Unraveling the Tale
- "Imp Bells!" she said brightly as everyone looked at her funny. "Oh come now, they're really fascinating creatures." -
“Let’s see… first is Herbology out in the greenhouses, next Potions and, to our luck, it’s with the Slytherins! They just seem to love us, don’t they?” Rachael, Remus, and Sirius were sitting in the Great Hall listening to James read the schedule. “After potions is Transfiguration, then Defence Against the Dark Arts, Charms, lunch and finally, History of Magic.”
“I heard Binns is such a boring teacher,” Rachael said as she began piling bacon onto her plate. “Least that’s what I heard a couple of fifth years saying.”
They began eating their breakfast when the boy named Peter Pettigrew came over to them. “Can I see your schedule?” he asked politely. “McGonagall never gave me mine.”
James handed it to him. Peter muttered a quick thank you and sat down besides Remus so he could read it. Lily was talking to Alice Gordon and Rachael was sitting with her brother, James and Sirius. They were all looking forward to the first day of classes, eager to learn some magic. Rachael and Remus were really looking forward to Defence Against the Dark Arts; they wanted to see their dad teach. The bell to signal the beginning of class rang and they hurried out of the building down to the greenhouses, where all of the Gryffindors were gathering with the Ravenclaw first years into greenhouse one.
The professor, Professor Sprout, was a squat little witch who was beaming at them through the dirt on her face. She gestured for them to follow her into the greenhouse. It was terribly warm and cluttered with all different plants, some moving, some snapping, and some just sitting there looking bored. They saw a long row of tables and for each three places was a small plant. They were small, human like creatures, much like the Mandrake plants, but much uglier. They were scrawny, skeleton like, fanged, dirt covered and their eyes were squinted and mouths wide open. All of the students looked at them disgusted, but Professor Sprout looked at them quite adoringly.
“Imp Bells!” she said brightly as everyone looked at her funny. “Oh come now, they’re really fascinating creatures.”
“Fascinating, yes,” said a Ravenclaw whom Rachael recognised as Alex Anderson. “But ugly!”
The students snorted. They looked up at the teacher, expecting to see her looking a little disconcerted but, luckily, she was smiling. She cleared her throat and walked over to her Imp Bell. Rachael wondered why the word “bell” was included in the name, then she saw that the head was shaped much like an upside down bell. The head was a sort of cone with eyes, a nose and a mouth. She picked hers up, with extreme caution, and held its bottom in her right hand and its neck in her left.
“Now, I should warn you all,” she began sternly, trying to keep her Imp Bell still, as it was fidgeting wildly, “Imp Bells are not the nicest creatures; you don’t want to go doing something wrong. See the fangs?” She indicated the sharp fangs protruding from the plants mouth and going past its chin. “If you do something wrong you will become acquainted with them. So, they are very hungry, which is why you want to be cautious and it will be your task to feed them.” There was a loud groan from the class. “Oh, don’t be upset they are very good when being fed. Now to feed them you need to take the worms there in the pot.”
All the students looked towards the tables and saw several clay pots filled to the top with wriggling worms. “You will feed them the worms for the entire class. They aren’t easily full, so it will take time. Now I will break you up into pairs of threes.”
Professor Sprout began shuffling through students, pulling them apart and sticking them with someone else and then finding three students standing by each other and naming them a trio. She went over to Rachael, who was standing next to Remus and Alex Anderson, and made them a trio. They walked over to a particularly calm looking Imp Bell, pulled on their dragon skin gloves and began to feed them.
“These things are nasty,” Rachael muttered as she held a handful of worms in her hand. She took one and dropped it into the Bell’s mouth. The Bell’s eyes swiveled up to her and it spit the worm in her face. Wiping worm guts off her face, Rachael looked around at the rest of the class to make sure they hadn’t noticed. Remus and Alex were talking quietly as they fed the Imp Bell, who was behaving for them at least. They seemed to be talking about the Defence Against the Dark Arts class.
“I hear that the first years don’t do anything except learn about the creatures and stuff,” Alex was saying.
“Well, maybe they’ll let us do something,” Remus added, wiping slime off his hands.
“Well, can’t you ask your dad about that? He is the professor, after all.”
“My dad can’t do that. It’s just his job; he doesn’t make up what we learn.”
They stopped discussing that topic.
Now when most think of worms their stomachs cringe, but feeding worms to a creature that’s even more disgusting makes worms seem almost like a delicacy. The Imp Bells wailed and cried every time their mouths were forced open so they could be fed. They smelled like Dragon Dung and were just a murder to look at.
