“Good evening, Mistress Millicent and Master Potter,” the chauffer said as Millie approached. His voice was deep but surprisingly melodic. He touched two fingers to the brim of his cap and offered them a stately little smile.
“Hi Balor, happy Christmas!” Millie called up to the giant man, and then surprised James by throwing her arms wide, as if in expectation of a hug. Balor lowered the sign and hunkered to one knee, allowing Millie to throw her arms around him, although not exactly returning the embrace himself. When she disengaged, he straightened again, rising so tall as to blot out the overhead lights, and ran a platter-sized hand over his uniform, straightening nonexistent wrinkles.
With a faint clunk, the boot of the car swung open. Balor deftly collected James’ and Millie’s bags and loaded them into the car, then opened the rear passenger door. Millie clambered inside. More tentatively, James stepped in after her—the interior was so large that he barely had to duck his head—and joined her on a sumptuous burgundy leather sofa that served as the rear seat. Speechless, he looked about, taking in the paneled walnut furnishings, the silver fixtures, the gently curving side seats and thick plush carpeting. A miniature crystal chandelier hung from the gentle dome of the ceiling. There was no ballroom, in fact, but the front of the passenger compartment was divided from the driver’s seat by a polished wooden bar decked with crystal decanters, wine and cordial bottles, and rows of glasses hung upside down in neat racks.
“That’s Balor,” Millie said, fitting her hand into James’ again and giving it a squeeze. “He’s been in the family for, oh, centuries probably.”
“What,” James asked, watching over the bar as the enormous man folded himself behind the driver’s seat, wrapping his black-gloved hands around the ring of the burled wooden steering wheel, “what is he?”
Millie blinked up toward Balor as if she’d never really considered the question. “A cyclops, I think,” she answered with a shrug.
The engine of the car started with a subtle, throttling thrum, almost like a butler clearing his throat.
None of the Muggles looked at the car, and yet they moved aside before it, clearing a channel for the car to travel through. It began to roll with understated grace, the prowl of its engine preceding it like a red carpet. The chandelier barely swung, merely turned its crystal pendants gently, adding prisms to its distinguished glow.
James had ridden in the Knight Bus through this very terminal once. But that ride had been wild, frantic, like dancing with a banshee.
By comparison, this was like riding on the shoulders of a giant black panther as it calmly stalked the jungle.
“But…” James said faintly, “I thought Cyclopses only had one eye?”
Millie shrugged again. “We haven’t read that section in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them yet.”
The car, Millie told James almost off-handedly, was a Rolls Royce Wraith, though admittedly equipped with distinctly magical options. The engine required no petrol, for instance, running instead on liquid Goblinfire, and the hood ornament statue projected its own unplottability field everywhere it went. Even more impressive, James thought, was the car’s ability to bend space around it wherever it rolled, allowing it to fit through small openings, such as one of the revolving door entrances of King’s Cross station. The car didn’t do anything so undignified as shrink itself. Instead, it seemed to press reality aside as if the world itself were made of plastic, or the metal and glass doors were mere curtains, drawn back by hidden cords.
The Wraith merged into the dense holiday traffic, but wasn’t in the least affected by it. Ranks of taxis, cars, lorries, and vans crowded the slushy boulevard at a near standstill, lurching forward one by one like impatient animals at a feeding trough, but the Wraith merely slipped between them, riding the centre line like a rail, bulging the space so that the narrow aisle became a grand, empty thoroughfare. Balor did stop the car at traffic lights, but James noticed that the Rolls was always the first in line, its engine throttling patiently, until the light on the falling feathery flakes switched from red to green, whereupon the vehicle would ease forward again, preceding the traffic all around like a general leading troops on parade.
The drive to Canterbury took some time, and James was reminded once again of how immensely large London really was. They passed through shopping districts crowded with travelers on foot, most loaded with bags and boxes. They skirted industrial areas dominated by brick walls and filthy windows, tall smokestacks and metal garage doors.
Finally, they came to a neighborhood of large homes set far back behind carefully pristine gardens. Trees lined the double boulevard, most decorated with understated white Christmas lights. No cars were parked on the streets here, and the snow was no longer tramped down by endless intersecting vehicle and pedestrian tracks. Instead, the boulevard was striped with two neat black tyre marks, repeated carefully by the few cars that drove here. The Rolls Royce followed the tracks discreetly while James peered from the huge side windows, wondering which of the large, impressive-looking homes might be their destination.
“We’re not there quite yet,” Millie said with a smile in her voice.
James waited, his chest tight with a blend of anticipation and trepidation that was becoming all too familiar. The only other vehicle on the road, he noticed, was another large luxury car, though of much newer vintage, following the Wraith at a respectful distance, its headlights bright as diamonds on jeweler’s velvet.
As they neared the end of the boulevard, James realized that there was something unusual about the houses lining the left side. The spaces between and behind them were seamlessly dark, stretching off into foggy flatness. With a jolt of mild surprise, James realized that the flatness was the sea, mostly frozen over, so that the blue-white edges blended into smooth black over the depths. The rear yards of the homes sloped down to stony beaches, some dominated by the blocky silhouettes of boathouses, all dark and shut tight for the winter.
A line of trees obscured the shore view as the Wraith reached the end of the boulevard, which angled toward the sea and terminated at a neat round cul-de-sac with a curving metal guardrail. Trees lined the rail, crowding directly up to it, blotting out the sea view and the night sky beyond. The streetlamps ended at the last house, leaving the cul-de-sac thick with shadow, like a giant paved period at the end of a formal sentence.
The Wraith stopped in the centre of the period.
“Are we,” James asked, leaning forward on the seat to peer through the windscreen far ahead, “like, here yet?”
Beyond the windscreen, the dark line of trees began to shift.