The Marauder’s Map Begins
Much to Remus’s relief, Professor Finely made no further mention of his request. As a matter of fact, he continued to treat Remus just the same as any of his students “ with the utmost loathing. Strange as it seemed, the only student Finely did not seem to despise, outside of Slytherin, was Peter. No one could figure out why he had taken a liking to Peter. Peter was not doing well at all in class; he could not succeed in producing silent spells. None of the class really could perform the spells well, but he did the worst out of them. Twice already he had incapacitated Lily Evans in the Hospital Wing because his spells went haywire. Perhaps Finely enjoyed seeing the Muggle-born hurt and that was why he didn’t despise Peter. Peter also never brought anything interesting into the conversation, he had no new facts and only knew what his friends told him was going on in the world. None of the Gryffindors understood why Finely had taken to the mousy-haired boy.
Not that they truly cared. Peter was one less person to be tortured unfairly.
Sirius continued to receive mail from his family daily and he continued to burn the evidence every morning at breakfast in the Great Hall, only until Professor McGonagall caught him and asked that, if he must burn his mail, to do it outside. Sirius took the Transfiguration professor’s words to heart and he could be seen every day during break igniting multiple pieces of parchment in the courtyard. When asked why he was ignoring his parents, his answer was that he would stop ignoring them when they realised that he was not going to change his beliefs and they should stop trying to make him No one could argue with this. Sirius was right. His parents had very little say in what his beliefs were.
“I’m bored,” Sirius lamented one Saturday night in late September.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Remus muttered to himself before biting the head off of a Chocolate Frog.
Sirius turned around to face Remus, who was sitting above Sirius on his bed while Sirius leaned against it on the floor. His expression was indignant. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Remus sighed and looked down at Sirius with a tired look. “You’re always bored.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Sirius, we could be having an absolutely mental party and you would still say you were bored.”
Sirius’s eyes lit up at once. “Let’s have a party!”
James pointed to Peter’s alarm clock. The time was half past ten. “A little late for that, don’t you think? Lily would have our heads for waking half of Gryffindor up.”
Sirius scoffed. “I don’t think half the house is sleeping.” Sirius stood up and rounded on James, who was absentmindedly doodling little Snitches on a sheet of parchment. “Besides, when do you care about the wrath of Lily Evans?”
James sniffed irritably, keeping his eyes averted from his best friend. “I don’t.”
Peter shook his head doubtfully. “I dunno, James… Remember what happened second year?” Peter was, of course, referring to the incident in which Lily hexed James so he looked very much like an awkward woman. After that embarrassing situation, they would have thought James cared very much about the wrath of Lily Evans.
James sent Peter a dark look. “I’ve been doing my best to repress that, thank you, Wormtail.”
Sirius snorted loudly. “Why would you want to, Prongs? You made a pretty girl.”
James ripped the pillow off his bed and chucked it at Sirius, who caught it just short of it missing his face. “Stuff it, Padfoot.”
Sirius tossed the pillow back at James and continued his pacing. Quite suddenly, he stopped. He looked around at his three friends with a look of the utmost determination. “We’re going to wander aimlessly around the castle!” he declared loudly, causing Frank Longbottom, who was trying to sleep, to tell him to shut up.
“Why?” Peter asked.
“Because I’m bored, for Merlin’s sake!” Sirius walked around to the foot of James’s bed, and flipped the lid of James’s trunk open. Lying under James’s Potions textbook was his Invisibility Cloak. He tossed the cloak at the messy-haired boy. “Get up, Potter! On your feet! Move it!”
James shrugged and stood up, tossing the Invisibility Cloak over himself and Sirius. He recognised defeat when he saw it and he was not exactly reluctant to sneak around the castle after curfew. His disembodied voice then said to Remus and Peter, “Let’s go, you two.”
Remus and Peter exchanged uncertain glances before joining James and Sirius under the cloak. They crept out of the dormitory and down through the common room that was sparsely littered with late night stragglers who were trying to finish their homework or else were just not tired yet. The boys waited for a few moments, making sure no one was looking in the direction of the portrait hole entrance, before pushing the portrait aside and stepping out into the darkened Gryffindor Tower corridor.
There was no sign of Mr. Filch or his nasty cat, Mrs. Norris, as they boys walked cautiously down the blackened passageways, lit only by the orange glow of the torches lining the walls. They had to crouch forward under the cloak so it could cover their feet. James and Sirius had grown so tall that they were almost too big to fit under it. The boys had no idea of where they were going; they were doing exactly what Sirius had intended “ wandering aimlessly. They had no destination at all, so they simply allowed themselves to go wherever their feet decided to carry them.
