Chapter 21

FIELD TRIP

"Tom? I don't think your Cat Repelling Charm is working very well," Ron said grumpily. "I haven't seen Scabbers all week. I think Hermione's cat has finally eaten him."

"Don't you dare accuse Crookshanks!" Hermione objected. "You've no proof!"

"Oh, I don't? I've still got marks on my scalp from that one time the bloody cat scraped me while trying to get Scabbers!"

"Your rat is not at Hogwarts anymore," I intervened before Hermione replied in anger. "I'm afraid I can't tell you the whole truth, but I assure you, he's in good health."

"Huh? What's this secrecy about Scabbers? I think I've got the right to know!"

"I found out that Scabbers was fatally ill and took him to London for proper treatment," I lied. "I didn't want to give you hope in case he couldn't be saved. Fully healed Scabbers would've been a merry surprise for you."

"You just said he was in good health!"

"Well, good compared to the alternative. He's already much better than he was before." (That was not a lie. Peter Pettigrew had already regained some of his lost weight after Dobby had pampered him with food and restorative potions.)

"I didn't know you were so concerned about Scabbers," Harry said, frowning.

"He is, after all, the test subject of my Cat Repelling Charm. The spell has worked for a few months now, and I don't want to start all over again with a new rat. Once you craft some spells of your own, you will understand." I smiled and nodded in a way that I hoped to be older-brotherly.

The children left me alone after a while, but I could tell that Ron was going pester me again about his pet. At least I had not needed to use any mind affecting spells to control them. My Slytherin perfectionism considered mind spells cheating in social interactions. A real Slytherin should be able to navigate past all social reefs without needing to soften the wits of others. If I could not outsmart school children, how could I ever outsmart the likes of Dumbledore who could not be Confunded?

Dobby Side-Along-Apparated me to my house in Diagon Alley with a crashing noise. Peter Pettigrew fell from his chair with a pathetic yelp and spilled his milkshake all over himself.

"Confundo. Obliviate," I cast as I did every time. Pettigrew did not deserve to be aware of my way through the Hogwarts wards.

"You'll be happy to know that your master is concerned about your whereabouts," I told him once he had returned to his senses.

"M-my m-master?" he stuttered with his eyes wide. "I-I dunno what you're talking about…"

"Ronald Weasley," I snarled. "Already forgotten him?"

"Ah, Ron!" he exclaimed in relief. "No, no… I was just… uh, so foolish of me!"

Sometimes I could not shake the feeling that Pettigrew was hiding something. Or then my Obliviations, Memory Modifying Charms, and Confundus Charms had somehow further damaged his already ailing mind. One could never be certain about those with mental disorders. Perhaps mind spells affected them differently. Interrogating him with Veritaserum would have to wait at least until I had no more use for him.

"I've been studying to become an Animagus," I said. "My progress has been slow, because I've had so much else to do. There are still many things I've not caught on. You will help me overcome these final obstacles."

"Anything, I'll be happy to help," Pettigrew said, trying to sound sweet.

He turned out to be a horrible teacher. Some things he had to explain ten times before I understood what he was trying to say. My paranoid side suggested into consideration that he knew I would become a less hospitable host once I had got what I wanted from him, and that he deliberately taught me poorly. It was also possible that living as a rat had changed his brains over time. Since hexing him would probably not have worked, I gritted my teeth and tried to temper my frustration. When I finally returned to Hogwarts, I was not an Animagus yet, and Pettigrew had strict orders to organize his thoughts and prepare meticulously for our next session.

The 1st of April, 1994, was Good Friday.

There was going to be a performance of St Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach in St Paul's Cathedral that evening, and I was to attend. It would be the final victory over his past by the poor orphan who had wandered the streets of London and enviously looked at those who had the fortune of being immersed in high culture. At present I was rich, I was a wizard, and I was respected by most of those who knew me, feared by those whose interests crossed mine, and even liked by some people. I had triumphed over poverty, hunger, and hopelessness. I had almost triumphed over apathy, bitterness, and other enemies originating in my own soul. I was about to triumph over death, just like Christ whose Passion I was about to witness through music.

But first I would have to go through my own Passion.

Research about my family had led me to the village of Little Hangleton in Yorkshire. I had stood for a long time in the graveyard, looking at the imposing tombstone that marked the last resting place of one Tom Riddle. He, like his parents, had died in the summer of 1943, just a few weeks after I had been trapped in the diary, and the cause of death had been a total mystery to the Muggles. The doctors who had performed the autopsy had stumbled upon a riddle, the final piece to complete the puzzle. I knew that the riddle was magic wielded by another Tom Riddle… but that Tom Riddle was not me. He was the shadow of me.

