Hunter's Hunters, Part II
Part II
After a frustratingly long time Miss Winter returned. “There’s nothing at the bottom; the pipes will shoot a body out into a tunnel of some sort. Mistress Flint has gone ahead to scout, she told me to tell you. You will probably need a cushioning charm for the bottom.”
Severus frowned and secured a rope to one of the pipes with an absent strengthening charm. Then he attached a plummet and sent it down. Finally, he turned to Kettleburn. “Will you go first, Silvanus?”
Filius was last; he had to acknowledge that going in order of reverse weight made some sense, in the circumstances.
When he finally shot out the bottom, the others were up and waiting, wands drawn and lit, examining the tunnel in which they found themselves. There was a very faint ambient glow, apparently from the greenish slime that covered the stones. “Nox,” said Severus finally, extinguishing all their wands. “Miss Winter, will you lead us?”
The three wizards crowded together in the tunnel, following Miss Winter’s Will-o-the-Wisp. Realizing this, Snape said sharply, “Spread out more! I’m first; Filius, you take rear.”
They moved through the tunnel in silence for a time.
“That was a dirty trick to play on the boy, Severus,” Silvanus finally muttered.
Snape snorted. “I should have risked a child’s life for the forlorn chance of recovering another child’s body? I think not.”
Kettleburn’s shoulders sagged a trifle in the dim green glow. Had he truly never thought about the basilisk’s known diet and the little girl’s chances? Perhaps he’d seen himself as part of an expedition to triumphantly bring back a living child to the light.
They strode on in heavy silence; the tunnel twisted and turned. Another light bobbed to meet them; Severus gestured Filius behind the last bend in the tunnel, while he and Silvanus flattened themselves against the slimy walls. But it was only Mistress Flint, reporting back. “The tunnel ends in a solid wall carved with serpents, and I cannot pass that wall. No side passages this direction that I can find.”
Snape nodded, and they continued, the ghost leading and lighting the way. When they reached the dead end, the wizards lit their wands again to examine the wall. Two serpents were carved in it, entwined like a caduceus.
‘Well, we’re certainly gamblers, and we hope to be thieves.’ thought Filius irreverently. ‘Pray that neither we nor the Weasley child need the services of the guide for the dead.’
The emeralds in the serpents’ eyes glinted in their wand light. Filius and Severus tried a few of the most common opening spells, to no avail whatever; Silvanus, meanwhile, ran an admiring hand over the carvings. “Basilisks, these are, for sure,” he said admiringly. “See the crest on that male?”
Severus snorted. Filius said, “If we can’t open this-maybe, like the top entrance, it requires Parseltongue to open-Severus, do you really think we three can blast open Slytherin’s private sanctum? We might need to bring Potter down after all to get in.”
Severus smirked. “That won’t be necessary. Spread out! Should something be waiting to greet us, no need to present a single target.” He pulled the parcel from his pocket and unwrapped the headmaster’s miniaturized pensieve. Snape set it on the ground, enlarged it, and then closed his eyes, pulling a strand of memory from his head. He cast it into the pensieve, muttering. The Potter boy’s silvery form rose up and hissed like a serpent.
At the sound, the wall cracked open silently, the two halves sliding apart. The wizards and ghosts found themselves at one end of a vast chamber. It was lit by a stronger, but still dim, version of the greenish glow that emanated from the tunnel. Two rows of pillars carved with more snakes supported the high ceiling.
Snape shrank and pocketed the pensieve, then cast a Revelo Hominem. There was one living human within. It was futile to imagine they hadn’t been noticed, but still Severus murmured quietly, “The ghosts first; then Silvanus to the right. I’ll take the left. Filius, you’re rearguard again.”
Mistress Flint and Miss Winter drifted in, bobbing up to the high ceiling. Silvanus went right, Severus left; Filius waited in the tunnel, covering them all with his wand, then finally followed Silvanus to the right. He slid down the long chamber, using the pillars as cover where he could. But nothing moved.
