and he showed it to Bumblemore.
"It's all signed," the pale man said. He said it the way Hollis says forty Gallons.
It looked like a board meeting. I've never been invited to one, but I've seen a lot of them through windows.
Then I noticed the teacup. It was on the table near the wall, with nobody next to it, and while I watched, it moved. It slid over about an inch, all by itself. Nobody looked at it, and nobody said a thing.
So I decided the hut was just like that. Haggard keeps a lot of strange animals. One of them was probably thirsty and see-through, and you don't bring that up in front of company.
Bumblemore stood up and said something polite to everybody, even the pale man. Then he put on his hat and walked out, very calmly. On the way past, he looked right at the bush I was in.
"Good evening," Bumblemore said.
"Evening," I said. Two businessmen.
Then Haggard got up and put on his big coat. He stopped at the door and said something very loud to nobody, to the empty middle of the room. Through the glass I only caught one word of it, and the word was spiders.
There wasn't anybody in that hut who needed to hear about spiders. So he must've meant it for whoever was listening, and I was listening.
They all went out, and the light went off, and Tooth started howling inside. I pushed the socks under the door.
"Free sample," I told him. He ate one. That's how you know he's interested.
I wrote it down in my notebook. Spiders. Then I underlined it twice.
A businessman follows a tip.
The tip said spiders, so the next evening I went looking for spiders, and I found them right away. That's how you know it's a good tip. They were walking across the lawn in one long line, toward the Forbidding Forest, and they were in a hurry.
I had another reason to go, too. I'd heard the little blue car from the willow was living wild in the forest now. Nobody owned it, so it was basically lying around, and I've built a whole business on things lying around.
"Come with me," I told Phil. "I'm repossessing a car."
"I'm allergic to spiders," Phil said. "And the forest. And you going into it."
So I went by myself, with my notebook and a pencil, for the paperwork.
A little way into the trees, the spiders were the size of a footstool. Then they were the size of the armchair Nana watches her programs in. They were hairy and busy, and they wouldn't stop clicking.
"Evening," I said to the first big one. "Nice line you've got here."
It stopped and looked at me with all its eyes at once. Then the next one did. You don't get that kind of attention in a lot of shops.
Then I looked down at their feet. Every one of them had eight, and there wasn't a sock on any of them. I didn't believe it, so I counted on a few. Here was a whole forest of customers with cold feet, and nobody'd ever sold them a thing.
So I got out my notebook and started taking orders. I'd point at a spider and say, "Socks?" and it'd click. One click, I put down small. Two clicks, medium. Nobody clicked three times. Large is always a hard sell.
Then, far off in the dark, a deep old voice said something long and slow. It sounded like a grandfather calling everybody in for supper. Every spider turned around to listen. Then the voice said its own name, slowly, so everybody'd know who was calling. It was Aragoat.
That cleared it up. It's a goat. A goat that old, living out here with all these spiders, is basically the landlord.
"I'll put you down as a referral!" I called.
Then there were headlights, and then there was honking. The little blue car came crashing through the trees all by itself, with its doors flapping. Larry Spotter and his red-haired friend were inside, and Tooth was in the back. Larry was holding on with both hands. He looked like he'd had a long night.
The spiders were very interested in the noise of the car. They all went toward it at once, and then they all went away from it, fast. It's the most a customer's ever moved for me.
The car came straight at me. I got out of the way at the last second, partly by jumping and partly by falling over. It went by so close I could've read the mileage.
"That car's been repossessed!" I shouted, and I ran after it.
It didn't stop. Cars almost never do, when you shout that.
I didn't get back to the castle till after midnight. I had a scratch on my nose from a branch, pine needles in both shoes and a tire mark across my notebook. But all forty orders were still there.
I also had a web in my hair for a week. It's the most anybody's ever done for my hair.
Forty spiders, eight feet each. I did the math in bed by candlelight, then again on a page of Phil's notebook, because his pages are waterproof and I was sweating. Three hundred and twenty socks.
I had eleven, and three of them were on me. Nana's Christmas box had gone in January to Snufflepuffs with cold feet. Mr. Dibbs has four hundred, but they aren't mine, technically, and he counts them.
At breakfast I told Phil the whole story. "Phil," I said, "last night I walked into a forest full of giants, all by myself, and I closed a deal."
