he destroyed it and ended up dying just like everybody else. Still, I think there probably are lots of ways for witches and wizards to prolong life for a long time, even without Flannel's stone.'
'Maybe you should get his autograph on one of your hundred dollar bills,' Ralph mused to Zane.
'I don't have any hundreds. I gave my last five to that elf doorman downstairs. It was all I had.'
'He wasn't a doorman!' James tried again to convince Zane.
'Well? He got the door for us,' Zane said placidly.
'Ralph knocked him over when he shoved it open! He wasn't trying to open it for us!'
'Well, I'm out of money anyway. I just hope the service doesn't suffer.'
Zane stopped in front of the door to the Ravenclaw common room. The eagle door knocker spoke in a high, trilling voice. 'What is the significance of the hat in magical mastery?'
'Ahh, sheesh, these are supposed to be the easy ones,' Zane complained.
'Are you sure it's all right for us to go in there?' Ralph said, shuffling his feet. 'What're the rules for hanging out in common rooms other than your own?'
'There aren't any rules about it that I know of,' James said. 'I just don't think people do it much.' This didn't seem to ease Ralph's mind. He looked up and down the corridor fretfully.
'The hat… the hat…,' Zane mumbled, staring at his shoes. 'Hat, hat, hat. Rabbit out of a hat. You pull things out of a hat. It's probably like a metaphor or something. You wear a hat on your head… your brain's in your head, under the hat. Ummm…'
He snapped his fingers and looked up at the eagle door knocker. 'You can't pull anything out of a hat that you haven't already put in your head?'
'Crude, but close enough,' the door knocker replied. The door clicked and swung open.
'Wow!' James said, following Zane into the common room. 'And your parents are Muggles?'
'Well, like I said, my dad makes movies, and my mom has E.S.P. about anything I try to sneak past her, so I assume I am unusually prepared for the magical world,' Zane said in an offhand manner. 'So this is the Ravenclaw common room. Not an electric light or a Coke machine in sight. We do have a really cool statue, though, and a talking fireplace. Saw my dad in it last night. He's adapting to all of this a little too well, if you ask me.'
Zane toured them through the Ravenclaw rooms, apparently making up details whenever he didn't know them. Ralph and Zane tried to teach James how to play gin rummy with a deck of Muggle playing cards, but James couldn't get interested in King, Queen and Jack cards that didn't actually attack one another. When they got bored, Ralph took them to the Slytherin common room, leading them through a maze of dark, torch-lit cellar passages. They stopped at a large door that dominated the end of a corridor. Set in the middle of the door was a brass sculpture of a coiling snake, its wedge-shaped head protruding menacingly, open-mouthed.
'Oh, yeah,' Ralph muttered. He shook back his sleeve, revealing a new ring on his right hand. The ring was set with a large green emerald, shaped like an eye with a slit pupil. Ralph pressed it carefully into one of the snake's eye sockets. The other socket glared to life, glowing green.
'Who sssseeks entry?' the snake's head said in a thin, hissing voice.
'Me. Ralph Deedle. Slytherin, first year.'
The glowing green eye flicked over James and Zane. 'And thessssse?'
'My friends. I, uh, I can vouch for them.'
The glowing eye studied Zane then James for an uncomfortably long time, and then finally winked out. A series of complicated ratchets, clicks, and clanks came from within the door. It swung ponderously open.
The Slytherin rooms occupied a large, gothic space carved from beneath the lake. Thick, stainedglass windows in the vaulted ceilings looked up through the depths of the lake, making the filtered sunlight flicker greenly on the glass portraits of Salazar Slytherin and his progeny. Even Ralph seemed jumpy as he showed them around. Only a few other students were in the common room, draped over the furnishings with extravagant indolence. They followed Zane and James with their eyes, smiling cryptically, but apparently without malice. Ralph stiffly mumbled greetings.
The Slytherin sleeping quarters felt to James like someplace a very tasteful and wealthy pirate captain might sleep. The room was wide, with a sunken floor and low ceilings hung with gargoyle head lanterns. The large beds were mahogany with great square pillars at each corner. The Slytherin House crest hung on curtains at the end of each bed. The three boys clambered onto Ralph's immaculately made bed.
'These guys are pretty hardcore,' Ralph admitted in a low voice, indicating the owners of the other beds. 'To tell you the truth, I feel a little out of place here. I like the Ravenclaw rooms better.'
'I don't know,' Zane said, looking around the room admiringly. 'They sure have a flair for decorating. Although it'd be hard to sleep with all those stuffed animal heads on the walls. Is that one a dragon?'
'Yes,' Ralph replied, his voice strained and terse. 'These guys bring them from their houses. They have families that actually go out dragon hunting.'
James frowned. 'I thought dragon hunting was illegal.'
'Yeah,' Ralph whispered severely. 'That's the thing, isn't it? These guys' families have hunting preserves where they can go shoot just about anything! That over there is the skull of a unicorn. Still has the horn on it, although they said it isn't the real horn. The real horn is too valuable for magical uses to leave hanging on the wall. And that thing back behind Tom's bed is a house-elf head! They put them on the wall when they knock 'em off! And I swear it looks at me sometimes!' Ralph shuddered, and then seemed to decide he'd said too much. He pressed his mouth into a thin line and looked from James to Zane and back.
'Yeah, it is pretty creepy,' James admitted, deciding not to tell Ralph any of the things he'd heard about how some of the Slytherin families lived. 'Still, I expect it's mostly just for show.'
'What's that?' Zane said suddenly, pouncing forward on the bed. 'Is that a GameDeck? It is! And you've got the wireless uplink for online competition and everything!' He rummaged into a duffle bag at the end of Ralph's bed, pulling out a small, black box about the size and shape of the deck of cards they'd been playing with earlier. It had a tiny screen set into the front, with a mind-boggling array of buttons beneath it. 'What games do you have for it? Do you have Armageddon Master Three?'
'No!' Ralph rasped, grabbing the tiny machine away from Zane. 'And don't let anybody else see this thing! They flip out about stuff like this.'
Zane was incredulous. 'What? Why?'
'How should I know? What's the deal with wizards and electronic stuff?' Ralph addressed the question to James, who frowned and shrugged.
'I don't know. Mostly, we just don't need it. Electronic stuff, like computers and phones, are just Muggle things. We do what we need to do with magic, I guess.'
Ralph was shaking his head. 'That's not how these guys act about it. They talked about it like I'd brought something nasty to school with me. Told me if I meant to be a real Slytherin, I needed to abandon all my false magic and machines.'
'False magic?' Zane asked, glancing at James.
'Yeah,' he sighed, 'that's what some wizarding families think of Muggle electronics and machines. They say those things are just cheap knockoffs of what real wizards do. They think any wizards who use Muggle machines are traitors to their magical heritage or something.'
'Yeah, that's pretty much what they told me,' Ralph nodded. 'They were, like, passionate about it! I hid my stuff right away. I figure I'll give it all to Dad at the next break.'
