Harry Potter and the Herbology Experiment
The end of the Christmas holidays were filled, apart from Harry’s nocturnal search for the strange mirror, with schoolwork. Finally realising that they had mere days left to complete their assignments even the Weasley twins had settled down to studying. Harry and Ron, having fewer assignments than the older boys, were freed sooner from the tyranny of homework, but Percy’s workload made him short-tempered and the two first years had to keep quiet.
Ron had looked up Cerberuses in the library and had concluded that keeping one in the school was “not on!” Harry had gone back to Serpent Tongues from Knockturn Alley to see whether there was anything in there about how to guess a snake skin’s magical qualities based on the snake. Nagara should, according to what he’d read about keeping snakes, stop growing so fast now, but Harry had amassed quite a tidy pile of shed skin, and was still at a loss for what to do with it.
***
Hermione came back from the Christmas break looking cheerful. She stood with Ron and Harry watching the other students file through the Entrance Hall waiting for Neville. Finally, after the last student had walked past them, they turned to one another. “We must have missed him.” Hermione said, pragmatically, “come on, he’ll be in the tower.”
But Neville wasn’t in the tower. Nor was he in the hospital wing. Nor was he at dinner. Hermione jumped up as soon as she finished her bowl of trifle. “I’m going to ask Professor McGonagall about Neville,” she told Harry and Ron, whose mouths were still full. They watched her.
When she returned to them, she said, “Neville had an accident at home yesterday. He’s alright, but the healers haven’t cleared him to travel yet. Professor McGonagall says he’ll be back soon, though.” Harry wondered what kind of accident Neville could have got into that a healer couldn’t immediately fix. Madam Pomfrey never kept him more than overnight. However, Hermione began telling them about her holiday skiing, which amused Ron no end, so it wasn’t until they got into bed that Harry was again confronted by the absence of Neville and Trevor.
***
The following day, during break, they told Hermione about their encounter with the three headed dog on the third floor. She was shocked that something so dangerous was locked up in school with them but didn’t have a chance to get much past that when the bell rang. Consequently, it was only after dinner when Harry, who had been thinking about it, brought up the Cerberus again.
“I’m sure I read somewhere that Cerberus means Spot. It made me laugh to think that the great and terrible Hades had a dog called Spot.” Hermione said, utterly derailing Harry’s chain of thought.
“What are the chances this one is too?”
“Well, what would you name a three headed dog?”
“I think ‘aaarrgh!’ pretty much sums it up,” said Ron, with his usual bluntness
“I dunno, I can see someone calling it ‘Spot’ or ‘Mr Snuggles’ in jest.”
“Yeah! Hagrid’s got a normal dog called Fang who’s a real old softie. Maybe he’s got a three headed dog called… I dunno, Snuffles,” Harry suggested.
“Do you think it does belong to Hagrid?” Hermione wondered aloud
“Who else around here would own a three headed dog?” Ron asked, rhetorically, shutting down opposition to the theory.
“Why’s it there?”
“What?”
“Well, if it’s Hagrid’s dog, why isn’t it out by his cabin?”
“Because it might eat someone, Hermione!”
“But won’t it be more comfortable tethered outside than stuck inside a school?”
“Are you sure you’d call it Mr. Snuggles as a joke?”
“Really, Ronald. I’m not saying it would be nice. I looked up Cerberi in the library and they’re a category 5X creature. There shouldn’t be any around a school, but if there has to be one, shouldn’t it be outside?”
“Well, it either belongs to Hagrid or Professor Kettleburn. Why don’t we just ask them?” Harry tried to interject into the argument, and to bring the conversation back around to what he wanted to say.
“What,” asked Ron, “‘Hi Hagrid, have you got a giant three headed dog up on the third floor’?”
“How do you know about Fluffy?” They turned in shock to look at Hagrid’s worried face.
“We just- found out.” Ron babbled.
“It was an accident, Hagrid, we just went through the wrong door.”
“Yeh shouldn’a been there. Just forget yeh saw ‘im.”
“Is he alright up there?” Harry asked his friend, “Hermione thought he might need to be outside.”