Peter Pettigrew’s Imp Bell tipped the pot over and it fell to a floor with a smash and soil covered the greenhouse floor as the Bell made a break for the exit. All the students abandoned their own plants to go and chase it, but the Imp Bell was quicker. It soon had found its way onto the greenhouse roof and everyone tried jumping on top to get it back. All of the Ravenclaw students were too short, so the Gryffindors (who were slightly taller) tried to climb up. James attempted to give Sirius a leg up but it ended up that one of the worms had wriggled its way out of the greenhouse and crawled its way up James’s pants leg and he freaked out, dropping Sirius to the ground.
Lily and Alice tried finding a way to make the Bell levitate down to the ground, but they ended up setting the roof on fire and Professor Sprout had to rush to put the fire out. Finally, Rachael managed to lift Remus onto the roof and he brought the Bell down, only after it bit Remus’s hand and they had to bring him to the infirmary. Peter, as a punishment for being careless, had to feed all of the Imp Bells while the rest of the class spent their time outside. Rachael, Sirius and James accompanied Remus to the infirmary, where James and Sirius were startled to hear Madam Pomfrey (the school nurse) asking Remus if it was time yet.
“What’s she talking about?” James asked as they walked to the dungeons for potions. Madam Pomfrey had been able to cure Remus’s hand in a manner of a minute.
“N-nothing,” Remus said warily. “I dunno what she was talking about.”
Potions class could be put into a single word - torture. First off, the professor was rude, arrogant, slimy, horrible, and just about every other synonym you could find for mean. Professor Binstom, a hairy old man with no neck and small beady eyes, spent half the class lecturing them about the fine art of potion brewing, and then sprung a pop quiz on them, which all the Gryffindors were sure they had failed. Meanwhile, the Slytherins had gotten a heads up and learned about the quiz the night before and had time to study. After the quiz (which Professor Binstom had been kind enough to grade them in the blink of an eye and announced the Gryffindors’ horrible scores to the entire class) they started brewing a Shrinking Solution in which Rachael had been paired with Snape, where he purposely added extra daisy roots to her cauldron so it exploded in her face, making it break out in boils.
After another quick trip to the infirmary, they were off to Transfiguration, where they were thankful for a calm, uneventful period in which there wasn’t a disaster. Professor McGonagall gave them a strict talking to before handing them out a match which they were to turn into a needle. Of course they had to copy a whole board of the most puzzling notes they had ever seen in their life before they were actually able to attempt the transfiguring. By the end of class, several matches had disintegrated, some just stayed matches some rolled over on the desks and no one was able to get the match to change one bit. Professor McGonagall was displeased with the results, She had been hoping for at least one student to have some change in their match, and, as a result, she assigned them to practise for the night and she said she would know if they had practised or not.
Everyone had been looking forward to Defence Against the Dark Arts. They wanted to learn about warding off evil creatures, and hexes. They wanted to do practical assignments and experiment with actual live creatures. Who wouldn’t love a class like that? As it turned out - no one. Professor Lupin couldn’t give them any practical work to do because, being that they were only first years, none of the other professors wanted them to start with something that advanced.
Class started as thus,
“Okay we’ll start with role call,” Professor Lupin said, pulling out a sheet of parchment from his desk. “Sirius Black? Here, good. Lily Evans? Over there. Alice Gordon… oh, right there. Frank Longbottom, okay. Rachael Lupin, yes there you are. Remus Lupin, next to his sister. Peter Pettigrew, right there. Be careful with that desk, Mr. Pettigrew, the leg is a little wobbly. Lastly, James Potter. Okay we’re all here, then.” He folded the parchment into fours and placed it on his desk. “Welcome to first year Defence Against the Dark Arts. You guys are my second class today, first was a group of Slytherin sixth years, not fun. So we will be learning about the different magical creatures that roam our land. The whole year will be based on that and there are plenty to learn.
“We won’t be able work with them though. You won’t be doing that until third year, but we’ll make the best of it. Some of the ones we’ll be studying are Hinkypunks, Grindylows. We will go a bit into Boggarts, and werewolves.” His voice went very low and hesitant as he spoke werewolves and his eyes gently grazed past Remus. “Vampires, all that stuff. Now today we will be starting with Grindylows.”
They spent part of the period listening to Professor Lupin describe the Grindylows. He told them a tale about how, when he came to Hogwarts, his friends had dared him to dive into the lake and bring back the giant squid and, instead, a Grindylow brought him back. Then, after that, they were assigned work to do from their textbook.
Once class was dismissed, they all began to file out.
“Rachael,” Professor Lupin called. “Come here, please. Remus, would you tell Professor Flitwick she’ll be a little late?”
Remus nodded and walked out with his friends.
