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deadlyhollow2008-01-25 12:30 am
gehayi.livejournal.com) wrote in deadlyhollow2008-01-25 12:30 am
Chapter Seventeen -- Bathilda's Secret
In which the entire series is proven to be impossible, the Duo goes out of their way to fall into a trap, Rowling abuses ellipses and colons, a powerful, muscular mass slides over Harry as he smashes to the floor, and zombies RULE.
Chapter Seventeen – Bathilda's Secret
Harry and Hermione have just visited the Incredibly Dramatic and Previously Unmentioned Grave of the Potter Parentals in a small churchyard in Godric's Hollow. They're just on their way out of the cemetery when Hermione spots someone watching them.
They stood quite still, holding on to each other, gazing at the dense black boundary of the graveyard.
I can't find any description in the previous chapter of a fence or of hedges around the graveyard. I keep picturing someone having drawn a line around the cemetery with a big black Sharpie.
The two squabble about whether Hermione saw anything—she says she did, Harry isn't so sure. Harry also insists that they "look like Muggles"--whatever Muggles look like--so what difference does it make if anyone saw them? It doesn't seem to occur to him that if they've just run into a Death Eater or two, being taken for a Muggle wouldn't be an advantage. Hermione objects too, but for a different reason:
"Muggles who've just been laying flowers on your parents' grave!
If someone was looking at you from a distance, they might be able to tell which graves you were near, but I really don't think they could tell precisely which grave you were laying flowers on. Non-magical people wouldn't care, and can you picture a Death Eater doing something so sensible as using high-powered binoculars? I can't. Far too Muggle for them.
Harry thought of A History of Magic; the graveyard was supposed to be haunted: what if --?
Well, what if it is, Harry? You lived at a haunted school for six years. One of your teachers was a ghost. You even went to a Deathday party. Voluntarily. Ghosts shouldn't bother you.
Hermione points to a bush and Harry hears a rustling noise and sees some snow fall off of the shrubbery. My reaction: What of it? I've lived in New England all my life. I've seen snow fall off of bushes thanks to the slightest breeze. This doesn't prove whether anyone's there or not.
Harry, however, decides that ghosts can't move snow. Apparently he's forgotten all about Peeves the Poltergeist, who's certainly a spirit if not a ghost, and who can lift and move any number of things.
Based on this flawed information, he informs Hermione that it was a cat or a bird, and that it can't have been a Death Eater or they'd be dead already. Right away, I knew that the Narrative Laws of Comedy would mandate that Harry be deeply and profoundly wrong.
So they exit the graveyard. Once they are on the sidewalk—in full view of a full pub and a church holding Christmas services—they put the Invisibility Cloak back. Harry, selfish beast that he is, considers taking refuge in the church. Yes, Harry. When someone who is very probably lethal is following you, the loving and compassionate thing to do is to give the potential killer a variety of targets.
(It might be, under the right circumstances, the practical thing to do. But no one has ever suggested that practicality is the Power That The Dark Lord Knows Not.)
However, before Harry can suggest using the church as sanctuary, Hermione starts leading him out of the village into open country. As she's asking him how they're going to find Bathilda's cottage, Harry spots the ruins of his parents' house.
He could see it; the Fidelius Charm must have died with James and Lily.
How come he's referring to his parents by their first names?
The cottage is a ruin, all overgrown with ivy and missing the right side of the top floor. Harry thinks that might have been where Voldemort's curse went haywire. No shit, Sherlock. Also, we have two consecutive sentences that are fine separately but that don't make any sense together:
The hedge had grown wild in the sixteen years since Hagrid had taken Harry from the rubble that lay scattered amongst the waist-high grass.
Most of the cottage was still standing, though entirely covered in the dark ivy and snow
Rowling earlier described the snow in the cemetery as deep enough for the kids to leave trenches behind them as they walked. I'd say at least knee-high snow, then. So is the Potters' cottage surrounded by knee-high snow, as it should be if the cottage is covered with snow, or is it surrounded by waist-high grass out of season?
Honestly, JKR. Do try to keep continuity from at least one sentence to the next, at least.
Hermione wonders why it's still a ruin. Evidently she hasn't heard about people letting houses go to ruin for tax purposes. Harry suggests that maybe it can't be fixed:
"Maybe it's like the injuries from Dark Magic and you can't repair the damage?"
Now I want to see a wizarding Healer who mends residences. And lo, his name shall be Doctor House.
However, when Harry touches the gate, a previously invisible sign appears, which explains why the house in the state it's in.
On this spot, on this night of 31 October 1981,
Lily and James Potter lost their lives.
Their son, Harry, remains the only wizard ever
to have survived the Killing Curse.
This house, invisible to Muggles, has been left
in its ruined state as a monument to the Potters
and as a reminder of the violence
that tore apart their family.
It wasn't violence that tore apart their family. It was WAR. Betrayal and war. And it destroyed their family. Use the right words, will you?
And it would also be nice if the sign mentioned who killed them. Yes, everyone nowadays in the wizarding world knows that Voldemort did it, but if you're going to preserve a spot for posterity, you have to plan for a time when everyone doesn't remember what you're memorializing.
As far as Harry's concerned, this is all about him:
And all around these neatly lettered words, scribbles had been added by other witches and wizards who had come to see the place where the Boy Who Lived had escaped.
Now this graffiti indicates that something is deeply and profoundly wrong. Let me reconstruct the situation as best I can.
Okay. Peter was the Secret Keeper, and he told Voldemort where the Potters were hiding. Voldemort then became a co-Secret Keeper, according to HBP and DH. Voldemort then went to Godric's Hollow and killed the Potters and got killed himself.
Voldemort couldn't confide the information in anyone because of this:
"The only people who ever knew their precise location were those whom Wormtail had told directly, but none of them would have been able to pass on the information."
The only person that we know Peter told in canon is Voldemort. And Voldemort could not pass the information on. We found this out in OotP. The Order members knew perfectly well that the headquarters was at Twelve Grimmauld Place. But they couldn't tell Harry. They could give Harry a note with the address written on it—but the note was written by Dumbledore, the Secret Keeper, who told one of the members to give Harry this note. None of them could personally write a note telling Harry where the house was. And it gets worse...
Now--according to Rowling's website on February 21, 2006 and the Lexicon:
"When a Secret-Keeper dies, their secret dies with them, or to put it another way, the status of their secret will remain as it was at the moment of their death. Everybody in whom they confided will continue to know the hidden information, but nobody else..."
Well, Voldemort was a Secret Keeper; Peter telling him the secret made him so. And only he and Peter knew where the Potters were when he died.
So the cottage should be completely invisible to everyone in the wizarding world except for Peter Pettigrew. There should not be a plaque in front of the cottage, or graffiti on that plaque. Hell, no one should have found the wounded Baby Harry lying in the wreckage of the cottage.
The whole saga, according to JKR herself, is absolutely impossible.
The only logical conclusion is that all seven books are a hallucination on Baby Harry's part as he lies wailing in the rubble, dying of exposure and brain injury. (Rather like St. Elsewhere, where the entire hospital drama series was revealed to be, in the series finale, a fantasy in the mind of an autistic child.)
Meanwhile, back in the hallucination of the invisible cottage, Hermione is annoyed that anyone wrote on the sign. Harry's delighted. I guess he likes seeing his name written over and over.
Keep in mind the following in mind, by the way, because the Duo has not.
1) They believe that they were observed in the cemetery.
2) The person observing them might be following them.
3) They didn't put the Cloak on until they reached the open street.
4) They are walking through deep snow, and are therefore leaving tracks.
5) They are out in the middle of nowhere, in front of a ruined and deserted house.
This is the equivalent of a pretty blonde girl in high heels and with no cellphone walking alone into a crumbling mansion with a dark and bloody past, ignoring the blood all over the floor and the heavy footsteps of the axe-murderer behind her.
Let me spell it out for you, Harry and Hermione:
IF YOU THINK THAT SOMEONE IS FOLLOWING YOU AND MAY KILL YOU, YOU DON'T PAUSE TO LOOK AT A TOURIST ATTRACTION.
I mention this because at this point, Harry sees someone heading toward them—well, walking in their direction, anyway. The description is rather interesting:
Her stoop, her stoutness, her shuffling gait all gave an impression of extreme age.