Phil put down his toast. "That's not how I remember it," he said.
"You weren't there," I said.
"No," Phil said. "But I was here at midnight when you came in with a web on your head and woke me up to ask what size a spider takes."
That's true, and I'd forgotten that part. It's not the kind of thing you put in the memoir.
"What did you tell me?" I said.
"I told you to go to sleep," Phil said.
So that's still an open question. I put them all down for small.
Spiders don't send things back.
Professor McBonagle stood up at breakfast with good news and bad news, and she gave it to us in the wrong order.
"The Mandreeks are nearly ready," she said. "Everyone who's been frozen will be unfrozen very soon." The whole hall cheered. "And exams will go ahead as normal." The cheering stopped about halfway through the word exams.
I kept cheering the first part for a while, by myself. I'd been keeping Dustin's candy safe since before Christmas, and some of it was still in the wrappers. And Harmony would be back, and my partner and I could finally have our first meeting.
Then I sat down and did my spring points on the back of my hand. I've lost sixty-nine more since New Year. Mostly Snipe. It's his busy season.
He took ten for the way I was standing, then five more when I stood a different way. He took three for a sneeze, and it wasn't even mine. It was Phil's, but I was nearest. He took fifteen for my spider order book, which I was reading inside my Potions book. He said that was worse than not reading at all.
I didn't add it to the first half yet. I'm saving that for the end of the year, like a present.
Phil made me a revision timetable. It had every hour from now till June on it, color-coded, and he'd written my name on some of the hours in pencil, so I could rub it out.
"You'll need all of it," Phil said.
"I've got a system," I said.
"What's the system?" Phil said.
"I'll tell you after exams," I said. "If it works."
That night I opened my Potions book and studied. Briefly. But I meant it.
They sent everybody back to the common rooms in the middle of the afternoon. At Frogwarts that means something's happened. At the Sudsy Duck it means dryer six is on fire again.
Our common room's right by the kitchens, so it always smells like toast. That afternoon I offered toast to four people, at cost, and not one of them took any.
Bernie MacMullet came in last and climbed onto the good chair by the fire. Bernie's called eleven meetings this year, all from that chair. It's a good chair, and I've offered to rent it.
"There's new writing on the wall," Bernie said. "It says a girl's been taken down into the Chamber." Somebody by the fire asked which girl.
"Minny Measley," Bernie said. "The first-year. Lon's little sister."
The whole room went quiet. I knew her a little, from the train. I'd offered her a Welcome Kit back in September, and she'd said no very politely. Out of all the noes I got this year, hers was the nicest.
The Chamber had been open since Halloween. I'd been to the front office twice, left my card and stood on a seat in a wet stall for ten minutes. And they'd taken a first-year instead.
"They're hiring," I said. "And they didn't even call me."
Phil was on the rug with his knees up, holding his notebook shut with both hands. He'd been holding it like that since Harmony.
"Dale, it isn't a job," Phil said. "She's a first-year, and everybody's scared for her."
"I'm scared too," I said. "I'm scared I filled in the form wrong."
"There's no form," Phil said.
"There's always a form," I said. "That's how they keep a guy like me out."
Bernie said the teachers had sent Professor Lookhart to deal with it. Lookhart had been telling everybody all year that he knew exactly where the Chamber was. He'd just been too busy signing things to go.
That settled it. If anybody could get me an appointment, it was my mentor. He'd signed my forehead, and you don't sign a man's forehead and then not take his calls.
I licked my hand and pressed my hair flat, in case the hair warning was still in effect.
"I'm going to go and ask about the position," I said.
Phil opened his notebook, and then he closed it again. "I understand," Phil said.
On the way out I told the room they could call me Dale of the Chamber now. Nobody did. But I'd said it out loud, and that's how titles start.
Then I went to see my mentor.
When I got to Professor Lookhart's office, his robes were packing themselves. A lilac one flew past my head into a trunk, then a mint one, then one that was mostly sequins.
The pictures on the walls were all of Lookhart, and they were packing too. They climbed down out of their frames into a box, one by one, blowing kisses on the way in.
Lookhart was in the middle of it in a traveling cloak, stuffing books into a bag. They were his books. He was taking about forty copies of each.
"Professor," I said. "I've come about the Chamber."
