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“Dudley,” Yasmin said, her hands on her hips, “this house is haunted.”
Dudley blinked owlishly at her over his newspaper. He was never quite awake before his second cup of coffee, but he could’ve sworn she said the house was haunted. Nonsense. It was a perfectly good house. The garden in particular was splendid.
“It’s a new build?” he said, sounding slightly bewildered even to himself. “Nobody’s died in it. There’s no Great Aunt Matilda to walk the halls.”
Yasmin didn’t look convinced. “I’m telling you, it’s haunted. When you stand at the sink to do the washing-up, the hair prickles on the back of your neck. And there was something knocking about in the garden last night. Gave me quite the start, with all the wailing.”
Dudley didn’t like the sound of that. The garden was his proud and joy. It was only newly planted – they’d moved in a fortnight ago – but he’d saved his seeds from his old allotment and was looking forward to a bumper crop of his prizewinning marrows. “Foxes. It’ll be the bloody foxes.”
“I know what foxes sound like, Dudley Dursley. And unless foxes have started speaking, it’s not foxes.”
Dudley put his coffee cup down. “Are you sure they were speaking?”
Nina looked up from her oatmeal, her cherubic face beaming. “Da, what does the fox say?”
“Later, sweetheart,” he said.
“I know what I heard,” Yasmin said, crossing her arms. “It wasn’t foxes, or the wind, or whatever you’re going to say. This house has a ghost.”
“Well,” Dudley said, “if you ever see it, yell for me, and I’ll hit it with a broom.” Privately he still thought it was foxes. Or some local lads messing about. He’d need to get a lock for the garden shed. He remembered his own days as an undesirable teenager, and garden sheds were a temptation.
“Dudley.” Yasmin sounded exasperated, but the laugh lines at the sides of her eyes had crinkled up. Progress.
Nina giggled. “You can’t hit ghosties.”
“If Mr Ghost comes around to bother my girls, I can,” Dudley said, making a silly face at her, and grinning when she laughed.
***
It was two nights later, and Dudley had forgotten all about the foxes in the garden, when Yasmin shook him awake out of a dream about running to catch a train. “Dudley. The ghost’s in the kitchen.”
Dudley was far too muzzy with sleep to like the idea of chasing after phantom ghosts in nothing more than his boxer shorts and fuzzy slippers, but he had promised. And if it was teenagers in the garden, a torch pointed out the window might scare them off.
He padded sleepily down the corridor, Yasmin behind him. Halfway to the stairs, the nursery door opened, and Nina’s little face was tipped up towards them. “Is it the ghost, Da?” She was practically bouncing in place.
“Go back to bed, sweetie,” Yasmin whispered. “Don’t wake Kira.”
Dudley, still feeling ridiculous from sneaking around his own house in the middle of the night, began to gingerly creep down the stairs, careful to avoid the creaky third step. He wasn’t entirely sure where the torch was, come to think of it. Possibly in his desk? He could feel Yasmin’s breath on the back of his neck – and more importantly, as he woke up further, he too began to hear the muted banging in the kitchen.
Shit. Foxes didn’t come into houses, did they? He tried to remember. Were they being burgled? Should he call the police? And if the police came and found a pair of foxes overturning the crockery, would they be fined for wasting police time? (Dudley and Yasmin, not the foxes.)
“Stay with the girls,” he hissed at Yasmin, though he didn’t have any great hope that she’d listen to him. She might be superstitious about ghosts, but she’d always been the braver of the two of them. She’d never wait quietly upstairs while he swanned about playing the Great Hero in his slippers.
They’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Just the living room to go. Dudley gulped, and turned the corner.
And stopped. And stared.
Yasmin swore, fluently.
In front of them, in the living room and through into the kitchen, their house had gone mad. Things were whirling industriously through the air. Dudley saw one of Nina’s teddy bears rhythmically bouncing off the ceiling, and a bag of nappies was dropping nappies one by one on top of the sofa. The cutlery in the drying rack was doing some sort of complicated dance in mid-air, and an aubergine was spinning like a top on the windowsill. Apart from their possessed possessions, not a soul was to be seen, not even a fox.
“I’m dreaming,” Dudley said faintly.