“Nah. I go up and have a bit of a play with ‘im ev’ry day. ‘e’s still on’y a puppy really. I on’y got ‘im last year. ‘e were tiny then, o’course.”
“Well, we wouldn’t want him to get hurt would we?” Ron asked, snorting. Harry elbowed him, but Hagrid didn’t seem to have noticed Ron’s tone.
“’s’good of yeh to think of ‘im like that, Ron. There’s not many think like that. But don’t yeh worry about ‘im. I can play with ‘im alright, but I reckon ‘e’d be a bit much for yeh. I know I gave yeh the flute ‘Arry, but I didn’t mean yeh to use it on ‘im, got it?”
“Of course, Hagrid,” said Harry, trying to look innocent.
“What’ll happen to… Fluffy… when he grows up, Hagrid? He’s going to need a bit more than play soon, isn’t he?” Hermione asked, looking nervous.
“Oh, once the school years over Dumbledore’ll move the- uh- Dumbledore’ll help me build a kennel for ‘im.”
“Oh, that’s great!” Ron’s sarcasm had become, if possible, even thicker. Hagrid accompanied them to the library and shuffled off to look up something about unicorns in the Restricted section. Harry, Ron and Hermione settled down, with resignation, to their first homework of the new term.
***
Neville returned to the school in time for class on Friday morning. He didn’t talk about what had happened, but he did mention a venomous tentacula, which Harry gathered was a type of plant, and mooncalves, which, by the impression Neville gave, were a cross between mushrooms and rabbits.
Hermione was focussed on catching Neville up with the classwork he had missed, and the normal pairings were thereby disrupted in Potions. Harry found Ron an indifferent partner, used to letting Hermione do all the work and keep up a barrage of commentary about the rest of the class. Harry was quite happy to work alone, but Ron was half with him, and half busy escalating tensions between himself and Malfoy.
Malfoy was delighted to have fresh fodder for his insults. The previous day had been Harry’s first flying lesson since the disastrous first class. He had made a point of leaving Nagara behind and found that he had become accustomed to her weight. As a result, as he handled his broom instinctively, he had overcompensated for his smaller mass, spinning out of the neat line of the other flyers.
Harry was content to ignore Malfoy, and to focus on his potion, but Ron, never one to let an insult slide, only got more incensed as class continued, eventually burst out with “yeah, and you were so good your second time on a broom, were you Malfoy? No, I bet Daddy was still holding your hand!” This caused Malfoy’s cheeks to go pink and Professor Snape to take five points from Gryffindor for not paying attention to class topics.
Harry spent the afternoon trying both to cheer Ron up and calm him down. This proved to be difficult, and they eventually went outside for a snowball fight, over Hermione’s warning that they still had homework.
***
What with one thing and another it wasn’t until Neville and Harry had gone to their dorm room early that they had the chance to talk.
“Neville, I was looking in the library, and you said your gran called Aconite Cerberus’s Venom, right?”
“Yes, but it’s an old name. There’s a story that, wherever the original Cerberus’s venom fell, Aconite grew.”
“What about modern cerberuses?”
“I don’t know. They’re really rare, so I suppose not.”
“So, hypothetically, if we got some slobber from a cerberus, and planted some aconite seeds in it…?”
There was a noticeable pause as Neville’s mouth seemed to run through several replies. He finally settled on: “How would you even get cerberus venom?”
“Hagrid has one.”
Neville opened his mouth, closed it, breathed out heavily and then said, “why am I surprised?”
“So, what do you think?”
“I think- I think we need to go to bed.” Harry made a disgruntled noise, but changed into his pyjamas, and snuggled down with Nagara beneath the covers.
The conversation was continued the following day in the hallway outside the transfiguration classrooms, where Neville, Harry, and Ron were waiting for Hermione to finish talking to Professor McGonagall.
“So, Nev, how about it? Aconite in cerberus slobber?”
“Not again, Harry!” protested Ron, having heard Harry’s proposal a few days previous.