"Ah, a fan," Lookhart said, without looking up. "Not now, I'm afraid. I've been called away, very urgently and very far."
"Is it a book tour?" I said.
"A tour!" Lookhart said. "Yes, exactly, a long one, somewhere with no owls."
"I'll carry," I said. "I can carry and sell at the same time. I've done a whole train."
"Can you carry quietly?" Lookhart said. I said that was extra. He didn't answer, because there was a knock on the door. When there's a knock and I'm in a room, I hide. It's nearly always Hollis.
There was a wardrobe in the corner, still full of the robes that hadn't gone yet. I got in and pulled the door shut. It smelled like cologne in there. Phil would've been in the hospital wing by now.
Through the keyhole I could see a slice of the room. A pair of round glasses went past, then a red ear, then a lot of Lookhart, explaining.
He explained that he'd never done any of the things in his books. Other people had done them. A lady who kept bees had done the swamp one, and a little old man who mended boots had done the one on the glacier. Lookhart had just turned up afterward, asked them all about it and written it down. Then he'd put his own picture on the front, because nobody buys a book with a boot man on it.
"Do you know how hard it is to find those people?" Lookhart said. "I had to ask all over. I wore out four pairs of boots. Well, three. The boot man fixed one."
I stood there in the robes, and I was moved. I'd never heard anything so beautiful.
That's consulting. You find the people who did the work, and then you do the part people remember. I'd been trying to get that right for two whole years, and Lookhart had done it in hardcover.
The voices got short after that. Through the keyhole I saw Lookhart go past toward the door with his hands up a little. Two second-years were walking behind him with their wands out. The red ear was one of them.
I figured it was team-building. They do that at the top. You put the boss in front and everybody walks him somewhere, so he knows they've got his back.
On his way past the wardrobe, Lookhart turned his head a little and smiled the smile from the magazine.
"Goodbye, Dave," he said.
He'd known I was in there the whole time, and he'd let me hear all of it. A man doesn't do that for a stranger, even one he calls Dave. I counted to twenty and climbed out.
I followed at a professional distance.
I lost them on the second staircase. It swung off sideways while I was on it and put me down outside the Charms classroom. The stairs here always do that when you're following somebody. I think they're on the teachers' side.
So I went to the one place in the castle where I had an appointment pending, which was Mildred's bathroom.
The out-of-order sign was still on the door. Inside, one of the sinks had been pushed aside, and where it used to be, a big dark pipe went straight down into the floor. Cold air came up out of it. It smelled like the bottom of a mop bucket, which is a smell I know professionally.
Mildred was floating over the end stall with her arms folded. She's always there. I think she's on the desk full-time.
"Some people went down it," Mildred said. "They didn't say hello. Nobody ever says hello."
"Hello," I said.
"Too late," Mildred said.
I looked down the pipe. It went a long way. There wasn't a mat or a bell, but the Chamber's very old, and that's how they built lobbies back then.
The trouble was, I didn't have an appointment. You can't just walk into a place like that. You sit in the lobby and you wait until they call your name. If you go in early, they put you back at the bottom of the list, and then you're the guy who went in early.
"Do they call names down there?" I asked Mildred.
"Nobody calls my name," Mildred said. She went into the end stall and slammed the door, and two sinks overflowed. That's how she files things.
I took the stall next to the pipe, so I'd hear them call. I tore off a square of toilet paper and wrote Tummins, D., ten past five, and put it on the edge of the pipe as a sign-in sheet. Then I sat down.
Waiting's half of business. The other half is snacks. I'd brought one of Nana's nap sandwiches from that week's box.
I'd only have one bite, just to keep my strength up.
I was asleep before I'd swallowed.
I woke up to singing, which is a first for me in a bathroom.
It wasn't Mildred. Mildred doesn't sing. She hums sometimes, but only so you'll ask what's wrong. This was a bird, and it was the nicest thing I've ever heard, and I've heard dryer four finish a load.
I was lying on the floor of the stall with my cheek on the wet tiles and the sandwich still in my hand, one bite out of it. I didn't get up. I looked under the door instead.
From the floor of a stall you can see everything in a bathroom, as long as it's shoes.
First there was a tail. It was long and red and gold, and it swept right past my nose across the wet tiles. It smelled warm, like toast. I'd only had one bite of dinner, so I noticed.
