The Goblet of Fire Read online

  Harry had walked right past the stone gargoyle guarding the entrance to Dumbledore’s office without noticing. He blinked, looked around, realised what he had done and retraced his steps, stopping in front of it. Then he remembered that he didn’t know the password.

  ‘Sherbet lemon?’ he tried tentatively.

  The gargoyle did not move.

  ‘OK,’ said Harry, staring at it. ‘Pear drop. Er – Liquorice wand. Fizzing Whizzbee. Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum. Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans … oh no, he doesn’t like them, does he? … Oh, just open, can’t you?’ he said angrily. ‘I really need to see him, it’s urgent!’

  The gargoyle remained immovable.

  Harry kicked it, achieving nothing but an excruciating pain in his big toe.

  ‘Chocolate Frog!’ he yelled angrily, standing on one leg. ‘Sugar quill! Cockroach cluster!’

  The gargoyle sprang to life, and jumped aside. Harry blinked.

  ‘Cockroach cluster?’ he said, amazed. ‘I was only joking …’

  He hurried through the gap in the walls, and stepped onto the foot of a spiral stone staircase, which moved slowly upwards as the doors closed behind him, taking him up to a polished oak door with a brass door-knocker.

  He could hear voices from inside the office. He stepped off the moving staircase and hesitated, listening.

  ‘Dumbledore, I’m afraid I don’t see the connection, don’t see it at all!’ It was the voice of the Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge. ‘Ludo says Bertha’s perfectly capable of getting herself lost. I agree we would have expected to have found her by now, but all the same, we’ve no evidence of foul play, Dumbledore, none at all. As for her disappearance being linked with Barty Crouch’s!’

  ‘And what do you think’s happened to Barty Crouch, Minister?’ said Moody’s growling voice.

  ‘I see two possibilities, Alastor,’ said Fudge. ‘Either Crouch has finally cracked – more than likely, I’m sure you’ll agree, given his personal history – lost his mind, and gone wandering off somewhere –’

  ‘He wandered extremely quickly, if that is the case, Cornelius,’ said Dumbledore calmly.

  ‘Or else – well …’ Fudge sounded embarrassed. ‘Well, I’ll reserve judgement until after I’ve seen the place where he was found, but you say it was just past the Beauxbatons carriage? Dumbledore, you know what that woman is?’

  ‘I consider her to be a very able Headmistress – and an excellent dancer,’ said Dumbledore quietly.

  ‘Dumbledore, come!’ said Fudge angrily. ‘Don’t you think you might be prejudiced in her favour because of Hagrid? They don’t all turn out harmless – if, indeed, you can call Hagrid harmless, with that monster fixation he’s got –’

  ‘I no more suspect Madame Maxime than Hagrid,’ said Dumbledore, just as calmly. ‘I think it possible that it is you who are prejudiced, Cornelius.’

  ‘Can we wrap up this discussion?’ growled Moody.

  ‘Yes, yes, let’s go down into the grounds, then,’ said Cornelius impatiently.

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ said Moody, ‘it’s just that Potter wants a word with you, Dumbledore. He’s just outside the door.’

  — CHAPTER THIRTY —

  The Pensieve

  The door of the office opened.

  ‘Hello, Potter,’ said Moody. ‘Come in, then.’

  Harry walked inside. He had been inside Dumbledore’s office once before; it was a very beautiful, circular room, lined with pictures of previous Headmasters and mistresses of Hogwarts, all of whom were fast asleep, their chests rising and falling gently.

  Cornelius Fudge was standing beside Dumbledore’s desk, wearing his usual pinstriped cloak and holding his lime-green bowler hat.

  ‘Harry!’ said Fudge jovially, moving forwards. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ Harry lied.

  ‘We were just talking about the night when Mr Crouch turned up in the grounds,’ said Fudge. ‘It was you who found him, was it not?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry. Then, feeling it was pointless to pretend that he hadn’t overheard what they had been saying, he added, ‘I didn’t see Madame Maxime anywhere, though, and she’d have a job hiding, wouldn’t she?’

  Dumbledore smiled at Harry behind Fudge’s back, his eyes twinkling.

