Archive of Our Own

Augustus Rookwood
Desk No.17
[The One with the Wonky Legs]
To the Right of the Ever-Shifting Hourglass
Time Room
Department of Mysteries

Bennington Bode
Office No.1
[The Biggest One]
Department of Mysteries

Monday 15th April 1946

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Transfer Request

Dear Mr Bode,

I am writing to you - for the sixth time now - to formally request that I be permitted to transfer from the Time Room to the Death Room.

From our previous correspondence, you will be aware that I have been in Time since I first started work at the Ministry in August 1941. You will also be aware that the Employee Handbook states that Apprentice Unspeakables are supposed to spend their first five years rotating through six-month studentships in each of the Rooms, before choosing a specialty on which to focus for the rest of their careers. [p. 10,007, n. 171]

As you are also aware, Death is the area of study which I indicated in my initial application [and which every piece of written work in my portfolio - particularly my article on the advantage yew wands have over other woods in Necromancy, which won the New Horizons in Magical Mortality essay prize in September 1940 - related to] it was my intention to focus on in my senior career. I do not think it is unreasonable of me to suggest that I have the basic skill-set to perform highly in Death, and, accordingly, I would very much appreciate the chance to gain some valuable experience in its Room, in order that I may make a competitive application when the SpeS Portal opens.

I would also appreciate your reassurance that the rumour that the Junior position in Death has already been earmarked - prior to the application period beginning - for your nephew, Broderick, is false.

Yours sincerely,

Augustus John Rookwood

PS: I’d have liked to discuss this face-to-face, but Maureen says that you’ve charmed your diary to prevent me from scheduling any meetings with you. I must be frank, I think this is something of an overreaction.

Monday 15th April 1946

As dull a day as ever, save for the briefest flicker of intrigue this afternoon.

I was procrastinating from my filing by drafting an addendum to my letter to Bode, having spent all morning kicking myself for failing to mention that - if he has indeed reserved a position in Death for his nephew prior to the opening of the Specialty Scheme - he would be in contravention of Subsection 806 Q of the Employee Handbook, which is [according to Astrid in Personnel, although, since I have my doubts as to whether she possesses the brain power to do more than chew bubblegum and bat her eyelashes at the Aurors, I take all her pronouncements with a pinch of salt] a sackable offence.

I had come up with an - if I do say so myself - exceedingly pithy turn of phrase, when I heard Croaker’s voice coming from the entrance hall. The wriggle of curiosity - the one which is always accompanied by his ears twitching - danced on the edge of it.

‘It just appeared out of nowhere, you say?’

My interest was piqued.

‘Yes,’ came an answering squeak. This revealed that Croaker had been waylaid by Milmo. My interest receded. ‘It wasn’t there when I went on my tea-break. It was there when I came back.’

‘Blimey. What’s behind it?’

Milmo is deathly afraid of owls and spends his days dusting the shelves in the Hall of Prophecy. He is a hopeless case if ever there was one. An Unspeakable of seven years’ service who wouldn’t recognise a decent mystery if it stabbed him through the heart.

He responded to Croaker’s sensible question with his typical priggish outrage.

‘Bloody hell, Croaker, you don’t think I’ve opened it? What if a demon lives behind it? What if it curses me to be bright yellow? What if it’s the container for some sort of otherworldly plague? I don’t fancy being the person responsible for setting that loose!’

Milmo is fond of overreacting. Croaker - like many of our colleagues, including, I will be frank, me - is fond of daydreaming about drowning him in the Brain Tank.

‘It wouldn’t be here if it contained a plague, would it, Milmo?’ he said, in a long-suffering voice. ‘It’d be in the Department of Magical Health.’

‘You don’t need to be quite so condescending to me, Croaker. I am very well aware that -’

As much as I would have enjoyed staying exactly where I was, a quick mental calculation told me that Croaker was - at best - twenty-five seconds away from committing murder. I decided that it was in my interest to prevent this. I would miss him if he were sent to Azkaban.

I hobbled into the hall.

‘What’s all this, then?’

Croaker and Milmo were staring at a door.

‘It’s a door, Gus,’ said Croaker.

He flashed me what he evidently considered to be a roguish grin, which I decided not to dignify with a response.

‘This is an odd way to spend a Monday afternoon, isn’t it, Milmo?’ I said, pointedly ignoring Croaker, who tittered. ‘Don’t you have portents of doom to be polishing?’

I was sure that I was right to say it. The Department of Mysteries is rarely thrilling, but even I have never found it so tiresome that I have been reduced to staring at a door - which looked exactly the same as every other door leading off from the hall - to pass the time.

But I should have been a little less hasty.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Gus,’ said Croaker, tapping me conspiratorially on the shoulder and forcing me to withdraw my attention from Milmo [which was hardly a travail], ‘but I was under the impression that you could count past ten? And if that is indeed the case, you will be able to see that there are usually twelve doors in this room, and that this door - which has appeared out of thin air in the time it took Milmo to make a cup of tea - is number thirteen.’

That was, I had to concede, a rather more engaging state of affairs than I had presumed.

I peered at the door. ‘What does it lead to?’

‘No idea. Milmo thinks we shouldn’t open it in case it lets a multitude of evils loose into the world.’

Milmo is an idiot. I laughed in a way which got that point across succinctly. Croaker beamed at me.

I was able to bask in the glow of his approval for a microsecond, before Milmo’s enraged little face bobbed into my field of vision.

[He comes up to my shoulder. This is a feat I’ve always found impressive, since I have been reliably informed since the day I started school that I am a pipsqueak - the result of the bout of dragon pox I had when I was seven stunting my growth.]

‘I know you think I’m a prig, Rookwood,’ he huffed, already an ominous shade of red, ‘but I’m actually very - Croaker! Don’t push the door!’

Croaked had pushed the door.

I had allowed myself to be taken in by Milmo’s agitation, and had permitted my expectations for what the door was about to reveal to soar higher than was advisable, since I have learned - during the course of my five years here - that the recondite threads of the universe have ended up that way because anyone with any sense finds them too boring to research. Nevertheless, I still felt a flicker of childish disappointment [and a flicker of annoyance at Milmo’s transparent relief] when the door didn’t budge an inch.

‘Rats,’ said Croaker, which was apposite.

But I suppose that it is an unwritten rule of the Forces we study that even locked doors must summon trouble, just to keep us on our toes. Mr Devereux charged out of his office with the exact gait of an ostrich [if ostriches wore bow ties with dancing hippogriffs printed upon them], brandishing the brain which he’d clearly been occupied with dissecting like a cudgel.

‘What the bloody hell are the three of you doing standing around out here?’ he squawked. ‘Don’t you have the mysteries of the universe to be unravelling?’

‘We’re examining this mysterious door, Mr Devereux,’ said Croaker, winningly.

Despite Croaker’s hearty manner, Devereux looked like he’d just been told his pension had been stolen.

‘Oh, Merlin’s ample tits!’ he cried, throwing the brain at the wall in frustration. ‘Not this again.’

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: L. Devereux, Department of Mysteries
To: M. Plywood, DoM Front Desk

Maureen, could you call Maintenance and tell them to have someone come down with a bottle of Vortex Remover as soon as possible?

That bloody door’s back.

Thursday 18th April 1946

My week continues to be a slog through the waist-high river of unmitigated tedium.

It is only Thursday, and yet I have already planned thirty-seven new and exciting ways to inject a bit of va-va-voom into the grim monotony of my existence by shuffling myself off this mortal coil, my favourite of which features me learning how to perfectly execute a back-flip, learning how to carry a tune, and artfully tumbling through the Veil while singing an aria about what a dickhead Bode is.

I wonder if this course of action would prompt a response to my latest letter, since whatever I’m doing currently has been singularly ineffective.

Soon five years - five interminable years - will have passed, and I have nothing more intellectually stimulating than jamming endless bits of dusty parchment into endless dusty filing cabinets to show for them. My brain is atrophying; I can literally feel it shrinking with each day that crawls by - even though Purfoy, who is the person they permit to fish the specimens out of the Brain Tank with the net Graves brought back from a holiday in Skegness, insists this is impossible. I am constantly suppressing my rage at being reduced to the lackey of a project which does the simply groundbreaking research of investigating whether Time Turners send one further back by increments the closer one edges to the earth’s poles. I am constantly biting my tongue, lest I give into my baser urges and tell the recrementitious rabble who I am forced to call my colleagues exactly what I think of them.

I am gradually losing the will to live.

I need to get a grip. I sound almost offensively dull, which is a statement I should take as a very bad sign indeed. I have always been tremendously boring - a glum, sardonic little thing, predisposed to staying inside and disinclined towards frivolity, with a weak chest [yet another gift the pox bestowed on me, having apparently decided that permanently disfiguring my face wasn’t quite enough] which meant I had to spend my childhood sitting on the sidelines of birthday parties and ball games - which means that, if I have noticed myself becoming duller, then everyone around me is likely to be of the opinion that I suck fun from the air like a Dementor as I lope by.

It seems almost unreal - a baffling, dream-like claim - that, in the halcyon days when I started my job, I was no more irksome than the average Unspeakable [and certainly far less irksome than Milmo]. But my ability to tolerate nights of small talk and weak shandies has been sapped from me paperclip by lousy paperclip.

When Croaker invited me to the pub - as he does every evening - his face alight with scientific glee at the experiment he and Bean were going to run to test if the rumours The Potioneer’s Toad serves the strongest gin in London are true, I could bring myself to do nothing other than refuse.

I think it was because I had caught sight of myself, marred and pathetic, in the lenses of his glasses.

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: S. Croaker, Department of Mysteries
To: A. Rookwood, Department of Mysteries

Please tell me you’re coming to lunch today? I have an extremely amusing story to tell you about Milmo getting pecked by the Hummingbird.

Something strange has happened.

I had decided that, if I was going to stay late in the office [instead of taking the risk of actually enjoying myself with Croaker and Bean], I ought to write another letter to Bode, making sure to really hammer home just how well my article on yew wands had been received.

Having delivered this to his pigeon-hole - which attempted to break my wrist as I did so - I was commencing my trudge homeward, motivated to overlook the ache in my hip which suggests I’m due a flare-up of my post-pox arthritis by the promise of sardines on toast and an ovaltine, when I noticed my shoelace was untied.

Since tripping over this and snapping my neck was rather low on my list of snazzy ways to kill myself, I stopped in the entrance hall and arranged myself - with only a little agony - into a position conducive to rectifying it.

And I would be prepared to swear on Bode’s bald head that, when I knelt down, the Thirteenth Door [which maintenance have been scrubbing all week, to no avail] was shut fast.

When I stood up, it was not.

Croaker - through the judicious application of chocolate biscuits - had managed to get out of Mr Devereux that the door appears, on average, once every decade. In every one of these previous appearances, it has remained in the entrance hall for a few weeks before vanishing again, and nobody has ever been able to open it. Some of the greatest minds of our time have pondered the matter, he said. Levina Monkstanley drew up a complicated spell matrix she insisted would cause it to swing from its hinges. Esperança Quadra proposed singing to the door in Mermish. Justice Adebayo simply attacked it with a crowbar. Nothing they did ever managed to shift it an inch.

But now it was open. Open just a crack, but open nonetheless.

And through the gap, I could see the glow of a white, astringent light and smell the strong, astringent whiff of antiseptic potions.

Which made me think that whatever lurked behind the door was unlikely to bugger things up for me irreparably. Croaker had done a three-week stint as one of the Veil Keepers, and he’d informed me that it was an objective fact Death smelled like nutmeg.

Nonetheless, I had not forgotten that the first item on the agenda during the Department of Mysteries Induction Week is the exhortation to new and eager Unspeakables that they must never walk into portals or wormholes or vortexes or rips in time without the express permission of a superior. Our insurance premiums are already high enough, Bode said, his bloodhound-like jowls wobbling, without the Ministry having to cover the excess if one of us gets lost in an alternate dimension.

I would not, therefore, ordinarily be the sort of rebel who would plunge into a breach in the fabric of the universe without someone else’s say-so. I have never been a risk-taker - spending much of one’s childhood in bed does that - but I found myself staggering off the path of my usual tiresome adherence to the rules by the thought that:

1. Evidently, something mysterious is going on.
2. Mysteries - as anyone who has read Helsing Gaiters’ seminal paper in the Salem Review of Necromancy is aware - almost always have something to do with Death.
3. If I am the person who manages to unravel this Death-related mystery, I will have accomplished a feat unheard of for a Junior Unspeakable since Azrael Shufflebottom discovered those lizards living on Neptune.
4. Bode won’t have a hope in hell of continuing to deny my transfer request.

The moment my mind alighted on that final point, the crack in the door opened wider - wide enough for me, with only a little arranging, to slip through.

I took it as a sign.

ST MUNGO’S HOSPITAL FOR MAGICAL MALADIES AND INJURIES
Corpus Sanus Magica Sana Est

Department of Magical Accidents and Emergencies

Patient Name: Tom Marvolo Riddle [D.O.B. 31 December 1926]

Date: 03 April 1946
Time: 17.15
Healer: Hr. Edwin Rheum BHS, FMCHMS

Mr Riddle is a nineteen year old man who was brought to MA&E by paramediwizards at 16.25, having collapsed at work. He had recovered consciousness and was lucid and talking by the time he arrived at St Mungo’s. Mr Riddle claimed that the only thing wrong with him was a mild cold, which he was managing easily at home. He also claimed that his collapse was fabricated, in order that he might extract himself from a conversation with a customer who repeatedly subjects him to unwanted romantic advances.

Upon examination Mr Riddle did indeed have the symptoms of a mild respiratory illness. His heart rate, respiratory rate, and temperature were raised, but not to levels which caused any particular concern, and he didn’t bear any signs of unusual magical interference. His blood pressure was low [88/56] and he is considerably underweight for his height. A Basic Blood Profiling Charm revealed anaemia and additional vitamin deficiencies.

Diagnosis Issued: iron-deficiency anaemia and malnutrition.
Treatment Prescribed: a one-time intravenous dose of Vitamin Elixir and the pamphlet about how your local apothecary can offer advice on weight gain.
Admission Required: NO

The universe is fathomless and ever-changing. The door could have led to literally anywhere in literally any dimension.

The universe is also lazy, and possessed of the middlebrow fondness for twee aprons emblazoned with swear-words and thinking Elphias Doge is a public intellectual that people who read The Perspicacious Warlock cover-to-cover every month consider to be evidence of wit.

Which meant, naturally, that it brought me to St Mungo’s. I expect that it thought it was hilarious to dump me in a place where I have spent so many miserable afternoons, chugging vials of potions and watching Healers fill in questionnaires in an attempt to iron out the wrinkles the pox left behind in the fabric of my body.

I did not find the joke amusing.

Stepping through the door deposited me in a supply cupboard. This cupboard stood - so an extremely rude portrait of the man in question, who had taken offence to me interrupting him while he was picking his nose, informed me - on the back wall of the Alveolus Mullein Ward for Magipulmonology.

I thanked Mullein for deigning to speak to me. He called me a “cur” and stomped out of his frame.