Then came shoes. There were muddy shoes, a few pairs, all soaked through and walking slowly. Whoever they were, they'd had a long day, and they'd had it in a puddle.
Then came a sword. I only saw the tip of it, dragging along the floor and scraping on every tile, with a little ring to it. I'd never seen a sword in a girls' bathroom before. I'd hardly seen one anywhere.
Then came a pair of very nice boots. They were polished, with buckles, and they walked along happily, stopping to admire things.
"What a charming bathroom," the boots said. "Is it yours? Who's everybody? Have we met? I feel we've met."
Nobody answered. "I'd remember, I'm sure," the boots said. "I've got a marvelous memory. At least, I think so."
Somewhere over by the sinks a girl was crying, very softly.
"It's all right now," a boy kept telling her. He said it a few times, quietly, and each time he said it, she cried a little less.
I didn't know who any of them were. All I knew was that it wasn't my appointment. Nobody called my name. Somebody stepped right on my sign-in sheet, and it stuck to a shoe and went out the door with them.
"Tummins," I whispered at the door. "With two Ms. For the file."
Then the door swung shut, and the singing went too.
"Typical," Mildred said, from the end stall. "Nobody ever stays."
I lay there a minute. Then something came floating down under the stall door, rocking side to side, and landed on my sandwich.
It was a feather, red and gold and about as long as my arm, and it was still warm. I held it up to the window. I'd put it at four Gallons, easy, five if it came with the bird.
In my line of work, you know a quality feather. I put it inside my robe, next to my heart, where I keep things I'm going to sell.
I'd waited all night, and nobody had called me in. But they'd sent something out.
That's a callback.
I walked back to Snufflepuff the long way that night. The short way goes past Mr. Filtch's office, and I had a feather on me worth four Gallons.
On the landing I had to step aside for a tall pale man with long fair hair and a black cane. He was coming down fast. It was the man from the bookshop, the one who wouldn't give me a free sample.
He had the face of a man who'd just been charged a fee he hadn't seen in the fine print. I know that face. I've put it on people. He went past without a word, and the cane hit every step.
Then I went on down the corridor. It was empty, except for the torches and one small gentleman.
It was the gentleman from the hospital wing, with the large ears and the big round eyes. He was standing in the middle of the corridor, holding something up in both hands.
It was a sock. It was long and gray-green, with a hole in the heel. Somebody had darned that heel so many times that the hole had come back.
He was looking at it like it was the sun.
I knew the style. Larry Spotter had one on under the library table back in the winter. Gray-green was having a big year.
Last time I'd offered this gentleman a sock, he wouldn't take one. Somebody had finally made the sale. You don't get bitter about that. You get in on the second sock.
"Evening, sir," I said. I took out my spare, a short orange one with a duck on it, from Nana's box. "Matched by Tummins. You'll want two. They don't match, but they're matched in spirit."
The gentleman looked at the duck sock. Then he looked at me, and he smiled. It was the biggest smile I've ever seen on anybody, and it went all the way up into his ears.
"Thank you, sir," he said. "But one is all Nobby needs."
Then there was a crack, and he was gone, sock and all.
I stood there in the empty corridor holding the duck.
I've had a lot of customers turn me down. Most of them do it because of the duck. He didn't. He'd already found the one he wanted, and he wasn't shopping around.
That's a man who knows what he likes.
By breakfast the whole Great Hall knew what had happened, and everybody knew it a different way. I got most of it between the toast and the eggs.
Larry Spotter had gone down into the Chamber and beaten a giant snake called the Basilick. When I heard Basilick, I thought basil. I'd figured the Chamber had a kitchen, and I'd been looking forward to lunch.
He'd done it with a sword that came out of the Snorting Hat. I've had that hat on my head, and all I got out of it was a sneeze.
A phoenix named Forks had helped him. I didn't see how a fork could help, but maybe there were a lot of them.
Minny Measley was safe, back in Gruffindoor, eating breakfast with her brothers. That was the best rumor of the morning, and nobody argued with it.
Professor Lookhart couldn't remember his own name. I felt for him. He couldn't remember mine all year.
And the little black diary had belonged to somebody called T. R. Middler, who'd grown up to be You-Know-Who.
