Chapter 7
Under the Three Broomsticks, Wizard Club is about to begin again. Voldemort is standing in the middle, surveying the men around him.
"I look around, look around. And I see a lot of new faces."
They begin to laugh, joke, hurrah. Voldemort cuts them off.
"Shut up. That means a lot of you have been breaking the first two rules of Wizard Club." That shuts them up. They look at each other. Voldemort begins to pace.
"I see in Wizard Club the strongest and smartest wizards who have ever lived. I see all this potential. Goddamnit, an entire generation modifying memories, reversing magical accidents, and hiding our very existence from the Muggles who swarm across the planet like a plague. The Muggles we once lorded over and now hide from, scurrying away from them like roaches from a lantern.
"The Ministry would expect us to keep this farce up indefinitely, and believe it can be done. They think that our magic and enchantments will always keep us hidden away from Muggles. They think that our spells and potions will keep us invisible, always a step ahead of the Muggles' science and technology. But it won't.
"And when the right Muggles find Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, there won't be enough Memory Charmers to keep the secret. Even if every able wizard picked up a wand, the word would spread faster than we could cast. And when the Muggles learn the truth, they will hate us. Fear us. Try to destroy us.
"We cannot allow that. We cannot allow them to have the first strike against us, and destroy both our worlds in the process. Instead of taking the intiative and bringing our world to theirs, the Ministry would have us hide behind enchantments and spells, until the day their world comes to ours. The legends and stories have told us that we would all grow up to be archwizards, lich-kings, and rulers of this world. We've had those illusions shattered. We think we won't. But I'm here to tell you, we will."
The crowd erupts into cheers. Voldemort is telling them what they want to hear, but also what they need to hear, what needs to be said, about a world of gods that hides from the mortals that populate it. That cave into fear and pressure, and hide from power that runs through their veins instead of seizing their birthright.
This week, there's something extra, Voldemort tells us. "I want you to get into a duel with someone. And I want you to lose."
The idea is to take some Fred on the street who's never been in a fight and recruit him. Let him experience winning for the first time in his life. Get him to explode. Give him permission to hex the crap out of you.
You can take it. If you win, you screwed up.
"What we have to do, people," Voldemort told the committee, "is remind these guys what kind of power they still have."
This is Voldemort's little pep talk. Then he opened each of the folded squares of paper in a cardboard box in front of him. This is how each committee proposes events for the upcoming week. Write the event on the blank parchment scroll. Tear off a square, fold it, and put it in the box. Voldemort checks out the proposals and throws out any bad ideas.
For each idea he throws out, Voldemort puts a folded blank into the box.
Then everyone in the takes a paper out of the box. The way Voldemort explained the process to me, if somebody draws a blank, he only has his regular homework to do that week.
If you draw a propoal, then you have to go the Muggle's Airplane Modeller's convention this weekend and make their models zoom around the hall on their own. Or slip a batch of Ton-Tongue Toffees into a shipment of Muggle chocolates to be distributed all over Westchester.
Nobody knows who draws a proposal, and nobody except Voldemort knows what all the proposals are and which are accepted and which proposals he throws in the trash.
Later that week, you might read in the Daily Prophet about an unidentified wizard, downtown, who let a crate of Blast-Ended Skrewts loose on the Muggle Underground, causing havoc and creating a nasty job for the Memory Modifiers.
You have to wonder. Was this a homework assignment you could've drawn?
The next Tuesday night, you'll be looking around the meeting under the one light in the black fight club basement, and you're still wondering who forced the horse and buggy into the fountain.
Who snuck into the art museum and animated the genatalia of Michelangelo's David?
Everybody gets their homework: lose duel a in public; and each member draws for a proposal.
I STEP INTO MY BOSS' OFFICE at work, making sure the wand is still in it's holster at my waist. He looks up from his ten-foot long scroll which spills out onto the floor, filled with facts and figures and little animated sketches of exploding brooms. A brown owl sits on a perch by the open window, snoring softly. His greasy black hair frames his face, falling lanky, and he fixes me with a baleful stare. My boss has never liked me, and even though I requested to be transferred out, he never allowed it. I think he liked to keep me here just so he could torment me.
We need to talk, I say.
He blinks, then sets his peacock-feather quill back in the inkwell, fixing me with a baleful glare, and begins to roll up the scroll.
"Okay. Where to begin? With your constant absenteeism? Your un-presentable appearance? You're up for review."
I am Harry's Complete Lack of Surprise.
"What?" he sneers.
Let's play pretend, I say. Let's pretend you're the Department of Magical Transport Someone informs you that this company installs handles that have unreliable Sure-grip enchantments, air brakes that fail after a thousand miles, and propellant bristles that explode and burn people alive. What do you do?
His eyes widen in shock and outrage. "Are you threatening me?"
No--
He stands up, shaking with rage. "Get out of here! You're fired!"
I have a better solution. You keep me on payroll as an outside consultant and in exchange for my salary, my job will be to never tell people these things that I know. I don't even have to come to the office, I can do this from home.
"Who the fuck do you think you are, you crazy little shit?" He touches a button on his desk. "Security?"
I am Harry's Smirking Revenge, I say.
The building is enchanted against Apparating and Disapparating. It'll take a minute for them to come up to the office. Fortunately, that's all I need.
