Falling Upwards

[Louis Harrigan]

This is the first of a series of vignettes about Louis. I have quite a bit to explore for him: his past as a hit wizard and him crossing paths with my other characters, his family's history, and so on. I’m still firming up some of the details and filling them in only along the way, so the vignettes might seem a bit raw and unpolished at times. Feedback is very welcome and appreciated, so please feel free to contact me on Discord :)

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The Harwich Incident
21st January, 2000

Owww…

The first thing Louis noticed was his throbbing headache. It felt like someone had hit his the back of his head really hard with a baseball bat or something. In fact, it hurt so bad that, for some time, it was the only thing he noticed.

And then the smell hit him. Musty, stale, forgotten by time. It wasn’t a foul or overpowering smell, but it wasn’t pleasant and just strong enough to announce its presence despite his headache and alert him to his surroundings.

He tried to reach out and soothe that painful spot when he realised that he couldn’t quite feel his arms. But his head was already leaning against something soft, so he turned slightly and pressed the aching bit onto whatever it was. And that was when he noticed the third thing: he wasn’t leaning against something. Rather, he was lying on his right side on a carpeted floor. In a really awkward position.

Which led to the fourth thing: his legs were bent, almost like he was sitting on a chair—

—and all of a sudden, Louis remembered where he was and what he was doing and why he had ended up here, wherever here was, firmly tied up to a chair and lying on a mercifully carpeted (but probably filthy) floor.

He was in Harwich. Or rather, they were in Harwich—him and the good old information broker Mal—to investigate a series of disappearances when they were ambushed. He hadn’t gotten a proper glimpse at their assailants, but he did dimly recall Mal shouting right before he blacked out. What happened to Mal after that, Louis did not know.

Time to take stock of the situation. In all certainty, they had been sniffing around at the right spot – why else would they be attacked? And he was probably in the baddies’ hideout – an old and abandoned house, judging from the outdated decor and the derelict state of the barren bedroom he was in – which said baddies had saved him the effort of locating. And the most important thing he had to do right now was to free himself.

Which was easier said than done without his wand. Fortunately, thanks to his dogwood wand’s stubborn refusal to perform nonverbal spells, he happened to be slightly better than the average wizard at wandless nonverbal spells. But then again, because of how tightly his arms had been bound to the back of the chair, plus the fact that he had been lying on one of them, both his arms were, as he discovered to his chagrin, completely numb.

Excellent.

The hit wizard wiggled a little, testing his bonds. His left leg was tied firmly to the chair leg, but there was a bit of give for the ropes around his right leg. Grunting, he squirmed harder, and lo and behold the chair leg gave way with a loud creak, and his right leg was free.

He froze, clamping his mouth shut even though he hadn’t said a word, and listened. Silence.

Emboldened by this turn of good fortune, he swung the chair around with all his might, rolling over so he was in an awkward kneeling position with the chair behind (or above?) him like a tortoise’s shell. The wooden backrest thwacked hard into his back, and he winced. Recklessly he decided to chance it: standing up as best as he could, he swiftly backpedaled and slammed the chair as hard as he could into the closest wall with a loud crash. Both he and the chair groaned from the impact, and neither were any worse for wear. Again! The chair creaked louder this time, and on the third try the wood finally gave way and he fell awkwardly amongst the splintered pieces.

Without the backrest to hold them taut, the ropes around his arms loosened, and he shrugged them off, then shrugged a bit more to try to get some circulation into his still-numb arms. For a moment, nothing. Then all of a sudden, the stinging sensation of pins-and-needles took hold and spread down his arms to his hands and fingers, unpleasant yet welcome.

He quickly limbered up, stretching his sore limbs, and reached for his wand. It wasn’t there, of course. Shaking his head at this minor inconvenience, he approached the door of his ‘cell’. The lock seemed busted, so he gave the door a firm tug. It rattled but didn’t yield.

“Alohomora,” he intoned, pressing his palm against the door just above the lock. Immediately he heard the squeak of metal rubbing against metal as what sounded like a rusted door bolt slid open, and the door swung free.

Cautiously, he poked his head out, but there was no one in sight. His room was at the end of a corridor, saving him the effort of figuring out which way to go. As stealthily as his boots and the floorboards underfoot allowed, he tiptoed his way to—

“Hey!”

A shout from somewhere further down the corridor, and then the unmistakable ruckus of a full-blown brawl. Mal, he thought, as he sprinted towards the source of the noise. He rounded a corner just in time to see the information broker smashing the remnants of a chair into another man’s face, knocking the latter out instantly. A second man was already sprawled on the ground in a heap, face down and with one arm bent unnaturally over his back. A third man closed in from behind, but Mal whirled around and grabbed his arm. A startled yelp escaped the assailant’s lips as he was flung bodily over Mal’s shoulder and slammed hard into the ground. He cried out in shock and agony, before he was silenced by three vicious punches to the face.

Louis cringed. “Ow.”

Having dispatched his attackers, Mal looked up, concerned. “Louis! You hurt?”

“Just secondhand pain.”

Mal smirked. “Glad you’re fine. They didn’t rough you up too badly?”