Eventually Filius reached the last pillar in the chamber, behind which Silvanus was inadequately covering himself. Miss Winter swooped down silently. She murmured almost inaudibly, “The child is alive. The basilisk is not presently within this chamber. But there is another being here, not a living human, but-well, we can’t tell exactly what it is. Be ready.”
Filius craned to see around Silvanus’s bulk. The open area in front of them reminded him of the proscenium of a temple. And before them was a towering statue which should then logically be of a deity. Filius looked up; it depicted an elderly wizard in medieval-styled robes. Salazar Slytherin, presumably. A tiny black-robed figure lay crumpled at the statue’s feet, hair fiery even in the dim light.
Severus’s Revelo had showed only a single living human within this chamber. So if the Weasley child were still alive, what then were they dealing with?
An indistinct silhouette stirred near the statue. “Hello, Professor Kettleburn. And I think you must be Professors Flitwick and Snape. I’ve heard about you.”
The blurred figure strolled forward. It took the form of a dark-haired youth in student robes. It wasn’t transparent like a ghost or silver like an invoked memory. It was as though the shape were sketched on fog, waiting to be filled in more fully. Filius had never seen the like.
Silvanus squinted at the form and said sorrowfully, “Riddle? Tom Riddle? Did you die then, and come back as a ghost? I never heard that, and I’m right sorry to think it now. At least-it is young Riddle, is it not?”
Filius put out an arm, barring Silvanus from rushing forward. Across the room, Snape snapped, “What are you, and what are you doing here?”
The boy-figure smiled insolently in Severus’s direction. “You’re supposed to be the head of Slytherin House? Standards have really been lowered, haven’t they? Why are you working to counter Slytherin’s will?”
Mistress Flint said sharply, “That’s never a ghost, but it does look and sound like young Riddle. A sweet talker, he could be, but only when he chose. Got on the Baron’s good side, and that’s not so easy.”
Snape demanded harshly, “Silvanus, what does this-entity-seem to you to be? Tell me everything you know of him!”
Kettelburn fumbled for words. “Tom Riddle, it seems to be-best student I ever taught, best Hogwarts student ever in some subjects, they said. They say he bested even Dumbledore’s performance on his Defense and Charms NEWTS…. Slytherin, he was, and Head Boy in his time, of course. Fifty years back now. He was an orphan, no word ever about his family, and you’d have thought they’d have wanted to claim him. Raised at a Muggle orphanage, of all places. But he was conjured from air and he went back to air, as the saying is. He disappeared shortly after he left Hogwarts; he worked a couple of years in a shop, a shop, mind you, with his abilities, in Knockturn Alley, and then he just vanished, no one ever had word of him again. Dippet thought perhaps he’d killed himself in some experiment gone wrong.”
Silvanus straightened suddenly, staring harder at the figure. “But-Riddle-I just realized, it was you who caught young Hagrid with that Acromantula, what everyone thought was the monster that killed Myrtle Jennings. You got an award for catching him. Only it wasn’t ever an Acromantula that killed Miss Jennings; we know that now.”
He paused. “Did you ever really think it was? What are you doing here, in Slytherin’s Chamber?”
The boyish figure laughed. “So you’ve got there at last, Professor Kettleburn? Only took you, what, fifty years? Slow but sure, that was always you. Or, slow and unsure, I suppose. That old fool Dumbledore at least had the wit to suspect me, though he could never prove anything to my discredit.”
Snape stepped out from behind his pillar and snapped his wand at the shape. “Verum dice,” he hissed, then demanded again, “What are you, and what are you doing here?”
The boy’s-shade’s?-misty face froze for a moment and then contorted in anger, fixed on the Potions master. “You dare to use my own spell against me? Well, if you want to play like that….” His lips curved suddenly in a warm, teasing smile. The boy’s eyes fastened upon Snape’s. Severus couldn’t seem to look away; his stiffening was visible even across the dim chamber separating him from Filius and Silvanus. Snape raised his wand again, and it wavered drunkenly in the air.