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Fudge, looking embarrassed, ‘we’re about to go for a short walk in the grounds, Harry, if you’ll excuse us … perhaps if you just go back to your class –’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you, Professor,’ Harry said quickly, looking at Dumbledore, who gave him a swift, searching look.

  ‘Wait here for me, Harry,’ he said. ‘Our examination of the grounds will not take long.’

  They trooped out in silence past him, and closed the door. After a minute or so, Harry heard the clunks of Moody’s wooden leg growing fainter in the corridor below. He looked around.

  ‘Hello, Fawkes,’ he said.

  Fawkes, Professor Dumbledore’s phoenix, was standing on his golden perch beside the door. The size of a swan, with magnificent scarlet and gold plumage, he swished his long tail and blinked benignly at Harry.

  Harry sat down in a chair in front of Dumbledore’s desk. For several minutes, he sat and watched the old Headmasters and mistresses snoozing in their frames, thinking about what he had just heard, and running his fingers over his scar. It had stopped hurting now.

  He felt much calmer, somehow, now he was in Dumbledore’s office, knowing he would shortly be telling him about the dream. Harry looked up at the walls behind the desk. The patched and ragged Sorting Hat was standing on a shelf. A glass case next to it held a magnificent silver sword, with large rubies set into the hilt, which Harry recognised as the one he himself had pulled out of the Sorting Hat in his second year. The sword had once belonged to Godric Gryffindor, founder of Harry’s house. He was gazing at it, remembering how it had come to his aid when he had thought all hope was lost, when he noticed a patch of silvery light, dancing and shimmering on the glass case. He looked around for the source of the light, and saw a sliver of silver white shining brightly from within a black cabinet behind him, whose door had not been closed properly. Harry hesitated, glanced at Fawkes, then got up, walked across the office, and pulled the cabinet door open.

  A shallow stone basin lay there, with odd carvings around the edge; runes and symbols that Harry did not recognise. The silvery light was coming from the basin’s contents, which were like nothing Harry had ever seen before. He could not tell whether the substance was liquid or gas. It was a bright, whitish silver, and it was moving ceaselessly; the surface of it became ruffled like water beneath wind, and then, like clouds, separated and swirled smoothly. It looked like light made liquid – or like wind made solid – Harry couldn’t make up his mind.

  He wanted to touch it, to find out what it felt like, but nearly four years’ experience of the magical world told him that sticking his hand into a bowl full of some unknown substance was a very stupid thing to do. He therefore pulled his wand out of the inside of his robes, cast a nervous look around the office, looked back at the contents of the basin, and prodded them. The surface of the silvery stuff inside the basin began to swirl very fast.

  Harry bent closer, his head right inside the cabinet. The silvery substance had become transparent; it looked like glass. He looked down into it, expecting to see the stone bottom of the basin – and saw instead an enormous room below the surface of the mysterious substance, a room into which he seemed to be looking through a circular window in the ceiling.

  The room was dimly lit; he thought it might even be underground, for there were no windows, merely torches in brackets such as the ones that illuminated the walls of Hogwarts. Lowering his face so that his nose was a mere inch away from the glassy substance, Harry saw that rows and rows of witches and wizards were sat around every wall on what seemed to be benches rising in levels. An empty chair stood in the very centre of the room. There was something about the chair that gave Harry an ominous
feeling. Chains encircled the arms of it, as though its occupants were usually tied to it.

  Where was this place? It surely wasn’t Hogwarts; he had never seen a room like that here in the castle. Moreover, the crowd in the mysterious room at the bottom of the basin was composed of adults, and Harry knew there were not nearly that many teachers at Hogwarts. They seemed, he thought, to be waiting for something; even though he could only see the tops of their pointed hats, they all seemed to be facing in one direction, and nobody was talking to anybody else.

  The basin being circular, and the room he was observing square, Harry could not make out what was going on in the corners of it. He leant even closer, tilting his head, trying to see …

  The tip of his nose touched the strange substance into which he was staring.

