The Observer Effect

      A quiet, warm, untroubled August night was settling over Little Whinging, gently and imperceptibly swaddling the identical houses in dusk, like a glass marble wrapped in cotton wool.       The sitting room of number four, Privet Drive—already sunk deep into evening darkness—was lit only by the rhythmic flicker of the television screen. Those bluish, unreliable patches of light picked out first one detail of the room, then another, as though composing a curious mosaic or turning a kaleidoscope. The Dursley family, in full complement, were intently giving themselves over to their evening repose.       Mr Dursley, in slippers and a pinstriped, no‑nonsense pair of pyjamas, had settled, as usual, into a deep, soft armchair. His moustache—stiff as a brush and every bit as thick—had been combed with care. Mrs Dursley had, no less habitually, taken up her spot in the corner of the sofa. She, too, was kitted out for bed—a long, roomy nightdress with a flannel dressing gown thrown over it. Her hair, set in curlers, was covered by a faded blue kerchief. Mrs Dursley’s left hand rested on her son’s shoulder—Dudley had commandeered the rest of the sofa, lying on his side with his head on his mother’s lap. His pyjamas, emblazoned with the Superman logo, were blue; his face, pink; his hair, damp from the shower.       It looked for all the world as though the three of them were quietly watching television—exactly as they had on the endless procession of evenings leading up to this one, and, no doubt, as they would on many a night to come. And yet something was wrong; something, tonight, was not as it had been. Look a fraction closer, and the respectable little picture of family leisure began to crack and crumble to dust.       Glazed, unblinking eyes. No movement. Silence. A thread of drool trickling from the corner of a mouth. The television on with the sound off. The remote fallen from a slack, boneless hand.       Even so, the muffled, fainting hush of the sitting room—barely ruffled by the hum of the fridge in the kitchen—was not absolute. From further off, there came, at intervals, the sound of footsteps and voices—voices so out of place in Privet Drive in general, and in this God‑fearing household in particular, that one might have taken them for no more than a random, foolish dream.       ‘Mordred!’ said one voice, hoarse, as though its owner had drunk himself senseless for years, or had once had his vocal cords badly damaged (and perhaps both). ‘All right? Let’s have another go—both wands. I start, you take it up. Ready? Prior Incantato!’       A second’s silence followed. Then the other voice—deep velvet and dark honey, with a drop of poison mixed in—answered the first, ‘Alastor, we’re wasting our time. This wasn’t a spell. There was an artefact here. Even I can sense… residual emanations. And you, with that eye of yours, can surely see them.’       ‘I can see them!’ snapped back the first voice, in which a guard dog’s angry growl tangled with the fruitless wheeze of a cracked recorder. ‘Know what else I can see? We’ve cocked it up—we’ve lost the lad! Careless idiots, the lot of us—and I’m the chief idiot,’ he added bitterly.       ‘Commendably self‑aware,’ observed the baritone, coldly, though not without irony; but the one named Alastor refused to be knocked off his line and finished, ‘We trusted the Muggles! Oh, of course—there’s the outcome. All that blood protection—pixies up the—’       Here he launched into a particularly filthy construction concerning Mordred’s complicated love life and the Cornish pixies. His companion hummed three bars under his breath, as a man will when engaged upon delicate, intricate work, and yet forced to be distracted.       ‘How would you characterise the artefact?’ he asked, with the dispassionate curiosity of a boffin peering into the core of a nuclear reactor.       ‘I’ve no idea!’ the hoarse voice growled and whistled at him. ‘I’ve never seen such muck in my life! It looks like a bit of everything got muddled in—like a portrait that someone, almost finished, went and cursed for seven years’ bad luck, then for some reason reworked into a binding parchment, then thought better of it halfway, laced it with mind‑desiccating charms, and topped the lot with a runic shield. I’m telling you and you’re not listening—we’ve lost the lad. Think it was planted? Not a chance. No, he brought this crap here himself.’       ‘I take your point; there’s no need to boil over.’ The rich baritone grew even chillier than before. ‘And now you’ll excuse me.’       Footsteps sounded; over them, a muffled, ‘Accio Harry Potter’s blood!’ But straightaway, the tread of proprietorial feet drew near the sitting room—and if anyone retained coherent memories of that evening, none of them were Dursleys.

