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What Myrtle Saw


“Well will you look at this? The castle’s still standing next morning,” Sirius said, stretching as he sat up at the crack of dawn. “Must be that nothing horrible happened because of the Filibuster’s we flushed down the toilet, ‘ey?” He playfully punched Remus in the elbow, “Maybe somebody needs to admit they over thought it a wee bit? Hmm?”

Remus sighed, “Nothing bad happened. Yet. This time,” he said, adding the stipulations pointedly. “Just because there were no consequences doesn’t give you permission to go shattering rules left and right.”

Sirius grinned and ran a hand over Remus’s curly hair, messing it all up with his fingers. Remus scrunched his nose up. “Remus Lupin, always worrying about the rules!” Sirius jumped away and Remus reached up to try to salvage the mop of his hair, shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

They went to breakfast in the Hall and out onto the grounds to play a bit of snowball throwing in the dismal remains of the dirt-strewn snow. Halfway to lunch, Remus had to go inside to see Madam Pomfrey for his second treatment to remove the nasty words from his back. Covered in mud and soaked from melting snow, the other three decided to go back to the dorms to change, and as they were walking up the stairs, Sirius announced, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Here we go,” said Peter.

“Here we go what?” Sirius asked, looking ‘round at him.

Peter replied, “It’s just that you thinking is never a good thing. Usually it ends with us running from Filch or Death Eaters or Voldemort. So here we go.”

Sirius grinned, “Well it’s not quite such a dangerous thing I’ve been thinking this time… It’s just that it’s coming up to March and Remus’s birthday’s the 10th. He’s had a rather terrible year, I think we ought to figure some way to surprise him with a good birthday, to cheer him up. What do you lot reckon?”

“I like it,” James replied. “Let’s do it for sure.”

“What sort of surprise?” Peter asked, still wary of the dark places that the brain of Sirius Black could traverse.

Sirius laughed, “Well I was thinking we could get him some presents and Pete, you could knick us a cake and some butterbeer from the kitchen, yeah? Maybe we can even find a way to procure something stronger… Perhaps nip off to Hogsmeade for a minute via the Shrieking Shack and get us some firewhiskey so we can have a proper afterparty in the dorm? We’ll play music and the like. Stay up all night…” His eyes twinkled with mischief.

“Excellent,” James said, nodding.

Peter nodded, “Yeah, excellent.” But he sounded less sure than James did.

The boys then spent the rest of the morning plotting how to go about getting all the things they would need for the party to be a success and deciding how to set the whole thing in motion. It wouldn’t be too hard, they decided, to keep it a secret with Remus and Sirius gone for a whole day and a half for the full moon just a few days before the party. It would give James and Peter plenty of time to do last minute preparations.

By the time Remus returned from Pomfrey’s, they’d mapped out exactly who would do what in for Remus’s Secret Birthday Bash. Peter said that he was starving (from all the talk of cake) and they headed down to the Great Hall to eat their lunch. Everyone was crowded about their house tables and talking as they ate sandwiches and chips and drank large cups of pumpkin juice. Sirius glanced over the Slytherins’ direction, as they laughed amongst each other, fully unaware that under their table hung hundreds of firecrackers, just waiting to be ignited with the swish of a wand.

“What’s that smell?” asked Marty Brown from the Hufflepuff table, loud enough that someone a few seats away heard it and sniffed the air and found their senses tickled with the same odor that Marty was questioning. That person asked someone else and they asked another and another and someone from Ravenclaw started noticing it, then a Slytherin was shouting about filthy smelling mudbloods over the crowd and Remus suddenly coughed, the scent having finally reached Gryffindor.

“Oi, what in the hell is that?” Remus asked, like most everyone was doing. He looked around at the other lads, but they seemed a bit lost for what to say. The scent was repugnant. “It’s horrible.”

“What?” asked James, looking about confused.

“I don’t smell anything,” Peter said.

Remus grabbed at the neck of his sweater vest and tucked his face into the warm material, “Merlin’s beard. Do you smell it, Sirius?” he asked.

“Loud and clear,” Sirius answered, choking on air, too. “Bloody hell, it’s like a troll rolled about in dragon dung and brought his pet inferius for a walk through the castle!”

It took several more moments before the smell broke into James’s nose, but when it did, he, too, began gagging, as did Peter. “Blimey!” James exclaimed. “That’s rank whatever it is!”

The scent bloomed and seemed to take over all of the Great Hall and Dumbledore got up and walked swiftly through the Hall to the doors, wrenching them open. The moment the door opened the scent redoubled and became so strong that there wasn’t a single person in the Great Hall not choking on the air or holding their noses.

“UGH,” Frank exclaimed loudly, “It smells like dung in here! Like literal, actual dung. Like a toilet that’s never been flushed!”

Sirius looked at James and saw there was a similar worry to his eyes as Sirius felt in his own. “You don’t reckon --” James started.

“Surely not,” Sirius answered, shaking his head.

Remus looked over at them and raised an eyebrow. “Are we rethinking our life choices about now?” he asked, voice muffled by the fabric of his sweater vest.

James replied, “Maybe a wee.”

Out in the entrance hall, Dumbledore moved up the stairs, sniffling the rank smell until he’d traced it to the second floor girl’s bathroom. Filch, who was coming from the opposite direction down the corridor came up at the same time and they both paused before the door. Dumbledore turned and Filch followed as he pushed opened the door. All of the toilets were gallantly overflowing all over the floor, a vile liquidy substance swirling about. Dumbledore lifted the ankles of his robes and stared down at it dourly and Filch let out an almighty howl of agony.

