Chapter 4
Jessie Edwards, Finn Pearson and Zachary Small-Bone were all still being used by torturers when the mass escape took place.
A bored witch started up the Imperius Curse, making Jessie undertake difficult ballet poses, some of which were on top of levitating furniture. Two wizards had made Finn jump from the furniture, using a levitation spell to catch him every time he was near the ground. However, they let him drop a different height each time, laughing at his terrified screams. Zachary Small-Bone was contorting his body into many different positions, controlled by a beefy wizard. Zachary thought he could hear his bones popping in his ears.
Then the Muggle-borns escaped.
The three children were discarded like ragdolls on the floor, as some other Muggle-borns, who had come inside to try and find their friends or relatives, entered cautiously.
Nearly all of them left immediately, but one man, a large guy built like a boulder, lifted Finn to his feet. “You okay, kid?” he asked.
Out of breath, Finn could only nod, although he certainly didn’t feel all right. The man tugged Jessie and Zachary to their feet.
“Nearly everyone’s run out the front,” he breathed, “but people are going to come down here soon, work out something’s wrong. We’d better get away now.”
“Where to?” Zachary squeaked, barely audible, “They took the wands. You need wands to teleport, don’t you?”
“No, but we can get to the fireplaces, find some way out.” the man gabbled, running into the corridor.
The three battered, exhausted and frightened children looked at each other.
Eventually, Zachary broke the silence by mumbling, “We don’t really have a choice.”
They followed the man upstairs, with the dark, ghostly figures held at bay with a wand that the man had grabbed in the commotion.
As soon as they reached the room with all of the fireplaces, there was absolute chaos going on. Ministry officials were trying their best to stop Muggle-borns using the Floo Network to escape, dragging them to the floor if they weren’t using their wands. However, the man seized Jessie’s wrist and pulled her to a nearby, presumably unguarded fireplace.
When a guard shouted and pointed to the fireplace that they were using, the three children shrank back in fear. But the boulder-sized man had already set off.
Arriving in a cottage, the four rolled out onto a clean carpet. The three children started coughing, but the figure was in too much of a hurry. Stepping on Finn’s foot roughly and linking arms with Zachary, he Apparated away.
When the four of them smashed down onto a grassy hillside, the children wondered if the clothes in washing machines feel like this. If said washing machines were filled with rusty nails.
When the three children shook the soot out of their hair, they had a look at where they had landed. They were right in the middle of the countryside, with fields as far as the eye could see. The hillside they were on was not steep, so they pulled to their feet and followed the man to a nearby car park, which had only one car.
“Sir,” Zachary asked, “could you please tell us your name?”
The man looked over his shoulder at them, a little surprised. Then he broke into a smile. A rather nasty smile, it seemed.
“Stanley Robinson,” he held his hand out for Zachary to shake, “Muggle-born, like you.”
Zachary was a little wary, but shook his head anyway. Stanley had a firm grip.
“Muggle-born?” Jessie asked as she and Finn approached. Stanley went back to trying to prise the car door open, this time with a branch on the ground.
“Didn’t you read the books you were given?” he asked.
“Yes.” All three children answered in unison. They looked at each other, their faces breaking out into small smiles. Jessie gave a giggle.
They definitely had read the books. Finn was not a very good reader, since he had dyslexia. But his older brother – who had been a little bit jealous, to be honest – had helped him through everything. He couldn’t read the incantations either, but Finn had tried his best anyway.
He now remembered how excited he had been to find out that he was a wizard. That he was going to a magic school instead of boring old Baddow High. Every night Finn had dreamed of the wonder and amazement that might be there. And now, he had been robbed of his wand and books, tortured and thrown from great heights, forced to run away with a stranger and was stuck in a car park in God knows where. He tried his best not to cry. It would be embarrassing enough to cry in front of a girl, Finn thought, but in front of a stranger was mortifying.