* * *

      ‘Since sorcery wrought upon human blood is apt to bend toward ill, a man must approach it with a heart purged of turmoil and stain. The chamber should be censed with a sprig of rosemary. Most propitious is the last quarter of the moon at the waning of the year…’       Severus remembered perfectly the first time he had brewed this potion.       It hadn’t been a test. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary or of note—just another routine assignment, one more in a string of such; but what made it special, at once and for ever, was the touch of a strong, aristocratically narrow hand upon his shoulder, and the fondly mocking, ‘Well done, Severus.’ The hand, weightless‑warm, had been barely perceptible through three layers of cloth, yet the mark it left seemed to burn on his skin like sun‑scorch.       By then he knew he’d been noticed; he had worked like a man possessed, tireless and asking no mercy. He received his Mark a month later, and for an entirely different reason. And yet it was this that remained. A wizard of the mind ought to be master of his emotions, but when emotions fuse with memory the result is often beyond calculation.       Three grains of fresh heather blossom rattled into the cauldron; a glass rod traced seven stirs left to right, and Severus turned the small hourglass. Next addition in one minute.       In part, Severus loved the night‑long vigils at the cauldron—how else? Daylight was devoured almost whole by the little monsters called students, and any crumbs left over the Headmaster appropriated; so only at night—and he loved the nights for the chance to put his thoughts in order.       Even as a child he had thought best in silence, alone with a softly simmering potion, as though by following the recipe step by step he could distil an idea step by step, precipitating out the salts of emotion, and setting each judgement in its proper phial.       Later, this even became his anchor in Occlumency. Everyone sought perfect calm and focus in their own way—some ran, some stood beneath a waterfall, some practised breathing exercises, or contemplated a blank wall in silence. Snape knew a man who made the taste of a sherbet lemon the focus of his mind. For Severus, it was enough to take his place, in thought, at the cauldron.       One drop of widow’s tears infused with native gold; then, very slowly, grain by grain, nine grains of fire‑moth eggs. Three stirs with a bone spatula.       Snape cast Tempus and checked the time—the next stage did not fall neatly into the intervals of a standard hourglass, and he had no patience with approximation. He always conjured Tempus as a Muggle digital clock with seconds—at first out of contrariness; then because it proved convenient; and then, simply, out of habit.       Thus the facts known to him, slowly cleared of impurities, began to show the peculiar attraction that always revealed the marrying ingredients of a potion. At first not obvious, the affinity, with due reflection, grew plain.       The first fact was the child glimpsed in another man’s memory. Pitying Lucius—crushed by a careless blunder—Snape had gone to the ill‑starred bookshop and put the shopkeeper’s recollection through a very fine sieve a second time. Nothing in it about the diary—Lucius had been right—but there, in the memory, was a boy whom Malfoy did not know by sight and was unlikely to recognise from any description; but Severus would not have mistaken him even blind drunk. The boy was Harry James Potter. Snape took note.       Potter’s—the Boy Who Lived’s—appearance at the same point in space and time as the disappearance of an artefact entrusted for safekeeping by the Dark Lord, looked like a coincidence. But the sort of coincidence that draws the eye, and you lay it aside to see whether a pattern emerges.       And in this case it did, together with the second fact that had come into Severus’s hands today.       This second fact was a return visit to Petunia’s family nest, on which the Headmaster had insisted; and he had foisted Alastor Mad‑Not‑Only‑The‑Eye Moody on him as a partner and—Snape had no illusions—as a minder. Moody it was who spotted the traces left in the Dursleys’ house by some enchanted object. Correction: by a highly intricate enchanted object of unknown nature and purpose. And this time, too, there was a curious balance, only in reverse symmetry: the artefact had appeared, the boy had disappeared.       Still a coincidence—but already a very nasty one. The sort for which you draft contingency plans headed, ‘This Will Never Be Needed, But—’. Snape would lose count of how often they came in handy.       A primary flight feather of a wandering pigeon, an eel’s tooth, the right wing of a swallowtail. Nine stirs with a wand of copper‑plated silver; then lower the flame by a third. Severus fastidiously assessed the potion’s colour and viscosity. It looked right. And the steam from the cauldron smelt right—a blend of burnt coffee and seaweed. Neither, of course, featured in the mixture, but only the most primitive decoctions preserved unchanged the taste and scent of their components.       