James Potter and the Curse of the Gatekeeper

threw rocks into the lake, admiring the splashes.

        'I think we should just ask him straight up,' Ralph said, heaving a stone sidearm. 'Like you said last night, Rose, there's no reason for him to say no.'

        'That's what I thought then,' Rose replied. 'But that was last night.'

        James glanced back at her. 'A lot's changed since then, has it?'

        'I stayed up late last night, reading,' Rose said. 'I wanted to get a head start on some of the books our Wizlit textbook suggested, like I told you in the library.'

        'You sure don't waste time,' Ralph commented.

        'I happen to like reading. Besides, not surprisingly, our Headmaster shows up occasionally in some of those books and I thought it'd be worth checking into his history a bit more before we talked to him.'

        Ralph lowered his throwing arm and looked up at the sky, squinting. 'It's so weird. I was there when it happened, but I keep forgetting our Headmaster is the famous Merlin from all the old legends and myths. It's a little hard to wrap your mind around, isn't it?'

        'I told you a lot of people find it a bit unsettling that Merlinus Ambrosius is Headmaster of Hogwarts,' Rose said meaningfully. 'And I found out why, a little bit. There's loads of stories about him in the old books of the kings. It's almost impossible to figure out what's made-up and what might be real, but even if only a tiny bit of it is true, it's pretty worrying.'

        'Like what?' James asked, prying a large rock out of the bank of the lake.

        'Like kings used to hire him to curse armies. Not bad armies, necessarily; just any army that any king with enough treasure happened to dislike. More than once, when Merlin got to the army he was paid to curse, they would send out people to pay him more to go back and curse the king that'd originally hired him. And he did!'

        'Sounds pretty practical, if you ask me,' Ralph said, heaving a stone with both hands. It splashed nearby, wetting both James' and Ralph's shoes.

        'This isn't funny, Ralph,' Rose admonished. 'He was a magical mercenary. A man like that wouldn't have any loyalty at all! Some of those armies he cursed… they got completely slaughtered, sometimes even before they got to the battle! There'd be floods, cyclones, even earthquakes where the ground would open up right beneath the army camp, swallowing them all whole.'

        'That can't be true,' James commented. 'I mean, Merlin's powerful, but nobody can do that.'

        'You're forgetting where Merlin gets his magic from,' Rose replied as if she'd been prepared for such an argument. 'According to the legends, Merlin can tap into the power of nature. We saw him doing that the night he took us to get his stuff. Nature is huge, and it was even huger back then, with less civilization. Who knows what a wizard like that would be able to do?'

        Ralph brushed his hands off on his jeans. 'I don't think 'huger' is a word.'

        'Don't you start correcting me,' Rose said, looking back and forth between James and Ralph. 'Why are neither of you taking this seriously?'

        'Because like I said, we were there, Rose,' Ralph replied. 'We saw the man Reapparate from the Dark Ages. We worked with him in the days after. He helped us get rid of that Muggle reporter, who was going to blow the lid off the whole magical world. He was completely brilliant about it. He may have been a loose cannon in the past, but he's different now, isn't he? He's trying to be good, and he seems to be doing pretty well with it.'

        'Well,' Rose said, 'it isn't just that he was a loose cannon.'

        James plopped down on the grass next to her. 'What? Did he put ketchup on his eggs? Did he draw mustaches on portraits?'

        Rose looked at him, and then looked away. 'According to some of the legends, he was supposed to be the bearer of an awful curse. His returning was to be an omen of the end of the world.'

        James felt a twinge of worry at that, but kept his voice even. 'This is the part where it's hard to separate the fact from the loony made-up stuff, right?'

        'Laugh if you want,' Rose said, 'but the prophecy shows up in a lot of places. Some call him the Harbinger of Doom. Other places just call him the Ambassador; of what, it never says. It gets pretty creepy,' she admitted, shuddering. 'Especially when you are reading it in the middle of the night.'

        'So far, he's just been the Ambassador of an extra ten points for Gryffindor and Slytherin because we helped him go get some magic box,' Ralph said, shrugging. 'Come on, it's almost two. He'll be expecting us.'

        'You coming, James?' Rose asked, climbing to her feet.

        James glanced up. 'What? Oh. Yeah, sure.'

        The three plodded through the foggy afternoon, heading for the courtyard. In the distance, thunder rumbled like a veiled threat and the wind began to switch. James was thinking rather nervously of the skeleton in the cave, Farrigan, the long lost associate of Merlin, and of Cousin Lucy's letter about the Gatekeeper. In the light of those things, Rose's tale of the legendary curse of Merlin sounded uncomfortably familar. James couldn't remember it exactly, but the skeleton had said something about a gate, and about things coming through, all because of Merlin's return. The Borleys had come through, at the very least. Merlin acknowledged that. But he claimed to have captured all of them except for the last one, the one that had followed James from that night at the Grotto Keep. Merlin said he'd trapped them all in his mysterious Darkbag. But the skeleton had warned of something else, something worse. Like the legends, it had also called Merlin the Ambassador, but Farrigan had identified the thing Merlin was supposedly representing: the Guardian, the Sentinel of Worlds, the Gatekeeper. Lucy's letter had corroborated those legends, and now Rose's studies were confirming them as well. James shuddered as he followed Rose and Ralph into the castle.

        They threaded their way through the weekend-empty corridors, passing darkened classrooms and halls. Finally, they reached the gargoyle which guarded the entrance to the spiral steps.

        'You remember the password, Rose?' Ralph asked. 'I couldn't even pronounce it, and you know how they are about writing things like that down.'

        Rose screwed up her face, thinking. Finally, she carefully pronounced, 'In ois oisou.'

        The gargoyle moved with the sound of millstones grinding. It stepped aside, revealing the doorway.

        'What's it mean?' James asked as he hopped onto the rising staircase.

        Rose shook her head. 'It's more of that ancient Welsh, I'd guess. Who knows what it means?'

        They arrived in the hall outside the Headmaster's office and James reached to bang the door knocker.

        'Wait,' Rose said, grabbing James' arm. 'Remember this morning? He told us to wait outside. He said he had another appointment before us.'

        James remembered. He carefully lowered the knocker and the three settled onto a long bench situated across from the Headmaster's door.

        On the wall next to the door, amongst an arrangement of old paintings and portraits, was a face James recognized.

        'Look,' James nudged Ralph, pointing. 'I remember him. Old Stonewall used him in Technomancy last year to teach us about magical portraits.'

        The portrait of Cornelius Yarrow, former Hogwarts bursar, peered at James over his spectacles. 'I remember you too, young man. You had a rather unseemly number of questions regarding the subject. I hope you were satisfied.'

        'I was,' James answered. 'I especially liked the part about how only the original artist can destroy a magical portrait. It was really wicked when Stonewall melted his painting of that horrid clown.'

        'Your Professor Jackson did leave out one small detail,' Yarrow sniffed, chafing at the memory. 'There is one other person who can destroy a portrait, although it has never been known to happen.'