Snidely Porpington and the Fifth House of Hogwarts

Chapter 7

In Which A Poser Is Revealed

That evening, towards midnight, Snidely, Hugo, Theresa, and several other students from Bouryk dragged their unwilling feet up the stone stairs to the Astronomy Tower. Normally they would never put in so much effort to go to a class of all things. But Astronomy with Professor Sinistra was often a great deal more fun than the usual snore-fest lessons.

Up a last wooden stepladder the gang emerged into the cool starlit night, high atop the castle with a simply marvelous view of the Scottish Highlands.

"Is that Loch Ness over yonder?" said Jadujeet, pointing it out to Theresa.

"You can't see Loch Ness this time of night," said a voice by the wall. "Only the lights in Inverness next to it."

Aurora Sinistra emerged from the shadows in her pointed hat and dark purple robes. She was a youngish, Black British witch with strong and sharp features. Sinistra had woken up one morning, several years back, and realized she had completely run out of fucks to give. Her incisive but unorthodox classes reflected this approach. Snidely and the others often wished she could be their head of house (even if they grudgingly liked Filch), but Professor Sinistra would only have laughed at such an idea.

"Is it true about that – monster down there?" said Jadujeet timidly.

"Yes," Sinistra said matter-of-factly. "But the real magic," she went on, "happened a few miles off – at Culloden."

"What's 'Clodden'?" said Hugo, his mouth full of Cornish pasty.

"A battle site. It saw a minor skirmish over a muggle kingdom in 1746," she said. "The Scottish rebel king was called Bonnie Prince Charlie. He was useless as a general, but happened to be a damned clever wizard. How else do you think he evaded Butcher Cumberland's men so many months and escaped back to France?"

The children stared blankly at Sinistra, never having wondered this question.

"Well anyway, he had two great big Kelpie sea creatures he could ride between the lochs and islands. He couldn't take them both back to France because King Louis thought they smelled too much of herring. So he left one in the loch there, and it's come out to eat muggle tourists once in a while ever since." Sinistra flashed a quick smile at them, then strode over to the telescope shed.

"Right then, everyone out with your 'scopes," she said, and the students bustled around setting up their astronomical instruments.

The students of Brork weren't the only children up in the tower that night, but it was so dark they couldn't even tell what house the others were from, let alone year. They seemed to be a sullen lot, so probably Slytherins.

It took them a good ten minutes to sort out all the different telescopes and their tripods in the midnight blackness. Someone suggested using the lumos spell but Sinistra forbade them. It would desensitize their vision to the dark, she said. At last even Hugo had his tripod more or less standing and their teacher looked up to examine the sky. A thunder-clap sounded far away.

"Bugger piss and shit!" she exclaimed.

"What is it nooow, Miss?" said a whiny Slytherin voice near Snidely's waist.

Bloody first-years, Snidely thought. He aimed a kick at the boy's tripod but missed in the dark.

"Cloud cover just rolled in," said their teacher, "not sure how long it'll last. You lot know any good jokes?"

As usual Professor Sinistra's easy candor caught her students off guard. Snidely knew a few jokes but most of them involved outrageous acts of perversion, so he thought he'd better not tell them in front of a bunch of eleven-year-olds. The little sods would tattle in owls to their nosy parents no question.