This is it.
This is what's left of the splendour and blood purity of the House of Gaunt. Rotten wood housing the last living descendant of Salazar, right here on the cold underground without a foundation. Where no intact walls keep out the voices of the night and the forest spirits can do as they please.
The Chamber of Secrets testifies to power and strength, but this, this shack overgrown in nettles – this is nothing. This is less than nothing, the worn out, broken hut before us only knows tragedy.
Unworthy, in each and every world.
Unworthy for magic, unworthy for Muggles. Nothing and no one could ever stay here, let alone stay sane ...
And for the first time in my life, I have to admit that there may be worse things than growing up in an orphanage with plenty of books, a piano and a high-functioning alcoholic. Perhaps it would've been worse to grow up in the damp morass like a rotting plant, forgotten by the world – and most of all, self-forgotten.
"Tom, are those –" Harper pauses, trying to make out what's nailed onto the front door of the hut in the distance.
I try to recognise the strange threads hanging there as well. Until it dawns on me.
"Snakes," I mutter. "Dead snakes. Madness, as you'd expect ..."
Harper gulps.
"And bare patches all over the trees," I quietly add.
"Like someone's constantly climbing up and down, sure, but this worries me even a bit more," she replies, pointing to a knife on the ground, almost invisible in the green thicket not far from us. The blade is quite brown – as if stained from dried blood.
"The garden behind the shack must've been nice in the past, though." It's such useless optimism. "Tom, is that ... a well?"
"Not sure, looks more like a cairn to me." I frown and sigh. "Darling, this isn't a good place. There's insanity in the air, can't you feel it?"
She nods, hesitant to admit it even though it's so obvious. "The darkness under the treetops doesn't exactly help."
"Have your wand ready," I demand. "And don't hesitate to use it."
"You know what else I was actually going to mention?" She bites her lips to then give me a guilty smile. "I still have the trace on me ..."
I instantly groan, staring up into the heavens. "Of course you do! You deliberately saved this reminder for now!"
She all but shrugs. "You wouldn't have let me join you otherwise. And maybe you wouldn't have come here on your own. But this place is important. I know it."
"I know this place is dangerous," I growl.
As if to prove it, a dry branch cracks not far from us.
We both freeze, and again there is nothing but silence.
Too much silence ...
Until suddenly we make out nagging laughter behind us. Or next to us? It seems near, but the reverberation of the forest makes it impossible to determine.
Yet soon, with slow steps from tree to tree in a stooped posture, a curious and shockingly neglected figure approaches us.
I instantly push Harper behind me, it's quite intuitive. I know she could defend herself from evil. But whether she would do so in the face of sheer and ultimately pitiful madness, I couldn't bet on.
Dirty, dull hair, ragged clothes and mud on his face – but none of that, against all logic, can hide prying eyes that follow our every move.
"How long has he been watching us?" Harper whispers, I imagine I can hear her heart thump.
"Long enough." I don't take my eyes off him as I finally shout, "Are you Morfin Gaunt?"
What I must unfortunately think to be my uncle seems to consider disappearing back into the safety of the very forest he's so familiar with. And indeed, the mad figure takes shelter behind a tree trunk to just poke his head out, sniggering derisively.
"Are you Morfin Gaunt?" I repeat, this time in Parsel.
His eyes flash. He immediately claps his hands like a maniac before pulling a viper out of his moth-eaten coat. "A split tongue, did you hear that?"
When he suddenly rushes towards us in an unexpected haste, my Patronus is quicker.
"Don't you dare get close to her!" I warn him as the sweep of my shimmering thunderbird's wings scares him for a moment. A healthy mixture of scepticism and fear settles on his face as he tilts his head to stare at us again, all puzzled.
"Are you Morfin? Do you live here?"
"Who wants to know that about Morfin?" he mumbles.
"So you're not him?" I ask in irritation, but he just cackles and nods.
