Disclaimer: The fine tapestry of plot and characters belongs to J.K. Rowling. I am merely pulling threads at will and weaving my own design in counterpoint to hers.
Chapter 16
Costume Check
Harry purposely waited until Ron and Hermione left in order to begin his preparations for the evening. Neville made an uncharacteristically snide remark about Hermione having a bad case of the jitters, although he diplomatically waited until her footsteps had died away to do so. Harry laughed heartily as he allowed that Neville had hit the mark once again.
“That kind of jumpiness may enhance her costume,” observed Harry sardonically, “but it totally interferes with my peace of mind when I’m trying to get dressed.”
Neville admitted that he still had a few last minute details that needed his attention downstairs. With a dramatic swirl of his dark school robes, he exited through the stone sconce. His costume, or lack thereof, perplexed Harry momentarily. Neville seemed to be wearing ordinary street clothing! Remembering that there was usually much more to Neville than met the eye, he expected to be pleasantly surprised later.
Harry began the laborious process of donning formal attire while his mind was going over the character that he had researched. His amateurish attempts at facial expressions in the mirror were abandoned. His portrayal of the tortured persona that he had selected would have to come from deeper within. If his conversations with Hermione had taught him anything, it was that the key to success was to become a true embodiment of the character.
He tentatively tried on the black opera cape and examined his reflection critically. The cape swirled just like the ones that the Durmstrang students had worn so majestically to the Yule Ball. Leave it to Hermione to remember that detail, Harry thought wryly. The pure white of the lining was sure to contrast starkly and magnificently with the blackness of his coat and trousers.
He heard the sound of scraping stone as if from miles away and slowly brought his thoughts back to the moment.
“Are you decent?” Neville called from near the entrance. “Ginny has a special delivery for you!”
Harry leaned out into the common room to give the all clear signal but was suddenly caught short. Neville was nowhere to be seen and Ginny was standing uncertainly in the middle of the room. Her hair had been styled into a hundred tiny braids and she was wearing some sort of stretchy coverall that reminded Harry of children’s one-piece pajamas. Her hesitant manner only enhanced the illusion that she was a small, lost child.
“You need a Paddington Bear to go with that,” Harry offered, wishing he could have come up with something better to say.
She screwed up her face briefly, and even though she no longer looked so childlike, Harry still had to admit she looked adorable. On closer examination, it was evident that she had also donned some very un-childlike false eyelashes and theatrical pancake make-up.
“Nobody gets my outfit! Trust me, it will all make sense when we get downstairs…” She trailed off as she got a good look at Harry.
He did a small flourish with the cape and smiled. He could feel her eyes slowly drinking in every detail of his costume, but for once, he didn’t seem to mind.
“I brought you…I mean…Mr. Edward sent…by owl…” She finally just lowered the bundle to the nearest chair. “I’m never going to be able to get past that barrier,” she whispered, wetting her lips nervously.
It had been a number of years since he had seen Ginny at a loss for words and Harry was not exactly sure how to proceed. He settled for the direct approach and just walked out to meet her.
“You have something for me,” he patiently urged her. “The package…”
She shook her head slightly before answering, allowing just enough time for Harry to notice the copper sheen glinting from her dancing braids. “Shoes,” she said firmly. “Mr. Edward from Gladrags sent you shoes to complete your outfit.” She held out the package to him.
“What is it that so intrigues you about my costume, Ginny?” he asked gamely. Perhaps if he kept talking the butterflies in his stomach would settle.
“Hermione fretted so much about it, I didn’t know what to expect,” she began hesitantly. “You know how she is, Harry, she does a bit of research and suddenly she’s an expert on the subject…”
“I doubt an experienced salesperson would have been so easily taken in.”
“You really haven’t seen her around adults lately, she had Mr. Edward convinced that she was his long lost daughter. I think she may have talked him out of one of the suits that he wore in his youth.”
“Well, then I will make sure that she charges me for second-hand robes,” Harry quipped. “Now, Ginny, if you don’t get out of here, I'm never going to get finished.”
“Sorry, Harry,” she uttered, jumping up quickly. At the exit, she turned briefly and asked, “I’ll see you downstairs then?” She gave him a small beseeching look and was gone.