“What the hell is going on here?” Yasmin said, stepping into the living room and glaring at the nappy bag.
Behind Dudley’s knee, there was a little giggle. “Mummy said a bad word.”
“Mummy said many bad words,” Dudley muttered under his breath, and if he hadn’t been so poleaxed he would’ve joined her. “Go back to bed. Mummy will be up to tuck you in again in a minute.”
Yasmin’s challenge seemed to have brought the room back to its senses. As Nina scampered back up the stairs to the nursery, the nappy bag flopped down to the sofa, with an almost guilty air. The cutlery whisked itself back into the drying rack. The aubergine nestled in with the potatoes. The teddy bear dropped into Yasmin’s arms.
Dudley and Yasmin stared at each other.
“Well,” Dudley said at last, wetting his lips, “I think you’re right about the house being haunted.”
Yasmin looked at the teddy bear. “What do we do?”
It might be the middle of the night, and Dudley might be both decaffeinated and in a mild case of shock, but he found with relief that he knew exactly what they needed to do. He smiled reassuringly at her. “We call in an expert.”
***
“Sounds more like a poltergeist than a haunting to me,” Harry said, sipping his tea. Nina was perched on his knee. She didn’t often see Uncle Harry, but when she did, he always brought the best presents, out of mysteriously deep pockets. Currently she was being angelic, waiting to see what the pockets would disgorge.
“What’s the difference?” Dudley asked.
Harry half-shrugged. “Ghosts do the standard haunting, some wailing. Scary, but harmless. Poltergeists, well… they can move objects around, and they’re mischievous. Often have a nasty sense of humour.”
“Whatever it is,” Yasmin said, “I want it stopped. Dudley said you could help?”
“If it’s a poltergeist, probably not. They’re hard to move once established. Often impossible. You’d have to move.”
“Move?” Yasmin sounded as dismayed as Dudley felt. Moving once with a four-year-old and a baby had been difficult. To move again would be torture. And Dudley would lose his marrows.
“I could look at houses with you,” Harry offered. “No ghosts, poltergeists, or other paranormal activity, guaranteed.”
Dudley tried to imagine tramping around Durham with two children under the age of five, a perturbed Yasmin, and their helpful witchy cousin. What would Harry do, anyway? Stand in the kitchen, stick a wand in the air, and go “No ghosts!” They’d be blackballed by every estate agent in the city.
“Thanks,” Dudley said, suppressing the mental image. “But are you sure you can’t just fix this place?”
“Well, I can have a look,” Harry said, cheerfully. “Could be something else entirely. There’s a whole magical world that might have taken up residence in your garden. Maybe you have pixies. Did you see any pixies?”
Dudley didn’t remember seeing any pixies. Not that he knew what pixies looked like. “I don’t think so.”
Harry set Nina on the floor and put his teacup on the table. “Let’s see,” he said, and then there was a wand in his hand. (Nina clapped.) “I’m not sensing any ghosts in the area. Has there ever been a school nearby? Poltergeists like to be around adolescents, generally.”
“Uncle Harry,” Nina said, tugging at his coat. Harry patted her absentmindedly on the head.
“There’s the grammar school,” Yasmin said. “And St George’s.”
“Uncle Harry,” Nina said.
“Stop bothering your uncle,” Dudley said, and patted his own knee. “Come sit with me.”
Harry pulled a lollipop out of a pocket and handed it to her. “Could be St George’s. There was a poltergeist at Our Lady’s last year that had begun to branch out into neighbouring homes. That was a mess.”
Yasmin was handling this rather well, Dudley thought. It wasn’t every day that your husband sat you down and told you that his cousin was a witch. (A warlock? A wizard? Dudley wasn’t entirely clear on the terminology.) She’d primarily been glad to have an expert in the family, even if it meant that mild-mannered Cousin Harry turned out to have Hidden Depths.
“They’re not violent, are they?” Yasmin asked.
“Er,” Harry said. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you’ve upset them.”
Dudley tried to think if he’d done anything to annoy a poltergeist. Problem was, he didn’t know what annoyed them. If it was singing in the shower, he was toast.
“Uncle Harry.”
