23 – Caspian the Great & His Invisible Coin
"Your mission failed when you left the doppelganger in Willow Gorge." Voldemort's voice, though calm, insinuated blame as they walked up the creaking stairs to the second floor. The voice echoed throughout the house, and it seemed to come at Snape from all sides. "You will now see why the root is so vital to our mission," Voldemort continued. "You now will see why you need to go back and get what you lost."
Snape scowled in anger. How was he supposed to know that the blue unicorns would be real and attack them, nearly taking Lily's life? If Voldemort had been living in the Lost City, why hadn't he warned him? Was it some kind of test? "Sir, why didn't you warn me about the danger in Willow Gorge?"
"You have no idea? No clue at all?"
"Er—not exactly." Snape's voice trembled with anger.
"Like Hogwarts, you cannot apparate into the Lost City. So I've always flown by broom over Willow Gorge, obviously not an easy feat in itself. I did not tell you about the Willow Gorge unicorns because I was not aware of this annoying little detail."
"But where do you get your doppelganger root? It had to come from somewhere!"
Voldemort turned before they reached the top of the stairs, hands clenching the railings, fingernails looking like the tips of freshly sharpened butcher knives. He looked directly at Snape, who realized he'd gone too far. "Are you doubting me again, Severus?"
"No, sir. I—"
"Good. Because you should never doubt me. Grindelwald accumulated a stash of doppelganger in this very house. The stash is diminishing, and I need it for the magical and Muggle communities I will control. That is why I asked you to get more. That is why your failure has hindered my plans." Voldemort looked as if he were going to continue the conversation, but then he turned and proceeded to climb the remaining steps.
They entered a dimly lit room, and the first thing Snape noticed was a picture of a man holding a snake, coiled in a perfect spiral. The man and snake were creeping up behind another man to…? Snape had no idea what they were doing, but the picture gave him the chills , and he wondered how this scene could be giving him a sense of déjà vu. This was something he had never witnessed, not even in his dreams, so why did it feel so real? He quickly looked away.
"You don't care for Nagini?" smiled Voldemort.
"What is Nagini, the snake?"
"So many questions." Voldemort moved further into the room, and then turned to face him. "Patience, young wizard."
Plush velvet couches lined the walls as if to make the center of the room a stage—there, a stone fire pit was heating a single, black cauldron that effervesced a blue, iridescent mist into the air.
"The blue is from the doppelganger I've already added." Voldemort stirred the pot. "The best effect comes when it's brought to a slow simmer. Moments from now it will turn into sludge, then a fine powder."
Voldemort continued stirring and, sure enough, the blue mist hovering in the air disappeared as the water turned to sludge that quickly crystallized, then disintegrated into a fine powder. He dipped his hand into the cauldron and let the powder run through his fingers, the way a child would when building a sandcastle on a beach. "This is where other wizards have gone wrong. They see only the cloning abilities and fail to use its full potential."
With his other hand, he opened a jar that contained a singing worm. The worm immediately sang the Sinatra song from downstairs, repeating "Excuse me while I disappear," over and over until the words even seemed to madden Voldemort. He sprinkled the blue powder around the worm, and a blue mist hung in the air, briefly showing a suspended double image of the worm. "Immateri," said Voldemort as the tip of his wand touched the mist; it swirled around the worm, which continued to sing despite the mini-cyclone engulfing it.
What happened next, Snape couldn't believe this eyes. It looked as if a ghost were leaving the worm's body. It floated into the air next to it, a perfect clone of its parent, and the clone (a doppelganger) fell to the floor, this worm singing, "Your angel eyes will leave tonight." It sang that over and over until Voldemort stifled both worms inside of the jar.
He watched his student's expression, pleased with the reaction. "Severus, this is only the cloning—we haven't even started the Dark Tourist." Voldemort licked his lips. "You haven't seen anything yet."
Each fall, one of the main attractions at the Spinner's End Carnival was Caspian the Great. Caspian was a magician, which Snape thought was a funny title since Caspian didn't do any real magic. He escaped from water tanks while being handcuffed, sawed beautiful assistants in half before putting them back together, had the audience pick random cards from a deck and then guess them, made birds fly out of his sleeves—none of it real magic. The one trick Snape did like was perhaps the simplest of them all, and yet he couldn't quite figure it out. Near the end of Caspian's show, the magician produced a large silver coin that he let members of the audience inspect.
"This is a very special coin," he told them. "This coin brought me together with the love of my life, the beautiful, Victoria the Valiant." He pointed to Victoria, one of several of Caspian's assistants, Victoria being the most beautiful of them all, long flowing brown hair, olive skin, and almond-colored eyes.