Harry carefully made his way down the long staircase to the entrance hall. He had secured his school robes over his costume but the extra layers were beginning to chafe under his chin. If it got too uncomfortable, he decided that he would doff it once inside the Great Hall.
It was still a bit early and the stairs had not yet become choked with students, although those that were about all seemed to be wearing their school robes buttoned up to their chins. He caught the glint of water from the entrance hall and realized that it must still be raining outside. The traffic was steadily increasing as he neared the ground floor, but it was difficult to see any details as the entire area was shrouded in an unnatural fog. He was reasonably sure that it was George Weasley who was waving to him from the foot of the stairs.
“Still under wraps, I see,” George offered in greeting as he clapped Harry genially on the back. He was wearing the lime green dragon-skin jacket that Harry remembered but had added a facial skin in a deeper green and some bolts to his neck. It was a reasonable imitation of Frankenstein’s monster. “Didn’t have a lot of time to get myself together “ much too busy getting all the costumes out to the kiddies.”
George seemed to be in a particularly jovial mood as he waved his wand feebly to get the fog to clear a bit. Suddenly Harry could see that the entire entrance hall was flooded!
George beamed proudly. “The return of the Portable Swamp “ by special request of the headmistress. Your chariot awaits.”
Harry stepped into a tiny dinghy together with four or five other students and was effortlessly ferried across to the massive doors of the Great Hall. As a test, he tossed a handful of stale Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans into the murky water. One of the giggly girls who was still in the process of disembarking gasped loudly as a huge black tentacle quickly snatched the unexpected treasure. Harry waved his appreciation to George on the far horizon.
A witch wearing a sparkly skeleton suit under a voluminous violet cape motioned to him. The lining of her cape glittered with multi-colored sequins as she checked him over with her wand. When she demanded, “Costume check,” in a familiar throaty voice, Harry recognized that it was Professor Sinistra, their astronomy teacher. He smiled as he lifted the hem of his school robes just enough to show her the fancy dress beneath. She waved for the oversized doors to creak open to admit him into the Great Hall.
One look around and Harry could see why the Decorating Committee had needed extra assistance from the resident experts. Somehow the dimensions had been extended until it was no longer a room as such; he felt as if he had been transported into the midst of an ancient land. This was not some moonlit glen embraced by a circle of oaks “ this was a wild unkempt land, stark despite the slender twisted trees that seemed to fade into the misty distance. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw indistinct black shapes among the narrow branches but they flickered out of sight whenever he tried to look at them directly.
He spied Ron and Ginny talking softly in the corner and joined them.
“Did you happen to notice what the weather was like outside before you left the common room, Harry?” Ron asked.
“I could hear raindrops spattering hard against the window at times, must mean that the wind has…” Harry’s voice died in his throat when he noticed that Ron was pointing ominously at the ceiling.
He looked up, fully expecting the foul weather to be mirrored on the ceiling as always “ the lashing rain couldn’t have been more ideal for All Hallow’s Eve, especially if one was safe and dry inside a castle. Only in this instance, the sky above was the deep purple of congealed blood, clear except for a few wraithlike clouds. The large orange moon was still a few hours from its zenith but was already tinting the nearby clouds with strange and disturbing hues.
“Can you image how difficult it must have been to alter a spell like that?” Ginny asked in an awed whisper.
“That one just about did me in,” Lupin’s voice chuckled from behind them. He was wrapped tightly in a red cape that managed to cover him to below the knees. Harry was surprised to see that the man was wearing sandals.
“Now I, personally, think that the table decorations were particularly inspired,” Lupin observed.
Harry examined the closest small table that had been draped in tattered black cloth, the fabric so light that it fluttered like bats wings every time someone walked by. The twisted iron candelabra with black candles was practically a cliché, but it was the collection of objects in the middle that seemed to draw his attention. Despite their apparent randomness “ each table had a different assortment “ there was a sinister quality about them that was practically palatable.
“Almost feels as if they’ve been cursed, doesn’t it?” Lupin asked conversationally.
“Is that how it was done?” Ginny inquired tentatively, not daring to actually touch the objects.