Within minutes they found themselves walking along the third floor corridor near some of the unused classrooms.
“Hold on,” Sirius hissed, stopping short. The other boys, not expecting this, stumbled forward, pulling the Invisibility Cloak off of Sirius as they stumbled to the floor. Now on the floor, the torsos of James, Remus and Peter were invisible, as the cloak was sprawled across them. James yanked the cloak off him, Remus and Peter and picked himself up, extending a hand to help Remus up. Sirius waited until the three were completely on their feet before revealing the reason why he had stopped. “We need a plan.”
“You were the one who suggested wandering aimlessly,” James pointed out impatiently, stuffing the cloak inside his pocket.
Sirius frowned and walked towards a statue of a one-eyed witch. He leaned against it, rubbing his chin as he tried formulating a plan. James turned to Remus and Peter, shaking his head sadly. Trust Sirius to lead them out on a trek that was supposed to have no cause and then proclaim that they needed a plan. The three boys wheeled around when they heard Sirius let out a yell of surprise. He had stumbled backwards, almost losing his balance, but managing to keep his footing. The statue he was leaning against had slid backwards.
“Bloody hell!” Sirius exclaimed. When he was sure he was not going to fall backwards, he spun around to see what had happened. What he saw shocked him. Where the statue had once been standing was a black hole. Sirius whipped out his wand and said, “Lumos!” With the orange glow of his wand, he was able to see that he had uncovered a passageway. There was a tunnel under the old witch’s hump. His face broke into a broad, mischievous grin and his excited eyes darted to his friends. “I think I’ve found our plan.”
“Ow!”
“What happened?”
“I hit my head on something.”
“Good, maybe it’ll knock your brains loose.”
Sirius grumbled under his breath at the insult to his intelligence and rubbed the top of his throbbing head. He took a step back and brought the light of his wand up to see just what exactly he had hit his head on.
The four boys had been walking for what felt like hours down the long tunnel Sirius had discovered. In reality, they knew the walk had only last about a half hour, possibly an hour at the most. The walk only seemed like it lasted hours because of their heightened anticipation of what they were walking towards. They knew Hogwarts had dozens of secret passageways. They knew of only one, the one under the Whomping Willow. They had always wanted to find more of them, but they never expected to find one in such a random place. Then again, what did they expect? The passageways were secret and therefore had to be put in an unassuming place. There couldn’t be signs in bright colours pointing to the entries to the passages.
They now only wondered where this tunnel led to.
The light from Sirius’s wand uncovered a dusty trapdoor. At the sight of it, his face split into a victorious grin. Glancing over his shoulder, he declared, “Gentlemen, we’ve reached our destination.”
Sirius pushed the door up and led the way out into the unknown frontier. He climbed out into what looked like a stockroom, but he didn’t have time to discover just what kind of stockroom he was in. He could see upon first glance boxes upon boxes littered everywhere in the room, but turned to help James out into the room before he inquired the contents of the boxes. Once Remus had managed to pull Peter out of the trapdoor, they were able to take in their surroundings. The four boys dispersed across the room, looking at the labels on the boxes, trying to figure out exactly where they were.
Of course, once they saw the first labels on the boxes that indicated items such as Chocolate Frogs and Cockroach Clusters were stocked there, it was not at all difficult to realise that they were in Honeydukes Sweet Shop. “Wicked,” Sirius said quietly, running a hand along the dusty surface of a box filled with Fizzing Whizzbees.
“Why would the school have a passageway that led to a sweets shop?” Remus wondered aloud, wiping away some dust so he could see what was in the box he was looking at. He did not mind this, obviously, but he was curious as to why.
“Who cares?” James said happily as he discovered a box with Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans inside. “The point is that the passageway exists!” They had all of Honeydukes at their disposal, which meant they had all of Hogsmeade at their disposal. The only downside to having everything in Honeydukes at their fingertips was that they had to be exceptionally quiet, as the owners lived above the shop. This meant that they could not leave the shop, as the sound of a door creaking open would carry through the dead silence. With this thought in mind, they crept up the wooden steps into the main store, trying to make as little noise as possible.
The store was almost pitch-black, lit only by the faint moonlight streaming in from the windows. The shelves were still stocked with the sweets that were displayed during the day, waiting patiently for the next day’s customers to come and purchase them.