Okay, I can understand the stoop and the shuffling gait being characteristic of an old person—but stoutness? What, there aren't any thin old people?
Harry was waiting to see whether she would turn into any of the cottages she was passing, but he knew, instinctively, that she would not.
So he's waiting for her to do something that he knows she's not going to do. Yes, Harry. That makes so much sense.
At last she came to a halt a few yards from them, and simply stood there in the middle of the frozen road, facing them.
There's a creepy old woman standing in the middle of an empty road and staring at two people who ought to be invisible to her. Is anyone else hearing theremin music? And does anyone else think that Harry and Hermione Apparating out of here would be a really good idea?
Not content with just standing there, the Creepy Crone beckons to the Duo. Hermione, at least, doesn't like this, and scrunches closer to Harry. Harry, however, who desperately wants to believe that the woman bears a message or an artifact from his true love Dumbledore, starts asking some rather pointless questions—and jumping to conclusions:
Was it possible that she had been waiting for them all these long months?
Anything is possible. However, you don't have enough information to say whether she has been waiting or not.
That Dumbledore had told her to wait, and that Harry would come in the end?
What does your performance anxiety have to do with this?
Was it not likely that it was she who had moved in the shadows in the graveyard and had followed them to this spot?
Possible, certainly. Why do you think this is a good thing?
Even her ability to sense them suggested some Dumbledore-ish power that he had never encountered before.
Why are you calling it "Dumbledore-ish power" when Dumbledore didn't possess it?
Harry finally asks the Creepy Crone—out loud and without removing the Cloak—if she's Bathilda. Way to completely blow your cover, Harry. Don't you think that the Death Eaters know you have an Invisibility Cloak? Oh, wait. You don't. That would require you to think, period.
SNIP!
Creepy Crone nods in response to Harry's question and signals that he should follow her. For no logical reason, he and Hermione agree to do so, and follow her back to another cottage with an overgrown garden. Once they're inside, Harry takes the Cloak off—again, for no rational reason—which causes Bathilda to take a good hard look at him, despite the fact that she has thick cataracts:
He wondered whether she could make him out at all; even if she could, it was the balding Muggle whose identity he had stolen that she would see.
She could see you in the middle of the night on a deserted, unlit road while you were wearing an Invisibility Cloak. Under the circumstances, I suspect that she can make you out perfectly well, and that your disguise spell isn't going to be an obstacle.
Harry became aware of the locket against his skin; the thing inside it that sometimes ticked or beat had woken; he could feel it pulsing through the cold gold.
The thing that contains part of Voldemort's soul is coming alive in the presence of Bathilda, and you're STILL not suspicious?
You know, Harry's not a sitting duck. In the words of Alan King, he's a duck that insists on sitting in front of the gun.
Bathilda leaves the hall and goes into the sitting room. Hermione lets Harry know that she's not at all certain about this, and generally gives the impression of being both nervous and uncomfortable. Harry says that Bathilda is tiny and that they could overcome her easily—and anyway, Ron's Great-Aunt Muriel said that Bathilda was a bit nuts. Why this is an argument in favor of the plan, I don't know. Would you leave an invaluable artifact that could win a war with a person who wasn't quite sane?
Now, much has been made of the fact that Bathilda doesn't speak in Hermione's hearing. I regret to report that this is simply not true. The next three sentences are consecutive.
"Come!" called Bathilda from the next room.
Hermione jumped and clutched Harry's arm.
"It's OK," said Harry reassuringly, and he led the way into the sitting room.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, that was a perfect opportunity for Hermione to say, "Harry, she's not talking, she's hissing!" Even Harry the Incredibly Oblivious might figure out that he was hearing Parseltongue.
But Hermione says nothing. This seems to support the notion that Bathilda knows and can speak at least one word of English—and directly contradicts later assertions that Bathilda never spoke in Hermione's hearing. She did. And there's absolutely no excuse.
Bathilda is lighting candles in the sitting room. Harry gives another description of how dirty the place is.
Thick dust crunched beneath their feet, and Harry's nose detected, underneath the dank and mildewed smell, something worse, like meat gone bad.
Dust doesn't crunch. Dirt does if it's gritty, but dust? Dust is soft.
SNIP!
She seemed to have forgotten that she could do magic, too, for she lit the candles clumsily by hand, her trailing lace cuff in constant danger of catching fire.
I note this line, because two sentences later, Harry is also not lighting the candles magically. First, he takes the matches away. Then he does this:
She stood watching him as he finished lighting the candle stubs that stood on saucers around the room, perched precariously on stacks of books and on side tables crammed with cracked and mouldy cups.
I grant you that he could be whispering, "Incendio!" to light the candles. But it sure sounds like he's using the matches, doesn't it?
Harry spots a chest of drawers in the sitting room. Why it's not in the bedroom, I don't know, but it has a lot of photos on it. Harry does a non-Scourgify cleaning spell (in accurate Latin, for a change) and instantly spots a picture of the cheerful blond man that he saw stealing from Gregorovitch.
And it came to Harry instantly where he had seen the boy before: in The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, arm in arm with the teenage Dumbledore, and that must be where all the missing photographs were: in Rita's book.
Why would the photographs be missing? Rita could make copies of the photos if she couldn't get hold of the negatives.
As Hermione, who is also not using magic, it seems, lights the fire for Bathilda, Harry starts asking Bathilda who the blond guy in the photo is. He gets nowhere; all Bathilda does is stare at him and look vague. Hermione asks Bathilda why she wanted them to come here, and does she have something to tell them?
Zero response from Bathilda. She doesn't even acknowledge that Hermione is there.
At this point, I would just cut my losses and leave the Creepy Crone and her stinking house. However, Harry is still convinced that Bathilda is going to tell him something of Great Significance, and that she's going to give him the Sword of Gryffindor.
What follows is a game of charades in which Bathilda makes various gestures which tell Harry that she wants to talk to him upstairs alone. Why one of them doesn't pull some paper and a quill from a rucksack, I don't know. If you were dealing with someone who could barely speak, wouldn't you at least try to communicate through writing?
Ah, but that would destroy the suspense. Which wouldn't exist if anyone acted like they had brains for two minutes running.
To be fair, Hermione does demand to know why Harry has to go upstairs alone. And she demands it loudly. Of course, Harry has an answer to that.
"Maybe Dumbledore told her to give the sword to me, and only to me?"
What I would say if I were Hermione:
1) You don't know that Dumbledore told her to do anything.
2) You don't know that she has the Sword of Gryffindor.
3) You don't know that she knows who you are.
4) You don't even know that she's Bathilda Bagshot. She CLAIMED to be, but that's not proof.
5) This is obviously a house of an old woman who can't take care of herself. Why do you think anyone would entrust a war secret to her?
6) SHE'S HISSING!
I suspect Hermione just doesn't want to deal with Harry getting all indignant and capslocky, for she asks only one of these questions: "Do you really think she knows who you are?" Harry says that he does. Reluctantly, Hermione agrees, telling him to make it fast. On his way upstairs, Harry steals the photograph of the wand thief.
Bathilda leads him up some steep stairs into a reeking bedroom. Then, and only then, does she ask him if he's Potter. Harry foolishly tells her that he is, and asks if she has anything for him. At this point I'm sitting here muttering, "Yeah, death."
SNIP!
Then she closed her eyes and several things happened at once: Harry's scar prickled painfully; the Horcrux twitched so that the front of his sweater actually moved; the dark, fetid room dissolved momentarily. He felt a leap of joy and spoke in a high, cold voice: hold him!
Now, it's painfully obvious what's going on. Harry's scar always pains him when Voldemort is around, and I've already mentioned that anything that makes Voldemort's soul-bits wake up is not a good thing. Not to mention Harry Quantum Leaping into Voldemort's head.
You would think that Harry would at least have an inkling that he's in trouble, wouldn't you? Oh, no. That's much too much to expect from Harry Potter.
Harry swayed where he stood: the dark, foul-smelling room seemed to close around him again; he did not know what had just happened.
I can't say anything here. This sporks itself.
Not content with completely missing every clue to Voldemort's presence, Harry also sticks around the room and asks, yet again, if Bathilda has anything for him. She tells him to come over to a cluttered dressing table covered in dirty laundry.
