Chapter Nine
Often people will say that two separate things, such as people or books, are exactly alike when in fact there are quite obvious differences. Maybe one of those people has a strange scar while the other does not, or one of those books is about magical adventures while the other has no magic whatsoever, no matter what I might wish on the darkest days of my investigations. We might say that people who make such faulty judgements are, in fact, in the dark. While they walk and talk as if they see everything perfectly, the only thing perfectly clear is that they haven’t examined the issue closely enough, and they are acquiring all sorts of ugly bruises from bumping into the things they chose not to see.
The Baudelaire siblings, and the three wizards they had just met in a disused bathroom, were not in the dark at all, and as such Klaus Baudelaire and Harry Potter could see each other quite clearly, and their siblings and friends could see them. While there were a few superficial similarities between the two of them – they both had glasses, and they both had black hair that could get quite ruffled – then anyone who knew them would easily be able to tell the difference. For one thing, Klaus didn’t have a lightning-shaped scar on his head, but there were other differences between them that were harder to describe – something in the way Harry looked reckless and ready for action, while Klaus looked cautious and contemplative. For a moment, all six individuals simply stood quietly, looking from Klaus to Harry and studying their differences.
“Blimey, Harry, he looks exactly like you!” the red-haired boy, Ron Weasley, said. “Well, apart from all the differences.”
“I think I’ve been in a few more fights than you,” Harry said to Klaus. “But you’ve not had an easy life either, I think.”
“You can’t imagine,” Klaus sighed, shaking his head.
The six made their introductions to each other, and sat down around the glowing wands to discuss their mutual preoccupation, a phrase which here means “Nossifer Vulpine.”
“I suppose you three were trying to break into Vulpine’s office,” Harry said. “You, us, and Malfoy – we were probably all looking for the same thing.”
The Baudelaires exchanged looks. “I’m not so sure we were,” Violet said. “We’ve heard that you think Professor Vulpine is a dark wizard – an agent of You-Know-Who.”
“Voldemort,” Harry said firmly. Ron flinched at the sound of the name. “He tried to kill me when I was a baby. Most people think he’s dead, but he’s still out there and he’s still after me.”
“We know how that feels,” Klaus sighed. “Nossifer Vulpine has tried to kill all of us, and he’s been chasing us for a long time now – trying to steal the fortune our parents left us. But his real name is Count Olaf.”
“Count Olaf,” Hermione mused. “That name sounds familiar.”
“Probably in one of your books, Hermione,” Ron said.
“More likely the newspaper,” Violet said. “Count Olaf is a wanted man. That’s why he has to use so many ludicrous disguises.”
“Last year, You-Know-Who possessed our Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher,” Hermione explained. “He was living in the back of the man’s head, and had to use a turban to conceal himself. Ron – well,
we’ve been thinking that Vulpine’s doing the same thing.”
“Sort of,” Klaus said.
“Unifur,” Sunny explained.
“Um, okay?” Ron said, nonplussed.
“What Sunny means,” Klaus said, “is that Nossifer Vulpine isn’t hiding the face on the back of his head, but the face on his front. Under that turban is a single eyebrow which Olaf is well-known for, and under his running shoes is a tattoo of an eye on his ankle. If we can expose those, we can expose Count Olaf.”
“Hold up, I’m lost,” Ron said, holding up his hands. “So is this Olaf guy a dark wizard at all?”
“If he had magic, he’d have used it on us long ago,” Violet said. “He hasn’t used it in his classes. He’s just a normal person, like us.”
“Yes, but Muggles can’t get into Hogwarts,” Hermione said, sounding as if this was something she had to explain often. “There are all sorts of defensive enchantments preventing Muggles from even seeing Hogwarts or coming near.”
“The Baudelaires got through them,” Harry pointed out. “Maybe this Olaf found a loophole.”
“But if Olaf’s a Muggle, who’s the dark wizard?” asked Ron.
“Is there one?” frowned Klaus.
“I’m pretty sure,” Harry said grimly. “Someone’s made a couple of attempts to kill me this year, and whoever it is is probably at Hogwarts.”
“Sassin?” asked Sunny.
“Look at this,” Hermione said, drawing something out of her bag. It was a folded piece of red paper that looked quite normal to the Baudelaires.
“That was a Howler,” Harry said, “which is a magical letter which records the sender’s voice for angry messages.”
“This one, though, had been filled with five hours of silence,” Hermione said, tapping it. “It’s not very well-known, but it’s dangerous to make a Howler too long and without sound. It releases all the air in an explosion.”