I wondered what had happened that day. Voldemort had come to this place in search for knowledge about his origins. He had found the man after whom we had been named and killed him in cold blood. Why? Was it something he had learned about our father? I had felt great resentment towards the man who had apparently abandoned my mother before my birth, but I had not planned or even fantasized about murdering him as revenge. The past could not be corrected.

The house of the Riddles was a handsome one; my paternal family had been rich. Was that the reason the pure-blood heiress of Salazar Slytherin from the impoverished family of Gaunt had stooped so low that she had married Tom Riddle the Muggle? Wealth in exchange for abandoning the honour of a pure-blood family? It had been quite common in the Muggle world when the social hierarchy of the three estates had broken down and many noble but poor families had formed matrimonial bonds with wealthier bourgeois families. Well, I preferred my existence over the honour of one family, so I was not going to complain.

However, Voldemort could have inherited the house and the lands if he had just made peace with our paternal family. It would have freed him from the orphanage for at least a few weeks. But instead he had killed them. Had something gone awfully wrong in the family reunion, or was the massacre the first sign of his short-sighted madness the creation of a Horcrux had caused? I would probably never know.

The humid climate of England had been rough to the house of my ancestors; it was probably mouldy and in the need of total renovation. The gardener who lived in a humble cottage took care of the garden, but the house was left to decay. Its gloomy silhouette looked over the village like some kind of monument to Voldemort's early steps on the bleak road to darkness.

I had learned that a wealthy Muggle man had purchased the house, but had never lived in it. As I walked in the musty hallways, I thought about purchasing the house myself. I could restore the house to greatness and take my rightful place as the nobleman of those parts. It would be transformed into a magical court of the most powerful wizard of Britain and the entire world.

But that would have to wait. Both Dumbledore and Voldemort might pay attention to me being interested in the house where the latter's paternal family had lived. They needed to be dealt with before I could abandon the false identity of Tom Valedro.

The villagers of Little Hangleton were simple folk who would probably have considered the appearance of a stranger the sensation of the year. Careful not to leave any memories of my visit, I moved under the Disillusionment Charm and gathered information from the villagers with Legilimency. There had long been a local legend about the freaky family of Gaunt who had lived outside the village, but only the oldest villagers remembered any of the visits of "the Gaunt troll." When scanning the memories of an old man, I saw vague and blurry images of a raging drunken man with a huge, unkempt beard. The old man was quite sure it was the last time "the Gaunt troll" had visited the pub in the village, and it had happened sometime in the mid or late twenties. Then the fearsome brute had mysteriously disappeared, but some villagers had claimed to have seen him as late as in the early forties, downcast and muttering to himself. After that the Gaunts had only appeared in the local folklore.

So, that had been my maternal family of pure-blood wizards. Comparing these stories of the Gaunt family to the elegance of the Riddle house might make even the Malfoys doubt the pure-blood supremacist dogmas.

When I tried to find information on where exactly the Gaunts had lived, I did not find any memories at all. I considered it a good thing, because it might have been caused by Voldemort using the Memory Charm, and he would not have used it without a reason. And so I mounted my Firebolt and went to fly over the forested valley next to the village. I had the Supersensory Charm on and I used the Revealing Charm on anything even slightly suspicious. I was beginning to get excited. There might be another Horcrux nearby!

I had visited the Ministry and rummaged the records about wizarding residences. Just like in the memories of the villagers, there was no mention about where the Gaunt family had lived; Voldemort had most likely removed also all documents about it. However, I had not been discouraged that easily. An old book about magical genealogy had given me quite exact information, pointing to the right direction.

Unfortunately, "quite exact information" by wizarding standards was not good enough. It served the purposes of investigating breaches in the Statute of Secrecy and of managing the Floo Network, not the purpose of finding old ruins from an overgrown thicket.

But there was another method of finding such places, a method Voldemort had certainly overlooked. I had visited Ordnance Survey, the British national mapping agency, and studied many Muggle maps of the Hangleton region from different eras. All maps from before the Second World War included a small square symbolizing a house in the middle of the forest. However, it had mysteriously disappeared after the terrain had been surveyed after the war. It could be just a coincidence, perhaps the house had just burned down and nature had reclaimed the site, but I suspected magical concealment.

There was a small road next to the location; or rather a path, because it was too narrow for a car. I halted above the path and began to determine my exact location from landmarks. After a few minutes I was sure I was flying right above the place where the small house should be according to the old maps.