The boy was filling in somehow, his shape suddenly more substantial.
Filius cast a stinging hex at the boy’s shape, hoping to distract him; the spell splashed uselessly against the floor behind the foggy form. Silvanus flung himself out from the pillar, charging at the figure. He went right through it and fell to the floor, landing heavily. He groaned and struggled to rise again, seeming a little disoriented.
Severus sagged against his far pillar; his fingers loosened, dropping his wand. His mouth twisted and opened soundlessly. The boy-shape was fully focused now on Snape, smiling, and becoming more sharply defined by the moment.
Filius considered, very coldly, Snape’s contorted lips and lax fingers, and the boy’s solidifying. What contest could cause this, and how could another intervene?
He cast a fiery explosion directly in front of the boy-figure.
The explosion did no harm, of course; the boy-figure wasn’t corporeal enough for that. The blast didn’t even throw him back a step. But the bang and flash in his very face startled him enough to break his concentration on Severus for a moment.
And the moment was enough.
Severus snatched his wand from the floor and stepped back into nearly a duelist’s stance, except that he avoided the ghastly figure’s eyes. His face was white and wet; he said rapidly, panting, “Don’t meet his eyes. A Legilimens at the least, and he-it-has powers of possession. In fact-” Snape muttered unintelligibly, and the three pairs of goggles suddenly flared with light and blurred slightly. Severus added urgently, “It’s not a full protection! Resist him-”
Filius understood what Snape meant when the boy-figure turned an ugly glare back on him. The lenses blurred his vision enough that Flitwick couldn’t make out the figure’s eyes at all, though he could see the boy’s arms waving threateningly. The boy snarled something unintelligible at Filius. Someone-some thing-hammered against Filius’s will, but with warning and without the binding of eye contact, Filius could fight it.
From a distance, Severus yelled, “Only physical attacks! He can turn any mental attack against you!”
Filius shook his head and was free. The additional charm on the goggles had been a very neat spur-of-the-moment adaptation, though it might hamper Filius in dueling this creature. Well, Filius had won one contest blindfolded, after all. But that reminded him-if Miss Weasley were not yet dead, she was wholly unprotected, from both this thing and from the basilisk. “Severus! Goggles for Miss Weasley!” Filius urged.
The boy-shape jeered, “Do you think your stupid goggles will protect her from ME? No, little Ginny poured out her very soul to me, and I have it now! Goggles won’t do a thing for her, and little enough for you, you fools.” It giggled-a very ugly sound-then pivoted to the statue behind him and started hissing. But Filius noticed that its outline had faded a bit, presumably when Severus pulled free.
Severus spat the incantation for the basilisk goggles once more, then added, “Silvanus! The child! Get her!”
The older man groaned; Filius’s blast, unfortunately, had knocked him back to the ground and he’d apparently hit his head. Filius cast a quick Ennervate, and Silvanus lumbered to his feet, swaying a little. Staggering, he made his way to the limp black figure. He picked her up and peered at her uncertainly, backing away from the hissing shape he’d called Tom Riddle. “She’s mortal cold, but she is still alive, Severus.”
Behind him, high above in the greenish gloom, the mouth of the gigantic statue of Slytherin was opening.
Severus snapped, “Get her out of here, then, Silvanus! Miss Winter, escort them.”
“And leave you lot alone to fight a basilisk and this… whatever he is….?” Kettleburn objected, continuing to back up.
“Get the child OUT of this!” Snape shouted, his eyes on the widening black hole, his wand ready.
Filius raised his.
Silvanus whirled and ran, cradling the girl’s limp form tenderly.
Severus and Filius remained, watching the black hole silently open. Something was stirring within the open mouth.
Mistress Flint hissed to Snape, “Fool boy! Can you make me a ghost-pair of those spectacles, or must I shut my eyes?”
