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Aurora Areli
THE NEXT TWO DAYS passed without great incident, unless you counted Neville melting his sixth cauldron in Potions. Professor Snape seemed to have achieved higher levels of vindictiveness than I thought possible over the summer, and therefore gave Neville a detention where he was made to disembowel a barrelful of horned toads, and returned in a state of nervous collapse.
"You know why Snape's in a foul mood, don't you?" Ron said to Harry and I, as we watched Hermione teaching Neville a Scouring Charm to remove the toad guts from under his fingernails.
"Yeah," Harry said. "Moody."
I frowned at down at the chart in my hands I was working on for Divination. It was common knowledge that Snape really wanted the DADA job, and that he had now failed to get it for the fourth year running. What was so unusual about this year was that, instead of blatantly showing his dislike for Moody, like he had done for all of the other Defence teachers, Snape seemed to avoid Moody's eye whenever the two of them were together.
"I reckon Snape's a bit scared of him, you know," Harry said thoughtfully.
"Imagine if Moody turned Snape into a horned toad," said Ron, his eyes misting over, "and bounced him all around his dungeon . . ."
"One can only hope," I said with a sigh.
The Gryffindor fourth years were looking forward to Moody's first lesson so much that we arrived early (i.e. Harry and Ron had practically dragged me) after lunch on Thursday and queued up outside his classroom before the bell had even rung.
The only person missing was Hermione, who turned up just in time for the lesson.
"Been in the —"
"— library," I finished her sentence for her, smiling. "C'mon, let's go so we can at least get decent seats."
We hurried into seats right in front of the teacher's desk, took out our copies of The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection, and waited in the unusually silent classroom. Soon, Moody's distinctive clunking footsteps could be heard coming down the corridor, and he entered the room, looking as strange and frightening as ever.
"You can put those away," he growled, stumping over to his desk and sitting down, "those books. You won't need them."
I returned my book to my bag like the rest of the class.
Moody took out a register, shook his long mane of grizzled grey hair out of his twisted and scarred face and began to call out names, his normal eye moving steadily down the list while his magical eye swivelled around, fixing upon each student as they answered.
"Right then," he said, when the last person had declared themselves present, "I've had a letter from Professor Lupin about this class. Seems you've had a pretty thorough grounding in tackling Dark creatures — you've covered Boggarts, Red Caps, Hinkypunks, Grindylows, Kappas and werewolves, is that right?"
