Harry Potter and the Monster of Gryffindor

The scream woke the Gryffindor boys when the moon was still up. It came, when Harry had found his glasses and oriented himself, from Neville. The boy was standing by Trevor’s terrarium holding the toad in both hands. Trevor himself was unnaturally still. “Trevor’s dead,” was all he said, into the silent dimness of the dormitory. “Trevor’s dead.”

Harry moved to his friend to offer comfort, and, maybe, prove him wrong. Trevor had been fine last evening.

Seamus looked up at Harry’s movement, and his eyes focussed with such malice on his friend’s face that Harry was stopped. “It was your snake that did this! We all know basilisks are dangerous, and we only have your word that it’s not. Well, here’s proof that it is!”

“No,” Harry was surprised at how weak his voice sounded against the shouted accusations. “No…” He looked desperately for Nagara, to force the snake to tell him whether it had really killed Neville’s beloved toad.

“Harry, I think it was.” Neville stated flatly. “I had to remove Nagara before I could get to Trevor.”

Harry felt himself go cold. He’d tried so hard to tell Nagara that the other boys’ pets weren’t food. Had the snake disobeyed him? He took a stunned step back and felt himself overbalance onto his bed. One hand flew out to catch himself, and contacted the soft scales of the very creature he sought.

“Nagara,” he croaked, “is it true? Did you kill Trevor?”

“Nagara does not kill pets. Nagara does not like to kill by bite. Biting is cold”

“What happened to Trevor?”

“Stop encouraging it!” Dean shrieked.

Seamus began to stride to Harry’s bed. Harry hurriedly put the snake behind his back.

“I’m asking her what happened!” he shouted back. “She says she didn’t kill him, now let me talk to her.” The other boys stopped moving, but the range of emotions he saw on their faces said that the explanation had better be good. He took another look at Neville’s hurt sense of betrayal and brought Nagara back up to his face to talk to. He looked Nagara straight in the eyes and asked. 

“What happened to Trevor?”

“Toad on his rock in the warmth. Nagara wants water. Nagara goes to fetch water. Nagara looks at toad. Toad is still. Then Toad’s-Boy starts shouting and Harry is being hurt.”

“You looked at Trevor and he went still?”

“Yes.”

“I’m looking at you now.”

“Yes. Nagara doesn’t like when Harry looks at Nagara’s eyes. Nagara’s eyes begin to burn. But Harry is bigger than Toad. Harry is tougher than Toad.”

“Harry!” Ron’s voice jerked Harry’s eyes away from Nagara’s yellow ones. Ron was pointing, apparently, to Nagara. Harry was about to tell the other boys what she had said when Ron exclaimed, “your fingers!”

Harry looked at his fingers. The tips down to the second knuckle had gone grey. He touched them together and they sounded like stone. More worrying, to Harry at least, was that he couldn’t feel the contact, only hear it. “Oh,” he breathed in understanding. The sorting hat had said that the basilisk became more dangerous with age. Here was proof. Harry couldn’t wait to put this in his notes. Less than six months, and Nagara was starting to kill things with her eyes. Which posed a problem because it meant she had almost certainly killed Trevor.

“Harry goes cold,” Nagara complained, twining around his stiff fingers.

For the first time Harry ignored her. He looked directly at Neville. “If she has killed Trevor, I will take full responsibility. I think she didn’t know that she might hurt him. That’s what she seems to be saying. Let’s wait until morning, then go to Professor McGonagall before breakfast.”

“He’s got a point,” said Dean, moving back to his own bed, “no offense mate, but Trevor’s not going to get any deader for a couple of hours kip. And you never know. I’ve heard of toads that come back to life.”

“I swear, Neville, I never meant any harm to you, or to Trevor,” Harry’s voice was barely above a whisper.

Seamus was unconvinced, “what if it kills us all in our sleep?”

“She won’t,” Harry protested.

“I don’t trust that thing. I never did. Neville’s your best pal, and now look what’s happened. I want that thing locked up before I sleep in the same room as it.”

“Harry, why don’t you explain to her that she has to stay in your trunk. We can lock it behind her, and keep her in. It’ll be warm enough.” It was Ron’s suggestion. Harry, Nagara, and Seamus eventually all agreed. Nagara was annoyed that her heat lamp wouldn’t fit while switched on, but Harry mollified her by giving her his cloak to snuggle into. Ron had to help Harry with the cloak and with locking the trunk. Fingers that had turned to stone were not very useful, it turned out. Harry hoped that Madam Pomfrey would have a solution in the morning.