“Shut them,” whispered Severus. She shot up before the hole and complied, plump silver face screwed up in defiance.
Filius’s last act as his goggles blacked was to throw a swarm of silver arrows at the hole. He heard a rustle and a hiss like the engine on the Hogwarts Express far above him, and then Snape cried out, “Avada Kedavra!”
Filius’s goggles cleared as abruptly as they’d darkened. He looked up. The first few feet of an enormous bright green serpent lolled out of the statue’s mouth like an obscene tongue. One eye was pierced by one of Filius’s silver arrows. The ghost floated away from the body, looking satisfied.
The boy-shape stared at his monster and screamed, “That was mine, and Slytherin’s!”
He turned and rushed at Severus. “You filthy traitor to our house! You’ll pay for that!”
Severus stepped back from him, but jeered, “Crying over your pet, boy? How will you make me pay? You’ve no wand or body, and I’ve just killed your tame monster for you.”
Riddle’s shape tried to grab at Severus’s face; by Snape’s reaction, he could feel the fingers, but they couldn’t grasp him. Severus dodged, leading the boy back among the pillars. He mocked, “How will you make me pay, boy? You’ve no power, none at all!”
“I still have the power to possess you, you filthy traitor!”
Severus laughed. “You’ve already tried that and failed.”
Riddle snarled, “Yet you don’t dare to meet my eyes or let me touch you, coward!”
Severus retreated further, taunting, “Why should I make it easy for you, boy? Take me if you can….”
Mistress Flint hissed suddenly in Filius’s ear, “He’s distracting him for you, noddicock! What does he need you to do?” Closing his ears to Severus and the Riddle creature, Filius applied himself to think. The creature was capable of possessing humans…. Severus had made himself vulnerable to it by trying to cast a mental compulsion; it had turned the spell back against the caster, and become more solid as it ate at the Potions Master’s mind and will.
But it had already had a form when they had entered the chamber, and the girl had already been lying unconscious. So the Weasley girl had perhaps been the Riddle-creature’s victim, not the basilisk’s? Only how then had it claimed her? Scarcely by the same means as it had used to try to take Severus; no first year knew any mental magics. But then again, they had not heard whether another student was missing; there might be an older child down here in the gloom. Yet Severus’s spell had shown only one living human in the room…. Wand steady, Filius cast a Revelum Corpus, and sighed in relief that the spell found no human bodies within the room.
Then it probably was the Weasley child whose possession had powered the Riddle-creature’s appearance. Riddle’s possession of the child might, of course, have been effected by an amulet or such that the girl had been induced to wear, in which case the team upstairs should find it when they examined the child…. But the fact that the figure hadn’t faded further when Silvanus bore the child away suggested that the creature might still possess a physical anchor within this room.
Filius moved forward to examine the area where the child’s body had lain. In a moment, he had spotted something: a little book lying open, its pages blank, at the statue’s toes. Careful not to touch it, Filius closed the book with a whispered spell. Riddle, continuing his gruesome game of tag with Snape back among the pillars, didn’t react.
Filius grimaced. Not that he had expected it to be that easy, but it never hurt to try the obvious first. Closed, the book revealed itself to be a diary, a Muggle-made one at that, with the year 1942 stamped on its cover. Filius shook his head, guessing how this thing might have been spelled to seduce a naïve First-year.
Did he dare keep this intact for study and just try to disable the creature? No, any thing that could almost overpower Severus was too powerful to risk. Filius aimed his wand and thought, “Incendio.”
To his shock, the book reacted no more than the stones under it to his fire-spell. Nor did the Riddle-thing’s voice among the pillars so much as falter. Filius tried a cutting-hex next, to similar effect. Filius shuddered; this was even darker than it had first seemed, then. He steadied himself, levitated the innocuous-looking book a little, cast a containment sphere around it, and flung Fiendfyre.