"Lord Moldevort?" I said, loud, to show I wasn't scared. The whole table shushed me, and a first-year dropped his spoon in the jam.
Then a Ravenpaw at the next table said the last thing. The Chamber was just pipes and water and the snake, and there was nobody else down there at all.
There were no secretaries.
I set my toast down. I'd had plans. I was going to walk in and take the corner office. There'd be a water cooler, and a rug, and forty secretaries in a row, all stapling at once. It'd sound like the Sudsy Duck on a Saturday. They'd call me Mister Tummins and bring me a biscuit at eleven.
Now I had a feather and a sandwich with one bite out of it.
"I guarded the entrance all night," I told the table. "Somebody had to."
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said. "You came in at two in the morning with a sandwich stuck to your face, and you asked me if anybody'd called your name."
"That's what guarding looks like," I said, "from the outside."
After breakfast I went to the trophy room. The old award was still there, For Special Help to the School, T. R. Middler. Underneath, small, it still said and D. Tummins, where I'd scratched it in with a nail.
I scratched it back off with the same nail. It took most of the morning. You don't want your name next to a guy like that. It confuses the customer.
On the way back I found Tilly in the common room, doing the books. They'd balanced every day since she started. I put that down to good management.
"Tilly," I said, "you're off trial. You've got the job. You're the only secretary in the castle, and I've checked."
Tilly took out a fresh contract, already written out in her neat hand, and the stapler.
"Thank you, Mister Tummins," she said. She stapled it twice, to be sure. "Stapled."
The Mandreeks were ready, and the hospital wing smelled of their juice. It's mostly carrot and a little bit of scream.
Madam Comfrey went down the rows with a jug and a spoon. Everywhere she'd been, somebody was sitting up and complaining.
Mr. Filtch's cat came unstuck in her basket and hissed at everybody, warm and grumpy. A Ravenpaw prefect sat up and asked whether there'd been homework. Two beds down, Colby Cleevey woke up and took a picture of the ceiling, because that's what was in front of him. By the door, Mostly Headless Mick had come unstuck too. He said he'd missed a whole term of people staring at his neck, and he'd never get it back.
I'd come for Dustin. I'd been holding his candy for safekeeping since December, and I wanted to give it back in person.
Dustin sat up. He was pink and warm and very grumpy, and the first thing he said was that he was starving. Then he looked down at his feet. He was still wearing the pair I'd put on him in the winter, my own good pair, right over his school ones. He wiggled his toes in them.
"Whose socks are these?" Dustin said.
"Matched by Tummins," I said. "No charge. They kept you warm all spring."
"Where's my candy?" Dustin said.
I handed him the wrappers. I'd folded every one into a neat little square, the way Tilly taught me. I'd kept the wrappers very safe. Candy's harder to keep safe, especially at night.
"Thanks, Dale," Dustin said. He was too hungry to argue.
Professor Lookhart was in the bed by the window, in a pink robe, waiting to be taken somewhere quieter. He looked very happy and very empty, like a man watching a dryer. He'd been reading the label on his water jug and enjoying it.
He saw the quill behind my ear and sat up.
"Oh, excuse me," he said, very politely. "I hate to be a bother. Might I trouble you for your autograph?"
I'd signed a lot of names this year. I'd signed Larry Spotter about two hundred times, and Silvaroy Lookhart three hundred, and better than he did. Nobody had ever asked me for mine.
I took the quill and signed his water jug label, carefully, so it'd be clear. I wrote Dale Tummins, my real name, in my best hand.
Lookhart held it up to the window.
"Dave," he said, reading it. "What a lovely name."
I'd always thought so.
The end-of-year feast ran so late that everybody came in pajamas. That's a rule here: if dinner goes past midnight, the castle stops pretending.
Professor Flickwit wore a nightcap with a bell on it, and Bumblemore wore slippers with little moons. Snipe wore black pajamas that looked exactly like his robes, so either he'd changed or he hadn't, and nobody was brave enough to ask.
I wore my flannel ones from last year. They still fit, apart from the arms and the legs.
Halfway through the pudding, the doors banged open and Harmony Grainger ran in. She was unfrozen and warm and talking already, and the whole hall stood up and cheered. The Gruffindoor table swallowed her up in one go.
I gave it a minute, and then I went over and stood behind her, very professional, and waited for a gap.
