The Girl Who Lived

Unforgivable Curses

The next two days passed without great incident, unless you counted Neville melting his sixth cauldron in Potions. Professor Snape, who seemed to have attained new levels of vindictiveness over the summer, gave Neville detention, and Neville returned from it in a state of nervous collapse, having been made to disem- bowel a barrel full of horned toads.
"You know why Snape's in such a foul mood, don't you?" said Ron to Harry as we watched Mione teaching Neville a Scouring Charm to remove the frog guts from under his fingernails.
"Yeah," said Harry. "Moody."
It was common knowledge that Snape really wanted the Dark Arts job, and he had now failed to get it for the fourth year running. Snape had disliked all of their previous Dark Arts teachers, and shown it — but he seemed strangely wary of displaying overt animosity to Mad-Eye Moody.
Maybe Snape's scared of him. I thought to myself.
We raced to the DADA room for our first lesson with Moody. Apparently, we were 'really far behind'. He was going to catch us up on charms.
"So I'm here to bring you up to scratch on what wizards can do to each other. I've got one year to teach you how to deal with Dark —"
"What, aren't you staying?" Ron blurted out.
Moody's magical eye spun around to stare at Ron; Ron looked extremely apprehensive, but after a moment Moody smiled — the first time Harry had seen him do so. The effect was to make his heavily scarred face look more twisted and contorted than ever, but it was nevertheless good to know that he ever did anything as friendly as smile. Ron looked deeply relieved.
"You'll be Arthur Weasley's son, eh?" Moody said. "Your father got me out of a very tight corner a few days ago. . . . Yeah, I'm staying just the one year. Special favor to Dumbledore. . . . One year, and then back to my quiet retirement."
He then started to explain curses- the Unforgivable Curses to be exact. Imperius, Cruciatus, and Avada Kedavra.
Moody got heavily to his mismatched feet, opened his desk drawer, and took out a glass jar. Three large black spiders were scut- tling around inside it. I felt Ron recoil slightly next to him — Ron hated spiders.
Moody reached into the jar, caught one of the spiders, and held it in the palm of his hand so that they could all see it. He then pointed his wand at it and muttered, "Imperio!"
The spider leapt from Moody's hand on a fine thread of silk and began to swing backward and forward as though on a trapeze. It stretched out its legs rigidly, then did a back flip, breaking the thread and landing on the desk, where it began to cartwheel in cir- cles. Moody jerked his wand, and the spider rose onto two of its hind legs and went into what was unmistakably a tap dance.
Everyone was laughing — everyone except Moody.
"Think it's funny, do you?" he growled. "You'd like it, would you, if I did it to you?"
The laughter died away almost instantly.
"Total control," said Moody quietly as the spider balled itself up and began to roll over and over. "I could make it jump out of the window, drown itself, throw itself down one of your throats . . ."
Ron gave an involuntary shudder.
"Years back, there were a lot of witches and wizards being controlled by the Imperius Curse," said Moody, and Harry knew he was talking about the days in which Voldemort had been all-powerful. "Some job for the Ministry, trying to sort out who was being forced to act, and who was acting of their own free will.
"The Imperius Curse can be fought, and I'll be teaching you how, but it takes real strength of character, and not everyone's got it. Better avoid being hit with it if you can. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" he barked, and everyone jumped.
He then took the next spider out to demonstrate Crucio.
"The Cruciatus Curse," said Moody. "Needs to be a bit bigger for you to get the idea," he said, pointing his wand at the spider. "Engorgio!"
The spider swelled. It was now larger than a tarantula. Abandoning all pretense, Ron pushed his chair backward, as far away from Moody's desk as possible.
Moody raised his wand again, pointed it at the spider, and muttered, "Crucio!"
At once, the spider's legs bent in upon its body; it rolled over and began to twitch horribly, rocking from side to side. No sound came from it, but i was sure that if it could have given voice, it would have been screaming. Moody did not remove his wand, and the spider started to shudder and jerk more violently —
Then he stopped, after Mione begged him to.
Lastly, the Avada Kedavra. The killing curse.
He put his hand into the glass jar, and almost as though it knew what was coming, the third spider scuttled frantically around the bottom of the jar, trying to evade Moody's fingers, but he trapped it, and placed it upon the desktop. It started to scuttle frantically across the wooden surface.
Moody raised his wand, and I felt a sudden thrill of foreboding.
"Avada Kedavra!" Moody roared.
There was a flash of blinding green light and a rushing sound, as though a vast, invisible something was soaring through the air — instantaneously the spider rolled over onto its back, unmarked, but unmistakably dead. Several of the students stifled cries; Ron had thrown himself backward and almost toppled off his seat as the spider skidded toward him.
Moody swept the dead spider off the desk onto the floor.
"Not nice," he said calmly. "Not pleasant. And there's no countercurse. There's no blocking it. Only two known people has ever survived it, and they're both sitting right in front of me."
I felt my face redden as one of Moody's eye looked into my own, the other into Harry's. We could feel everyone else looking around at us too. Harry stared at the blank blackboard as though fascinated by it, but not really seeing it at all. . . .
So that was how my parents had died . . . exactly like that spider. Had they been unblemished and unmarked too? Had they simply seen the flash of green light and heard the rush of speeding death, before life was wiped from their bodies?
All these questions raced through my mind to the end of class. Before the bell rang, I put my hand up to my neck. It could've been me. I could've died.
Somehow, I survived.
And I keep surviving each and every day.