At a quarter ‘til ten, James met Graham’s eye across the room.
The other boy nodded curtly. Simultaneously, they stood and angled as nonchalantly as they could toward the portrait hole. James scanned the room, making sure no one noticed their departure. Rose was nowhere in sight, fortunately. He was certain that she would have observed the departure of the seventh-years and known something was up, possibly even following them at a distance.
Once through the portrait hole, neither James nor Graham spoke as they trotted lightly through the darkened halls and stairways, making their way to the entrance hall. Ahead and around them, they caught glimpses of other seventh-years flitting in the shadows, passing at intersections, all wending their way variously to the appointment.
Deirdre caught up with Graham and James at the bottom of the main staircase, where the rest of the seventh-years gathered beneath the night-dark chandelier.
“Excited, are we?” Deirdre asked, apparently trying to conceal her own enthusiasm.
James nodded and shrugged. “Could be fun. That is, if there are any real secrets we haven’t already discovered.”
“Even so,” Graham said darkly, “It’s an evening with Filch. I still haven’t gotten over the way he was in our fourth year, back when Grudje was Headmaster.”
James nodded, remembering it well. “You think he’ll ever retire?
Like Flitwick and McGonagall?”
An unexpected female voice answered softly, coming up from behind, “Filch will never retire. It would mean spending the rest of his natural life in his own stinky company.”
James glanced back and his cheeks suddenly heated at the sight of Millie Vandergriff, accompanied by Julian Jackson and a Hufflepuff boy, Patrick McCoy. As they congregated, Millie smiled openly at James in the dimness.
Graham nodded at Millie’s comment. “Yeah, Filch will die here and his body will probably just keep limping around the halls out of pure habit, muttering threats and pointing out gum stains on the floors.”
“How do we know that hasn’t already happened?” Deirdre asked, arching an eyebrow. “I don’t think anyone would be able to tell the difference.”
As if on cue, the echo of Filch’s cane announced the caretaker’s arrival. He ambled crookedly across the entry floor, seeming to avoid the pools of light cast by the wall sconces, until his stern, stubbly features loomed before the gathering, eyeing each face with obvious disapproval.
“Just in case it wasn’t clear,” he enunciated carefully in his gravel voice. “I lead this tour as part of my duties. Not because I believe it is in any way a worthy tradition. Bear that in mind, should you ever be tempted to breath a single, solitary word of what you are about to see to any other students.” He smiled grimly, showing all of his crooked, yellow teeth. “Not that I’d mind one bit revoking your—ahem— privileges.” He glared at the group beadily, meaningfully, and then his smile clicked off like a lamp. Resentfully, he twitched his head toward a side corridor. “This way, then.”
Without looking back, he turned and limped away, his cane clacking hollowly on the stone floor.
As it turned out, James did, in fact, know about most of the school’s secret passages, rooms, and amenities.
Filch began with the newest passage, a stairwell that led to a doorway halfway up the Sylvven Tower, which was (as no one dared to point out) not a place students typically went. James followed along with the rest of the troupe, noticing that Millie Vandergriff sometimes walked right next to him, brushing him with her elbow, and other times drifted to the front of the line, where she whispered and giggled with Julian and the boy, McCoy, whom James remembered from the Hufflepuff Quidditch team, where he played Beater.
He tried to dismiss the sight of Millie and McCoy laughing quietly, their heads together, but the image stuck in his brain, somehow prickly and irritating. Perhaps the bigger boy was also a member of the Hufflepuppet Pals. James doubted it, noting the boy’s huge square hands and dull eyes. Finesse and wit were definitely not McCoy’s strong suit.
And why, James asked himself suddenly, was he spending so much time thinking about this?
Deliberately, he turned his attention back to Ralph, Deirdre, and Graham, who drifted along near him, following Filch’s tour with increasing tedium.
As the trek around the castle ambled on, Filch showed them the tunnel to the Quidditch shed and several connecting passages between classrooms, a moving bookcase in the library that opened onto a hidden reading room, a pair of strangely sumptuous bath and steam rooms on the seventh floor, and finally, oddly, the laundry. There, the house elves watched the tour from a distance, their gazes wary and grim, completely unlike the expressions they wore on the rare occasion that they were seen in the castle proper.
James was becoming tired and bored. “I wonder, could we just slip away without being seen?” he whispered aside to Ralph.
“Fiona Fourcompass and George Muldoon did that ten minutes ago,” Ralph answered behind a raised hand. “I almost joined them then.
But I sort of feel like I have a duty to stay.”
“Ah,” Millie rasped, peering at Ralph around James’ shoulder.
“That’s a Head Boy’s duty, for sure. Also, to tell the rest of us what we missed if we decide to scarper around the next corner.”
Millie grinned aside at James and winked.
“One final stop,” Filch said, his rough voice echoing back from the narrow dungeon walls. “And for this one, we shall need a key.”
Without turning, the caretaker raised his left hand. James glanced up at it in the torchlight. An emerald ring glittered on Filch’s knobbly-knuckled middle finger. James recognized it.
“Looks just like yours, Ralph,” he nudged the big boy. “Your Slytherin ring-key.”
“Makes sense,” Trenton Bloch muttered. “We’re nearly to our common room. I’m going to dodge in and call it a night.”
“He’s wearing it on his left hand, though,” Ralph commented.
“You’re supposed to wear it on your right. House rules. The door won’t unlock otherwise.”
Ahead of them, Filch glanced back over his shoulder, pinning Ralph with one sharp eye. “That’s if you want to get into the Slytherin common room,” he said, lowering his voice to a mean growl. “Why anyone would want to get into there I couldn’t begin to guess.”
A scattering of muted laughter emanated from the crowd as all eyes glanced around at Ralph, Trenton, and the other Slytherin seventh-years. Among them, Nolan Beetlebrick and Fiera Hutchins frowned and narrowed their eyes. Slytherins, James observed, were not typically magnanimous in the face of taunts. None, however, dared to reply to Filch’s unexpected jibe.