“To conclude,” the headmaster went on, lowering his chin to peer intently at the gathered throng. “You will have noticed, perhaps, a few changes in our staff during the summer. Our much respected charms teacher, Professor Filius Flitwick, has finally succumbed to the demands of his muse, choosing to spend the remainder of his years in pursuit of his art and the perfect cup of oolong tea. He shall still grace us with his presence on certain special occasions. In the meantime, however, I trust you will offer a sincere greeting to your new charms teacher, Professor Donofrio Odin-Vann, himself a graduate of these esteemed halls, and a valued new member of our teaching staff.”
Tepid, confused applause washed over the room as heads craned to find the new teacher at the staff table. James was fairly shocked to discover that the new charms teacher appeared to be the young man he had glimpsed earlier that day on the train. He stood tentatively from the end of the table, smiling thinly and lifting one hand in an appreciative wave. He wore short-cropped dark hair and a tidy little pointed goatee that, on almost any other man, would have looked malevolently wicked.
On him, however, it looked merely forced and contrived, rather like the young professor was trying just a bit too hard to cultivate a dashing image. James liked him, despite his obvious youth and discomfort. Or perhaps even because of it.
“And with that, students,” Merlin proclaimed, raising both of his slab-like hands, “The official portion of the start of term festivities are concluded. You may feel free to finish your meals and repair to your dormitories, where I am quite sure—”
A sudden and wholly unexpected thumping sound echoed through the room, emanating from the tall wooden doors at the rear of the hall. Merlin paused, his brow lowering slightly at the interruption.
For a moment, stony silence filled the hall. And then the doors thudded again as someone seemed to knock on them from the outside, the noise amplified by the natural acoustics of the Hall. At the sound, the doors eased open, as if pushed tentatively from the outside.
Filch watched brightly, his gaze alert and careful, stepping aside as the doors began to creak open.
Revealed behind them, eyes wide and worried behind a pair of chunky black eyeglasses, was a middle-aged man dressed in a pink polo shirt and blue jeans beneath a light jacket. His right fist was raised in a knocking gesture. Next to him was a portly woman with a mass of voluminous brown hair and a purse slung protectively over one shoulder.
Two children stood behind her, a boy and a girl, one each peeking from around her prodigious hips.
“I’m sorry,” the man said, his adenoids turning the phrase into a nasally echo around the suddenly silent Hall. “The missus and I… we seem to have gotten just a wee bit lost. We saw the, um, lights of this domicile from below, and the missus, she suggested we pop up and…er… ask directions.”
Every eye in the room stared back in complete, astonished silence. Merlin himself seemed, perhaps for the first time since James had ever met him, utterly at a loss for words.
The spectacled man drew a breath and looked around, clearly trying to make sense of the scene before him, and failing miserably.
“Can any of you,” he asked querulously, clearing his throat against the echo of his own words, “point us properly in the direction of the Lakes of Killarney? Only, we have reservations for seven o’clock, see, and…” His voice finally trailed away as the strangeness of the sight finally overwhelmed him.
Hovering near the end of the Hufflepuff table, Cedric Diggory’s ghost noticed the man’s wife staring at him, her eyes so wide that the whites were visible all the way around. Her fingers trembled at the base of her throat. Her lips quivered in a tiny frown of speechless shock.
“Boo?” Cedric said, raising a hand and waggling his fingers at her.
Ponderously, the woman keeled over backwards in a dead, heavy faint.
“It appears, Mr. Caretaker,” Merlin finally said in a wholly different voice than before, eyeing Mr. Filch where he still stood next to the rear doors. “That we have rather unexpected Muggle guests. Please, let us make sure that they feel perfectly… at home.”
3. – The Midnight Summit
There was no official obliviator on staff at Hogwarts, but Merlin was more than equipped for the task, with his otherworldly powers and his weirdly hypnotic staff, its carven runes glowing with faint blue light.
Students were hastily dismissed and instructed to proceed directly to their common rooms while the headmaster, with the assistance of Professors McGonagall and, curiously, Trelawney, revived the fainted woman and placed the four confused Muggles into a sort of walking trance. They were still alert enough to look vaguely around at the students and living paintings and moving stairways, but when they spoke, it was in dull, dreamy voices. James, along with a knot of wide-eyed students, watched from the landing beneath the Heracles window as Merlin and the professors led the family back to the open main doors.
Beyond them, a small brown car was parked in the darkness of the courtyard, its headlamps still on and its engine puttering dutifully.
“A school, you say,” the Muggle woman said, blinking vapidly up at Merlin.
“Oh yes,” he replied with a comforting smile. “But don’t you concern yourself with that, my dear lady. Soon you and your delightful family will be en route to your destination. We can show you the way.
Quite simple, really. You shall have a wonderful holiday, and you’ll forget you were ever here or met any of us.”
“Who did we meet?” the man asked a little blearily, looking aside at his wife with furrowed brow.
“Oh, that nice older fellow at the petrol station,” she said, with just a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “When we stopped for directions.
He was so helpful, wasn’t he?”
The man nodded as he stepped out into the dark courtyard, accompanied by Professor Trelawney on one side, Professor McGonagall on the other.
The two children, each no older than ten, followed along, eyes wide, absorbing everything in sight. James knew how Merlin’s forgetting spells worked. By the time the family got back onto the main highway, their memories of Hogwarts would have faded to a breath of a dream, completely ephemeral, unrooted from reality. The children would remember it slightly better, since young memories, James knew, are both more firmly rooted and far more detailed. But no one believed kids when they talked of moving staircases, floating candles, or mysterious castle-schools looming out of the untracked Scottish countryside. For once, James was glad of that otherwise unfortunate truth.
“Go on with you, now,” Filch called up the stairs in a hushed growl. “This don’t concern none of you lot. Do as the headmaster said, and be quick about it.” With that, the caretaker hurried on toward the open doors, a paper map folded under one arm and, strangely, a red plastic travel mug clutched in his right hand. The mug steamed faintly and left the aroma of coffee in the cool air of the entrance hall. Props, James knew, conjured to both help the Muggle family find their way to their destination and confirm the planted memory of a helpful petrol station visit.
“What if more Muggles wander up to the castle?” Cameron Creevey asked breathlessly, still watching from the landing alongside James, Rose, and Scorpius. The boy sounded as excited about the prospect as he did worried.