"Harmony," I said, "welcome back. I just want you to know you've been a partner since the spring. You're on the letterhead. Silent partner."
She turned around and looked at me. She'd been frozen for weeks, and this was the first thing anybody had asked her.
"No," Harmony said.
That's nine. But it was her first word back, and she'd been saving it for me. You can't buy that kind of loyalty.
Later on, Haggard came back. The doors banged again, and there he was in his moleskin coat, and the whole hall clapped till the candles shook. He cried into his beard, and Tooth cried into Haggard. I clapped hard. Tooth's a customer, sort of. He ate a free sample.
Then Bumblemore stood up in his moon slippers. "Exams are cancelled," he said, beaming, "as a treat."
Everybody cheered except me, because I'd studied. I'd studied for most of a Tuesday afternoon, and I'd read a whole page of Phil's notes twice. You don't put that kind of time into something and have it cancelled for a treat. I've had treats. A treat's a toffee.
Gruffindoor won the House Cup again, and the banners went red and gold.
"Where did we come?" Phil said.
"A strong one," I said. That's really all you need to know about a place.
Then Colby Cleevey came down the table with his camera. He'd been unfrozen since lunch and he'd already used two rolls.
"Can I take one of you?" Colby said. "For a change." He pointed the camera at me.
I'd been in the back of every picture this year, so I stood very still, right in the middle, and did my best face, which is the one with the eyebrows.
Right as it flashed, Larry Spotter walked into the back of it, in his pajamas, looking for more pudding.
By breakfast everybody wanted a copy. I took eleven orders before it was even developed.
"Is it the one with Larry in the back?" a third-year said. Every one of them asked that. That's me, in front. That's what they're asking for.
Before bed I wrote the final number on the back of my hand. One hundred and forty-two points. Last year it was one hundred and forty-one.
One better than last year. That's called growth.
Mr. Dibbs had a new sign up on the lost-and-found closet that said, Back in two weeks. He was sitting right under it, dusting a lamp.
"Is that for now?" I said.
"It's for September, kid," Mr. Dibbs said. "I mean it every year."
I told him about the Chamber. Not one secretary, just pipes. I'd waited all night in the lobby, and nobody even offered me a magazine.
Mr. Dibbs blew the dust off his lamp. "You hardly ever find what you went looking for, kid," he said. "But you usually find something."
Phil wrote it down and underlined it, and then he put a little box around it, which he's only done twice in his life.
I thought it over. I'd found a feather, a secretary and most of a sandwich. That's not something, that's three things. Mr. Dibbs has always undersold me.
Then I gave him back the socks I hadn't sold. There were a hundred and twelve, and none of them matched, so I'd kept up the standard right to the end. I took out a handling fee of one sock in ten, for handling.
Mr. Dibbs counted them back onto the shelf. He said he'd started the year with four hundred, and somehow he was down to three hundred and eighty-one. "That's handling," I said.
On the way back to the common room, Sir Pomeroy was waiting by the Snufflepuff door. He leaned on his sword and looked down at the number on the back of my hand.
"One hundred and forty-two," Sir Pomeroy said. "Up one. Splendid."
Out the window on the stairs, a tentacle rose out of the lake and swung slowly from side to side.
I waved back. He's never missed a day.
Hollis Brandt was waiting on the castle platform with his notebook open. There was a lot of empty platform around him. People will carry a trunk a long way to stay out of a notebook.
I'd spotted him from the carriage. I could've hidden behind the trunks again, like last year, but I'm a second-year now, and I'd brought a feather.
"Tummins," Hollis said.
"Hollis," I said. Then I looked out past him at the lake for a minute, to set the mood. It was flat and gray, with a goose on it. I waited for the goose to go.
"Lakes are deeper than they look," I told him.
Hollis didn't look at the lake. "Forty Gallons," he said. "I've dropped the interest. Your secretary keeps finding things."
I took out the feather. I'd kept it inside my robe since the bathroom, and it was still a little warm, which I figured meant it was eager.
"Phoenix," I said. "One careful owner. Hardly used."
Hollis took it. He held it up to the light and turned it over, very slowly. He held it so long that two first-years stopped to watch. The tip was glowing a little, but mostly they'd never seen Hollis hold anything that long without writing it down. Neither had I.
