Au revoir! Au revoir!Another entry for the Guardian's kill-off-Dumbledore competition. I just can't leave it alone, can I?It took Albus Dumbledore several minutes to realise where he was. One minute, he was in his rooms at Hogwarts, experimenting with a new combination of manticore dung and arcane ephemera, the next… the next… robes replaced with an apron, receding hairline, fatter than usual.
She was French. Darting eyes, long trench coat, black beret, red-hot lipstick of the kind that fired even Dumbledore’s ancient loins.
“Listen carefully, I shall say zis only once.”
Then it dawned. And he knew at once, there, in his laboratory, sixty years whence, a French café owner would be sitting inside his body, wandering what the hell was going on.
And the door burst open, and the room filled with the Wehrmacht’s finest, followed by a leather-coated Aryan thug with a limp.
“Ah! Rene! Ve have you and ze resistance at last!”
Dumbledore knew the way out, dredging the words from the deepest recesses of his potion-addled mind.
“Perambulus Perfecto” Dumbledore mumbled under his breath.
“I beg your pardon?” sneered the Gestapo, “There is no point denying it – Yvette has been working for us for months, after we busted her little scam with ze flying helmet and ze celery. Zis little café of yours has been a right little bed of intrigue, ja?”
“Perambulus Perfecto!” he shouted again, this time in despair as it became clear that his wizardly skills had been lost in the transfer. Then quieter: “Perambulus Perfecto.”
Nazi justice was swift. He was dragged through the café by the arms, registering in his confusion what he knew to be the artist Van Klump’s great lost masterpiece laid out across the bar, and a large cake containing a partially dismantled bomb. Urine streaming down his legs, and terror rising, he and the resistance girl were lined up against a wall in the town square.
Dizzied, confused, all he could see were the muzzles of his executioners’ guns, and one German cavalry officer crying tears of sorrow.
“Feuer!”
Pain. Black.