I pull the collar of my coat up – to no avail, however, as without Harper, I'm freezing from the inside anyway – and I feel my eyes burning, probably for that very reason.
It's grotesque how everything in me wants to resist my head. Ridiculous attempts at sparks of humanity, as if my earthly shell wanted to testify to its immanence with all its might.
Yet I ignore it – and curse my mother for everything that was ever sacred to me.
I can't feel love. Only all the loathing. The disgust. The utter lethargy and emptiness of my purpose …
Why longer face any of it? I'd much rather feel absolutely nothing again, like all those years before.
The grass is still full of cold dew, and the misty meadows with Ophelia's lilac bluebells don't seem half as pretty as they did a day ago. And contrary to my hopes, I can hardly breathe more freely now.
Shouldn't the right decision feel a lot better?
The utter lack of purpose is unbearable. I have no destination, I'm all but fleeing from the sunlight like the lost soul I am, and I know I could apparate.
But where to?
And so my numb legs just carry me on and on, through Little Hangleton, past dark alleys, deserted homes and meadows.
Until there's this chapel by the cemetery. Like a moth to a flame, I've been subconsciously drawn to the sounds of the organ for a while now …
In the liturgical year, it's been the night of nights, from Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday, in preparation for the approaching resurrection.
These celebrations, however, do not play down how much suffering and death had to be involved in the conciliation of justice and mercy. A God who gives his own life for his creation to make up that very discrepancy is probably rightly sung about on a day like this, and called upon to purify worldly sins.
But are my sins worldly?
The voices behind the walls of the small church echo to me, crystal clear.
The seventeenth-century Miserere Chorale by Gregorio Allegri was named after the incipit of Psalm 51 – said to have been written by none other than King David after guilt weighed down his soul. The Vulgate describes how he had sacrificed the life of a faithful man just to avoid admitting adultery with his wife.
But who am I to judge?
I am no stranger to murder …
Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
Have mercy upon me, O God: after Thy great goodness.
Some claim that a piece of heaven is interwoven into these sounds. And as tragic as the chorale is, it's also mythical. Allegedly, any transcription of it was forbidden by the Vatican State, under threat of excommunication – so that the revelation of it might never leave Rome.
But Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, just fourteen years old in 1770, is said to have heard the piece at a Wednesday service in the Sistine Chapel. Legend holds he wrote it down from memory afterwards so the world would hear as well …
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me.
Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness: and cleanse me from my sin.
Can I be cleansed?
Do I want to be?
"Tom! Tom, where are you going?"
I'm startled to even turn around. Her voice, here and now in this graveyard, is the last thing I expected.
She is salvation, within reach – and yet it can't be wasted on me of all people.
She's completely out of breath when she reaches me. Her hair looks just as chaotic as she herself does in Riddle's far too large coat. She's wrapped it around her body and I can well imagine the scene – he handing it to her in the hopes of a good ending at last …
"How did you find me?"
"You can hear the choir in the village," she says, still trying to catch her breath. "And you love music …"
She almost sighs herself as she mouths the word that seems so impossible for me.
Undeterred, however, she adds, "What did you have in mind?" She stares at me, gesturing into the distance she must imagine to be my undefined destination. "What was this supposed to be?" She already knows the answer, her eyes well up for a reason. "In secret, all alone? Say something!" She wraps the cloak even tighter around her waist as I just begin to shake my head wearily.
Here I stand, saying nothing. The chant ringing through the walls of the little chapel, too much pain gathering in Harper's eyes, and when I finally come closer to embrace her, I feel her warm tears on my neck, as I did tonight.
"Tom," she whispers, "stop losing your mind. Come back with me!"
I shake my head. "I can't. You know it."
"I know you're telling yourself that, but can't you see you're getting caught up in theories? Why condemn yourself like that? I would never …"
"Stop expecting any good in me," I all but whisper, wiping a tear from her cheek.
She remains silent for a moment there, yet she soon takes heart and asks, "And now, Tom Riddle? Just leave me here? Without saying goodbye?"
"Little Hangleton," I bleakly say, "changed everything, Harper."
"No." It's like a stifled plea. "It didn't, it … it doesn't have to. At least try! Here, with your father!"
"I did –"
"Not even for 24 hours!"
"I'm suffocating." I gently detach myself from her, all while holding her serious gaze. "And I said goodbye."
"Oh, were you staring at me in the darkness?" she snaps. "And what would've been next? Should I have left by train? Should your father have driven me across England in one of his sports cars?"
She stares at me incredulously as I nod. "William would prefer that anyway."
"Don't you dare," she hisses, "even mention my father! Just two heartbeats ago you looked him in the eye and claimed you wanted to marry me because I was your family – and now you're sneaking away at dawn! My father wouldn't like any of it."
"This is for you."
"Me?" She shakes her head, visibly angry by now. "Do you even believe yourself what you're saying?"
"Harper –"
"You would have left me stuck here, with the father you don't want!" she shouts. "With his daughters and his wife, and that insolent grandmother! So let's practise Unforgivables on the spot, Tom, I'd really like to hurt you!"
"Nothing's stopping you –"
She points to her heart and almost whispers, "You may feel pain, but not this?" She takes a deep breath and adds, "Why even bother, then? You'll never feel the most unbearable pain in that case …"
I look at her, for quite a long time, then lost in thought I say, "You should've … just given me that salt shaker."
I notice how she's raising her hand, her slap still comes as a surprise.
"You think I regret anything? Us, last night?" she shakes her head in utter disbelief. "Do you?"
"No, how could I …"
"Then why would I feel any different about it?"
"Because yesterday and today are two different worlds."
"You're making it two worlds, that's all."
