The following scenes occur in November 1981.
SCENE && Hide! Hide!
His mind, heart, and breathing refused to calm down as Peter Pettigrew apparated again – his fourth blind leap since blasting the gas lines to kill the muggles and Sirius Black. Nothing had gone right since that night! Nothing!
'Everyone will try to kill me, now,' he knew. 'The Death Eaters will blame me for getting the Dark Lord killed. Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix will blame me for killing James, Lily, little Harry, and Sirius.'
The wizard transformed into his human form after leaving the sewers but didn't bother to clear away the filth and smell that clung to his rat form. The muggles he passed on the street moved away, not because of his strange clothes but because of the stench and matter clinging to those robes. Peter made his way around several large buildings, finally finding an empty dumpster where he climbed inside, pulled the lid closed, and in the darkness, calmed down and finally fell asleep.
When he woke, it was night again, so he apparated back to London, turned into his rat form, and snuck into Diagon Alley. The street was littered with confetti and newspapers – the rat found a copy of the Daily Prophet that proclaimed the demise of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named at the hand of the Boy-Who-Lived. In the darkness, with no one around, Peter turned back into his human form to read the newspaper underneath a lamppost.
'Harry lived? Little Harry lived?' Peter thought as he read the Daily Prophet with fear and disbelief. 'Sirius is alive! Wait…they threw him into Azkaban! I'm saved!'
The rat-Animagus sat on a bench, his stomach rumbling as a reminder that he needed to eat. The wizard folded the newspaper and secreted it inside a pocket before returning to the shape of the common, brown rat. Food was easier to come by in the rat form – insects, scraps, and dead animals.
Over the next week, the rat hid in the alley, reading the Daily Prophet and gathering his courage to act in some form or another. There was an article about his death at the hands of Sirius Black, the Dark Lord's right-hand man, and how his mother was awarded a third-class Order of Merlin in his name.
'Should I come forward? No, there'd be too many questions. Remus might be lurking, and Dumbledore will invade my mind like always,' Peter argued internally. Then he had an even more terrible thought. 'And what if the Dark Lord isn't dead? He claimed to be immortal now. Said every day that he couldn't be killed!'
Sitting in a dark, damp hole in the wall, Peter-rat thought about the Dark Lord's claims to be immortal; for an entire night, while he dined on stale biscuits thrown out of the Leaky Cauldron, Peter remembered Lord Voldemort's tales of his efforts to live forever. Fearful of the Dark Lord's temper, Peter decided that he would be the first Death Eater called before the Dark Lord and punished for failure.
'But how was it my fault that Little Harry had some secret power to kill the Dark Lord?' Peter mourned in his mind. 'Nothing is ever fair!'
About two hours before dawn, Peter ventured out of his hiding place and into a lighted corner of the alley. There were goblins on the steps leading to Gringotts Bank, but there were no wizards or witches in the alley. Bank customers from Knockturn Alley ventured across Diagon Alley and into Gringotts at this time of night, but with the smell still clinging to Peter's robes, the vampires, werewolves, and hags would keep their distance.
Searching through his pockets, Peter found his wand, the Dark Lord's wand, the money bag he'd lifted from the corpse of James Potter, and the book he'd stolen from Lucius Malfoy a week ago.
CHANGE && Death Eater Meeting before Halloween 1981
There'd been a meeting with the Dark Lord, who was in a foul mood because no one could discover the location of the Potters or the Longbottom family. For some reason, the Dark Lord was determined to kill both families. Lucius had been unable to discover any information at the Ministry for Magic that might reveal the locations of the two couples. In his anger, the Dark Lord punished the proud wizard by casting the Cruciatus curse until Lucius fell unconscious.
"Move him to a closet, Wormtail!" the Dark Lord ordered. "Get him out of my sight!"
Levitating the comatose Malfoy into an empty closet off the hallway leading to the ballroom of his own manor house, Peter closed the door behind him, cast luminous, and proceeded to loot Malfoy's pockets of galleons, potion bottles, and every other item. But Peter was intelligent enough to leave the potions that would give Malfoy relief from the Cruciatus curse and the resulting headache and body pains. He also left most of the galleons. But there was a book with spells that did not have protections on it.
'Fool!' Pettigrew sneered as he stuffed the book with a dozen galleons into a pocket. He'd been gone long enough and must reappear in the ballroom – another Death Eater would be cursed by the Dark Lord, and Peter might get to pocket a few galleons from that wizard as well.
