A loud, clanging bell sounded from downstairs, followed at once by the cacophony of screams and wails that had been triggered the previous night by Tonks knocking over the umbrella stand.
“I keep telling them not to ring the doorbell!” said Sirius exasperatedly, hurrying back out of the room. They heard him thundering down the stairs as Mrs. Black’s screeches echoed up through the house once more: “Stains of dishonor, filthy half-breeds, blood traitors, children of filth . . .”
“Close the door, please, Harry,” said Mrs. Weasley.
Harry took as much time as he dared to close the drawing room door; he wanted to listen to what was going on downstairs. Sirius had obviously managed to shut the curtains over his mother’s portrait because she had stopped screaming. He heard Sirius walking down the hall, then the clattering of the chain on the front door, and then a deep voice he recognized as Kingsley Shacklebolt’s saying, “Hestia’s just relieved me, so she’s got Moody’s cloak now, thought I’d leave a report for Dumbledore . . .”
Feeling Mrs. Weasley’s eyes on the back of his head, Harry regretfully closed the drawing room door and rejoined the doxy party.
Mrs. Weasley was bending over to check the page on doxies in Gilderoy Lockhart’s Guide to Household Pests, which was lying open on the sofa.
“Right, you lot, you need to be careful, because doxies bite and their teeth are poisonous. I’ve got a bottle of antidote here, but I’d rather nobody needed it.”
She straightened up, positioned herself squarely in front of the curtains, and beckoned them all forward.
“When I say the word, start spraying immediately,” she said. “They’ll come flying out at us, I expect, but it says on the sprays one good squirt will paralyze them. When they’re immobilized, just throw them in this bucket.”
She stepped carefully out of their line of fire and raised her own spray. “All right — squirt!”
Harry had been spraying only a few seconds when a fully grown doxy came soaring out of a fold in the material, shiny beetlelike wings whirring, tiny needle-sharp teeth bared, its fairylike body covered with thick black hair and its four tiny fists clenched with fury. Harry caught it full in the face with a blast of Doxycide; it froze in midair and fell, with a surprisingly loud thunk, onto the worn carpet below. Harry picked it up and threw it in the bucket.
“Fred, what are you doing?” said Mrs. Weasley sharply. “Spray that at once and throw it away!”
Harry looked around. Fred was holding a struggling doxy between his forefinger and thumb.
“Right-o,” Fred said brightly, spraying the doxy quickly in the face so that it fainted, but the moment Mrs. Weasley’s back was turned he pocketed it with a wink.
“We want to experiment with doxy venom for our Skiving Snackboxes,” George told Harry under his breath.
Deftly spraying two doxies at once as they soared straight for his nose, Harry moved closer to George and muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “What are Skiving Snackboxes?”
“Range of sweets to make you ill,” George whispered, keeping a wary eye on Mrs. Weasley’s back. “Not seriously ill, mind, just ill enough to get you out of a class when you feel like it. Fred and I have been developing them this summer. They’re double-ended, color-coded chews. If you eat the orange half of the Puking Pastilles, you throw up. Moment you’ve been rushed out of the lesson for the hospital wing, you swallow the purple half —”
“‘— which restores you to full fitness, enabling you to pursue the leisure activity of your own choice during an hour that would otherwise have been devoted to unprofitable boredom.’ That’s what we’re putting in the adverts, anyway,” whispered Fred, who had edged over out of Mrs. Weasley’s line of vision and was now sweeping a few stray doxies from the floor and adding them to his pocket. “But they still need a bit of work. At the moment our testers are having a bit of trouble stopping puking long enough to swallow the purple end.”
“Testers?”
“Us,” said Fred. “We take it in turns. George did the Fainting Fancies — we both tried the Nosebleed Nougat —”
“Mum thought we’d been dueling,” said George.
“Joke shop still on, then?” Harry muttered, pretending to be adjusting the nozzle on his spray.
“Well, we haven’t had a chance to get premises yet,” said Fred, dropping his voice even lower as Mrs. Weasley mopped her brow with her scarf before returning to the attack, “so we’re running it as a mail-order service at the moment. We put advertisements in the Daily Prophet last week.”
“All thanks to you, mate,” said George. “But don’t worry . . . Mum hasn’t got a clue. She won’t read the Daily Prophet anymore, ’cause of it telling lies about you and Dumbledore.”
Harry grinned. He had forced the Weasley twins to take the thousand-Galleon prize money he had won in the Triwizard Tournament to help them realize their ambition to open a joke shop, but he was still glad to know that his part in furthering their plans was unknown to Mrs. Weasley, who did not think that running a joke shop was a suitable career for two of her sons.
The de-doxying of the curtains took most of the morning. It was past midday when Mrs. Weasley finally removed her protective scarf, sank into a sagging armchair, and sprang up again with a cry of disgust, having sat on the bag of dead rats. The curtains were no longer buzzing; they hung limp and damp from the intensive spraying; unconscious doxies lay crammed in the bucket at the foot of them beside a bowl of their black eggs, at which Crookshanks was now sniffing and Fred and George were shooting covetous looks.
“I think we’ll tackle those after lunch.”