But there was absolutely nothing interesting to be seen. Trees, bushes, rocks, fallen branches… the place looked exactly the same as the forest surrounding it. There was not any moss-covered foundations of a house, no remains of a path diverging from the larger path… nothing. The Revealing Charm had no effect, nor did any diagnostic spells.

In case I had made a mistake in determining the location, I mounted the Firebolt again and surveyed the surrounding area. After fifteen minutes I had returned to the same spot.

I was offered a challenge! Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, I closed my eyes and allowed my thoughts to wander. If the house or its ruins were magically hidden by Voldemort, how could a much less skilled wizard find any proof about it?

I had a clever idea. I walked to the path and faced the site that did not appear to be there. I waved my wand and conjured a small ball of light that stayed fixed in the air. Then I took thirty steps forward, conjured another ball of light, and turned to the right. The second ball of light was right next to me, the first one thirty steps to the right. I took thirty steps forward again, conjured the third ball of light, turned again to the right, and with thirty steps returned to the path. Once there, I conjured the fourth ball of light. They now marked a square in the middle of the forest, marking the alleged borders of the unseen site.

Next I positioned myself in the midway between the first and fourth balls of light and faced the forest. I took thirty steps forward, not looking left or right, crossing the distance without experiencing anything noteworthy. Once I stopped, I thought about the obvious hypothesis: I was standing in the midway between the second and third balls of light.

I turned to look. They were not straight to the left and the right from me, but behind me. Somehow, the thirty steps I had taken had moved me much further away from the path than they should have. Feeling excited, I faced the path again, and locked my eyes on the first ball of light as I took thirty steps. At one point the ball seemed to jump closer to me than it made sense.

That was the place after all. Voldemort had somehow folded reality around the house so that when I had approached it, I had somehow moved to the other side of it without noticing anything. The house was practically impossible to find without knowing it was there. Such concealment had to have a very good reason.

I mounted the Firebolt, rose above the trees, and pointed my wand towards the magical anomaly.

"Finite Incantatem," I said.

The General Counter-Spell shot from the tip of my wand, but then disappeared. I tried again and again, but apparently Voldemort's magical craftsmanship could not be simply dispelled, not that I had expected such an easy trick to work. It would have been beyond depressing.

This called for much expertise in Curse-Breaking. It was one of the most challenging professions in the wizarding world, equal to Aurors. Those Curse-Breakers who would be able to safely dismantle something which Voldemort had crafted were probably a hundred years old. Hiring help from such a person was out of the question. They would want answers, and if they found a Horcrux from the house Voldemort's ancestors had lived in, they would not give it to me. I would have to succeed on my own.

I had learned some Curse-Breaking techniques from the Kwikspell teachers, especially after I had found the Diadem, but most rudimentary skills were useless against Voldemort. But there was one advantage in the present situation. Usually Curse-Breakers had to work in small, confined spaces like catacombs and dungeons. They had to be careful when snipping the threads of curses and other magical protections, because any mistake might make the curse go off and incinerate everyone in the proximity. However, I had all the space in the world.

The most basic Curse-Breaking technique was the Blunt Triggering Spell, and it was as crude and undignified as a spell could possibly be. Using it in a catacomb would be a certain suicide. Curse-Breaking was in many ways similar to the Muggle profession of bomb disposal. The Blunt Triggering Spell was like disposing a bomb by detonating another bomb next to it: you would get rid of the bomb, yes, but by causing an even bigger explosion than the one you were afraid of in the first place.

I circled the hidden house in the air and used my Triggered Firing Charm to later shoot the Blunt Triggering Spells towards it. It was very tiresome, because the Blunt Triggering Spell required so much brute force. After casting twelve of them I felt my magic starting to ache like muscles after hard gymnastics. Then I flew away, until I was over a mile from the site. It was time for the show to begin.

The noise was like thunder, and the multi-coloured flashes of light were like the fireworks Fred and George had tossed around in the Room of Requirement as a distraction. One by one I launched the Blunt Triggering Spells, and each time a new burst of light and sound erupted from the middle of the forest.

Once it was over I returned to the site and extinguished all fires that had broken out. The house was still nowhere to be seen, but such a barrage of the Blunt Triggering Spells was sure to have made at least some impact. I tried a diagnostic charm, and it actually found some magic in the vicinity, although it could not tell in what form.

Breaking the concealment with the Blunt Triggering Spells might take all the magical power I had, but as there were some cracks for the diagnostic charm to notice something, I could continue using physical force. It was a method used commonly in the Middle Ages: wizard warlords had first weakened the magical defences of their enemies, and then their Muggle troops had finished the job using catapults and ballistae.

