Chapter 164 — The First Demonstration

Ron named Imperius before anybody else answered. Moody asked whether his father knew about that one, and Ron said he had mentioned it. The blue eye travelled towards Slytherin while Moody described the work of separating people forced to act from those who discovered a useful story afterwards.

Draco sat straighter. Moody reached beneath his desk and brought out a jar with something climbing its glass, then removed a spider and let it run across his hand. A touch of his wand enlarged it until I could distinguish the joints of its legs from my seat.

‘Imperio,’ he said. The spider stopped beneath his wand, then rose onto its hind legs.

Laughter travelled through the room as it balanced, turned and began an absurd little dance along the desk edge. Ron gave a startled snort. Moody made the creature bow towards him, provoking another ripple of amusement.

I watched its feet. Before the curse they had tested the surface and changed direction; now they moved with a certainty which belonged to something else. Moody called the performance amusing, then sent the spider leaping towards our desk.

Ron jerked sideways as it landed in front of him. It balanced on two legs and raised the others towards his face. His demand to have it removed scarcely left his mouth before Moody twitched his wand and made it walk away again.

‘Don’t like it quite so much from there?’ Moody asked. Ron sat upright, red-faced, and admitted he did not. ‘Imagine being the one made to dance.’

The remaining smiles faded. Moody directed the spider between two desks and up its jar, leaving it poised above the open top with its legs extended. It stayed there while he paced beside it.

‘It will jump if I tell it to. It will stay if I tell it to.’ His wand moved a fraction, and the spider adjusted its balance. ‘It has no better idea it is permitted to use.’

I thought of the diary telling Ginny what she needed, then making her do things she could scarcely bear to remember. The magic was different, but I recognised that cold interest in finding a way round somebody’s will.

Moody returned the spider to the desktop. People had been controlled during the war, he said, and people had lied about being controlled; deciding which had happened was not a matter of asking nicely. Ron muttered that some had escaped the consequences, and Draco heard him.

‘Got something to say, Weasley?’ he demanded. Ron suggested asking his father, and Draco’s chair scraped the floor as he began an answer about Arthur.

‘Enough,’ I said, bringing both of them round towards me. ‘If we’re discussing claims, we can ask how they were checked. Sniping about our fathers won’t tell us.’

Draco’s mouth tightened. ‘We know your opinion, Mercer,’ he said, remaining halfway out of his seat.

‘Then ask me to explain it.’ I kept my voice level, though I disliked having him loom over the desk. ‘Ron’s father isn’t on trial because you don’t like the question.’

Ron shifted beside me and settled back into his seat. Moody had watched the exchange with a stillness I liked less than his shouting; now he asked how we would distinguish a false claim from a true one.

Hermione suggested a change in behaviour. Moody called it a reason to investigate rather than proof, so I asked about what someone remembered afterwards. He turned towards me, the spider motionless beneath his wand.

‘What they can tell you,’ he said. ‘If they can tell you. And if you believe it.’

He lowered his wand, and the spider scuttled towards the edge. This time he stopped it with the jar instead of a command. Some people wanted simple answers to that question, he added, and a number of them wore very respectable robes. Draco looked away as Moody returned the spider to its jar.

He took out another and called Neville forward. At the mention of Sprout’s opinion of his eye for plants, Neville gave a hesitant smile and admitted that he liked Herbology. Moody told him that looking closely mattered, then asked which curse should come next.

‘The Cruciatus Curse,’ Neville said. His answer scarcely reached our bench, and the stiffness in his hands made me put down my quill.

This version was copied without the author's permission from the author's official page; reading the published chapter supports its creator.

Moody enlarged the second spider. ‘Pain,’ he said, raising his wand above the desk. ‘Nothing elaborate to hide this one behind.’

At the incantation the spider convulsed. Its legs folded inwards and thrashed against the wood, making a small scraping sound between each blow of its body against the desk. I found myself wishing there were something louder to listen to.

Neville had gone very pale. His eyes stayed fixed on the spider while one hand closed tightly against the seam of his robe. I did not know what the sight meant to him, but I could see he was no longer following a lesson.

‘Stop it!’ Hermione said. When Moody failed to lower his wand immediately, she stood. ‘Can’t you see what it’s doing to him?’