Rachael went up to her dad and he nodded for her to sit down. “Yes?” she said.
“Yesterday you said you wanted to talk to me.”
Rachael nodded, feeling slightly awkward. Here she was, sitting with her father, yet he was just asking as though she was just a student and not his daughter. “I did,” she answered quietly.
“What about?”
“Well, I was wondering, how’d you end up here? What happened to your job down in the Magical Menagerie?”
Her dad studied her for a while through his glasses, seemingly having difficulty trying to find the right words to say. Finally,
“Well, you knew how hard it was to get money from that job? I could hardly support you guys. I wouldn’t be as hard but it still would be. I worked there for a little longer, trying to raise enough money to raise myself and hopefully you.”
“So, you were trying to get me back?”
“Yes, I was. I suppose you thought I forgot all about you. I don’t blame you. The way your mother reacted, and having you put in that dreadful orphanage. You must’ve hated it there, being there with all those people that didn’t know why you were there, not even that one woman who was a witch.”
“You have no idea.” Rachael sunk back in her chair as she remembered her time at the orphanage.
“I also wanted to talk to you.”
“’Bout what?”
“About what happened that day in the forest? Why’d you go in there?”
“It was Remus’s idea. He said it was shortcut or something; it wasn’t my fault it happened! Everyone just says it was… I ran into a tree! I never saw anything! And here’s something I wanted to know… why did you let Mum just send me away like that?” Rachael didn’t know didn’t know what had come over her. It was an unexplainable rage. She had kept it inside her for so long; she had to let it out, and now was the time. “How come you didn’t stop her? You just gave in like that! You wouldn’t argue or anything-”
“I did!”
“Oh it really worked then, I still went there. I had to spend three years being bossed around by some snotty kid, getting yelled at by a bitter old woman who kept making me write lines on the blackboard. I haven’t had a decent happy birthday until this year when people actually remembered it was my birthday. I can’t count how many times I went into the infirmary. But no, just send the kid away to the orphanage where no one will understand her, where no one will accept her because she was disowned!”
“Rachel Michelle Lupin!” her father boomed. He was on his feet, with a fury blazing in his eyes. “Do you think I wanted to send you there? You think I wanted my daughter put somewhere like that? No, I didn’t! You have no right to assume I did! Now get out and get to class!”
Giving her father one last look, Rachael rushed out of the classroom and up to Charms where Professor Flitwick had the rest of the class writing notes about levitation. She slipped into the seat beside Lily and began copying the notes, though she was barely taking in what she was writing. Why had she blown up at her dad like that? She knew it wasn’t his fault, but no she had to blame him. She had to blame someone, but it wasn’t her dad.
Rachael remembered that day as sharp as anything, well everything after she ran into the tree. She remembered waking up in St. Mungo’s, listening to Dr. Griemer say that they didn’t know what was wrong with her brother. She remembered thinking he was dead. She recalled when she learned the truth, her mother yelling at her. Her mother... That was who should be blamed for all of this; no one could hold any more blame than her. Why had she reacted like that? Rachael had said she didn’t know what happened. Did her mother think she was lying? Thinking she had just tried to avoid getting into trouble? Remus had an excuse for her already. But still, Remus had only just woken up; he couldn’t have had the time to create an excuse. She was still blamed!
“Class,” Professor Flitwick said suddenly in his squeaky high-pitched voice. “Now that we have our notes copied we shall begin practising the Levitation Spell, which is, as you see on the board, Wingardium Leviosa. The movements are a simple swish and flick, you try now.”
Everyone picked up their wands, swishing them, flicking them, muttering the spell words, but still the feathers they had been given to practise with didn’t move. Rachael managed to get her feather a mere centimeter off her desk, but it fluttered back onto the desktop before Flitwick could notice.
Charms Class was dismissed and all the Gryffindor first years hurried down to the Great Hall. Rachael sat down with Lily and they began taking their lunch as it appeared on the golden platters on the table.
“So,” Rachael said. “All we have is History of Magic, right?” Lily nodded. Rachael fiddled around with her fork. “Herbology was interesting, wasn’t it?”
A smile flickered on Lily’s mouth. “Who knew me and Alice could set the greenhouse on fire?” she joked.
Now that the greenhouse was safe, the thought of nearly destroying it was near hilarious. Rachael looked towards the door and saw James, Sirius, Remus and, for some odd reason, Peter Pettigrew. As the boys walked by, James said a very dramatic, “hullo Lily,” but, to his disappointment, she didn’t even pay attention to him. Sirius and Peter followed James to the end of the table but Remus wanted to ask Rachael a question. He took the empty seat next to his sister.