"You see, this coin allowed me to buy an ice cream sundae that Victoria and I shared on our first date." He stopped and held a finger in the air. "But this story is about much more than ice cream. On that day, there was a magic in the air, a special feeling that I had. The connection I felt to Victoria was a strong one, and though I could not explain why or how, and though this feeling was completely invisible to the world, it was there all the same. Invisible…" Caspian now strolled from the left side of the stage to the right. "Some of the best things in our world are invisible—the kinds of feelings I have for Victoria, perhaps the very best. Yet, still, they are invisible. Do you believe that this coin, this very coin that brought Victoria and I together, could disappear before your eyes?"
He looked to the ground and strolled back to the other side of the stage. "If the coin helped create these invisible feelings for me, perhaps I could make the coin invisible itself?"
Caspian rolled up his sleeves and held the coin two feet from his body. He stared at the coin so long and hard that Snape wouldn't have been surprised if laser beams shot out from his eyes making the coin invisible. Instead, Caspian made a quick flick of his fingers, and the coin disappeared. He then let the audience inspect his sleeves and pockets, no one ever able to find anything…
Snape returned from the memory where Voldemort was now holding an blue wafer in front of him. It was about the size of Caspian's invisible silver coin. "With a flick of your fingers , this will disintegrate, and the Dark Tourist comes out."
"What do you mean it comes out? You can see it?"
"Why don't we give it a try?" Voldemort smirked.
"What do you—"
Before Snape could finish his question, Voldemort had already left the room and was headed back down the stairs. Snape replayed the events he'd just seen: Voldemort boiled more doppelganger root turning it to sludge; the sludge turned to an iridescent, blue powder; Voldemort kneaded the powder in his hands, whispering "Phasma Phasmatis," and it solidified into the round, paper-thin wafers.
But like Caspian's magic trick, he couldn't picture how the curse was going to work, and when he saw how Voldemort intended to demonstrate, adrenaline surged through his veins. "No, no, no. How could you?"
Voldemort was at the head of Lily's bed, holding one of the blue wafers in front of her. "I asked you to trust me. You will be doing this to Dumbledore when you return to Hogwarts, so you best pay attention."
"What?"
"This should not be a surprise, Severus, as I've alluded to this before. Sometimes we need to influence others to be successful. Dumbledore is the only person that stands between me and recruiting other wizards… the wizards won't be to the level of your caliber obviously, because I believe you are the brightest in your class. But these are young leaders we will need to rule the Muggle world. I've even thought of applying for the Defense Against the Dark Arts post again. Should it happen to suddenly open, of course."
Lily, still asleep, frowned as if she had just heard Voldemort's words. "She'll be waking soon. We need to move faster," said Voldemort.
A cold sweat appeared on Snape's forehead, and in that moment, he looked like the boy that he still was. Could he really let Voldemort demonstrate the Dark Tourist Curse on Lily? Caspian the Great again came to his thoughts…
After convincing the audience that he really had made the coin invisible, Caspian moved to a table where there were five Styrofoam cups. "The coin is invisible. Feelings are invisible. However, the connections we share are all very real. For the next part of the trick, I will make the coin reappear, but there's a catch."
Caspian paused at center stage and took an exaggerated deep breath. "Four of the Styrofoam cups will be empty, turned over like this. Underneath the fifth cup there will be a knife." He stood a knife straight up and intentionally nicked his finger on its serrated edge, drawing a drop of blood to prove to the audience just how very real it was. "When you leave here today, you will believe in the invisible, without a shadow of a doubt. This is why…"
Caspian told the audience that the coin would reappear in the cup with the knife, and they would be the ones choosing the cup. After an audience member made the selection, they tell him what cup and he would sit at the back of the crowd—it would be Victoria's job to find the cup with the coin.
"But she won't be without help," said Caspian dropping his voice to a near whisper. "Victoria will be guided by the invisible. She will feel my energy and will narrow her options cup by cup to find that coin."
"How will she narrow her options?" shouted a boy, who Snape guessed Caspian had planted in the audience before the trick.
"Excellent question," said the magician. "She will smash them like this." He took an additional cup, turned it over, and smashed it with the palm of his hand. "So confident am I in my connection with Victoria, that she will know which cup to avoid. The invisible is that powerful. But of course if I'm wrong…" He slowly shook his head. "She will lose the very hand that I held at the ice cream parlor so long ago."
Snape rolled his eyes at Caspian's blatant showmanship, and yet he was on the edge of his seat as Victoria was blindfolded and an audience member pointed which cup the knife should go under, the one in which the invisible coin would reappear. After the selection was made, Victoria's blindfold was taken off and she approached the table, trembling a little as she moved her hand over each of the five cups, closing her eyes as if she were sensing Caspian's energy from the audience. Snape thought it was a load of witch's brew. Of course, they had somehow communicated which cup the knife was under.
Victoria brought the palm of her hand down firmly on the first cup, and the audience cried out, relieved when they saw the Styrofoam crumble into pieces—no knife.
She repeated the process again, slowly moving her trembling hand over each of the cups, eyes closed, feeling which one was safe. With a quick motion, she slammed her hand down again, shrieks from the audience starting even before impact and—
