Black Serendipity
By Opopanax
Introduction
First the formal stuff.
What follows is basically a retelling of one of my favourite Stephen King stories—a novelisation of a novel, if you can dig that.. Mister King's "constant readers" will no doubt recognise the foundation upon which this story is built. I have added enough of my own material to make it stand out in and of itself, and I think it is pretty good..
As is usual with me, I have played fast and loose with things like geography and accuracy of historical events. It's my story, and in my story I am God, so what I say goes. If I want to say that the Prime Minister wears fuzzy hats and attends political rallies dressed as Bozo the Clown, then he'll show up in greasepaint!
The only warning I will give here is that, if you are expecting light and fluff, hit the back button. I also left a lot unsaid; this story is a character-driven story, not a magic-based one. So there is only enough magic background given to provide a setting. The rest is pretty unimportant.
And finally, since this story is being posted complete, please save reviews for the end. Thank you very much.
Now, for the personal stuff.
I think this might be the last fanFic I write. For a while, or forever—I just don't know. I think I have just about run out of things to say in this area. I can't promise a sequel to my other story up here this summer, but I will try to get it done at some point.
I do have ideas, but they're all pretty weird and far out; I'm not sure they'd go across very well. I had an idea about time travel. Suppose magic is the result of future humanity going back in time and injecting alterations into the first human females so that magic gets bred into the race? Or what if Harry had to find the First Wand, and it is not the Deathstick, but a wand made with piecesof Noah's Ark and the One True Cross? Crazy stuff.
Perhaps I'll put them up someday. iN the mean time, this is probably going to be my last offering. I want to thank my editor, Teufel1987, for sticking with me through all these years. I'm sure he clutches his head in agony every time a new chapter comes through. I have always been one of those writers more concerned with substance than style—a fact which causes most editors to develop large headaches.
That being the case, I decided to go out with a bang. I came across the Stephen King story this one is based on again earlier this year, and I instantly saw the possibilities. I don't believe anything like this has ever been done up here yet.
And now, gentle reader, I have some things to tell you, and I think you'll be able to hear me better around the corner … In the dark.
# # #
1
He looked like the total all-English boy as he pedalled his shiny new-looking Italian-made bicycle down the tree-lined village street, and that's just what he was. His name was Alvin Sedirius Potter. He was the youngest son of Harry James Potter, who was in turn the youngest recipient of a whole fruit salad of medals awarded by the Prime Minister and the Sovereign, as well as the Order of Merlin from their own side of the divide. Alvin was very proud of his father.
Now here he was, thirteen years old, a healthy five-feet-eight-inches tall (taller than his father was at that age, Alvin sometimes thought with a trace of smugness), black hair, green eyes, lightly tanned skin unmarred by so much as a shadow of adolescent acne. He was the spitting image of his father, only healthier than his father ever had looked.
The man he was coming to visit lived well outside any magical areas—although Alvin couldn't really blame him for that. The nearest Floo was in Godric's Hollow, the next town over. It was in his house, as a matter of fact. Al often bicycled around the countryside, unlike his siblings. They had little patience for such slow means of transport, and generally viewed most of the Muggle world as a somewhat scary place. Al, however, with the support of his father, often poked around the Muggle world. Which is what had led him to the man he was now visiting.
Now, as he pedalled through alternating bands of sun and shadow down the quiet streets of Greaves, grinning his summer vacation grin, Alvin felt a growing sense of excitement. He was flushed with the knowledge he carried around inside him, a secret nobody but he and the man he was coming to visit knew.
He drew his bicycle to a stop in front of 963 Edgehill Road, leaning it against the mailbox. The house here was a neat bungalow surrounded by an equally neat privet hedge. The lawn was well-trimmed and there was a small herb garden and flower bed underneath one of the curtained windows, which were all dark at nine in the morning.
Alvin smiled widely and set off up the walk. The Guardian was lying in a plastic bag at the foot of the front steps, and Alvin picked this up and tucked it under his arm as he climbed to the stoop.
Here there was a heavy windowless wooden door behind a latched screen door. There was a door bell on the right, and beneath it were two signs, screwed into the wood and covered with plastic so they would not water spot or fade.
The top sign read ARCHIBALD CRAVEN.
The bottom sign read NO SOLICITORS, NO PEDDLERS, NO SALESMEN.
Al smiled at these as he pressed the door bell, and cocked his head to listen for footsteps from within.
There was the muted burr of the bell from inside the house. Al glanced at his watch and counted thirty seconds of silence. Then he leaned on the bell, still keeping his eye on the watch.
By his count, seventy seconds passed before he heard the soft wish-wish of slippers on the floor.
"I'm coming!" the man who was pretending to be Archibald Craven said querulously. "Let it go. I'm coming!"
Still smiling, Al released the door bell and stood back a little.
There was the soft rattle of a chain latch and the snick of a bolt being drawn back. The heavy wooden door creaked open and there was the guy. He did not unlatch the screen door.
An old man hunched inside a bathrobe stood in the doorway, a smouldering cigarette clamped in his fingers. He looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Lurch, from the old Adams Family movies Al had seen at his friend George Leavenson's house. His hair was short and white and beginning to yellow in an unpleasant way that was more nicotine than ivory. There were only a few teeth left in his mouth, causing his face to have a vacuous, caved-in look. His eyes were dim and covered by thin cataracts, shot through with bursts of red. His nose was long and hooked and covered with burst veins. Al also noticed with some distaste that the guy hadn't bothered shaving for a few days.
