"Stay low and move fast," Ted instructed. He turned and peered between the planks of the door. The equipment shed was positioned at a corner of the pitch, just inside the magical boundary erected by the match official. The door faced away from the pitch, visible only to the Slytherin grandstands right next to it.
"Looks clear enough," Ted said, his face pressed to the cracks in the door. "Let's just hope
everybody's looking at the pitch and not this shed." With that, he pushed the door open and stepped aside. James and Ralph shuffled through and James heard the door clunk shut behind them.
The wind was shifty and unpredictable. It barreled across the pitch and swatted restlessly at the Invisibility Cloak, flapping it about the boys' legs.
"Somebody's going to see my feet," Ralph moaned.
"We're almost there already," James said under the noise of the crowd. "Just stay close and keep down."
Through the transparent fabric of the Invisibility Cloak, James could see the dark mouth of the doorway into the Slytherin holding pen. The great doors were swung wide open, latched to the walls of the grandstand to keep them from blowing shut. The Slytherin players were lined up along the pitch on the other side of the doorway, close enough that a careless word or a flicker of their shoes might be noticed. James held his breath and resisted the urge to run. Slowly, the two boys sidled past the nearest Slytherin player, Tom Squallus, and slipped into the shadow of the doorway. Inside, the wind fell away and the cloak hung still. James let his breath out in a careful hiss.
"Come on," he whispered almost soundlessly. "We don't have much time."
James knew what the Gremlins were planning, even though he wasn't going to see any of it. Zane, who was watching along with his teammates on the Ravenclaw side of the pitch, told him all about it later. As Tabitha and Gennifer Tellus, the Ravenclaw Captain, walked to meet Ridcully at the centerline of the pitch, a strange sound began to build in the air overhead. All day, the sky had been low and sluggish, packed with grey clouds, but now, as the spectators and players glanced up, the clouds had begun to circle ponderously. There was a bulge in the clouds directly over the pitch, spiraling in on itself and lowering even as the crowd watched. The general noise of the assembly quieted, and the sound of the clouds in that silence was a deep, vibrating groan, long and menacing. With only his eyes, Zane glanced toward the equipment shed at the far corner of the pitch. He could just see the shapes of Ted and Petra, ducked low in the corners of the tiny window, their wands raised, teasing the cloud shapes. He smiled, and then, when the timing was perfect and the entire pitch had fallen silent, he called out across the pitch, "Quidditch is never called on account of weather, right, Gennifer?"
There was a nervous ripple of laughter across the nearer grandstands. Gennifer glanced at Zane for a moment, then looked back up at the funnel lowering over her. As a Gremlin, Ted had told her of their plan, but Zane could tell that her nervousness wasn't hard to fake. Neither Ridcully nor Tabitha Corsica seemed prepared to move. Corsica merely looked up at the clouds, her hair whipping wildly around her face, her wand visible in her hand. Ridcully's expression seemed to be one of grim determination.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Damien's voice echoed throughout the grandstands from his place in the announcer's booth, "we seem to be experiencing some sort of highly localized weather phenomenon. Please stay in your seats. You are probably safe there. Those on the field, please remain where you are. Cyclones cannot see you if you don't move."
In the crowd, someone shouted out, "That's dinosaurs, you crazy fruitbat!"
"Same concept," Damien answered in his amplified voice.
Sabrina and Noah darted out of the equipment shed, ducking against the swirling winds. They scurried toward the tiny concessions area built into the base of the Hufflepuff grandstand. The counter was manned by Hufflepuff students, but the food itself was prepared by elves in a kitchen near the back. Noah and Sabrina headed along the side of the grandstand and stopped at an open doorway.
"Hey, you fellows see what's going on out here?" Sabrina yelled over the growing noise of the cyclone. "Weather's getting pretty foul, isn't it?"
A grumpy looking elf in the back of the kitchen lowered his pipe. "And what do you want we's to do about it, eh? You wants we should shoot a blast of storm-calming pixie dust out our ears, maybe?"
"I was just thinking about section fifty-five, paragraph nine of the Elves of Hogwarts Coalition Agreement," Noah yelled, hunkering in the doorway. "Says elves are responsible for securing the grounds during inclement weather. Getting pretty inclement out here, I'd say. Maybe you'd like Sabrina and me to go shut and lock the holding pen doors for you until this blows over? Come on, Sabrina."
The elf stuffed his pipe into the knot of his napkin loincloth and jumped forward. "Never you mind that, now!" He turned and called into the depths of the kitchen. "Oi! Peckle! Krung! Seedie! We got a job, we does. Let's get a move on."
The four elves bustled past Sabrina and Noah. The grumpy elf called back over his shoulder as they went, "Much obliged, master and mistress. Enjoy the match, now."
As the elves scurried through the wind toward the holding pen doors, the cyclone finally touched the pitch. It licked across the center line, twenty feet to Tabitha Corsica's right, and for several moments, she watched it, fascinated. Many people commented later that, impressive as it was, it was certainly the smallest cyclone they had ever seen. The grass where it touched down tossed wildly, but the power of the tornado dropped off significantly after a hundred feet or so, so that those in the grandstands were relatively unaffected. Gennifer Tellus turned and ran to the sidelines to join her team. Ridcully didn't seem to notice. Still standing in the center of the pitch next to him, Tabitha Corsica fingered her wand and glanced around, now ignoring the writhing cyclone. She seemed to be looking for something.
In the holding pen deep beneath the Slytherin grandstands, James and Ralph heard the noise of the cyclone and the creaking of the grandstand as the wind pressed against it.
"Which one is it?" Ralph asked as James whipped the cloak off them. "There're so many of them!"
James pointed past the row of broomsticks leaning against the lockers. There, in the corner farthest from the door, a broom hung in the air as if awaiting its rider.
"That's got to be it," he said, darting toward it. They stopped, one on either side of it. Close up, the broom seemed to be vibrating or humming very slightly. A low, unsettling noise came from it, audible even over the moan of the wind and the creak of the grandstands. "Grab it, then, James. Come on, let's get out of here."
James reached out and grabbed the broomstick, but the broom didn't budge. He pulled it, then wrapped both hands around it and yanked. The broom was as immobile as if it had been buried in stone.
"What's the problem?" Ralph moaned, glancing back toward the door. "If we're still in here when they come back…"
"We have the Invisibility Cloak, Ralph. We can hide," James said, but he knew Ralph was right. The holding pen was small and there were no obvious places to get out of the way, even if they couldn't be seen. "The broom's stuck, somehow. I can't move it."