Let us assume the coincidence was no coincidence at all. The thing came into Potter’s hands—and he evaporated. Causes? Consequences? Necessary measures? Tiny bubbles rose and burst at the surface. Snape pondered, intent.       The Dark Mark over Little Whinging. The missing Potter child, the child of the Prophecy, a fact known only to three people in this world, and one more—on the other, or wherever he happened to reside at present. The Headmaster’s secret burned his stomach like accidentally swallowed acid. He, Albus, and Sybill were bound by an oath—but what bound the Dark Lord? Had he confided in anyone? Not his way, quite—but one could not rule it out.       Suppose the artefact fell into the boy’s hands and his whereabouts ceased to be a secret. A kind of beacon, able to slip past blood protection—though such a thing was thought impossible. Was that it? But in that case they’d have found two corpses under the Dark Mark. Potter was alive—Snape was, after all, still breathing; the vow to preserve the boy’s life, even at the cost of his own, was still in force.       Then—an execution deferred? Or was the kidnapping not for revenge at all? Or—given the air of mystery about the diary‑like object—had the boy gone with his captor of his own accord?       Severus doubted it. Even the children of his House—calculating little snakes—would not, when running, leave absolutely all their belongings behind. Almost everyone going on the hop snatched something sentimental, and a first‑year least of all would abandon his Hogwarts letter and his train ticket. Yes, one could get onto Platform Nine and Three‑Quarters perfectly well without that ticket; indeed, in Snape’s recollection no one ever actually checked them. But… he’d certainly have taken it. Any child would—especially one raised in… what Severus had seen there.       One drachm of wormwood seed, three mistletoe berries, astragalus root, and a snowdrop leaf. Mix with an obsidian knife. Only the final addition remained. Severus doused the flame. Steam rose from the liquid in the cauldron; dim, pale‑blue sparks flared in the depths, curling in a spiral.       The boy’s blood, gathered in the house, was whispering Snape a story he would rather not have heard; he disliked the new shape the world was assuming under the force of that tale. It is unpleasant for anyone to be wrong. And Snape’s error was of the sort he had made before, which made it sting all the more. But to refuse to acknowledge it would have been stupider still.       Blood on the floor. Puddles, chains of fallen drops, smeared streaks. Common enough—perhaps a touch too much of it, but children do get into things. Blood in the bathroom, ground into cracks and gaps—stranger, but let it pass. Yet there were traces that could not be mistaken: the marks left by beatings. Stains on door jambs. Spatters on the walls—slanting, interlaced fans. Spatters on the ceiling. Had someone, a quarter of a century ago, tried to find every drop of Severus’s blood spilt within the cottage walls at Cokeworth, the result would have been painfully similar. A vile, unacceptable truth now fit into small phial number five, thin‑walled and clear.       ‘We’ve cocked it up—we’ve lost the lad,’ Moody had frothed, spraying spittle; and Snape, at the same time, had been thinking, ‘I ought to have guessed.’ And also, ‘What have you done?’ And, ‘This as well—for the greater good?’ By then he had had a very good look at the cupboard.       A cage. A pen for a beast in which there had been, after all, no beast.       Dark. Reeking of every substance a human body can exude. Lacking even a pretence of a window and practically empty, save for a mattress and a pillow that ought, on hygienic grounds, to have been burnt, and a moth‑eaten woollen blanket. In the corner—a shoebox with a heap of broken toys, a torch, pens, and stubs of coloured pencils. Clothes on a hook, a girlish‑looking rucksack, a stack of exercise books. A fuse box on one wall, a scuffed narrow shelf on another, and straight opposite the entrance, ‘Hary’s Rum’, scrawled on the wall in a child’s hand. And it really was Harry’s room. Snape had examined the minds of Petunia, Vernon, and Dudley very carefully indeed. There was no mistake. Not that Severus hadn’t already made enough.       Now, perhaps, he was to make another. Disobey the Headmaster—and die of a broken oath. Obey his order and track Potter by means of a blood‑seeking potion—and very likely die of the same. Cradling in his palm a phial with microscopic flakes of dried blood, Severus gazed into the cauldron. The potion was ready, but his thoughts had not simmered down to an acceptable answer. At last he pulled the stopper and tipped the final ingredient into the sparkling blue.       In an instant the potion heaved. The colour shifted to a dark, venous red, then paled to scarlet and settled into an opalescent violet. The reaction quieted. The final stage remained: to use it as intended.       Snape cleaned the worktable and instruments, put everything back in its place, and took out a fresh sheet of parchment. He did not hurry—in truth, he was stalling. But at last the preparations were complete. Taking up a standard number three ladle, Severus drew off two ounces of the potion and poured it slowly, in a controlled stream, onto the sheet.

