HARRI PUTTER
Chapter 3
Harri quite enjoyed his visit with the Weasel family, but there was one event he looked forward to more than anything else: his annual visit to Hypotenuse Square. This was a place which sold all the wonders of the magical world. There were foods which changed into other foods when you ate them, magical pranks and practical jokes, and comic books. Not the average type of comic book, with superheroes and supervillians, or the kind with rather normal teenagers having slightly abnormal adventure. Here, in Hypotenuse Square, the comic books featured people from the other side of the world who battled demons and monsters.
These comics also were printed in a rather strange format, starting on the last page and moving backwards through the book. Harri often wondered why they didn't print the word backwards as well.
On the day that the family was to visit Hypotenuse Square, Mama Weasel tucked everyone onto a giant oriental carpet, tucked thermoses and sandwiches about them, and sewed them down with heavy carpet thread. Harri tried to make sure that he was positioned next to Gingerly, but in one of those odd last minute shuffles he found himself pinned between Run and Run's two twin brothers.
"A grand day for flying, isn't it?" shouted Gorge as the carpet took off. It caught a thermal, swooped skywards, then plummeted to catch the next thermal.
"Oh, yeah, you'll probably want this!" shouted Fed as he pushed a plastic bucket into Harri's hands. "It's for carpet sickness."
"I don't feel sick!" Harri shouted back.
"It's for Run!" Gorge shouted. "Hey -- did I tell you what I had at the party last night?"
"No, what?" Fed screamed back, well over the whistling wind.
"About five pints of beer, a fried steak, a kidney pie, a few cakes, half a haggis....."
The carpet swooped down. With a groan Run grabbed for the bucket.
#
"Green suits you," Harri commented when the carpet finally landed in the central coutr of Hypotenuse Square.
Run only mumbled incoherently and shoved the bucket away from himself. He closed his eyes limply and collapsed back onto the carpet.
Harri looked up into Mama Weasel's eyes. She grinned dismissively and said, "Don't worry about him, dear. He'll feel better when he's had a little fresh air.
Harri glanced back at the carpet and wondered if a little fresh air hadn't been the cause of Run's problems.
"Harri! Run!" A figure was barreling across the square towards them: Herman, the third member of their close trio. Harri and Run had been shocked the first time they saw Herman outside of the school, here in Hypotenuse Square, though it had solved a great mystery, which was why Herman never came back to the dorm with them. It also illustrated just how much the voluminous school robes hid things. For they learned that their close bosom buddy was in fact a _girl._ One of the enemy. The opposite sex, in every sense of the word.
Then and there the two boys made an unspoken pact, to never reveal the truth to their good friend. If she could pretend she was a boy, they would too. Though when she showed up here in the square in a mini-skirt and makeup, it was harder than usual to pretend.
"I'm glad you're finally here. " The words came out in a rush. "I've been waiting forever. And -- oh, Run, are you all right?
She knelt to throw her arms around Run. He recovered immediately, scrambled to his feet, and punched her heartily on the arm. "Good to see you too, Herm."
"Yes. Lets' go get our books, shall we? I can't wait to start reading for my classes."
"How about some lunch first?" Harri suggested.
Green returned to Run's face. "Books first, I think. Then maybe lunch."
The three started to walk across the Square. "Meet us at Boil and Bubble for supper!" Mama Weasel called after them.
"While I was waiting for you, I noticed the oddest thing about the buildings here." Herman started all her conversations at a breathless tilt, as if afraid that her companions might run off in mid-sentence. Probably from experience. "Look at the buildings on the short side of the street. Now look at the buildings on the perpendicular side If you add them together...."
"You get sixteen buildings." Run announced proudly.
"Well, yes, but I meant add together the area of the buildings. See, the ones on the short side are, well, short. The ones on the perpendicular side are a bit larger. But the ones on the slanted side..."
But when Harri looked to the slanted side, he saw something which made him forget everything that Herman was saying. "What's _he_ doing here?"
It was Snipe, in discussion with a rather odd person dressed in red pajamas. It wasn't so much the long white hair which cascaded down his back which made him odd, or the pert pointed canine ears. It was that he was barefoot in the middle of a typical London street. Just the sight of that made Harri want to go and wash his feet.
"Here, let me try this new spell I learned," Herman said excitedly. She pulled out her wand and made a series of grandiose gestures, like an overexcited conductor leading a giant orchestra. "It's the Distance Ear Spell. You can listen in on far away conversations, and no one knows you are doing it."
Harri noticed that most of the people who had stopped to watch Herman no longer were talking to each other, only making furtive gestures. But Snipe, apparently, had not noticed the act, and his voice echoed in a nasally snarl around them.
"Yes, I'm sure you are well-qualified for the job, as long as news of your monthly affliction does not reach the student body."
"Blimey!" Run exclaimed. "That's the new Dark Arts teacher!"
Both Snipe and the man in red pajamas started and turn to face the trio.
"Er," Herman said as she preformed another quick maneuver with her wand. "I forgot to tell you that the spell works both ways, and you need to be very quiet while doing it."
Snipe started to stalk their way. The three of them backed up slowly.
"Have a care, will you?" called a cockney voice behind and below them.
Harri looked down to see an elderly man kneeling on the pavement, a stick of colored chalk in his hand. He was shooing them off of a landscape he had created on the pavement, a countryside with a road running through a field and off into a copse of trees. In the field was drawn a small streetside fair, with rides and races and a vendor selling cotton candy. As he repaired the place where Herman's shoe had scuffed the sky, the chalk-drawn fair came to life in a swirl of music and movement. A child laughed, and a breeze of clean air swept up from the picture.
"What's this?" Run asked.