For a second, Al felt a sense of deep disappointment. The guy did sort of look like Albert Einstein, but what he looked like more than anything else was one of the vagrants you sometimes saw skulking in Knockturn Alley or lurking down in the train yards, or in the outlying fields that surrounded the three towns of Raven's Glen, Greaves and Godric's Hollow, looking for hay bales to curl up in, or something to steal.
Of course, Al reminded himself, the guy had just gotten up. Al had seen Craven many times before today (although he had been at great pains to be sure that Craven never saw him.) On those occasions, Craven had looked very natty, every inch the officer in retirement, you might say, even if he was seventy years old if the articles Al had read in the library had his birth date right. Whenever Al had followed him to the Asda, where Craven did his shopping, or to the Greaves public library where Craven got his books, or to the Raven's Glen theatre where Craven went to see a movie every Saturday night, he was always dressed in one of three suits, meticulously ironed and starched. When the weather was threatening he carried an umbrella under his arm, and he wore a very sharp looking top hat over his thinning white hair. And on these occasions, he had always been neatly shaved.
"A boy," he said now. His voice was thick and sleepy. Al saw with fresh disappointment that his robe was faded and tacky. One rounded collar point stuck up at an awkward angle to poke at his wattled neck. There was a splotch of what might've been chili, or tomato sauce on one lapel. But Al saw something else, something he had been looking for: Recognition. It was gone almost as fast as he saw it though, and he couldn't be sure.
"A boy," the man pretending to be Archibald Craven repeated. "I don't need anything, boy. Read the signs. You can read, can't you? Of course you can. All young boys can read. Do not be a pest, boy. Good day."
It might've ended right there, Al thought later on the nights when sleep was hard to find. There was the deep disappointment in this meeting, of seeing the man close up, with his street face hung up in the closet. Up close, the man was no more unusual than any other old man living in quiet obscurity. Up close, it was hard to believe that this old man had been anything other than what he appeared to be.
Yes, the whole affair might've stopped there, the sound of the closing latch and the snick of the bolt driving home putting paid to everything that followed as neat as you please.
But Al was a bright boy, and he had been taught that persistence was a virtue.
"Don't forget your paper, Mr Snape," Al said, holding up the plastic-wrapped Guardian politely.
The door stopped dead in its arc, still inches from the jam. A tight, watchful expression flitted across Severus Snape's face and was gone at once. Al felt another sharp jab of disappointment. It was good how Snape had made that expression disappear, but Al hadn't expected Snape to be good; he had expected Snape to be great.
Boy, Al thought with real disgust. Boy oh boy.
The door came open again. A hand, bunched with arthritis but still looking somewhat elegant, came wriggling through the gap to unlatch the screen door. Al saw, with renewed disgust, that the fingernails were long and yellow and horny. It was a hand that had gone from being buried in potions ingredients day after day to spending all its time holding one cigarette after another. Al thought smoking was a filthy dangerous habit, one he himself would never take up. It was a wonder Snape had lived as long as he had.
The spider-like hand clamped on to the edge of the paper Al was holding out and tugged. "Give me my paper, boy."
"Sure thing, Mr Snape," Al said.
The spider hand retreated back inside, leaving the screen door to clack shut. "My name is Craven, boy. Not this Snape. Apparently you cannot read. What a pity. Good day."
The wooden door started to close again. Al spoke rapidly into the narrowing gap. "Lockwood, June 1997 to October 1997. Brecon Resettlement and Re-education, November 1997 to February 1998. Aldershot—"
The door stopped again. The old man's face hung in the gap like a wrinkled half-deflated balloon. Al smiled. "You left Aldershot just ahead of the Order of the Phoenix. You went to Rome. Some people say you got rich there, investing some of the money you took out of Britain. Whatever, you went to the United States—"
"Boy, you are insane." One of the once-elegant but now arthritic fingers twirled around a misshapen ear. But the mouth was quivering infirmly.
"From 2000 to 2005 I don't know," Al said, smiling wider still. "No one does, or if they do, they're not telling. Then you were spotted in London, working at a Bayswater hotel as a concierge. Then you popped up again in 2010. An MBO agent spotted you in Wiltshire. They almost got you." He pronounced the last two words as one: gotcha. His hands clenched together in one large, wriggling fist. Snape's eyes dropped to those well-made hands, hands that looked as though they might be used to build models and possibly play an instrument. As a matter of fact, Al and his father had built a model of the Titanic the previous year. It had taken them four months and his father kept it in his Ministry office. And just this spring, Al had taken up the guitar.
"I don't know what you are talking about, boy." Snape's voice had a mushy rounded quality, nothing at all like the sharp, snide voice Al had imagined he might have. But in his time, he must have been a real sharp cookie. In an article Al had read, Snape had been called the Potion's-Fiend of Lockwood. "Get out of here, before I call the constable."
"Gosh, I guess you better call them, Mr Snape." He continued to smile, showing teeth which had been fluoridated since the beginning of his life and bathed in Crest Toothpaste for almost as long—his sort-of-Aunt Hermione's influence. "After 2010, nobody saw you again until two months ago. That was me, on the bus."