“If Hermione hadn’t noticed it bulging and drained the air out, we’d just be three red smudges in the Great Hall,” Ron said. “Unfortunately, once you fix it, it’s no longer evidence of anything!”
“Someone cursed my trunk on the Hogwarts Express, too,” Harry went on. “At the time I thought it was just Malfoy, but now I’m not so sure.”
“I guess we both have our problems,” Klaus sighed. “A dark wizard’s trying to kill you. An evil man is trying to torment us. Without magic, we’re defenceless against him.”
“Hmmm,” Hermione mumbled out loud.
“You three might just be in luck,” Ron said, jabbing a finger towards Hermione. “By the sound of things, she’s got a great idea to help. Let’s just hope she doesn’t have to run off to the library first.”
“Maybe not right now, Ron,” Hermione said, with a frown, “but I do think it’s possible to turn the tables on this Olaf character. It’s bad enough that he’s an awful teacher, but if he’s a criminal as well, we have to get rid of him. We have to trick him into confessing.”
“Usually he only confesses when he’s alone with us,” Violet shuddered. “That’s the last place I want to be.”
“I think we can get around that,” Hermione said. “I’ve been thinking. Klaus and Harry look a little alike – enough that people who aren’t paying attention can’t tell the difference. So how about we use a disguise of our own?”
“Polyjuice Potion?” Ron asked.
“That’s a bit excessive,” Harry said, pulling a face. “And besides, it tastes awful.”
“No, we wouldn’t need Polyjuice Potion,” Hermione said. “But we would need to come up with a simpler way of making the two of you look more like each other rather than yourselves, and we also need to invent a way of tricking Vulpine.”
Klaus and Sunny looked at their older sister, who had begun smiling at the mention of inventions. She looked around the room for a moment, and then started tying her hair up with a ribbon – which, as you probably remember, is a sign to anyone who knows her that she is about to invent something amazing.
“I have a few ideas that might just work, with your help,” she said. “Now, listen…”
At this point, the six students delved deep into thought and conversation, and at this point I will leave them to their planning. You would doubtless prefer to skip straight to seeing how all of these plans came together, and then the surprising way in which everything worked out after that, and if you heard these plans beforehand then you would have no surprises at all. It would be just like seeing the same thing twice, or, if you have been following the Baudelaires’ tale closely, seeing the same thing happen over and over again, as they arrive at a new home, nearly fall into Olaf’s clutches, and then evade him in the nick of time with a daring plan. If that is the case, and you would prefer not to see the same thing happen once again, then perhaps you should return this book to the dark corner you retrieved it from rather than continuing. But for those of you who see the changes and differences between each tale of the Baudelaires, I can advise you to simply turn to the next chapter rather than stumbling about in the dark once more.
Chapter Ten
The following day, if you had seen the Baudelaires you would have assumed that nothing was out of the ordinary; Violet and Klaus went to their classes as normal, and Sunny stayed safely in the kitchens helping with the drying-up while listening to Biccy’s cooking tips. But as they finished their last lesson before Defence Against the Dark Arts, instead of walking in the direction of Nossifer Vulpine’s awful class, they hurried down to the kitchens to collect Sunny, before sneaking all the way back up to the disused bathroom where they had agreed to meet Harry, Ron, and Hermione.
At first, they thought they had arrived early; the bathroom appeared to be empty, apart from the ghost of a girl too busy crying from within the depths of the plumbing to be interested in the Baudelaire orphans. But a few moments later, the trio of wizarding students appeared out of nowhere, slipping off the invisibility cloak they’d told the Baudelaires about the night before.
“We’ve got everything,” Violet said, setting her bag on the floor and opening it.
“Us too,” Hermione replied, doing the same.
“We are going to be in so much trouble if anything goes wrong,” Ron said, looking cautiously at the Potions equipment Violet was setting out.
“Stop fussing, Ron, it’s perfectly safe,” Hermione said. “Violet, you work on that potion, and I’ll work on Harry and Klaus. Ron, you and Sunny test the coins.”
“Come here often?” Ron asked Sunny, who giggled. He emptied a small bag of about six coins onto the floor, and explained everything to Sunny while the others got to work.
Violet had her Potions textbook set out on the floor, and a number of ingredients spread out with her. She had to replicate a certain potion perfectly; any slip-ups, and their one chance to expose Olaf was bound to fail, and get them all into horrible trouble. But she’d had quite a bit of practice at Potions now, and could see where she’d gone wrong in her ingredient preparations the first time – when measuring out ingredients she needed to be sure that they were level, not heaped, and the roots she needed to halve would be better split lengthways…
Meanwhile, Hermione had sat Harry and Ron side-by-side, and was studying their appearances carefully. She pulled out a comb from her bag, and handed it to Harry. “Parted down the centre,” she commanded, before turning to Klaus. “You’ll need to mess up your hair a bit, as if you’ve been spending all day under a cloak running down secret passages.”