"Oh, just a little fancy to help an old man pass the time. I've a whole set, you see." And he pointed down a row of pictures, which included one of the high mountains where a goatherd could be heard yodeling, and a seashore where mermaids sunned themselves on rocks, and a frozen wasteland where black and white birds waddled about looking important.
"There's so real!" Herman cried. "Almost as if I could walk right into them."
"I suppose you could," the old man said with a wink, as a bird waddled out of the wasteland and hopped over to the countryside scene. As Harri watched, the bird waddled down the road and toward the fair. "And if you be enjoying them, perhaps it would be most fair if you let Old Bert know in a solid sort of way."
He slapped his hat on the ground and looked up at the three.
Harri dug into his pocket and examined what he had. "Er, could you use a couple of arcade tokens I stole off my cousin?"
"What are you doing?" snapped a churlish voice above them. It was Snipe, glowing as he stood there with his arms crossed.
"Er," Harri started to explain, then realized that his teacher was glaring at the old man, not at the students.
"Just trying to get by," Old Bert said in a suddenly wheezy voice. "Maybe get a bite of bread for my supper, a thimbleful for my pipe, and a wee drop for my throat. I'm an old man, and there's no chimneys for old men to clean."
"You have more than enough to keep you comfortable," Snipe snarled.
"Oh, I never could put away a cent of my own," the old man wheezed. "Always got just enough to get by, and there's not enough of that any more."
Harri looked sadly at the arcade tokens. They'd do the old man no good.
"Grandmother left you her fortune," Snipe said. "You're well taken care of, if only you'd quit wandering away."
"Oh, that's money for my old age!" Old Bert cried. "I can't touch that!"
"All rrrright, me boys, on the count a' three!" squeaked a very tiny Scottish burr from the end of the row of pictures. A couple dozen miniature men, with blue skin and orange hair, were clustered around the picture of the seashore. As Harri watched, they lifted the chalk image from the ground and rolled it up.
"Bugger off!" shouted Old Bert, swatting at them with his hat.
Ignoring him and carrying the picture like a long piece of carpet, the miniature men jumped into the treeless hills covered with soft green grass and softer white sheep.
"They just stole that picture!" Run exclaimed.
"Eh, they'll steal anything which ain't nailed down, and half of what is," Old Bert sighed. "Come out ever' time I does that scene, they does."
"Then why do you draw that scene?" Herman asked.
"Cuz I'm an artist, and that's whut an artist does," he replied proudly. "And now, perhaps if you could see your way to half a kidney pie for an old man whose not had his breakfast, nor his lunch, and tea isn't looking so good, either."
Snipe grabbed the old man by his shoulder and hauled him roughly to his feet. "Off to the Boil and Bubble for Fish and Chips, Grampa," he snarled. "Then it's back to the home for you!"
As they went off, the trio stared after them. "Amazing," Herman said at last. "You never think of your teachers as having parents and grandparents."
"I always thought Snipe was hatched," Run added. "From an egg laid by a rooster."
"Excuse me," spoke a voice behind them. Harri turned around to see a little girl, barely old enough to enter Pigpimples. She wore huge black boots. Behind her were three witches, all in black, all with tall pointy hats, all wearing huge clunky boots. One was young and very wide, one was elderly, squat, and wrinkled like a prune, and one was tall and proud as a broomstick, her grey tucked sternly into place and not daring enough to let even one wisp loose. Harri wondered if the head of his house, Dame McDonagle, had a sister.
"Are you one of the new students?" Herm began breathlessly. "You really will enjoy it there, it is the best school, I know all the really good places to buy your books, and you ought to get the best wand you can buy..."
"I'm learning at home," the girl said shortly. "I only wanted to ask if you've seen some friends of mine."
"Er, what do they look like?"
"Orange-red hair, lots of tattoos, and they wear kilts."
"Are they short?" Harri held his hands six inches apart.
"A little," the girl agreed. "Though they prefer vertically challanged. It was the toad's idea."
Run pointed to the empty space on the pavement. "There were some tiny men who stole one of Old Bert's paintings. They jumped in that picture."
"That would be them," the girl sighed. "If you see them around again, please let me know."
"And check you purses," cackled the squat, wrinkled witch.
"And your socks," added the fat witch.
"And anything else you came into the world with," stated the tall witch. "Come along, Tiffiney. Breakfast is waiting."
#
Later that day, after they had bought their books, their quills, their potion supplies, and a vast amount of medicinal chocolate, the three joined the rest of the Weasels at the Boil and Bubble. Harri was picking at his catchall soup, which changed colors and in which random objects floated and sank. He jabbed something which looked like an eyeball in the purple-red liquid, but when it floated back up the soup was green and it looked like a Brussel sprout.
And eye ball would have been better, he mused, jabbing it again.
Run was plowing his way through a huge pile of fish of chips, which he had ordered from the exotic and foreign foods menu. Herm had only a green salad, topped with a little egg, a little bacon, and a little cheese, and two croutons. She had also doused it with something which resembled salad dressing, but the fine print on the bottle read, "Hair Growth Potion." That would certainly help her disguise, he thought approvingly as a dark shadow appeared on her chin.
Run paused to breathe. "Amazing, isn't it, running into Snipe and the new Dark Arts teacher here."
Harri shivered. "Disturbing, more like."
"Why do you say that?"
"Think about it. If that old man is Snipe's grandfather, then he must have a mother somewhere. Someone who gave birth to him, fed him, changed his diapers..."
"He must have been hatched," Herm announced. "Excuse me, I'll be right back."
She left the table, and headed in the direction of the washroom. A minute later, her screams echoed through the inn while Fed and Gorge laughed.
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Helen E. Davis