“Well, it could work, I suppose. If you add the… slobber,” Neville made a face at the word, “to the potting soil. I don’t know that it would have any effect, though. I’m sure someone would have mentioned if it did.”
“But if we got some, could you ask Professor Sprout for some seeds?”
“It’s not the seeds that are the problem, you can get those anywhere. I think I’ve got some at home. It’s the pots, and soil and the space. Harry, I don’t think she’d approve.”
“Space? What’s space got to do with it?”
“To grow things in, Harry. You weren’t planning to do this in the dorms were you?”
“Why not?”
Neville only shook his head. Harry didn’t see what the problem was. He wanted to grow some flowers, not raise a- well, actually he did want to raise a deadly monster in the dorms, but that was beside the point. How much harm could- actually, flowers could do a lot of harm, but these were definitely muggle flowers. They were not going to sprout legs and eat people.
“Do what in the dormitories, Mr. Potter?” The glacial voice made them turn. How, Harry thought, did Professor Snape move so quietly? And why was he always showing up?
“---” Neville opened his mouth, and a gurgling came out. Professor Snape ignored him, focussing all of his cold, black stare on Harry. Pink elephants! Pink elephants on parade!
“We were talking about growing aconite, Professor.”
“In your dormitories?”
“Yes, Professor,” Harry felt the cold sensation in his stomach that was starting to associate with conversations with the Professor. Conversations which, it seemed, involved a careful blending of truth and lie to create a socially acceptable fiction. “I was talking to Hagrid about his pet cerberus, you see, and I know that cerberus slo- spit has been associated with aconite, so I was wondering whether it would be possible that planting aconite seeds in cerberus spit would make them grow faster, or something.”
“Mr. Potter, experimentation is permitted at Hogwarts only under extremely rigorous criteria. Growing poisonous plants in venomous liquid in a public location does not meet these criteria. I suggest you ask Professor Sprout whether such an experiment has been done before and leave the matter there.” So saying, he strode past them and knocked loudly on Professor McGonagall’s door.
By the time Hermione re-joined the group Neville had worked up the courage to whisper “told you” to Harry. Harry was feeling angry at Snape’s obvious dismissal of what was, to him, a perfectly sound idea. He was also annoyed at the chorus of elephants in his head again.
After dinner Neville, tired of Harry’s grumbling, took him to see Professor Sprout. She was overseeing a detention, however, and the two boys could only make their slow way back up the stairs to Gryffindor tower. Halfway there Harry changed his mind, and went to the owlery where Suku was happy to see him before he went hunting for the night. Nagara sat coiled on a windowsill and snapped at food the other owls brought in.
Harry drew comfort from his little family. The turret room reminded him a little of his room at the Leaky Cauldron. Experimentation might not be allowed at Hogwarts, Harry thought grimly, but it was in Diagon Alley. If he couldn’t grow aconite here, he’d just have to wait for summer.
***
A week after this, in the middle of January, Neville’s grandmother sent him, at his request, a packet of flower seeds, which he took to Professor Sprout to ask whether he could have space to grow them. Harry tagged along trying to pick up hints on buttering up Herbology Professors. He needn’t have worried.
Professor Sprout took the boys to a twisted structure of steel and glass which had, she told them, been Greenhouse 6 until the summer. Here she did her own experimental growing, but after a particularly nasty incident with a dirigible plum in late August, she had abandoned the site for the time being. The remains of the building had been cleared of greenery and stabilised to prevent students coming to harm. The atmospheric charms also still held, making a cube of warmer air in the freezing Scottish winter.
Neville burbled his thanks to Professor Sprout until she was pink. She said that “someone’s coming soon to help me get the rest of the place fixed up. I’m no great shakes at anchoring these things, you know. But feel free to use some space. Its not like its being used for anything else and I hate to see anything wasted!”
Neville looked at Harry after she had left. “Seeds, soil, space…slobber?”
“You did this for me?”
