Chapter Two: A Hoggy, Wartsy Happening
Harry Potter had taken the world by storm.
“Ha!” said Happy O’Brien to Jackie, his assistant, and their crack team of anonymous authors. “Harry Potter has taken the world by storm. What’s next on the agenda, Jackie?” Jackie pulled out his massive piece of butchers’ paper.
“Next we’re meant to write book two!” he explained. Everyone in the room looked at each other in confusion.
“A sequel?” asked one anonymous author. “But why? The world has already been taken by storm!”
“Ah, but you see,” Happy told her cleverly, “it’s only a category one storm. We need to throw a bigger storm than that.” He tapped his chin. “I see… a car…”
There was a scratching sound as every one of the anonymous authors wrote on their exercise books.
“What kind of car?” asked Jackie.
“A blue one,” said Happy. “And you know what else I see?”
“A bird?” asked an author.
“No!” snapped Happy.
“A plane?” asked another.
“No!” snapped Happy.
“Superman?” asked a third anonymous author.
“No, no, no, you dunderheads!” exclaimed Happy. “Far more original than that! I see… a giant snake.”
“What?” asked an author. “But what about Jurassic Park?”
“They were dinosaurs!” Happy growled. “I tell you, a giant snake that can kill people just by making eye contact with them is entirely, completely original!”
“But what about Medusa?” asked the same author, looking concerned.
“She was a gorgon, with snakes for hair,” explained Happy irritably, and glared at the author. Her eyes appeared to be brown…
Five minutes later, when the clearly non-anonymous author had been ejected, Happy returned.
“Come on, people,” he told everyone, “We need to name this giant snake! Harry Potter depends upon it!”
“How about ‘Sirius Black’?” suggested an author.
“No!” snapped Happy. “What a terrible name! Not to mention, it’s vaguely familiar!”
“How about ‘Mad-Eye, the Fatal’?” suggested another author. After a while, they all began to look the same.
“That’s terrible!” Happy told him. “Come on, people, focus! I want something with impact!”
“I’ve got it!” cried one of the authors. “How about ‘Basil’?”
“Perfect,” said Happy. “Have a 2% raise.”
With the fundamentals of the story started, Happy, Jackie, and the group of anonymous authors were able to work on the story. For one hundred and thirty days and one hundred and thirty nights, they drafted and drafted, each author writing one chapter each, until finally they had a masterpiece.
Due to the first-degree storm that had swept the world, it would be easy for Happy to get the book published. The problem was that, after all this drafting, he didn’t have any time to actually read the chapters, so he decided to pick a random one out to proof-read before he sent the manuscript to the publishers.
Chapter 12, A Hogsy, Wartsy Happening for Harried Harry and Ridiculous Ron
Harry Potter (who was no longer a little baby), and Ron Weasley, cried over their various grievances.
“Oh dear!” sobbed Harry. “Our best friend whose little nose is just like my little nose has been petrified, and is now in the hospital wing!”
“Oh my!” Ron wailed. “And she was the only one in the school who was smart enough to solve this deadly mystery!”
“Oh, flobberworm!” Harry moaned, and dropped to his knees in misery. “We’re both complete failures! There is no hope.”
“Oh goodness!” agreed Ron with a sniff, “I’m an even bigger failure than you, because I’m comically afraid of spiders, our only clue left by our half-giant friend, Hagrid!”
It was at this moment, however, that Harry suddenly had an idea. He jumped to his feet.
“Stop your pathetic crying, Ron. I have an idea.” Ron stopped his pathetic crying, almost instantly.
“Really?” he asked, a small amount of hope shining through his pathetic tears.
“Yes,” said Harry. But before he got a chance to explain properly, voices became audible, from the direction of the castle.
“I’m telling you, Minerva, he’ll be back in a jiffy!” someone was comforting tearfully. It seemed it was a sad night for everyone.
“You’re probably right, Pomona,” McGonagall’s distinctive voice replied. “I just hope the Headmaster left some clue in Hagrid’s hut before he was suspended.”
“They’re heading this way!” warned Ron, stating the obvious.
“Yes,” said Harry. “Quick, my comically arachnophobia-challenged friend, the dark forest will be a good place to hide. Under the invisibility cloak!” Ron nodded, and the two of them ran for the forest, invisible. When they were safely behind a tree, they stopped for a moment.
“What’s your brilliant idea, Harry?” asked Ron.
“Well,” Harry explained carefully, “when you said you were comically afraid of spiders, I remembered: Hagrid’s clue! Follow the spiders!”
“Yeah…” said Ron, not cottoning on.
“So I thought: let’s try following it!” Harry finished excitedly.
Ron didn’t have time to ponder the irony or terror that this induced, as Harry quickly set off into the forest, following a thin trail of creepily controlled spiders.
“Well, at least they’re only tiny spiders,” said Ron, whose pathetic crying was threatening to return.
“Yeah, right,” agreed Harry, who, by looking ahead, could see they had just run into a magnificently huge spider, with thighs as thick as dinner plates and shins as thick as desert bowls. “Just keep looking directly at the ground, okay?” Ron nodded dismally.
“My children,” erupted a voice, as if from the bowels of the very Earth itself. “What morsels have you brought for our feast?” Several giant spiders dropped from the trees.
“Err-” said one of the spiders, and then spotted Harry and Ron. “Oh “ humans!”
“Is it Hagrid?” demanded the massive spider.
“Not by the looks of them,” replied the spider, self-acclaimed to be one of this enormous spider’s ‘children’.
“Oh, hear me, hear me, giant and terrifying spider!” Harry proclaimed. Ron quivered in his socks, glad he was not looking.
“I can hear you, stupid child!” the spider told him.