Peace was restored in the dormitory and the boys got another few hours of sleep. They were disturbed next by the alarm on Dean’s bedside table. Harry had only dim recollections of the night’s confrontation. Neville, however, immediately checked on Trevor, reminding Harry of what had happened. The toad was not where Neville had left him. After some frantic calling and searching on Neville’s part, and an insistence from Seamus that Harry check on Nagara, the toad crawled out from under a hollow log Neville had placed in his terrarium.

Harry lifted Nagara out of his trunk, stroking her beautiful emerald scales. His fingers, he noticed, were once again pink and healthy all the way to the tips. If he surreptitiously checked each one to make sure he could still feel with them no-one needed to know.

“He’s alive,” said Ron, rather stupidly.

“He’s alive!” Neville breathed, joyfully.

“He’s alive?” Seamus asked, incredulously.

“I can feel my fingers,” Harry commented, to break the repetition.

“So, it was your snake?” Seamus asked.

“I think so, but it seems to wear off. And it’s not death, its paralysisiss. S” Harry tailed off, not quite sure how many esses were in paralysis.

“So, it does need to go,” Seamus insisted.

“I dunno,” Dean put in, laying a placating hand on his friend’s arm. “It’s only if you look into her eyes, isn’t it? Like you did last night. And like Trevor must have done. So as long as we avoid her eyes it’s OK.”

“That’s not what I call OK!”

“Well, look at it this way,” Ron interjected, before Seamus could start shouting, “Nagara isn’t going to kill anyone right now, yeah? And, like Dean says, we can just avoid looking at her eyes. So, let’s calm down. Harry can look up ways to make her eyes safe to be around, and if we can’t find anything then we’ll fess up to McGonagall, OK?”

“How long will you look before you do? Cause I say one week and if you can’t make that creature safe then I’ll tell on both of you.”

“One week, to come up with a solution,” Harry capitulated. He had a few ideas, including simply blindfolding Nagara. He was pretty sure the snake hunted mostly by smell.

“Right,” Seamus grunted, turning his back on them to start pulling off his pyjamas.

Harry looked across at Neville, who was holding Trevor as though the toad might break. Neville looked up and grinned sheepishly at his friend. “I should’ve known she wouldn’t deliberately harm Trevor.” The words seemed to carry a great deal more in them than Harry could simply hear, and it occurred to him that, in their own way, humans did use more than words to communicate.

***

It was later that day, as they headed to the library to start a particularly knotty essay for Professor Snape on the effect of fluxweed, that Neville whispered to Harry. “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t tell Nagara to hurt Trevor. It’s just- nevermind.”

“No, Nev. I get it. You were angry and it was me or her.”

“You probably think I’m silly for being upset over a toad. I know Seamus does.”

“Seamus doesn’t have a pet. He doesn’t know what it’s like. I don’t care if it’s a toad, or an owl, or a talking baboon.”

“Thanks Harry.”

“I’m sorry she scared you.”

“That’s OK. If- you said she didn’t mean to do it?”

“She didn’t. It’s a new thing.”

“That’s OK. It’d be pretty cool to have a pet that did stuff like that. Trevor’s a bit- you know?”

“Damp?” Harry suggested, unable to stop himself.

“Yeah.” Neville smiled. “Did I tell you my great-uncle gave him to me?”

“Did he?” Harry had the strange impression Neville wanted to say something he felt was important. He stopped outside the library door and pulled Neville into an alcove by a suit of armour.

“Yeah. See- the family- see- I didn’t do accidental magic. All magical kids do it, but I didn’t. So, the family thought I must be a squib. Great-Uncle Algie kept trying to force some out of me. I nearly drowned once, if Gran hadn’t been there and pulled me out. Then, when I was eight, I told you about the time I bounced in the garden?”

“When your uncle dropped you out the window?”

“Yeah. After that, he thought I should be able to do more stuff, but I still didn’t. He locked me in the greenhouse with a venomous tentacula. It’s such a sweet little thing. No one had been looking after it. It was pretty pleased to get some attention. Anyway. I just did that one thing, you know. So, the family thought maybe it was a fluke. And then I got my Hogwarts letter. And they knew I wasn’t a squib because I got my letter. Uncle Algie was really pleased, and he bought Trevor for me.”

