Death Eater, I would have been sure to research my own jam-preferences before impersonating myself.’
‘Er … right,’ said Harry. ‘Well, on that leaflet, it said something about Inferi. What exactly are they? The leaflet wasn’t very clear.’
‘They are corpses,’ said Dumbledore calmly. ‘Dead bodies that have been bewitched to do a Dark wizard’s bidding. Inferi have not been seen for a long time, however, not since Voldemort was last powerful … he killed enough people to make an army of them, of course. This is the place, Harry, just here …’
They were nearing a small, neat stone house set in its own garden. Harry was too busy digesting the horrible idea of Inferi to have much attention left for anything else, but as they reached the front gate Dumbledore stopped dead and Harry walked into him.
‘Oh dear. Oh dear, dear, dear.’
Harry followed his gaze up the carefully tended front path and felt his heart sink. The front door was hanging off its hinges.
Dumbledore glanced up and down the street. It seemed quite deserted.
‘Wand out and follow me, Harry,’ he said quietly.
He opened the gate and walked swiftly and silently up the garden path, Harry at his heels, then pushed the front door very slowly, his wand raised and at the ready.
‘Lumos.’
Dumbledore’s wand-tip ignited, casting its light up a narrow hallway. To the left, another door stood open. Holding his illuminated wand aloft, Dumbledore walked into the sitting room with Harry right behind him.
A scene of total devastation met their eyes. A grandfather clock lay splintered at their feet, its face cracked, its pendulum lying a little further away like a dropped sword. A piano was on its side, its keys strewn across the floor. The wreckage of a fallen chandelier glittered nearby. Cushions lay deflated, feathers oozing from slashes in their sides; fragments of glass and china lay like powder over everything. Dumbledore raised his wand even higher, so that its light was thrown upon the walls, where something darkly red and glutinous was spattered over the wallpaper. Harry’s small intake of breath made Dumbledore look round.
‘Not pretty, is it,’ he said heavily. ‘Yes, something horrible has happened here.’
Dumbledore moved carefully into the middle of the room, scrutinising the wreckage at his feet. Harry followed, gazing around, half scared of what he might see hidden behind the wreck of the piano or the overturned sofa, but there was no sign of a body.
‘Maybe there was a fight and – and they dragged him off, Professor?’ Harry suggested, trying not to imagine how badly wounded a man would have to be to leave those stains spattered halfway up the walls.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Dumbledore quietly, peering behind an overstuffed armchair lying on its side.
‘You mean he’s —?’
‘Still here somewhere? Yes.’
And without warning, Dumbledore swooped, plunging the tip of his wand into the seat of the overstuffed armchair, which yelled, ‘Ouch!’
‘Good evening, Horace,’ said Dumbledore, straightening up again.
Harry’s jaw dropped. Where a split second before there had been an armchair, there now crouched an enormously fat, bald old man who was massaging his lower belly and squinting up at Dumbledore with an aggrieved and watery eye.
‘There was no need to stick the wand in that hard,’ he said gruffly, clambering to his feet. ‘It hurt.’
The wand-light sparkled on his shiny pate, his prominent eyes, his enormous, silver walrus-like moustache, and the highly polished buttons on the maroon velvet jacket he was wearing over a pair of lilac silk pyjamas. The top of his head barely reached Dumbledore’s chin.
‘What gave it away?’ he grunted as he staggered to his feet, still rubbing his lower belly. He seemed remarkably unabashed for a man who had just been discovered pretending to be an armchair.
‘My dear Horace,’ said Dumbledore, looking amused, ‘if the Death Eaters really had come to call, the Dark Mark would have been set over the house.’
The wizard clapped a pudgy hand to his vast forehead.
‘The Dark Mark,’ he muttered. ‘Knew there was something … ah well. Wouldn’t have had time, anyway. I’d only just put the finishing touches to my upholstery when you entered the room.’
He heaved a great sigh that made the ends of his moustache flutter.
‘Would you like my assistance clearing up?’ asked Dumbledore politely.
‘Please,’ said the other.
They stood back to back, the tall thin wizard and the short round one, and waved their wands in one identical sweeping motion.
The furniture flew back to its original place; ornaments re-formed in midair; feathers zoomed into their cushions; torn books repaired themselves as they landed upon their shelves; oil lanterns soared on to side tables and reignited; a vast collection of splintered silver picture frames flew glittering across the room and alighted, whole and untarnished, upon a desk; rips, cracks and holes healed everywhere; and the walls wiped themselves clean.
‘What kind of blood was that, incidentally?’ asked Dumbledore loudly over the chiming of the newly unsmashed grandfather clock.
‘On the walls? Dragon,’ shouted the wizard called Horace as, with a deafening grinding and tinkling, the chandelier screwed itself back into the ceiling.
There was a final plunk from the piano, and silence.
‘Yes, dragon,’ repeated the wizard conversationally. ‘My last bottle, and prices are sky-high at the moment. Still, it might be reusable.’
He stumped over to a small crystal bottle standing on top of a sideboard and held it up to the light, examining the thick liquid within.
‘Hm. Bit dusty.’
He set the bottle back on the sideboard and sighed. It was then that his gaze fell upon Harry.
‘Oho,’ he said, his large round eyes flying to Harry’s forehead and the lightning-shaped scar it bore. ‘Oho!’
‘This,’ said Dumbledore, moving forwards to make the introduction, ‘is Harry Potter. Harry, this is an old friend and colleague of mine, Horace Slughorn.’
Slughorn turned on Dumbledore, his expression shrewd.
‘So that’s how you thought you’d persuade me, is it? Well, the answer’s no, Albus.’
He pushed past Harry, his face turned resolutely away with the air of a man trying to resist temptation.
‘I suppose we can have a drink, at least?’ asked Dumbledore. ‘For old times’ sake?’
Slughorn hesitated.
‘All right then, one drink,’ he said ungraciously.
Dumbledore smiled at Harry and directed him towards a chair not unlike the one that Slughorn had so recently impersonated, which stood right