"You're totally insane."
"So if you want to call the constable, you go right ahead. I'll wait right here. But if you don't want to call them right off, why don't I come in. We'll talk." Al smiled and smiled.
There was a long moment of silence while the old man looked at the smiling boy. Birds chirped in the trees. On the next block, a power mower hummed somnolently in the warm morning air. On busier streets farther away, distance making them sound as unimportant as they undoubtedly were, cars honked their own rhythm of life and commerce.
As the moment spun out, Al felt the onset of doubt. He couldn't be wrong about Snape, could he? He had checked and double checked and he was sure he was correct, but this was no school assignment; this was real life, with much higher stakes involved. So he felt a sense of relief (mild relief, he told himself later) when Snape said: "You may come in for a moment, but only because I do not wish to make trouble for you, you understand?"
"Sure, Mr Snape," Al said. He opened the screen door and stepped into the hall. Snape closed the wooden door, shutting out the morning.
The house smelled stale and old. It was the smell of cheap liquor, fried foods, dirty clothes and floors which lay un-vacuumed for weeks at a time. It was the smell of the house of a man who had given up. The hallway was dark, and Snape was standing too close, his head bunched into the collar of his tacky bathrobe like a vulture waiting for its prey to give up the ghost. In spite of Snape's age, the stubble and loosely hanging flesh, Al could suddenly see the man in the black Death Eater uniform more clearly than ever before. He felt a sharp lancet of fear slide into his belly. Mild fear, he told himself later.
"I should tell you that if anything were to happen to me—" Al began, and then Snape was brushing passed him into the lounge, his slippers whispering. He flapped a contemptuous hand at Al, and Al felt a rush of hot blood mount into his face.
Al followed, his smile wavering for the first time. He had not quite pictured it happening like this. But things would work out eventually. Sure they would. They usually did. He began to smile again as he stepped into Snape's lounge.
Here was another disappointment. There was of course no portrait of the Dark Lord with his snake-like nose and red eyes that followed you everywhere. No decorative potions cauldron hanging on the wall, no ceremonial wand on the mantel (there was, in fact, no mantel.) Of course, the guy would have to be crazy to have left any of that stuff out. But it was hard to put all your expectations out of your head. It was sort of like the old joke about the fat disk jockey with the skinny voice, or the way you built up television actors in your head into idealized portraits. Then when you actually got the opportunity to see them, they turned out to be not at all like you pictured—either taller or shorter or somehow less there than their on-screen personas.
It looked like the lounge of any other old man whiling away his final years on a slightly frayed pension. The fake fireplace was faced with fake bricks. An old-fashioned clock hung over it, ticking calmly into the stillness. A very old television stood on a stand in the corner. The rug on the floor was balding and frayed and dusty. There was a magazine rack by the sofa, holding copies of National Trust Magazine, Nature's Home, and TV Choice.
Instead of a portrait of Voldemort or a decorative potions cauldron on the wall, there was an indifferent landscape with an indecipherable signature in the lower right hand corner. And a somewhat smudged photograph of a scrawny woman wearing a hat.
"My wife," Snape said sentimentally. "She died in 2005 of ovarian cancer. At that time I was working at the Ford assembly line in Essex. I was heartbroken."
Al continued smiling. He crossed the frayed carpet as though to get a better look at the woman in the picture. Instead of looking at the picture, he fingered the shade on a small table lamp.
"Stop that!" Snape barked harshly.
Al jumped backward a little, and then smiled again. "That was good," he said sincerely. "Really commanding. It was Dolores Umbridge who had the lampshades of human skin, wasn't it? And she came up with the trick with the spiked collars."
"I don't know what you are talking about," Snape said for the second time. There was a package of Dunhills on the TV. Snape reached for them and offered one to Al. "Cigarette?" he asked, and grinned. His grin was hideous.
"No. They give you lung cancer. My dad picked up the habit, but he quit."
"Did he?" Snape scratched a match alight indifferently on the case of the TV. Puffing, he said: "Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn't call the constable and tell them of the monstrous accusations you've just made? Speak quickly, boy. The phone is just down the hall. Your father would spank you, I think. You would take your dinner sitting on a cushion for a week or so, eh?"
"My parents don't believe in spanking. They say corporal punishment causes more problems than it cures." Al's eyes suddenly gleamed. "Did you spank any of them? The women? Did you take off their clothes and—"
With a muttered oath, Snape strode toward the phone.
Al said coldly: "You better not do that."
Snape turned and faced the boy. In measured tones, spoiled only slightly by the loose way his lips flapped over his missing teeth, he said: "I tell you this once and only once, boy. My name is Archibald Craven. It has never been anything else, not even Snape, or Father Christmas. I had nothing whatever to do with Death Eaters, although I followed their exploits on the news. I was born in Yorkshire and attended school at Milford Preparatory School. I married in 1985 and worked at the Ford plant in Essex until 2012, when I retired due to a back injury. I bought this little house here with my severance pay, where I have remained ever since. No Rome. No United States. No Bayswater hotel. And now, unless you leave, I am calling the constable."
Snape watched Al do nothing. Then he went to the phone and picked it up. Al continued to stand by the table with the small lamp on it. He watched Snape dial, his heart speeding up in his chest.
After the fourth number, Snape stopped. His shoulders sagged, and he put the phone down.
