Portkey in GOF

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 149551

David wrote:
> > <snip> I was wondering why Crouch/Moody went through all of that
trouble to have Harry go through the tournament and then make the
Goblet the portkey.  Why didn't he, for example, just make Harry's
toothbrush or pillow the portkey?
> 
> 
> Ana:
> I can only guess. Perhaps he figured that if Harry had gone missing
in an ordinary day, Dumbledore would´ve known or suspected that
something odd had happened and could have tried to rescue him. That
would make things harder to LV (specially if he still didn´t have a
suitable body of his own). I think that by making the Cup the portkey,
he guaranteed that no one would go looking for Harry for a few hours,
because they didn´t know what was going on inside the maze, so they
simply wouldn´t assume anything was wrong.
>
Carol responds:
That's the part I can never understand--how no one could know what was
going on in the maze. Why were they watching, then? Surely they at
least saw the lit wand tips and the lights from the various spells,
and certainly they saw the red sparks shot up when someone needed to
be rescued. And I would think that the glow of the TriWizard Cup in
the middle of the maze would be visible and everyone would have seen
it mysteriously disappear. Again, why have an audience if you can't se
*anything*? (And, as an aside, did anyone besides DD, Snape, Harry,
and McGonagall know that Krum had been under Imperius and cast a Crucio?)

As for the TWT cup (not the Goblet of Fire) being a portkey, I agree
with others that Dumbledore had been authorized to turn it into one to
get the winner out of the center of the maze--a nice thrill for the
audience at an otherwise rather dull event. Maybe the maze itself was
supposed to magically disappear at that point so that the losers
didn't have to struggle pointlessly toward the now cupless center.
(Really, the whole maze sequence doesn't seem very well thought out,
but maybe it's just me.) I also think that Crouch!Moody adding an
extra stop to an existing, and legal, portkey makes sense. Indequate
as the MoM is, surely they have ways of detecting illegal spells like
unauthorized port keys, even at Hogwarts.(?)

As for David's original question of why Crouch!Moody went to all that
trouble, I think Barty Jr. was proud of his cleverness and happy to
serve LV. The more elaborate the plan, the better he liked it, and
impersonating the eccentric DE-hating, hip flask-swigging Moody was
right up his alley. (Cool to have that magical eye, too, and an excuse
to cast Unforgiveable curses on students since his own father had
authorized the Aurors to use them--on DEs, but that little detail
wouldn't bother Barty, who in any case would have loved to Crucio DEs
who walked free, especially Severus Snape and Igor Karkaroff.) 

More important, Voldemort wanted Harry to appear at a specific time
and place. The place had to be the graveyard, where the bone dust was,
and the huge clay cauldron had to be there with the preliminary potion
(who knows what was in that--more unicorn blood and essence of
Nagini?) already boiling and sparkling. And Voldie is a drama
queen--he wanted as many people as possible to witness Harry's
disappearance--and quite possibly his own reappearance in front of
thousands at the TWT with the dead Chosen One in tow. How's that for a
dramatic return, especially if he considered himself invincible? And,
of course, he'd have brought some DEs along for the ride to kill as
many people as possible and create panic and mayhem. Much more
satisfactory than having Harry simply disappear.

IOW, what's important is not merely getting Harry to Voldemort to be
killed. It's first obtaining his blood for the potion and forcing him
to witness the rebirth and then summoning the DEs to witness Voldie's
triumph over the Boy Who Lived. So any old portkey would not do even
if Crouch!Moody could turn a piece of Harry's property into one
without detection. It had to be the TWT cup, which would get Harry to
the graveyard at exactly the right moment, with the cauldron waiting
for bone, blood, and flesh. And Crouch!Moody also had to insure that
Harry would be the winner of the tournament, a task that took him
almost the whole year. 

Carol, imagining poor Fleur winning the maze race and showing up alone
at the graveyard