  Dumbledore’s office gave an almighty lurch – Harry was thrown forwards and pitched headfirst into the substance inside the basin –

  But his head did not hit the stone bottom. He was falling through something icy cold and black; it was like being sucked into a dark whirlpool –

  And suddenly, he found himself sitting on a bench at the end of the room inside the basin, a bench raised high above the others. He looked up at the high stone ceiling, expecting to see the circular window through which he had just been staring, but there was nothing there but dark, solid stone.

  Breathing hard and fast, Harry looked around him. Not one of the witches and wizards in the room (and there were at least two hundred of them) was looking at him. Not one of them seemed to have noticed that a fourteen-year-old boy had just dropped from the ceiling into their midst. Harry turned to the wizard next to him on the bench, and uttered a loud cry of surprise that reverberated around the silent room.

  He was sitting right next to Albus Dumbledore.

  ‘Professor!’ Harry said, in a kind of strangled whisper. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to – I was just looking at that basin in your cabinet – I – where are we?’

  But Dumbledore didn’t move or speak. He ignored Harry completely. Like every other wizard on the benches, he was staring into the far corner of the room, where there was a door.

  Harry gazed, nonplussed, at Dumbledore, then around at the silently watchful crowd, then back at Dumbledore. And then it dawned on him …

  Once before, Harry had found himself a place where nobody could see or hear him. That time, he had fallen through a page in an enchanted diary, right into somebody else’s memory … and unless he was very much mistaken, something of the sort had happened again …

  Harry raised his right hand, hesitated, and then waved it energetically in front of Dumbledore’s face. Dumbledore did not blink, look around at Harry, or indeed move at all. And that, in Harry’s opinion, settled the matter. Dumbledore wouldn’t ignore him like that. He was inside a memory, and this was not the present-day Dumbledore. Yet it couldn’t be that long ago … the Dumbledore sitting next to him now was silver-haired, just like the present-day Dumbledore. But what was this place? What were all these wizards waiting for?

  Harry looked around more carefully. The room, as he had suspected when observing it from above, was almost certainly underground – more of a dungeon than a room, he thought. There was a bleak and forbidding air about the place; there were no pictures on the walls, no decorations at all; just these serried rows of benches, rising in levels all around the room, all positioned so that they had a clear view of that chair with the chains on its arms.

  Before Harry could reach any conclusions about the place in which they were, he heard footsteps. The door in the corner of the dungeon opened, and three people entered – or at least, one man, flanked by two Dementors.

  Harry’s insides went cold. The Dementors, tall, hooded creatures whose faces were concealed, were gliding slowly towards the chair in the centre of the room, each grasping one of the man’s arms with their dead and rotten-looking hands. The man between them looked as though he was about to faint, and Harry couldn’t blame him … he knew the Dementors could not touch him inside a memory, but Harry remembered their power only too well. The watching crowd recoiled slightly as the Dementors placed the man in the chained chair and glided back out of the room. The door swung shut behind them.

  Harry looked down at the man now sitting in the chair, and saw that it was Karkaroff.

  Unlike Dumbledore, Karkaroff looked much younger; his hair and goatee were black. He was not dressed in sleek furs, but in thin and ragged robes. He was shaking. Even as Harry watched, the chains on the arms of the chair glowed suddenly gold, and snaked their way up his arms, binding him there.

  ‘Igor Karkaroff,’ said a curt voice to Harry’s left. Harry looked around, and saw Mr Crouch standing up in the middle of the bench beside him. Crouch’s hair was dark, his face was much less lined, he looked fit and alert. ‘You have been brought from Azkaban to give evidence to the Ministry of Magic. You have given us to understand that you have important information for us.’

  Karkaroff straightened himself as best he could, tightly bound to the chair.

  ‘I have, sir,’ he said, and although his voice was very scared, Harry could still hear the familiar unctuous note in it. ‘I wish to be of use to the Ministry. I wish to help. I – I know that the Ministry is trying to – to round up the last of the Dark Lord’s supporters. I am eager to assist in any way I can …’

  There was a murmur around the benches. Some of the wizards and witches were surveying Karkaroff with interest, others with pronounced mistrust. Then Harry heard, quite distinctly, from Dumbledore’s other side, a familiar, growling voice saying, ‘Filth.’