"A boy," he breathed, turning back to Al. "A boy."
Al smiled modestly.
"How did you find out?"
"One piece of good luck and a lot of hard work," Al said, and then he told Snape his story.
# # #
The second wizarding war had been a catastrophic mess from the start. In June of 1995, Harry Potter had been kidnapped at the end of the final task of the Triwizard Tournament, and his blood used to resurrect Tom Riddle, aka Voldemort. Potter escaped, taking Peter Pettigrew with him. Pettigrew stood trial at which time the fact of Voldemort's resurrection came out. With Aurors hunting him almost from the outset, Voldemort had had to take action forthwith, rather than wait and gather allies as he had originally planned.
Things hadn't ended there, however. Severus Snape, who had been teaching potions at Hogwarts School since 1982, felt his Dark Mark burn and immediately swung into action. It came out later that he had, ever since he started working at Hogwarts, been lacing Albus Dumbledore's favourite candy with a sleeper poison; that is, a poison that would only become viable when an activating ingredient was introduced into the target. Dumbledore died the day after the final task, frothing at the mouth and dissolving from the inside out, in full view of a horrified Wizengamot Council. This was a devastating blow to the newly-reformed Order of the Phoenix. They began to doubt their ability to triumph, with Dumbledore gone.
Voldemort did not give them any breathing room, either. Within a week of his resurrection, sleeper agents in the Ministry for Magic had facilitated its complete takeover, and by July first, magical Britain was under Voldemort's rule.
Then Voldemort struck out into the Muggle world. Lucius Malfoy, Amycus Carrow and Fenrir Greyback broke into Ten Downing Street and assassinated John Major, the prime minister. They did not bother erasing or in any way disarming the security cameras. Thus the magical world became known to the Muggle.
With the Ministry taken over, Voldemort began rounding up Muggle-borns and their families, under the auspices of the so-called Muggle-born Registration Commission. A number of camps were established to house them, and the experiments and exterminations began. By the end of the war, almost sixty thousand squibs, Muggle-borns and their families from all over Europe were killed. When one considers that the magical population of the entire world was, at that time, about only eight hundred thousand, this was a devastating blow. Along with the deaths in the camps, another five thousand were killed in actual fighting.
At first the British military wanted to go in and wipe out every magical in the British Isles. It took a lot of fast talking by the tattered remains of the former magical government to get them to change their mind. And even then, they, the magicals, were given a deadline. If they hadn't taken care of the problem, the military would go in with guns blazing and exterminate every magical person alive on British soil.
Things almost escalated into World War Three before Harry Potter finally killed Voldemort, in 1998. The village of Hogsmeade was flattened by an air bombing. Diagon Alley was wiped from the map also. There were a lot of squibs in the military- people who had left the magical world due to blatant discrimination and hate. They were more than happy to help bypass magical wards and plant bombs in key locations.
With the killing of Voldemort, things began to change. An organisation of Muggle-borns was started—the Muggle-born Organisation against Oppression (MBO), whose main mission was to ensure that things never got so bad again. They oversaw every law that went into effect to make sure the pure-bloods never got so much control of things. Many of the old families, of course, were unhappy about this turn of events, and several small civil wars broke out. The queen once again began to have a hand in magical affairs, and the ICW merged with the United Nations to oversee world magical politics.
Interestingly enough, once the remnants of the Death Eaters were rounded up, there did not immediately begin a series of witch hunts, as many feared. With the popularity of video games, movies, fantasy literature, Wicca, new-age religions and mysticism, there was almost universal acceptance of wizards. After all the upheavals had settled down, there began to be a rising industry of do-it-yourself wizardry, tests you could buy to see if you or anyone in your family was magical, Facebook pages devoted to magical studies, and so on. All of it was pure nonsense, and many of the real wizards in the ministry found this turn of events baffling.
Meanwhile, almost all the Death Eaters and their sympathisers were executed by sending them through the veil at the Ministry. The shock and outrage at what had been discovered in the camps was almost unparalleled, and there was no mercy granted to those who staffed them. Dolores Umbridge was torn apart by a mob prior to her sentencing, and Lucius Malfoy committed suicide before they caught up to him. The only Death Eater to escape had been Severus Snape.
Harry Potter was awarded a great many medals, as were his two friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Sirius Black (who had been killed in a battle) was posthumously awarded an Order of Merlin, also. Harry married Ginny Weasley and Ron married Luna Lovegood, who had turned out to be one of the fiercest fighters on their side.
Hogwarts was turned into a day school overseen by the Muggle education system in joint cooperation with the Ministry for Magic. Educational standards at the school were upgraded on both sides of the divide, and students were expected to sit for both magical and Muggle exams.
Harry Potter had three children, James Sirius, Alvin Sedirius, and Lily Luna. Ron Weasley had two, Hugo and Rose. Draco Malfoy, who surprisingly enough, had turned against his father, had two children, Scorpius and Belladonna.
Al had always been interested in his father's history, but whenever he had asked about it his father had given him vague answers, telling him that it was best forgotten. And the stuff in his history book was bland, almost antiseptic. None of the older people Al had tentatively approached would talk to him either. Hear no evil, see no evil.