Jessie curled up her fist in her sleeve and placed it by her mouth. She thought she had stopped doing this long ago, when she had entered the Juniors. Her parents had always told her that it was okay to cry if you were really upset. They had tried telling her the difference between crying for attention and crying when the cat died, but Jessie had been confused and didn’t cry at all. Now all she wanted was to go home. She didn’t want to be a witch. Not if it meant entering a scary world where you were made to twist your body into horrible shapes against your will and were lied to.
Of course she had read the books. She had been eager to fly a broom, just as she had done with the toy broom she flew at Halloween when she was eight. She thought that she actually had flown up several inches from the ground, but had told herself this was her imagination. It was starting to look as if she would never fly a broom, though.
Zachary had raced through the books at the speed of lightning. His parents had been anxious at first, but were quickly impressed when he had made the dinner hover and land on the table without spilling anything. He had been looking forward to learning more magic, so that he could carry on pleasing his parents, to be something other than a mechanic like his dad.
Now those dreams had been dashed and torn up like confetti. He still wanted to be a wizard, of course. He had always been a determined young man and some old toad in pink wasn’t going to stop him. If anything, it made him even more desperate.
Stanley finally prised the door open with a grunt. “Well, do you want to stand out here all day, or do you want to get home?” he grumbled.
Jessie made her way around into the passenger seat while the boys sat in the back. Stanley bent down to hotwire the engine.
“You see,” he mumbled as he tried to place two wires close enough to each other to start without burning himself, “wizards don’t think learning to hotwire a car is a good thing. I can see why they think that if they use brooms and Portkeys and the Floo Network all the time. But it’s still a useful tool if you get stuck out here, far away from any wizarding contact.”
He started up the car, gave a hearty laugh and slammed the door. “Oh! We’re in luck!” he smiled, handing out two sandwiches still in their plastic wrapping from the seat.
As he drove onto the small, winding road, Zachary asked, “Exactly where are we?”
“Oh, someplace in Ayrshire,” Stanley trailed off, “went here on a hiking trip when I was your age. Before I started at Hogwarts. First place that came to mind. Hasn’t changed a bit since I was here, though.”
“Ayrshire?” Zachary perked up, “I live in Dumfries and Galloway! It’s not too far!” it finally seemed as if he was going to have a piece of good luck.
“Eh? What about you two?” Stanley asked, eyes still on the road, going at about ten miles an hour.
“West Hanningfield.” Finn replied, matter-of-factly.
“Really?” Jessie turned in her seat. “I live in Witham! We’re right next to each other!”
“Well, Essex is still a long way away,” Stanley muttered, “so I’d say our best option right now is to find – what’s your name, boy?”
“Zachary.” Zachary answered, just before Jessie and Finn gave him their names.
“Right, we’re going to try Zachary’s house first.” Stanley reassured him.
Zachary felt a warm glow through his body as he thought of home. He could get away from all this unpleasantness. And if he was asked to come back – though he doubted it – he would simply say that he would never go back in a million years.
After a while of sitting of silence, Jessie turned her head and asked Stanley, “How did you find out about the magical world? Did you get a letter like we did?”
Stanley nodded. “Yes. I was eleven years old, just like you. I went to Hogwarts. Smashing place. People were a bit nasty because I don’t have magical parents, but apart from that, everything went swimmingly. Didn’t get very good marks, though.
Only average. Started working in Diagon Alley after that. Got thrown out for…well, never mind that. Let’s just say that I was back to working in the muggle world for twenty years. Then this all comes up again because my name was recorded in Azkaban. Never going back there again.”
The children hadn’t understood a word of what Stanley had said. But it sounded terrible.
After a while, Stanley pulled up on a dirt road in a valley. He was grumbling that the engine was playing up. “Trust me to choose a bad car,” he groaned, “guys, do you think you could walk down that way and see if you notice any hikers or something?”
“But – what if they’re bad wizards?” Zachary asked.