SCENE && Back In Diagon Alley, November 1981
Now, under the light of the streetlamp, Peter looked at the contents of the book.
'Taboo on a name or word,' he read. 'So, there was a spell to place the taboo on Lord Voldie's name.'
Peter wasn't brave enough to say the Dark Lord's full name – some Death Eater assigned to investigate such an utterance might appear and recognize him. After placing a glamour on his face, Peter entered the Leaky Cauldron to purchase a bag of day-old bread, meat, and cheese. He'd retreat to a dark corner to eat and think. Then as dawn approached, the rat returned to his hole for another day of sleeping and dreaming.
It took ten days for Peter to make his way through the spell book as he studied the spell. He thought he understood the spell and the parameters required to cast it to achieve the desired results. One of the first things he learned was that the taboo ended when the wizard who cast the spell died. Everyone was safe from the Death Eaters who responded to the words, 'Lord Voldemort.'
Peter found himself writing in the margins on pages and to record his thoughts later in the book. He wrote about taking the dark mark, how you had to freely take the mark, and then you discovered the Dark Lord was a cruel task master who punished his followers when he stubbed his toe on the stairs. Pettigrew wrote that he wished the child had died with his parents – the reward promised to him by the Dark Lord had been his choice of muggleborn girls twice a year for the remainder of his life.
And when he thought about the taboo spell, Peter decided to renew the taboo on the name 'Lord Voldemort' as well as the sobriquet 'He Who Must Not Be Named.' The consequence of saying the name would be that the speaker would feel 'fear.' Smiling, Peter decided, 'No one would forget the Dark Lord and his reign of terror, so if…when the dark lord returns, things will be the same.'
He continued to study the spell and the wand movements, thinking about the number of words required and how much of his magic would be used.
Peter read Malfoy's notes about Voldemort tiring of the locations of speakers constantly appearing in his mind. The dark lord manipulated the spell to direct the information to another person - Regulus Black. After a few days, Regulus grew tired of the constant thoughts and created modifications for the spell. The young wizard could turn it on and off, and how to move it to different Death Eaters.
Then young Regulus Black became creative and figured out how to cast the spell to create a feeling in the spell caster or in the targeted person. Lucius wrote that he planned to use the spell to create nightmares in the designated person. Then Malfoy wrote about the Dark Lord's anger when Regulus Black suddenly disappeared. The journal reported that Bellatrix visited Orion and Walburga Black and learned that Regulus had not only vanished, but he was also dead.
Lucius recorded two failures to cast the taboo – he did not properly prepare himself or his magic for the casting. Reading the notes, Peter realized, 'It'll wear me out for at least three days if I cast the taboo. I can't change back into Wormtail and would have to hide in Diagon Alley as a wizard for three days. I'll have to go out in muggle land to hide as a man. I'll need shelter and food.'
In his planning, Peter knew he couldn't use the Imperious curse to force someone to help him – the spell fell away after a couple of days – at least when Peter cast it on someone magical or muggle. The wizard slipped out of the alley and into the muggle world as a rat. In the shadows around muggle bars and cafes, he used the Imperious curse to steal money from the muggles and cursed himself for never paying attention to Lily's discussions about those things called credit cards.
With pockets full of stolen pound notes, Peter cast spells to clean his robes, ate in a muggle restaurant, and then paid for five nights in a relatively clean, private room in a seedy hotel near Diagon Alley. He cast his wards around the room and hallway to hide his presence from malicious muggles (there were plenty of them about). After a good night's sleep and a large breakfast at the same restaurant (Peter cast notice-me-not after receiving his food), the wizard plotted the taboo he wanted to cast.
In his shabby hotel room, near enough to Diagon Alley to hide his use of magic, Peter Pettigrew built the foundation of the spell to place the taboo on the names of the Dark Lord again. It took multiple hours for the less than robust wizard to cast the spells that identified the names to be in the taboo, identify the speaker to be the recipient of the emotion of fear, and tie the taboo to Peter's life force.
Once the spell was complete, Peter drank some beer and chewed on some bread and meat before falling into bed to sleep for more than 36 hours.
CHANGE && Around Magical Britain
In the weeks following 31 October 1981, the euphoria at the ending of the insurrection by the Death Eaters and their Dark Lord faded away but people found their fear of Lord Voldemort remained. Even when they mentioned 'He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,' they felt the same fear as before the night the Dark Lord was killed.
The Unspeakables and goblins were disturbed by the continuation of the fear, but everyone else simply refused to speak the names, hopeful the fear would fade away.
SCENE END