1944
.
.
The Chamber was empty and it was all a lie.
That statement lingered in Tom's mind. It echoed, grew, and transformed with each iteration, until its original meaning dwindled in his conscious thoughts, and the surface began to slough off, revealing to him the true shape lurking beneath the façade of unpleasant truth.
An accusation.
Every morning before lessons, Tom ate his breakfast at the far end of the Slytherin table, under the House banners, velvet serpents in green and silver rearing on sinuous coils to hiss at the other animated banners—frolicking lions, slumbering badgers, and haughty eagles. On his way back to the dormitory, he passed the Entrance Hall, and the torchlight flickered off the row of hourglasses, the piled emeralds in one bottom bulb marking Slytherin's continued progress toward another House Cup. Together, these images were an unspoken reminder of what he'd glimpsed in the Chamber of Secrets; they became a wordless taunt of what he lacked.
Every evening, he took his reserved armchair by the fireplace, the best seat in the Slytherin Common Room, and surveyed his Housemates. They had no idea of the existence of Salazar's legacy, the Chamber of Secrets, a legend among Slytherin students. To them, it was nothing but a First Year Hallow's Eve tradition, an idea whose continued circulation depended on those wistful few who dreamt and believed that it just might be real.
That number did not include Tom Riddle, who knew the Chamber of Secrets was real, and who had seen the face of Salazar Slytherin with his own eyes. Tom's hands had touched the founder's stone likeness, had discerned the lack of chisel marks marring the stone eyelids and the creases of the earlobes, an indication that the statue had been created through Transfiguration, smooth and seamless as the Transfigured tunnels outside the Chamber. Such power, and at such a scale! On any other day, Tom would have marvelled at it; he would have spoken of it to Hermione, and caught her up in an enthusiastic debate on how it had been done then, and if it was possible to replicate now.
But today, the last few days, the past week, theoretical Transfiguration was a passing afterthought to the real matter that occupied his thoughts, which whispered to him through all hours of the day. In the waking dreams of the hour before breakfast, the watery windows glowing green with the risen sun, to the silent hours past curfew, when Tom showered away the grime accumulated from a day's exposure to other people, he heard the Chamber calling to him.
The Chamber has been opened...
It whispered to him when Tom stood under the dripping shower head, one hand upraised to Summon his towel from the rack. He hardly dared to breathe, ears straining to catch another hushed word in the haze of writhing white steam.
Released from slumber, awakened to air and sky... Awakened and awaiting...
The whispers continued. In class, on the way to dinner, after a meeting with the Prefects. No one else heard the softly spoken words, let alone made any sense of them. Hermione's face had remained blank and confused when he had asked if she'd recognised the speaker.
Awaiting...
Tom sought the source of the whispers, not quite allowing himself to believe that they had originated from the depths of his own mind. He couldn't have imagined it; he knew he wasn't mad.
...And searching.
It wasn't madness. It couldn't be.
There had to be another explanation: magic.
His careful questions to Hermione hadn't produced any tangible result, and he wasn't going to ask her about symptoms of wizarding diseases without arousing her natural instinct for interference. The last time Tom had been physically indisposed, Hermione had forced him to take potions and go to bed at set times every day, smothering him in well-meaning concern. And Tom, though admittedly liking special attention given him on other occasions, did not appreciate being treated like a child whilst in that state, but he'd been too weak then to resist.
Tom's dorm mates hadn't noticed any strange sounds, either—not that he'd bothered to thoroughly question them. Nott, the most observant of the Slytherin boys, hadn't appeared to have heard anything, though it was difficult for Tom to keep track of him, when Nott put quite a bit of effort into strategic avoidance. Nott had developed an odd habit of vacating the Common Room whenever he saw Tom step through the doorway; in the evenings, Nott ducked behind the curtains of his four-poster instead of joining the other boys in playing cards or coming up with the answers to the day's load of homework. However, that wasn't too unusual when Tom recalled that Nott preferred studying in the library, where he could work by himself without having a dorm mate lean over his shoulder to read his answers.
In a quest for alternative sources of advice, Tom dug through the bottom layers of his trunk until he found the loose parchment pages copied from the Healing textbook he'd borrowed from Rosier back in Fourth Year. Medicamenti Magica, the sixth of a seventeen volume set: he'd had Rosier bring him this one in particular for its focus on mind-related magical Healing. Before Dumbledore had begun offering him Occlumency lessons in Sixth Year, he had searched through more and more obscure textbooks for information on mind magic. It had been a futile endeavour in the end, but he'd learned about various forms of magical mental damage, an affliction that most commonly came as a result of amateur Obliviations and brewing potions without reading the directions.
Skimming through his notes, he ticked off his list of symptoms.
Severe mood fluctuations?
No more than usual, he decided. That ruled out having an adverse reaction to potion ingredients. He wasn't taking any potions, nor had he been dosed without his knowledge.
Minor to mild emotional fluctuation, accompanied by tender muscles and food cravings on certain times of the month?
The last he checked, he wasn't a woman, or a werewolf. This was useless; he skipped down to the bottom of the list.
Visions, illusory figures, or voices?
Tom turned over to the next page, his hands shaking.
Missing time within recent memory; hours unaccounted for in the past week?
The good news, Tom found, was that he wasn't a victim of possession, through unwitting contact with a cursed artefact or a malevolent spirit.
The bad news was that Tom, being very certain that his dilemma had nothing to do with a mundane illness of the mind or body, was probably being haunted by a ghost.
It was... absurd.
He didn't know what to make of it, but the longer he considered it, the more it made sense. Hogwarts was one of the most magical sites in the British Isles, steeped in a thousand years of history. For a thousand years, students had cast magic in its halls, dozens of Headmasters had laid on fresh enchantments over old, hundreds of professors had wandered in and out, leaving behind portraits and books and odd teaching props that found their way into broom cupboards and dusty classrooms.