And in the instant that he looked away, his eyes taking the tangled mess for a sword hilt, a ruby, she moved weirdly: he saw it out of the corner of his eye; panic made him turn and horror paralyzed him as he saw the old body collapsing and the great snake pouring from the place where her neck had been.
Okay, I can see how someone could think that laundry was maybe shaped like a sword hilt. But a ruby? A ruby is generally sparkly and crystalline and laundry is...kind of not.
And can anyone figure out how Nagini made Bathilda's body work? I mean, I can see a snake occupying a dead body. It's disgusting, but I can picture it. But how did Nagini make her body walk and light matches and open doors with keys?
And the "It's maaaaaaaaaagic" line—I'm sorry, I'm not buying it. I'll accept bizarre explanations, provided they make sense within the context of that particular world. I've got no problem with a curse that makes dead bodies animate, or necromancers cloaking bones in ectoplasmic flesh by means of unimaginable power. I accept I Am Legend's virus that reduces people to a zombie-like state, and The Serpent and the Rainbow's drug that puts people in something like a coma. Hell, sheer determination is enough to create a zombie on Discworld.
But a snake manipulating a human body like a puppeteer? Doing what, using her fangs as hands to work the nerves and the muscles? Doesn't wash.
Despite the unbelievable nature of Nagini's disguise, she—or Bathilda's body—is a kickass zombie. She beats up Harry but good. Unfortunately, at this point in this chapter, Rowling starts displaying her skills as Queen of the Run-on Sentence. Take a look at this sentence--
The snake struck as he raised his wand: the force of the bite to his forearm sent the wand spinning up toward the ceiling; its light swung dizzyingly around the room and was extinguished: then a powerful blow from the tail to his midriff knocked the breath out of him: He fell backward onto the dressing table, into the mound of filthy clothing--
Three colons, one semi-colon and one dash. I don't know what the woman has against full stops. I really don't. And "a powerful blow from the tail to the midriff knocked the breath out of him"? That's truly awkward. Why not "the snake's powerful tail struck his midriff and knocked the breath out of him"?
Oh, and she totally ripped off "the light swinging dizzily around the room" bit from a famous scene in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. I think it works better visually than it does in writing.
Harry falls back on the dressing table, rolls sideways and falls to the floor. Hermione hears all the noise and calls to him. We then get some of Rowling's extremely suggestible lines:
Then a heavy smooth mass smashed him to the floor and he felt it slide over him, powerful, muscular--
"No!" he gasped, pinned to the floor.
"Yes," whispered the voice. "Yesss... hold you ... hold you ..."
I think I read some porn like this once.
Anyway, Harry tries summoning his wand, which does not work for some reason, and he nearly gets choked to death by Nagini before, again, plot devicing into the mind of Voldemort.
A metal heart was banging outside his chest,
I still want to know why Harry decided that wearing the Horcrux locket was a good idea. Did he just say to himself, "Wow, wearing cursed jewelry worked SO well for Frodo"?
and now he was flying, flying with triumph in his heart, without need of broomstick or Thestral...
I can't stand Super-Voldemort. Rowling spent years telling us that wizards HAD to have something to help them fly—brooms, carpets, the Thestrals, whatever. But in this book, suddenly, Voldemort can fly! And Snape can fly! And we're just supposed to forget that they shouldn't be able to do this.
Also, why waste time flying when you can Apparate? Even Apparating in stages would get Voldie to Godric's Hollow quicker than flying would.
In fact, Voldemort doesn't even have to show up at all. Forget ordering Nagini to hold Harry—why not just order her to kill him, or eat him. It shouldn't matter who kills Harry. Once he's dead, he's no longer in Voldemort's way.
Nagini, hearing Hermione coming up the stairs, frees Harry in order to attack her. This is very dumb. Harry's the important one. Kill him, and nothing else matters.
He scrambled up and saw the snake outlined against the landing light: it struck, and Hermione dived aside with a shriek:
On a flight of steep stairs? Not much room for diving.
her deflected curse hit the curtained window, which shattered.
Do you see anything in there about Hermione casting a curse BEFORE it got deflected?
Harry ducks so that he won't get cut by flying glass and nearly slips and falls when he treads on his wand. He grabs it. Hermione casts a spell that sends Nagini flying:
then there was a loud bang and a flash of red light, and the snake flew into the air, smacking Harry hard in the face as it went, coil after heavy coil rising up to the ceiling.
Even in a place with a low ceiling, all those coils would be about thirteen feet high. That's a lot of snake.
Harry's scar starts hurting. Again. He screams to Hermione that Voldemort is coming. Nagini starts smashing everything in the room. And something rather odd happens.
Harry jumped over the bed and seized the dark shape he knew to be Hermione--
She shrieked with pain as he pulled her back across the bed
So he jumped OVER the bed, grabbed Hermione, who was NEXT to the bed, and then pulled her backwards ACROSS the bed? Umm...can anyone come up with a non-shippy reason why?
Harry, sensing Voldemort coming—well, finally, it took him long enough!--takes a running leap while still on the bed, jumps to the broken dressing table, and out the window, dragging Hermione with him. She casts a spell in the meantime. This one hits a mirror, explodes the mirror and ricochets all over the room. I'm pretty sure that if the mirror explodes, the energy should dissipate in the explosion and the ricochet shouldn't occur. Paging Mythbusters...
Harry then hallucinates...I think. Harry normally sees through Voldemort's eyes when Voldemort is focusing on him, and we know that Voldemort is en route, so what follows is a bit confusing. If Harry's not hallucinating, then Voldemort officially gets my vote as the stupidest fucking villain on the planet.
And then his scar burst open and he was Voldemort and he was running across the fetid bedroom, his long white hands clutching at the windowsill as he glimpsed the bald man and the little woman twist and vanish,
It only makes sense if Harry's hallucinating, because if this IS Voldemort, why wouldn't he just use his Sue-per Powers of Flight and swoop down on them? Hell, why not just hit them with a Stunning Spell, or the Full-Body Bind, or the Entrail-Expelling Curse? Why would he just stand at the window dramatically and do nothing?
And yet it sounds like every other time that Harry's Leaped in Voldemort's mind.
and he screamed with rage, a scream that mingled with the girl's, that echoed across the dark gardens over the church bells ringing in Christmas Day...
What girl? Harry looks like a bald man, Hermione is disguised as a small woman, Nagini has ditched the Bathilda body, and Voldemort, if he is not a hallucination, is Voldemort. I honestly think that from one part of this sentence to another, Rowling forgot that Hermione would not look like a girl to anyone present.
Also, why are the dark gardens on top of the church bells? Commas, JKR. If we treat them properly, commas can be our friends.
What follows is a run-on sentence with run-on ellipses. Fifty-one words, punctuated by six sets of ellipses. Take a look.
And his scream was Harry's scream, his pain was Harry's pain... that it could happen here, where it had happened before... here, within sight of that house where he had come so close to knowing what it was to die ... to die ... the pain was so terrible ... ripped from his body ...
What happens next? Three pages of italics. I'm not going to bother italicizing all of it, as three pages of italics are really hard to read. But this section is Voldemort's flashback to Halloween 1981.
The night wet and windy, two children dressed as pumpkins waddling across the square and the shop windows covered in paper spiders, all the tawdry Muggle trappings of a world in which they did not believe ...
Why are the children dressed as waddling pumpkins?
And is there a main verb anywhere in that sentence? Anywhere? Anywhere? Bueller?
Also, trick or treating on Halloween is a fairly recent innovation in England. A celebration of that style would have been very rare in England in the 1980s; people would have been far more likely to hear about Halloween through American movies.
So basically, Voldemort is describing something that wasn't done at the time, and that he therefore would not have seen. Sorry, wrong era.
And he was gliding along, that sense of purpose and power and rightness in him that he always knew on these occasions ...
"These occasions"? How often does Voldemort attempt to assassinate a child prophesied to destroy him? He makes it sound like this is a weekly occurrence!
Anyway, Voldemort walks along feeling triumphant, though he hasn't actually done anything yet. One little boy compliments him on his costume. Voldemort considers killing the kid, but decides that's "quite unnecessary." I guess all the others he tortured and killed were quite necessary, then.
He heads toward the Potter's cottage and flies over the hedge, again without benefit of broomstick. That's the way to be inconspicuous, Voldie! You show 'em!