* * *

      ‘Too late. A day, perhaps less.’ Emmeline Vance pressed together her already narrow lips. ‘He was definitely still there around noon yesterday. After that—nothing.’       Statuesque, tall, full‑bosomed, she looked like a Valkyrie, ready at any moment to step without a qualm into the thick of the fiercest battle. The hair gone early grey at the temples lent her features a stern severity, and the dark green mantle set off the icy grey of her eyes. A quintessentially Slytherin palette, though Snape knew perfectly well she had been a Ravenclaw.       Another meeting—already the fifth in three days—of the Order of the Phoenix was proceeding in its usual fashion: that is, neither one thing nor the other. Severus suppressed a yawn with difficulty—there had been no sleep to be had, and plenty of running about. Including round the late Figg’s house, positively begging to be noticed by the Ministry; but such niceties had never troubled the Headmaster. No useful traces there, of course. Someone had tossed off a feeble, single Stupefy, and then some Dark artefact had been set to work again—but whether it was the same one that had pinged with Potter, or another, neither Moody nor, still less, Severus could say. It looked like a variant of a ‘soul‑box’—a rare and nasty piece of work used to siphon off life‑force. They’d been banned two centuries ago; Snape hadn’t thought anyone still had them tucked away.       ‘The room’s paid for till the end of the month,’ Vance went on. ‘But I don’t think he’ll return, though I’ve hung signalling charms there just in case. He tidied the place to within an inch of its life—as if no one had ever lived there.’       The Headmaster sighed in gentle reproof, as though Emmeline might have avoided the failure had she worked better and faster. In point of fact, she probably could have—but luck mattered too, and they had been abominably unlucky in the hunt for Potter. Snape drummed his fingers on the chair arm.       ‘The potion doesn’t work,’ he reported in turn. ‘Potter is either under a Fidelius Charm, or in a place protected by Unfindable and Unplottable charms. Nothing for it, Albus; I did warn you.’       There were, it must be said, plenty of places in magical Britain that were unfindable and unplottable. Take the Blacks’ ancestral townhouse, for a start. But that one was warded with paranoiac thoroughness—Sirius’s father had seen to that. Other old families had not denied themselves a bolt‑hole for the direst emergency either; and not always an obvious one—often a modest hunting lodge somewhere in Needwood Forest saved lives far better than the most heavily warded manor. They might even be freshly wrought wards, laid on specially for Potter—who could tell.       When last night (strictly speaking, already this morning) the map that should have appeared on the potion‑treated sheet failed to show, Severus felt a surge of genuine gratitude to the higher powers. To present himself to an unknown Death Eater (for who else could it be, honestly), acting either on the Dark Lord’s direct order or on his own reading of the Lord’s potential wishes, and try to wrest Potter from him—Snape felt himself decidedly unready.       He hated to play a hand with nothing in it—and at present he had nothing with which to try to barter for the boy’s life, and his own into the bargain. The bloody Order of the Phoenix still had no actions in preparation, no plans of any shape, no recruits—absolutely bugger‑all was happening, beyond haring about in search of a missing child; and the semi‑farcical tales of those efforts would serve, at best, to amuse Lucius—not the Dark Lord.       