"Tom, I think he's talking about himself, in the third person," Harper whispers, trying hard not to let her uneasiness shine through. "Maybe because he's alone so much?"
"What are you doing here in Morfin's forest?" he wishes to know as he draws closer again, step by step. "And why are you bringing a girl for him?"
"You're not even looking at her!" I hiss, and he backs off right away. "Otherwise I'll make it the last sight of your miserable life – got it?"
After a brief moment of weighing his options, he laughs insidiously again, and the closer he gets now, the more obvious it becomes.
Consistent marrying in circles that were far too narrow has left undeniable traces. Morfin's posture is crooked, the look of his two eyes anything but straight, his laughter is uncontrollable and every movement peculiar – all this is visible.
But not how schizophrenic and dangerous he is. People were not exaggerating with their stories about him.
"What's her name?" he asks with too much interest, trying to catch a glimpse of Harper behind me again – which I acknowledge with a red sparking Relashio that brings him to his knees, with his skin obviously burnt.
"Tom," Harper whispers quite taken aback, "he didn't do anything!"
"You don't understand his words," I simply correct her over my shoulder, then I walk towards Morfin.
I'm about to start asking him questions with all the force it will take, just when he looks up with a sneer and utters, "Morfin thought you were the Muggle at first – you look just like the Muggle ..."
"What Muggle?" I ask, and yet I know. I envision the man from the café in my mind probably as much as he does right now ...
"The Muggle Morfin's sister fancied. The Muggle who lives in the manor on the hill behind the valley." I take a step back, my eyes never leaving his face as he stands up to turn his back on us, only to scurry towards the house like a weasel.
"What about Marvolo?" I call after him. "Is he dead as they say?"
"Stone dead," Morfin hisses, then suddenly he bangs his clenched fist against the old front door in strange fury, making the snakes nailed there tremble. He turns around, then spits on the ground in front of us. "Left Morfin alone like everyone else ... And you look just like the Muggle. But he's older. Older than you, now that Morfin thinks of it ..." He pushes the door open with his foot, backwards he disappears into his hut like a shadow.
Yet he leaves the door open, as though he wanted us to join him ...
"What are you waiting for?" Harper gently pushes me. "We have to follow him, if only to watch out."
I knew it was a mistake to bring her here. I knew it was foolish to put her in this situation. But I'd rather her enter this shack with me than be out here all alone.
"Stay close behind me," I say as we move.
Like the very sight of the shack suggested, the interior with three small rooms is just as wretched and dilapidated. Two doors lead away from the main room, which, despite the insane layers of dust and dirt, probably doubles as a kitchen and living room. Next to the fireplace, obviously unused for a long time, a tattered, dirty armchair – Morfin already uses it like a throne – sits in front of a corner with a dim window. Next to the black, sooty cooker there's a shelf with encrusted pots and a dented metal box, otherwise a table and two chairs. That's likely all the belongings the Gaunts have left ...
How anyone can bear to vegetate here is a mystery to me.
"He left her, that disgusting Muggle," Morfin mutters, then suddenly he smirks. "She deserved it. Filthy traitor!" Again he spits on the floor, and it seems he has long since ceased to mind being in his own home amidst all the chaos. "Stole from us before she ran away the first chance she got," he grumbles, increasingly angry. "Abandoned us. Disgraced us! Exposed us, trampled on blood purity! Father wanted very different things for her and me ..."
Harper shudders at this comment, and it also makes me feel sick at once.
"And such a pity, the shiny heirloom," he continues, lost in thought, sinking lower in his chair. "The locket of Slytherin himself!"
Much too many new details for Harper. I want to curse his filthy mouth, but he already talks on.
"Proof of our purity for so many generations, worth more than her useless life ..."
It doesn't take another second for Harper to stare at me. "The Gaunts owned an heirloom from Salazar Slytherin? As a pureblood family of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, they can be traced back that far? Tom, is that true?" She doesn't wait for my answer and turns to Morfin with quite some urgency. "Is that why you speak Parsel like Salazar himself?"