But before he goes in, the former Tom Riddle lives up to his name and becomes a Peeping Tom. No, really. He's seconds away from killing the one person who could destroy him, and what does Voldemort do? He peeks in the windows, and watches James conjuring puffs of colored smoke for little Harry.
Shortly, James hands the baby over to Lily, throws his wand down on the sofa and stretches out, yawning. Voldemort casts some unnamed charm on the door—Rowling says it "bursts open," which could mean anything from the Blasting Curse to Aholomora.
He was over the threshold as James came sprinting into the hall. It was easy, too easy, he had not even picked up his wand ...
There's been a lot of speculation about whether wizards are so titchy about Apparating into other peoples' houses because they need to wait to be invited in or not. Now we know. They don't have to be invited. Death Eaters can break in anytime.
Still begs the question of why they don't just Apparate in, though. I mean, why go through all that silly business about passwords to get in and spells to knock down doors if you don't have to?
James attempts to hold Voldemort off—without a wand. Yeah, that makes sense. Then it's Lily's turn. And that's even dumber.
He could hear her screaming from the upper floor, trapped
a) Screaming wastes time and breath.
b) Screaming also tells the bad man where you are.
c) You don't need a wand to Apparate.
All she has to do is grab the baby and go.
He climbed the steps, listening with faint amusement to her attempts to barricade herself in ...
Especially since any witch or wizard could just, you know, Apparate on the other side of the barricade any time that he or she wanted to. And at this point, I'd think that Voldemort would be highly motivated.
SNIP!
She had no wand upon her either ...
*cough* Accio wand! *cough*
SNIP!
How stupid they were
Frankly, I think all three of them are making a pretty poor showing of it.
SNIP!
He forced the door open
Why BOTHER? The door itself isn't a barrier!
Mini-SNIP!
... and there she stood, the child in her arms.
There was also a lot of discussion in fandom about whether Lily was holding Harry or not when Voldie came in. The consensus was that Lily couldn't have been holding Harry, as she'd surely have tried to get away if she had. Now we know. She was holding Harry. She could have made a stab at escaping. But she didn't.
Lily does nothing useful at this point. She just stands in front of the crib begging for mercy for Harry (yeah, like THAT'S going to happen) and begging Voldemort to kill her instead. Look, Lily, you're a Muggleborn witch, an Order member and the newly-widowed mother of the magical Messiah. And you've got oceans of motive for revenge. And you think there's a chance he's NOT going to kill you?
Harry seems to mistake Voldemort for James:
he looked up into the intruder's face with a kind of bright interest, perhaps thinking that it was his father who hid beneath the cloak, making more pretty lights, and his mother would pop up any moment, laughing--
Voldemort (breathing heavily): Harry, I am your father.
He pointed the wand very carefully into the boy's face: He wanted to see it happen, the destruction of this one, inexplicable danger.
You know, Voldie, you don't need a Killing Curse to murder a baby. A pillow would work just as well.
Anyway, Harry starts to cry:
The child began to cry: It had seen that he was not James.
He finally realized that the bald, white-faced, red-eyed, noseless monster isn't the black-haired, hazel-eyed, bespectacled James. Having seen babies cry at the sight of human relatives they don't know well, I think that Harry is, to be charitable, a little slow.
Oh, and Voldemort doesn't like crying babies. Wow. What a shock.
So Voldie casts the Killing Curse.
And then he broke: he was nothing, nothing but pain and terror, and he must hide himself, not here in the rubble of the ruined house, where the child was trapped and screaming, but far away ... far away ...
I have to wonder how Voldemort could experience pain when he doesn't have a body. It's not that the concept of spirits that can be hurt is a new one in fantasy. However, we've never seen a ghost or spirit hurt in the Potterverse. I think the closest we've come is seeing Peeves the Poltergeist being made momentarily uncomfortable. It's just a bit late to introduce the concept in the conclusion of the series.
SNIP!
And now he stood at the broken window of Bathilda's house, immersed in memories of his greatest loss, and at his feet the great snake slithered over broken china and glass...
And this just reinforces the question: is this a hallucination born of delirium, or a singularly do-nothing Dark Lord?
Anyway, Voldemort—at least in Harry's dream—picks up the photograph of the blond thief, a.k.a Gellert Grindelwald. And Harry wakes up in the tent, with Hermione fretting over him, dark shadows under her eyes. She tells him that he's been quite ill.
I thought this meant that Harry had been unconscious and sick with fever for days. But no, according to Hermione it's only been hours. Considering the size of the snake that bit Harry, that would probably be enough to kill him, let alone make him sick. For some odd reason, the snake left "half-healed puncture marks." I'm attributing the half-healing to Hermione, but that was a BIG snake. I'm surprised Harry doesn't mention the size of the puncture marks. Then again, Harry never notices anything.
Also, the Horcrux-locket stuck to Harry's chest, leaving yet another scar, this one over his heart.
Hermione asks what happened, because Rowling will never say something once if she can say it four times. So Harry repeats, in condensed form, what we've just finished reading about, and of course he gets it wrong:
She didn't want to talk in front of you, because it was Parseltongue, all Parseltongue, and I didn't realize, but of course I could understand her.
Rowling has completely forgotten that Bathilda-Nagini DID speak in Hermione's hearing once, and that the cleverest witch of her year completely missed the fact that the woman was hissing.
Once we were up in the room, the snake sent a message to You-Know-Who, I heard it happen inside my head
And that's not true, either. The snake didn't send a message to Voldemort. All Bathilda did was close her eyes. Voldemort sent a message to Nagini—"Hold him!"
Harry then decides that Hermione doesn't need to know unpleasant details like the snake pouring out of Bathilda's neck. So despite having told Hermione earlier in this conversation that Nagini was living inside the snake, he lies and tells her that Bathilda turned into the snake when he went upstairs.
Hermione, of course, does not notice. No one ever notices breaks in continuity in Rowlingland.
Harry then decides that he's been unconscious for long enough and he wants to go on guard duty. Hermione tells Harry that he should rest, but he pooh-poohs that idea before asking her three times, "Dude, where's my wand?"
As it turns out, his holly and phoenix feather phallic symbol has been broken almost in half. Harry isn't any good at wandless magic, aside from the accidental kind, so he is essentially helpless. Impotent, even. Harry tells Hermione to fix it. She does mend it, at least cosmetically. Magically, it's no use at all. He tries casting Lumos, which gives a weak blink and then goes out like a burned-out light bulb, and Expelliarmus, which tugs briefly at Hermione's wand before making Harry's wand split in half again.
Hermione blames herself, saying that the Blasting Curse she cast ricocheted everywhere—even though I don't think it should have—and must have hit Harry's wand. See, Hermione, this is why you don't cast Blasting Curses unless you can see what the fuck you're casting at.
Harry insists that they'll find a way to fix it. Hermione, in a startling burst of continuity, reminds him of Ron's wand—the one that got broken when the Ford Anglia hit the Whomping Willow. Ron, she points out, had to get a new one.
Harry thought of Ollivander, kidnapped and held hostage by Voldemort; of Gregorovitch, who was dead. How was he supposed to find himself a new wand?
It's never been said that Ollivander makes the only wands in England, just the best wands. That rather implies there are other wand makers in the U.K. If Ollivander is the best, then there must be someone for him to be better than.
Plus, you know, Harry could fly over to France. Judging by how easily Sirius, Peter and Voldemort managed to travel to and from England without being stopped by border guards, he could probably be there and back before anyone knew he was gone. And after all, Fleur had to get that veela hair wand of hers from somewhere.
Interestingly, when Harry is sharing digs with Ollivander at Shell Cottage, he never brings up the possibility of Ollivander making him a new wand. Harry asks about the old broken wand, and about the wands formerly belonging to Bellatrix and Draco. But "Can you make me a new wand?" Nope. Never crosses his lips.
At any rate, Harry tells Hermione—not asks her, tells her--that he'll just borrow her wand. Hermione, evidently feeling guilty, hands the wand over, and Harry goes outside to brood like an angsty vampire.
I think that this is supposed to be a terribly dramatic chapter. And, compared to the Boys' Own Camping Adventure chapters, or the many, many, MANY instances in which Harry seems to have nothing better to do than read the newspaper, it is fairly dramatic.