  Harry leant forwards so that he could see past Dumbledore. Mad-Eye Moody was sitting there – though there was a very noticeable difference in his appearance. He did not have his magical eye, but two normal ones. Both were looking down upon Karkaroff, and both were narrowed in intense dislike.

  ‘Crouch is going to let him out,’ Moody breathed quietly to Dumbledore. ‘He’s done a deal with him. Took me six months to track him down, and Crouch is going to let him go if he’s got enough new names. Let’s hear his information, I say, and throw him straight back to the Dementors.’

  Dumbledore made a small noise of dissent through his long, crooked nose.

  ‘Ah, I was forgetting … you don’t like the Dementors, do you, Albus?’ said Moody, with a sardonic smile.

  ‘No,’ said Dumbledore calmly, ‘I’m afraid I don’t. I have long felt the Ministry is wrong to ally itself with such creatures.’

  ‘But for filth like this …’ Moody said softly.

  ‘You say you have names for us, Karkaroff,’ said Mr Crouch. ‘Let us hear them, please.’

  ‘You must understand,’ said Karkaroff hurriedly, ‘that He Who Must Not Be Named operated always in the greatest secrecy … he preferred that we – I mean to say, his supporters – and I regret now, very deeply, that I ever counted myself among them –’

  ‘Get on with it,’ sneered Moody.

  ‘– we never knew the names of every one of our fellows – he alone knew exactly who we all were –’

  ‘Which was a wise move, wasn’t it, as it prevented someone like you, Karkaroff, turning all of them in,’ muttered Moody.

  ‘Yet you say you have some names for us?’ said Mr Crouch.

  ‘I – I do,’ said Karkaroff breathlessly. ‘And these were important supporters, mark you. People I saw with my own eyes doing his bidding. I give this information as a sign that I fully and totally renounce him, and am filled with a remorse so deep I can barely –’

  ‘These names are?’ said Mr Crouch sharply.

  Karkaroff drew a deep breath.

  ‘There was Antonin Dolohov,’ he said. ‘I – I saw him torture countless Muggles and – and non-supporters of the Dark Lord.’

  ‘And helped him do it,’ murmured Moody.

  ‘We have already apprehended Dolohov,’ said Crouch. ‘He was caught shortly after yourself.’

  ‘Indeed?’ said Karkaroff, his eyes
widening. ‘I – I am delighted to hear it!’

  But he didn’t look it. Harry could tell that this news had come as a real blow to him. One of his names was worthless.

  ‘Any others?’ said Crouch coldly.

  ‘Why, yes … there was Rosier,’ said Karkaroff hurriedly. ‘Evan Rosier.’

  ‘Rosier is dead,’ said Crouch. ‘He was caught shortly after you were, too. He preferred to fight rather than coming quietly, and was killed in the struggle.’

  ‘Took a bit of me with him, though,’ whispered Moody to Harry’s right. Harry looked around at him once more, and saw him indicating the large chunk out of his nose to Dumbledore.

  ‘No – no more than Rosier deserved!’ said Karkaroff, a real note of panic in his voice now. Harry could see that he was starting to worry that none of his information would be any use to the Ministry. Karkaroff’s eyes darted towards the door in the corner, behind which the Dementors undoubtedly still stood, waiting.

  ‘Any more?’ said Crouch.

  ‘Yes!’ said Karkaroff. ‘There was Travers – he helped murder the McKinnons! Mulciber – he specialised in the Imperius Curse, forced countless people to do horrific things! Rookwood, who was a spy, and passed He Who Must Not Be Named useful information from inside the Ministry itself!’

  Harry could tell that, this time, Karkaroff had struck gold. The watching crowd were all murmuring together.

  ‘Rookwood?’ said Mr Crouch, nodding to a witch sitting in front of him, who began scribbling upon her piece of parchment. ‘Augustus Rookwood of the Department of Mysteries?’

  ‘The very same,’ said Karkaroff eagerly. ‘I believe he used a network of well-placed wizards, both inside the Ministry and out, to collect information –’

  ‘But Travers and Mulciber, we have,’ said Mr Crouch. ‘Very well, Karkaroff, if that is all, you will be returned to Azkaban while we decide –’