So things might've remained had it not been for one of Al's Muggle friends, Steve Jacobs. If he couldn't get any information from the magical world, the Muggle one was chalk full of stuff. Finding a whole subsection of society that had remained hidden for hundreds of years was big news. And in Steve's garage one day, when they were out looking for comics to read, Al noticed a pile of boxes stuffed under the shelving units on one side.
"What're those?" Al asked, pointing at the bulging boxes.
"Aw, those are boring. Just old newspapers and magazines. 'Bout the war 'n stuff," Steve said, shooting a disinterested glance at the mildewy pile.
"Mind if I have a look?"
"Sure. I'll find the comics."
Al remembered, at the end of second year, Professor Karen Smith (whom all the kids called Professor Bunny because of her big ears) telling them about what she called finding YOUR GREAT INTEREST.
"It comes all at once," Professor Bunny had said, striding across the classroom, talking with her hands and her ears standing out from the side of her head. "Like a key turning in a lock or falling in love for the first time. That's why picking the right electives is so important, children- you might find YOUR GREAT INTEREST." And then she went on to tell them about her own GREAT INTEREST, which was not teaching children, but collecting sixteenth century gravestone rubbings.
At the time, Al had thought old Professor Bunny was full of hippogriff spit, but that day in Stevie's garage, he wondered if maybe she hadn't been right after all.
It had been raining at the time, the wind blowing in great whooping gasps against the loosely fitted windows of the garage. Al remembered everything about that day. The smell of the air, redolent of motor oil and sawdust from the floor, and the cleaner scent of the rainy day being forced through the cracks in the windows. Stevie's cowlick sticking up at the back, his shirt, with a splotch of grape jelly on the front from their sandwiches earlier. He remembered everything.
And by the time Stevie had found the comics, Al had been lost—totally lost.
It's like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time.
It had been like that. Al had known a little bit about the war, but only a little bit. He knew Voldemort wanted to rule everything and that he had killed a lot of people, and others like his father had fought against him. He even knew a little bit about the camps that had been set up, and that because of the war magicals and Muggles now lived in somewhat uneasy peace.
The difference between what he knew and what had been in the magazines and newspapers was like the difference between intellectually knowing about magic and actually learning how to use it.
Here was Dolores Umbridge. Here were magically fired crematoriums with their doors standing ajar on soot-crusted hinges. Here were wizards in Death Eater uniforms and prisoners in paper uniforms. The smell of the magazines was old and pulpy. He turned the pages, no longer in Stevie Jacobs's garage but caught somewhere in time, trying to wrestle with the idea that someone had actually done those things, that someone had let them do those things, and his head ached with a mixture of revulsion and excitement, and his eyes felt hot and strained, and then beneath a picture of tangled bodies at a place called Lockwood, a figure jumped out at him:
60,000
And he thought: That can't be right, somebody goofed there, somebody maybe added a zero or two, that's almost the entire population of magicals in the British Isles!
But in another magazine (this one had a picture on the cover of a guy in a Death Eater uniform approaching a woman chained to a wall with a branding iron in his hand and a grin on his face), he saw that number again:
60,000.
His headache worsened and his mouth went dry. As though from a hundred miles away, he heard Stevie say he had to go in for supper. Al asked if he could stay and read some more. Stevie, looking puzzled, said sure. And Al stayed there, hunched over the boxes of old newspapers and magazines and read, until his mother called and asked if he was ever coming home.
Like a key turning in a lock.
All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But the stories were continued at the back, and they were surrounded by ads selling Death Eater uniforms and banners, fake wands and t-shirts emblazoned with the Death Eater insignia, and Voldemort action figures. They said it was bad, but it seemed an awful lot of people must not mind.
Like falling in love.
Oh yes, he remembered that day very well. He remembered everything—a yellowing calendar on the back wall of the garage, the way the shadows fell on the dirt floor, the sound of life going on inside the house. He remembered thinking: I want to know about everything that happened in those places. Everything. And I want to know which is more true—the words, or the ads they put beside the words.
He remembered Professor Bunny as he pushed the boxes back under the shelving and thought: She was right. I've found my GREAT INTEREST.
Snape looked at Al for a long time, unable to analyse the dreamy, slightly nostalgic expression on the boy's face. Then he crossed the room and sank heavily into the old wooden rocker by the window.
"Yeah, it was the magazines that got me interested, but I figured a lot of what was in there might've been, you know, exaggerated. So I went to the library and found even more stuff. Some of it was even neater. My parents gave me an adult library card for my birthday last year, so I didn't have any problem finding books. There must've been a hundred books about the Death Eater camps right there in the Godric's Hollow library. Guess a lot of people like reading about that stuff. There weren't as many pictures as in the mags, but it was still pretty neat. Spiked collars to turn magic against you. Poisons that came out of the showers. You guys really went overboard, you know it?" Al shook his head. "You really did."
"I did a research paper last year, too. And guess what I got on it?" An O plus. Of course, I had to write it a certain way. You got to be careful."
"Do you?" Snape asked. He took another cigarette with a trembling hand.
"Oh yeah. All those books, they were written like the guys who wrote them got sick over what they were writing about." Al was frowning, wrestling with the thought. The fact that tone, as that word is applied to writing, wasn't a part of his vocabulary, made the task more difficult. "They all wrote like we had to make sure nothing like that ever happened again. I made my paper like that and I guess the history teacher gave me the O plus 'cause I didn't get sick just reading the source material." Al smiled his wide smile again.