“JUST CLEANED THEM ALL THIS MORNING! JUST CLEANED THEM ALL!” he yowled and he ran out of the room, shouting that he was getting his mop.

“I do doubt so very much that a mop would be able to do anything against this mess, Argus,” Dumbledore murmured, looking around at the inch-thick mixture that coated the floor.

“It’s all stopped up!” wailed a ghost of a young girl, who had been behind one of the stall doors. She rose up over the top of the stall, spiraling through the air and coming to hover over the sinks.

“Ah yes, Myrtle Warren. This is your bathroom, isn’t it?” Dumbledore looked up at her as she hovered about over the sink, a very sad expression on her face. “How badly is the stop?” he asked, “Can you tell?”

“No! I’m not swimming though all this filth! The pipes are full to the brim, Professor,” she moaned. “All I know is that I tried to go down the pipe and it’s stoppered and all this horrible muck came out with me and I’ve not no way to rest in my ubend!” she pouted terribly deeply.

“There, there Myrtle,” Dumbledore said. “We will get it taken care of once we know what has caused it so that we can unstopper the clog.”

“I’ll bet it’s because of those two boys I saw jamming their nasty toys into the toilet on the third floor,” Myrtle said slyly.

Dumbledore contemplated for a moment. “Go on?” he asked.

“Well just last night, I was playing a bit of a game, you see there’s a lovely current comes from the third floor to the second floor, and I enjoy sliding down the pipes there. And I was messing about when suddenly this -- thing -- passes right through me!” she looked quite indignant, “It wasn’t what you’d think, it was a rocket, and I was soo angry somebody would flush something such as a rocket, that I turned about to follow where it had come from and just as I did there came another one! And another! So I zipped along and followed it up to the girl’s toilet on the third floor. I hated being hit with the rockets, so I went down a different ubend and looked over the stall wall and there were two nasty boys -- in a girl’s bathroom! They had a rucksack filled with firecrackers and they were stuffing them one-by-one down the toilet and flushing them away….” she waved her fingers dramatically to indicate the firecrackers going down the toilet’s draining system.

Dumbledore had a feeling he already knew the answer to this question, but he asked it anyway, “Do you know who the boys were, Myrtle?”

“I don’t know every student’s name, Professor, there’s far too many that have come and gone through here, and especially not the boys,” Myrtle said.

Dumbledore nodded, “I understand, Myrtle.” He started for the door as Filch returned with a mop and started in the spillover that had gone into the hall from the open door, a large clothes pin clipped to his nose.

“But I do know these two,” Myrtle added before Dumbledore could step out of the toilet.

Dumbledore stopped and looked up. “And?”

“The girls always talk about them - about how handsome they are - they really like the pair of them quite a lot! I knew the moment I saw them exactly who they were just from the descriptions the girls have made while they’re fixing up their make-up in the mirror!” Myrtle was drawing this out as long as she could, it was obvious. “I said to myself, with such lovely manes as those two have, they’ve got to be the ones all of the girls talk about -- James Potter and Sirius Black!”

Nodding, his suspicions confirmed, Dumbledore said, “Thank you Myrtle, you’ve been most helpful.” Dumbledore stepped out of the room.

Filch caught the door, shoving in a bucket sloshing murky water. He stepped inside with his mop and looked about.

Myrtle giggled. “Mr. Filch!” she called, waving her fingers at the caretaker, who very carefully kept his eyes adverted from her. “Oh Mr. Filch, I do so love when you visit my toilet!” Myrtle swooped down to see him, “So sorry it’s under such unfortunate circumstances. I didn’t stopper the toilet after all…”

Dumbledore was nearly back to the Great Hall. He grabbed both handles of the wide double doors and pulled them open so that he stood in the frame of them looking over the Hall, his arms splayed wide like a cross. Everyone in the Hall fell into silence at the sight of the redness of his face. It was so quiet in the hall you could have heard a pin drop.

“Sirius Black and James Potter,” Dumbledore called out. “My office.”

James looked at Sirius, “You bleeding idiot, you’ve gone and gotten us expelled.”

Sirius’s face had gone very, very pale. “I can’t be expelled,” he choked, “I’d have to go home if I’m expelled. My mum and dad’ll kill me.”

Peter said, “Maybe next time you should think about that before shoving firecrackers down a toilet!”

Sirius looked at Remus, seeking some kind of comfort, his eyes wide and panic-stricken. “They’ll literally kill me,” he said.

Remus reached out a hand to grab onto Sirius’s. “He can’t be going to expel you…” Remus said but his voice shook as he said it.

“SIRIUS BLACK AND JAMES POTTER!” Dumbledore bellowed, losing patience, “NOW!”

“Bloody hell!” James leaped out of his seat and scurried, followed by a more reluctant, slower Sirius, who dragged his feet all the way to the door, looking over his shoulder to see Remus was wide eyed and looking quite as scared as he was. A lump rose up in Sirius’s throat and he forced himself to look away.

Dumbledore watched James rush past into the entrance hall and heard his clattering footsteps on the stairs. Sirius trudged by, his head hung low so he was staring at his shoes as he moved by the headmaster. Dumbledore gently bowed out of the Great Hall, pulling closed the doors behind him. He followed after Sirius up the stairs - James was already long gone, heading up to the Headmaster’s office on the fifth floor corridor at a full out run. Sirius moved as though he were keeping time with a funeral march.