The curse ended. One of the spider’s legs scraped weakly against the desk, and Neville kept staring as though he had not heard the silence begin.

I got up and called his name. ‘Come and sit down,’ I said when he turned towards me. Moody announced that Longbottom could return to his place, but I was already beside him.

I waited until Neville saw my hand before touching his elbow. He came back with me while Dean shifted his bag out of the way. Hermione sat on the opposite bench, watching Neville’s face as Moody placed a third spider on the front desk.

‘One remains,’ he said. His wand pointed down, and Harry’s quill bent between his fingers.

I knew the name before Moody spoke it. Green light flashed across the room; the spider died without a mark I could see or an injured limb searching for somewhere to rest. Moody gave us time to look at it.

‘No counter-curse,’ he said. ‘No ordinary shield to stand behind while you wait for someone to rescue you.’

I could smell smoke which was not in the classroom. Beneath the desk I opened my left hand and laid it flat against my knee, feeling the cloth there. The floor beneath my shoes was wood; daylight came through the windows.

Moody named the Killing Curse, then told us there was only one person known to have survived it. His gaze settled on Harry, followed by half the room. Harry looked down at the quill he was holding.

The man at the campsite had stared at him before raising his wand. Now everybody was looking at him after another green flash, waiting for survival to explain itself. I shifted enough to interrupt some of the sightlines.

‘Professor, you said we’d learn to recognise what could reach us,’ I said. ‘Is that all for today?’

Moody stared at me before confirming that the demonstrations were over. He put down his wand, and I let out a breath I had not meant to hold.

The rest of the lesson came in uneven pieces. We recorded the names, effects and assumptions a defender could not safely make while Moody asked questions without warning. Some answers were useful. Others required me to concentrate on his words instead of waiting for his hand to move.

At dismissal Harry put his books away with great care. Ron kept looking towards Neville, and Hermione went to ask whether he would like to walk with us. He agreed, still holding himself stiffly as he collected his things.

I stood with my bag in my hand. After what we had watched, wanting to stay felt uncomfortable, but I had come with a question which remained unanswered.

‘I’m going to ask about reading,’ I told Harry. Hermione turned towards me, and I continued before she needed to ask. ‘I don’t mean lessons in casting those curses.’

‘You’d better mean that,’ she said. I assured her I did, then asked Neville whether he would be all right with them. He answered quietly but clearly that he would.

Moody called him before they reached the door. Hermione stopped beside Neville and offered to wait outside while he had a word with the Professor. Neville glanced between them, then nodded, and the others went into the corridor.

The door remained open. I stayed near my desk, catching Sprout’s name and something about a book in Moody’s quieter conversation with Neville. His answers did not reach me. I could not judge what the exchange had done for him, but Hermione was still waiting when he left.

Moody turned towards me and asked what I wanted. I approached the front desk, where the dead spider remained beside his papers.

‘I want to read about curses,’ I said. ‘How they work and where they fail.’

‘You saw three that don’t fail often.’ His fingers rested beside the wand, and the blue eye stopped its wandering.

‘I saw you use them on spiders.’ His expression changed, but I kept my hands beside my bag. ‘At the World Cup I had to work out what to do while someone was trying to kill Harry. I want to know more before that happens again.’

He watched me for several seconds. Then his mouth moved in something which might have been a smile, and he remarked that my father used to stand like that.

‘Ken?’ I asked, looking at him sharply. Other people had known my father, some offering stories readily and others needing time. I disliked how easily Moody’s mention of him made me want to listen.

‘Same way of putting a question,’ Moody said. ‘As though you’ve decided an answer ought to exist.’

I asked what he had told Ken. The tip of his tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth and vanished before he answered that wanting an answer had been the easy part.

He drew a sheet of parchment towards him. ‘There’s a compendium in the Restricted Section,’ he said, beginning to write. ‘Definitions, forms and accounts of failures. Some of it will be well beyond you.’

‘Then I’ll know what questions to bring back.’ I watched him put a title above the permission and sign it.

‘One book,’ he warned, passing the parchment across. ‘Reading doesn’t authorise you to try everything inside.’

I read the title, A Compendium of Curses, before folding it with his signature inside. The lesson had given me reasons to distrust his judgement about what a class needed to experience. The permission offered access to something I had wanted before meeting him, and I took it.