Snape dragged heavily on his cigarette and coughed an old man's dank, hollow cough. "I hardly believe this conversation is taking place." He leaned forward and peered intently at Al. "Boy, do you know the meaning of the word 'existentialism'?"
Al ignored the question. "Did you ever meet Dolores Umbridge?"
"Dolores Umbridge?" Almost inaudibly, Snape said: "Yes, I met her."
Al looked up eagerly. "Was she beautiful? I mean…" his hands described an hour glass shape in the air.
Snape drew some more on his cigarette. "Surely you have seen her photograph? An aficionado such as yourself?"
"What's an af… af…?"
"An aficionado," Snape answered, "is one who has … who has found their GREAT INTEREST, as you put it."
"Oh." Al smiled again. "Sure I've seen her pic. But you know how they are in those books." He spoke as though Snape had them all. "Blurry, black and white, mostly just snapshots. None of those guys knew they were taking pictures for, you know, history. Was she really stacked?"
"She was fat, dumpy and looked like a toad," Snape said with some distaste. He butted out his cigarette in an ashtray in the shape of a fish.
"Oh, darn," Al said disappointedly.
"Just my luck," Snape mused, lighting a fresh cigarette. "You saw my picture in a magazine and recognised me on the bus. Gah." He slammed his hand on the arm of his chair with disgust, but little force.
"No sir, Mr Snape. There was a lot more to it than that," Al said earnestly.
"Oh? Really?" Snape's bushy eyebrows rose in polite disbelief.
"Oh yeah. The pictures of you in my scrapbook are all at least thirty years old. I mean, it is 2030."
"You keep a … a scrapbook?"
"Yes, sir. It's a great one, got over a hundred pictures. I'll show it to you sometime. You'll love it."
Snape's face pulled into a revolted grimace, but he said nothing.
"First couple times I saw you, I wasn't sure. Then one day you got on the bus when it was raining, and you had this big black slicker on—"
"That," Snape breathed.
"Sure. It wasn't exactly a Death Eater robe, but it billowed behind you in the same shape your robes used to do. So I saw that, and I thought to myself, 'it's for sure. That's Severus Snape'. So I started shadowing you."
"You did what?"
"I shadowed you. Followed you. I want to be a detective or a hit wizard when I grow up. I was super careful, didn't want you to get wise. Want to see some pictures?"
Al took a folded envelope out of his back pocket. Sweat had folded the flap down, and he peeled it back carefully. His eyes were shining like a boy thinking about Christmas, or his birthday, or the fireworks he will shoot off on Guy Fawkes Day.
"You took pictures of me?"
"Oh yeah. I got a cell phone. No magical cameras can be used for surveillance. All that magic and they still make a racket." Al shook his head in disappointment." "Anyway, I took pics on my phone and printed them out at home. Not like the old days when you had to develop them in a darkroom."
Al handed Snape several prints, their paper indicating they had been printed rather than developed. Snape went through them, silently grim. Here he was sitting on the bus, holding a copy of The Casual Vacancy in his hands. Here he was, standing in the produce aisle of the local Asda, frowning over some corncobs. Here he was, standing in line at the theatre, conspicuous by his height and bearing among the blank faced teenagers and housewives. And finally, here he was getting the mail out of his own mailbox.
"I was worried you might see me on that one," Al said. "I was right across the street. Crikey, I wish I could afford a camera with a telephoto lens. One of these days." Al looked wistful.
"You no doubt had a story ready."
"I was going to ask if you'd seen my dog. Anyway, after I finished those, I compared them to these."
He handed Snape three photos, run off at the library's Xerox machine. Snape recognised all of them. The first one showed him in his office at the Brecon Resettlement Camp. It had been cropped so the only things showing were Snape himself and the Death Eater flag in its stand by his desk. The second one showed a picture of him, just after he had joined the Hogwarts staff. And the last one showed him shaking hands with Lucius Malfoy; it had been taken after the assassination of John Major, a security camera still.
"I was pretty sure then, but I couldn't take any chances. I had to be one hundred percent certain it was you. So I got this."
He handed Snape the last paper in his envelope. It had been folded many times; dirt was ground into the creases. The corners were chewed and frayed looking—the way papers get when they spend a lot of time in the pockets of young boys with lots of places to go and things to do. It was a copy of the MBO want sheet on Severus Snape. Holding it in his hand, Snape reflected on corpses that were unquiet and refused to stay buried.
"I took your fingerprints. And then I compared them to the ones on the sheet," Al said, smiling. "With computers, it's a snap these days."
Snape gaped at him. "You did not!"
"Sure I did. I got a fingerprint set for Christmas. A real one, not just a toy. It even came with an ALS."
"A what?"
"Alternative light source," Al said. "The book that came with the kit explained all about whorls and lands and points of similarity. They're called compares, and you need ten good compares to stand up in court.
"So anyway, one day while you were out shopping I came here and dusted your door knob and mailbox and got all the prints I could. Pretty smart, huh?"
Snape said nothing. He was clutching the arms of his chair tightly and his mouth was quivering. It looked as though he might burst into tears. That, of course, was ridiculous, though. The Potions-Fiend of Lockwood, in tears? You might as well expect Gringotts to hand out free gold or the Canons to finally win the league.