Then he wrote it down. He wrote for a while, and then he turned the notebook around and showed me. It said, Feather, one, red. Credit, two Gallons. Balance, thirty-eight Gallons.
"Two?" I said. "It's a phoenix feather. I had it at four. Five with the bird."
"Bring the bird," Hollis said.
He put the feather in his notebook to keep his place. Then he picked up his trunk and got on the train, and everybody went back to walking in a straight line.
I borrowed a napkin from a Ravenpaw and did the math on it. Thirty-eight Gallons, at two Gallons a year, if I can find a phoenix every June. That's nineteen more years, and I'll be thirty-one.
That's young. Lots of people are thirty-one. Nana was thirty-one once, and she's fine. I folded up the napkin and put it in my pocket, for my records.
A free man, nearly.
The train home is the last sales floor of the year, so I worked it front to back with a clearance tray. I'd marked down forty-one Lookhart autographs, because he couldn't remember signing them, which I said made them rarer. I'd also got one Anti-Freeze, lightly used, a duck sock and a stack of order forms for the picture of me with Larry in the back.
Nobody bought much. A first-year took the duck sock, because he said he felt sorry for it. I'll take that money. I checked, and it spends the same as the other kind.
Near the back of the train there was a compartment full of red hair. The red-haired first-year was in the middle of it, laughing at something one of her brothers had said. She didn't have a book in her hands, just a Chocolate Toad. She looked a lot less tired than she'd looked on the way up.
The bushy-haired girl was by the window, reading. She glanced up, saw it was me, and went back to her book very fast. That's how she says hello.
And by the door, with his feet up on his trunk, was Larry Spotter. He looked up.
"Hey, Z," Larry said.
That's twice now. I've started keeping count, in case he loses track.
"Hey," I said, very cool.
I kept walking, at the same speed, and walked face-first into the door at the front of the car. Last year it was the one at the back. You can't do the same door twice. People notice.
I went back to our compartment the long way, through two other cars, so it'd look like I meant to.
Phil was by the window with his notebook, and Tilly was across from him with the company books in her lap, doing the year-end.
So I told them about the year. I'd found the Chamber's front entrance. I'd held the lobby all night by myself, and a phoenix had sent me a feather, personally. Professor Lookhart had picked me to hear his last confession. I'd matched the socks of a whole school, and I'd paid Hollis Brandt with a bird. And Larry Spotter and I were on a Z basis now. It's been two years running.
Tilly wrote all of it down. When I got to the phoenix, she stapled the page to the one before it, so it'd stay.
"Stapled," Tilly said.
Phil had stopped writing a while back. His pencil was behind his ear, which he only does when he's enjoying something.
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said. "Keep going, though."
"I was going to," I said.
Somewhere outside London I wrote to Mr. Feeney. A client deserves a report at the end of the year, and his reward goes up every Thursday.
Phil was asleep against the window. Tilly lent me a sheet of company paper. It still had Harmony on the letterhead as a silent partner, because we hadn't had time to reprint.
"Is the case nearly closed, Mister Tummins?" Tilly said.
"Nearly closed is the worst thing a case can be," I said. "That's when the reward stops."
The letter said, Dear Mr. Feeney, I'm writing with an update on the Case of Your Sock. The case is still open. The investigation has gone international, or anyway to a castle, which is further than it sounds. I can report that long gray-green socks are very popular at school this year. I've seen the style on some very important feet. So wherever yours is, it's in good company. The style was last seen on a small gentleman who looked very happy. Please don't lower the reward. It's what keeps me going.
The signature took longer than the letter.
I tried Dale of the Chamber, but it turned out there wasn't a Chamber, not the kind with chairs. I tried Detective Tummins, but that's for when you've solved something. I tried Dave, but that one was a gift, and you don't use a gift on a letter.
In the end I signed it Z, for now. Larry Spotter's said it twice, so it's basically official, and I want Mr. Feeney to know he's being handled by somebody in the industry.
I folded the letter up and reached into my trunk for my spare sock, to put my feet up.
Lightning was in the toe.
I don't know how long he'd been in there. Since March, maybe, the way he moves. He'd made himself at home, right at the very end, where it's warm.
I put my feet up bare instead. He looked very comfortable.
I didn't charge him.