Dark Pasts { A Harry Potter Story }

Chapter 6 - The Unforgivable Curses

Everyone was so excited for our first class with Moody that we queued up outside his classroom before the bell had even rung. We hurried to the front of the class and sat down. Hermione and I were in the seats just in front of the teacher's desk, Ron and Harry were right beside her. Everyone waited, unusually quiet until we began to hear approaching footsteps coming from the corridor.

"You can put those away," he growled as he entered the room, "those books. You won't need them."

We all put our books back in our bags, exchanging excited glances.

"Right then," he said, "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?"

There was a general murmur of assent.

"But you're very behind on curses," he said. "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, you aren't staying?" Ron blurted out.

Moody's eye spun around and landed on Ron. He was quiet for a moment, but eventually, he cracked what appeared to be a smile.

"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 favour to Dumbledore. . . . One year, and then back to my quiet retirement."

He gave a harsh laugh then clapped his hands together.

"So — straight into it. Curses. They come in many strengths and forms. Now, according to the Ministry of Magic, I'm supposed to teach you countercurses and leave it at that. I'm not supposed to show you what illegal Dark curses look like until you're in the sixth year. You're not supposed to be old enough to deal with it till then.But Professor Dumbledore's got a higher opinion of your nerves, he reckons you can cope, and I say, the sooner you know what you're up against, the better. How are you supposed to defend yourself against something you've never seen? A wizard who's about to put an illegal curse on you isn't going to tell you what he's about to do. He's not going to do it nice and polite to your face. You need to be prepared. You need to be alert and watchful."

Hermione and I exchanged a glance.

"So . . . do any of you know which curses are most heavily punished by wizarding law?"

He pointed at Ron, but his eye was fixed on something in the back of the class.

"Er," Ron said tentatively, "my dad told me about one. . . . Is it called the Imperius Curse, or something?"

"Ah, yes," Moody said, "your father would know that one. Gave the Ministry a lot of trouble at one time, the Imperius Curse."

Moody got heavily to his mismatched feet, opened his desk drawer, and took out a glass jar. Three large black spiders were scuttling around inside it, making me frown. Then, he reached into the jar, caught one of the spiders, and held it in the palm of his hand so that we could all see it.

"Imperio!" he muttered, pointing his wand at the spider.

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 backflip, breaking the thread and landing on the desk, where it began to cartwheel in circles. 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?"