Unfortunately, the drama stems less from any inevitable danger than from Harry's towering illogic, blatant stupidity and completely unfounded conviction that Dumbledore left him one last message and the Sword of Gryffindor besides. There is a vast difference between doing something and getting into trouble in the process and staring into a pit filled with snakes, saying, "Snakes? I don't see any snakes!" and then leaping into the pit. Rowling does not seem to know how to write the former.
Harry and Hermione have just visited the Incredibly Dramatic and Previously Unmentioned Grave of the Potter Parentals in a small churchyard in Godric's Hollow. They're just on their way out of the cemetery when Hermione spots someone watching them.
They stood quite still, holding on to each other, gazing at the dense black boundary of the graveyard.
I can't find any description in the previous chapter of a fence or of hedges around the graveyard. I keep picturing someone having drawn a line around the cemetery with a big black Sharpie.
The two squabble about whether Hermione saw anything—she says she did, Harry isn't so sure. Harry also insists that they "look like Muggles"--whatever Muggles look like--so what difference does it make if anyone saw them? It doesn't seem to occur to him that if they've just run into a Death Eater or two, being taken for a Muggle wouldn't be an advantage. Hermione objects too, but for a different reason:
"Muggles who've just been laying flowers on your parents' grave!
If someone was looking at you from a distance, they might be able to tell which graves you were near, but I really don't think they could tell precisely which grave you were laying flowers on. Non-magical people wouldn't care, and can you picture a Death Eater doing something so sensible as using high-powered binoculars? I can't. Far too Muggle for them.
Harry thought of A History of Magic; the graveyard was supposed to be haunted: what if --?
Well, what if it is, Harry? You lived at a haunted school for six years. One of your teachers was a ghost. You even went to a Deathday party. Voluntarily. Ghosts shouldn't bother you.
Hermione points to a bush and Harry hears a rustling noise and sees some snow fall off of the shrubbery. My reaction: What of it? I've lived in New England all my life. I've seen snow fall off of bushes thanks to the slightest breeze. This doesn't prove whether anyone's there or not.
Harry, however, decides that ghosts can't move snow. Apparently he's forgotten all about Peeves the Poltergeist, who's certainly a spirit if not a ghost, and who can lift and move any number of things.
Based on this flawed information, he informs Hermione that it was a cat or a bird, and that it can't have been a Death Eater or they'd be dead already. Right away, I knew that the Narrative Laws of Comedy would mandate that Harry be deeply and profoundly wrong.
So they exit the graveyard. Once they are on the sidewalk—in full view of a full pub and a church holding Christmas services—they put the Invisibility Cloak back. Harry, selfish beast that he is, considers taking refuge in the church. Yes, Harry. When someone who is very probably lethal is following you, the loving and compassionate thing to do is to give the potential killer a variety of targets.
(It might be, under the right circumstances, the practical thing to do. But no one has ever suggested that practicality is the Power That The Dark Lord Knows Not.)
However, before Harry can suggest using the church as sanctuary, Hermione starts leading him out of the village into open country. As she's asking him how they're going to find Bathilda's cottage, Harry spots the ruins of his parents' house.
He could see it; the Fidelius Charm must have died with James and Lily.
How come he's referring to his parents by their first names?
The cottage is a ruin, all overgrown with ivy and missing the right side of the top floor. Harry thinks that might have been where Voldemort's curse went haywire. No shit, Sherlock. Also, we have two consecutive sentences that are fine separately but that don't make any sense together:
The hedge had grown wild in the sixteen years since Hagrid had taken Harry from the rubble that lay scattered amongst the waist-high grass.
Most of the cottage was still standing, though entirely covered in the dark ivy and snow
Rowling earlier described the snow in the cemetery as deep enough for the kids to leave trenches behind them as they walked. I'd say at least knee-high snow, then. So is the Potters' cottage surrounded by knee-high snow, as it should be if the cottage is covered with snow, or is it surrounded by waist-high grass out of season?
Honestly, JKR. Do try to keep continuity from at least one sentence to the next, at least.
Hermione wonders why it's still a ruin. Evidently she hasn't heard about people letting houses go to ruin for tax purposes. Harry suggests that maybe it can't be fixed:
"Maybe it's like the injuries from Dark Magic and you can't repair the damage?"
Now I want to see a wizarding Healer who mends residences. And lo, his name shall be Doctor House.
However, when Harry touches the gate, a previously invisible sign appears, which explains why the house in the state it's in.
Lily and James Potter lost their lives.
Their son, Harry, remains the only wizard ever
to have survived the Killing Curse.
This house, invisible to Muggles, has been left
in its ruined state as a monument to the Potters
and as a reminder of the violence
that tore apart their family.
It wasn't violence that tore apart their family. It was WAR. Betrayal and war. And it destroyed their family. Use the right words, will you?
And it would also be nice if the sign mentioned who killed them. Yes, everyone nowadays in the wizarding world knows that Voldemort did it, but if you're going to preserve a spot for posterity, you have to plan for a time when everyone doesn't remember what you're memorializing.
As far as Harry's concerned, this is all about him:
And all around these neatly lettered words, scribbles had been added by other witches and wizards who had come to see the place where the Boy Who Lived had escaped.
Now this graffiti indicates that something is deeply and profoundly wrong. Let me reconstruct the situation as best I can.
Okay. Peter was the Secret Keeper, and he told Voldemort where the Potters were hiding. Voldemort then became a co-Secret Keeper, according to HBP and DH. Voldemort then went to Godric's Hollow and killed the Potters and got killed himself.
Voldemort couldn't confide the information in anyone because of this:
"The only people who ever knew their precise location were those whom Wormtail had told directly, but none of them would have been able to pass on the information."
The only person that we know Peter told in canon is Voldemort. And Voldemort could not pass the information on. We found this out in OotP. The Order members knew perfectly well that the headquarters was at Twelve Grimmauld Place. But they couldn't tell Harry. They could give Harry a note with the address written on it—but the note was written by Dumbledore, the Secret Keeper, who told one of the members to give Harry this note. None of them could personally write a note telling Harry where the house was. And it gets worse...
Now--according to Rowling's website on February 21, 2006 and the Lexicon:
"When a Secret-Keeper dies, their secret dies with them, or to put it another way, the status of their secret will remain as it was at the moment of their death. Everybody in whom they confided will continue to know the hidden information, but nobody else..."
Well, Voldemort was a Secret Keeper; Peter telling him the secret made him so. And only he and Peter knew where the Potters were when he died.
So the cottage should be completely invisible to everyone in the wizarding world except for Peter Pettigrew. There should not be a plaque in front of the cottage, or graffiti on that plaque. Hell, no one should have found the wounded Baby Harry lying in the wreckage of the cottage.
The whole saga, according to JKR herself, is absolutely impossible.
The only logical conclusion is that all seven books are a hallucination on Baby Harry's part as he lies wailing in the rubble, dying of exposure and brain injury. (Rather like St. Elsewhere, where the entire hospital drama series was revealed to be, in the series finale, a fantasy in the mind of an autistic child.)
Meanwhile, back in the hallucination of the invisible cottage, Hermione is annoyed that anyone wrote on the sign. Harry's delighted. I guess he likes seeing his name written over and over.
Keep in mind the following in mind, by the way, because the Duo has not.
1) They believe that they were observed in the cemetery.
2) The person observing them might be following them.
3) They didn't put the Cloak on until they reached the open street.
4) They are walking through deep snow, and are therefore leaving tracks.
5) They are out in the middle of nowhere, in front of a ruined and deserted house.
This is the equivalent of a pretty blonde girl in high heels and with no cellphone walking alone into a crumbling mansion with a dark and bloody past, ignoring the blood all over the floor and the heavy footsteps of the axe-murderer behind her.
Let me spell it out for you, Harry and Hermione:
IF YOU THINK THAT SOMEONE IS FOLLOWING YOU AND MAY KILL YOU, YOU DON'T PAUSE TO LOOK AT A TOURIST ATTRACTION.
I mention this because at this point, Harry sees someone heading toward them—well, walking in their direction, anyway. The description is rather interesting:
Her stoop, her stoutness, her shuffling gait all gave an impression of extreme age.
Okay, I can understand the stoop and the shuffling gait being characteristic of an old person—but stoutness? What, there aren't any thin old people?
Harry was waiting to see whether she would turn into any of the cottages she was passing, but he knew, instinctively, that she would not.
So he's waiting for her to do something that he knows she's not going to do. Yes, Harry. That makes so much sense.
