''Where are we now, Grandfather? Are we home?''
It pained him that she called that place, that time, home. He should have had so much more to offer the child. The old man didn't speak his thoughts. He stepped out of his TARDIS, his poor broken TARDIS, and into the hallway beyond. ''I don't believe so,'' he told his granddaughter Susan. ''Wait inside for now.''
There were children in the hallway, dressed in oddly Medieval robes. Between the stone hallway lit only by wooden torches and the black robes of the children one might have thought they had found their way to the Medieval Era. But their hairstyles and shoes were too similar to those of the time and place the old man had lived in for so long.
But it was not home. No, that place was never home. Home was the maelstrom of probability, the endless whirlpool of chance and fate. And he would not accept his exile from it.
There were children in this place, and their odd calm acceptance of a police box appearing from nowhere was another argument against the Medieval Ages. The old man looked down at the calmest of the children, a dark-haired sloe-eyed boy of perhaps eleven or twelve. ''You there, young man. Who are you? Where are we?''
The boy looked at the old man with an expression of utter calm, and looking past that expression the old man knew this child hated him.
''My name is Tom Riddle. And this is Hogwarts.''