“Sort of. I do like growing things. I miss it, when I’m here. So, I was looking for a way to grow something, and then you popped up with that idea. Shall we ask Hagrid about getting the venom?”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” Harry replied absently, marvelling at his friend. Neville had agreed to his idea! Even though he clearly thought Harry was bonkers, he had agreed to the idea simply because he missed growing his own plants. “You could just have asked Professor Sprout if she wanted a helper,” he felt obliged to point out.
“I do that anyway. When Hermione’s fussing in the library. There’s not much to do this time of year, so it’s not really noticeable. But there’s enough to make me happy.”
“And Professor Sprout?”
“I think she likes the company. Sometimes she teaches me new things while we’re down here.”
“And you don’t mind me messing around?”
“No. I asked, and she said she hadn’t heard of anyone trying this. Mind you, she did say, ‘no one looks at a blessed Cerberus and thinks of flowers’. Except apparently you, Harry.”
***
True to his word Harry donned his Invisibility cloak the next morning after breakfast, crept out of the tower, down the many flights of stairs, and into the forbidden third floor corridor. He had prepared carefully the night before. Dragonhide gloves (cerberus saliva wasn’t a potent venom, but it could cause a nasty rash), several glass bottles collected from the tower (including an ink pot, a potion phial, and what looked like a coca-cola bottle), the flute Hagrid had given Harry for Christmas (Harry wasn’t sure what this was for, but Hagrid had mentioned it, so he brought it with him), and, the inspiration had struck last night at dinner, some ham.
Harry hadn’t been able to find anything in his limited reading to suggest that cerberuses (Hermione insisted that the plural was cerberi, but that confused Harry) were like runespoors with each head responsible for a different aspect of the overall creature, but he would be the first to admit he hadn’t looked in too much detail. Nevertheless, he felt that ham might make enough of a distraction for two of the heads for him to get to the third.
Most important of all, however, was the date. Today was the day of the Gryffindor-Hufflepuff Quidditch match. While not the grudge match that Gryffindor-Slytherin had been, it was enough to get almost all the students and teachers outside. Harry hoped that Gryffindor’s seeker would use the same tactic to delay his opponent from catching the snitch again. Harry had tried to interest Hermione in coming with him, in case he needed an extra pair of hands. She had shot down the suggestion firmly. She might not be interested in going to the match, but she had no intention of getting herself mauled to death in the name of experimental botany, she said.
So, alone and invisible, Harry eased open the forbidden door. To his surprise he was met, not with growling, but with the sound of a harp playing beautifully. The sound was captivating, and Harry stood with the door cracked open listening. After a minute of this he poked his head in, keen to see who was playing. A harp stood alone, gently playing itself, some distance from the enormous paws of the sleeping cerberus.
Harry wasn’t about to complain. He laid his paraphernalia on the ground, donned the gloves, and carefully approached the left-most head. The dog’s mouth, once open, elicited far more saliva than Harry could store, but he took as much as he could hold in the ink bottle. The central head, with some of the ham placed on the tongue, provided a puddle of goo which Harry, with some difficulty, scooped into the potion phial. As Harry stood to fetch the coke bottle, he felt the animal stir. The harp had stopped playing, he realised. Perhaps the two were connected.
Very gently he brought Hagrid’s flute up, and blew into it. He wasn’t attempting a tune, but the cerberus heads snuffled into sleep at the sound. Harry kept playing until he was kneeling by the right-most head, and, holding the flute in his teeth, began to force the heavy jaws apart for the third time. He had to let go to play the strange hooting flute several times before he finally got the mouth to stay open. There was a painful pull-ring in the floor under Harry’s knee, and constantly having to stop to play the flute was additionally annoying, but he had got this far, and he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to finish.
By the time Harry left Fluffy’s corridor he ached. One knee was agony from the handle of what he thought must be a trapdoor in the floor. His back hurt from being bent at an unusual angle over the dog’s mouth. His teeth hurt both from the effort of gripping Hagrid’s little flute, but also because he’d managed to hit himself while scrambling out the door as fast as possible. His arms ached with the effort of moving the jaws of three heads each larger than his torso. And his hands, encased in their protective gloves, felt sweaty and swollen. As excited as he was to begin experimenting with aconite, what he wanted more than anything was a long, hot shower.