To my great relief, there was nobody around to witness my dressing-down. The ward was silent. There were no Healers anywhere to be seen. The atmosphere was sterile and oddly sombre - the sort of place which would have one defaulting to talking in a whisper, even if no other people were present.

Only one bed - whose occupant appeared to be sound asleep - was taken.

I decided it would be sensible to walk around the hospital, rather than assuming everything I was looking for was perched by the narrow window on the opposite wall. Somewhere along the linoleum-clad corridors of St Mungo’s, I told myself, there would be something that would prove useful to me in Operation Bode.

And even if there wasn’t, Croaker would - I hoped - still find the story of my stepping through the door suitably exhilarating.

I started off on my adventure.

But I was - because of course I was - interrupted.

ST MUNGO’S HOSPITAL FOR MAGICAL MALADIES AND INJURIES
Corpus Sanus Magica Sana Est

Department of Magical Accidents and Emergencies

Patient Name: Tom Marvolo Riddle [D.O.B. 31 December 1926]

Date: 03 April 1946
Time: 18.37
Healer: Hr. Edwin Rheum BHS, FMCHMS

Mr Riddle was administered an intravenous drip of Vitamin Elixir at 17.41, at which time he was reading a magazine and appeared to be in reasonable health.

At 18.06, I was called over by Trainee Healer Patella to find Mr Riddle presenting with sudden shortness of breath and a severe cough, which was productive of sizeable fresh red clots of blood. His respiratory rate was high [32 breaths/minute], heart rate high [105], and his blood oxygen was low [SpO2 88%], blood pressure low [96/50]. His capillary refill time was 4 seconds and he was peripherally cold to the touch.

We performed an Auscultation Charm on his chest, and heard crackles coming from both lungs. A Properly Exhaustive Blood Profiling Charm showed several areas of concern [pH 7.0; PCO2 4.6kPa; PO2 7.5kPa; HCO3 20 mmol/L; WCC 25x10₉/L; Platelets 304x10₉/L; CRG 150mg/L; ESR > 100 mm/hr; Urea 15.5 mmol/L; Creatinine 322 μmol/L; Na+ 134 mmol/L; K+ 5.8 mmol/L], although coagulation was normal.

I suspected either Pulmonary Embolism or Pulmonary Haemorrhage.

Trainee Healer Patella and I performed a Thorax Window Charm, expecting to see evidence of these - or of some other issue - in the lungs. The charm revealed nothing. I called over Healer Wellcome to repeat it. This too revealed nothing. We called over Healer Lancet to repeat it for a third time. This too revealed nothing: no fluid; no bleeding; no scarring; no growths. Mr Riddle’s lungs appeared to be perfectly healthy. Yet he was continuing to bring up substantial quantities of blood.

Healer Lancet suggested that we cast an Entrail Evidencing Charm, presuming that the source of the bleed was in his stomach or oesophagus. This too revealed nothing untoward. We called over Healer Bile, who assisted in performing a Skull Bonk Index Charm, in case Mr Riddle had a bleed on the brain. This too came back clear.

From a biomagical perspective, there was absolutely nothing wrong with him.

We put in a call for a specialist in Dark Magic.

The chap in the bed - who had been entombed in an enormous pile of blankets - flung these off, hauled himself upright, and launched into a coughing fit of such extraordinary violence that I found myself rooted to the spot, unable to perform the basic acts of self-preservation which are generally advisable when one has appeared as if from nowhere into a place one is not expected to be.

I can’t quite explain why.

I have always considered myself rather good in a crisis, which is a flattering way of saying that I am sufficiently disinterested in everything - and that I so infrequently find myself in situations which warrant excitement - that I’m able to approach the vast majority of situations with pragmatic detachment. I would have expected myself to quickly slither off somewhere, leaving him to his hacking and wheezing, before anyone spotted me. Worrying about whether he was about to choke is, after all, the Healers’ job, rather than mine.

And yet I couldn’t move a muscle.

I have never thought of myself as someone who is given to mawkishness over the fact that all human flesh must decay. I came very close to the grave as a child, after all, and my main memory of the entire experience is that it was profoundly boring. The only effect my mother’s commitment to sobbing at my bedside and repeating platitudes she’d hoicked from the pages of Witch Weekly - about fighting good fights and darkness being followed by dawn - had on me was that it made me determined to recover my strength so I could shred her blasted magazines into pieces with my bare hands.

And I can’t imagine that actual Death is any more interesting than near-Death, although Bode’s intransigence keeps me from knowing for certain. The heart ceases to beat and the lungs cease to fill and the brain ceases to tick over and then one rots. Some ways of ending up in one’s tomb are - obviously - rather more interesting for one’s friends and relations to chatter about at the funeral, but they all give the same result. I should not have found the coughing man before me any more compelling than I find any other person, and I should not have found how clearly he was teetering on the edge of eternal rest any more compelling than I find any other stranger almost dying. I should have regarded him with academic disinterest and gone about my day.

And yet.

Were I hauled before the Wizengamot and forced to give an account of why I stood stock-still gawping at the fellow, I would probably say that my attention had been grabbed by the fact that he didn’t look like he should be able to cough with such force. The multiple jumpers in which he was bundled up did nothing to hide that he was skeletal. It is no exaggeration to say that a gentle breeze could have snapped him in half. That he was hawking his lungs up with the vigour of a mountain troll was to the astonishment of science. I felt it was worth investigating.

I might also confess to being a little disturbed that he appeared to be seconds away from conking out and yet no Healers had come running. I made a mental note to write to Buchanan in the Department of Magical Health and tell him that his latest paper about their idleness and sense of entitlement had something behind it, and maybe the Minister’s plans to subject them to a pay-freeze weren’t - as I’d previously informed him - the dying belch of the nation’s shit and useless servant.

[I might also - although the idea of being squeamish about such things embarrasses me - confess to being deeply unsettled by the fact that, when he pulled the handkerchief into which he’d been gagging away from his mouth, it was soaked through with blood.]

I must have gasped. He looked up at me with huge, glassy eyes.

‘I’ll go and get someone,’ I said.

He made a sound which vaguely resembled the word “no”. This was followed by a sound which vaguely resembled the word “water”, which he accompanied with a spasmodic gesture in the direction of his bedside table, upon which there was a jug.

I poured him a glass.

The water calmed his coughing, which relieved me, since this reduced the likelihood of my having to speak at an inquest. It did nothing to wash away the flecks of blood which clung to his lips.

Of more immediate concern to me, however, was the fact that - since he was no longer occupied in an attempt to expel his lungs from his body - an absolutely murderous expression had appeared on his face. I deduced that he did not regard me as his saviour.

I decided it would be sensible to invent a cover story.

‘I’m terribly sorry for disturbing you,’ I said, using my “bumbling posh boy” voice, which is tremendously useful in these sorts of circumstances. ‘I’m visiting my aunt, she’s in the Saurus Pym Ward for Post-Pox Syndrome - I think - but I appear to have taken a wrong turn while trying to get there.’

It was hard to tell whether this had worked on him or not, since he continued to glower at me with unaltered malice. Unfortunately for him, the effect was rendered considerably less frightening by the fact it was so obvious his coughing fit had deprived him of the energy to sit up - which also meant it had deprived him of the energy to reach the wand [yew, I noted] that lay on the bedside table. He lay back on his pillows - so pale that his face was indistinguishable from the linen - and appeared to be summoning the strength to insult me.

This was when I realised I recognised him.

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: S. Croaker, Department of Mysteries
To: A. Rookwood, Department of Mysteries

Have you heard? Harjas Kaur Dhaliwal will be in Edinburgh on 3rd May delivering a lecture on Soul Magic. It will be unbelievable. We have to go.

I’m buying you a ticket right now. If you try to get out of it so you can sulk about Bode, I’ll throttle you.

Friday 19th April 1946

Wonders, it seems, will never cease.

I have had my most interesting day at work since I started in the department. Not even an afternoon re-labelling all the Time Turners - which Bean had done incorrectly, because Bean is thick - could dampen my spirits.

And it’s all because I am certain a metaphysical mystery is afoot and I’m the only person in the entire department who knows about it.

[My mind was seized, while rummaging in the stationary cupboard for a new sheet of labels, by the image of Bode and his insufferable nephew, who pride themselves on being the first on the scene for everything, sucking lemons as I present my findings on the Thirteenth Door to the Worshipful Company of Ponderers. The tableau was so magnificent that I had to sit down.]

And who would ever have imagined that the source of my incipient triumph would be the spindly cockney first year who told Iago Carrow to ‘shove a chimney-brush up your hole, you dog-faced cunt’ when he waved his prefect badge at him in an effort to boot him out of the armchair nearest to the fire.

This was an assessment of Iago which I considered rather apropos. He - as, I suppose, was his right - found it gravely insulting, and, to soothe the peevish ache in his chest at having been bested by someone even Dickens would have dismissed as a stereotype, forbade those of us with the dubious honour of being his dormmates [and flunkies] from having anything to do with an upstart whelp named Tom Riddle for our remaining time at school.

Rumours filtered through Iago’s moat of sulking nonetheless. Their contents ranged from the ordinary to the ridiculous: Riddle was said to be brilliant, his magical talent spoken of in awed whispers by boys years older than him [and, if the stories from the Slug Club were to be believed, by many of the teachers too]; he was said to be charming; he was said to have a tragic backstory, which explained his secondhand robes and general air of incivility, which all too soon became a glamorous backstory. I once overheard Walter Duhamel - who really ought to have known better - remarking breathlessly to Gaius Kneebone that Riddle was descended from Slytherin himself, and that he could prove this on account of the fact he was a Parselmouth.

By the end of his first term, Riddle - despite the fact that he wouldn’t have been able to tell a fish-knife from a whelk-fork with a wand pointed at his head - was surrounded at all times by a devoted clique of the poshest sons-and-heirs in wizarding Britain. They trotted at his heels as he minced along the corridors. They sat in a semicircle before him in the common room each night, eating the wisdom he saw fit to bestow upon them from the palm of his hand.

Iago, who considered himself the sun around which the great and the good moved, was livid. He regaled us with several lectures about how he couldn’t for the life of him understand what anyone named Malfoy or Lestrange could possibly see in an uncouth half-blood who darned his own socks.

[Except for the Avery boy. Everyone found it perfectly easy to imagine - given the rumours about his father and Professor Kettleburn - what he might have liked about Riddle. It was the same thing that led Quintilliana Fabricant to tell Iago she was far more interested in going to Slughorn’s Christmas party with Riddle than with him.]

[Riddle turned her down, which Iago really ought to have thanked him for.]

But, like everyone else who hadn’t been literally forced by the school to sleep in the same room as me, Riddle had never seemed to be aware I existed. He made no effort to speak to me, no effort to charm me. I had, therefore, assumed myself to have been unaffected by the mystique the halls of Hogwarts created for him out of thin air.

And yet I appear to have fallen under his spell like all the rest.

I found, as I watched him spluttering and wheezing, his body attempting to tear itself to pieces from the inside out, that I could think of it as nothing short of preposterous - so farcical as to be all the evidence the Worshipful Company would need of some bizarre anomaly in the makeup of the universe - for him to be confined to a hospital bed. He had seemed, even as an eleven year old, to be something more than a knock-kneed slip of a boy with dropped aitches and robes which were too short in the cuffs. He had seemed - I would catch myself thinking, if I drifted off during one of Iago’s monologues and was overcome by the spirit of a bad novelist - to be made of pure magic, someone it was totally implausible to imagine all the boring, everyday forces of existence - sickness and decay and death - ever sullying.

This is - I am aware - ridiculous. Riddle is a young man in the prime of life, who probably smokes too much and has had to take the odd swig of Syphilis Removal Serum. He could have picked up a spot of aruspice’s ague or cauldron-maker’s lurgy like any other chap, no matter how talented he is. His view of the situation - as he croaked at me, having soothed his displeasure at my presence by calling me a series of synonyms, several of which I’d never heard before, for “anus” - is that he has a touch of Muggle bronchitis. He may well be correct. Disease doesn’t discriminate on the basis of magical ability [although Iago was very much of the impression that it did]. He isn’t immortal, and it would be ludicrous for me to imagine he might be.

But there was just something about the way he said it - how he dismissed my concern that he’d soaked a handkerchief with blood and yet didn’t think a Healer should be summoned - which made me think that there’s more to this case than meets the eye.

ST MUNGO’S HOSPITAL FOR MAGICAL MALADIES AND INJURIES
Corpus Sanus Magica Sana Est

Department of Magical Accidents and Emergencies

Patient Name: Tom Marvolo Riddle [D.O.B. 31 December 1926]

Date: 03 April 1946
Time: 21.22
Healer: Hr. Dante Ossuaria BHS, FMCHMS, FMExSoH

I was asked by Hr. Rheum to examine Mr Riddle in order to rule out his condition having a third-party magical cause. I arrived in MA&E at 20.00 and found that Mr Riddle had been stabilised by Hr. Rheum’s team. He was weak but lucid.

I examined one of the blood clots Mr Riddle had coughed up in a solution of raskovnik and trailing nightshade. The solution did not change colour, indicating that Mr Riddle’s condition is not the result of the ingestion of any untoward potion or poison. Hr. Rheum and his team informed me that Mr Riddle had already been administered a bezoar, in case his condition was caused by an interaction between two or more licit brews, and this had made no difference.

Mr Riddle considered it absurd to suggest that someone might have poisoned him - nor that they might have cursed, jinxed, or hexed him. He admitted, nonetheless, to working in an environment in which he comes into regular contact with arcane - and often dangerous - magic, and conceded [although I suspect he may have been humouring me] that he may have acquired a curse accidentally. I ran a full Hex Panel, every test of which came back clear for the full gamut of third-party curses.

While I was waiting for these results, I happened to glance at Mr Riddle’s admission form. I noted that he gave his address as a tenement building in Knockturn Alley which is frequently in the press due to its landlord’s repeated sanctions for violating sanitation legislation, and that he also listed himself as having no next-of-kin. I have seen, in my career, how such circumstances can drive people to desperation. I decided to repeat the Hex Panel, with a modification in the spell matrix which presumed that Mr Riddle might have self-inflicted his condition.

But these results came back clear as well. According to my tests, Mr Riddle has never turned his wand on himself with the intention of taking his own life or causing himself grievous injury. Indeed, if the result of my Gamp’s Ideation Equation is correct [and I have no reason to suppose that it isn’t] I have never before encountered someone with a stronger will to live.

I am reasonably confident that any magical cause can be ruled out. My advice to Hr. Rheum was that Mr Riddle should be referred for further testing by a specialist in Muggle-Magical Respiratory Diseases.

Admission Required: YES
To: Alveolus Mullein Ward

Saturday 20th April 1946

My weekend plans - which I’d spent the pre-Riddle portion of my week honing, since, I have found, day-dreaming about them is a pleasant break between fantasies of swan-diving through the Veil - had been to draft yet another letter to Bode, make some headway on the biography of Ekrizdis I’ve been putting off starting, and prune my Biting Begonia.

