If you were to be standing in Professor Minerva McGonagall’s office, you might have thought it was completely empty. Well, apart from the desk, chairs, and other various things a professor would have in their office. What I meant to say is that you might have thought that there was no other living creature in that room with you. However, if you were to walk over to the desk and look underneath it, you’d see a rat lying there, with its namesake, a worm-like tail, coiled beneath it. Wormtail. He had many other names, but it was this one he went by the most, partly because he spent most of his time as a rat with a worm-like tail, but mainly because ‘Rat Man’ was a stupid name.
Wormtail was asleep, so he wouldn’t have noticed if you were peering under the desk, staring at him. However, you’re not in Minerva McGonagall’s office (and I doubt you ever will be), and neither is anyone else, for that matter. Apart from Wormtail, of course.
Voices woke Wormtail from his deep sleep, and he opened his drowsily to look around him. When he’d first entered the office, leaving Mrs. Norris behind, it had been late at night, so he hadn’t been able to see anything. He’d spent his first few minutes in the office walking into things and banging his head. Now, though, day had dawned and thanks to the shafts of sunlight streaming in through the windows, he could see what was in the office with him. The wooden desk, towering high above him, was studded with ancient balls of chewed chewing gum, possibly chewed by McGonagall herself, or perhaps one of her predecessors. That didn’t really matter, though. Wormtail poked his head out and looked around the rest of the room. It was rather plain, apart from a tartan rug in the middle of the stone floor, and a tartan rug on the tall chair. A bookcase crouched in the far corner of the room, laden with spell books and dictionaries. There was a fireplace on the other side of the room, filled with logs, ash, and a few scraps of burnt paper. The rest of the room was empty. Wormtail sighed and tried to focus on the voices that had rudely awoken him from his sleep. They seemed to be coming from the corridor, on the other side of the door.
“So you have no idea where Albus has gone?” asked a man’s voice. Wormtail recognised it “ Severus Snape.
“No, Severus. I’ve told you about ten times already. Just go away and leave me alone,” a woman’s voice replied, with a Scottish accent.
There was the sound of someone putting a key in the lock and turning it, but before they managed to open the door, there was another question. “Did you know Rubeus has disappeared?”
“Pardon?”
“I said, ‘did you know Rubeus has disappeared?’ I went round to his hut yesterday evening, and there was nobody there, apart from his dog.”
“Why on earth did you go to visit Rubeus, Severus? You’ve never been particularly friendly to him before.”
There was silence for a short while, as Severus tried to think up a suitable answer. “That’s exactly why I went,” he replied at last. “To make friends with him.”
“Really. I think you just wanted to question him, see if he knows where Dumbledore went. Are you upset that Albus never told you where he was going?”
A gasp. “So you know where he is?”
“No, he didn’t tell me. And I’m not that bothered really. He can cope by himself. Or with Hagrid, if that’s where Hagrid went. They’ll come back Severus, don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”
Finally, the door creaked open. Wormtail shrank back underneath the desk as it did so, and someone swept into the office. From his hiding place, Wormtail could only see their feet, and the bottom of a long tartan cloak. McGonagall, Wormtail guessed. Snape never wore tartan “ it didn’t go with his eyes.
“Now go away, Severus. I’m sure you have much more important things to do than interrogate me. Like drinking blood, for example.”
Snape growled and stomped off, shouting back to McGonagall, “I’m not a vampire!”
“Sure,” McGonagall muttered to herself. “We all believe you.”
The Transfiguration Professor made her way over to her desk and stopped in front of it in silence. After a few moments, Wormtail heard her pick up something, shortly followed by the sounds of eating. Puzzled, Wormtail poked his head out and looked up at McGonagall. In her hands was a tartan biscuit tin. McGonagall was taking shortbread biscuits out of it and stuffing them into her mouth. Eventually, she stopped gorging herself and put the lid back on the tin. She leaned back against the desk and stared at the fireplace for a few minutes with the tin still in her hands, lost in thought. Wormtail crept out more now, staring up at McGonagall. Suddenly, she turned round. Wormtail froze, hoping she wouldn’t glance down and see him.
Unfortunately for Wormtail, she did.
McGonagall screamed, and dropped the tin. Wormtail sprang away moments before the tin hit the ground and burst open, sending shortbread biscuits flying all over the room. Meanwhile, Professor McGonagall had jumped onto her desk and was staring at Wormtail, trembling.
She obviously didn’t like the look of him. Wormtail looked up at her one more time and winked before scurrying over to the bookcase in the corner of the room, and hiding under it.
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Two hours later, Wormtail was still hiding underneath the bookcase. As soon as he’d gone under there, McGonagall had climbed off her desk, straightened her cloak, and walked out of the room, locking the door behind her. While he waited for her to come back, Wormtail had found an old, dust-covered biscuit and a piece of shortbread, and had eaten them while he sat there. McGonagall arrived just after he’d licked the last crumb off the floor, with a basket full of some strange devices made out of wood and metal. It was only after she’d put them all on the floor, in a big semi-circle around the bookcase, that Wormtail realised what they were.
Mousetraps.
Wormtail smirked. She obviously hadn’t realised that he was a rat, not a mouse. The smirk faded, though, when he realised that they could still kill him, even if he wasn’t a mouse. And he couldn’t just crawl out into the open, turn back into a human, and walk out without blowing his cover. He was supposed to spy, not die. He had to get out of there, without McGonagall seeing him, and preferably without dying.
He poked his head out from under the bookcase. McGonagall was perched on the edge of her desk, her legs folded beneath her, and a tennis racquet clutched in her hands. Wormtail gulped and quickly withdrew his head. He knew that the racquet would be for him if he managed to get past the row of mouse traps.
Suddenly, an idea occurred to Wormtail, and he turned round. Everyone knew that there were holes in skirting boards. There had to be, for any rats or mice that needed them, to escape. And lo and behold, there was one, a dark opening in the skirting board, like a wooden cavern. He glanced back over his furry shoulder at the mouse traps, and crept into the hole.
There was a faint light on the other side of the skirting board, although Wormtail couldn’t see where it was coming from. It was completely silent, apart from the occasional sound of water dripping. Wormtail looked left and right, but there didn’t seem to be any way of getting out of the narrow space. The only way out was straight up, he realised, looking up. He couldn’t see the roof, although he supposed that he’d be able to escape once he got up there, make his way through the rafters to some other room where he could climb down safely.
Wormtail climbed up onto a nearby water pipe, and then jumped up onto another, higher one. Soon, he was near the ceiling, and on one side of him, there was another hole in the wall. He had no idea where it led, but he had to try it, to see where he ended up. Wormtail took a deep breath, and crawled through the hole. When he saw where he was, he groaned.
He was back in McGonagall’s office, up by the ceiling. McGonagall herself was below him, still sitting on her desk and staring at the foot of the bookcase. Wormtail curled up on the narrow ledge he was on. She’d get bored soon, and leave. Besides, she was a teacher. She must have more important things to do than sit on her desk all day, like teach.
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Far away, in another part of Hogwarts, the Transfiguration classroom was full of children, waiting to learn something. They were all sitting at their desks, their parchment and books in front of them, staring quietly at the front of the classroom.
“I wonder where McGonagall is,” Harry muttered.
“Search me,” Ron replied, his head on the desk. “Wake me up when she comes.”