Book 1 - James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing

difference. Don’t ask me how I know. I just know. Whoever sketched these drawings was either a master
forger… or he was the actual artist.”
Ralph thought about it for a moment, and then shook his head. “That doesn’t even begin to make
sense. These paintings were painted at lots of different times. No way one bloke was responsible for all of
them. Besides, a lot of these paintings are old. Way older than this book.”
“It makes perfect sense,” James said, clapping the potions book shut and looking down at the cover.
“Whoever painted these didn’t paint the whole paintings. Think about it: not a single one of these sketched
characters is of a dominant person in any of the paintings. Every one of them is a drawing of some totally
unimportant background character. Whoever drew these just added the characters into existing paintings.”
Zane cinched up the corner of his mouth and furrowed his brow. “Why would anyone do that? It’s
like graffiti, but nobody would notice it except the guy who painted it. What’s the fun in that?”
James was also thinking hard. He nodded slightly to himself, looking down at the old book in his
hands again. “I think I have an idea,” he said, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully. “We’ll find out for sure.
Tonight.”
“Come on, Ralph!” James complained in a harsh whisper. “Quit tugging! You’re yanking it up.
You can see my feet!”
“I can’t help it,” Ralph moaned, crouching down as far as he could. “I know you said your dad and
his mates used to do this all the time, but one of them was a girl, remember?”
“Yeah, and she didn’t eat seven meals a day, either,” Zane said.
The three of them shuffled down the darkened corridor, crammed under the Invisibility Cloak.
They’d met at the base of the staircases, and apart from one tense moment when Steven Metzker, the
Gryffindor prefect and brother of Noah, had passed them in the hall singing slightly off key, they had
encountered no one. When they reached the intersection near the statue of the one-eyed witch, James
directed them to stop. The three of them maneuvered clumsily into a corner and James opened the
Marauder’s Map.
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