At last she came to a halt a few yards from them, and simply stood there in the middle of the frozen road, facing them.
There's a creepy old woman standing in the middle of an empty road and staring at two people who ought to be invisible to her. Is anyone else hearing theremin music? And does anyone else think that Harry and Hermione Apparating out of here would be a really good idea?
Not content with just standing there, the Creepy Crone beckons to the Duo. Hermione, at least, doesn't like this, and scrunches closer to Harry. Harry, however, who desperately wants to believe that the woman bears a message or an artifact from his true love Dumbledore, starts asking some rather pointless questions—and jumping to conclusions:
Was it possible that she had been waiting for them all these long months?
Anything is possible. However, you don't have enough information to say whether she has been waiting or not.
That Dumbledore had told her to wait, and that Harry would come in the end?
What does your performance anxiety have to do with this?
Was it not likely that it was she who had moved in the shadows in the graveyard and had followed them to this spot?
Possible, certainly. Why do you think this is a good thing?
Even her ability to sense them suggested some Dumbledore-ish power that he had never encountered before.
Why are you calling it "Dumbledore-ish power" when Dumbledore didn't possess it?
Harry finally asks the Creepy Crone—out loud and without removing the Cloak—if she's Bathilda. Way to completely blow your cover, Harry. Don't you think that the Death Eaters know you have an Invisibility Cloak? Oh, wait. You don't. That would require you to think, period.
SNIP!
Creepy Crone nods in response to Harry's question and signals that he should follow her. For no logical reason, he and Hermione agree to do so, and follow her back to another cottage with an overgrown garden. Once they're inside, Harry takes the Cloak off—again, for no rational reason—which causes Bathilda to take a good hard look at him, despite the fact that she has thick cataracts:
He wondered whether she could make him out at all; even if she could, it was the balding Muggle whose identity he had stolen that she would see.
She could see you in the middle of the night on a deserted, unlit road while you were wearing an Invisibility Cloak. Under the circumstances, I suspect that she can make you out perfectly well, and that your disguise spell isn't going to be an obstacle.
Harry became aware of the locket against his skin; the thing inside it that sometimes ticked or beat had woken; he could feel it pulsing through the cold gold.
The thing that contains part of Voldemort's soul is coming alive in the presence of Bathilda, and you're STILL not suspicious?
You know, Harry's not a sitting duck. In the words of Alan King, he's a duck that insists on sitting in front of the gun.
Bathilda leaves the hall and goes into the sitting room. Hermione lets Harry know that she's not at all certain about this, and generally gives the impression of being both nervous and uncomfortable. Harry says that Bathilda is tiny and that they could overcome her easily—and anyway, Ron's Great-Aunt Muriel said that Bathilda was a bit nuts. Why this is an argument in favor of the plan, I don't know. Would you leave an invaluable artifact that could win a war with a person who wasn't quite sane?
Now, much has been made of the fact that Bathilda doesn't speak in Hermione's hearing. I regret to report that this is simply not true. The next three sentences are consecutive.
"Come!" called Bathilda from the next room.
Hermione jumped and clutched Harry's arm.
"It's OK," said Harry reassuringly, and he led the way into the sitting room.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, that was a perfect opportunity for Hermione to say, "Harry, she's not talking, she's hissing!" Even Harry the Incredibly Oblivious might figure out that he was hearing Parseltongue.
But Hermione says nothing. This seems to support the notion that Bathilda knows and can speak at least one word of English—and directly contradicts later assertions that Bathilda never spoke in Hermione's hearing. She did. And there's absolutely no excuse.
Bathilda is lighting candles in the sitting room. Harry gives another description of how dirty the place is.
Thick dust crunched beneath their feet, and Harry's nose detected, underneath the dank and mildewed smell, something worse, like meat gone bad.
Dust doesn't crunch. Dirt does if it's gritty, but dust? Dust is soft.
SNIP!
She seemed to have forgotten that she could do magic, too, for she lit the candles clumsily by hand, her trailing lace cuff in constant danger of catching fire.
I note this line, because two sentences later, Harry is also not lighting the candles magically. First, he takes the matches away. Then he does this:
She stood watching him as he finished lighting the candle stubs that stood on saucers around the room, perched precariously on stacks of books and on side tables crammed with cracked and mouldy cups.
I grant you that he could be whispering, "Incendio!" to light the candles. But it sure sounds like he's using the matches, doesn't it?
Harry spots a chest of drawers in the sitting room. Why it's not in the bedroom, I don't know, but it has a lot of photos on it. Harry does a non-Scourgify cleaning spell (in accurate Latin, for a change) and instantly spots a picture of the cheerful blond man that he saw stealing from Gregorovitch.
And it came to Harry instantly where he had seen the boy before: in The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, arm in arm with the teenage Dumbledore, and that must be where all the missing photographs were: in Rita's book.
Why would the photographs be missing? Rita could make copies of the photos if she couldn't get hold of the negatives.
As Hermione, who is also not using magic, it seems, lights the fire for Bathilda, Harry starts asking Bathilda who the blond guy in the photo is. He gets nowhere; all Bathilda does is stare at him and look vague. Hermione asks Bathilda why she wanted them to come here, and does she have something to tell them?
Zero response from Bathilda. She doesn't even acknowledge that Hermione is there.
At this point, I would just cut my losses and leave the Creepy Crone and her stinking house. However, Harry is still convinced that Bathilda is going to tell him something of Great Significance, and that she's going to give him the Sword of Gryffindor.
What follows is a game of charades in which Bathilda makes various gestures which tell Harry that she wants to talk to him upstairs alone. Why one of them doesn't pull some paper and a quill from a rucksack, I don't know. If you were dealing with someone who could barely speak, wouldn't you at least try to communicate through writing?
Ah, but that would destroy the suspense. Which wouldn't exist if anyone acted like they had brains for two minutes running.
To be fair, Hermione does demand to know why Harry has to go upstairs alone. And she demands it loudly. Of course, Harry has an answer to that.
"Maybe Dumbledore told her to give the sword to me, and only to me?"
What I would say if I were Hermione:
1) You don't know that Dumbledore told her to do anything.
2) You don't know that she has the Sword of Gryffindor.
3) You don't know that she knows who you are.
4) You don't even know that she's Bathilda Bagshot. She CLAIMED to be, but that's not proof.
5) This is obviously a house of an old woman who can't take care of herself. Why do you think anyone would entrust a war secret to her?
6) SHE'S HISSING!
I suspect Hermione just doesn't want to deal with Harry getting all indignant and capslocky, for she asks only one of these questions: "Do you really think she knows who you are?" Harry says that he does. Reluctantly, Hermione agrees, telling him to make it fast. On his way upstairs, Harry steals the photograph of the wand thief.
Bathilda leads him up some steep stairs into a reeking bedroom. Then, and only then, does she ask him if he's Potter. Harry foolishly tells her that he is, and asks if she has anything for him. At this point I'm sitting here muttering, "Yeah, death."
SNIP!
Then she closed her eyes and several things happened at once: Harry's scar prickled painfully; the Horcrux twitched so that the front of his sweater actually moved; the dark, fetid room dissolved momentarily. He felt a leap of joy and spoke in a high, cold voice: hold him!
Now, it's painfully obvious what's going on. Harry's scar always pains him when Voldemort is around, and I've already mentioned that anything that makes Voldemort's soul-bits wake up is not a good thing. Not to mention Harry Quantum Leaping into Voldemort's head.
You would think that Harry would at least have an inkling that he's in trouble, wouldn't you? Oh, no. That's much too much to expect from Harry Potter.
Harry swayed where he stood: the dark, foul-smelling room seemed to close around him again; he did not know what had just happened.
I can't say anything here. This sporks itself.
Not content with completely missing every clue to Voldemort's presence, Harry also sticks around the room and asks, yet again, if Bathilda has anything for him. She tells him to come over to a cluttered dressing table covered in dirty laundry.
And in the instant that he looked away, his eyes taking the tangled mess for a sword hilt, a ruby, she moved weirdly: he saw it out of the corner of his eye; panic made him turn and horror paralyzed him as he saw the old body collapsing and the great snake pouring from the place where her neck had been.
Okay, I can see how someone could think that laundry was maybe shaped like a sword hilt. But a ruby? A ruby is generally sparkly and crystalline and laundry is...kind of not.