Couldn't his explorations in the Chamber of Secrets, one of the oldest structures in or under the castle, have created some odd phenomenon of magical disturbance? The Chamber of Secrets, a founder's artefact in its own right, was bound to have mysterious and powerful properties. Perhaps Salazar Slytherin had built a mechanism to transfer a sliver of his power to whomever was worthy of continuing his legacy—but somewhere along the way, the instructions were forgotten, or the instructor itself lost in a maze of renovations and wardwork.
If Hermione and Nott hadn't noticed any voices, then it was only because it had been Tom who had opened the Chamber of Secrets, spoken the password to both the magical entrance built into the bathroom sinks, and the entwined serpents before the Chamber itself. The other two had provided some, yes, minor contributions, but it was Tom who found the Chamber and granted them access.
There was no chance he was going to ask Dumbledore for advice, or turn himself in to the Hospital Wing. With these limitations, and knowing that whatever this was—a ghost, Slytherin's monster, a magical imprint of the man himself—it was something he wanted to see with his own eyes. And thus, he sought the company of his own monster.
For what better way was there to catch a monster, than with a monster?
The room he'd dedicated to Acromantula storage had remained undisturbed over the summer holidays. Since the start of term, he'd cast Hermione's intruder repelling ward over the door, the one she'd perfected to keep the maids out of her room—or as he thought of it, their room. The ward was anchored to runes (Nauthiz and Isa, to restrict and reinforce) carved on the inside of the door, by the hinge and latch, and carved in reverse on the outside (to impair and impede). The runes wouldn't do anything to keep the Acromantula secured inside the room, but they would keep other people from stumbling in and letting it out by accident.
Entering the room and closing the door behind him, Tom lit the sconces, cleared the dust that had accumulated in the corners of the room, and kicked the top of the trunk.
Thunk!
He heard a dry rasping sound from the inside of the trunk, but the lid failed to rise.
"Are you awake?" asked Tom, drawing his wand. His fingers traced the line of the yew handle, and the grooves scored down the shaft, left by the teeth of his father's dog.
"I am resting," came the muffled words from the inside of the trunk, followed by a few sharp clicks.
"You've had enough rest," said Tom impatiently. "I have a task for you."
"I am happy to stay here."
"That's not an option!"
Rustling came from the trunk, then a sudden and pointed silence.
Tom blasted back the lid of the trunk, to a loud tirade of angry chittering.
"I won't repeat myself, Spider," said Tom. "I'm being haunted, by a ghost or spirit."
The Acromantula's body was folded within its legs. Its large jointed limbs were furred with thick black hair that had grown thicker in the years since Tom had captured it from Hagrid's cupboard. One by one, the legs stretched open like the blade of a pocket knife, until the Acromantula's eyes were revealed to him, shiny and lidless, a liquid black that glowed orange in the wavering torchlight.
Its pincers clicked. "It is not a ghost of which you speak. Nor a spirit."
"How do you know?"
Hairy limbs shivered in agitation; Tom had spent enough time in the Acromantula's mind to have learned some of the simpler hallmarks of arthropod body language.
"It travels under stone, passes through it, and the stone tremors in its wake. The water changes its route where it goes, when it rises from below. It does not hunt, not as yet—but it searches. And it hungers."
"Well, that's helpful," Tom remarked. "What is it?"
The spider drew its legs up, twitching furiously. "We do not speak of it! We do not name it!"
"I bet you don't even know," Tom scoffed. "How would you, in any case? You haven't seen the outside of this room in years."
"Our kind know to fear it by instinct, foolish man," said the Acromantula. "You seek your death if you dare to look for it."
"'Instinct'?" Tom repeated. "Does this mean your kind know of its existence? Is it some species of magical creature? A predator?"
"Not just any creature—a great and mortal enemy!"
"A creature, then," said Tom, relieved that it wasn't a ghost. He wasn't sure what spells would be effective against ghosts. He had read of exorcism rituals, but most of them evicted ghosts from the physical sites of their death, instead of banishing them to their Next Great Adventure. There was no way to force that to happen until the ghost itself chose to leave for good. The ghost of Sir Nicholas, for instance, had been executed in London but had somehow ended up haunting Gryffindor Tower in Scotland. "One that eats spiders. Is that what it's searching for? A snack?"
The Acromantula shuddered and a ripple moved across its body, its eight outermost limb joints flexing and bowing, followed by the next, until they reached the lumpen shape of the thorax in the centre. To Tom's distaste, it looked like the clenching of a hairy black sphincter.
"It does not pursue prey," said the Acromantula. "One such as it bides and strikes; it moves now in too regular a pattern, searching for something. A mate. Nesting territory. Hatching grounds. The last warmth before the turning dark."
"So you won't tell me what it is," Tom mused, "and yet you happen to have a good idea of how it hunts. Hmm, interesting... Is it a snake?"
The Acromantula chittered in fear.
"That's not an answer," Tom said. He raised his wand. "Imperio."
Acromantula spoke, its voice taking on a peculiar squeaky edge, like the sound of air being let out of a punctured bicycle tyre. "It is the greatest of its kind. So long as it breathes and feeds, it grows. It is the One Who Passes in Silence."
"What sort of name is that?" said Tom. "How can it pass in silence when you can sense its movements?"
"When it passes," said the spider, "all is silent."
"Is that a riddle?" Tom demanded, increasing the pressure on the spider's mind.
"That is how it is known to us," said the spider, forelegs clicking erratically against the stone flagstones. "The Bringer of Silence."
Tom flicked his wand; the curse dissipated. There was no use in continuing. The spider knew something of the mysterious creature's nature, but couldn't name it by the standards of human taxonomy. This was one of the weaknesses of the Imperius Curse—its use in gathering information was limited by the intelligence and education of the target. And despite the Acromantula possessing some form of primitive biological memory, the entirety of its life experience revolved around sleeping in a box and being fed table scraps.
"You once asked to see the sky," said Tom. "I refused you then, but perhaps I've changed my mind about it."
"I cannot leave this room!"
"You'll go if I tell you to go," said Tom in a cold voice. "Where and when I tell you."