“What’d Dad want to talk to you about?” he asked quietly. “I saw him in the hallway before and asked him, but he just said ‘the last thing I want to discuss is your sister.’”
Rachael looked quickly at Lily, who was watching them talk. She couldn’t say in front of Lily and she did look a bit suspicious. “I’ll tell you up in the common room,” she answered, looking apprehensively at Lily.
Remus nodded and muttered, “Now.”
“Oh, err, Lily I have to go up to the common room for a minute and give something to Remus. I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll come with you,” Lily volunteered.
“No, no that’s okay!” Rachael said quickly, holding her hand out to prevent Lily from following them. “You just stay here, we won’t be long.”
Looking slightly put off, and offended; Lily sat down, while Rachael and Remus made their way out of the Great Hall, through the Entrance Hall and all the way up to the Gryffindor Tower, where they saw the portrait to the Gryffindor common room, The Fat Lady, having tea with another unfamiliar portrait. They walked up to it and Remus said the password.
“Fairy Lights,” he said. They didn’t hear him; they just kept on going as though they weren’t there. “Fairy lights!” Remus said louder. Still they kept on talking. “FAIRY LIGHTS!”
The Fat Lady jumped in her portrait and turned around to look at who was making such a racket. She frowned at Remus. “Honestly, Mr. Lupin,” she said in a stiff, annoyed tone. “If you wanted to get in you could have asked nicely.”
Remus rolled his eyes as the portrait swung open and he and Rachael climbed in. They entered a deserted common room, no one seemed to be in there, but just to make sure Remus checked the boys’ dormitories and Rachael checked the girls’. Luckily they found no one that could possibly overhear them, except the Fat Lady, but they doubted she would even be able to hear.
They both took seats on the two armchairs near the crackling fire.
“So,” Remus said, “what’d Dad want to talk to you about?”
“Well,” Rachael began; she still was a bit angry at both her dad and herself about that conversation and didn’t want to tell it over. “Remember at the feast yesterday when I said I wanted to talk to dad?” Remus nodded. “Well, he wanted to know what I wanted to talk to him about.”
“And that would be…?”
“I just wanted to know how he ended up here. He said he worked at the Menagerie for a little more, trying to get money to get me back. Obviously it didn’t work, so I guess that’s how he ended up here. He never said really.”
Remus leaned back in his seat and nodded. “Okay, but why was he mad at you?”
“Because after that he said he needed to talk to me too. About what happened, you know, the day you were… bitten. I told him that you said we should go in the forest ‘because it would be quicker to get home. I said I saw nothing but then I got a little mad at dad, I don’t know why. I yelled at him saying that why didn’t he try to stop Mum from sending me to the orphanage. Dad got mad at me for yelling at him and, so, that’s about it.”
Remus didn’t say anything; he merely studied her, apparently trying to figure out what to say. He couldn’t blame his sister for being upset about the whole thing, who wouldn’t be? But still, she shouldn’t have yelled at their dad either. Remus knew he didn’t want her to go. If she had seen him when he got back from bringing her there, if she had seen him then….
She didn’t see him later that day either, the arguement their dad and mum had, before their dad left. Remus wasn’t supposed to be listening; he was supposed to be in his room, cleaning it up. But he had gone downstairs to look for his sneakers so he could put them away and avoid being yelled at about being careless and that one day someone would trip over them. He was at the foot of the stairs when he walked in on the arguement.
His parents had been putting the dinner dishes away, but then their dad brought up the subject of Rachael. He said that putting her in an orphanage wasn’t the solution to the problem, and that she didn’t cause the problem either. She hadn’t suggested going into the forest, she hadn’t been the one to see any of it happen. She didn’t see Remus get bitten. None of it was her fault, she was purely innocent. She shouldn’t have been blamed. He said when he found them both in the forest, both of them covered in blood, not moving, both looking dead; it was the worst day of his life. Neither of them should have been in there.
Rachael wasn’t to blame, she didn’t suggest going into the forest… Remus did.
Well when he said that, their mum, who had been silent the whole time, got to have her part in the conversation. She said (at the top of her voice) that he shouldn’t blame Remus. Remus wasn’t the one to blame; he was the one to suffer. It was all Rachael’s fault. Then, this was the worst part; Rachael was a terrible sister who should have been condemned to death for what she caused. No one, she repeated, no one would blame her son.
Well, that was the final straw for their dad. He didn’t even look at his wife when he said, “You evil woman… you… TALKING ABOUT YOUR DAUGHTER THAT WAY! SAYING SHE SHOULD DIE FOR SOMETHING SHE DIDN’T EVEN DO! IF ANYONE SHOULD DIE IT SHOULD BE YOU!” And with that, he stormed out of the house. Remus never saw him again.