Harry was stunned. He knew that ‘Uncle Algie’ was a bit of a nightmare in Neville’s life, like his own Uncle Vernon. But he’d never imagined that the man had tried, multiple times, to kill Neville. “He could have killed you. A toad is the least he could give you.”

“It’s not that bad. I survived,” Neville protested, “anyway, lots of magical families try to scare their kids into their first magic. It’s- well- they say it’s easier after the first time.”

“Nev, there’s scaring someone, and there’s nearly killing someone.”

“It’s OK, Harry, it really is.” Neville bit a chubby lip and looked worried. He whispered, “sometimes I think I’m more scared of magic than of dying. But that’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid Nev. I did some pretty whacky things with magic as a kid. My uncle would agree with you.” Harry started to laugh as a thought struck him. “Your uncle punished you for not doing magic, and mine punished me for doing it. We’re a pair, Nev, we really are.”

“Really?”

“Yup. You should have heard the shouting when I turned my teacher’s hair blue. I’m surprised you didn’t, it was that loud. And I thought his head would explode when I accidentally set a boa constrictor on my cousin.” Harry gesticulated wildly and led the way out of their alcove. Neville laughed behind him but quietened quickly as they entered the sacred silence of the library, narrowly avoiding Professor Snape himself, as he had a murmured conversation at the librarian’s desk.

“How does he get up here so quickly?” Neville asked, agog. “We left the classroom before him, and he’s still here before us.”

“It’s like magic,” Harry said, grinning. Neville fetched books on fluxweed while Harry wandered the shelves looking for information on magical death stares and how to avoid them.

***

Harry hadn’t quite forgotten this conversation with Neville a week later. Seamus’s deadline was looming and the best they had come up with was Ron’s suggestion of wrapping Nagara in the invisibility cloak “after all, you can’t make eye contact with something you can’t see”. Hermione had looked up invisibility spells, but they were too complex even for her. “We could ask one of my brothers?” Ron had suggested, hopelessly. Neville had pointed out that wouldn’t exactly be keeping the secret.

In spite of the looming dread of having to tell his Head of House about Nagara Harry was comforted by her weight on his shoulders when Professor McGonagall called himself, Hermione and Neville to remain behind after Transfiguration on Tuesday. The three exchanged glances. Bafflement and a tinge of guilt showed in each pair of eyes.

Professor McGonagall handed Hermione a note for Professor Sinistra to excuse Harry and Neville from Astronomy and took the boys to her office. This did not comfort either of them. She made tea and gave them both a cup, and a ginger newt. Harry was disturbed to see that the newt looked content to curl around the warm cup like a salamander. It rather put him off eating it. He let it curl up and sipped tea politely, too busy trying to calm Neville to worry about what the Professor might be about to say.

“Mr Longbottom,” she began, in a serious voice that lacked its usual sharpness, “this is likely to be a very difficult conversation. If you want Mr. Potter to leave at any time, you may say. I have invited him because I think it might be easier for you to have someone here you can rely on. Alright?” she waited for Neville to give her a wide-eyed nod before turning to Harry. “Mr. Potter, what is discussed here is completely confidential. That is to say that you may not discuss it except with Mr. Longbottom or myself. Do you understand? No matter how much or how little you hear, you will not discuss this.” Harry nodded. He could keep secrets. He was nervous about Neville, but keeping a secret wasn’t hard.

“It has come to my attention that things are not- not as they should be at home, Mr. Longbottom.”

Neville looked about to bolt, vomit, or both.

“Please relax. Your family- that is, Augusta, Algernon and Enid are all in perfect health. Your parents are… no worse. This is a separate matter.” Some of the tension eased out of Neville’s shoulders at her reassurance, and Harry spared the teacher a glance before focussing back on his friend.

“I have heard that your great uncle, Algernon, has been hazing you? That is, trying to force accidental or childhood magic,” she explained when Harry shot her a quizzical look.

“Yes, Professor,” Neville’s voice was a squeak.

“Did Aug- did your grandmother give him permission to do this? Do you know?”

Neville shook his head, looking into his lap. “I don’t know Professor. She was pretty angry that time in Blackpool. But so was Uncle Algie.”