Instead, I found myself striding through the main entrance of St Mungo’s [turning up via cupboard would have given the wrong impression] at eight o’clock sharp, wearing my most officious-looking robes [the navy ones, which my mother has deluded herself into believing make me look “handsome”] and armed with a story I had meticulously rehearsed while making my morning porridge.

I was lucky enough to accost a Healer as she came out of the Alveolus Mullein Ward. I was doubly lucky that the Healer I had accosted fitted the profile I wanted to a tee: she had an air of great efficiency, mingled with a clear tendency to not suffer fools gladly.

She also appeared to be extremely quick on the uptake.

‘I am going to assume,’ she said, when I asked if I could speak to her about Riddle, ‘that you are not a social caller.’

‘No. I’m not.’ I handed her my card. ‘My name is Augustus Rookwood. I’m from the Department of Mysteries.’

She had an admirably firm handshake. ‘Johanna Elpis. How might I be able to help you?’

‘We’re running a project - which, I must stress to you, is top secret - on a condition connected to our areas of study. The condition manifests itself with symptoms which seem to be similar to those Riddle is experiencing.’

‘How do you know what symptoms he’s experiencing? Who told you he was here?’

‘I’m sure you’ll understand that I can’t disclose that.’

She looked at me flintily. ‘And what are you hoping to gain from our discussion?’

‘I’m hoping you can give me some more information about Riddle’s condition - its exact symptoms, how it seems to be progressing, and so on - which I can use to tell whether or not he should be included in our test group.’

‘Patient information is confidential, Mr Rookwood.’

I had been expecting this. I assumed my most bureaucratic air. ‘I am happy to return with a warrant.’

This had the desired effect. Healers do not like anything which generates more paperwork than is absolutely unavoidable. ‘That won’t be necessary.’ She ushered me in the direction of her office. ‘This way, please.’

ST MUNGO’S HOSPITAL FOR MAGICAL MALADIES AND INJURIES
Corpus Sanus Magica Sana Est

Alveolus Mullein Ward for Magipulmonology

Patient Name: Tom Marvolo Riddle [D.O.B. 31 December 1926]

Date: 19 April 1946
Time: 15.14
Healer: Hr. Johanna Elpis BMBCh, BHS, FMCHMS

Mr Riddle was admitted to the ward from MA&E on 03 April, having needed emergency treatment for sudden onset respiratory distress which had no obvious magical or biomagical cause.

Over the past sixteen days, we have - as yet - also been unable to identify a definitive explanation for Mr Riddle’s symptoms. All tests for both magical and Muggle respiratory diseases - including spattergroit, pneumonia, necromancer’s lung, tuberculosis, influenza, vanishing sickness, and bronchitis - have come back negative, as have tests for long-term respiratory conditions such as asthma and warlock’s wheeze. My team and I perform the full panel of cardiopulmonary charms on Mr Riddle daily. These detected a mild atrial fibrillation at the beginning of his admission, which has responded to treatment with Flutter-Be-Gone. They have detected nothing amiss with his lungs, which are shown to be completely healthy every time. Yet, despite this, he is coughing up around 500ml/day of blood.

My observations of Mr Riddle during his time on the ward are that his illness must be taken as having both chronic and acute periods. Chronic periods are marked by the cold-and-flu-like symptoms observed during his initial admission in MA&E [low blood pressure, low-grade fever, loss of appetite, rhinitis, cough, bilateral crackles in the lungs, dizziness, mild tachycardia, some shortness of breath, and poor circulation]. Acute periods are marked by rapid-onset respiratory distress, of which the most noticeable symptom is the aforementioned discharge of blood.

There is no clear trigger for the onset of acute symptoms, which appear at random. Over the past sixteen days, I have observed that the gap between acute events is narrowing, and Mr Riddle is now having several per day. The severity of his chronic symptoms - particularly his cough, shortness of breath, and fever - is also increasing.

Neither his chronic nor his acute symptoms respond to frontline treatments [Fever Reducer, Broncho Balm, Appetite Increasing Draught, Tranexamic Titration, Cassidy’s Vasopressor Oil, etc.]. Blood Replenisher continues to remain effective.

Mr Riddle has repeatedly expressed the opinion that he has bronchitis, and is unmoved by the evidence that all tests show this is not the case. He believes that he should be allowed to self-discharge from the hospital in order to recover at home. He has been unable to, because he is too weak to make it to the front desk.

Diagnosis Issued: ???
Treatment Prescribed: Blood Replenisher and Analgesic Unction as needed. Dreamless Sleep is often required if acute symptoms occur at night.

‘And there you have it, Mr Rookwood,’ said Healer Elpis, as I closed the file she had handed me. ‘This is his seventeenth day on the ward and nothing we’ve done has had the slightest effect on his symptoms. He’s getting weaker by the minute - although his view is that he is getting neither better nor worse and we all need to stop fussing.’ She returned the file to her desk. ‘And the strange thing is, there doesn’t actually seem to be anything wrong with him. Or I supposed I should say’ - she looked at me, her expression steely - ‘there doesn’t seem to be anything medically wrong with him. But I imagine you knew that already. Working where you do.’

This was exactly what I wanted to hear, though I took care not to let it show on my face. ‘Forgive me if I’m wrong,’ I said, ‘But it sounds like you would indeed consider him a suitable candidate for the department’s study?’

She stared at me for several minutes. Her face was unreadable, her ice-blue eyes unwavering, but I felt sure that she was engaged in a furious internal debate - a run-down of every ethical question she’d ever encountered - about whether or not she should speak further.

I hoped she would. And she did.

‘I have omitted something from the notes, Mr Rookwood,’ she said, looking at me quite unabashedly. ‘Official policy is that anyone in Tom’s position is to be discharged, told to pull their socks up, and left to get over it on their own. It is a waste, my bosses tell me, for them to be kept here to use up resources St Mungo’s doesn’t have to spare. But my view is that I took an oath to preserve my patients from harm, and it is clear to me that allowing Tom to leave the hospital would be in contravention of that oath.’

I was on tenterhooks.

‘He’s losing his magic.’ Her face softened, just a little. ‘I think it’s been going on for a while, but he’s sufficiently good at masking it that he’s been able to get away without anyone realising something’s wrong. But it’s reaching a stage now where even he can’t hide what’s happening.’

I cursed myself for missing it. I remembered Riddle choking, his dark eyes shot through with the ruby gleam of burst capillaries and his bloodied, trembling fingers reaching out for the glass of water I’d had to pour for him, because he was unable to Summon it for himself.

Healer Elpis sighed. ‘And you know as well as I do, Mr Rookwood, what causes that.’

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: S. Croaker, Department of Mysteries
To: A. Rookwood, Department of Mysteries

Wotcher! I’ve just nicked loads of iced buns Accidents and Catastrophes had left out in Meeting Room J.

Monday 22nd April 1946

I ate my iced bun in a slough of despond.

I had been in an awful mood since Saturday morning, when my conviction that Riddle was being assailed by some hitherto unknown Force - and, with it, my hopes of seizing the position in Death from right under Broderick Bode’s quivering nose - had been bundled into a burlap sack and biffed firmly with a beater’s bat.

Tom Riddle - Slytherin House’s favourite unicorn - had revealed himself to be the sort of tiresome, workaday donkey who opts to wither away from unrequited love, like all the world’s least interesting people have been doing since time immemorial.

Love is a concept I have even less interest in studying than Time. I was going to have to go back to the drawing board when it came to my career plans.

Croaker, who was perched on my desk [I had chosen not to tell him that his arse was in my inkwell], was looking at me with concern, his eyebrows furrowed.

‘Are you alright, Gus?’ he said. ‘You look a bit glum.’

‘I always look glum.’

I do. The scarring caused by the pox didn’t just make me so visually unappealing that every woman I’ve ever entertained the prospect of kissing has screamed and run for the hills. It also left nerve damage in my face. Any exaggeration of expression - especially any expression which involves smiling - hurts.

‘True… But you look even more glum than usual. I find myself rather concerned.’

I brushed a crumb from my robes, and thought of another crumb which I was clinging to.

Were I dragged into one of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement interrogation rooms, tied to a chair, forced to swallow Veritaserum, and asked if I considered myself to be a logical person, I would have said yes. I am not predisposed to wishful thinking. I do nothing unless the weight of centuries of academic inquiry justifies it.

And I have great respect for the science of Healing, even though I would rather propose to Milmo than pursue it myself [given how intrinsically it requires one to interact with the public]. Healer Elpis seemed eminently qualified. She and her colleagues had conducted their tests correctly and interpreted their results sensibly. I had been shown into her office and presented with a plethora of evidence and I ought to have believed it.

I have no explanation whatsoever for why my brain seemed so determined to do otherwise. Why it was so eager to cling to my initial nagging belief that Riddle’s condition was something strange and beguiling.

‘Croaker,’ I said, not looking at him, lest he detect the moonshine in my eyes and have me committed, ‘have you ever heard of someone who’s dying from unrequited love coughing up blood?’

He looked horrified. ‘Blimey. That’s not happening to you, is it?’

‘No.’ [I was far more touched than I would have imagined to see that he looked relieved.] ‘I was reading about a case in… Albania. A wizard choked to death on his own blood with no obvious medical or magical explanation. The Albanian Ministry looked into it, noticed that his symptoms hadn’t started until his girlfriend chucked him, and concluded that was the cause.’

‘Right.’

‘I’ve seen the evidence, and it’s compelling… But I can’t shake the feeling that the conclusion isn’t correct.’

Croaker scratched his head. ‘I’d be inclined to agree with you. Unrequited love is slow and undramatic, everyone knows that. It saps the magic and triggers a gradual shutdown of organ function and it does so in a sufficiently unexciting manner that the victim can fade away while the object of their affections goes on with their life. Coughing up blood is a bit… flashy.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Tell you what, you can ask that new girl - Georgiana Brandon. They’ve just hired her in the Love Room to work with that research group on pheromones. She’s an absolute star. I bet she’d know.’

He looked exceedingly pleased with this idea. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that - while I’d read the memo announcing her employment - I couldn’t have picked Georgiana Brandon out of a line-up.

‘On a much more important note,’ said Croaker, ‘are you coming to the pub this evening?’

‘Oh - er -’

‘The Hopping Warlock. It’s quiz night.’

He was staring at me earnestly, eyes twinkling behind the lenses of his glasses.

And I would, had I been a weaker man, have given in.

[Have believed that he might actually, sincerely have wanted to spend time with me.]

But there had been a second part to the plan I’d commenced on Saturday morning. And while my sulk over Riddle’s pathetic lovesickness had delayed it, it was clear to me - from the way it had started kicking the inside of my skull - that it would not wait much longer for me to get on with things.

‘I can’t. Not tonight.’

A flicker of something resembling disappointment crossed Croaker’s face. ‘Why on earth not?’

‘I have to go to an antiques shop.’

BORGIN AND BURKES
Est. 1863

Purveyors of Magical Antiques and Artefacts

Famously Discreet

It is a truth universally acknowledged - by Unspeakables at least - that anyone daft enough to set foot in Borgin and Burkes deserves the inevitable shower of shit which will befall them.

The informal policy of the Department of Mysteries is to turn a blind eye to the shop’s existence, largely because acknowledging its malevolent presence, squatting like a particularly warty toad over Knockturn Alley, would result in an enormous quantity of paperwork. Virtually everything in the place is some combination of stolen, illegal, deadly, aesthetically displeasing, and overpriced. Both proprietors are widely regarded as conmen.

Riddle had been one of Slughorn’s favourites from the moment he clattered down from the train. I would have expected him to have ended up shuffled into the Minister’s private office - guaranteed power and riches, all for the low, low price of two boxes of pineapple a month - like all the other Sluglets. Why he would have opted for Borgin and Burkes instead was beyond me.

There was one other customer present when I entered the shop. A hefty woman, whose bearing put me in mind of the HMS Victory, who’d been unflatteringly crammed into robes of magenta silk [out of the neckline of which a substantial portion of her was attempting to escape], was speaking in a carrying voice to the greasy little man behind the cash desk about how the price he’d offered her for some goblin-made tchotchke was an appalling insult.

He looked up at me - although his eyes were obscured by his thatch of silvery hair - an expression of supreme gratitude on his face.

I felt rather more trepidation. I had no desire to be used as a human shield against this terrifyingly-bosomed battle-axe.

‘Good evening, sir,’ he crooned, unctuously.

I am a terrible Legilimens [I have no desire to discover how dreary everyone I meet thinks I am in the private space of their minds; they express this perfectly adequately in the things they say to my face], but even I could work out that he’d mistaken the fact that my work robes fitted me properly for evidence of wealth, and was hoping to steer me towards purchasing the enormous opal necklace which stood, glittering malignly, to my right.

[If I’d had the money, he might have been successful. The necklace hummed with a series of extremely nasty curses, which I could see myself spending a tolerable weekend dissecting. It did not occur to me to be insulted that he’d evidently taken me to be the sort of man who might harbour a desire to bump off his missus.]

But I wasn’t there to buy. I was there to wheedle.

I assumed character, becoming as fat-headed and annoying as I possibly could - the sort of galumphing numbskull, interested in nothing other than farting and Quidditch, whose father does very little in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures and whose grandparents were cousins.

[That is to say, Iago.]

‘Is Tom in?’ I said, in my best patrician drawl. ‘I’m an old friend of his from school. I’ve been travelling for the past few months, but now I’m back in town and I thought it would be a spot of fun to look him up.’

‘He’s not here.’

‘I say, that’s a shame. Very well, I’ll call in again tomorrow.’

Borgin-or-Burke did not look pleased by this suggestion. ‘There’ll be no need for that, sir. He’s off for the foreseeable.’

‘Golly. Not because there’s anything wrong, I hope?’

His manner became distinctly surly. ‘He’s in hospital.’

‘What?’ boomed the foreboding woman, with enough force that a mirror [which had, so the label said, driven several previous owners to suicide by insulting their appearance] told her to shut up. ‘Still?’

‘Yes, madam.’

She whacked him across the knuckles with her umbrella. ‘Burke, you odious little man, this is your fault. Haven’t I been saying for months that you were going to drive that poor boy to his death?’

‘It’s nothing to do with me, madam,’ Burke said, through gritted teeth. His eyes were fixed on an obsidian dagger on display in the window. I was sympathetic.

‘Absolute nonsense, Burke,’ she thundered. ‘You work him like a house elf, and you pay him a pittance for the privilege. He’s been looking peaky for weeks. Oh, poor Tom!’

‘What’s the matter with him?’ I asked, the very picture of guilelessness.

‘He fainted,’ said Burke.

‘He collapsed,’ she said, tremulously. ‘Oh, it was awful. I felt sure he was dead.’

‘He fainted,’ said Burke, ‘because he doesn’t eat enough. That’s all there is to it.’

She turned her face towards me. I was irresistibly reminded of a bulldog wearing too much rouge. ‘I was asking him all sorts of fascinating questions about a mother-of-pearl teapot which used to belong to the Merking of Iona - which I’m sure you robbed me blind for, Burke, but I was too worried about Tom to quibble over the price - and, all of a sudden, he just keeled over. It was terrible. I was quite undone with worry.’

