Chapter Four
The security task force wizard explained everything to me.
Throwers can ignore a ticking trunk. The security task force wizard, he called the goblin baggage handlers Throwers. Magical bombs don't tick. But a trunk that vibrates, the goblins, Throwers, have to call the Aurors.
How I came to live with Voldemort is because most Knight Buses have this policy about vibrating baggage.
My ride back from Dublin, I had everything in that one trunk. When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six black robes. Two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive.
Pocket sneakoscope.
Toothbrush.
Six pair underwear.
Six pair black socks.
It turns out, my trunk was vibrating on departure from Dublin, according to the security task force wizard, so the aurors brought it off the bus. Everything was in that trunk. My spare eyeglasses. One red tie with blue stripes. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie.
A list of all these things used to hang on the inside of my bedroom door at home.
Home was a closet in a Muggle house in little Surrey, an area without another wizard within miles. I had the closet expanded, so the interior was roughly twice the size of the house that contained it, magically protected to keep the Muggles out and my potion fumes in. A foot of charmed concrete and Air Filtration Potion, there weren't any windows to open, so all thirty thousand airtight feet would smell like the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom.
Yeah, and there were butcher block countertops and non-flammable candle lighting.
Still, a foot of charmed conrete is important when the Muggle brat upstairs decides to have an all-night party with a hundred of his closest friends. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas and debris that used to be your living room set and personal effects blows out the closet door, down the hall and through the back door to land on the gardenias in the back yard.
These things happen.
Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal elves of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture the floor-to-ceiling tapestries blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind.
In the middle of Muggle Central, this stuff comes flaming and bashing and down in my Aunt's back yard.
Me, while I'm heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83 or 455 miles an hour, true ground, the WBI is bomb-squading my trunk on a vacated parking lot back at Dublin. Nine times out of ten, the security task force wizard says, the vibration is a pocket sneakoscope. This was my pocket sneakoscope. The other time, it's a vibrating dildo.
The security task force wizard told me this. This was at my destination, without my trunk, where I was about to cab it home and find my flannel sheets shredded on the ground.
Imagine, the task force wizard says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it's even a man. It's airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article.
A dildo.
Never your dildo.
Never, ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.
A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required evacuating your baggage.
Rain was falling when I woke up for my connection in Liverpool.
Rain was falling when I woke up on our final approach to home.
An announcement told us to please take this opportunity to check around our seats for any personal belongings we might have left behind. Then the announcement said my name. Would I please meet with a Knight Bus representative waiting at the gate.
I set my watch back an hour, and it was still after midnight.
There was the Knight Bus representative at the gate, and there was the security task force wizard to say, ha, your pocket sneakoscope kept your checked trunk at Dublin. The task force wizard called the baggage goblins Throwers. Then he called them Rampers. To prove things could be worse, the guy told me at least it wasn't a dildo. Then, maybe because I'm a guy and he's a guy and it's one o'clock in the morning, maybe to make me laugh, the guy said industry slang for bus attendant was Space Waitress. Or Road Whore. It looked like the guy was wearing a driver's uniform, white shirt with little epaulets and a blue tie. My trunk had been cleared, he said, and would arrive the next day.
The security wizard asked my name and address and flue number, and then he asked me what was the difference between a condom and a driver's seat.
"You can only get one prick into a condom," he said.
I cabbed home on my last ten sickles.
The local Aurors had been asking a lot of questions, too.
My pocket sneakoscope, which wasn't a bomb, was still several hundred miles behind me.
Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda potions kit in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. Well they were splinters, now.
You buy stuff. You tell yourself, this is the last cauldron I will ever need in my life. Buy the cauldron, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your cauldron issue handled. Then the right set of dishes.
Then the perfect bed. The wireless. The pensieve.
Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
Until I got home from the Knight Bus terminal.
A wizard from the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad steps out of the shadows to say, there's been an accident. The Aurors, they were here and asked a lot of questions.
The Aurors think maybe it was the fireplace. Maybe the connection to the Floo network didn't close properly after I left, and it left open, a thin stream of Conduction Gas, the volatile material that reacts to the Floo Powder and the verbalizations, the gas filling the closet from ceiling to floor in every room. The closet was thirty thousand square feet with high ceilings and for days and days the gas rose. The gas must've leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the salamander at the base of the stove hiccuped.
Detonation.
The closet door with it's anti-Muggle enchantments would've given, to let the force direct itself outward. If it hadn't, the entire closet's magical integrity would've been compromised, and number four, Privet Drive would have been a crater.
The wizard blew his nose and something went into his handkerchief with the good slap of a Bludger into a Seeker's face.
You could go up into the house, wizard said, but nobody could go into the closet. Auror's orders. They had been asking, did I have an old girlfriend who'd want to do this or did I make an enemy of somebody who had access to dynamite.
"It wasn't worth going in," the wizard said. "All that's left is the concrete shell."
VOLDEMORT IS SITTING IN a massive leather chaise recliner next to me on the Knight Bus, looking at the laminated safety card. The little cartoon woman on the card is squatting on the seat of her own chair, detaching the buoyant armrests and handing them to other wizards and witches floating in the water around her.