After the arguement, Remus disappeared back into his room and sat there for hours with the conversation he had heard replaying in his head. Rachael wasn’t to blame, she didn’t suggest going into the forest… Remus did. He had said to go in there, he said it would be easier to get home through there. It wasn’t his sister’s fault… it was his. It was his fault they were in there. It was his fault they woke up in a hospital, his sister with a broken nose and two black eyes, him with something much worse. It was his fault his mum hated his sister; it was his fault he had to experience the worst of pain. It was his fault his sister went to an orphanage. It was his fault he was a werewolf. If anyone was to blame… it was him.
Remus told Rachael everything that had happened the day she left; it was hard for him, but he had to. Rachael listened quietly, nodding every so often, but never saying anything. Her face was blank, but he knew she was listening.
“So that’s what happened,” Remus finished.
“Mum said that?” she asked quietly, nearly to herself. “Mum said I should die? Well next time you talk to her, tell her she almost got what she wanted!”
“What?”
Rachael leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath.
It had been a week after her tenth birthday; classes in the orphanage had started up again. It had been a weeklong ridicule fest for Becky and her friends. Every day of the first week of school Becky and her friends would seek out Rachael, who took classes with different teachers than they did, and find ways to humiliate her. This year had been the worst. So far, she had been given a swirlie, locked in the utility closet for five hours and several other things. She couldn’t take it anymore.
She was walking down towards Ms. Marshall’s room, looking for something, something that would take care of all her problems. She didn’t care about what she going to do. As far as she was concerned, it would be much better than what she had to deal with, what she had dealt with already. It was just a way to get away from her problems for good. She crept stealthily into her personal instructor’s room, being careful not to make too much noise because she was sure Ms. Marshall or Becky were lurking somewhere close by and they would catch her.
She looked around the room and spotted a long wooden stick on the bureau. Of course it was a wooden stick to the unknowing, but Rachael knew what it was… it was a wand. She snuck over and gently picked the wand up. This was it, now or never, she had to do it. It would solve her problems forever. She held the wand to her heart, even though she didn’t need to.
“Avad-” she began but,
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Startled, Rachael dropped the wand and spun to the door. Ms. Marshall was standing there, wide-eyed, furious, but, for once in her life, looked worried. “What do you think you’re doing?” She ran over and snatched the wand off the floor. She was lost for words now, waiting for Rachael to respond, but Rachael’s eyes were locked on the wand. She wasn’t going to give up so easily.
“Give me the wand!” she shouted, making a swift grab for it but Ms. Marshall was quicker. Rachael didn’t know what came over her, she couldn’t control herself; she wanted the wand. She wanted to end it all. Ms. Marshall wouldn’t let her, despite how much she despised Rachael she couldn’t let her give in so easily. She took the wand and locked it in a special safe that only she could open and ran Rachael to the infirmary.
“Give me the wand!” Rachael kept saying over and over until her instructor had to clap her hand over Rachael’s mouth to keep people from hearing her. When they got there the nurse asked what was wrong and why Ms. Marshall looked so worried.
“She tried to kill herself!”
“I spent a month there,” Rachael said, now pacing up and down in front of the common room fire. “Everyone thought I was crazy, and they were right. I just couldn’t take it anymore, everyone hated me. Everyone wanted to do nothing to me but torture me and humiliate me! I just wanted to end it all. Now I realise how stupid I was, thinking that killing myself would end it all. It’d end it all for me, but not for everyone who actually cared about me. It would stay with them forever.”
“You tried to do that?” Remus said, now scared of his sister. Rachael nodded. “But… but that’s…” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It sounded nothing like the sister he had known three years ago. She had always been smart, logical, never one to do something so… so… drastic. And here she was, talking about it. “What’d the nurse say?”
“Nothing really. She just nodded, told me to get into one of the empty beds and told me to just go to sleep. She probably watched me the whole time to make sure I didn’t try it again… I was just so stupid!”
“You said you wouldn’t be long.”
Rachael and Remus turned to see Lily standing at the common room entrance. She looked relaxed but sounded annoyed.
Rachael had forgotten all about Lily. “Sorry… I… sorry I just got…err… caught up in telling my brother something.”
She smiled. “It’s alright. Come on we have History of Magic to get to.”
She nodded and they followed Lily out of the common room. As they were walking to class Rachael couldn’t help but feel a little bit better. It was good to finally tell someone that, despite how hard it was. She had never told anyone before and she just wondered, had I scared Remus? Well of course I did but… him telling her that her mum wanted her dead just made her realise that at one point she agreed with her.