‘He’d have come round on his own, madam.’

‘Yes, you said that at the time, Burke, which was simply ghastly of you. Do you know, Mr -?’

‘Rookwood.’

‘Do you know, Mr Rookwood, that I had to beg him to call the paramediwizards?’

‘Gosh.’

‘It was too, too beastly.’

She was in quite a state, quivering like some sort of distressed blancmange.

[My respect for Riddle had increased exponentially. I would have handed in my notice after thirty seconds in her company.]

‘Has this ever happened before?’ I asked Burke. ‘Ri- Tom being taken ill, I mean.’

‘No, sir. He’s been here since July and he’s never had a single day off.’

The woman jabbed him in the chest with a stout finger. ‘Don’t sound so pleased about that, Burke! It’s no way for a young man to live. How’s he ever going to meet a nice girl and settle down if he’s here every hour of the day?’

‘That’s his business, madam.’

‘I’m sure you’ll agree, Mr Rookwood’ - she fixed her beady eyes on me - ‘that Tom is very much in want of a wife. Any decent woman would take one look at him, march in here, and give Burke a piece of her mind, I’ll you that much. Why, if I were the lucky lady, Burke, I’d hex you into next week.’

[My view of things was more that, if she were Riddle’s wife, she’d be in her grave and he’d be in Azkaban.]

‘He needs someone to look after him before it’s too late. Why, I told him that just before he collapsed. Oh, it was so frightening.’

A muscle was twitching in Burke’s jaw. ‘He doesn’t need all this fussing, madam. He seems perfectly happy with his social life as it is.’

‘Well, yes, I’m aware he has friends,’ she sighed. ‘But -’

‘But no girlfriends?’ I asked, as casually as possible.

‘No,’ said Burke. His expression was inscrutable. ‘No girlfriends.’

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: G. Brandon, Department of Mysteries
To: S. Croaker, Department of Mysteries

Saul, I know the chocolates in my pigeon-hole this morning were from you. You are nowhere near as subtle as you believe yourself to be.

[Thank you, though.]

Georgie xxx

Riddle lived in a bedsit, which occupied the the top floor of a rickety tenement building - sandwiched between a brothel and bookmaker - at the furthest end of Knockturn Alley.

I’d acquired his address from Healer Elpis. From the expression on her face as she wrote it down, I had been primed not to expect extravagance.

But, even so, I was astonished by just how miserable the place was. It was practically a coffin, rotting from the ground up, turning the poor souls who lived within it to mulch as it went. The peeling walls were thick with mould. It reeked with the brackish, cadaverous smell of damp. I had to clamber over a family of rats - which looked at me with pure disdain and refused to move out of my way - while climbing the stairs.

Riddle’s door - painted a sepulchral black and bearing the number 13 - was guarded by a series of impressively nasty charms, which I lost a fingernail dismantling.

The flat behind it, however, was - and there’s no other word for it - homely. The furniture was austere - a single bed with a nest of patchwork quilts upon it; a table with uneven legs, against which one battered chair was drawn; a lopsided wardrobe, in which hung a shabby black suit and a shabbier black robe; and so on - but the room itself was absolutely crammed with stuff.

[I couldn’t understand it. My impression of Riddle had been that he was rather ascetic. I would never have imagined that the aura of malevolence I’d assumed belonged to a black mamba actually belonged to a crow.]

Every available surface was covered in trinkets - paperweights and bric-a-brac, shells and bits of sea-glass, tin soldiers and commemorative mugs. Slips of paper - Riddle didn’t seem to have thrown a single thing away in his life - were stacked in shoeboxes. I glanced at the nearest one: the first sheet contained his NEWT results [ten, all Outstanding]; a Head Boy badge shone dully on top of it.

The table was strewn with half-finished jigsaw puzzles and dog-eared playing cards. A chessboard - which had certainly seen better days - was balanced precariously on the chest of drawers. There was no food in the larder, but there were volumes of cryptic crosswords. A stack of dog-eared notebooks - a leaking inkwell on top of them - were balanced precariously next to a cauldron. I wondered if he kept a diary.

And then there were the books.

They were piled everywhere, on every free surface, from floor to ceiling. I am not a large man [although I probably have about three stones on Riddle], but I had to weave carefully through the maze in order to cross the room.

His taste was esoteric. I spotted titles - magical and Muggle - on topics as diverse as Mitochondrial Transfiguration, Theory of Law, and Sewing Charms. He seemed to have a particular interest in Soul Magic [I spotted several titles which even I had found too dry to attempt] and Wizarding Genealogy. He had a liking for detective fiction [which I share, and which induced a spark of fond-feeling for him to appear in my chest]. More amusingly, he also - given the location of the pile directly next to his bed - seemed to have a great weakness for saucy novels about buxom witches who are taken prisoner by muscle-bound mermish kings.

[I resolved never to admit to him that I knew this.]

Unfortunately, the cover of one of these - The Lord of the Thrusting Trident - distracted me from paying attention to where I was going. My foot caught on a copy of an enormous volume entitled An Abridged and Succinct Summary of the Evidence for the Existence of the Vampire King of County Fermanagh, Presented in Seventeen Parts by Excelsior O’Connor and I tumbled to the floor, hoping ardently - for the brief period in which I was airbourne - that the floor joists were strong enough to handle me landing heavily on top of them.

They were. Which I did not take for granted.

And my fall turned out to be a blessing.

Since it allowed me to discover a letter Riddle had crumpled and discarded under his bed.

Tom, darling, if you would only talk to me then all of this could be resolved. I know you’ve said that you don’t want to see me until I’ve told my father about us, but if you would give me five minutes to explain everything then you wouldn’t need to get yourself into such a state.

You’re angry - I understand that - but I will be frank that I think you’re being rather unreasonable. It’s not anywhere near as bad as you think. And if you just listen to me, then you’ll see that.

Tuesday 23rd April

I told myself that my filing could survive me being a little late to work, wolfed down my porridge, and set off for St Mungo’s.

[I had forgotten, it seemed, that I’d professed myself disinterested in the mundanity of unrequited love, the role of which in this case I was no longer committed to denying. When it came to Riddle, I appeared to have decided the subject was fascinating.]

Riddle - who was propped up on his pillows leafing rather listlessly through a copy of Witch Weekly - looked no better than he had on Thursday.

Nor did he look any happier to see me. Although perhaps this is merely the way his face falls when at rest.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

He refused to dignify such inanity with a response.

I perched myself on the chair next to his bed, noticing as I did so that he had the newest thriller by Laburnum Jones - The Unyielding Wand, the latest caper featuring her magical detective, Achille Morisot - lying, open, on his bedside table.

He was a man of taste, then. I’d devoured it in a single sitting the day it was released.

I told him so.

From Riddle’s expression, I might have confessed to believing in the existence of Nargles. ‘It’s complete doggerel.’

‘I think that’s a bit -’

‘The characters are banal. The writing is weak. The plot is disastrous. Anyone possessed of even half a brain cell can recognise that the murder doesn’t make a lick of sense.’

‘I’m not sure I’d agree with -’

‘Morisot stands there, in the bloody drawing room, and claims that Madam Horbury died because Horbury the Younger nipped to the kitchens when the dinner gong sounded, quickly spiked his stepmother’s soup with Exsanguinating Essence, rushed back upstairs before anyone was the wiser, and then sat tight until the old cow’s blood drained out of her as the clock struck one. But that’s impossible! Even if one leaves aside the fact that Horbury had no way of knowing which soup bowl would be his stepmother’s - the house elf’s conversation with Morisot in Chapter Sixteen proves that - everyone knows that Exsanguinating Essence is a terrible choice as a murder weapon because it acts so quickly. One chooses poison because one wishes not to be discovered at the scene of the crime - well, with Exsanguinating Essence the death is so instantaneous that the Aurors will rush in when you’re still holding the vial. The idea that twelve people could just sit there, chomping away happily, while the poison works its way into the old woman’s system is absolute nonsense. She’d be dead the second the soup touched her lips.’

I felt it would be cruel to mention to him that most readers do not have such an anorak-ish knowledge of the workings of poison. This topic clearly exercised him rather more than was strictly necessary, and I didn’t wish to be responsible for his heart being placed under any more strain.

Although I suppose he can be forgiven his overreaction. He must be dreadfully bored of being stuck in hospital.

And I was struck by the realisation that his agitation seemed to have some sort of medicinal effect on him. His voice sounded less hoarse. His eyes lost a little of their glassy, feverish sheen. The faintest hint of colour crept over his elegant cheekbones.

And then I was struck by the realisation that he is the only person I’ve ever encountered whom excitement renders less beautiful.

[I did not stop to wonder when it was that I’d decided he was beautiful at all.]

In his usual seething repose, he could pass for a marble statue - of a nubile Greek demigod of dubious morality - which has come to life and is singularly displeased by it. He is smooth, flawless - with perfect alabaster skin and sultry eyes and an aristocratic jawline - and one cannot help but feel a little overawed by him.

But when he’s venting his spleen, he starts to look like an alley cat. His lips curl, and reveal teeth which are slightly too long and slightly too crooked. He talks with his hands, his balletic control vanishing into something frantic. His cut-glass accent slips and he begins to sound like a barrow-boy. He suddenly looks much younger - with his big eyes and his mouth running a mile-a-minute - like he’s a precocious, annoying ten year old, who has cornered you at a wedding reception to talk about newts.

And yet his passion draws you in all the same.

[Indeed, I found myself wondering - strictly scientifically, you understand, given what had landed him in St Mungo’s in the first place - what it must be like to find oneself on the receiving end of that passion.]

‘And,’ he said, clicking his bony fingers in my face for emphasis, ‘the motive was ludicrous.’

‘Well, no,’ I replied. ‘That was the part which made the most sense.’

‘Rookwood, are you illiterate? How can you possibly -?’

Because I’d read and understood the book. ‘It was obvious,’ I told him, ‘from the very first chapter - that thing about the Remembrall - that it was a crime passionnel. And it was also obvious from the very first chapter that Horbury’s feelings for his stepmother were rather more than filial, and her feelings for him were the same. I’d clocked it the moment the cursed emerald was mentioned.’

‘It was contrived.’

‘It seems contrived because it’s so realistic. A crime of passion is the oldest motive in the book.’

‘It was irrational.’

‘People do not behave rationally when it comes to love.’

I had spoken without thinking through the implications, which is unlike me.

[I’d been enjoying needling him. It had made me careless.]

The irrationality of love was - as I could easily have predicted - not something Riddle wanted to discuss. His expression - which had been one of frenetic condescension - hardened into pure malice.

‘Why are you here, Rookwood?’ he hissed. ‘Visiting your uncle again?’

‘Yes,’ I said, wrongfooted by the conversation taking such an abrupt change of direction. Riddle’s eyes flashed ominously. I realised my mistake. ‘By which I mean -’

‘- that your aunt has changed sex since Monday. You must give him my congratulations.’

I had the sudden feeling of having been plonked in the middle of a tightrope suspended above a shark-infested sea while wearing a coat made out of rare steak. I hadn’t realised anyone who looks that ill could also look so frightening.

Had I not been [reasonably] sure he couldn’t hex me, I would have run.

[But his wand was in the same place it had been on Thursday.]

‘Who told you I was here?’

‘Nobody.’

He appeared to have stopped blinking. The force of his gaze was extraordinary. It made my head ache. ‘Do not lie to me.’

‘I’m not lying. It’s as I said, I found you by accident. I came back today because I thought you might want some company.’

I had edged forward, attempting to appease him with a friendly sort of leaning in, having lulled myself into a false sense of security, having allowed myself to believe that he was trapped by lethargy within the narrow confines of the bed. He had thrown out an arm - like a striking snake - and seized the front of my robes with his skeletal hand before I could react.

‘I want you to listen to me very carefully, Rookwood,’ he spat, pulling me down [I was dumbfounded as to where this burst of strength had come from; he was so thin I could probably have broken every bone in his body by breathing out hard enough] until my face was in inch away from his own. He smelled very strongly of Blood Replenisher. ‘One wrong move and I’ll destroy you so thoroughly there won’t even be a toenail left to bury. Do I make myself clear?’

Magic or no magic, I believed him.

‘Crystal.’

His sharp mouth curled into a terrifying smile. He looked like a crocodile. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

He flung me away from him. My hands were shaking.

‘I should -’

‘The same applies to any accomplices you may have, I hope you realise that. If some grasping little worm who thinks he’ll get the chance to win the College of Healing Essay Prize by turning me into a case study has written to the Department of Mysteries leaking my confidential information, then I’ll see him struck off the record and then I’ll see his head struck from his shoulders. Don’t you dare forget it.’

[I had not - as far as I could remember - told him that I was an Unspeakable.]

‘That’s not what’s happened.’

‘Once again, Rookwood, I suggest that you do not lie to me.’

‘I’m not lying.’

‘You -’

‘After all, why would anyone assume the Department of Mysteries would be interested in you? I thought you had bronchitis?’

Riddle tensed. ‘I do have bronchitis. Now get out.’

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: S. Croaker, Department of Mysteries
To: A. Rookwood, Department of Mysteries

We ought to get to lunch early today. Mulholland reckons they’re serving fish and chips.

Thursday 25th April 1946

Mulholland was wrong.

Croaker and I turned up - disproportionately eager - the second lunch opened, only to discover we’d rushed for the pleasure of queuing for the usual Ministry-issued slop.

Croaker was clearly worried this was going to be one disappointment too many for me.

‘Is everything alright, Gus?’ he said, peering at me intently, the expression one usually associates with a funeral director on his face. ‘You’ve been a bit off recently. Is something going on?’

He has remarkable eyes, Croaker, even if their full majesty is obscured by his glasses. They are the exact same shade of blue as the Hummingbird. Looking into them gives one the same impression of staring into the immensity of Time.

[It is for this reason, I think, that I tolerate him calling me “Gus”. It’s a nickname I usually loathe.]

I didn’t have a hope in hell of explaining myself. Were I to admit to Croaker that I’d spent a full seven days preoccupied with someone who’d been completely inconsequential to me eight days ago - and who, for good measure, quite clearly loathes me - he would think I’d lost my gobstones.

Since Riddle had told me to sling my hook on Tuesday, I had - instead of taking the bloody hint - been back to the hospital twice. I’d been turned away by the Healers both times because I’d arrived during one of his coughing fits. That very morning, the experience of being pushed out of the way by a Healer carrying enough Blood Replenisher to revive a Hungarian Horntail had disconcerted me so much that I’d handed over a frankly criminal amount of money to the St Mungo’s gift shop to send him a fruit basket.

I had not - as yet - received any acknowledgement that I’d done this.

Croaker’s body language told me that he expected me to say something.

‘One of my relatives has been ill,’ I said. ‘I’ve been rushing around sorting things out.’

‘Crikey, I’m sorry. How terribly stressful. Are they on the mend?’