“I’ll try my best,” Klaus said, glancing at Harry momentarily before ruffling his hair.
As the pair started fixing their hair, Hermione removed a thin make-up pen from her bag, along with what appeared to be a plaster.
“Do you wear make-up, Hermione?” Ron asked in surprise, looking over at what she was doing. “I never noticed.”
“These aren’t mine, Ron,” Hermione explained, turning to look at her things as her cheeks went slightly pink. “I borrowed them for this plan. And if you two are done with your hair, we can move onto the next phase.”
Harry returned the comb, and Hermione turned a critical eye to Harry and Klaus’s hair – Harry’s was neatly parted in the centre, if still slightly ruffled around the edges, while Klaus’s looked like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. “Good enough,” she declared. “Now, both of you hold still. I’m going to draw your scar on Klaus’s forehead, Harry.”
Meanwhile, Ron and Sunny were holding each of the six coins in turn. “Hermione says these have been enchanted synchronically, or something like that,” Ron explained. “If you rub their faces three times, they all heat up, and we use that to signal that we need help. So we all get one, and if you Baudelaires are in trouble, one of you just needs to rub the coin and we’ll come and help – or the reverse too, for that matter. We just need to check they all work…”
Violet had finally perfected the potion – a misty substance which looked as if it was made of liquid clouds. She carefully dripped it into her smallest and most fragile bottle, and stoppered it tightly. “The transmutative potion is done,” she announced. “I don’t have enough spare to test it, but it looks right.”
Hermione glanced over her shoulder momentarily to have a look. “It looks okay to me,” she said. “Now, what do you think?”
Although it was still clear to anyone who knew them which was which, to strangers, Klaus and Harry had been transformed – Klaus had wild and ruffled hair and a lightning scar on his forehead, while Harry’s hair had been neatly parted. The pair had even exchanged glasses, finding the two pairs thankfully similar.
“You’ve done a great job,” Violet said. “But what about Harry’s scar?”
“Just getting there,” Hermione said, picking up the plaster. “This is a concealing plaster. You can’t see it, Harry, but trust me, it works.”
She covered up Harry’s scar with the plaster, and smoothed it down. The colour of Harry’s skin seemed to seep up the edges of the plaster, before billowing across the patch of fabric on his forehead – completely erasing all sign of his scar.
“If anyone looks closely, they’ll see that it’s fake, but you’ll be in the dark in Vulpine’s classroom,” Hermione said. “I think it’s good enough.”
“Done!” announced Sunny to the rest; the coins had been neatly stacked into two piles of three.
“They all work,” Ron nodded. “Rub one, the rest set off. The perfect signal.”
“Then, we’re really ready, then,” Violet said, and they were. Each of the six present took one of the signal coins, and then stood facing one another.
Violet stood with Harry. “I’m afraid this deception won’t be very pleasant for you, but it could be vital to us.”
Harry nodded. “I’m sure you’d do the same if it was me in trouble.”
Hermione and Ron stood with Sunny, while Klaus stood apart. “People will have to believe that you’re Harry, Klaus, so that nobody can figure out that Violet’s Klaus is Harry,” Hermione reminded Klaus. “But it’s best if you stay relatively out of the way all the same.”
“I’ll hole up in the library,” Klaus said. “What about Sunny?”
“It’s best if we keep her even farther out of this,” Violet said.
“Biccy,” Sunny pointed out.
“We’ll take you down to the kitchens, Sunny,” Hermione said, picking up the baby. “We’ll have to use the invisibility cloak. If anyone saw us together, they might figure things out.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t listen to the kitchen password,” Ron said. “Well, maybe, anyway.”
Ron and Hermione, under the invisibility cloak with Sunny, were the first to leave the bathroom, hurrying off to the kitchens. Klaus left next, disguised as Harry, to go and do some reading in the library with one finger on his coin at all times. Lastly, Violet and Harry, the latter disguised as Klaus, left – and slouched towards Nossifer Vulpine’s class. He’d be enraged at their lateness, but they hoped to exploit that – and finally reveal his true identity as Count Olaf.
Not that I would put something like that past Olaf, of course, but still, it's a very tragic end. *cough* Even if Lockhart was unlikeable to begin with. *cough*