I chose one of the rocks on the ground for the purpose, one which was too heavy for me to move.

"Wingardium Leviosa," I cast and the rock rose into the air. I directed the Firebolt upwards and began a long ascend, letting the broom do the hard work of lifting the rock. I had to cast the Warming Charm on my cloak on the way to the cold and windy altitude of two miles. Once there, I could see the entirety of the Hangleton region spreading out all around me; I could even see the North Sea and Scarborough, the closest large town, to the East. Then I let the rock fall, but added still more force to the impact.

"Amplio Gravitas!" I yelled the incantation of the Gravity Amplifying Charm. It made my magic cry from exertion, but the rock plunged downwards with unbelievable speed as gravity suddenly affected it ten times stronger.

I nudged the rock a few times with my magic to make sure it fell on the right spot. The fall only lasted a few seconds, and then an almighty explosion flashed, only much later was heard in the heights. Fire erupted, lightning struck, the horrible form of an incandescent dragon raged… all of the remaining protections seemed to be dismantled in an instant.

When I reached the level of treetops, the forest around the site was on fire again. I had water poured all over the place and then stopped to marvel at the destruction I had caused. The remains of the house (or shack, rather) were now visible, but the falling rock and the breaking protections had blown everything up. My diagnostic charms assured me that the area around the ruin was safe, but the inside was still pulsing with magic.

After having had a bottleful of restorative potion I cleared the shack of curses with a few Blunt Triggering Spells. Then I conjured a shovel and charmed it to dig a hole in the middle of the ruin; a diagnostic charm told me there was something buried there. I flew impatiently in a circle above the ruin until the shovel unearthed a small gilded wooden box. Very, very carefully I opened it with a flick of my wand and peeked inside with a magical spyglass, barely daring to breathe.

There was a crude golden ring inside, and a black stone attached to it. A diagnostic charm told me that it, unlike the Diadem, was cursed with a deadly curse. After a few more probes I was convinced the ring held another soul fragment of Tom Riddle; the magical imprint was unmistakable.

Flying high in the air, I tried to break the curse with the Blunt Triggering Spell two times, but to no avail. It had to be such a sophisticated work of malice that it could withstand attempts to break it without putting the ring on a finger. Well, luckily for me, I was not the only person with fingers.

"Dobby," I called after descending to the ground.

Crack.

"Yes, Master Tom, sir!"

"I have an order for you," I said and the elf nodded enthusiastically. "Follow the order only after I say "now". Here's some cloth for you – no, it's not a piece of clothing! I need you to wrap it around that ring, but carefully. Make sure your skin does not touch the ring."

"Dobby understands, Master Tom, sir," the elf said, looking into the box with slight unease.

I mounted the Firebolt again and rose to a safe distance.

"Now!" I called.

Dobby followed my order, and nothing happened. My elf was safe and sound, but soon someone else would not be.

I could have chosen anyone to suffer the curse, but something, perhaps the slight compassion towards other people that I had learned from Ginny, made me choose carefully. And so it was a prison near London where I chose to go. I checked the memories of the prisoners with Legilimency, and that was how I found a psychopathic brute who had sold drugs to teenagers, beaten up more people than he could count, broken in to over twenty homes, blackmailed some other criminals, and finally murdered a police officer. He was just the right person for my purpose. He was alive only because the British Muggles were too soft and naive to cleanse their society of such scum with capital punishment. I would be doing a public service by being the executioner Muggles should have employed.

"Imperio," I said and threw a bundle of cloth onto the floor. "Count to ten, then open the bundle and put the ring on your finger."

I Apparated out of the prison. I paced for a minute which in my impatience seemed to last for an hour, waiting for an explosion that never happened. Then I hurried back inside and found a horrible sight in the cell.

Only the skeleton and charred remains of flesh were left of the murderer. The ring was on his finger, gleaming with malicious power. I could almost feel my fellow soul fragment enjoying himself.

"Innocents have been executed on Good Friday," I informed the skeleton. "You were not one of them."

A diagnostic charm told me that the deadly curse had lifted, but I did not let my guard down. I levitated the ring to the next cell and forced another murderer to wear it too. When I returned to the cell, he was still alive. The ring was now as harmless as a Horcrux could be.

I summoned Dobby again and told him to take the ring to my Gringotts vault, next to the Diadem. The day's excursion had been more successful than I had dared to hope.

Two found, three still to go.

Published on the 8th of February, 2020.