He laid a sympathetic hand on my arm. His touch was warm and only a little sticky. I found myself compelled to spill the beans.

‘I haven’t got a bloody clue. It’s quite hard to get a clear picture of what’s going on because he won’t admit that there’s anything wrong with him. There is - there clearly is - but he simply will not acknowledge that fact. It’s driving me round the bend.’

‘I had an aunt like that,’ he said, sagely. ‘She was one of those people who pride themselves on never making a fuss about anything, never being the centre of attention, all that sort of thing. I suppose she thought that it would be - oh, I don’t know - vulgar to admit to being unwell.’

I remembered Riddle sitting in the common room, gazing in sinister pleasure at his circle of worshippers.

‘I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.’

‘Nonetheless… I think lots of people don’t like finding themselves in a position where they have to rely on other people for help. They just hope that if they insist nothing is wrong then nothing will be wrong.’

All of a sudden, he beamed in a way I have never before seen him beam - a golden, blazing-sun smile, which made me feel like I ought to start singing and dancing in the middle of the canteen. I had no idea what I’d done to trigger such cheer, but -

‘Georgie!’ he exclaimed, happiness fizzing out of him and his gaze focused over my shoulder. ‘The incomparable Georgiana Brandon! Meet Augustus Rookwood.’

Georgiana turned out to be an elfin blonde woman, who was wearing electric-blue robes [and a mischievous glint] which made her look like a Cornish Pixie. She gave me the distinct impression of being the sort of person who says horrible, cutting things and then claims it’s just “banter”. I disliked her immediately.

‘How do you do?’ she said, her eyes flickering over me. From the slight curl of her lip, I deduced she’d not been impressed. I wondered what Croaker had told her about me.

He, however, remained effervescent. ‘Now, chaps, are we ready for today’s edition of Mystery Ministry Gristle? I’ve heard tell that the soup of the day is grey.’

Georgiana let out a tinkling laugh. ‘How delicious. I must have a bowl this instant.’

‘I’ll join you!’

He offered her his arm and they darted off together, giggling like children.

Neither seemed to notice that I had suddenly lost my appetite.

Riddle,

Here is some fruit.

Clearly I upset you the last time we spoke. This wasn’t my intention.

Wishing you all the best for your continued recovery,

Augustus Rookwood

I left work at five with a headache.

I felt so rough that I could barely read the labels on the files. My skull felt like it was filled with cotton wool. My entire body was being pricked by needles.

I knew I was due a flare-up.

By the time I reached St Mungo’s [why had I gone to St Mungo’s?] I would have sold my soul for a hot bath and a new immune system.

Riddle was propped up in bed reading the paper, which I was phenomenally grateful for. I was in such a funk that finding him in a pool of his own blood would have landed me in the loony bin.

The fruit basket I had sent stood on his bedside table. He’d eaten all the strawberries and two of the nectarines [odd choices; I find both fruits disgusting], and my life is so lacking in triumphs that I was hard-pressed to think of something in the recent past which I considered a greater success.

‘Eat that pear,’ he said. ‘I don’t like them.’

[This wasn’t quite “thank you for sending me a gift, Rookwood”, but it would do. Pears are my favourite fruit.]

‘If the Prophet’s culture section is to be believed,’ he said, a raven-ish sparkle in his eye, ‘Laburnum Jones is hard at work writing a new Morisot. The Poisoned Astrolabe. It sounds a hoot…’

I decided to ignore the derision in his tone. I like the Morisot novels. Riddle’s opinion is irrelevant. ‘I shall have to pre-order it.’

‘I’d save your money. It’s coming out for Christmas. All your dullest relatives will be lining up to buy you a copy.’

‘Perhaps I shall waste my money buying it for you, then.’

‘That would irritate me beyond belief.’

‘That’s why I’d do it.’

He looked faintly amused. It suited him. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

‘I definitely would.’

He peered at me, one eyebrow raised, for an uncomfortably long period of time, before returning to his paper. ‘Sadly, you shall be denied the opportunity,’ he said softly, his manner suddenly gloomy, ‘I shall be long gone by Christmas. I will be out of here soon and I shall not stay in London. By December, I will be on the other side of the world. Nobody will ever find - What on earth is the matter with you?’

He’d looked up and was staring at me with the sort of unenthusiastic concern I always associated with Slughorn, a man who’d spent seven full years convinced my name was Algernon.

‘Sorry. It’s - I’m being silly.’

Riddle frowned.

‘It’s just - When you said you’d be “long gone” by Christmas, I - I thought you meant that you were going to be - well - dead.’

Some undefinable emotion slithered across his face. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘Well, I certainly hope not.’

‘Hope doesn’t come into it. It’s objective fact. I am not going to die.’

He returned to his newspaper, while I searched for something to say, my brain prevented from processing language, held captive by the shimmer of the harsh hospital light along his elegant nose.

It was still fixated on the geometry of Riddle’s bone structure when he came to the end of the article he was reading [a rather boring account, which I’d skimmed that morning while eating breakfast, of the Minister’s latest meeting with Atlee] and turned the page. The society announcements followed.

And he began to cough.

I sprung up to pour him some water. It was apparent, however, that this wasn’t what he wanted: he was miming something - as though we were playing a game of charades with very unusual stakes - the meaning of which I could not decipher.

I worked out that he’d been asking me for a handkerchief when he gave up trying to communicate with me as a bad deal and simply hacked up a pint of blood - thick, dark clots glistening like blackberries within it - into his cupped hands.

I felt quite dizzy.

Riddle, in contrast, looked resigned to - or even bored by - this turn of events.

‘I’ll get a Healer,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘I’ll be back as soon as I -’

‘I - said - no.’

I dithered by his bedside. He watched me with palpable disgust.

‘It’s - fine,’ he wheezed. ‘It - will - pass.’

‘With all due respect, Riddle, that’s not a claim which can withstand the fact you’re holding your own blood.’

And couldn’t - even though neither of us acknowledged this - Vanish it.

‘It - will - pass. No - Healers.’

His hands were shaking from the effort of cupping them together. I withdrew my wand and cleaned up the mess. He didn’t thank me.

He fell back against the pillows with his eyes closed. ‘I’m - always - fine.’ His eyelids were the colour of old bruises, the skin translucent. ‘It - always - passes.’

‘What do you mean it always -? Riddle, has this happened to you before?’

None of his medical notes made any mention of such a thing.

‘When? Months ago? Years?’

He opened his eyes - his coughing had made them bloodshot; his iris, the colour of strong coffee, was ringed with scarlet - and stared at me, without blinking, for what felt like fifteen minutes.

When he eventually averted his gaze, I felt sick.

‘For the past couple of years.’

There was an ominous crackle in his voice. His throat sounded like it had been scraped raw.

‘So - since you were about sixteen?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘And you’ve always recovered eventually?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re absolutely sure about that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the symptoms have been this bad all the other times?’

He opened his mouth to answer.

Then he closed it again.

And then his eyes rolled back in his head and he began to shake and alarms started ringing and the bed was suddenly swarmed by Healers and I was bundled so rapidly from the room that, as I stood in the corridor wondering what to do, it felt as though my heart had been left by his bedside.

THE DAILY PROPHET

SOCIETY ANNOUNCEMENTS

Forthcoming Marriages

Mr P.R. Clam and Miss G.H. Arkles

The engagement is announced between Peter, son of Mr and Mrs Percy Clam, of Isleworth, and Geraldine, daughter of Mr and Mrs Roger Arkles, of Clapham.

Mr. B.W. Fitzjoly and Miss L.J. Rosier

The engagement is announced between Berengar, son of Mr and Mrs Jocelyn Fitzjoly, of Market Bosworth, Leicestershire, and Lucretia, daughter of Mr and Mrs Terentius Rosier, of Upper Flagley, Yorkshire.

Mr A.H. Malfoy and Miss V.P. Blood

The engagement is announced between Abraxas, son of Mr and Mrs Septimus Malfoy, of Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, and Valentine, daughter of Mr and Mrs Iorwerth Blood, of Ynys Gybi, Anglesey.

Mr E.N. Vavasour and Miss A.N. Reeves

The engagement is announced between Eustace, son of Mr and Mrs Edmund Vavasour, of Mayfair, and Arabella, daughter of Mr and Mrs Bettancourt Reeves, of Cambridge.

Riddle was alive and asleep.

This meant, I told myself, that there was no point moping by his bed like a maiden aunt. Nor was there any point in trying to work out which of the four women whose engagements had been announced in the Prophet was his beloved, whose name appearing alongside another man’s had been too much for him to bear. I needed to get a grip. He wasn’t my concern and he had no intention of becoming so. Worrying about him was idiotic and it was going to have repercussions - if I fell behind on my filing, Bode would only have more excuses not to transfer me to Death.

I trudged back into the department shortly after ten, intending to catch up on the work I’d felt unable to do that afternoon.

It seemed to be totally deserted. I presumed everyone else had decamped to the pub and I was alone.

Croaker and Georgiana Brandon, whom I rounded a corner in the archive stacks to find entwined, must have thought the same.

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: S. Croaker, Department of Mysteries
To: A. Rookwood, Department of Mysteries

Delighted to have you back, Gus! I hope you’re feeling better?

Friday 3rd May 1946

It was my first day back at work after a week of sick leave.

My long-awaited flare-up had arrived, forcing me to take to my bed and ache and adding another black mark to my attendance record. If this wasn’t enough, it had also deemed it appropriate to forego the usual boredom it causes and afflict me with a general state of malaise. I’d felt as though I was permanently on the edge of weeping. I lacked the inclination to eat or drink or read.

And I had the distinct impression that nobody in the department - who are, I am dismayed to say, the closest thing I have to a circle of friends - had even noticed my absence.

Certainly, nobody had written. I had one owl all week. It was from Riddle - I’d obviously been bothering him so much that a multiple-day period without me turning up at St Mungo’s made him think I might have died. I wrote a few lines explaining about my dragon pox and the trouble it continues to cause me. His response was, Ah, I’d thought as much. On account of your face.

Maureen had just painted her nails and didn’t want to smudge the polish, and so had sent me to see Purchasing about the status of our latest ink order on her behalf. I was plodding back through the Atrium when I bumped - quite literally, since I was thinking about beating Bode to death rather than watching where I was going - into Leodegrance Tremblay.

This was undesirable. Tremblay is one of the nation’s finest idiots. I knew this because I’d had the dubious honour of sharing a dormitory with him for seven years.

‘Gus!’ he cried. ‘How the devil are you?’

He didn’t wait for me to answer.

‘You look a bit under the weather, old chap. Being trapped in the DoM all day getting you down, is it? I’m not surprised. It sends a fellow loopy to spend so much of his day without sun, eh?’

Tremblay - like every single one of his male relatives - works in the Department of International Magical Cooperation [a division of the Ministry which I view as about as useful as a chocolate cauldron, but which everyone else I know considers rather glamorous]. This allows him, for reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained to me, to spend three months of the year in Monte Carlo.

‘You know,’ he said, examining me with an untroubled eye, ‘you ought to have a bit more fun, Gus. Live a little! Instead of spending all day worrying about death!’ He brayed with laughter. It didn’t seem to matter to him a bit that I did not join in. ‘I say,’ he said, with the air of a man who’s had a brilliant idea, ‘here’s a thought. There’s a house party tonight. At Tarquin Rosier’s place in Mayfair. It’s looking likely to get a bit wild, if you know what I mean.’ He winked at me. I did not - in fact - know what he meant. ‘All the chaps from school will be there. And plenty of beautiful witches too - all of whom I know for a fact loosen up delightfully once they get a bit squiffy.’ He winked at me again. The subtext of this one was easier to decipher. ‘Why don’t you come along?’

I would honestly have been much happier if he’d invited me to eat my own skin.

‘Well. I’m - I’m rather busy tonight, so -’

‘Nonsense. I’ve never seen a man look less busy than you.’

‘I am. I’m going -’

I was - or, at least, I was supposed to be - going to Edinburgh with Croaker, to see Harjas Kaur Dhaliwal giving a lecture on Soul Magic.

The idea made bile rise in my throat.

Tremblay - since he is a moron - assumed that my wavering was because he’d convinced me. ‘Spiffing,’ he said, thumping me on the back. ‘Get there at nine. Wear black tie.’

‘But I don’t have any black -’

‘Pip-pip!’ he honked, and disappeared into one of the lifts.

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: S. Croaker, Department of Mysteries
To: A. Rookwood, Department of Mysteries

We’re still on for tonight, right?

I left Twilfitt and Tattings with my savings account considerably depleted, swathed in a set of dress robes which the sales assistant - who had big green eyes and an artificial smile - insisted made me look exceptionally elegant.

She needn’t have lied. I wouldn’t have been offended if she’d pointed out they made me look like a waiter - at least anyone who saw me would assume I was a well-paid one.

Rosier’s party didn’t start for another two hours. I needed something to fill my time. Something to distract me, so that I didn’t have to dissect the question of why I’d agreed to attend a soirée I was guaranteed to detest just to get back [and was it even getting back, or was it just having a strop?] at Croaker.

It came as no surprise to me [when did it cease to be a surprise?] that I ended up at St Mungo’s.

I was the glummest I’d been for a fortnight. I should have expected, then, that Riddle would be the most cheerful I’d ever seen him.

‘You look like a pallbearer,’ he informed me, the moment he laid eyes on my new outfit.

It was clear that he meant this as a compliment.

‘That’s what I was going for.’

Riddle beamed at me.

And it occurred to me that it was the first time I’d seen him properly smile.

I’d seen him sneer and leer and smirk, the sharp angles of his face split by a slash of cold malice. I’d seen little quirks of faint amusement when I’d made a quip he didn’t think was totally cretinous. I’d seen him bare his teeth like a hungry snake. But I’d never seen him actually smile.

It was - like his excitement - something which made him less beautiful, which marred his immaculate features. He has a very toothy grin, which seems almost too big for his face. His nose puckers. The skin at the corners of his eyes crinkles. He has - and they look absurd, on someone who otherwise seems to have been turned on a lathe into unblemished smoothness - dimples.

He is - which I had not realised - cinnamon-sprinkled with freckles.

I felt quite warm.

My flare-ups are often accompanied by fever. Clearly, I hadn’t quite flushed the latest out of my system.

‘Violet cream?’ he said, thrusting a box - which was two-thirds empty - in my direction.

‘Absolutely not.’

Violet creams are foul. They taste like licking an old woman’s boudoir.

I wondered if the blood-loss was starting to affect his brain.

‘Good. I hoped you’d say that.’ He popped one into his mouth, making a satisfied sort of chirrup - like a six-foot-four kitten - as he did so.

‘You look like you’re finally on the mend,’ I croaked.

Yes. I was definitely still feverish.

‘Bronchitis is not permanent, Rookwood,’ he said, with his mouth full.

I have no specialist training in Healing, but I was reasonably sure that it could be.

I was also reasonably sure that Riddle’s improved condition had rather more to do with the enormous bouquet of yellow carnations - the giver of which had presumably also sent his vile chocolates - which adorned his bedside table than with anything else.