“So, get some sweets and leave the money on the counter, you reckon?” Sirius said as his eyes scanned every inch of the store, searching for his favourite sweets. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the supple of Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum. James nodded at once and made a beeline towards the Cauldron Cakes. Sirius exchanged looks of utter revulsion with Remus and Peter. In the almost six years they had known James, they could never figure out why he enjoyed those disgusting cakes that gave them all stomach aches. They just liked to entertain the idea that he had an iron stomach.
When they had finished searching the shelves and left the appropriate amount of money on the counter, they disappeared back into the basement. It was unbelievable that there was a passageway from the castle to Honeydukes, but what the boys didn’t understand was that no one before them seemed to have discovered it before them. Surely Sirius couldn’t have been the first person who decided to lean against the old witch. But whoever found it first didn’t matter, the fact was that they knew it was there now. They could visit Honeydukes any time they wished now; they no longer had to wait until the Hogsmeade weekends.
By the time they had all fully climbed out of the passageway and were safely under James’s Invisibility Cloak, they had agreed to explore the rest of the castle for these secret tunnels. If there was one, there had to be more. They would have liked to have delved deeper into Hogsmeade, but there was the danger of waking the owners of the sweets shop. Yet they were perfectly content searching through the barrels of Bertie Botts and the shelves of Drooble’s and Chocolate Frogs. Perhaps if they found another tunnel somewhere they could go further into the village.
“That was brilliant!” Sirius exclaimed loudly as they reentered the common room.
“Shh!” Remus hissed. “Do you want to wake up the entire house?”
Sirius looked thoughtful for a moment, as if he was seriously considered doing what Remus was warning again, but shook his head. If he woke up all of Gryffindor, everyone would start asking what he was so excited about. That would lead to questions about where they had gone. They were not willing to share their secret knowledge of the castle yet. He dropped the volume of his voice. “Seriously, though, there’s a passage that leads to Honeydukes! D’you know how useful that’s going to be?”
“Very,” James agreed, leading the way up the stairs to the dormitory. “When you’re ready to go on a sugar binge, we’ll know where to take you.”
The boys entered the dormitory and each went to their beds, except for Sirius, who appeared to be too excited to go to sleep.
“How exactly do you expect to find all the other hiding places for the passageways?” Remus asked realistically, sitting down on his bed and pulling his shoes off. “Are you going to lean on every statue in the school and hope it falls over?”
Sirius rolled his eyes at the drip of sarcasm in Remus’s voice. Trust Remus to put a downer on his good mood. “No… that would take too long. Besides, they won’t be under statues. They’ll be in other places.”
Remus balled up his socks and dropped them unceremoniously on the floor beside his bed. He pulled back his covers and got under them. “Whatever you say, Sirius. Good night.” He rolled over so his back was facing his friends and shut his eyes.
“You two know what this means, don’t you?” Sirius continued, glancing from James to Peter.
“You were just telling Remus you weren’t going to run around pushing over statues when you really are?” James said, grinning broadly.
“Stuff it, Potter.” Sirius crossed the room and sat down on his own bed. “We’re about to find out more about this castle than anyone else has before.”
For the next few weeks, the boys spent most of their free time scouring every inch of the castle, searching for any other secret passageways. They tried looking in every spot imaginable; including the S-bend that Moaning Myrtle took to haunting. She had mistaken Peter’s interest in the toilet as an interest in her and, when she found out the truth, proceeded to wail at an ear-piercing level and flood the entire second floor, saturating the four boys immeasurably. James, Sirius and Peter had also looked through the storage room in the dungeons one night while Remus was on patrol. Sirius gave Remus his two-way mirror, so he would be able to warn them if someone was going in that direction, as Remus and Lily were patrolling the Entrance Hall and the Great Hall.
They had no success in finding more secrets of the castle and were beginning to think that maybe there was just the one tunnel under the old witch’s hump. It was only another unintentional move that revealed the next passageway behind a mirror. James was sifting through some of his gold and the coins dropped to the floor and rolled away. The majority of the coins landed under the bottom of the mirror, which was a few inches above the floor. James couldn’t quite reach his fingers through the space to get the coins, so Sirius and Remus tried shifting the mirror to the side. When the two gently pushed the mirror to the side, they saw something unusual.
There was not a wall behind the mirror; instead there was a dark corridor.
Naturally, their curiosity peaked and they pushed the mirror aside completely so they could explore this new revelation. If this was anything like the tunnel they had found under the witch’s hump, they were in for another new way into Hogsmeade. It wasn’t as though they needed to have these passages at their disposal, they all had written permission from their families to go into the village, but these new discoveries would come in handy on days when there wasn’t a trip into Hogsmeade.