The spider's pincers snicked together, tips glistening with venom. Its head lowered between its forelegs, the rest of its hairy legs curling defensively around its body. "You make a perilous choice to seek it out. Better to wait until it feeds and returns to dormancy."
"I'm not afraid of it," said Tom, and that was the end of the argument.
He slammed the lid of the trunk shut and left the room, considering how best to use the Acromantula's ability. The ability to sense vibrations—that could be useful in tracking the passage of 'The Bringer of Silence' around the castle. But it would only be useful in following it. He wanted to see it, with his own two eyes, not just feel the echo of its movements whilst borrowing the senses and faculties of another. He wanted to... to catch it.
It.
A creature so powerful that it made others shiver in terror at the very mention of its name. What could be more fitting for Salazar Slytherin's legacy than 'The Bringer of Silence'?
(Tom personally thought it was a cumbersome name—too long, too vague—but if it inspired fear in lesser beings, then its effectiveness was undeniable.)
How on Earth could it be made possible?
...On Earth.
"The water changes its route where it goes..."
Tom remembered the journey down, down, down into the tunnels beneath the castle. The hours of trudging through cold silt and shattered bones, and the brief stop where Nott kicked at the floor with a booted foot. The bones of a mermaid, broken into pieces—the curved set of human-like ribs, the pin-bones of a fish-like tail and desiccated fins, as fine as the vanes of a plucked feather.
No one hunts tigers by poking them in the face, Tom recalled.
He had a guide, didn't he?
Now all he needed was the lure.
.
.
On the last clear day in October, the students of Hogwarts rushed off en masse to Hogsmeade, emptying the shops of bottled butterbeer, sweets, and firecrackers for Hallowe'en festivities in their Common Rooms after the official school supper. The enchanted carriages rattled past all morning, carrying students from the castle and down to the front gates, bursts of red and blue light flashing from the windows.
Tom, having checked both ways down the corridor, floated the Acromantula's trunk out of its room, casting a Disillusionment Charm on both it and himself. The portraits, habitual eavesdroppers on the best of days, noticed nothing out of the usual as he passed. A few stragglers lingered in the Entrance Hall, but Tom slipped past them, and they remained none the wiser. As he'd expected, the viaduct was deserted, and he met no other students descending the slippery rock stairs carved down the side of the castle's foundations.
The boathouse sat at the foot of a sheer escarpment, a squat longhouse roofed in wooden shingles, grey and weathered with age. The interior smelled of watery things, kelp and fish and something unpleasantly briny, which Tom thought strange since Hogwarts had a freshwater lake. Then again, Hogwarts also had a giant squid living in the lake, and Tom had read that cephalopods, squids and octopi, were saltwater organisms.
Inside the boathouse, dozens of boats were stacked five deep on wooden racks, keels pointed toward the roof. Inspecting them closely, Tom observed that both the racks and the bottoms of the boats had been carved with runes, worn but still readable: endurance, preservation, movement, direction.
The rune for 'direction', Raidho, turned out to be rather convenient, as a simple tap from his wand to the carving resulted in a boat sliding down the rack and onto a set of tracks that sloped to the water's edge. Tom set the trunk into the boat before getting in himself, lifting up the hems of his robes to keep them from dragging in the water.
Once he'd gotten into the boat, it rocked in the water from the added weight, but to his relief, no water slopped in. It was cramped inside, smaller than he remembered from his First Year memories. Ten feet long from front to back, it could easily fit three or four eleven-year-olds, but two adult men would have trouble keeping their knees from brushing against each other. The front narrowed to a pointed vertex, and the back was flat, set with a wooden handle that turned from side to side when he poked at it, and when Tom looked closer, saw that it was carved with runes for movement and direction.
A rudder.
He hadn't remembered that from First Year, but then again, he recalled Mr. Ogg, the groundskeeper, thumping the back of the boat after ensuring the children had gotten in and weren't dangling anything over the sides. Tom had been too entranced by the view back then to pay attention to other things, for what a view it had been! The high turrets and crenellated towers spearing up out of the rocky cliff base, a rippling constellation of reflected lights bobbing over the Lake's dark surface, the windows of the Great Hall aglow with welcome and warmth, and every inch of stone imbued with power and grandeur and magic.
In the daylight, the castle was no less magnificent, but the wonder and beauty of Tom's first impression had faded over the years. Some part of him would always be fond of Hogwarts, the place where he had learned what it truly meant to be a wizard. But more and more often these days, he looked forward to beginning his life outside those stone walls, without the added inconvenience of teachers, schedules, and unruly children. And to think that he had once dreaded leaving Hogwarts, dreaded re-entering the Muggle world after his final year of schooling, and returning to London with nothing but his wits, a handful of old textbooks in a battered trunk, and the clothes on his back.
For now, his battered trunk contained a live Acromantula, very unhappy about being wobbled about through the corridors and now tossed into a boat. And the unhappiness would naturally be compounded by the fact that spiders didn't do well in the water, since they had no way of holding their breath.
"If you try anything," said Tom, opening the trunk, "I'll push you off the side."
"What are you doing?" the Acromantula asked, in no hurry whatsoever to leave its container.
"Fishing."
Tom reached into his pocket and brought out a case of chocolate frogs, traded from a Fourth Year in exchange for a re-scheduled detention. (Professor Merrythought was a strict supervisor who demanded physical labour of student delinquents, but Professor Binns allowed students to do whatever they wanted, as long as they didn't make any noise.) Ten frogs, each box fresh and the seals intact—he'd checked, and the boy who'd given him the set had assumed it was to ensure that the cards, the most valuable part of every frog pack, hadn't been nicked.
The cards didn't matter. The frogs' animation enchantment, mass-produced but still durable and well-made, was the reason for his interest. Of course he could Transfigure and animate frogs of his own, but why bother, when someone else had done the work for him? Hermione would have cited something called 'personal integrity', but Hermione's personal integrity meant that she would interrupt a professor who'd mentioned some minor detail that was contradicted by three other authors on the subject. Because her conscience wouldn't allow an error to stand, uncorrected, even at the detriment of the other students in the class, or the teacher's lesson plan.