[He hadn’t reacted like this to the basket of fruit I’d sent, my brain saw fit to inform me.]

‘But tell me,’ he purred, eyebrows arching towards his hairline, ‘why are you all suited and booted? I’ve never thought of you as the type who goes out and gets rowdy on a Friday night. I shall have to update my notes on you.’

[I hoped this was a joke.]

‘I’m going to a house party.’

He snorted. ‘Are you indeed? And here I was thinking you didn’t have any interests besides putting a pin in Justice, or whatever it is you do all day.’ He ate another violet cream. ‘Well, except for bad detective fiction… Bloody hell, liven up a bit, Rookwood. You look like a man on his way to the gallows.’

‘I feel like a man on his way to the gallows. I don’t want to go.’

‘Why are you doing it, then?’

I sidestepped the question.

‘I’m not the house party type,’ I sighed. ‘I don’t like wearing dress robes. I don’t like getting drunk. I don’t like dancing. I don’t like loud music. I don’t like small talk. I loathe most of the crowd one sees at these sorts of things… And I hate how everyone I know thinks that makes me abnormal in some way. People treat it like some black mark on your character if you don’t want to go and listen to So-and-So and Such-and-Such banging on about wasting their money on the Flying Horse Races or their “glory days” playing Quidditch for Ravenclaw.’

‘Quite,’ said Riddle. ‘I am not the house party type either.’ He fiddled with the ribbon adorning his chocolate box with gentle, spindly fingers. ‘I just loathe all the conventions. How you’re only allowed to talk to the person on your left during the starter and you have to talk to the person on your right during your main… How you have to dance, but just dancing isn’t enough - you have to dance with different people, and you have to do it in a particular order… If I manage to find someone I can stand talking to all night, which is near-miraculous, and I want to sit in a corner the whole time and discuss interesting things, then that’s what I’m going to do. But somehow that’s considered “not on” and “uncouth”…’

He’d come over oddly sorrowful.

I had no idea why. He’d just described my idea of heaven.

‘See,’ I said, ‘I’d enjoy myself if I got to spend a night like that.’

His expression was appraising. ‘Then perhaps you are not quite as foolish as you look.’

I didn’t quite know what to say to that.

He was staring at me, his eyes big and glittering and looking - oddly - like he’d just discovered something surprising, and I realised they had flecks of a lighter brown sprinkled through them, like a conker, and were a warmer colour than I’d initially believed, and his gaze was roving over my face - over my scars and my nose and my lips - but with a cool sort of inquiry, rather than the disgust which usually accompanies my being seen, and I started sweating buckets, like a giant had picked the hospital up and deposited it in a swamp in the tropics, and I thought about how Riddle had said he wanted to travel and where he might go, and I thought about magic, and I wondered if Riddle had ever read any of Harjas Kaur Dhaliwal’s books about souls, and -

A clock chimed and the spell was broken.

‘Pass me that vial, would you?’ said Riddle, pointing to his bedside table.

He grimaced as he swallowed the potion.

And I used his momentary distraction to glance at the card attached to the flowers, which was written in the same elegant hand as the crumpled letter I’d found in his flat.

[It was a better use of my time, I told myself, than thinking about the scent of violets which had surrounded me when he spoke, which clung to the curve of his lips.]

Dear Tom,

We were so sorry to hear that you’re in hospital.

We hope you’re on the mend and will be back to full health soon.

Abraxas and Valentine

I arrived at Tarquin Rosier’s party to find Tremblay sitting on the curb, holding back the hair of someone I was reasonably sure was called Cygnus Black as he threw up into the gutter.

This was not, I felt, auspicious.

The house was packed to the rafters. People crammed onto the dance floor, and had inane conversations on the stairs, and pressed each other into alcoves. House elves trotted through the throng with trays of canapes and champagne. The gramophone blared.

The wall of sound was unbearable, as was the fact that - as I retreated upstairs, in search of somewhere I could hear myself think - I didn’t pass by a single person I wanted to exchange two words with, let alone sit in a corner all night with talking interestingly.

It was a blessed relief to find that the library was empty. Perhaps the lump of randy imbeciles downstairs weren’t yet drunk enough to be seeking it out as a place to canoodle. Perhaps they were simply shameless enough to get down to groping each other in public.

I let out the breath I’d been holding as I closed the door behind me.

Sadly, fickle Fortune had decided it would be far more than I deserved for me to actually be alone.

A broad-shouldered young man, with auburn hair and a morose expression, was sitting in an armchair in front of the fire, drinking a brandy and sighing.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I thought this room was unoccupied.’

‘I can’t face it out there,’ he gurgled, swirling the liquid in his glass like it might take human form and give him a talking to. ‘The love of my life - the girl I thought I’d make my wife - is out there dancing the polka with Mordecai Mulciber. I want to die.’

‘I see.’

Merlin’s beard. Has every man and his owl come down with a case of unrequited love? Is it in fashion? Is it a new law? Has the Minister demanded we have a crack at it to celebrate Dumbledore locking up Grindelwald?

‘Mordecai Mulciber!’ he wailed. ‘Mordecai Mulciber!’

‘Get a hold of yourself,’ I said, in a tone I hoped masked that I was debating whether or not to hex him. ‘A couple of dances is hardly the end of the world.’

I realised then that I recognised him. His name was Lestrange [his first name escaped me, although I presume he did, indeed, have one] and he’d started Hogwarts when I was - if I remembered correctly [and there was every chance I didn’t, since he was a profoundly unremarkable specimen] - taking my OWLs.

Which would mean he was in the same year as -

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘You know Tom Riddle, don’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s right. He’s a good friend of mine.’ He frowned slightly. ‘Is he here? This isn’t usually his scene.’

‘No.’

He worried his lip with his teeth. ‘That’s probably for the best. I don’t think it would be good if it all kicked off…’

‘You do know he’s in hospital?’

‘What?’

‘He has been for weeks.’

From the fly-catching expression on his face, this was manifestly news to Riddle’s “good friend”.

‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘It’s not my place to say.’

‘But he’s going to be alright?’

I could practically hear the cogs whirring as the damp sponge sitting in his head tried to make sense of this information. I found myself unaccountably angry that Riddle had no better option to surround himself with than such a low-watt bulb.

‘I don’t get the impression that he’s had many visitors, Lestrange.’

Lestrange - possibly because he’s so inbred - didn’t get the hint. ‘Well, that’s only to be expected, isn’t it? What with him being an orphan and all.’

He said it quite casually, as though this fact of Riddle’s existence was no more interesting than his star sign.

I wondered if Riddle would have been angry to hear him speak that way. I wondered if, maybe, he wouldn’t care a jot. Perhaps he thought, as I did, that the dead were the dead and that was that.

[Perhaps, like many other people, he wore black and sobbed at a graveside.]

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I knew that.’

‘I mean, it’s not like the matron of that godforsaken Muggle orphanage would go and see him, is it now?’

He chuckled to himself, like a bore of a stand-up comic on an evening radio show, not noticing - or, certainly, not bothering to notice - that I was having to modify every hypothesis I held in my head.

How I hadn’t known this about Riddle already? I could understand why he kept it close to his chest… but it must have been one of the facts about him which circled the Slytherin common room, offered up as an explanation for his tatty robes and ancient textbooks, understood by everyone as the reason why he was the only boy who never went home at Christmas.

[I thought about his necrotic little flat. I thought about how - if his lungs gave out, when his lungs gave out - the nest he’d cobbled together, with solitary effort, for himself and his treasures would be eaten up by the damp, without anyone to claim them.]

‘He’s an odd fish,’ said Lestrange, more to himself than to me. ‘Very clever. Very funny. Very charming, even. But I’d always thought he didn’t quite have the full range of human emotions…’ He stared into the fire, a pensive expression on his face. ‘I would never have guessed he was capable of being so devoted…’

I left him to it.

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: B. Bode, Department of Mysteries
To: S. Croaker, Department of Mysteries

I have heard a rumour that you have a spare ticket to Harjas Kaur Dhaliwal’s lecture this evening. Soul Magic is a topic I find fascinating. I would be delighted to take it off your hands.

For what it’s worth, I’m sure my uncle would regard your collegiality in extending me an invitation to the event as evidence that you should go right to the top of the pile when the speciality application window opens. His aim is a department in which everyone helps everyone else, after all.

Broderick Bode

The house elf behind the bar was pouring me a ginger beer when I had the distinct impression that I was being loomed over.

‘Augustus Rookwood?’

I turned to find myself face-to-face with a tall, willowy young man, who was wearing an enormous quantity of gold jewellery and a sable coat [despite the fact all the fires were lit] over velvet robes. He had very pale blonde hair - stuck to his head with a nauseating quantity of pomade - and a face dominated by an impressively pointy chin. He looked, I thought, like a giant albino mouse.

His name - as anybody who’d glanced at a gossip column in the years which had passed since his seventeenth birthday was aware - was Abraxas Malfoy.

I had come to think of him - in the hours since I glanced at the card on Riddle’s bedside table and received definitive proof of his identity - as Riddle’s love rival.

I’d decided, as I’d stomped toward Rosier’s house from Bond Street station [having apparated into a grungy alleyway adjacent to it, frightening a fox which was rooting through the dustbins], that I thought very little of Valentine Blood, Malfoy’s fiancée. According to the papers, he was a cad, who spent his days attending the opera and taking huge amounts of cocaine. All I remembered of him from school was that he never stopped whining.

Seeing him in the flesh for the first time since I’d left Hogwarts - and, therefore, getting the whiff of noxious cologne and bullshit which enveloped him, which photographs in the Prophet of him stumbling out of nightclubs couldn’t convey - only served to increase my disdain.

‘Tom tells me that you have been visiting him,’ he drawled.

I got the sense he was mocking me. I did not care for it. ‘Yes,’ I said authoritatively, ‘I think it’s good for him to have visitors.’

‘Indeed. I went this afternoon.’

So, the treacherous Valentine couldn’t even be bothered to deliver her own flowers, could she?

‘But what I’d like to know, Rookwood,’ said Malfoy, examining his manicured nails with practised froideur, ‘is what your angle is?’

‘What do you mean, my “angle”?’

‘What do you aim to achieve?’

‘By visiting someone who’s in hospital?’

‘Rookwood, I know you’re an Unspeakable. I’ve looked you up. It wasn’t difficult - the Department of Mysteries is but one of the parts of the Ministry which run on my father’s gold. And what did I find? You’ve been stuck on a dead-end project for half a decade. You’re quite desperate to be moved to another area. But you have as yet been unsuccessful… You would be thrilled to acquire a case study. And why don’t we speak plainly? Given your… expertise, you have undoubtedly worked out that Tom does not - despite the fact he is hell-bent on insisting otherwise - have bronchitis.’

‘Yes,’ I said, in a hard voice. ‘I’ve worked that out.’

‘And you have decided that his affliction comes under your remit.’

‘That’s not what’s going on at all.’

Malfoy’s eyes were the colour of a frozen lake. And far less warm. ‘You are a poor liar, Rookwood.’

‘I’m not lying.’

‘And I am here to tell you that whatever conclusions you’ve drawn about the situation are wrong. Any essay you’re intending to write will be torn to shreds. Continuing to interfere would be career suicide…’

‘What conclusions have I drawn, Malfoy?’

He smirked. ‘That you think I’m at fault.’

I drew myself up to my full height. I reached the end of his rat-like nose.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘You need to keep your greasy little nose out of things you don’t understand,’ he sneered. ‘Oh, you may think you’ve managed to figure everything out in two weeks - that I’m the villain of this story, that Tom’s some poor waif who can’t stand up for himself - but you’re wrong. Tom and I met on the Hogwarts Express and we’ve been inseparable ever since. There’s nobody on earth who knows me more intimately than he does. And there’s nobody who knows him - and all his secrets - as well as I do…’

‘Which only makes it all the crueler, Malfoy, for you to marry a woman when your best friend is in love with -’

‘Tom has always known I will have to get married eventually. That is the way our world works: a man in my position must take a wife and produce an heir. It’s tradition. It’s a business transaction. Tom cannot pretend this has taken him by surprise. And he cannot hope to change my mind.’

I stared at him, struck dumb.

‘I hope that’s cleared everything up.’

He turned on his heel and slithered towards the dancefloor, the crowds parting before him, leaving me to stand like a lemon and curse myself for my idiocy.

Because - and didn’t I hate to admit it! - Malfoy was right. I had drawn entirely the wrong conclusions. I had thought I’d managed to figure everything out in two weeks. I had been charging confidently in completely the wrong direction.

I had totally failed to see that Valentine was not the half of the pairing Riddle was in love with.

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: G. Brandon, Department of Mysteries
To: A Rookwood, Department of Mysteries

Dear Augustus,

I know it’s awkward for me to reach out to you like this, but has Saul done something to upset you? He thinks you seem angry with him. It’s making him quite worried.

I think it would be a good idea for you to talk to him, whether you are actually annoyed with him or not. He’s a good man and, if he’s done something wrong, he’ll do whatever he can to make it right.

All best wishes,

Georgiana

Monday 6th May 1946

Tom Riddle is an idiot.

I have mulled over the evidence all weekend, and this is the only logical conclusion which can be reached: Riddle, for all his air of intellectual vigour, is properly, properly thick.

Abraxas Malfoy is a cunt of the first water. He is loathsome. He is venal, cruel, arrogant, dishonest, profligate, and vain. He has appalling fashion sense. He’s never worked a day in his life. He looks like a ferret somebody’s jammed a signet ring onto.

The only way anyone could fall in love with him was if they’d been dropped on their head as a baby.

[Perhaps that was the standard practice in Muggle orphanages.]

I’d just jammed my internal mail with considerable force into Maureen’s pigeon-hole, wondering whether I ought to just snap and tell Bode I’d hex him if he didn’t hurry up and respond to my fucking letter, when I heard the click of a lock.

The Thirteenth Door had opened again. There were voices coming from it.

Mr and Mrs Iorwerth Blood
request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their daughter

VALENTINE PRYDWEN

to

Mr. ABRAXAS HYPERION MALFOY

at

St Veneficus Church, Marylebone
on Saturday 1st June 1946, 3 o’clock

and afterwards at
Claridges

R.S.V.P.

The door leading from the cupboard to the ward had been left ajar.

Malfoy, his blonde head gleaming under the lights, stood at the foot of Riddle’s bed, dispassionately examining a diamond-encrusted pocket watch.

‘Right,’ he said, briskly. ‘I have fifteen minutes. We are going to sort this out. A month in hospital has made your point very elegantly, Tom, but it ends now.’

Riddle said nothing. He was propped up on his pillows, watching Malfoy. His eyes were so dark - their pupils so dilated - that I could have sworn they’d turned the colour of congealed blood. His gaunt face was zealous, prickled all over with fever. He didn’t seem to be breathing. He looked hungry - starving even. Like he wanted to devour Malfoy. To swallow him whole.

I was afraid.