“Let’s go watch Peppa Pig,” Dudley told Nina, and scooped her up in his arms. She could pester Harry for presents later, after Harry and Yasmin had sorted out the Mystery of the Flying Nappies.
Or at least, that’s what Dudley intended to do.
He’d barely managed to get out “Let’s go…” before he stopped short, staring.
Harry caught the direction of his gaze and turned. “Ah!” he said, smiling at the floating teddy bear. “Your friend has decided to come out and play. Where are you?” he asked, addressing the corners of the room. “Show yourself.”
“Teddy flying,” Nina said.
“Do poltergeists target children?” Yasmin asked Harry. “The nappies and the teddy bear last night, the bear again today –”
“And the aubergine?” Dudley couldn’t think of a way aubergines were related to children.
“Zoom zoom,” Nina said.
The teddy bear swooped up to the ceiling, did a somersault, and dive-bombed straight down into Nina’s arms.
Dudley heard a shriek, and only belatedly realised it was from him. “It attacked her! That’s it. I don’t care how inconvenient it is, we have to move.”
Yasmin, who had caught Nina up in her arms, nodded. “There was that house on Somerset Place. I know the garden was cramped, but…”
Nina was wiggling. “Put me down, mummy.”
“Just a second,” Harry said. Dudley had almost forgotten he was there for a moment, he’d been so caught up in the poltergeist’s attack on Nina. “There’s one more test I can run.”
“I don’t care,” Yasmin said, decidedly. “Thanks for your help, but that could have easily been something heavy, or hit Nina on the head. I’m not staying in a house that flings things at you.”
Harry bent down until his head was level with Nina’s. “Nina,” he said, “how would you like a box of chocolates?”
Nina looked at his pockets with an avaricious gleam in her eye. “Two boxes.”
“One box and a Screaming Yo-Yo.”
Now Nina looked downright gleeful.
“All you have to do,” Harry said, pulling a box of chocolates out of his coat, “is make Teddy fly to the ceiling. Can you do that?”
Nina, who was still holding her teddy, looked down at it as if she’d forgotten it entirely. Then she laughed, tossed it in the air – and it sailed up to the ceiling.
“Zoom zoom,” she said, and grabbed the chocolates while everyone was distracted.
***
“Our house was haunted by our daughter,” Yasmin said. She’d put double her usual sugar in her tea.
“Poltergeisted,” Dudley corrected.
“I should’ve realised she was about the right age to start showing signs,” Harry said. “And an upheaval like moving can trigger it. I just never thought –”
He didn’t finish his sentence, but Dudley knew where it would have been going. “I’m so unmagical, you probably never thought one of our girls would be witchy.”
“You’re magical with marrows.”
“You have a shitty poker face, Harry Potter,” Dudley said, and grinned at him. “It’s okay. I know I don’t have magic. It’s not a tragedy.”
Harry, being so immersed in his magical world, probably thought to be unmagical was a tragedy, but he was polite enough not to say so.
“Our daughter’s a witch,” Yasmin said. She was working through this slowly. But then, quite a lot had happened in the last twelve hours.
Dudley put an arm round her shoulders. “Not yet she isn’t,” he said, patting her reassuringly. “But she will be. She’ll be the best witch there ever was. And Harry’ll keep an eye out for her. Right, Harry?”
“Right,” Harry said, with creditable readiness.
“He’s not a bad lot, Harry,” Dudley said.
Yasmin was quiet for a minute more, and then she straightened her shoulders. “Well,” she said, clearing her throat. “Well. If Nina’s going to be a witch, I need to know all about it. Where do I go to research? Does she need a special diet? Are there books I should be reading? Educational toys we need to buy?”
“Er,” Harry said. “Let me give you the number of a friend of mine. She does all my research.”
Dudley barely heard them. He was looking through the archway to where Nina sat on the sofa watching Peppa Pig, her teddy in her lap.
His daughter was a witch. When she was old enough, he was going to take her to that fancy Scottish school, and meet all her magic teachers, and hear all her magic stories, and go to every single damn parent-teacher conference. She was going to be the best witch of her generation, and he was going to be the proudest dad.
And maybe, just maybe – he’d ask her to bewitch the marrows.
***