Category: The Magic Quill

The path wound up the hill between wide areas of deeply scored earth, shattered trees, and the dark, threatening shapes of the whomping willows. Warily, deprived of a good broom and an even better wand, I walked the middle of the path and wondered what I would find at the end of it.

The cowled storyteller leaned back in his seat and began swirling firewhisky around the bottom of his glass, looking for all the world as if his tale was done.

After a long, expectant pause, Endora the cloaked witch exclaimed, ““That’’s it? That’’s the tale of the Bette Noir Affair?””

“Hush, dear,”” her companion, Merlin, warned.

“…I was out with some old schoolfellows, celebrating somebody’s last weekend of bachelorhood. After chasing around one noisy, upbeat place after another, we found a certain quiet little pub to be a pleasant change and were catching up.”

As Spanky paused for a sip of firewhisky, the veiled witch called Sadie chimed in: “Catching up on what? Drinks?”

As soon as Spanky stepped out of the cubicle in the bathroom of the Three Broomsticks, his world went dark. Someone had pulled a sack over his head. He heard muffled voices from the people hustling him out the back door of the tavern.

“My first job after leaving Hogwarts,” the cloaked speaker reminisced through his personal cloud of firewhisky smoke, “was as a handler for the Dragon Squad, Southeast Zone. I had always liked magical beasts, and my two wand-hands gave me an advantage in dealing with their rough behavior. I could stun with one hand and ward off fire with the other, for instance. But I was too good at my job…

“Now wait a mo,” Endora cut in. “I do believe as I’ve ‘eard of somethin’ like that. The Sword of Godric Gryffindor, right? Now where…”

“Shush,” Merlin insisted.

“Well, you may have heard about it,” Spanky conceded, with a generous inclination of his hooded head.

“Coo, if ‘e ain’t a bloke as needs to use the courtesy a lot,” Endora sighed from under her deep hood. “An’ ‘ere I ham, on tenterhooks awaitin’ for ‘im to go on wiff ‘is story. I wunner if ‘e’s never heard of an illocal bladder spell.”

“The first time I faced Sid Shmedly in the Dueling Club,” Spanky continued, as another sizzling mug appeared before him, “was during our second year at Hogwarts, the year Flitwick started it up. In the meantime, many things had come between us, and only the school’s strict discipline and lack of opportunity had kept us from cursing each other to smithereens before then.

The next night, the cloaked wizard who called himself Spanky shouldered his way through the standing-room only crowd of cloaked wizards and witches at the Hog’s Head. Horrible noises, like a tomcat getting the worst of a nocturnal assignation,