Let something—anything—of substance accrue, and then…       What had happened the last time he had tried to purchase someone’s life that way was something Severus tried his utmost not to think about.       A sigh—one that practically begged for a Cruciatus—rolled through the Headmaster’s office. Albus smoothed his beard—the little bells tinkled—and asked, pensively, ‘Emmeline, my dear girl, who did help Harry to get to Diagon Alley, after all?’       ‘Unknown.’ She shook her head, lips pinching again for a heartbeat. ‘Whoever I asked, they all swore Harry had been living at the Leaky with his parents. A barefaced lie—and its source is the boy himself. He was hiding, Albus; even hid his name, I tell you.’       Yes—‘Fomalhaut Black’ had made Severus laugh inwardly. It was clear now how the Malfoys had got wind of Potter’s bolt—no doubt the rumours were brought to Narcissa the next day. No, the next hour.       ‘Could’ve been Figgy?’ sniffed Mundungus Fletcher, who had kept out of it till then. ‘And that’s why they killed her…’       He drooped altogether and, unembarrassed, fished out a hip flask of brandy. Severus, to tell the truth, wouldn’t have said no either, but hadn’t thought to bring any, and the Headmaster offered his guests nothing but tea.       Guests, indeed. Subordinates, soldiers, pawns. Getting drunk with such was a bit much; one might let the Chief Warlock’s authority slip.       ‘Severus, what do you say?’—there, you see, spoke too soon. Snape grimaced.       ‘I advised appealing to his rightful guardians. But Potter did not. Albus, we’ve been over this.’       Potter, literally, had dropped ‘With Muggles?’—and pulled such a contemptuous face, so typically pure‑blood, that memories of cherished classmates rose bitter in Severus’s throat. Now, in light of the newly uncovered circumstances, he understood perfectly why the boy had said it. A pity the understanding had come too late. Then, when the brat had spat an insult at Lily, Snape had simply bolted—home, into the welcoming arms of a bottle, and the rest of the day dissolved in the soft oblivion alcohol affords.       If, instead, he had asked, for instance, ‘Do they hurt you?’       Who could say where that unspoken conversation might have led. But there was no profit in regrets.       So: Severus did not know who had helped Potter. Petunia did not know who had helped Potter. Vernon and Dudley had not been at home at all at the time. The boy had opened the door to Severus, taken the key from him and… found himself at the Leaky Cauldron—where the barman also did not know who had helped him, and had seen no one with him! Was it really Figg who had had a hand in it? And why hadn’t he taken his things? Afraid to go back?       In the rented rooms above the pub the troublesome child had lived not quite a week—five days and nights, and another half‑day. All that time he had apparently believed he was hiding from pursuit—yes, even a deaf‑blind man could have traced him, but he was a child, after all; professionalism was hardly to be expected. On the sixth day, by noon, the boy vanished. This time—with all his belongings; and he had not reappeared since. Snape rubbed his temples. A migraine seemed to be starting.       ‘…close our ranks… redouble our efforts… Minister Fudge’s blindness…’ the Headmaster was declaiming meanwhile; Severus listened with half an ear. He needed to warn Lucius that the diary’s trail, it seemed, had turned up after all. And to try to ferret out which of their own might have snatched the boy—or helped him bolt.       Ah yes—and there was one more person who needed to learn a thing or two.