“I might have a concussion,” Louis admitted. “I don’t know.”

“Might explain this,” Mal replied, tossing over a wooden baseball bat he picked up from the ground with a dark red splotch. Louis flubbed the catch and fumbled a little before finally getting a grip on the bat. “Yea, probably explains my splitting headache,” he replied, before gingerly touching the sore spot on his head. The hair there was a bit damp, and when he checked his fingers he saw that they were stained red.

“Fuck.”

“Behind you!”

Mal’s warning came barely in time for Louis to turn around and raise the bat defensively something collided solidly into it. Two more rough-looking men had charged into the room, wielding makeshift melee weapons of their own. Said object that Louis’ hasty parry had blocked turned out to be a wooden stick with nails sticking menacingly out of it, which its wielder swung again in an exaggerated overhead smash. The telegraphed attack was slow enough for the hit wizard to deflect, and he seized the opportunity to swiftly land a textbook riposte. Mr Stick-With-Nails howled more in anger than in pain and came at him again.

Meanwhile, Mal had already wrestled the other man to the ground, disarming his opponent with an armlock that elicited a pained squeal. They rolled on the ground, and for a moment Louis was tempted to butt in and sneak in an attack but held back because it was hard to hit the right person when both of them were tumbling around. Besides, he had his own problems to deal with: said problem was now swiftly closing in, wooden stick raised and ready to smash Louis’ head in. The hit wizard repeated his trick and parried the same way again, but his blood-slick hand slipped and they both watched as his bat went clattering across the floor. His gaze went back to his opponent, who was now grinning menacingly back at him, no doubt thinking about the myriad awful things he was going to do to Louis.

“Expelliarmus!” Louis shouted out of the blue, thrusting one hand forwards as though it were a wand. His opponent raised his arms defensively and reeled back… but nothing happened. Confused, he blinked—

—and let out a high-pitched croak as Louis delivered a kick to where the sun didn’t shine. The burly man grasped his family jewels as he sank to the ground in slow motion, his head now at the perfect height to be kicked. And so Louis did. Mr Not-So-Tough-And-Manly-Now toppled over instantly.

In the meantime, Mal was holding his own opponent in a triangle choke. The poor man gasped and flailed helplessly for a couple of seconds before going limp, and Mal dumped the unconscious man unceremoniously onto the ground.

“You good?” Mal asked, dusting himself off as he stood up.

“Yea,” Louis nodded, hunkering down as he searched the fallen men’s pockets for any clues. Nothing. No sign of any wands either.

From the corner of his eye, Louis spied something moving, and he looked up just in time to see – between Mal’s legs – three more figures at the end of the corridor. His gut twisted, and instinctively he threw out his hands just as gunshots rang out, the echoey corridors amplifying the tremendous booming that shook Louis to his core.

And then… nothing.

Was he dead? Gingerly he pried open one eye (he didn’t even realise he had closed them). The figures were still there, but his view was blurry and distorted, as though he was looking through frosted glass, or…

A magical shield!

Somehow he had conjured a barrier large enough to protect both Mal and himself. All ten eyes stared incredulously at the shimmering shield and the flattened bullets stuck to it. But he was in a really awkward position: half-squatting in a wide stance with both his outstretched arms were on either side of Mal. He looked up and Mal, who already seemed to have a plan in mind, and he had an inkling what it was.

“On three,” Mal said.

“On three,” Louis agreed.

“THREE!”

With a battle cry both man surged forwards as one like some awkward centaur with haemorrhoids – Mal sprinting with all his might and Louis scrambling and somehow keeping up right behind, legs still stuck in a wide stance to avoid stepping on Mal’s feet, and his arms still encircling Mal to sustain the shield. The gunmen screamed, panically discharging their firearms at the rapidly approaching bulletproof monstrosity that was barrelling straight towards them. The impact of each bullet sent a shockwave to Louis’s increasingly sore and quivering arms, and the shield flickered but stubbornly held. All five voices became louder – two with growing determination, three becoming higher with rising terror – until the guns clicked empty and the inevitable happened.

Like a wrecking ball, Mal and Louis plowed into the three gunmen, and all five of them crashed into a heap of tangled limbs. The magical shield finally shattered from the impact, and Louis rolled away with a groan. Someone else stirred, and immediately Mal was on him, his fists landing like hammers until the gunman was out cold.

And at long last, silence fell over the dilapidated house.

Picking themselves up, the two wizards took stock of their surroundings. “That seems to be the last of the reinforcements,” Louis noted as he eyed the seven unconscious assailants. But something was bugging him: these men – presumably the ones responsible for the disappearances – weren’t wizards. Why would Muggles abduct wizards? Unless…

“I think they’re Squibs, Mal.”

“Squibs?” Mal’s eyes darkened as he considered the possibility. It seemed plausible, and it could potentially explain something he had found out the week earlier. But it was too early to draw any conclusions. “Could be. But if that’s the case, we may have a bigger problem on our hands.”

“Then we’ll just have to get to the bottom of it,” Louis replied with a grin. “Just like we always do.”