A Different Halloween

Chapter 18

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The staff of the Daily Prophet found themselves not only working all night but being given the rollicking off their lives by the paper's editor. Peter White was laying down the law. "I don't give a shit who killed him, the goblins will give away free gold before the Daily Prophet prints that a muggle was responsible for his downfall! The owners would skin us all alive and pin our hides above the entrance. Lose this muggle-who-lived crap and come at it from a different angle. You're supposed to be journalists, go and write me something I can put on the front page of our paper!"

Peter was getting into his stride, "If I was a follower of the dark lord I would be shitting myself about now, all-powerful wizard my arse! A muggle baby may have killed him but I want people to remember it was the Prophet that buried the bastard! Dig out all the information you can on him and his followers, we'll see how these arseholes like reading about themselves instead of spending their evenings placing dark marks over peoples houses. Their leader is not only dead but humiliated, let's put the boot into these sick bastards while they're down."

The staff couldn't believe what they were hearing, it appeared the Prophet was declaring war on the death eaters.

"From now on we print the name, no more of this you-know-who nonsense. The prick got taken out by a muggle toddler, the Daily Prophet is done cowering in fear of retaliation. Get going and start tearing these bastards down, we've a deadline to meet."

There was a mad rush as the Prophet workers were probably the first to realise that the morning would bring a new dawn to their world in ways never imagined before.

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That mornings Prophet should really have come with a ministerial health warning, quite a few readers almost choked on their breakfast because of it. The banner headline proclaimed the unthinkable in more ways than one.

YOU-KNOW-VOLDEMORT?

HE'S DEAD!

Even printing the dark lord's name the day before would have been a death sentence. These bold headlines stated that not only was it over, there was nothing more to fear.

The story itself was a masterpiece of the Daily Prophet's art. Take a few known facts and fabricate whatever story you wanted to fit them. Everyone was aware Voldemort had delved into the darkest of rituals, it was also known that the Potters had eluded him again since the photograph of their wrecked cottage had appeared in yesterday's edition. When you then highlighted the fact that the house he died in belonged to the Potters muggle relatives, the fiction that would become the established story of what transpired that night was born.

Voldemort had travelled there to perform a dark ritual designed to provide him with access to the Potters. Something went badly wrong and the magical backlash left only the muggle toddler and an accompanying death eater still alive. The Prophet promised more news when the death eater, Hogwarts new head of Slytherin Severus Snape, regained consciousness from his substantial injuries.

Peter White felt there was more than enough truth in the story that it would stand any questioning, there was probably more truth there than most of their stories. Any new information that surfaced to contradict their sanitised view of the event could either be altered or conveniently lost and forgotten. The muggle baby would be consigned to become just that, a muggle baby that was lucky to survive and instantly ignored by their world as inconsequential. The Prophet didn't even print names of any of the three Dursley's who were involved. Peter figured that in the magical context of the story, muggles were irrelevant.

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Barty Crouch loved the story. It stuck it to the death eaters, especially Dumbledore's boy, and totally ignored the role of the muggle child. Barty thought if he played this just right, he could even imply to Lord Potter that he personally had played a role in keeping the child's name and involvement out of the paper. The only thing that could make this morning any better would be viewing Dumbledore's reactions as he read this morning's paper. Barty would pay good gold for that because he was sure it would be memorable.

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