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Mrs. Weasley was bending over to check the page on Doxys in Gilderoy Lockhart’s Guide to Household Pests, which was lying open on the sofa.
“Right, you lot, you need to be careful, because Doxys bite and their teeth are poisonous. I’ve got a bottle of antidote here, but I’d rather nobody needed it.”
She straightened up, positioned herself squarely in front of the curtains and beckoned them all forward.
“When I say the word, start spraying immediately,” she said. “They’ll come flying out at us, I expect, but it says on the sprays one good squirt will paralyse them. When they’re immobilised, just throw them in this bucket.”
She stepped carefully out of their line of fire, and raised her own spray.
“All right—squirt!”
Harry had been spraying only a few seconds when a fully-grown Doxy came soaring out of a fold in the material, shiny beetle-like wings whirring, tiny needle-sharp teeth bared, its fairy-like body covered with thick black hair and its four tiny lists clenched with fury. Harry caught it full in the face with a blast of Doxycide. It froze in midair and fell, with a surprisingly loud thunk, on to the worn carpet below. Harry picked it up and threw it in the bucket.
“Fred, what are you doing?” said Mrs. Weasley sharply. “Spray that at once and throw it away!”
Harry looked round. Fred was holding a struggling Doxy between his forefinger and thumb.
“Right-o,” Fred said brightly, spraying the Doxy quickly in the face so that it fainted, but the moment Mrs. Weasley’s back was turned he pocketed it with a wink.
“We want to experiment with Doxy venom for our Skiving Snackboxes,” George told Harry under his breath.
Deftly spraying two Doxys at once as they soared straight for his nose, Harry moved closer to George and muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “What are Skiving Snackboxes?”
“Range of sweets to make you ill,” George whispered, keeping a wary eye on Mrs. Weasley’s back. “Not seriously ill, mind, just ill enough to get you out of a class when you feel like it. Fred and I have been developing them this summer. They’re double-ended, colour-coded chews. If you eat the orange half of the Puking Pastilles, you throw up. Moment you’ve been rushed out of the lesson for the hospital wing, you swallow the purple half—”
“‘—which restores you to full fitness, enabling you to pursue the leisure activity of your own choice during an hour that would otherwise have been devoted to unprofitable boredom.’ That’s what we’re putting in the adverts, anyway,” whispered Fred, who had edged over out of Mrs. Weasley’s line of vision and was now sweeping a few stray Doxys from the floor and adding them to his pocket. “But they still need a bit of work. At the moment our testers are having a bit of trouble stopping themselves puking long enough to swallow the purple end.”
“Testers?”
“Us,” said Fred. “We take it in turns. George did the Fainting Fancies—we both tried the Nosebleed Nougat—”
“Mum thought we’d been duelling,” said George.
“Joke shop still on, then?” Harry muttered, pretending to be adjusting the nozzle on his spray.
“Well, we haven’t had a chance to get premises yet,” said Fred, dropping his voice even lower as Mrs. Weasley mopped her brow with her scarf before returning to the attack, “so we’re ru
“All thanks to you, mate,” said George. “But don’t worry… Mum hasn’t got a clue. She won’t read the Daily Prophet any more, ’cause of it telling lies about you and Dumbledore.”
Harry gri
The de-Doxying of the curtains took most of the morning. It was past midday when Mrs. Weasley finally removed her protective scarf, sank into a sagging armchair and sprang up again with a cry of disgust, having sat on the bag of dead rats. The curtains were no longer buzzing; they hung limp and damp from the intensive spraying. At the foot of them unconscious Doxys lay crammed in the bucket beside a bowl of their black eggs, at which Crookshanks was now sniffing and Fred and George were shooting covetous looks.
“I think we’ll tackle those after lunch.” Mrs. Weasley pointed at the dusty glass-fronted cabinets standing on either side of the mantelpiece. They were crammed with an odd assortment of objects: a selection of rusty daggers, claws, a coiled snakeskin, a number of tarnished silver boxes inscribed with languages Harry could not understand and, least pleasant of all, an ornate crystal bottle with a large opal set into the stopper, full of what Harry was quite sure was blood.
The clanging doorbell rang again. Everyone looked at Mrs. Weasley.
“Stay here,” she said firmly, snatching up the bag of rats as Mrs. Black’s screeches started up again from down below. “I’ll bring up some sandwiches.”
She left the room, closing the door carefully behind her. At once, everyone dashed over to the window to look down on the doorstep. They could see the top of an unkempt gingery head and a stack of precariously balanced cauldrons.
“Mundungus!” said Hermione. “What’s he brought all those cauldrons for?”
“Probably looking for a safe place to keep them,” said Harry. “Isn’t that what he was doing the night he was supposed to be tailing me? Picking up dodgy cauldrons?”
“Yeah, you’re right!” said Fred, as the front door opened; Mundungus heaved his cauldrons through it and disappeared from view. “Blimey, Mum won’t like that…”
He and George crossed to the door and stood beside it, listening closely. Mrs. Black’s screaming had stopped.
“Mundungus is talking to Sirius and Kingsley,” Fred muttered, frowning with concentration. “Can’t hear properly… d’you reckon we can risk the Extendable Ears?”
“Might be worth it,” said George. “I could sneak upstairs and get a pair—”
But at that precise moment there was an explosion of sound from downstairs that rendered Extendable Ears quite u
“WE ARE NOT RUNNING A HIDEOUT FOR STOLEN GOODS!”
“I love hearing Mum shouting at someone else,” said Fred, with a satisfied smile on his face as he opened the door an inch or so to allow Mrs. Weasley’s voice to permeate the room better, “it makes such a nice change.”
“—COMPLETELY IRRESPONSIBLE, AS IF WE HAVEN’T GOT ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT WITHOUT YOU DRAGGING STOLEN CAULDRONS INTO THE HOUSE—”
“The idiots are letting her get into her stride,” said George, shaking his head. “You’ve got to head her off early otherwise she builds up a head of steam and goes on for hours. And she’s been dying to have a go at Mundungus ever since he sneaked off when he was supposed to be following you, Harry—and there goes Sirius’s mum again.”
Mrs. Weasley’s voice was lost amid fresh shrieks and screams from the portraits in the hall.
George made to shut the door to drown the noise, but before he could do so, a house-elf edged into the room.
Except for the filthy rag tied like a loincloth around its middle, it was completely naked. It looked very old. Its skin seemed to be several times too big for it and, though it was bald like all house-elves, there was a quantity of white hair growing out of its large, batlike ears. Its eyes were a bloodshot and watery grey and its fleshy nose was large and rather snoutlike.
The elf took absolutely no notice of Harry and the rest. Acting as though it could not see them, it shuffled hunchbacked, slowly and doggedly, towards the far end of the room, all the while muttering under its breath in a hoarse, deep voice like a bullfrogs.