I just acknowledge that with a nod, as if in a trance, and hand her my arm. "So to Brimington?"
She frowns. "That's the bare minimum, obviously …"
Somewhere between hatred and tragedy, she stares at me as the chorale in the chapel beside us fades away. She touches my arm and before we know it we're standing in the Sullivans' front garden. As if the world far away from Little Hangleton was still untouched and pure and right.
The Sullivans deserve better … Polly should actually also have the opportunity to slap me, and William might be entitled to the satisfaction of shooting me.
"Your father wanted to get to know you, Tom," Harper repeats, and her tears are long swallowed by unspeakable anger. "He's not the man you had in mind all these years. He wanted you. He did everything he could to find you, and I hope you don't forget that. And your mother –"
"Harper –"
"At least take her book!" She pulls it out of the inside pocket of the huge coat and immediately presses Marvolo's ring into my hand as well. "Take what's yours! The ring is really unsightly, I was just being nice yesterday … I don't want any of it – take it!"
She hands the symbolic burden to me and I look at her one last time as she does so.
If only she knew how much I'd wish to stay with her ….
But it's no use. Resigned to fate, I say, "Take care, Harp, you know I'm sorry."
"Riddle, damn it, let's just –"
She reaches out for my hand again, but I'm already apparating. I'm leaving her for London before her parents even see me.
And if my soul has not been torn yet, it is by now, just as I find myself in a deserted alcove of the capital.
The rising sun of this day begins to fight the cold inside me, but I all but tumble through the streets I know so well – as if I were fleeing the city that raised me.
Where the hell do I belong?
London is big, the ideas of modernity are bigger. But my destination remains unclear.
This is a turning point.
Everything inside me resists stopping and pausing, I need to go on, like a torrent boring through rock, like thunder and lightning, consistently from the top downwards, no matter the lines.
Lightning, the Blitz … The consequences of the latter are still obvious in London. The rubble of bombed buildings is a silent witness of the fact that a war is raging. It's hard to believe that the Summer Olympics are to be held here this year …
Maybe Edwin was right around New Year's Eve. It's not a good time. Possibly the darkest time in the history of the world, and I find myself alone in it. As alone as it all began for me, without Harper …
I swallow this thought up with all its attendant symptoms as fast as I can and yet I implode. So much so, so short of breath, that I have to lean myself against one of the many benches in Leicester Square. The theatre and the restaurants so close, the air-raid shelter closer.
As if I've just controlled a Fiendfyre for far too long, I'm completely empty and sit down on the dirty park bench in a dull daze.
I'm so incredibly tired.
Physically, sure – but also mentally. I know I should sleep, eat something … But how trivial does all that seem when I can hardly breathe?
The rays of sun gradually rising above the buildings and thus finally reaching me glow in shiny orange. They impose themselves on me in all their warmth and cheerfulness, but my battered mind can do absolutely nothing with it.
I don't want to feel all that. Much less after such a cruel foretaste of a normal life that can never be possible for me …
I don't want to feel the loathing for my family, or all the cold self-hatred, now that I know what I'm capable of. And I guess I can't handle loss because I've never had anything to lose …
Letting her go is tearing me apart, and as this thought flashes through my mind – I do realise what I have to do.
Tearing the soul will inevitably come with an eternal loss of such feelings, won't it? If I can't feel the good, why would I want the bad? It could be a switch I just need to flip.
The murder I've committed. And the brief confusion of my mind, so sentimental, so foolish, is nothing but smoke and mirrors now that I know my true nature. A deceptive memory of what was and can never be again.
There is only one way back to that numbness and paralysis that defined my life before I needed a salt shaker.
I need to know how to create a Horcrux.
I've been searching the Forbidden Section of the Hogwarts library page by page for the past few months without getting to the bottom of the spell or even the ritual.
So I obviously need to go to darker places to get solutions. Much darker …
My mind is racing, but my hands want to do something, hold something, when already everything that has reassured me so far is at the other end of the country and spectrum of possibility.
I intuitively grope in my coat pocket for its contents and come across the ring Harper forced me to take. In the glaring rays of the rising sun, it doesn't get any prettier – but something very specific becomes very visible.
As I look at the stone of the ring against the light, I notice it for the first time.
A triangulum engraved in it with a circle and a vertical line in the middle.
Marvolo's words to the minister in Merope's second memory …
Owned by our family for centuries. Kept pure, we never gave our heirlooms away. Do you know how much I was offered for it? With the Peverell sigil engraved in the stone?
My pulse increases as I reach inside my pocket for the book as well.
Beedle the Bard, the chapter with the Tale of the Three Brothers, right there – Merope sketched that very symbol.
What did she know that I'm missing?
Was the Peverell family crest chosen at random? And randomly drawn by my mother on exactly this fairytale? Hardly.
And where the hell did I first see that symbol? It was long before Harper had tapped it with her finger in the open book on Riddle's piano.
Where and when …
Where did I first see this triangle?
My gaze switches from the book to the ring, visualising the name Peverell in my mind – until I remember another one. A name on everyone's lips …
Like an electric shock, the sudden realisation flashes through me.
1938, Old Compton Street.
That's what was already on my mind last night, next to my father, and I'm so close to that place that my subconsciousness has already done excellent work.
I met him when I was eleven, the man who supposedly created a Horcrux – if whispered rumours are to be believed. The man who might know how the ritual works …
All at once, my body turns away from the sun. As if in a maelstrom, it drives me from Leicester Square to where I have often been before, it's but a stroll.
Only yesterday I'd told my father.
Where I felt magic before I knew it truly existed. Where I felt like I was right for the first time.
Pieces of a puzzle presented themselves to me almost seven years ago, and yet I've overlooked them all. Until now.
But it's frankly just in time …