* * *

      Minerva McGonagall was not one to shirk her duties. Some—Severus, for instance—might reproach her for indifference to the children of her own House, but one had to understand that under Godric’s red‑and‑gold banner there had, from time immemorial, gathered the most troublesome, prank‑prone, and reckless students in Hogwarts.       Had Minerva continued to react as sharply to all the scrapes her little lions managed to get up to as she had in her first years as Head of House, she’d have ended with a burst heart—or in St Mungo’s secure ward. There were simply too many pranks, and too many with them, every blessed day.       The balance of involvement and sternness had taken a long time to find, but the hard‑won equilibrium yielded a motto, ‘It’ll sort itself out.’ So long as there was no accidental decapitation, or Grindylows being bred in the bath, problems were left to the prefects to settle—or to melt away of their own accord (which happened more often than Severus, naturally suspicious and thin‑skinned like all Slytherins, imagined). Snowed under with administrative chores, Minerva was a busy woman; besides, there was neither time nor strength for foolishness.       But there remained matters that a Head of House had to face in person.       Severus had not been generous with explanations. Astonishing her by his visit—usually getting the Potions Master into the Deputy’s office was no easier than coaxing a Nundu into a cat‑carrier—Snape had handed her a phial of memory and said, ‘Minerva, acquaint yourself with this. It concerns you. And it’s important.’ And then he departed, his robes flaring behind him.       His stagey way of walking, and that dramatic clutching at his temples, Minerva disapproved of separately—one ought to be simpler, without all that… theatre.       She set the memory aside till evening—Severus had said ‘important’, not ‘urgent’. And quite right—after what she saw, it would have been difficult to refocus on a petition to the Board of Governors.       Petitions were a headache all their own—yet again, for the umpteenth year, she was having to beg a bursary for another Weasley. When five of them had ended up round Gryffindor’s neck, Minerva had wanted to stitch shut, with stout thread, that bottomless hole from which they all kept popping into the light of day. Molly, a devout Catholic (not that she’d admit it, but God brands the rogue—red‑haired Irish are hard to miss), was fruitful and multiplying to a degree that had the Nargles in the Forbidden Forest green with envy. All well and good—save that the family were not exactly industrious, and they never had enough money to kit out even one of their brood for school. Once the two eldest had graduated it became a touch easier, but fresh consignments of Weasleys were due this year and the next. And as if that were not enough, the Board was now chaired by none other than His Lordship Malfoy. From him, Minerva sensed, you’d not wheedle snow in winter—let alone five charitable bursaries for one family.       Be that as it may, the petition was drafted, the accounts sifted, the letters read, and in the gathering dusk, lighting an enchanted candle (far more economical and sensible than keeping up a Lumos, as certain poseurs did), Minerva at last reached her first cup of tea of the day and, afterwards, finally, Severus’s phial.       This was not the first time she had encountered the like. Truth be told, there were few years when Hogwarts did not admit at least one first‑year with hasty St Mungo’s patch‑ups and a tidied memory. The latter Minerva disapproved of, but such was Albus’s policy. He thought it wrong that children should be frightened themselves, suffering dreadful recollections, and, above all, that they should frighten other children who might never have clapped eyes on a single Muggle—like those same Weasleys.       No one was proud of it, but facts were facts. Only this particular boy…       She had known. She had felt it. She had told Albus—don’t. She had taken against the whole family, root and branch—call it intuition, which any Animagus trusted at least in part; but the name didn’t matter. She had simply known in her bones—nothing good would come of it. And nothing good had.       The cupboard. The traces of beatings. Choice ‘quotations’ from Petunia’s memory (watching a memory inside another memory was deeply unpleasant; it made her head spin), and like fragments sliced from the minds of Vernon and Dudley. The last were especially monstrous: it was Dudley who had seen, start to finish, the ‘game’ with the dog. Dudley had enjoyed himself. It seemed that was when the little droplets of blood had appeared on the ceiling. Magical surges—and fresh beatings. A sea of unending cruelty broke over Minerva. For the first time, she embraced Albus’s view with all her heart. This was indeed better forgotten. By all involved.       After six cups of tea in a row—the last three with a little brandy, and by ‘a little’ one meant ‘about half a cup’—Minerva came to a firm decision.       One way or another, she had to save the child. It could not go on. Everything Albus had said was sound and sensible; the boy ought to have been shielded in early childhood from his fame, from being insufferably spoiled, and the other pitfalls of his special status—but the Dursleys had proved simply the wrong choice, full stop. Harry needed another home, and Minerva would find it. Lady Longbottom would help, in the end. By the next summer holidays Harry would have a normal family.       And if not, Minerva would take on the duty herself. Yes, she was no longer young—if not frankly old; yes, sorrow had knocked her about; yes, she had never had children of her own. But once Harry became one of Gryffindor’s charges, he would be her child, and she would do whatever was needful to ensure his protection.       Magical Britain—the whole wizarding world, for that matter—owed this boy a debt. It was time to pay it, and Minerva would see it paid properly.       Alone with her reflection in the windowpane, Minerva McGonagall raised her cup in salute. As though to seal her silent vow, a bright, tailed star tore from the high heavens, fell straight into the Black Lake, and went out.