Tom, on the other hand, wasn't burdened by so troublesome a notion as a 'conscience'.
He cracked open a chocolate frog box, and the frog popped out, leaping for freedom. Tom didn't attempt to catch it. Eyeing its trajectory, Tom lifted his wand and hit it with a Featherlight Charm just as it hit the surface of the water, limbs extended.
Plop!
The chocolate frog broke the surface with a tiny splash, and an equally tiny wave lapped against the outside of the wooden boat. The animation charm had a few minutes before it faded, but until then, the frog splashed about in the water, its chocolate skin glistening.
"The Great One does not feed on such objects of wizarding artifice," said the Acromantula, peering over the side of its trunk.
"I'm not trying to feed 'the Great One'," said Tom. "Keep watch on the other side and tell me if you can sense anything underneath the boat."
When the animation faded, Tom let the soggy chocolate frog sink into the water, before he cracked open a new box and repeated the technique. The useful thing about these novelty sweets was that their movements were modelled on those of real frogs, and from a distance, looked quite lifelike. Animation charms cast by the average amateur tended to be stiff and jerky; someone unfamiliar with the shape and structure of an animal's body could not hope to replicate their behaviour with any real accuracy.
(Tom had, over years of observation, noticed that most wizards used the simplest of animation charms. Pictures moved in a short, repetitive loop, a dustpan had but a single sweeping action, a ladle only stirred a cauldron in one direction. Anything more complex required actual thought, and it was for this reason that wizards bought their household potions at the local apothecary, and visited the grocer to buy their daily bread. But, Tom didn't hesitate to clarify, he himself visited the grocer not because he was incapable of the proper charmwork, but because he had more important things to do with his time. It was solely a matter of time, not capability!)
The sixth frog disappeared into the black depths of the Lake when the Acromantula, which had dipped its forelegs into the water, began to stir.
"Something approaches," it spoke, drawing back to the centre of the boat.
"How large?"
"Longer than you."
The seventh frog gave one earnest leap for freedom before it was abruptly caught. A grey-skinned hand surged out of the water, long-fingered and clawed, crushing the frog within its grip. The hand had membranous webbings between each finger and opposable thumb, and in its clutch, the frog gave one hopeful twitch before the charm failed for good.
Beneath the surface of the water, something pale and silvery twisted to and fro, as sinuous as an eel, with an intelligent air of menace possessed by no fish species he knew.
The Acromantula shivered and let out a shrill whistling noise.
Tom broke open an eighth chocolate frog, peeling back the pasteboard lid with his left hand. His right gripped his wand, lifting it out of his lap and up to the side of the boat, taking care to make no sudden movements.
This time, when the frog jumped out of the boat and a flash of silver rushed to meet it at the water's surface, Tom was ready.
"Stupefy!"
Tom slipped his wand up his sleeve and pushed past the Acromantula, seizing the rudder and nudging the boat several yards to the left—he almost heard Hermione's voice reminding him, in her charmingly pedantic way, that it was properly named port, larboard, widdershins, or some other nautical term he couldn't care less about—and the wood creaked under him, swaying as the bow turned against a rising wind. The tail of his robe caught the wind like a sail, and for an instant Tom was blinded as his necktie flapped across his face. But soon he'd brought the boat up by a length of sparkling silver bobbing on the water's surface, and when he turned it over, grabbing it by the nearest limb, he saw a mermaid up close for the first time.
She looked nothing like the mermaid in the stained glass window that graced the Prefect's Bathroom, which looked more appropriate for the sultan's bathhouse in Le Jardin Parfumé than a student bathing facility. That mermaid was a dewy-eyed maiden with a mane of red-gold hair that she combed with a bit of shell; when she wasn't dressing her hair, she lounged on her rock and watched the passing bathers with an innocent expression of curiosity.
This mermaid, as Tom dragged it by the hair over the side of the boat, looked like it was half fish. Its hair was green and matted, its skin smooth and slimy to the touch, covered in a viscous, slug-like layer of clear mucus. Its mouth was wider than a human's, a gash that opened from cheek to cheek, and inside its mouth, its teeth were set in rows like those in a shark's jaw. The more Tom looked, the more differences he saw between it and him: the gills on its grey throat, gasping and fluttering once he'd pulled the creature out of the water; the silver-scaled tail, adorned with a row of sharp spikes that followed the line of its spine; the cold, hairless skin mottled with markings over the back and shoulders, resembling corpse-flesh after the blood had pooled and settled...
The Ministry names these things beasts, thought Tom. Well, now I think I can understand their reasoning.
"Tell me if you sense any others," Tom said to the Acromantula, who squatted on its side of the boat, watching Tom drag the front half of the mermaid over the side. Back in the tunnels under the school, Nott had mentioned that mermaids grouped together to hunt down and neutralise mortal threats. When he'd arrived at this plan, Tom accepted that he couldn't just kill the mermaid, even if it would be the easiest thing to do—and the most profitable. So he'd planned accordingly.
From under the wooden plank seat, Tom drew out a small pouch containing the emergency supplies Hermione had gathered for their journey into the Chamber of Secrets. Vials of potions, bandages, scissors, and a brown glass bottle containing a tincture of iodine, whose paper label indicated that Hermione had filched it from her parents' clinic. Tom had supplemented the pouch with his own potion supplies, empty vials that he'd used for collecting Acromantula venom to sell at the tavern in Hogsmeade.
He began his "harvest" with methodical efficiency, clipping first the fingernails, and then the green hair, squeezing water out of the hanks with his fist, before he shoved it into a vial. He took samples of the scales, the spines, and when he was finished, he took out his silver-bladed potions knife and, turning the webbed hand this way and that, spent a moment contemplating where best to draw the blood.
The Acromantula wandered over, claws clicking on the wood. "The pulse runs warmest at the joint."
"The elbow?" asked Tom.