"I scanned them into the computer and got two sets. The first one didn't match anything on the sheet, so I figured it was the postman. And the last set was a perfect match, and it was you. And that's how I did it."
"You are a little bastard," Snape said, and there was a hard gleam in his eye all of a sudden. Al felt a tingling thrill, as he had in the hallway. Then Snape slumped back again.
"Whom have you told, boy?"
"No one at all."
"Not even this friend? This Kevin Jacobson?"
"Stevie. Stevie Jacobs. Nah, he's a bit of a loudmouth. There's nobody I trust that much."
"What do you want, then? Money? There is none, I'm afraid. In America there was, although it wasn't as romantic as you no doubt imagine. No drug dealing or human trafficking. There is—there was—a sort of good old boy network in the United States and Canada and Mexico. Sympathisers from the war. The Dark Lord's influence stretched globally, you know. I joined their circle and did rather well. They played the Muggle stock market and I picked up some and did rather well in commodities and minerals. But then I had to leave in a hurry. The MBO men almost got me; twice I heard the Muggle bastards in the next room.
"They found the Lestranges, you know," he almost whispered, his hand going to his neck. Now his eyes were as round as those of a child listening to the darkest passages of a scary tale— "Bluebeard," perhaps. "They were old and of no danger to anyone. Still, they hanged them."
Al nodded. It was big news when they were found, hiding in Istanbul.
"Finally I couldn't run any more. I went to the Mafia. Bought a set of false papers. They had connections here in the right departments. My identification is real enough. For all intents and purposes, I am Archibald Craven. Would you care for a drink, boy?"
"Sure. Got any Cola?"
"No Cola."
"Milk?"
"Milk." Snape got up and headed into the kitchen. A fluorescent bar buzzed into life. "I live now on new stock dividends," his voice came floating back, echoing off the walls. "Stocks I picked up once I returned here. A little British Telecom, a little IBM, some British Petroleum."
Al heard a cupboard door open and close, the sound of glasses clunking onto a counter. "Lucky the Mafia did not know about those stocks," Snape continues. "Else they would've sent me here to live off the dole."
Al heard a refrigerator door open and close.
"I dared not access money from Gringotts. I still have a vault in there, you know. But I found out that even the goblins have agents working for the MBO."
Al heard liquid poured into a glass, and then the refrigerator open and close again. Snape shuffled back into the room, his slippers whispering. He was carrying two chipped plastic glasses that looked as though they had come from a consignment shop. He thrust one at Al.
"I lived reasonably well on the portfolio for the first five years I was here. Then I sold some of the British Telecom stocks to buy this house, some of the British Petroleum to buy a small cottage in Caithness. Then, inflation, recession. I sold the cottage and one by one I sold the stocks. I wish to God I had bought more…" he made a toothless whistling sound.
Al was bored. He had not come here to listen to Snape whine about his money or mutter about his lost stocks. The thought of blackmailing the man never crossed his mind. Money? What would he do with it? He had his allowance and, should his monetary needs in any given week exceed that, there was always someone who needed his lawn mowed, or leaves raked, or driveway shovelled.
Al lifted his milk glass to his lips … and hesitated. His smile shown out, an admiring smile this time. "You have some of it," he said slyly, holding out the glass to Snape.
Snape looked uncomprehending. Then he rolled his bloodshot eyes and took the glass from Al. "Christ." He swallowed twice from it. No gasping for breath. No smoke coming out of his eyes or ears. No clawing at the throat. "It is milk, boy. Milk. From the Bates Dairy."
Al watched him for a moment, took the glass back and had a small sip. Tasted like milk, sure did, but he still somehow wasn't reassured and seemed to have lost his thirst. The spectre of Dumbledore danced behind his eyes. He put the glass down.
Snape shrugged and took a gulp from his own glass. He smacked his lips with relish.
"Firewhisky?"
"Regular whisky. Highland Black. Very nice. And cheap."
Al said nothing. He fiddled his fingers along the seams of his jeans.
"So," Snape said, "if you have come with extortion in mind, you should be aware that—"
But Al was laughing—hearty, boyish laughter. He shook his head, tried to speak, could not, and kept laughing.
"No," Snape said, and he now looked more frightened than at any time since he and Al had begun speaking. He had another large gulp from his drink, grimaced, and shuddered. "I see that is not it … at least, not the extortion of money. But, though you laugh, I smell extortion somewhere. What is it? Why do you come here and disturb an old man? Perhaps, as you say, I was once a Death Eater. But I have not used magic in better than twenty years, nor have I made a potion in almost as long; I do not even own a wand anymore. I am very nearly a Muggle these days—magic withers up and dies if you don't use it, you know. I am just another old man. So why do you come here and disturb me now?"
Al, having sobered finally, looked at Snape with an open, appealing frankness. "Why, I want to hear about it. That's all I want. Really."
"Hear about it?" Snape echoed. He looked utterly baffled.
Al leaned forward, tanned elbows on blue jeans clad knees. "Yeah. The ovens. The executions. The way they had to dig their own graves by hand. The potions that came out of the showers. The…" His tongue came out, wetting his lips. "The examinations. The experiments. All of it."
Snape was staring at Al with a certain amazed detachment, the way one might stare at something disgusting which has crawled out of a drain. "You are a monster," he said softly.