I hold his wand up to my face, the wand that I swapped with a fake an hour ago in the cafeteria. If my boss tried to use his wand now, it would turn into a mouse. I hex myself in the face, and my front two teeth sprout outwards, suddenly nearly a foot long.
What are you doing? I say through my buck teeth.
Another hex, and my tongue is three feet long, green, and slapping around with a mind of it's own. It flings itself up and begins hitting me on the head. Ow, I yell. That really hurts. What the fuck are you doing?
I stagger back and fall onto an oaken table, knocking a crystal ball to the floor, shattering it to a million pieces. My boss' wand is tight in my hand. The owl has woken up, and is hooting uncomfortably.
What are you doing, I yell. Oh my God, please stop!
It's the Jelly-Legs Jinx next, and I reel backwards, arms flailing.
What are you doing? Oh please God, no!
I hit myself with a combination of my own creation, a mix of the Leg-Locker Curse and the Banishing Charm. As I fly back and up, into a massive glass-fronted cabinet, shattering the front and knocking over a hundred tiny vials, bottles, and potions, I find myself thinking of my first duel. With Voldemort.
I sag down against the cabinet for a moment, the monstrosity that is my tongue rolling around in the shards of glass, blood oozing from oversize taste buds. I hit myself again, with the pimple pox curse. Shattered glass tastes like cinnnamon, and I begin to crawl on my hands and knees towards my boss, who hasn't moved the whole time. Blood is pouring from my tongue, leaving a slick trail of saliva and blood along the floor. The enchantment on the trick wand has worn off, and behind my boss it turns back into a mouse and scuttles out the open window. The owl soars out after it, looking for a quick meal.
Crawling to the feet of my boss, I grab his hands and shove the wand into them,
smearing pus and blood and saliva all over his robes.
Look, I tell him, barely intelligible through the tongue and teeth. Give me the paychecks like I ask and you won't ever see me again. The tongue lashes around his legs, and he is looking down at me with a look of utter horror and amazement.
And then, at our most excellent moment together, security arrives. A harried-looking wizard with his wand out, backed by a pair of cave trolls brandishing clubs and looking for something to smash.
This is how Voldemort and I were able to have Wizard Club every night of the week.
THE BOOKSTORE HAD ALMOST CLOSED for the night, a small secondhand shop off Knockturn Alley. In the alley behind the alley behind the Alley, Voldemort shoves the shop clerk out into the back, the wand pressed into the base of the fat kid's skull, and tells him to get down on his knees. I smell urine, and not all of it is from the gutter.
"Give me your wallet", Voldemort tells the fat kid, who is probably as old as me, but sobbing like a firstyear. Fingers trembling, the fat kid pulls out a wallet and hands it back to Voldemort. Voldemort flips through it.
"Neville P. Longbottom. 414 Arbor Place, Apartment A. Small, cramped basement apartment, Neville?"
"How'd you know?" Neville is sobbing, and I think of Ron.
"Because they give shitty basement apartments letters instead of numbers. Neville, you are going to die."
Neville sobs again. "No..."
Voldemort flips through the wallet some more. "Is that your grandmother? Nana's going to have to call Dr. So-and-so to dig up your dental records, do you want to know why? Because nothing's going to be left of your face. Have you ever seen what the Concussitus Curse does to a human skull, Neville? It's not pretty."
Neville keeps sobbing, and Voldemort keeps flipping.
"A Hogwarts Student ID! What did you study, Neville?"
"S-s-stuff..." Neville stammers. I think I can smell shit.
"'Stuff'?" Voldemort says. "Were the midterms hard?" Neville sobs, and Voldemort pushes the wand tip against the back of his skull, digging it in under a mop of sweaty brown hair. "I asked you what you studied, Neville!"
"H-herbology, mostly"
"Why?"
"I-I don't know"
"What did you want to BE, Neville P. Longbottom?" Voldemort demands. Neville whimpers.
"The QUESTION, NEVILLE, is what did you want to be?"
"Herbologist! Herbologist!"
"Magical plants!"
"Yeah, magical plants and s-s-s..."
"Stuff, yeah, I got that. That means you have to get more schooling."
Neville shakes his head. Fat tears drip down onto the cold cobblestones. "Too much school..." he whimpers.
"Would you rather be dead? Here? On your knees? In back of a bookstore?"
Neville wailed. "Nooo!"
A pause. A heartbeat. Voldemort lowers the wand.
"I'm keeping your ID, Neville. I'm going to check on you. I know where you live. If you aren't back in school and on your way to becoming an Herbologist in six weeks, you will be dead. Now run on home."
Neville rises, and Voldemort tosses the wallet at him. It falls to the street, and Neville picks it up, sobbing, and turns and runs with the clumsy gracelessness.
What the fuck was that, I ask.
"Imagine how he feels", Voldemort says.
Come on, this isn't funny, I say. What was the point of that?
"Tommorrow will be the best day of Neville P. Longbottom's life," Voldemort says, with a calm, zenlike expression on his face. "His breakfast will taste better than any meal you or I will ever taste."
Voldemort tosses the wand at me, and as it does so it shakes in just the right way, and it turns into a large rubber chicken that falls limp with a splat on the ground. Stamped on it's back is "Weasley's Wizard Wheezes".
Voldemort turned and began leaving the alley in the opposite direction from where Neville went. He had a plan. And it started to make sense in a Voldemort sort of way. No fear. No distractions. And the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.