"The top joint," said the Acromantula, running its foreclaw down the mermaid's shoulder, to its underarm. "Here. Warm. Can you not feel it?"
"No," said Tom, turning the mermaid's limp body to inspect the place that the Acromantula had indicated. "Show me."
A quick slash of a claw, and blood began to flow sluggishly from the incision. Thick blood, darker than human blood, a shade of red that was not quite violet, but couldn't be described with any of the terms—scarlet, crimson, or vermilion—that people often used for fresh human blood. Tom settled on calling it a dark wine colour, and wondered what magical properties it had. Acromantulas had blue blood, useful in testing potions—the colour of the blood would change depending on the potion with which it was mixed, and it had become a way to gauge the strength of commercial potion batches.
First one vial, corked and stored away, then a second, then a third. Tom siphoned the blood with the help of his wand, while the Acromantula watched him with its eight unblinking eyes.
"Will you keep it?" the Acromantula asked.
"No," said Tom. "I'll throw it back when I'm done."
"Such a waste," it said. "It is so very fresh..."
"If you want fish, then I'll get you a fish," said Tom, too pre-occupied with the harvesting to make much of a counterargument.
"But I am hungry," whined the Acromantula. "And I can feel how tender and warm it is. So warm; I feel it leaking. It moves like nothing I have tasted before. It moves, ah, it moves..."
And as it spoke, Tom felt under his hand the slightest twitch of muscle from the mermaid's shoulder—and then the mermaid's eyes opened, amber sclera with a flat, oval-shaped pupil, and it stared at Tom, at his hands full of blood-smeared crystal vials.
The next second, the boat gave a huge heave, and the crystal vials went flying out of Tom's hands, clattering to the bottom of the boat. Tom himself was thrown to one side, his head cracking against the edge. His head rang; his mouth tasted like salt and iron; when he pushed himself to a sitting position, the boat was still swaying, the Acromantula was shrieking at an ear-splitting pitch, and the mermaid was struggling on the bench seat, gills flapping open and closed, open and closed, like storm shutters blown loose in a howling wind.
Its tail thump-thump-thumped, drumming on the outside of the boat. In the blood-soaked chaos—for the boat's interior was splattered with wine-red blood—the drumming was the only steady thing Tom could grasp in his disoriented state, while blood, his own crimson-red human blood, trickled from his split lip down to his chin and collar.
"No," moaned the Acromantula, scuttling around its trunk, which Tom had left open on the floor of the boat, but had been thrown shut after the mermaid had woken up and tried to make good its escape. "No, no, no!"
Shut up, thought Tom. I can't think with all this damned noise.
"A-Accio," he murmured through crusty lips. Tom coughed, cleared his throat, and spat a mouthful of bloody phlegm into the water. "Accio wand."
His wand flew to his hand. "Stupefy."
The drumming stopped.
Tom dropped to his knees, peeling back the mermaid's eyelid with one hand, the other hand jabbing his wand to its temple.
A garden of kelp fronds wafted in the invisible currents of the Great Lake. Cold water, crisp fresh melt carried down from the distant snow line, mixed with warm water, sun-bright and white-frothed in the singing wind, bearing a peaty taint of the land-dwellers' waste. But—here, now, high above—there came an inexplicable tremor near the surface, a burbling voice of dissonance in the familiar harmony, almost recognisable, but something about it felt... alien.
The disturbance came in the form of a small brown frog, and was easily subdued. But there was another source of disharmony, a vessel on the water, and something within it—something dark and unfriendly—stirred.
Was this creature responsible for the changing currents, beyond the usual swell and surge that followed the rising moon and falling stars? A tide cycle ago, the flow of the waters had shifted, and it had taken on an odd brackish flavour, bone ash and acrid marshwort. Soon after, there had been a disappearance of the pincer crabs and the ambling shells that populated the lakebed...
Tom tore his consciousness out of the mermaid's mind, feeling the dull throb of an oncoming headache. There was a distant ringing in his ears from having struck his head on the side of the boat, and it wasn't helped by the squeaking of the Acromantula, scurrying from one side of the boat to the other.
"Obliviate," he muttered, swiping the blood still dripping from his torn lip. He turned to the shivering Acromantula. "Will you stop that?"
"We must leave," it said.
"Not yet," said Tom. He gestured to the mermaid, its top half draped limply over the bench. "I have to throw this back."
"Make haste," said the Acromantula urgently. "The water is changing."
With the help of a charm or two, Tom lifted up the mermaid and heaved it over the side. It sank slowly into the blue depths, and a trailing ribbon of blood stained the water a rich violet hue. Tom dipped his hand into the water, rinsing its dark blood off his skin and from under his fingernails; he scooped up another handful of water and washed the drying crust of blood from his chin. He couldn't help but wonder what feature of biology had allowed the mermaid to know when the currents had changed. If their species was a fusion of demi-human and fish, could a real human bestow their abilities unto his own body with a precise sequence of internal Transfigurations? What exactly was the source of their abilities? Was it morphology—or magic?
A trained wizard could Transfigure himself into any animal, if he could visualise it well enough. If he had detailed knowledge of the internal workings of a mermaid, then shouldn't it be possible, in theory, to re-create their innate abilities? From Grindelwald's decades old pamphlets, Tom had read the man's assertion that wizards were as inherently magical as any magical creature, with the gift that ran in their blood and gave them longer lives than any common Muggle. But, Tom supposed, if a wizard tired of Transfigurations and wanted to return himself to his original form—for a wizard's form was the natural superior—then he ought to be quite sure of the structure of his own anatomy...
Something shivered, far, far, beneath the surface of the Lake.
At first glance, it looked like nothing more than the glimmer of sunlight on the lapping wavelets. When the sun retreated behind a screen of wisping clouds, there were signs of subtle movement: it was an oddity in the texture and interchange of the light, as if a black blanket were being unfolded in a darkened room. Tom's senses, in their narrow human capacity could, to his frustration, only perceive the motion and not the form.
"The water is changing," he breathed.