Al sniffed. "According to the books I read, you're the monster, Mr Snape. Two thousand a day at Brecon before you came, twenty-five hundred after you got there and before the Order caught up and made you stop. You sent them to the ovens, not me. You gave them all those potions, not me. And you call me a monster."
"All of that is a filthy Muggle lie," Snape said, stung. He slammed his glass down on the table beside him, sloshing cheap whisky onto his hands. "The problem was not of my making, nor was the solution. I was given orders and directives, which I followed."
Al's smile widened into almost a smirk.
"Oh, I know how that sounds. Just what the Nazis said after World War II," Snape muttered. "I had a little more sympathy for them, given my own position. One does not argue with madmen, especially when the maddest of them all had the luck of Satan. He escaped a brilliant assassination attempt by inches … and then he had the culprits rounded up and executed in the most gruesome fashion in front of all of us. One either runs with the wind or one stands against it and gets knocked down, boy. If I had not followed orders, I would be dead."
Al ignored most of this. He wasn't interested in Snape's politics any more than he was interested in Snape's money. His idea was that people made up politics so they could do things. Like when he wanted to feel around under Rose Weasley's sweater a few weeks ago. She hadn't wanted to let him, although he could tell from the tone of her voice and the blush on her cheeks that she was sort of excited by the idea. So he told her he wanted to be a healer when he grew up, and then she let him. That was politics. Politics was just the shiny on-top reasons people made up to rationalize when they got caught. He wanted to hear about Death Eater experimenters trying to mate Muggles with unicorns, and about seeing how long magic could keep you alive while being locked in a magically isolated room with no food or water, and seeing the effect unicorn blood had on Muggles, and Death Eaters raping all the women they wanted. The rest was just so much tired hippogriff spit to cover up all the messy stuff when someone caught them and put a stop to it.
"If I had not followed orders, I would've been dead," Snape repeated. His upper body was rocking back and forth in the chair. A cloud of cheap whisky smell hung around him. "For that time and place, it was the right thing. I would do it again. But…"
His cloudy eyes dropped to his glass. It was empty.
"But I do not wish to speak of it, or even think of it. For many years I had dreams …" He took a cigarette slowly from the box and lit it, dragging deep. "Blackness and sounds in the blackness. Screams … and footsteps coming closer, made by something or someone I could not see. The sound of liquid that might've been blood or rain running down a hard surface. And then eyes, eyes shining out of the blackness would open and gleam, like small animals in the rain forest. I spent a lot of time in southern Mexico, you know. That is why I so often see the jungle in these dreams. When I woke from these dreams, I would be drenched with sweat and my heart thundering in my chest, my fist stuffed into my mouth to stifle the screams. And I would think: The work must go on so that there is no evidence of what we did here, so that the world would not have to believe it. The work must go on so that we could survive."
Al listened to this closely and with great interest. This was pretty good, but he was sure there would be a lot better in the days to come.
Snape dragged on his cigarette again, the smoke raftering on the still air of the room. "Later after the dreams went away, I would sometimes see people I thought I recognized from Lockwood or Brecon. Never Death Eaters or guards, always inmates. One time I was in Hoboken, New Jersey. If there is a nastier town than Hoboken, New Jersey on the east coast of the United States, boy, I don't know it. There was a traffic jam on the Garden State Parkway. I was driving a very old Plymouth Fury, and next to me was an equally old Cadillac. There was an old man in there, and he was looking at me. He was perhaps fifty, and he looked ill. The minutes passed, and Every time I looked over, he was watching me. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, and he was watching me. I became convinced that he had been at Brecon, and that he had recognised me. Many of the old prisoners did after all leave Britain. Every time I saw him watching me, I became more convinced."
Snape rubbed a hand over his face, producing a thin rasping sound.
"At last the traffic moved, and I pulled away from the Cadillac. If the jam had lasted another five minutes, I would've beaten the old man, whether or not he was an inmate. I would have beaten him for looking at me that way.
"Shortly after that, I left the United States. I came here, under a new identity. I had plastic surgery, did you know that?"
"Yeah. Your nose is a little smaller and your face is shaped differently than the old staff photos."
"Correct. I came here, and I eat out once a week at one of those fast food restaurants which are so clean and well-lighted by fluorescent bars. I go to movies. Here at my house I do crossword and jigsaw puzzles and I read novels—most of them bad ones—and I watch the telly. At night I drink until I am sleepy. And when I see someone looking at me in the supermarket or the library or the tobacconist's, I think that I must remind them of their departed grandfather, or a favoured teacher." He shook his head at Al. "What ever happened at Brecon or Lockwood or Aldershot, it happened to another man. Not me."
"Great," Al said. "I want to hear all about it."
Snape's reddened eyes squeezed closed, and then opened slowly. "You don't understand. I do not wish to speak of it."
"You will, though. If you don't, I'll turn you in. My father, 'specially, would love to know you're here."
"I knew I would find the extortion somewhere," Snape muttered. He stared at Al, Grey-faced.
"Today I want to hear about the ovens. How you tried to cook the magic out of them." His smile beamed out, radiant, expectant.
Snape did as he was told. He talked to Al about the ovens until Al had to go home for lunch. Snape drank a great deal as he talked. He did not smile. Al smiled. Al smiled enough for both of them.