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"Affirmative. All systems go, Captain," she replied, and there was a titter from Damien. They all turned and began to descend the staircase, Ted steering James along with them.
"Should I go change or something?" he asked, his voice shaking as he pounded down the stairs.
Ted gave him an appraising look. "No, I don't think that'll be necessary in your case. Relax, mate. You're going to have a blast. So to speak. Jump just here, then. You don't want to step on that step, mind you." James jumped, his backpack swinging from his shoulder, feeling himself pulled along partly by the group's enthusiasm, but mostly by Ted's grip on his elbow. He landed on the floor of a long, torch lit corridor and stumbled to keep up. At the end of the hall, the group met three more students, all standing in the shadow thrown by a statue of a gigantic, hunchbacked wizard wearing a very tall hat.
"Good evening, fellow Gremlins," Ted whispered as they all clustered together in the shadow of the statue. "Meet James, son of my godfather, some guy named Harry Potter." James gri
"Zane," Ge
"We're go
"Raise the Wocket," Noah corrected.
James decided it was time to impress himself upon the conversation. "So where is this Wocket? And why are we all crammed into a corner behind a statue?"
"This isn't just any old statue," Petra said as Ted shimmied as far between the statue and the wall as he could, apparently looking for something. "This is St. Lokimagus the Perpetually Productive. We only learned his story last year and it led us to a rather amazing discovery."
"Led you, you mean," Ted said, his voice muffled.
Petra considered this and nodded. "True enough," she agreed matter-of-factly.
"Back in your father's day," Noah said as Ted scratched around behind the statue, "there were six secret passages in and out of Hogwarts. But that was before the Battle. After that, a lot of the castle was rebuilt, and all the old secret passages were permanently sealed off. Fu
Noah pointed to the words engraved into the statue's base: Igitur Qui Moveo, Qui et Movea.
Ted made a grunt of triumph and there was a loud click. "You'll never guess where it was this time," he said, puffing from beneath the statue. With a grind of moving stone, the statue of St. Lokimagus straightened up as much as his humped back would allow, stepped carefully off his plinth, and then walked across the corridor with a slightly bowlegged gait. He disappeared into the door opposite, which James saw was a boys' bathroom.
"What's his slogan mean?" James asked as the Gremlins began to duck hurriedly into the low doorway on the back of St. Lokimagus' plinth. Noah gri
The passage led to a short stairway with rounded stone steps. The Gremlins pounded noisily up the steps, and then shushed each other as they reached a doorway. Ted creaked the door open a fraction, peering through the crack. A moment later he pushed the door wide and motioned for the rest to follow him outside.
The door opened inexplicably out of a small shed near what James recognized as the Quidditch pitch. The tall grandstands rose into the moonlight, looking bleak and imposing in the silence.
"The passage only works one way," Sabrina explained to James and Zane as the group ran lightly across the Quidditch pitch toward the hills beyond. "If you go into it without having come through St. Lokimagus' tu
"Have you gotten caught yet?" James asked, puffing along next to her.
"No, but this is the first time we've tried to use it. We only discovered it at the end of last year." She shrugged as if to say we'll see how this turns out, won't we?
Zane's voice came out of the darkness behind James, conversationally. "What if St. Magic Buns gets done with the loo before we all come back through his hole?" James shuddered at Zane's turn of phrase, but admired his logic. It seemed like a question worth asking.
"That's definitely a question for a Ravenclaw," Noah called back as quietly as he could, but nobody answered.
After ten minutes of skirting the border of a scraggly, moonlit wood, the group clambered over a wire fence into a field. Ted pulled his wand from his back pocket as he approached a patch of rambling bushes and weeds. James followed and saw that there was a low barn hidden among the growth. It was ramshackle, bowed and buried in vines.
"Alohomora," Ted said, pointing his wand at the large rusted padlock hanging on the door. There was a flash of yellow light. It bloomed out of the lock, and then resolved into the shape of a glowing, ghostly arm that snaked from the padlock's keyhole. The arm ended in a fist with the index finger pointed in the air. It waggled the finger back and forth reprovingly for a few seconds, and then vanished.
"Protective charm's still in place, then," Ted a
"That was Ge
"Would've been a nice touch," Zane agreed.
"We figured any magical types that tried to break in here wouldn't think to try anything as boring as a key," Noah explained. "We put up Disillusionment Charms to keep the Muggles away, but they don't come out here anyway. It's abandoned."