“I doubt anyone followed me here,” Stanley answered, “but just take a look, anyway? I’ll come if you take too long. No need to worry.”
He held up the stolen wand in his hand from where it had sat in the glovebox.
“I’m too scared,” Jessie mumbled, “I’ll stay in here.”
“Okay. Be back soon!” Finn half-heartedly waved at them as he and Zachary walked along the dirt road.
After five minutes of looking around, the two boys couldn’t see a house, never mind a hiker. But as they went back, they heard a horrible noise.
At first they thought it was an animal, whether one they knew or some magical creature they had read about in their Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them handbooks. Which, unfortunately, they thought they may never see again.
But then they heard Jessie squealing.
They ran around the corner to the car, thinking that they would find the scary people from the Ministry there, but all they saw was Stanley leaning over inside the car.
They heard Jessie crying again as they approached. Then Stanley said, “Oh, stop it! It will be over shortly.”
Finn shouted out, causing Stanley to jump. At his angle, he almost hit his head on the roof. Zachary raced around the side to see Jessie lying over the seats on her back and her skirt askew. He didn’t know what had happened, but it was obvious that Jessie was in pain.
Zachary helped her out as Stanley backed out through his door, calling out after them when they ran away down the path.
“You can’t keep running! You’ll die out there! I was only having a feel!”
They didn’t stop running until they had reached another fork in the road. Panting from exhaustion, they all stopped and leant on a nearby stile.
“What now?” Zachary asked, gripping onto the wooden stile, “He’s not chasing us, is he?”
“Don’t think so,” Finn wiped the sweat off his brow, “Jessie, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” the little girl mumbled, “let’s just go.”
She walked some way ahead of them after they had jumped over the stile and were climbing up a gigantic hill.
“It’s actually a mountain. It’s the Cairnsmore of Carpharin. It’s almost eight hundred metres high.” Zachary explained.
Finn snorted. “Just our luck. We get tortured, abducted and now we’re stumbling over a mountain. If we meet any horrible witches or wizards up here, Zachary, you tell me what we should do.”
Zachary looked taken aback. Finn sighed, running a hand through his dark brown curls. “Look, I’m sorry,” Finn tried to apologize, “I – I just want to go home. I’m not even going to bother with the magic stuff anymore.”
Zachary nodded, although he himself still wanted to go to the school, regardless of whether that horrid judge had said.
Catching up with Jessie, the two boys sat down beside her by a stream as she tried drinking from it.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Zachary explained, “see, you need a tube. You take some water and shake it and if it turns a certain colour, you know if there’s the right amount of pH. Otherwise you could get rather sick.”
Jessie already seemed a little sick. Finn looked at her pale face and asked, “Jessie? Do you want to talk about it?”
A few seconds of silence lingered before Jessie opened up.
“He –“ she threw her plait behind her shoulders, “said that he’d been sent away from the magic world because – because he hurt kids. He said he hadn’t been let anywhere near children in a long time so this wasn’t – wasn’t my fault.”
She gave a small hiccup as she sobbed, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I – I closed my eyes. I think I’d rather have had that torture back in the courtroom again.”
Neither boy had anything to say to that. After what seemed like an eternity of sitting by the stream, Zachary pushed himself to his feet.
“Well, I know roughly where we are. I know the village that’s just on the other side of the cairnsmore. If we hurry we can get there by sundown. Anyone got a watch?”
Finn’s watch said it was half past three already.
“Okay, so maybe not sundown,” Zachary tried to think, “but definitely by tomorrow.”
“But I’m hungry,” Finn told him, “and tired.”
“We just have to try,” Zachary helped him up, “and who knows, there could be hikers up here who can give us food. They can’t be worse than anyone we’ve met today, could they?”
Jessie and Finn glanced at each other before they followed Zachary up the mountain.
Darkness fell. The night grew colder. The three children hadn’t been outside this late at night before.
But they still trudged on.