“Your other spiders didn’t bring us! We wandered onto your dinner table of our own accord!” Harry had felt it necessary to clear that up.
“In that case,” said the giant spider, “I will talk to you two for a while, before I eat you horribly and allow my to children fight over your remains.”
Ron had reached the end of his tether.
“Is that pathetic crying I hear?” demanded the giant spider.
“Yes, Mr Giant Spider Sir,” whimpered Ron. “I am comically afraid of spiders!”
“Well then,” said the giant spider. “Don’t think of us as spiders. Think of us as huge beasts “ Acromantula, if you like. And you may refer to me as Aragog.”
“That’s fair,” said Ron, and stopped his pathetic crying.
“NOW!” bellowed Aragog. Harry and Ron jumped. “What brings you to my lair, or as you so rightly put it, my dinner table?”
“We were following a clue left by Hagrid,” explained Harry. “He said to follow the spiders.”
“So we did,” Ron finished, unnecessarily.
“I see. Hagrid, eh?” confirmed Aragog. Both boys nodded earnestly.
“They nodded earnestly, Aragog,” explained one of the other large spiders.
It was at this point that Harry realised that the spider’s eyes were milky white.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” asked Harry. “Are you blind?”
“No,” said Aragog. “They are just shut. That is the colour of my eyelids.”
Ron and Harry looked at each other oddly, but did not ask any more questions about Aragog’s eyes.
“NOW!” bellowed Aragog again. Harry and Ron jumped. “You haven’t answered my question properly! What do you want from me and my giant horde of deadly spiders?!”
Ron whimpered.
“Sorry, I meant deadly baby Acromantula,” he corrected himself.
“There is some pretty creepy stuff happening in the school!” Harry explained in a big voice, as bravely as he could. “Some creepy messages, and Myrtle’s acting really weird! They say the Chamber of Secrets has been opened!”
All around the ‘dinner table’, Acromantula gasped.
“And we wanted to know,” Harry went on, “was it you who was doing this stuff?”
“NO!” shouted Aragog. Harry and Ron jumped. “It was a creature that spiders and Acromantula fear above all others.”
“Are you sure?” asked Ron feebly.
“YES!” The boys jumped again. “And I’ll tell you what,” said Aragog, “I’ll strike you a deal. I’ll only eat one of you, and if the other goes back to the school and kills the creature, I’ll send my children to eat a person of your bidding.”
“Really?” asked Harry, considering the deal.
“Yes,” Aragog agreed. “But not Dumbledore. Last time I tried that… it didn’t end well.” He indicated his closed eyes with a massive leg. “And not Snape, either. I doubt he contains a shred of nutrition.”
“Snap…” muttered Harry and Ron.
“Is there any other choice?” asked Harry.
“Yes,” said Aragog again. “I will allow my children to eat both of you, and then we will go after TEN people of your choosing!”
“Really?” asked Harry, now considering very seriously.
“YES, YOU FOOLS!” bellowed Aragog. “I mean what I say! Oh,” he added as an after-thought. “But not Voldemort. Much too bony, that would be like eating a cockroach…”
As the boys considered their options, and their fates (especially Ron’s) became dimmer and dimmer, all of a sudden a rumbling emitted from the bowels of the forest.
“My children, something is coming out from the bowels of the forest!” Aragog warned.
The boys hadn’t noticed.
“Goodbye, Ron,” said Harry. “I’m sorry I’m leaving you to be eaten by the Acromantula, but my life is just more important.”
“I understand, Harry,” said Ron, as any loyal friend would, and he began to cry pathetically, as any spider-bait would.
However, the Acromantula were all shrinking back in dismay as a light blue car drove recklessly into clearing… without indicating.
“They’re going to get away!” sighed several hungry spiders, disappointedly.
“WAIT!” bellowed Aragog. Harry and Ron jumped. “Before you go. Be sure to check out the bathroom. That was where the accursed beast killed its last prey. If I can’t eat you, I can at least make sure you destroy my greatest enemy.”
Harry and Ron gave Aragog the thumbs up (and then another finger up) out the back window as the blue Ford Anglia drove them safely to freedom.
Happy scratched his chin as the anonymous author responsible for the chapter looked on nervously.
“Pure genius!” Happy exclaimed. “Positively corking! I cannot believe my own intelligence.”
He stuck the manuscript into an envelope, smirking at his own wit. But then, something massively important occurred to him. Something that could determine the fate of the publication.
“What should we call it?” he asked, pen hovering over the ‘subject’ line of the postal envelope.
“’H-Harry Potter 2’?” suggested an author, obviously realising the importance of the question.
“Don’t be ridiculous! Who would buy something like that?” Happy sighed. “Come on, people, it’s the last decision for this book!”
“How about, ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’?” suggested another author.
“No!” snapped Happy. “Completely irrelevant. But someone write that down somewhere. It has a certain ring to it.”
“Ooh, what about ‘Harry Potter and Ridiculous Ron?” suggested Jackie excitedly. Happy just shook his head.
“I’ve got it! ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’!” exclaimed one of the anonymous authors.
“Well… it’s completely irrelevant…” Happy considered, “but I really would like to break for tea. ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ it is!”
Once again, things are not going young Harry’s way. He’s stuck with the Dursleys again, and what’s worse, no one cares about him!
Following on from the first Harry Potter book, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’, ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ is a thrilling tale of friendship and enmity, good and evil. As, once again, Harry is confronted with inner and outer demons, this year is bound to be packed with adventure.
This is a fantastic book, to be enjoyed by anyone not afraid of spiders or snakes.
And here ends A Hoggy, Wartsy Happening.
Please, join us next time for the third chapter in this series, Chapter Three: The Furry Teacher