“How many times has your uncle endangered your life?”

“I don’t know, really. Four or five, I s’pose,” Neville shrugged.

“Did your grandmother or aunt participate?”

“Professor?”

“Did they help your uncle when he hazed you?”

“No… I don’t- not really…”

“Not really?”

“Well, sometimes Auntie Enid was there. Like when she offered Uncle Algie a meringue, so he dropped me, and the time she called him to the floo right after he shut the greenhouse door.”

“I see.” Professor McGonagall’s lips had gone very thin, Harry noticed when he next looked at her. She took a deep breath and flexed her fingers. “Mr. Longbottom, are you aware that hazing was outlawed twenty-seven years ago?”

Neville actually looked up from his lap in his surprise. “Uncle Algie always says it never did him any harm.”

“That remains to be seen. However, there is a large body of evidence to say that hazing is detrimental to children’s core development.” Noting the looks of confusion she restated, “that is, over the last thirty years wizards have noticed that children’s magic develops much more naturally without being forced. Especially,” and here her lips went thin again, “by life threatening scenarios.”

“Oh.”

Neville looked unable to say more, so Harry put in, “is Neville’s uncle going to be in trouble then?” Neville looked panicky. Professor McGonagall raised a hand to forestall comment.

“Not immediately. I am duty bound, by the school charter, to inform the WCS, that’s the Wizarding Children’s Services, that this has occurred. They will, as is their duty, open an investigation into the situation. If Algernon was acting independently, that is, without your grandmother’s knowledge, he will be reprimanded. If it transpires that Augusta colluded with him, it will be more serious.” She stopped to take a couple of deep breaths.

“Your grandmother is a member of the Hogwarts Board of Governors. This means that she knows that hazing is outlawed. If she is found to be allowing it in her own home, it will be seen as a rather more serious breach of the law.”

Harry and Professor McGonagall waited in silence to see whether Neville had anything to say. Harry, who was used to his friend’s expressions, saw the moment the fear hit. He grabbed for Neville’s hand and tried to reassure him, “but it might all be fine, right, Professor?”

“It might mean nothing more than a fine for your uncle. While the investigation is ongoing you will be here at Hogwarts. You might have to stay for the Easter holidays if things go on that long. Be assured that we only want you to have a positive home environment to go back to. If, as I doubt, the worst comes to the worst, we will work with you and the WCS to find an appropriate family to take you in.” Neville’s grip on Harry’s hand was tight enough to hurt, and he looked like he was going to be sick and burst into tears all at once.

“Do you need a calming draught, Nev?” Harry asked, remembering Professor Snape mentioning them to Parvati when she had been excited in class after the holidays, and hoping that Professor McGonagall got the message. Neville stared hard at the desk in front of him. Professor McGonagall opened a cabinet in her desk and fetched a bottle of light blue potion which she placed in front of Neville. Neville didn’t seem inclined to let go of Harry to take the bottle, so Harry grabbed it with his free hand, and, rather awkwardly, managed to get the lid off.

It took a minute or so for the potion to take hold, but Harry felt it when it did. Neville’s grip relaxed and the green colour faded from his face. He wasn’t back to his normal cheery self, still looking rather strained, but it was a vast improvement. Professor McGonagall had made fresh tea while they waited for the potion to take effect, and now offered Neville a second ginger newt. Neville managed a small smile as she asked, “something wrong with your biscuit, Mr. Potter?”

“I think I’ve got a ginger salamander. It’s so happy in the warmth. It’s a bit hard to eat it when it’s so happy.” He took a second biscuit from the tin she proffered, and he felt a lot better as this newt tried to wriggle away from the tea. He bit its head off with a smile. “Thanks, Professor,” he said, crunching.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Mr. Potter.”

Neville didn’t talk much for the rest of the meeting, which wasn’t actually that much longer. Professor McGonagall had got the difficult part over, the rest was a matter of explaining to Neville and Harry that the WCS would need to send a pair of representatives to speak to them both, and that, in all probability, Neville would need to remain at Hogwarts for the Easter term. Neville would be provided with a case handler in the WCS, to whom he was encouraged to talk. To this end Professor McGonagall said, smiling gently, Hogwarts would provide Neville with an owl of his own. Neville was concerned that she would take Trevor away, but Professor McGonagall said no, Trevor was welcome to stay as well.