"Then it is time to depart," urged the Acromantula. "It is coming!"
"What is?" asked Tom, his voice sharp.
Blood of my blood, he heard, a low and distant murmur that could have been mistaken for the sough of the wind, or the creaking of a weather-beaten wooden boat.
"The Great One!"
"Good," said Tom. "We can't leave until I see it."
The entirety of his present misadventures—the boat, the frogs, the mermaid—had been for one purpose: a means to compel the beast of Slytherin to reveal itself to him. After his initial disappointment with the Chamber of Secrets, Tom had planned to return another day, by himself. If he couldn't find the legendary monster inside the Chamber, then he decided he would have to lure it into the open.
From his extracurricular reading—and he had been pleasantly surprised by the offerings of his grandfather's library—catching large game was a matter of following proper procedure. Boars were flushed with hounds, bears baited and snared with hidden traps, crocodiles speared from the deck of an outrigger boat, and tigers lured with live goats tied to stakes.
Tom considered himself an expert in a number of subjects, but there was no subject in which he had as much experience as the care and management of animals. He knew animals. He had spent years living with them, training them; he had spent countless hours projecting his own consciousness inside their minds, until there was no longer a line of demarcation between native instinct and magical coercion. He had learned that an animal, a wild beast, was driven by the basest of urges—a trait that designated them as inferior to wizards, and made weak wizards the lessers of exceptional individuals like Tom Riddle.
Regardless of how great or terrible Slytherin's beast was reputed to be, in the end, it was nothing but a beast, which made Tom confident in his ability to master it.
(That slow transition of his desire to see the beast, to wanting to subdue it, went unremarked upon.)
Blood of my blood...
Tom glanced over his shoulder, to the Acromantula. "Did you hear that?"
I can smell you... I can taste you...
"It rises! We must leave now!"
"Can you hear me?" Tom hissed, leaning over the side of the boat.
I can hear you, spoke a voice, a faint and hollow voice that sounded like it was speaking to Tom from the bottom of a well. I hear you, speaker of my speech.
"What," said Tom, "are you?"
There was a long pause, as if the creature was contemplating what answer to give to Tom. I was hungry. Now I am fed.
"Can I..." Tom asked. "Can I have a look at you?"
Is this your will?
"Yes," said Tom eagerly. "It is!"
As you will it, you shall have it.
Tom was taken aback. The beast listened to him; it had obeyed him. Had he mastered it? Was it that easy?
He began to reconsider this thought after the passing of a very tense minute. The seconds, as marked by the ticking hand of his wristwatch, made one full circle, then began another, with no appearance of anything out of the ordinary. But then he heard a low rumble—he felt it, too, as he had felt the rumble of grinding stone when the doors before the Chamber of Secrets had opened for him—and the boat began to quiver, the charmed wooden planks creaking against each other, while the Acromantula ducked beneath the seat, forelegs lowered over its eyes, screeching incoherently.
A dark shape rose out of the water, water pouring off in waves down its scaled sides. A long column as thick around as a tree trunk, it ended in a great triangular head set with a row of bony horns at its base, an arrangement that resembled the points of a crown. The head split open to reveal a mouthful of dangerously sharp teeth, yellowed spikes smeared with a thick red paste that dripped down the side of its jaw...
It took an instant for Tom to recognise that it was the colour of mermaid blood.
"Do not look at it!" the Acromantula shrilled from behind him.
"Why not?" asked Tom.
"Its eyes!"
Tom inspected the creature as it coiled itself around and swam in languid circles, ripples of water in its wake causing the boat to rock back and forth. In direct sunlight, the serpent had a hide of dark green scales, with a lighter colour around the belly. It looked like it had a natural affinity to water, and indeed, the shape and position of its nostrils were similar to that of a crocodile's, placed at the end of its face—Tom could easily imagine it spending hours lurking unseen, with the bulk of its body hidden underwater, ready to propel itself in a deadly strike...
The creature's eyes, set in ridged sockets on either side of its face, were closed.
"They're closed," said Tom.
Why are they closed? he thought. Is it blind? The spider wouldn't fear it if it was blind and useless. No, it's something else; the eyes, they're—
The realisation struck Tom right then. Salazar Slytherin's monster of legend is a Basilisk.
He had spent the summer reading his Magical Creatures textbooks from cover to cover, and had produced a number of theories of what Slytherin might have chosen to guard his Chamber of Secrets. A Hydra, a Runespoor, perhaps a species of eastern sea serpent that wizards in the Orient believed brought good fortune and seasonal rainfall. Basilisk had been low on his list of possibilities; its name derived from 'Basileus', Greek for 'Emperor', and Tom had thought it a species too suited for warm climates to thrive in the perpetual gloom of northern Scotland.
But as he looked at the Basilisk, really looked, he began to perceive the extent of its imperfections. There were small pale marks scattered over its body, bubbled patches not dissimilar to the look of popped blisters, where loose scales were on the verge of falling away. The raised patterns across its back and belly were uneven, scales flattened and ill-formed, as if they had been crushed together or ground flat. Tom ventured a guess that this had occurred due to the Basilisk's massive size and lack of physical activity—it must have been sleeping for years at a time, within a confined space, heavy coils piled on top of each other and exerting great pressures to the lower parts of its body.
"Will you keep your eyes closed?" Tom asked.
I will, hissed the Basilisk, and this close to it, the sound wasn't anything like the little snakes he'd seen in the window of the pet shop in Diagon Alley, nor the common grass adder that had been left in the train compartment before the Christmas holiday of last year. Their voices had been weak and soft and whispery, and Tom's ability to understand them came not just from hearing their words, but observing the lift and movement of their heads, the twisting of their bodies, and the flicker of their tongues. The Basilisk, when it hissed, sounded like the dry rumble of a sand dune collapsing in the aftermath of a wild storm; its voice had a low, throbbing resonance to it that Tom perceived through his ears as much as he did through the whole of his body.
I can taste you, it said. Its head lowered, and a shadow fell over the boat, over the figure of Tom sitting inside.