And can anyone figure out how Nagini made Bathilda's body work? I mean, I can see a snake occupying a dead body. It's disgusting, but I can picture it. But how did Nagini make her body walk and light matches and open doors with keys?
And the "It's maaaaaaaaaagic" line—I'm sorry, I'm not buying it. I'll accept bizarre explanations, provided they make sense within the context of that particular world. I've got no problem with a curse that makes dead bodies animate, or necromancers cloaking bones in ectoplasmic flesh by means of unimaginable power. I accept I Am Legend's virus that reduces people to a zombie-like state, and The Serpent and the Rainbow's drug that puts people in something like a coma. Hell, sheer determination is enough to create a zombie on Discworld.
But a snake manipulating a human body like a puppeteer? Doing what, using her fangs as hands to work the nerves and the muscles? Doesn't wash.
Despite the unbelievable nature of Nagini's disguise, she—or Bathilda's body—is a kickass zombie. She beats up Harry but good. Unfortunately, at this point in this chapter, Rowling starts displaying her skills as Queen of the Run-on Sentence. Take a look at this sentence--
The snake struck as he raised his wand: the force of the bite to his forearm sent the wand spinning up toward the ceiling; its light swung dizzyingly around the room and was extinguished: then a powerful blow from the tail to his midriff knocked the breath out of him: He fell backward onto the dressing table, into the mound of filthy clothing--
Three colons, one semi-colon and one dash. I don't know what the woman has against full stops. I really don't. And "a powerful blow from the tail to the midriff knocked the breath out of him"? That's truly awkward. Why not "the snake's powerful tail struck his midriff and knocked the breath out of him"?
Oh, and she totally ripped off "the light swinging dizzily around the room" bit from a famous scene in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. I think it works better visually than it does in writing.
Harry falls back on the dressing table, rolls sideways and falls to the floor. Hermione hears all the noise and calls to him. We then get some of Rowling's extremely suggestible lines:
Then a heavy smooth mass smashed him to the floor and he felt it slide over him, powerful, muscular--
"No!" he gasped, pinned to the floor.
"Yes," whispered the voice. "Yesss... hold you ... hold you ..."
I think I read some porn like this once.
Anyway, Harry tries summoning his wand, which does not work for some reason, and he nearly gets choked to death by Nagini before, again, plot devicing into the mind of Voldemort.
A metal heart was banging outside his chest,
I still want to know why Harry decided that wearing the Horcrux locket was a good idea. Did he just say to himself, "Wow, wearing cursed jewelry worked SO well for Frodo"?
and now he was flying, flying with triumph in his heart, without need of broomstick or Thestral...
I can't stand Super-Voldemort. Rowling spent years telling us that wizards HAD to have something to help them fly—brooms, carpets, the Thestrals, whatever. But in this book, suddenly, Voldemort can fly! And Snape can fly! And we're just supposed to forget that they shouldn't be able to do this.
Also, why waste time flying when you can Apparate? Even Apparating in stages would get Voldie to Godric's Hollow quicker than flying would.
In fact, Voldemort doesn't even have to show up at all. Forget ordering Nagini to hold Harry—why not just order her to kill him, or eat him. It shouldn't matter who kills Harry. Once he's dead, he's no longer in Voldemort's way.
Nagini, hearing Hermione coming up the stairs, frees Harry in order to attack her. This is very dumb. Harry's the important one. Kill him, and nothing else matters.
He scrambled up and saw the snake outlined against the landing light: it struck, and Hermione dived aside with a shriek:
On a flight of steep stairs? Not much room for diving.
her deflected curse hit the curtained window, which shattered.
Do you see anything in there about Hermione casting a curse BEFORE it got deflected?
Harry ducks so that he won't get cut by flying glass and nearly slips and falls when he treads on his wand. He grabs it. Hermione casts a spell that sends Nagini flying:
then there was a loud bang and a flash of red light, and the snake flew into the air, smacking Harry hard in the face as it went, coil after heavy coil rising up to the ceiling.
Even in a place with a low ceiling, all those coils would be about thirteen feet high. That's a lot of snake.
Harry's scar starts hurting. Again. He screams to Hermione that Voldemort is coming. Nagini starts smashing everything in the room. And something rather odd happens.
Harry jumped over the bed and seized the dark shape he knew to be Hermione--
She shrieked with pain as he pulled her back across the bed
So he jumped OVER the bed, grabbed Hermione, who was NEXT to the bed, and then pulled her backwards ACROSS the bed? Umm...can anyone come up with a non-shippy reason why?
Harry, sensing Voldemort coming—well, finally, it took him long enough!--takes a running leap while still on the bed, jumps to the broken dressing table, and out the window, dragging Hermione with him. She casts a spell in the meantime. This one hits a mirror, explodes the mirror and ricochets all over the room. I'm pretty sure that if the mirror explodes, the energy should dissipate in the explosion and the ricochet shouldn't occur. Paging Mythbusters...
Harry then hallucinates...I think. Harry normally sees through Voldemort's eyes when Voldemort is focusing on him, and we know that Voldemort is en route, so what follows is a bit confusing. If Harry's not hallucinating, then Voldemort officially gets my vote as the stupidest fucking villain on the planet.
And then his scar burst open and he was Voldemort and he was running across the fetid bedroom, his long white hands clutching at the windowsill as he glimpsed the bald man and the little woman twist and vanish,
It only makes sense if Harry's hallucinating, because if this IS Voldemort, why wouldn't he just use his Sue-per Powers of Flight and swoop down on them? Hell, why not just hit them with a Stunning Spell, or the Full-Body Bind, or the Entrail-Expelling Curse? Why would he just stand at the window dramatically and do nothing?
And yet it sounds like every other time that Harry's Leaped in Voldemort's mind.
and he screamed with rage, a scream that mingled with the girl's, that echoed across the dark gardens over the church bells ringing in Christmas Day...
What girl? Harry looks like a bald man, Hermione is disguised as a small woman, Nagini has ditched the Bathilda body, and Voldemort, if he is not a hallucination, is Voldemort. I honestly think that from one part of this sentence to another, Rowling forgot that Hermione would not look like a girl to anyone present.
Also, why are the dark gardens on top of the church bells? Commas, JKR. If we treat them properly, commas can be our friends.
What follows is a run-on sentence with run-on ellipses. Fifty-one words, punctuated by six sets of ellipses. Take a look.
And his scream was Harry's scream, his pain was Harry's pain... that it could happen here, where it had happened before... here, within sight of that house where he had come so close to knowing what it was to die ... to die ... the pain was so terrible ... ripped from his body ...
What happens next? Three pages of italics. I'm not going to bother italicizing all of it, as three pages of italics are really hard to read. But this section is Voldemort's flashback to Halloween 1981.
The night wet and windy, two children dressed as pumpkins waddling across the square and the shop windows covered in paper spiders, all the tawdry Muggle trappings of a world in which they did not believe ...
Why are the children dressed as waddling pumpkins?
And is there a main verb anywhere in that sentence? Anywhere? Anywhere? Bueller?
Also, trick or treating on Halloween is a fairly recent innovation in England. A celebration of that style would have been very rare in England in the 1980s; people would have been far more likely to hear about Halloween through American movies.
So basically, Voldemort is describing something that wasn't done at the time, and that he therefore would not have seen. Sorry, wrong era.
And he was gliding along, that sense of purpose and power and rightness in him that he always knew on these occasions ...
"These occasions"? How often does Voldemort attempt to assassinate a child prophesied to destroy him? He makes it sound like this is a weekly occurrence!
Anyway, Voldemort walks along feeling triumphant, though he hasn't actually done anything yet. One little boy compliments him on his costume. Voldemort considers killing the kid, but decides that's "quite unnecessary." I guess all the others he tortured and killed were quite necessary, then.
He heads toward the Potter's cottage and flies over the hedge, again without benefit of broomstick. That's the way to be inconspicuous, Voldie! You show 'em!
But before he goes in, the former Tom Riddle lives up to his name and becomes a Peeping Tom. No, really. He's seconds away from killing the one person who could destroy him, and what does Voldemort do? He peeks in the windows, and watches James conjuring puffs of colored smoke for little Harry.