This tunnel, they soon learned, lead to the basement of the Hog’s Head pub. As the only experience they had ever had there was less than pleasant, the boys did not feel they would take advantage of this new find. Besides, they didn’t think the barkeeper would be too appreciative of four boys appearing out of his basement. But they were still glad they had found it. It would be useful if every other passageway suddenly caved in and they had a pressing need to get into the village. Soon they had located four more secrets of the castle, all of them leading into different parts of Hogsmeade. There was only one downside to this; many of them were ones that Mr. Filch knew were there. The caretaker had no power to eradicate them, but he could patrol them to make sure no troublemakers found them.
He had failed on that account, but he could still catch the boys in the act of breaking into the tunnels.
This fact brought them to a very important realisation. They needed to find a way to mark where everyone in the castle was when they elected to venture into one of these tunnels. It was this prospect that brought them to the conversation they were having on the shore of the lake, one Saturday afternoon in late October.
“Filch is going to catch us one of these days,” Peter fretted, throwing a small pebble in the lake.
Sirius meticulously shredded a blade of grass into miniscule pieces and scoffed. “He’s never caught us before.”
“Yes, he has,” Remus reminded him, looking up from the lake, which he had just been staring into. “Remember in our second year and Lily hexed James so he looked like a girl?”
James made an angry noise in his throat. “Must you constantly bring that up?”
“I’m trying to make a point, Prongs.” Remus turned his back on James, who made a mean gesture at him, and continued. “And Moaning Myrtle yelled at us all and-”
“Actually, she yelled at you,” Sirius said, gloating. Moaning Myrtle had only called Remus ‘tactless’; she had not yelled at any of the other boys.
Remus waved a dismissive hand. “And she started flooding the bathroom and Filch caught us and had us scrubbing the dungeons with toothbrushes.”
Sirius glanced between James and Peter and focused on Remus. “So?”
“So, we have bought caught by Filch. I think Peter has a point.”
Sirius nodded and suddenly rounded on Peter. “And what do you suggest we do about this, Wormtail?”
Peter shrugged helplessly. “I dunno… I was just saying we’re going to get caught one of these days.”
“So what you’re saying is that we need a way of knowing where everyone in the castle is when we want to go into one of those passages?” Remus surmised, observing a few strands of grey hair hanging over his eyes.
“And how do you propose we go about that, Moony?” Sirius asked, getting up from his spot on the grass and walking over to Remus, taking the liberty of yanking a piece of grey hair out of his friend’s head.
Remus flinched at the quick, sharp pain. “I don’t know.” He glanced up and saw Sirius was twirling the strand of hair around his fingers. He rolled his eyes. “It’s bad enough I’m turning into an old man at sixteen, must you make me bald, as well?”
Sirius grinned and held the strand of hair out to his friend. “Do you want it back?”
Remus shook his head. “No, keep it.”
“Seriously, though, what should we do, then?” James asked impatiently, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. He was staring out across the lake, where he could see the distinct head of red hair that belonged to Lily Evans, who was chatting affably with Frank Longbottom and Alice Gordon. He continued staring for a moment, a faraway look in his eyes, before he tore his gaze away and focused on his friends. “I mean, Pete’s right, we can’t afford to get caught much more. Filch is already out for our blood after we gave him that box of Sugar Quills that drew all over his face.”
“Hey, he can’t prove it was us!”
Remus sighed exasperatedly. “Sirius, you signed the card: Love from your favourite Gryffindor sixth years. He may not know a wand from a twig, but he knows which Gryffindor sixth years would do something like that.”
“It could have been Frank who sent it to him,” Sirius persisted, determined to prove that they were not the only suspects.
“Can we get back to the point?” James said loudly, cutting across whatever retort Remus was planning.
“The point is that we need to find a foolproof way to get to where we want to go without getting caught!” Peter said piercingly, a little too piercingly as a group of girls across the lake turned at his voice. Turning beet red, Peter shut his mouth and looked away.
Sirius laughed sardonically. “What do you suggest we do then, Wormtail? We should make a map that somehow has everyone’s exact location in the castle on it?” Sirius continued to chortle under his breath at the absurdity of this idea.
James, on the other hand, looked excited by Sirius’s joke. His eyes lit and he sat up straighter. “Say that again, Padfoot.”
Sirius raised an eyebrow at James, clearly wondering why he was asking him to do this. “We should… make a… map, was it?”
“Exactly!”
Now Remus and Peter were staring at James in wonder. “What are you getting at, Prongs?” Remus asked concernedly.