‘I will concede,’ Malfoy said, carefully, ‘that I have failed to take your… idiosyncrasies into account. I’ve made clear to you on multiple occasions - you know I have - that my marriage is merely a concession to tradition. I thought you understood that. But - perhaps - I should have told you more forcefully…’

Riddle was still watching him, burning with rabid hope.

‘I don’t love her. You know I don’t. And she doesn’t love me.’

He’d softened, just the tiniest bit; shed just a little of his icy façade. And it suddenly occurred to me that both of them were only nineteen - that it hadn’t even been a year since they’d left school - and yet Malfoy’s entire life was already planned out for him and the life Riddle had planned for himself was in tatters.

‘I don’t want to marry her,’ said Malfoy. ‘You know that.’

Riddle spoke in a reverent whisper. His voice was raw. ‘Are you going to call it off?’

He sounded like a child - a starving, desperate child - who’d been standing in the freezing cold, watching with corrosive jealousy through a window as his peers opened Christmas presents, only to have his wildest dreams fulfilled when a door was flung open and he was invited in.

[I wondered if this was the first time someone had chosen him.]

Malfoy fiddled with his watch. ‘Of course I am.’

I knew what was coming. Some syrupy, sentimental part of my brain had taken over and I was sure the ward would soon erupt with soft golden light, and Riddle would leap out of bed - totally cured - into his beloved’s arms, and they would live happily ever after.

I could never have imagined that he would start coughing.

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: S. Mulholland, Department of Mysteries
To: All Juniors, Department of Mysteries

This Friday, I am turning twenty-one!

I’ve planned a fabulous night out at Feathers - the hottest club [or so I’m told] on Aeturn Alley. I hope to see all of you there. Dress to impress!

Sekhmet

Friday 10th May 1946

‘I’m going to a nightclub this evening,’ I told Riddle. ‘Isn’t that ridiculous?’

‘Mm.’

Since Monday, his downturn has been precipitous. A week’s worth of newspapers were piled up on the bedside table, but he couldn’t bring himself to read them. He’d done nothing for days except stare listlessly at the ceiling. He’d lost even more weight - even though he had no weight spare to lose - and the hollowness which had overcome him troubled me so greatly that I held my nose and brought a pound of violet creams from Honeydukes. They remained untouched.

His fever was so violent that you could feel the heat radiating from him the moment you crossed the threshold to the ward. The whites of his eyes were turning yellow. The tips of his fingers were turning blue.

Blood dripped from him constantly now - little flecks of it with every rattling breath.

And I couldn’t for the life of me work out why, when Malfoy had stood where I was standing and offered him the very thing he wanted.

‘I’ll come by tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and tell you about everything I hated.’

‘Mm.’

‘Which means,’ I said, trying to sound funny, ‘I’d appreciate it if you could try not to die in the night.’

A muscle ticked in his jaw. ‘I’m not going to die.’

I ran into Healer Elpis as I left the ward.

‘He’s getting worse,’ I said to her. It wasn’t a question.

‘He is.’

‘How long do you think he has left?’

I was glad to see that, like many Healers, she was clear-eyed about Death. ‘It’s impossible to tell.’ She made a frustrated noise. ‘I had hoped that everything would work out differently, but there we are.’ She opened the door to her office. ‘It will make it a lot easier for him, I think, Mr Rookwood. Having you here at the end.’

FEATHERS NIGHTCLUB
101 Aeturn Alley

Come and Get Tickled

Mulholland had taken her own advice and dressed to impress.

She was wearing a wisp of pure white satin which left almost nothing to the imagination, and had announced as we left the department - Croaker and Georgiana holding hands and whispering to each other - that her birthday gift to herself was to be the reddest-blooded male she could find.

She had failed to take into account when she sent out her invitations that the venue she'd picked would make this mission considerably more difficult.

‘Only I could be stupid enough to think I’d meet the man of my dreams in a gay bar,’ she said, flopping down next to me, on the sofa where I was nursing a Shirley Temple and trying to drag my mind away from St Mungo’s. ‘I feel like I’m in a museum. All these gorgeous things floating about and I can’t touch a single one.’ She stabbed the glossy red cherries in her glass with a toothpick. I tried not to think about clots of blood. ‘Still, at least Milmo’s having a good time.’

Milmo was dancing enthusiastically on a nearby table. Several of the club’s patrons appeared to be tipping him.

‘He doesn’t usually drink,’ Mulholland said. ‘He told me he’d have one cocktail and then switch to lemonade. He has now had eight.’

‘Ah.’

‘I think he’ll be the only one of us pulling tonight. The guy over there - the one in the leather thong - is definitely giving him the eye.’

‘I could have done without that mental image.’

She snorted. ‘What? Milmo getting buggered against one of the Prophecy shelves doesn’t do it for you?’

The idea was horrifying, but I couldn’t even summon the energy to shudder.

‘Are you alright, Rookwood?' she said, gently. 'You can say if you're not.'

‘I’m fine.’

Mulholland works on the judicial application of Legilimency. As a result, I have always found her disconcertingly - and, perhaps, unethically - perceptive.

‘I’m going to get another drink,’ she said, tottering to her feet. ‘And look... I know it’s none of my business, but I’m going to say it anyway. Croaker is an idiot. And he doesn’t know what he’s missing.’

I managed to wait until she’d been subsumed by the crowd around the bar before I had to run out of the fire exit, into the narrow alley behind the club, and be sick.

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: S. Mulholland, Department of Mysteries
To: A. Milmo, Department of Mysteries

You have a love bite on your neck. And everyone has seen.

I just thought someone should let you know.

I rested my head against a wall and tried to drive the pounding of my heartbeat from my ears. My mouth tasted like vomit and grenadine. Every cell in my body ached. In all my years - through everything which has ever assailed me - I had never felt worse than I did at that exact moment.

Until, about fifteen seconds later, I managed to beat that record.

The fire exit opened and two men stepped out - first, a slim-hipped redhead with a neat moustache; and then, bedecked in tangerine satin -

‘Rookwood.’

- Abraxas Malfoy.

We glared at each other.

The other man looked between us. ‘I wasn’t expecting a third.’

‘That’s not what’s going on,’ Malfoy snapped. ‘Go inside and get us another bottle of champagne. I’ll find you in a minute.’

The man did as he was told.

Malfoy was examining me like a cruel boy examines the butterflies he pulls the wings from. ‘Are you following me?’

‘No. I’m at a birthday party.’

‘A birthday party which is taking place next to the dustbins?’

‘I needed some air.’

He was still watching me with naked malevolence. But all I could think about was how his voice had turned gentle as he’d looked at Riddle.

‘He’s getting worse, Malfoy,’ I said. ‘A lot worse.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Isn’t it obvious what it means? Tom’s getting -’

‘You have the temerity to interrupt my evening so you can preach a tiresome little sermon on monogamy?’

‘What the hell are you talking about? I’m not -’

‘You may not understand this, Rookwood, but I am not doing anything which anyone who is actually involved is unaware of. Nobody has a problem with how I conduct myself other than you. And since how I conduct myself is none of your business, I suggest you get out of my sight as fast as your bandy little legs will carry you.’

He loomed over me, speaking with the force of a man who is constantly assured of getting his own way.

And I am not, as I have said, a good Legilimens. But something - maybe some residual power bestowed upon me by Mulholland - told me that -

‘You’re lying.’

Malfoy’s nostrils flared. ‘I beg your -’

‘If I asked Riddle if he knew that you were on the pull tonight, what would he say?  Would it come as a surprise to him?'

Malfoy bared his teeth. ‘You don’t know what you’re -’

‘Because I think it would. I don't think he considers you a free agent. He wouldn't be so upset by the existence of your fiancée if he did, would he? How's that going, by the way? Because I know you said you were going to break it off, but I think you never intended to do anything of the sort. You were just telling him what he wanted to hear so that he’d stop annoying you by hoping you’d choose him.’

‘I don’t know what Tom’s been telling you, but I have always been clear with him. I am getting married. I have to get married. What I want doesn’t come into it. It doesn’t mean that I don’t - that I’m not fond of him. It doesn’t mean that I want our... affair to end. My view is that we can continue as we were once the knot is tied. And what we were was not - and never has been -for each other alone. But since he is apparently incapable of getting this information through his skull, I cannot see the harm in bending the truth a little.’

‘You think he’ll be alright with that?’

‘He will be furious and I will have to sleep with one eye open for a week. But then he will get over it. He always does.’

‘And does he always end up in a hospital bed whenever you betray him?’

‘Betray him? Listen to yourself! You sound like a schoolgirl. You cannot honestly believe that Tom is heartbroken because he wants me to slip a ring on his finger and let him make me dinner every night? He would rather swallow poison. He wants to do the things he does - things, may I say, that would make your hair curl - unencumbered by the tedium of domesticity and monogamy. This arrangement is what he wants. It has always been what he wants.'

‘Then why is he dying?’

He averted his gaze from mine.

‘He's not dying.’

‘He is.’

‘He’s sulking. All of this is him punishing me for “disobeying” him when he told me to refuse my engagement... I shall wait it out - all of his dramatic turns burn themselves out eventually - and then everything will revert back to the way it was.’

‘You need to open your eyes, Malfoy. He’s -’

He whirled towards me, snarling. ‘I know what he looks like, Rookwood. I have no problem with you passing the lonely hours each night with filthy little fantasies of him writhing under you. I don’t even have a problem with you dreaming about having him curled up on your lap talking about the miracle of Time Turners or some such nonsense. Because you will never actually have him. And I will. You can offer him nothing. Tom is proud. Tom is cruel. Tom is singular. Tom chooses - he is not chosen. He submits to nobody.’

He looked less like a rat and more like a wolf.

‘And yet he still gets on his knees for me.’

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Dum Magica Est, Spes Est

From: B. Bode, Department of Mysteries
To: A. Rookwood, Department of Mysteries

Rookwood, I need the attached book summarised by tomorrow afternoon. Kilkenny is off with food poisoning [he ate a bad oyster] and my uncle said you’d be happy to fill in.

Broderick.

Monday 13th May 1946

I stormed through the Thirteenth Door in a thundering temper.

Bode had just dumped a signed copy of Harjas Kaur Dhaliwal's new seven-hundred-page book on me - when I had a veritable tower of filing to do - with a shit-eating grin slashing his horrible little face, safe in the knowledge that I couldn’t even attempt to complain, lest his uncle sentence me to scrubbing the Brain Tank for the rest of my days.

I was absolutely boiling with rage. It was sending shooting pains along every nerve in my wretched body, making my head pound and my lungs ache and my heart hammer against my ribs. It was as though my skeleton was trying to fold in on itself.

Too bloody right! I am taken advantage of constantly - piled with endless aggravations I simply cannot stand - because I am pathologically incapable of speaking my mind.

Well, that changed today.

And I knew exactly where I was going to start.

‘Abraxas Malfoy is the worst person I have ever met. He is a twenty-four-carat, solid-gold, first-class cunt, and I haven’t got the slightest clue what you see in him.’

This was the first thing in a week which roused Riddle from his torpor. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Yes you do. For some insane reason, you are in love with that steaming pile of dog shit. And it is an absolutely ridiculous thing for you to be because he is a slug.’

A hundred competing emotions cartwheeled across his face. He landed, for reasons best known to himself, on lofty disdain.

‘I think this is projection, Rookwood. Evidently, whichever whey-face little trollop - gender irrelevant - you’ve been stepping out with has upgraded you for the newer model. Which is terribly difficult for you, I’m sure, but is, nonetheless, not something I have the faintest interest in hearing about. Love is tedious and infantile. It is weak. I do not waste my time on it.’  His lip curled viciously. ‘Perhaps you ought to do the same.’

‘God, you are insufferable.’

‘I think you ought to leave.’

‘Only one of us is dying because of love, Riddle, and it isn’t me!’

What little colour there was in his face drained from it.

‘I am not dying, Rookwood. From anything. And I am not going to die.’

‘Oh yeah? And how do you know that?’

‘It’s none of your concern.’

‘Right, so you’ve just pulled it out of your arse, then?’

‘I am not going to die.’

‘Yes you are! Unless you finally face facts and fucking deal with this, you -’

‘Shut up.’

‘Will it be worth it? Throwing your life away for someone like him? Throwing your magic away? Yeah, I know about that!’ - Riddle had recoiled as though I’d punched him - ‘I know you’ve lost your magic, Tom. So stop fucking pretending and just -’

‘Rookwood, you are raving. Everything you have said is incorrect. Abraxas and I are friends. There’s nothing more -’

‘Oh, right. I suppose I must have heard a different Abraxas Malfoy standing right fucking here, telling you that he was going to leave his fiancée. He was lying, by the way. But I guess -’

‘What?’

I have - since I was denied my desire to go to London Zoo on my seventh birthday by the pox and have never attempted another visit since - never heard a king cobra speak. But I imagine it would sound exactly as he did then. Quiet. Sibilant. Utterly, utterly deadly.

I decided - very much unlike a mouse in the aforementioned cobra's striking range - that I had nothing to gain from trying to wriggle away.

‘There’s a door. On the back wall of that supply cupboard. It appears periodically and - when it does - it connects this ward with the Department of Mysteries. That’s how I found you that first day, I stepped through the door and it brought me here. Which shouldn’t surprise you. Love and Death and Magic have all intertwined in you. Why wouldn’t your presence here trigger whatever it is which activates the connection?

‘Last week, I heard voices coming through the door. You were talking to Abraxas. He said he was going to end his engagement to be with you. But he was lying. He told me himself. He’s going through with it - he’s always been intending to go through with it - and he’s just telling you what you want to hear. He's planning a life for a version of you he’s invented in his head. And you're letting him and it's killing you.’

To my growing discomfort, Riddle had shed his murderousness. He was staring at me in sheer, incandescent horror.

I bid my voice not to waver and went on. ‘And I think, deep down, that you know this. But you don’t want to believe it, and so you hope that - if you just ignore it - then it will go away. It won’t. The only way this ends is with your funeral.’

It was, I thought, like watching someone be transfigured into stone. Riddle’s face shut down, becoming completely expressionless. His eyes turned the matte, lifeless black of the Veil.

‘You have been spying on me.’

‘No -’

‘All your little visits. All your inane chatter about books and parties. That was - what - to butter me up so I’d talk?’

‘I’ve been coming to see you because I want to!’

‘Do not lie to me! I knew it! I knew you wished to make a spectacle of me. You may have claimed otherwise, but I knew. You want to - to study me. To dissect me.’

‘That’s not -’

‘Leave.’

9

The assumption held by many of my fellow scholars is that the person who creates a Horcrux does so out of arrogance. That he believes his life to be of such exceeding value that it would harm the world to be deprived of it. That he sees the future spreading out before him and feels a radical sense of promise: for the exchange of one life, he will live forever, shaping the world in his image with every day that passes.

Even those of my colleagues who dismiss the idea of the Horcrux-maker as an optimist accept the general principle behind this idea: that the Horcrux prevents its creator from limits and endings; that its purpose is to prevent the introduction of any sort of fixity into the life.

