Double Dog Dare! -- Episode 21
Jan Dark, 2 April 2002

Jason remained standing in the Weasley's living room, still grasping Arthur's hand. A moment ago, he had wanted to run far away, to somewhere where he didn't have to be a teenager or a wizard, or even to have to face anyone he'd met ever again. Maybe it was the way the man standing in front of him had undramatically told him something that he instinctively recognised as the unvarished truth, or maybe Arthur's touch conveyed a sense of his worried but indomitable spirit, but Jason suddenly felt much steadier. He took a deep breath, and squared his shoulders. "Well, if the wizarding world's at war, and I'm a wizard, I guess you should be telling me how I can help the good guys win."

Silence followed his words. Replaying them in his own head, Jason found himself wishing he could decide whether he sounded noble or dorky, when he was startled out of his introspection by a gargling roar from somewhere beneath his feet. The sound quickly settled to a chuntering grumble, mixed, astonishingly, with Meatloaf's Greatest Hits. "What was that?" screeched Vera.

"Whatever it was," said Molly pugnaciously, "You can rest assured that it was something important, cousin, and also that it is something that I will never, ever have cause to know about." Jaw set, she stepped back so she could fix both her cousin and her husband with the same hard stare, then without warning she leapt and seized de Witt by his scrawny bantam shanks, yanking him off his perch on the curtain rail. There was a sudden surge of noise from the basement. The whole house shook and de Witt squawked and flapped, but Molly kept a firm grip on his legs, and the noise dropped to a distant buzzing before trailing away into silence.

"Right," said Molly after exhaling heavily. "Now that Dumbledore and the twins have got away in ..." She paused for another breath and another glare at her husband. " ... whatever it is they happen to be driving, we can find out what Mr de Witt here has been up to. You'd better fetch the Pensieve, Arthur."

"You do know it isn't primed, don't you dear?" said Arthur. "I don't think either of us has had the leisure for introspection, since the twins learned to crawl, otherwise I'd have suggested Snape use it for his little dog. We'd need the power of three to get it in a usable condition before de Witt here returns to a less-manageable form." There was another silence, then Jason shivered as both Molly and Arthur turned to stare at him. If the introspective part of his mind had had the necessary vocabulary, it would have discarded both "noble" and "dorky" and settled on "recklessly quixotic", but instead Jason felt on odd surge of pride that was only slightly tinged with panic. "I could try to help you," he said, not quite as steadily as he would have liked, "if you can show me how."

Arthur almost leapt through the door into the kitchen. Vera and Michael McCarthy stared nervously at one another and tried to ignore a series of clanging noises coming from the region of the cupboard under the sink. Arthur re-emerged clutching a shallow stone bowl which he set down on the table. "There's still time to back out, if you want, Jason," said Arthur as Molly drew her nephew up to the table. Jason shook his head, not trusting himself to speak, but placed his hands on the rim of the bowl to show that he had meant what he said. Molly had turned back to Vera, Michael and Jeremy, sizing them up. "I need one of you to hang on to de Witt whilst we prime the Pensieve," she said carefully. Unexpectedly, Michael stepped forward, scooped up de Witt one-handed, and tucked him securely under his left arm. "This takes me back to when I was a kid on the family farm," he explained, sounding almost cheerful.

Arthur used the distraction to talk to Jason quietly. "You don't need to know any spells for this. We'll all grasp the rim of the bowl, hands touching. Molly and I should be able to direct the magic. I think it will be enough if you just visualise the bowl filling up with cogitum - er, just think of it filling with a silvery-white gassy-liquidy stuff."

"He said should be able to direct the magic," thought Jason grimly as Molly and Arthur's hands closed over his. He gazed at the bottom of the bowl. Nothing there. "Come on," he said to himself, "Think dry-ice! It's bubbling out from under the star-cloth, it's drifting round the Marshall stack, it's filling the bowl."

Still nothing. Jason suddenly realised he was sweating with fear. Maybe he wasn't a wizard after all, maybe he'd have to go back home to Chelsea, and be as mundane as Jeremy. Jeremy would taunt him about this forever. Maybe ...

There was a sudden flare of light, that caused him to startle and almost upset the bowl. Clutching it, he looked down to see that it was full of a swirling white substance that was indeed exactly like dry ice. "Well, well, well," he heard Arthur saying in tones of relieved surprise, "I think that one of those unpredictable flares of power you sometimes get from desparate and untrained young wizards worked in our favour that time."

In a daze of relief, Jason was barely aware of his father bringing the cockerel to the table, or of Molly spinning the thoughts out of de Witt's head and into the Pensieve, but the sudden darkening of the dry-ice stuff in the Pensieve dragged his gaze downwards. Instead of the bottom of the bowl, he was looking at a darkened room. He seemed to be at the back of crowd of people he didn't recognise who were all craning forward to look at an empty dais. "There's Mockridge," gasped Arthur, "and Peasegood too. What is this?"

There was a shifting of the shadows and then, apparently coming from nowhere, a figure stood before the crowd. Pallid, skeletal, with malevolently glowing eyes, it reminded Jason of Iron Maiden's Eddie, then he felt another spasm of fear as he realised that next to this guy, Eddie was as anodyne as a fairy on a Christmas tree.

"It's You Know Who," Molly gasped.

~*~*~

Janet-as-Viviane cursed under her breath, caught unprepared by the sooner-than-expected reappearance of Snape with reinforcements. Too many to handle at once, but at least the curse on Sirius seemed to have cut in at last, and she'd already given him his instructions. "Split them up," she thought to herself, "and get Snape away from the polyjuiced Viviane before she regained consciousness." She stifled an urge to kick the stupid little yipping dog clear across the room, settled for a last heel-jab into Viviane's solar plexus, then strode across the room to catch Snape by the arm. "There isn't much time," she said urgently, as she steered him out back out onto the moving staircase. "She just let slip something about a map of Azkhaban hidden in the Slytherin common room, and Lucius Malfoy's on his way to fetch it!"

"Dumbledore," cried Sirius, "That's ..." he was cut off abruptly as though someone had viciously jerked on a choke-chain round his neck. His eyes bulged and a tinge of panic crept into them. He tried his dog form, but could do no better than wheeze at Fidelis. Howling with frustration, he resumed his human form, panting heavily. "Whose is this flask?" asked Dumbledore picking up the Thermos. "Have you been poisoned, Sirius?"

There was a sudden wild glitter in Sirius' eyes. Snatching the Thermos from Dumbledore, he reached down to the trussed figure, yanked out one of her hairs, plunged it into the remaining potion, then drained the flask in one draught. Again his face contorted with pain, but this time, the rest of his body contorted too, his chest swelling, his waist narrowing until it seemed as though the Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor stood in front of Dumbledore. "So that's Viviane trussed up on the floor there," said Dumbledore, ignoring the inarticulate gurglings of stupefaction coming from the twins. "Now quickly, Sirius, find some way to tell who just walked out of the door with Snape!"

~*~*~

"Much as find it distasteful to have to use you - the remnants of Rookwood's Rabble," sneered Lord Voldemort at the Ministry types gathered before him, "I order you to get your unworthy paper-pushing carcases to Ottery St Catchpole and seal every house by any means at your disposal. That silly bitch Tewksberry has somehow managed to mislay a crucial document somewhere in that village." He paused for effect, and glanced down at a piece of paper he was holding. "I rather suspect that she thought she'd sent it to me, but this appears to be something called The Evil Overlord List.