“A map!” Excitement was radiating from James, yet the others could not see why.
“A map?” Sirius repeated.
“Yes! What don’t you three get?”
Sirius, Remus and Peter glanced uneasily at each other, before each of their faces took on a look of comprehension. James wanted to create a map of Hogwarts, a map that would tell them where every person in the castle was. In theory, it was an excellent idea. But did James understand how hard it was going to be to do that? Sirius had only jokingly suggested this; he hadn’t expected James to take it to heart.
“James… it’s a brilliant idea,” Remus said quietly, ignoring Sirius who was muttering that it was his idea. “But, how are we going to do that?”
The excitement flooded out of James. It was a brilliant idea and he wanted to bring it to life, but he couldn’t deny that Remus had it right. He hadn’t the foggiest idea as to how he was going to make a map of the entire castle. “Okay,” James said, his voice rising as he tried desperately to back this up with something. “We can look it up, let’s go to the library!”
“Because the librarian would really appreciate helping us find information to help your marauding habits.”
“Stuff it, Remus.”
Remus shook his head and stood up, shaking a rock out of his shoe. “I’m not saying we can’t try,” he insisted. He beckoned the three to follow him and led the way to the library.
James and Sirius were often full of insane ideas, Remus knew this completely. He recalled with mild exasperation their plan to turn Snape into the former queen of Versailles, and the final product. He had to admit, Snape looked quite lovely with his black hair turned curly and piled on top of his head. Speaking of Snape… Remus’s eyes narrowed as the Slytherin passed by and asked, very discreetly, if his throat was sore from howling so much. Remus gritted his teeth and pretended he had not heard the Slytherin.
James and Sirius, on the other hand, were close enough to hear Snape’s comment and would not take it simply with gritted teeth. “What was that, Snivellus?” James demanded harshly.
“You heard me, Potter,” Snape snarled, his eyes still glaring at Remus. Remus’s hand twitched towards the pocket with his wand. Snape saw this and smirked widely. “Going to hex me, are you? Wouldn’t you just bite me on a full moon?”
Remus’s hand clenched into a fist this time and Sirius was quickly at Remus’s side, forcing his fist back. “Don’t, Remus, he’s not worth it.”
Snape laughed derisively. “That’s right, Lupin. Black must be your caretaker, keeping you from doing stupid things. Don’t want Dumbledore to expel you, do you?”
Sirius let go of Remus’s fist and drew his own wand. “Do you want to say that again, Snivellus?”
Snape’s eyes narrowed on the tip of Sirius’s wand. “Are you going to hex me then, Black?”
“I’ve never had any problem doing it before, so why not?”
“Sirius,” Remus said tensely. “Don’t bother; it’s not your battle to fight.”
Sirius raised a disbelieving eyebrow at Remus. If it hadn’t been for his stupidity the previous year, this wouldn’t have been Remus’s fight at all. There would be no reason for a fight because Snape would not know about Remus’s Lycanthropy. The least Sirius could do was hex the Slytherin who knew it into oblivion. Snape promised Dumbledore he wouldn’t tell, but Sirius didn’t believe that rubbish for a second. Snape would give anything to sell them all out to the entire school and the entire school wouldn’t hesitate for the slightest moment to run Remus out of the castle.
Remus eased away from Sirius and unclenched his fists. “Go away, Snape,” he said, surprisingly calmly. “We weren’t bothering, so leave us alone.”
Snape sneered. “You never thought about bothering me when I wasn’t bothering you.”
Remus exhaled slowly. “We haven’t done that for a while now.” James, Sirius and Peter watched the exchange between Snape and Remus with mild interest. Where could Remus possibly be going with this? Snape never listened to reason. Then Peter nudged James, who nudged Sirius when he saw what the two were looking at. Remus had successfully pulled his wand out of his pocket and it was hanging limply in his hand at his side. Snape had not noticed this action.
“I don’t care,” Snape continued angrily. “I’m making up for five years where you did.”
“Snape, please move right now.”
“I’m not listening to a bloody beast.”
“Fine, don’t move.” There was a loud crack and Snape was lying on the ground, stiff as a board. Remus glared down at him. Remus was a usually passive person, but not when it came to his condition. Snape had pushed him a bit too far.
“Wow,” Peter said in an awed voice. “When did you get so good at nonverbal spells?”
Remus shrugged and slid his wand back into his pocket. “I thought they might come in handy.” He sidestepped Snape and said over his should, “Going to the library, aren’t we?”
James, Sirius and Peter followed, Sirius being extra careful to tread on Snape’s face. It was time to start creating the map.