In his 1938 article on the matter, Albus Dumbledore argued that the Horcrux:

Is the embodiment of a fear of permanency. The creator - unable to accept the inevitability of death and the impossibility of returning to life once death has claimed him - opts instead for a half-life defined only by liminality. He can attach himself to no principles. He can take no fixed stance on any matter. He is a ghost.

But my position is - and has always been - that this assessment is woefully misguided.

In the fifty years which I have dedicated to the study of Souls and the magic which surrounds them, I have never seen the slightest bit of evidence that a Horcrux indicates such an outlook on behalf of its maker. Rather, the creation of a Horcrux is only possible within a Soul to which optimism is a foreign concept. The necessary fissure, from which the Soul-piece is extracted, is not - as I have demonstrated - the universal result of the taking of a life. Prisons, both magical and Muggle, across the globe are filled to the brim with murderers, but only some of them carry Souls which are mutilated. So, too, do the workers who butcher animals in abattoirs, the soldiers who take up arms against their fellow men, the politicians who weigh up how many lives it is acceptable to take in order to keep but one of their voters alive. As the old saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. So too is one man’s murder another man’s act of righteousness. 

Or, as I put it to Professor Dumbledore during our debate in Sarajevo, if a woman slits the throat of her wealthy, generous, adoring husband - if she plans it meticulously, if she acts demonstrably with malice aforethought, if she will receive a huge payout from his life insurance, if she attacks when he is sleeping and he has no means of fighting back, if she overkills, using hundreds of cuts to accomplish her goal when one would have sufficed - is that murder? Yes, he said. But what if the circumstances of the death remain exactly the same, except for the fact that the woman’s wealthy, generous, adoring husband was - behind closed doors - a violent man, who beat his wife, who raped her, who degraded her? Is this still murder? What if he had been unfaithful? Is this still murder? What if she had been unfaithful, and her husband had killed her lover, and she had acted to avenge him? Is this still murder?

According to Professor Dumbledore’s own theorem, the Soul would not be able to tell the difference. A life taken against its owner’s will, he says, is a life taken against its owner’s will, no matter how justified the person doing the taking believes themselves to be.

Then why is not every Soul on earth split? Why do we not treat the acquisition of the fissure the way we treat cutting our first baby tooth? Why do we not celebrate the first time our children crush a spider or swat a fly and their Soul rips?

The explanation, as I shall demonstrate in the chapters which follow, is that the ability of the Soul to split depends not on actions, but on temperament . The Horcrux is not - as Professor Dumbledore believes - the manifestation of a fear of permanency. It is not - as Professors McLeod and Xiao believe - the result of a radical [if macabre] desire to experience life to the fullest.

It is the embodiment of a fear of the unknown.

The person who creates a Horcrux opts, in this act of creation, for stasis. He chooses to kill - he bestows upon his victim the ultimate permanence - in order to give himself a portion of Soul which he may fashion into an anchor, to secure him in a world which otherwise frightens him by its uncertainty. Indeed, I have often been struck by how, in so many of the fissured Souls I have studied, the fissure was caused by the killing of someone whose relationship to the Soul was liminal in some way - a parent long-estranged, a love long-lost, a friend long-missed - and whose death thereby permitted the Soul to comfort itself with an undeniable fact - that the dead person was, indeed, dead - in order that it might be spared from having to confront the unknown - that the relationship might be, or might not.

The Horcrux-maker acts as he does because he is afraid of the passage of time, which moves him ever further away from a fixed point - a point which, usually, was his only experience of feeling himself truly exist in the world.

He is incurious. He is stubborn. He is incapable of hearing other points of view. He is neurotic. He is a perfectionist. He is incapable of coping with change or loss - unless he himself is in control of these things; ergo he is controlling. He is cruel. He fears rejection; ergo he rejects. He is a homebody. He hoards. He is mercurial. He is dishonest. He struggles to form friendships. He is lonely. He is incapable of faith. He is incapable of trust. He is incapable of hope. He is incapable of surrendering to the great uncertainties - of life and love and death and time - which the rest of us treat as adventures.

And he is, therefore, a figure to be pitied.

He didn’t seem remotely surprised to see me.

Perhaps he’d even been expecting it. Perhaps he'd been dropping hints so that I would -

‘A Horcrux?’

He sighed, his lungs rattling painfully. A trickle of blood - which he appeared to lack the energy to wipe away - was drying on his chin.

‘You can spare me the lecture on Ethics, Rookwood. I'm not in the mood.’

I suppose I should have been flattered that he thought I was the sort of person - that is to say, that he thought I was normal, decent - whose response to discovering that he’d killed was one of ethical certainty. Of overwhelming sympathy for the deceased and visceral hatred for him.

How little he knows of me. My ultimate goal in life is to work for a project which hurls the soulless of Azkaban through the Veil, to test if the velocity with which a body falls makes any difference. Almost every morning, I read the coverage of death on wholesale scale - reports from Nurmengard, reports from Nuremberg - and then I go on with my day. A girl - barely out of her teens, on the game because she was dirt-poor and desperate - was found strangled in the park right next to my flat. The papers printed her name, but I have made no effort to remember it.

I did not know the faceless dead. I knew him. I knew what I had thought of him, how he had impressed me, and I was angry at him for revealing himself to be such a waste of my time.

‘I don’t give a shit about the ethics, Riddle. I - You’re nineteen. You’re -’

I remembered him admitting, tension crackling in the thin line of his shoulders, when his symptoms had first started.

‘You were sixteen. You hadn’t experienced one fucking bit of what life has to offer, you had nothing to be afraid of. And yet you're such a coward that you chose this?’

His eyes were fixed, unblinking, on the ceiling.

‘You’re supposed to be brilliant. I thought you were brilliant. I thought you were interesting. I thought you were going to do something great. But this is just - just idiotic! It is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s stupid, and it’s cowardly, and - worst of all - it’s boring. You are going to live a boring, one-note life, stuck on the same fucking path you decided for yourself as a teenager. And why? Because you’re scared of your own shadow? Because you think that being false and dull and unpredictable is the only way Abraxas will want you? Because it’s the only way you can convince yourself that you don’t want him?’

He flinched.

‘You’re pathetic. You are actually pathetic.’

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said, so softly that I had to strain to hear him. ‘I think I did something wrong. When I made them.’

Bennington Bode
Office No.1
[The Biggest One]
Department of Mysteries

Augustus Rookwood
Desk No.17
[The One with the Wonky Legs]
To the Right of the Ever-Shifting Hourglass
Time Room
Department of Mysteries

Monday 13th May 1946

Meeting

Dear Mr Rookwood,

Thank you for your letter of 15th April. I apologise for the long delay in responding.

Would you be able to come for a meeting with me on Thursday 16th May at 5pm, in order to discuss the points you have raised across our previous correspondence?

Yours sincerely,

Bennington Bode

Head of the Department of Mysteries

Thursday 16th May 1946

I sat, perched on a hard wooden chair [which made me feel like I was in trouble at school], while Bode’s hangdog face bleared at me.

‘I do appreciate, Mr Rookwood,’ he said, in his sepulchral voice, ‘that you are very keen to work in Death -’

‘I am.’

‘- and that you believe the department to be conspiring to prevent it, but I must stress in the strongest possible terms that this is not the case. There is no conspiracy. There is simply bureaucracy. The Minister thinks the Room is overstaffed. So overstaffed, in fact, that he's ordered me to remove Death as a potential field of specialisation in this year’s SpeS.’

'What?'

‘I know you will interpret this as the crushing of a dream. But I would advise you to permit yourself to embrace the fork in the road. I accept that you are unhappy in Time. And this is something that I am more than willing to resolve.'

He rummaged in his desk, and then presented me with a thick stack of paper.

'There is a position available - in the pay-grade above your current one - in Love. I would be happy to authorise your immediate transfer to it.’

‘Love?’

‘I know Love is not a field of study you’ve ever expressed any particular interest in. But it's the site of some of our most cutting-edge research, and I hope you will be able to go into it with an open mind and - Are you quite alright, Mr Rookwood?’

‘Hope,’ I said.

‘Excuse me?’

Bode was looking at me as though I'd taken leave of my senses.

Since I had grabbed him by the lapels and started shaking him, he was right to.

‘The doors in the entrance hall are doors,' I said. ‘But they might as well be covers. Or zips. Or lids. They act as containers. They keep the Force which each Room holds secure. The door to the Time Room is the lid of the container for Time. The door to the Love Room is the lid of the container for Love... So if another door appeared, that door would be the lid of the container for a Force of its own. A Force distinct from any of the others.’

‘Could you possibly put me -'

‘It’s Hope. The Thirteenth Door is Hope.

‘And its Room is St Mungo’s. Because where else is Hope as concentrated as a hospital? Every day, it’s filled with patients who are hoping for an explanation for why they feel bad, Healers who are hoping for an easy shift, families who are hoping the ones they love will get better. It’s filled with people who are hoping someone will visit them, people who are hoping to hear a good bit of gossip to stave off their boredom, people who are hoping to be in less pain, people who are hoping to be less frightened, people’ - I felt a catch in my throat - ‘who are hoping the end will be gentle, people who are just hoping they can go home.

‘And yet we don’t study it. Why don't we study it? Because what is Love if not Hope? What is Magic without it? It makes Space cease to matter. It grants us more Time. It drives us towards Knowledge. It’s how we can believe that Death is not the end. It’s how Prophecies come to pass - or don’t, as the case may be. It may be the most powerful Force in the universe. And yet we don't study it...

'And I know why. Because it's a choice. And we don't - The things we study are certainties. We claim we deal in Mysteries but we actually deal in Inevitabilities. But Hope - We have to choose it. We have to choose it, over and over again.

'Because certainty is False Hope - which is convenient and solid and unambiguous, which lets us remain in blissful stasis, unchanging and unthreatened. True Hope - that requires embracing the sheer immensity of the Unknown. It is Potential. It is What May Be, rather than What Is.

‘And if you were someone who was terrified of the unknown, who hated change, who was afraid of not being in control… If you were someone who had first-hand experience of wanting something so much that the pain when it didn’t work out was unbearable... You’d arrange your life in such a way as to avoid Hope entirely. You'd do everything you could - no matter how drastic - to make yourself immune to Hope and everything it contains. Don't you see? It's not Love you'd be scared of - Love has all sorts of studies done on it, you can read them, you can understand them. It's not Death. It's Hope.

‘And what if you were wrong? What if you thought you could outrun it, but you can’t? What if - without ever intending to, after you thought you’d done what was necessary to protect yourself from it - your soul hoped for something anyway? It hoped that the man who said he loved you was telling the truth. That you would leave school and be together. That he would defy his father and choose you. That - if you could make it through one more day - he would come around. And if you refused to accept that what you were feeling was Hope... if you tried to repress it, if you tried to batten it down with objectivity...

'Doing that - fighting, constantly, to deny that you were as capable as any man of leaping into the unknown - would destroy you.

'It's the Hope that kills you, Bode. It's not the Love.'

Bode was staring at me with his mouth hanging open.

‘I have to go -’

‘Rookwood! Come back here and explain yourself!’

But I was running - running as fast as my poor legs could carry me - down the corridor and into the entrance hall - past the pigeon-holes and past Maureen and past Milmo and past Croaker - until I reached the Thirteenth Door, which was open as wide as it could go.

Dear Mr Rookwood,

There is still no change in his condition.

In my more sentimental moments, I almost think that he’s hanging on until something specific happens.

Yours,

Johanna Elpis

Healer Elpis was standing beside Riddle's bed, entirely unperturbed by the fact that I had just burst out of her supply cupboard.

[In fact, I might almost have said that she looked triumphant.]

‘Am I too late?’

‘No.’ [Yes, that was definitely triumph in her eyes.] ‘You are not.’

I would have to trust her judgement on that. Riddle certainly didn't look alive to me. He was grey and still and waxy. His long, thin hands lay limp on top of his blankets. I took one in mine. He was freezing.

I had never before appreciated just how delicate he was, with his heart-shaped face and the strange gentleness in his spindly fingers. In always thinking of him as made of marble, I had failed to see that he was really bone china. That his poor, fragile soul could only handle so many chips.

‘I can offer you almost nothing.’

[This was not, I will concede, the way great speeches tend to start.]

‘I have barely any money. I’m not well-connected. I have no influence. I'm tremendously boring. I pretend I’m above everything. I'm a coward. I’m ill all the time. I’m hardly a great beauty. All my favourite books are by authors you hate. I think all your favourite sweets are disgusting. I can offer you nothing except myself.

'But I expect nothing from you. I don’t expect you to regret what you’ve done. I don’t expect you to change. I don't want to fix you, or influence you, or lecture you, or see in you what I want to see. But I don't expect you to remain unchanging, or to do things one way simply because you can't face trying another, or to live behind a mask either.

'I just want you to choose me. I want you - as you are - to understand that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, that my plans never come to pass and my hunches are almost always wrong, and still choose me. I want you to see that - when we are ourselves - we are exactly as stubborn and selfish and unprincipled and cruel as each other, and that you're hung up on Malfoy, and I'm hung up on Croaker, and neither of us have told either of them how we feel and I doubt we ever will. I want you to know - as I do - that we are ridiculous people who will probably be an absolute disaster... and still choose me, just in case we aren't.

'The world will keep turning, Tom, whether we stay still or not. What do we have to lose by going along with it? Why should it bother us that we can't see the future unfolding, preordained? Because there are always some things that are certain. That I won’t make you go to parties. That when you talk about things, I’ll listen. That if you want to travel, I'll come with you. That if people send us fruit, I’ll eat the pears.’

In books, these sorts of confessions are rather grander.

And, in being grander [and in being spoken by men rather better looking than me], they elicit an instantaneous response. And there are fireworks and roses and happy ever after.

In real life, of course, things do not always work out the way you'd hoped. A man who is teetering on the threshold of Beyond does not simply turn back, wake up, and -

‘Rookwood?’

He didn’t exactly look thrilled to see me. The main expression on his face was confusion, which mingled with shock when he realised I was holding his hand.

But he was alive.

He was alive, and his fever had broken, and he may have been frowning at me like I was an arithmancy problem but he was doing it while sitting up, and he wasn't coughing, and -

‘Augustus. I'd like you to call me Augustus.’

It seemed to take quite a while for his brain to decode my sentence.

But then he said, ‘Augustus.’

I have always found my name ridiculous. My mother gave it to me out of some bizarre conviction that it would give me some status in the world [and perhaps it would have, if the pox hadn't had other ideas], but it has only ever seemed cumbersome, pretentious - a burden to haul around on my sloping shoulders.

But that is because I'd never known how nice it could sound.

'I'm not dead, am I?'

'No. You were right about that.'

'And you are... real? I wasn't dreaming?'

'Yes, I am and no, you weren't.'

'Oh.' Slowly - a look of intense, childlike concentration on his face - he interlaced our fingers. 'Right.'

He peered at our joined hands like an explorer making a map of uncharted lands.

'I'  - he looked up at me, and I didn't think I was deluding myself to see his wooziness giving way to satisfaction - 'was hoping that would be the case.'