Chapter Three: The Great Old One

 

Chapter Three: The Great Old One

            Draco had hoped all of the weirdness would’ve been behind him by now. He was finally back home with his parents. And then they dropped the bombshell on him about being in another dimension. Another place, another time. It still hadn’t sunk in, even the next morning. He didn’t sleep a wink last night, thinking so much about it.

            He was thankful that everything in the manor looked the same, including his bedroom. It still had that majestic view of the front yard with all the hedges, except now there were all the black men that his father had working on their property for reasons he had yet to explain to him.

            “Draco?” His mother, Narcissa, stood near the open doorway of his bedroom. She looked so beautiful in the light of the sun, shining through the large window. “Are you hungry? Breakfast has been prepared.”

            “I don’t feel very much like eating, Mother,” the melancholic Draco said.

            Narcissa recognized his sadness. “I realize how hard it is being in another world, Draco, but you must try and adjust to how our lives are now.”

            “I don’t want to adjust,” Draco retorted. “The time I’ve been away after Hogwarts fell…I traveled with this woman…Her name was LeMarier…I felt safe with her for the time that I was with her…And then came this other woman – someone LeMarier said was once her father…She changed everything…took away the happiness I had.”

            His recollection of these events made Narcissa uneasy. In her eyes, her son had changed greatly since he was away from home. She wanted to carry the conversation along further, until the resonance of oncoming footsteps directed their attention towards the doorway.

            Lucius appeared with an expression of jubilation. “Our special guest has arrived,” he announced, offering his hand to Narcissa to lead her out. “Come along, Draco. You’ll want to meet him.”

            Draco was in no mood to meet any “special guest” of his father’s.

            But rather than displease him on his first day back, he joined with his father and mother downstairs to meet the visitor. In the atrium of the manor, he saw a short, thin frail-looking man in a suit. His dark hair was slicked back, his skin was pale, and his eyes were sunken with dark circles around them. From Draco’s perspective, he might as well have been a zombie.

            “Draco,” Lucius addressed. “Meet H.P. Lovecraft.”

            Lovecraft stuck out his hand for Draco to shake. The boy didn’t accept it.

            “Don’t be rude, Draco,” Narcissa scolded. “Mr. Lovecraft was invited personally by your father. He’s come all the way from Providence to do a piece for his editorial. He’s a very famous author.”

            “Not ‘very’, I would say,” Lovecraft modestly joked.

            “I am rather fond of your tales, especially the legend of Cthulhu,” Lucius boasted. “Quite the interesting mythos.”

            “Thank you,” Lovecraft said. “That one certainly has helped pay the bills.”

            “What sort of piece are you writing, Mister Lovecraft?” Draco coldly asked.

            “Well, according to your father, he’s something of an expert on wizardry. That’s one topic I’ve never covered in Weird Tales, so I was inspired the second he told me.”

            Draco eyed his father in question, a bad vibe creeping up on him.

            After Lucius had one of his manservants show Lovecraft to the guestroom, Draco immediately griped to his father, “You’re going to share our secrets to a Muggle?!”

            “Not just any Muggle,” Lucius remarked. “H.P. Lovecraft.”

            “I don’t care who he is,” Draco barked. “Since when have we associated ourselves with such filth?! We’ve never exposed ourselves in our old world, any less this one!”

            “I assure you, son, Lovecraft will never be permitted to do his piece.”

            This reassurance from his father baffled Draco. “I…I don’t understand. You just told Lovecraft that you’ll…”

            “What I told him was the reason he thinks he’s here in Louisiana,” Lucius clarified. “I only invited him to our home because the Great Old One requires a body. And I intend on giving him what he desires before the Dark Lord and others arrive for the uprising.”

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            A vacant country road in Baton Rouge was the setting in which Alicia’s Type-Z TARDIS materialized, right along the side of it. She, Newt, Ben, and Eleven disembarked, taking in the relaxing scenery.