Since it was September, nobody dared to go out camping in this weather. And even if they had had a torch, Zachary pointed out, they wouldn’t know which berries to pick. He’d probably know, but unless he saw them in sunlight, he might not be able to tell one berry from another.
Jessie thought that she’d rather have her mother’s sausage casserole right about now and that had made her throw up.
Going down something is usual much easier than coming up, but going down in the dark is definitely not recommended.
Which meant that the unfortunate children had to sleep outside.
They didn’t have tents, sleeping bags, a campfire or even a coat. Finn and Jessie nestled up by one of the large piles of rocks that seemed to be scattered about (no doubt Zachary would have an explanation for them) and talked to each other.
“I used my wand to make a vase fly and place all of the roses inside,” Finn told Jessie, “I thought that it looked very pretty. I was looking forward to using it in lessons.”
“I wanted to fly a broom,” Jessie wistfully murmured, “to fly above the treetops and over the village. I’ve always wanted to fly. Most of my dreams involve flying.”
Finn nodded, even though he knew Jessie wouldn’t see him. “Apparently, that’s a common dream,” he explained, “It means that you want to be free.”
“What about the other kids?” Jessie asked nervously. “That John kid seemed rather nice.”
John Peterson had been ushered out quickly during the mass escape. Confused and knocked over at every turn by rushing adults, he had searched around for another child.
The only one he could find was a couple of years older than him. He was a stocky young man with blonde hair who was gabbling in French to a nearby older woman.
“Excuse me,” John had run up, “I need to go home.”
The woman nodded. “Follow us.”
When they had exited through the toilets, John had stammered, watching the woman fight with an aggressive-looking man as he and the boy cowered behind a skip, “How – how do I get home?”
The older boy swore in French, before he explained, “The Death Eaters will be looking for your home now. Your mother and father – I do not know.”
Before John could react, a flash of green light illuminated behind them. The woman’s spellwork ceased. The older boy held his head in his hands and wept.
John felt conflicted emotions flooding through. After peeking around the side, he saw the woman lying on the ground, lifeless. The man prodded her with his wand and kicked her in the stomach, letting her roll over. He snorted and turned around, going back to the toilet cubicle.
“Maman?” the boy called, before he ran to her body. John stayed put. He turned around and looked in the other direction. This was a private moment, he told himself, and he shouldn’t try and interfere.
Then John felt heavy breathing on his neck. Slowly turning around, he saw a rough-looking wizard – he had to be, since he was wearing robes like the other wizards John had seen – holding a wand out to the side, looking straight at him.
John shuffled away and opened his mouth to scream, but the rough-looking wizard held out a large hand and clamped it over the boy’s mouth. John struggled in his grasp, pulling away at the hand, afraid that if he panicked then he would suffocate, despite the fact that he had to try and get away anyway...
The man pulled John closer and said through gritted teeth, “Be quiet or the Death Eaters will kill both of us!”
John sat limply and listened as the French boy started shouting angrily at somebody. Then a voice cried, “Stupefy!”
The rough-looking wizard hissed into John’s ear, “That was Eva Baillairge and her son. She worked with me in the foreign sector. Translating and the like.”
John finally pushed the man’s hand away, although the wizard had stopped gripping so tightly and simply let John go. “What was that?” John asked, unsure where to start.
The wizard sighed. “You’re Muggle-born, aren’t you?”
John waited for a second before nodding.
“Figures. You were supposed to start at the magic school this year. But – well, let’s say that something happened last May that changed everything. Now if Muggle-born children – kids with non-magical parents – try to start there, they’re dragged in front of the Ministry and accused of stealing magic. And if they find you guilty of stealing magic, you go to the wizarding prison and trust me, kid, it’s far worse than any prison in Muggle England.”
John still couldn’t understand anything, but even with the little information he had been given, he knew this was unfair.
“And you?” he quivered.