Tom glanced around; the Acromantula had tucked itself under the seat, chittering to itself, of no use to anyone at present. He looked up, up to the Basilisk, which was drawing nearer and nearer to him. Craning his head backwards, Tom could see pearly, red-tinged flecks of its latest meal clinging to its jaw; he saw the inside of its nostrils, pits sunken into the front of its face, wet with lake water and glittering in the sunlight. Water dripped from its sides. Tom could easily imagine it as the carven figurehead on the prow of an admiral's flagship, and for an instant he wondered how he'd ever thought Salazar Slytherin would ever have chosen a dragon, a creature of fire, to—
A forked tongue flicked out of the Basilisk's mouth, and before Tom could raise a hand to defend himself, the tip scraped against his chin and jaw.
It felt like being whipped in the face by the tendril of a rogue Tentacula.
"What are you doing!" said Tom angrily, clapping a hand to his jaw. "You—you licked my face!"
Your blood, rumbled the Basilisk. It is for this that I have waited so long.
"You like the taste?" said Tom. He didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad one, but he could use it. "You will do as I order, then?"
What is your order?
"Will you present yourself to me if I summon you?"
If you will it.
"Good," said Tom. "Then you should go away until I summon you. Stay hidden, don't make noises, don't eat anything else—I'll find something else for you—and..."
The Basilisk waited patiently, tongue poking out every now and again to taste the air and the side of the boat stained with mermaid's blood.
"—And may I have some of your venom?"
Tom was pleased to see that the Basilisk didn't even question the order. It bent down low over the side of the boat—close enough to risk its capsizing—and opened its mouth, its breath hot and fouled with the awful ammoniac odour of a fishmonger's offal bucket. The inside of its mouth was pink and fleshy, set with a pair of prominent fangs on the upper jaw, and a row of smaller teeth angled inward on the lower jaw.
It took a loin-girding combination of pluck and persistence to milk the venom: Tom held a pair of crystal potion vials under the tips of the Basilisk's fangs, tensed and prepared for a quick withdrawal, in the event it tried to close its mouth while his hands were still within range of its teeth. The muscles within the Basilisk's pink fleshy mouth pulsed, and out squirted a stream of fluorescent green venom. A single wayward drop sizzled where it had fallen on the boat.
Browsing through Professor Slughorn's private textbook collection, Tom had learned of the rarest and most valuable potion ingredients. Mermaid blood and Acromantula venom were both rare and relatively hard to acquire, but there were licensed purveyors, and a small black market that operated in the shadows of Knockturn Alley and the outdoor privy behind Old Ab's goat shed.
Then there was the flesh of human and unicorn, neither of them rare in their raw form, but impossible to find rendered down into usable ingredients. (Many wealthy wizarding families who had a grove of magical woodland on their estates set out salt licks to attract unicorns, the same way Muggle gentry kept swan ponds—they were considered to be the height of tasteful garden ornamentation.) The rarity of human flesh and unicorn meat was due to nothing more than simple moral censure, because there were some vague superstitions, on equal standing to old wives' tales, surrounding their harvest. A curse, a pox on one's house, excommunication from wizard Heaven, something in that vein. Tom was uncertain of the exact details, as he'd skimmed through the handwritten pages of ominous warnings in the back of Slughorn's potions book, in order to get to the good parts. The part of the book that listed the rarest ingredients of all.
Phoenix tears and Basilisk venom.
Phoenix tears were sold by the drop, and collected from wild phoenixes that shed their tears if a wizard recited a profound poem or sang a heartfelt song. The creatures were, if not sentient, then extremely sentimental; they sensed the intent of the heart, and rewarded those whose creative endeavours were delivered with sincerity. (Tom thought it silly and beneath the dignity of a proper wizard to indulge the whims of a mere animal. When had anyone ever curtseyed to a cow before taking its milk, or thanked a tree for sprouting an apple? Never.)
Basilisk venom, according to the book, was not sold in any market in the British Isles. There had been no reports of a British Basilisk sighting in centuries, and no confirmed sightings whatsoever. The bestiaries had classified Basilisks as wizard-killers, impossible to domesticate, and dangerous to approach—the same classification as Acromantulas, but the entry came with a long list of additional warnings shared by no other creature in the book. Breeding them had been unanimously banned by the magical governments of Europe, even before the Statute, and the few samples of venom allowed into the country, after a generous application of Ministry levies, were imported from Asia.
And to think that Tom Riddle had now come into the possession of such a rarity.
After the Basilisk had been sent away, its sinuous body descending into the black waters of the Lake, Tom sat down in the boat. It disturbed him to find that, in the sudden release of tension, his hand trembled in returning his wand to his robe pocket.
"You can come out now," he said, kicking the bench. "It's gone. The... Basilisk." He savoured the word. Basilisk. He liked the sound of its name. It was only natural; he had always been fond of the titles of Basileus, Imperator, and Princeps.
The Acromantula crawled out. "You spoke to it. You can speak to it."
"I told it what to do," said Tom. "And it listened. You ought to take it as an example."
"Will you feed me flesh, too?"
"Fresh meat is a privilege to be earned," Tom said. He pointed at the trunk. "You can start earning it by getting in."
He locked the Acromantula in its room and returned to the Slytherin quarters, pressing his hands to his pockets to keep his potion vials from rattling around. The vials were of premium crystal and he'd made sure that the corks were secure, but he hadn't liked the idea of the Basilisk venom spilling open in his pocket. Nor had he liked the idea of carrying a vial in his hand; he doubted that anyone would be able to identify its provenance in the few seconds it took to pass someone in the hall, but there were few potions that came in such a bright, noxious colour—and those that were, were known to be rather deadly. And not something he could explain away as a special Head Boy errand.
The Common Room was occupied by First and Second Year students too young to visit Hogsmeade, playing draughts or copying each other's homework. As he passed, they scrambled off the armchair by the fire—his armchair—but he made no expression of reproval, proceeding directly to the Seventh Year boys' dormitory.