"If you are seated in an overstuffed chair," Voldemort reads. "And you feel you would be unable to perform the duties listed on the safety card, please ask the bus attendant to reseat you."
"It's a lot of responsibility", I say. He turns to me.
"Want to switch seats?"
I'm not sure I'm the man for that job.
"An exit-door procedure at 300 miles an hour. Mm-hmm. The illusion of safety."
Yeah, I guess so.
"You know why they put Bubble-head charms on the headrests?" he asks, indicating the runes subtly woven into the piece of doily behind my head.
So you can breathe. Voldemort grins.
"These Bubble-head charms contain pure oxygen. Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you're taking giant, panicked breaths. Suddenly, you become euphoric, docile, you accept your fate."
Voldemort holds up the card, pointing at the vacant expression on the witch who is trying to detach the back part of her lounger.
"Emergency water landing, 300 miles an hour. Blank faces – calm as Memory-charmed Muggles."
That's an... interesting theory, I manage. What do you do?
"Why? So you can pretend you're interested?" I laugh.
"You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh," he says.
Voldemort reaches under his seat and lifts a travel cauldron. It's the exact same one as mine. He undoes the latches on the sides, snapping the lid open. Inside, in neat little piles, are dozens of pinkish-white bricks wrapped in paper and tied with string.
"Soap." he says.
Sorry?
"I make and sell soap. The yardstick of civilization."
He pulls a card out of the cauldron, and hands it to me. "THE GRIMMAULD PLACE SOAP COMPANY." And this is how I met--
Lord Voldemort.
"Did you know if you mixed equal parts lamp oil and frozen pumpkin juice concentrate, you could make napalm?"
No, I didn't know that. Is that true?
Voldemort grins. "That's right. One can make all kinds of explosives using simple household items."
Really?
"If one were so inclined."
Voldemort snaps the lid of the cauldron back on.
"Voldemort, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I've met."
Voldemort stares at me for a moment. I lean in. See, obviously, everything on a plane is single-serving, even-
"Oh no, I get it. It's very clever." Voldemort cuts me off, grinning. "How's that working out for you?"
What?
"Being clever."
As I said, the most interesting single-serving friend ever. Great, I tell him.
"Keep it up then. Right up."
He stands, grabs his cauldron, and heads for the stairs in back leading further up the Knight Bus. A movement of the curtain, and he's gone.
How I came to live with Voldemort is that the Knight Bus has that policy about vibrating luggage.
Standing on the Muggle lawn, my Aunt and Uncle and cousin sitting Stupefied against the back fence, everything that I is or was up in flames or scattered around on the ground around me, my hands find a crumpled piece of parchment in a side pocket. Scribbled on it in her untidy handwriting is "Ginny" and "Gringotts Hotel - 8G".
The fireplace that the Muggles had had been temporarily connected to the Floo network. The wizard was milling around in the hallway, and lent me a bag of powder. I tossed a pinch in, and said quietly, "Gringott's Hotel. 8G".
I didn't stick my face in all the way, and could only make out dimly what was on the other side. After a moment, a vision of Ginny's face appeared in the flames. I backed away from the fireplace as she looked around. It took her a minute to focus her eyes, and I felt myself backing away and to the side.
"Yeah?" she coughed into the air.
I saw the fireball, pouring out onto the lawn.
"I can hear you breathing, you sick fu--" the connection broke, the last of the Floo powder used up.
I got another pinch of Floo powder and called Voldemort
THE ALLEY BEHIND THE Three Broomsticks smelled of old pumpkin juice, vomit, and house elf urine. Muggle alleys smell like this, too, though without the tangy scent of the house elf urine. Places like this never got the high-quality elves that the rich pureblood families had, and a lot of them had problems. The kind of problem you get through slave labor conditions, forced breeding for desired traits, and a lack of proper clothing. House elves peeing up and out through the basement windows is one of them. Most of the time the urine would dribble back down into the basement. House elves work hard, but none of them are very bright.
Voldemort and I stepped out into the alley, holding a pair of mugs smuggled through the back door. I look up at the stars, and it's getting late.
Oh, God, it's late. Hey, thanks for the beer.
"Yeah, man."
I should find a room. There were plenty of them in the area. Boarding houses and pubs with rooms, wizard-friendly.
"What?"
What?
"Like, a bed and breakfast?"
Yeah.
"Just ask it, man."
What are you talking about?
"Three pitchers of ale and you still can't ask." My mug still has an inch left, swirling in the bottom.
What?
"You called me so you could have a place to stay."
Hey, no, no, no,
"Yes you did. Just ask. Cut the foreplay and just ask, man."
Would that be a problem?
"Is it a problem for you to ask?"
Can I stay at your place?
"Yeah." He plucks the mug from my hand, then turns down the alley and sets it down on the cobblestones, right next to his.
Thanks.
"But I want you to do me one favor."
Yeah, sure.
"I want you to hex me as hard as you can."