Ron inhaled sharply when Lupin reached out to examine a cracked and dusty laboratory flask. “Absolutely ordinary materials,” intoned Lupin softly, “gathered from rubbish piles and dustbins and maybe an occasional junk shop. I thought Luna mad when she had Hagrid drag a box of this stuff from his cabin last night… Notice the careful placement of each article, how each fits into the sinister tableau. It’s a transformation I could not have accomplished with a dozen wands at my disposal.”
“Luna did this all by herself?” Harry asked incredulously.
“The rest of the committee helped with the cloths and the candles “ especially in the creation of the tatters. It took them hours to round up all the scraps. But in the end, it was Luna who arranged the objects on each table personally.”
Fred Weasley arrived wearing the most unique costume yet: he was totally headless and his facial features had somehow been grafted onto the large pumpkin under his arm. Even though Harry’s brain kept telling him that it was just a clever illusion, it was difficult to decide weather to address the empty space on Fred’s shoulders or the talking pumpkin.
Finally, Harry decided to just compliment him on the great costume.
“Thanks,” Fred replied. “Pretty disconcerting, isn’t it? I wasn’t sure that I would have it ready in time “ turned out to be a lot harder to reconfigure the Headless Hat and then to sort of morph it with the facial skins…Well, you get the general idea. Luckily, I wasn’t as swamped at the Diagon Alley store and was able to delegate… Yo, Hermione, I took your advice and went to the library, see? The Muggles issued me a library card and everything.”
Hermione looked him up and down appreciatively. “Pretty clever, you should sell a ton of those outfits.” Briefly glancing around at the other revelers that were rapidly filling the room, she added, “Let me guess, you located the American history section, right?”
Harry’s cursory review of the newest arrivals confirmed Hermione’s observation. He found Betsy Ross with her half-stitched flag, Paul Revere juggling two brass lanterns from hand to hand, and a white haired bloke in Napoleonic garb that must be George Washington.
“Did you get a look at the new enhanced Portable Swamp we installed in the entrance hall?” Fred asked excitedly.
George arrived at his elbow and added, “By special order of the headmistress, no less.”
“Always knew she had a soft spot for us. Say, Bro, did you manage to ferry all the kiddies past the swamp monsters?”
“Flitwick came over and offered to relieve me for awhile,” George answered.
“You two didn’t bill the headmistress for the swamp, did you?” whispered Hermione in a mortified tone.
“Of course not,” Fred assured her.
“With as many costume sales you and Ginny have, umm, what’s the word?”
“Faciliated. It was the least we could do--”
“”especially considering the weather pretty much shelved the fireworks display we’d planned--”
“”still having problems with the dancing skeletons, you know.”
Tonks leaned over and whispered something to Hermione who immediately jumped up and scurried away. Tonks, too, was cocooned in her old school robes, only she had opted to transform hers into an emerald green shade. A detail that almost got her disqualified, she confessed, had the headmistress not interceded on her behalf.
Every minute there were more and more costumed students arriving until Harry was certain that the entire school was in attendance. Had the hall not been magically extended, there would probably not have been room for everyone. In addition to Filch who was glumly stationed near the Great Doors, Harry noted a number of dark figures standing guard throughout the room. Each of them was positioned on a small raised platform to allow them to survey the crowd.
As his eyes adjusted to the lower level of lighting around the perimeter, he recognized that the closest figure was none other than Mad-Eye Moody. Only he wasn’t wearing his customary tweed coat. Instead, he was wearing some sort of costume that consisted of two radically different outfits that had been sewn together in the middle. Cradled in the arm that was wearing an old fashioned frock coat was a large book with the glowing title: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
He turned around to compliment Hermione on the concept, but remembered that she had been called away.
“Actually, I get credit for that one,” he was surprised to hear Ginny announce. He had not realized that she had followed him. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has always been a particular favorite of mine. Mum used to read it to us at bedtime when we were little. Don’t you remember, Ron?”
“I don’t get the costume, Ginny,” replied Ron as he shaded his eyes to get a better look. “I always thought Jekyll and Hyde were twins…”
“Well, Mum liked to paraphrase a bit,” Ginny returned. “Said it was an object lesson.”
Harry Potter and the Hero's Lament by L A Moody
Chapter Notes: The doors to the Great Hall finally open as students gather for the start of the costume contest; Harry notes that even the security guards are in costume.