The wizard shrugged. “Frank James. Muggle-born myself. That green light you saw, kid? That was the Killing Curse. I would never have believed they’d kill Eva without a trial first.”
“A-And the boy?” John felt even more scared than before.
“Well, he’s not a British citizen. It’s complicated. Most likely scenario is that they’ll shove him in the wizarding prison. Since he’s got a wizard dad, he’ll most likely be sent back to France if they don’t kill him to keep him quiet.”
John swallowed. Frank James groaned to himself.
“Best get you home, kid, if anything else. Where you from, anyway?”
“Pontrhydfendigaid.” John answered.
The wizard stared at him. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.
“It’s in Wales.” John gave the same answer he gave to everyone who couldn’t pronounce his village’s name.
Frank James muttered to himself. “Right, the good news is that I’ve still got my wand with me. The bad news is that I have no idea where In Wales to go.”
“It’s in Ceredigion, in the west.” John explained.
Frank James didn’t need to tell him that this was little help. He made up his mind to try and get to Swansea, even though he hadn’t been there in years.
“OK, kid –“
“John Peterson, sir.”
“John, this is going to be scary. But if I do this correctly, you won’t lose any body parts.”
John decided that losing a body part was preferable to possibly being killed, so when Frank James told him to grip on, he did so.
Landing in Swansea, Frank James pulled John towards a train station. “We’re going back to your home, John. Tell me if you recognise any of the names.”
John thanked Frank James, then looked at the timetable. It took them a while, but they soon figured out that they should take the train going directly north.
It was almost six-thirty by the time that the two of them arrived in John’s quaint little village. When John reached the end of his road, he smiled up at Frank James.
“Thank you, sir.” He gabbled, running off to the house, before Frank James could call out that he needed to see if Death Eaters had visited.
When John pushed open the door, he called out for his grandma. He shut the door behind him, letting it latch. He ran into the living room and grinned when he saw his grandma sitting on the sofa.
Then his grin faded, replaced by worry as soon as he saw her sitting absolutely still.
“Grandma?” he asked, gingerly walking up to her and touching her arm.
His grandmother’s body crumpled to the ground, her eyes bulging and lifeless. He gasped and stepped back, his heart beating in his mouth.
Then the living room door slammed shut. Penny Merryweather stood there, smirking nastily.
“Your parents were out, Mudblood,” she sneered, “and won’t they get a shock when they come home and find their magic-stealing little boy dead?”
“What did you do to Grandma?” John shouted, unable to hold himself together.
Merryweather did not react to his obvious fear. She strode up and cornered him. He shrank down so that he was sitting, then pulled his legs to his chest, his big green eyes filled with tears.
Merryweather raised her wand to shout the Killing Curse.
But then there was the sound of smashing glass. A brick flew through the window, chipping a china cat and landing on the carpet. Merryweather turned around in shock as Frank James then aimed at her.
“Stupefy!” he yelled, but Merryweather dodged him.
As she called out the Killing Curse repeatedly through the window and he called out Stunning Spells, John crawled out on his hands and knees through the living room door and outside into the front garden. He crouched under the windowsill as the Killing Curse flew through the little village. Thankfully, the angle that John’s house was at meant that it mostly ricocheted off nearby walls or hit garden gnomes with almighty bangs.
Three Killing Curses hit some local dogs fighting over a bone. Another hit a neighbour who had been leaving her house to go to the pub. One shot almost hit a child peering out from a nearby window, instead hitting the cat sitting by her windowsill.
Eventually, however, Frank James managed to strike Merryweather. Before he could say anything to John, Frank James Apparated with her body.
John, unable to comprehend anything that had happened, curled up and began howling.
By the time his parents returned the following morning from another village, having spent the night at a friend’s house, they found their scared, cold son on the porch.
John was immediately taken to hospital to be treated for possible pneumonia. John refused to tell his parents about what he had seen.
I’ll never go to the magic world, he vowed, never.