Chapter 392: The Shrieking Shack
Hogsmeade. The Shrieking Shack.
Three sharp cracks split the silence, and several figures in dark robes appeared inside the darkened room.
Gins looked around at the familiar surroundings, something shifting behind his eyes.
It was here, the previous year, that his greed for the bodies of those giant spiders had brought him into conflict with the mysterious Mister Judge. He had nearly died in this very place.
They had not died, in the end, but they had lost their freedom and become servants of the one who called himself Mister Judge.
"Cole, do you know why Mister Judge has called us here tonight?"
Gins looked at the man beside him.
"How would I know?" Cole said, shaking his head.
"You don't think he's finally run out of patience with us, do you?" said one of the others, his voice uneasy. "We've been at this for over a year, and we've got practically nothing to show for it."
The task Mister Judge had given them was to track Voldemort's movements and investigate the mysterious organisation collecting Sealed Artefacts. A year had passed, and on both counts, they had made almost no progress.
Cole's brow furrowed at that.
He had been with Dudley longer than any of them, over a year now. In all that time, the only real result he had managed was a handful of early leads on the organisation, which had since vanished without a trace. The matter had stalled entirely.
A full year and more, and nothing of any worth to show for it. He could hardly blame Gins and the others for being nervous.
"I doubt that is what this is," Cole said.
"Mister Judge has not burdened us with unreasonable demands. From what I can tell, he has not been in any particular urgency about these tasks."
He said the words calmly enough, but there was a thread of unease beneath them.
Cole knew who Dudley really was. A wizard of such immense power at such a young age was not someone whose true intentions could be easily read. When Cole had first been captured, imprisoned, and broken by him, he had felt something that went beyond fear of the Dark Lord. Dudley had seemed worse.
Crack.
A sharp sound came from the adjacent room, something snapping underfoot.
Cole and the others went still at once.
"Mister Judge?" Gins called out.
Silence answered.
The four of them exchanged a glance. Something was wrong.
"Go and look," Cole said, drawing his wand and moving toward the door.
Gins and the others followed, wands out.
Mister Judge had not arrived yet. So who had made that sound?
The Shrieking Shack was said to be haunted, but that was a story for ordinary people. Men like Cole did not put stock in ghost stories.
"Lumos," Gins said, and light bloomed from the tip of his wand, flooding the corridor with pale clarity.
"You don't suppose it's Black? There were rumours he was seen near Hogwarts."
Cole said nothing, his eyes moving slowly across the shadows.
Then a massive dark shape exploded from the corner and lunged straight at him.
"Reducto!"
Cole's reflexes were sharp. The spell left his wand in an instant and tore toward the shape.
In that same moment, they saw it clearly.
A dog. A black dog, enormous, the better part of two metres from nose to tail, its expression savage.
Bang!
The dog was faster than it had any right to be. It twisted aside before the curse could connect, hit the corridor wall, and bolted for the staircase.
"Where did that come from?" Gins said, staring.
"Stupefy!" another of the wizards fired, and missed.
Cole watched the dog vanish down the stairs, and his eyes narrowed.
Something was wrong with that animal.
He turned it over carefully: the position the dog had been in, the angle of its lunge, the exact moment it had broken away.
"It was never really attacking me. It was using the lunge as cover to reach the corridor. That was the whole point."
"Could a real dog calculate that?"
"It anticipated my spell. It dodged and fled in the same movement, simultaneously."
Cole's expression darkened.
"After it."
He moved at once toward the staircase.
"Is that really necessary?" Gins said. "We came here to wait for Mister Judge, not chase a dog. If we're spotted out here, it will not go well for us."
They were wanted men, most of them. Cole especially.
"It may be Ministry-sent," Cole said flatly.
He had been an Auror once. He knew the Ministry's methods. That dog had not behaved like an animal; its reactions had been too deliberate, too intelligent. If it was a Ministry tracker and it got away, their cover was already blown.
"Ministry-sent?" Gins went pale.
The thought landed immediately: the Ministry had Aurors scattered throughout Hogsmeade searching for the escaped Sirius Black. A tracking dog was entirely plausible.
None of them hesitated. They went after it.
They reached the lower level of the Shrieking Shack quickly, following the route the dog had taken.
The dog was gone.
"What? Where is it?" Gins turned in a slow circle.
It was a sealed basement. Stone walls, solid and unbroken on every side.
"Did it get back upstairs while we weren't watching? Through a window on the ground floor?"
One of the wizards was already heading up.
"Wait," Cole said sharply.
Gins stopped.
"There is a hidden passage here."
Cole crossed to a stone slab in the corner and flicked his wand. The slab flew aside, revealing a narrow, dark tunnel leading downward.
The colour drained from their faces.
A dog, fleeing in panic, does not stop to seal a trapdoor behind itself.
That was not possible.