Shortly, James hands the baby over to Lily, throws his wand down on the sofa and stretches out, yawning. Voldemort casts some unnamed charm on the door—Rowling says it "bursts open," which could mean anything from the Blasting Curse to Aholomora.
He was over the threshold as James came sprinting into the hall. It was easy, too easy, he had not even picked up his wand ...
There's been a lot of speculation about whether wizards are so titchy about Apparating into other peoples' houses because they need to wait to be invited in or not. Now we know. They don't have to be invited. Death Eaters can break in anytime.
Still begs the question of why they don't just Apparate in, though. I mean, why go through all that silly business about passwords to get in and spells to knock down doors if you don't have to?
James attempts to hold Voldemort off—without a wand. Yeah, that makes sense. Then it's Lily's turn. And that's even dumber.
He could hear her screaming from the upper floor, trapped
a) Screaming wastes time and breath.
b) Screaming also tells the bad man where you are.
c) You don't need a wand to Apparate.
All she has to do is grab the baby and go.
He climbed the steps, listening with faint amusement to her attempts to barricade herself in ...
Especially since any witch or wizard could just, you know, Apparate on the other side of the barricade any time that he or she wanted to. And at this point, I'd think that Voldemort would be highly motivated.
SNIP!
She had no wand upon her either ...
*cough* Accio wand! *cough*
SNIP!
How stupid they were
Frankly, I think all three of them are making a pretty poor showing of it.
SNIP!
He forced the door open
Why BOTHER? The door itself isn't a barrier!
Mini-SNIP!
... and there she stood, the child in her arms.
There was also a lot of discussion in fandom about whether Lily was holding Harry or not when Voldie came in. The consensus was that Lily couldn't have been holding Harry, as she'd surely have tried to get away if she had. Now we know. She was holding Harry. She could have made a stab at escaping. But she didn't.
Lily does nothing useful at this point. She just stands in front of the crib begging for mercy for Harry (yeah, like THAT'S going to happen) and begging Voldemort to kill her instead. Look, Lily, you're a Muggleborn witch, an Order member and the newly-widowed mother of the magical Messiah. And you've got oceans of motive for revenge. And you think there's a chance he's NOT going to kill you?
Harry seems to mistake Voldemort for James:
he looked up into the intruder's face with a kind of bright interest, perhaps thinking that it was his father who hid beneath the cloak, making more pretty lights, and his mother would pop up any moment, laughing--
Voldemort (breathing heavily): Harry, I am your father.
He pointed the wand very carefully into the boy's face: He wanted to see it happen, the destruction of this one, inexplicable danger.
You know, Voldie, you don't need a Killing Curse to murder a baby. A pillow would work just as well.
Anyway, Harry starts to cry:
The child began to cry: It had seen that he was not James.
He finally realized that the bald, white-faced, red-eyed, noseless monster isn't the black-haired, hazel-eyed, bespectacled James. Having seen babies cry at the sight of human relatives they don't know well, I think that Harry is, to be charitable, a little slow.
Oh, and Voldemort doesn't like crying babies. Wow. What a shock.
So Voldie casts the Killing Curse.
And then he broke: he was nothing, nothing but pain and terror, and he must hide himself, not here in the rubble of the ruined house, where the child was trapped and screaming, but far away ... far away ...
I have to wonder how Voldemort could experience pain when he doesn't have a body. It's not that the concept of spirits that can be hurt is a new one in fantasy. However, we've never seen a ghost or spirit hurt in the Potterverse. I think the closest we've come is seeing Peeves the Poltergeist being made momentarily uncomfortable. It's just a bit late to introduce the concept in the conclusion of the series.
SNIP!
And now he stood at the broken window of Bathilda's house, immersed in memories of his greatest loss, and at his feet the great snake slithered over broken china and glass...
And this just reinforces the question: is this a hallucination born of delirium, or a singularly do-nothing Dark Lord?
Anyway, Voldemort—at least in Harry's dream—picks up the photograph of the blond thief, a.k.a Gellert Grindelwald. And Harry wakes up in the tent, with Hermione fretting over him, dark shadows under her eyes. She tells him that he's been quite ill.
I thought this meant that Harry had been unconscious and sick with fever for days. But no, according to Hermione it's only been hours. Considering the size of the snake that bit Harry, that would probably be enough to kill him, let alone make him sick. For some odd reason, the snake left "half-healed puncture marks." I'm attributing the half-healing to Hermione, but that was a BIG snake. I'm surprised Harry doesn't mention the size of the puncture marks. Then again, Harry never notices anything.
Also, the Horcrux-locket stuck to Harry's chest, leaving yet another scar, this one over his heart.
Hermione asks what happened, because Rowling will never say something once if she can say it four times. So Harry repeats, in condensed form, what we've just finished reading about, and of course he gets it wrong:
She didn't want to talk in front of you, because it was Parseltongue, all Parseltongue, and I didn't realize, but of course I could understand her.
Rowling has completely forgotten that Bathilda-Nagini DID speak in Hermione's hearing once, and that the cleverest witch of her year completely missed the fact that the woman was hissing.
Once we were up in the room, the snake sent a message to You-Know-Who, I heard it happen inside my head
And that's not true, either. The snake didn't send a message to Voldemort. All Bathilda did was close her eyes. Voldemort sent a message to Nagini—"Hold him!"
Harry then decides that Hermione doesn't need to know unpleasant details like the snake pouring out of Bathilda's neck. So despite having told Hermione earlier in this conversation that Nagini was living inside the snake, he lies and tells her that Bathilda turned into the snake when he went upstairs.
Hermione, of course, does not notice. No one ever notices breaks in continuity in Rowlingland.
Harry then decides that he's been unconscious for long enough and he wants to go on guard duty. Hermione tells Harry that he should rest, but he pooh-poohs that idea before asking her three times, "Dude, where's my wand?"
As it turns out, his holly and phoenix feather phallic symbol has been broken almost in half. Harry isn't any good at wandless magic, aside from the accidental kind, so he is essentially helpless. Impotent, even. Harry tells Hermione to fix it. She does mend it, at least cosmetically. Magically, it's no use at all. He tries casting Lumos, which gives a weak blink and then goes out like a burned-out light bulb, and Expelliarmus, which tugs briefly at Hermione's wand before making Harry's wand split in half again.
Hermione blames herself, saying that the Blasting Curse she cast ricocheted everywhere—even though I don't think it should have—and must have hit Harry's wand. See, Hermione, this is why you don't cast Blasting Curses unless you can see what the fuck you're casting at.
Harry insists that they'll find a way to fix it. Hermione, in a startling burst of continuity, reminds him of Ron's wand—the one that got broken when the Ford Anglia hit the Whomping Willow. Ron, she points out, had to get a new one.
Harry thought of Ollivander, kidnapped and held hostage by Voldemort; of Gregorovitch, who was dead. How was he supposed to find himself a new wand?
It's never been said that Ollivander makes the only wands in England, just the best wands. That rather implies there are other wand makers in the U.K. If Ollivander is the best, then there must be someone for him to be better than.
Plus, you know, Harry could fly over to France. Judging by how easily Sirius, Peter and Voldemort managed to travel to and from England without being stopped by border guards, he could probably be there and back before anyone knew he was gone. And after all, Fleur had to get that veela hair wand of hers from somewhere.
Interestingly, when Harry is sharing digs with Ollivander at Shell Cottage, he never brings up the possibility of Ollivander making him a new wand. Harry asks about the old broken wand, and about the wands formerly belonging to Bellatrix and Draco. But "Can you make me a new wand?" Nope. Never crosses his lips.
At any rate, Harry tells Hermione—not asks her, tells her--that he'll just borrow her wand. Hermione, evidently feeling guilty, hands the wand over, and Harry goes outside to brood like an angsty vampire.
I think that this is supposed to be a terribly dramatic chapter. And, compared to the Boys' Own Camping Adventure chapters, or the many, many, MANY instances in which Harry seems to have nothing better to do than read the newspaper, it is fairly dramatic.
Unfortunately, the drama stems less from any inevitable danger than from Harry's towering illogic, blatant stupidity and completely unfounded conviction that Dumbledore left him one last message and the Sword of Gryffindor besides. There is a vast difference between doing something and getting into trouble in the process and staring into a pit filled with snakes, saying, "Snakes? I don't see any snakes!" and then leaping into the pit. Rowling does not seem to know how to write the former.