            She breathed in the fresh country air, her bosom swelling. “Ah! Nice!”

            “Is this the precise location that ‘Doctor’ friend of yours sent us to?” Newt questioned.

            Ben kicked up bits of gravel from the road in frustration. “Man! With all that big talk about Cthulhu, I was hopin’ for an alien planet or something…not some smelly countryside.”

            “It’s not smelly,” Alicia rebuked. “It’s nice. Reminds me of home.”

            The sputter of an old-fashioned engine lured their collective gaze over to a vehicle of the same nature approaching them. “T-That can’t be a Ford Model T, can it?” Newt identified it. “It’s in perfect condition!”

            “Maybe the driver can help us get some answers on the whereabouts of Cthulhu – just gotta make sure not to say ‘Cthulhu’ though,” Alicia suggested before waving for the driver of the Ford Model T (a mustachioed Southern Caucasian male wearing overalls and a brown Derby) to stop. He obliged, partially leaning out through the driver side window to be face-to-face with her. “Sorry to bother you, sir. My friends and I are from out of town on business, and we just want to ask if you’ve seen or heard of any suspicious activity around the area?”

            The mustachioed man looked up and down at Alicia, from her feet all the way up to the top of her bleach blonde head. He scoffed at her and then did something that horrified everyone, specifically Alicia herself: he spat out his chewed-up tobacco at her. It landed right on her cropped shirt, leaving a revolting, wet brown stain. The man drove away thereafter.

            Alicia was left standing stunned and disgusted.

            Ben was mortified by the display he and his friends just witnessed. “What a jerk!”

            The one offended most of all from the unsettling scene was Eleven.

            A force brewing within the young girl, her eyes viciously glared on the departing Ford Model T. With the simple twitch of her head, she telepathically dismantled the vehicle, leaving its driver sitting in nothing but pieces. Terrified of the unnatural event, he briefly glimpsed back at the group and ran the rest of his way down the country road.

            Ben cackled proudly with a raised fist, “Yeah, you better run, you big fat punk!”

            Meanwhile, Newt checked on Alicia. “Are you alright?”

            “Just a little grossed out but otherwise okay,” she sullenly confirmed.

            “As uncouth of an encounter that was, it discloses my suspicion of our current location being sometime in the 1920s, judging from the Model T,” Scamander inferred.

            “And, judging from the good ol’ fashioned racism we just saw, this must be the south of the 1920s,” Alicia added.

            Newt sympathized for her. “I-I’m so sorry. I never witnessed such bigotry the last time I visited America…in this time, I mean. Not unless you count Muggle-Wizardkind relations, of course.”

            Alicia sniffed. “Doesn’t bother me. I’ve experienced far worse before. It’s been a long while though. Hasn’t changed my abhorrence of it.” Taking a moment to collect herself, she refocused on the task at hand. “It does, however, limit my role in this investigation. Newt, you take Ben and Eleven to the more ‘upper class’ spots to learn what you can.”

            “Asking around about any suspicious activity relating to a guy with a squid for a head? Not exactly a low-profile kind of approach,” Ben pointed out.

            “I have some items in my suitcase that’ll provide quicker results to our investigation,” Newt assured Tennyson.

            “Great,” Ben remarked. “Let’s get goin’.”

            The wizard and the boy with the alien watch set off.

            Eleven, on the other hand, remained at Alicia’s side.

            “There’s not gonna be a whole lot I can do around here, Elle,” Alicia told her. “Not with this face.” She circled her finger around her features, which were nonetheless strikingly attractive to more rational-minded men.

            Eleven maintained her position at her side, taking Alicia by the hand. “I’m staying with you,” she defiantly asserted.

            It brought a warm smile to Alicia’s face.

            She and Eleven had grown close within the year they traveled together. She still couldn’t figure why there was such a strong bond between them. It was like she had known Eleven her whole life.

            “Alright, you can stay with me,” Alicia accepted. “We’ll take my TARDIS somewhere that’s more accommodating to my current body.”