The dormitory was empty, but the room had been cleaned and the beds made during his absence, the pyjamas that Tom's dorm mates had thrown over their bedposts washed, cleaned, and folded at the foot of each bed. Tom's pyjamas were there as well, folded so that his initials embroidered on the breast pocket were facing upward. His grandmother's work—she seemed to fear that while Tom was away at school, he would forget that he was part of the family, and so it was her duty to remind him.
The embroidery matched the initials embossed on his school trunk, another one of Mary Riddle's indulgences. Tom flipped the lid back and dug right down to the bottom of the trunk, where he'd stored his potions chest.
Within it, arranged in gleaming rows, was his collection of potions. Acromantula venom, labelled from the date of harvest, the earlier samples thin and watery and too weak to fetch a good price at market. Draught of the Living Death, fed to the Acromantula when the holidays arrived and Tom couldn't bring it meals or Vanish its wastes. And a few experimental brews of his Confusion Concoction. He'd won Slytherin a Quidditch Cup with it in Fourth Year, and although he was an adult who could cast Confundus Charms whenever he pleased, he was reluctant to discard something that had worked so well, and had given him so many good memories. (He hadn't forgotten Mrs. Cole from the orphanage, not by any measure.)
Tom set the bottled mermaid's blood into a few empty slots in the corner, rearranging the older vials to make more room.
It was then that he came across a scroll of parchment that he hadn't looked at in many months, since the beginning of the summer holidays.
File #DI-682. Persons of Interest.
There were names on the list that he'd marked after speaking to Mr. Pacek at the Grangers' home in June. Bührmann, Eglitis, Gerdt, Grozbiecki... The names of those who sympathised with the likes of Gellert Grindelwald. Reading over the list, Tom recalled the dream he'd nurtured from Second Year, that of the fat golden medallion strung on a silk ribbon, the premier accolade of Wizarding Britain.
"How easy do you think it is to get an Order of Merlin in peacetime?"
It wasn't peacetime now, but Tom didn't know how long that might last. From interrogating Travers, the Ministry and the Board of Governors had stationed Aurors in Hogsmeade for the protection of the students. There was an Auror liaison who had, several times, been invited to meals at the High Table by Headmaster Dippet. Watching the table, Tom had observed the Auror's valiant efforts in catching Dumbledore's ear, and their passionate debate which involved plenty of finger-jabbing, beard-stroking, and tablecloth strategising with salt cellars and drinking goblets.
Tom set the scroll back in the potion chest, organising the vials of Basilisk venom in the remaining slots, just as the dormitory door swung open with a creak.
"What's that smell?" came Nott's voice from the threshold. "Who's in here?"
Tom stood up, tucking his last vial of venom under his sleeve and out of sight. "What are you doing here? I thought you were spending the afternoon in the village."
"The others wanted to try the dragon's blood whisky," said Nott, scowling. "Never liked the stuff—it gives me indigestion. What are you doing here, Riddle? Why do you smell like... is that fish?"
"Nevermind that," said Tom quickly. "Am I mis-remembering, or did the Prophet say you scored an Outstanding O.W.L of ninety-six percent in Arithmancy?"
"Ninety-six, brought up to ninety-nine with the advanced extension questions," Nott replied. "If you want help with your homework, why aren't you asking Granger? She doesn't shy away from telling everyone that she got full marks."
"I don't need help with homework," said Tom coolly. "I've more important things to attend to."
"Things like..." Nott glanced over his shoulder, then shut and locked the door. "Like the Chamber, you mean?"
Tom gave an unconcerned wave of his hand. "More important things than the Chamber."
"What!" Nott gaped at him. "But we spent—I spent—the whole of last year looking for it. And we found it! What could be more important than that?"
"The future of Magical Britain, maybe?" said Tom.
Nott didn't look impressed. "You're going to take up Sluggy's offer to join the Aurors, then."
"And sign up to spend years sitting behind a desk, memorising rules out of a book?" scoffed Tom. "I don't need to tell you that my future takes precedence above anything else."
"No, you don't," Nott agreed. "So. You want my help with an off-the-books project, without Granger. No Granger, no Aurors. I don't think I'd be wrong in guessing that this scheme you've come up with is either very dangerous, very risky, or very stupid."
"It's very worthwhile," said Tom.
"Oh, is it?" said Nott. "I'm not convinced."
"I have a plan," said Tom. The vial of Basilisk venom dropped out of his sleeve, and coming to a swift decision, he tossed it to Nott. "Catch."
"Wha—" Nott yelped, as the small glass bottle, three inches long and no broader than a man's thumb, flew through the air. Nott caught it by the tips of his fingers, a graceless fumble unworthy of the greenest reserve Seeker. "What's this, Riddle? What kind of game are you playing?"
Tom watched him, a humourless smile forming on his face. "What do you think it is?"
"What have you done now?" asked Nott, sighing deeply. He rolled the vial between his fingers, tipping it upside down, then swirling it to inspect the viscosity, clarity, and hue of the liquid within. "It's... no, it can't be..." He looked up at Tom, his eyes narrowed. "There's no possibility of flogging this off without the Department of Magical Creatures putting you at the top of their list."
"I'm not going to sell it," said Tom. "I want to use it."
"'It'," Nott said, sounding contemplative, "is under your control?"
"Unquestionably."
"Since you managed this—" Nott tapped the vial, "—and didn't get yourself killed, then I suppose I'll have to believe you."
"There's no doubting the word of an honest man," said Tom amiably. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have a wash."
"Wait, Riddle," said Nott, holding up the vial. "Don't you want your... ah, 'parsley juice' back?"
"I told you our arrangement could be worth your while," Tom replied. "Keep it. There's more of that where it came from."
Tom picked up his pyjamas and strode to the dormitory bathroom, closing the door. When he turned on the shower tap and let the warm water rinse away the evidence of the day's labour, he heard a low, whispering voice rise up from the drainage grate beneath his feet.
Blood of my blood...