I only groan, but Morfin, humming, pulls out a bloodstained knife, not unlike the one we saw on the forest floor. He plays with it on his thick, dirty fingerstips and then asks Harper, "Who are you, eh? Who is he? Looks like Merope's nasty Muggle and you're both asking Morfin questions?" Again he scowls at me. "Your slag enters with you and looks around in Morfin's home?" He chuckles, it sounds alarming, then he jumps to his feet. "We better poke her little eyes out!"
However it happens so quickly, the next moment he's holding the knife to Harper's face to push her against the wall.
Until he's forced to his knees by the agony of my Unforgivable, howling in pain. He immediately holds his head like everything around him was far too loud.
Harper rushes behind me and holds onto my shoulders. And the fact that she's shaking makes me so unspeakably angry that she herself has to whisper reason to me.
"Let go, Tom, you'll kill him ..."
It requires all my self-control to let calm return to his battered body. Fortunately for him, I now merely hang him up by his feet with a silent Levicorpus, and the clanging sound of his knife on the rotten floor is simply surreal ...
"Morfin lives here!" he wails, his head becoming red. "Leave Morfin alone! He's at home here and you're just mugging him!"
Harper's eyes promptly well up with tears as she gets a guilty conscience, but I couldn't care less.
"Let's talk, Morfin," I say, looking at him darkly intent as I lean against the kitchen table and cross my arms over my chest. "How did you get your name?"
"Why do you wish to know?"
"Regrettably, I'm family," I retort, "so you can tell me."
"Mother," he eventually growls, "always said she couldn't live without me ..."
"Without morphine? It was first isolated from opium in 1804, and soon after its narcotic effects became infamous. Are you the Greek god of dreams or rather the paralysing nightmare of everyone in the village?"
"Put Morfin down!"
"Not yet – what else do you know about Merope?"
"Filthy blood traitor!" he grumbles right back with his face beet red. "Collected useless memories," he giggles, shaking his head. "And misery she has brought upon us!"
"Memories?" Harper asks under her breath. "You mean, like for a ... Pensieve?"
"It's none of the slag's business!" he shouts, tossing his snake at Harper's feet. It flees into one of the floor crevices faster than we can look.
"What exactly do you mean by memories?" I repeat the question. "Tell me!"
"Flickering silver stuff, worthless like her!"
"Memory threads," Harper adds in excitement. "Where? Where are they, Morfin?"
"Tell her to go to hell!"
"Answer her," I insist instead.
Still dangling in the air, he growls and briefly, though treacherously enough, glances to the metal casket on the messy shelf next to the black pots.
Harper promptly nods and gets the box, putting it on the table. She pushes it towards me with wide eyes.
I don't know if I even want to know more about my family. I can hardly put up with more of their madness ... And yet my hands open Pandora's box, its contents a crumpled pouch with five memory vials stored inside.
Harper quickly combines. "The well in the garden."
"A Pensieve?" I wonder. "Hardly ..."
Morfin, however, laughs so gleefully at these words that it almost has to be true.
"Let's go and look," Harper suggests.
"Morfin's going to be sick," my dim-witted uncle bleakly reminds us. "Blood in his head ..."
I roll my eyes and drop him to the ground so abruptly that the next moment he's snarling and rubbing his head.
"You're mean to Morfin ..."
"Incarcerus!" I promptly tie him up so he's again staring at me in utmost resentment. "Exactly," I say, "I don't trust you. You don't move from the spot. We'll be right back. And if you so much as flinch, Morfin, if you dare even think of touching her, I swear I will kill you. Do you get that?"
"Split tongue, but just as arrogant as the Muggle," he mutters to himself, spitting on the ground again as Harper and I leave for the garden through the back door.
Hi dears,
repdigit chapter 44 – thank you if you read this far. I hope you'll enjoy what's up ahead, and if you like, let me know your thoughts anytime.
xx Dalia