Moving On

January

‘A basilisk?’ O’Reilly asked, his one good eye popping wide, whilst the other one strayed to where the rust-marked sink sat in the corner.

‘Somevun from ze Meenistry vas ‘ere,’ Lenoir replied, picking something that might have been vegetation from his teeth, examining it, and popping it back into his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment. ‘’Oory Putter… ‘e swored eet might ‘ave been Poorsaltangue.’

O’Reilly gave the sink another look. ‘Sure, but my sink just makes a hissing noise, so it does,’ he said, his growing discomfort only eclipsed by relief that his lease, like most of the Alley, was due for renewal.

‘Zat vas Persiltoonge,’ Lenoir replied knowingly, mangling his vowels yet another way.

‘I need to piss,’ a new voice said, its owner pulling aside the tatty curtain on Lenoir’s back shop.

‘You closed your shop to come for a piss, Pasha?’ O’Reilly asked, his one good eyebrow shooting up in feigned surprise, pretending to himself that he had not stepped out the back of his own shop on the other side of Lenoir’s to relieve himself, instead of using his own dubious toilet alone.

‘Go pees in your own seenk, Poosha,' Lenoir replied, nodding to the wall that separated the two shops, as the Russian fiddled with his buttons.

‘Maybe I drown it,’ Pasha said, pissing like a horse. He turned the cold tap; it dripped twice, and then hissed, and Pasha jumped back, his cock still dribbling over his hand.

‘Shut the fecking tap,’ O’Reilly said, upturning the box he’d been sitting on as he backed away.

February

‘A premium, Mr Weasley, is an amount of money the tenant normally pays the landlord for prime property,’ Lucius Malfoy snapped. ‘Not the other way around.’

‘Prime properties don’t have ruddy basilisks in the plumbing,’ George reasoned, not that he believed the rumours running rife in Diagon Alley that Voldemort’s remnants were inhabiting the sewers there.

‘The Ministry has inspected the entire underground workings,’ Lucius replied, ‘and declared them safe.’ In truth he was becoming almost as unsettled as many of his tenants. Three empty shops in a row, and their neighbours all complaining about the lack of footfall didn’t bode well for rent reviews. ‘Good day, Mr Weasley,’ he said, nodding to the door in dismissal.

George stood up, and jumped back almost as quickly as Malfoy when a loud hiss emitted from the sink in the back shop he had been inspecting.

March

‘Well?’ George asked, as he drew the shutters on Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes’s first day of business.

‘Great, just great,’ Harry replied, standing back and surveying the decimated shelves of what was three back shops knocked into one; the rent was three knocked into one too. ‘By the way, Fred,’ Harry said, turning to where a wraithlike mist was emerging from the cold water tap, ‘that was never Parseltongue in a million years.’

‘Yesss, Harry,’ Fred hissed, ‘but it wasss good enough to get fifteen thousssand Galleonsss from Lucssiusss Malfoy.’

Prompt: An unseen presence unsettles the denizens of Diagon Alley.