This time, flames roared up from the little book. Distantly, Filius heard screaming, but his concentration was all on his containment spell. Flame-demons obligingly ate the book and then struggled to escape for a fuller feast. Filius fought them, white-faced, until they’d exhausted their fuel and died again. Then he slumped a little against the statue and let a small pile of ash sift to the floor.
“Bloody hell, Filius. Fiendfyre?” Severus had come up silently behind him.
Filius answered wearily, “Nothing less seemed to be working. It was a book, a Muggle diary; I imagine little Miss Weasley found it and started writing in it. And then it started writing her…. I thought of trying if there might be a way to deactivate and study it, but decided the risk was too great.”
“A diary… yes, that makes sense of Riddle’s comment that she’d ‘poured out her very soul.’ I’d expect that sort of exploit of a Muggleborn, not of someone wizard-raised. Had her parents taught her nothing? Little Gryffindor idiot, to be caught like that.”
Filius had thought much the same, but he roused himself in defense of the child. “Well, Flint did say that Riddle was plausible enough to get on the Bloody Baron’s good side-who surely must be considered more experienced in deviousness than any first-year, whatever her house. What happened to the simulacrum? I heard it scream, but my attention was-elsewhere.” Filius sagged a little more against the huge stone foot.
Snape snorted at that and stripped off his goggles. “And glad I am, Filius, that your attention stayed, ah, elsewhere. You do remember that there’s a prophecy that the world shall end in fire, which some have interpreted as meaning that some fool will let Fiendfyre go uncontrolled…? As to Riddle, screaming was almost all that he-it-had time to do. It turned, probably to try to attack you, but it vanished before it got a yard.”
Severus looked as weary as Filius felt. Moreover, he looked more grim than triumphant at their victory. Filius felt a stirring of fear; Severus knew far more than he about both Dark Arts and mental spells. “Severus-my destroying the diary-might I have damaged Miss Weasley, since she poured her soul into it?”
Snape’s eyes widened. That, then, had not been the danger he’d been considering. Severus straightened and looked away for a moment, pondering. Then he said, “No. It’s almost certain that destroying the physical vehicle of her possessor was the only, or at least the fastest, way to free her. She might already have been damaged by the possession, but your action would not have increased that damage. Most probably, whatever of her soul and energy Tom Riddle was feeding on returned to her when you destroyed that book. Consider a Dementor’s victim: if the soul’s already been sucked out, stopping the Dementor can neither heal nor harm the victim further. If one drives off the Dementor before that point, one does the victim nothing but good. And Silvanus confirmed that the child was still alive. But we won’t know more until she is examined.”
His gaze fell on the handful of ash; he grimaced, conjured a small lead box, and sealed the ashes within it, muttering, “Better safe.” He tilted his head back to stare up at Salazar’s grotesque new ‘tongue.’ “Merlin, the potions ingredients sitting there to be harvested… well, that can wait. We’re done here, and the child may need our further assistance.”
Filius pushed himself off the statue, stripped off his own goggles, and starting walking. He glanced up at Severus’s bleak face. “Severus-why are you so troubled, then, if you’re not worried that we might have further harmed Miss Weasley?”
They had reached the door of the chamber before Severus answered. “Riddle charged that I had turned his own spell against him. But the little known spell which I had used… the person who taught it to me told me that it had been invented, as a boy, by… You-Know-Who.”
Filius stopped walking for a moment as the implications crashed in on him; Mistress Flint, who had drifted ahead, hissed a little. Severus hadn’t broken stride; Filius hurried to catch him up. “That would at least answer Silvanus’s question of what had become of so-brilliant and talented Tom Riddle. But-do you actually credit it?”
“I do. That supposition … makes sense of many things, but it raises other questions.” Snape’s voice was flat. His head turned from side to side, scanning their surroundings. Filius reminded himself that just because two monsters were slain did not establish that there could be no more down here; they did need to stay vigilant. He was still rearguard; he fell back a little again, his eyes and ears at stretch.
So Filius could not give his full attention to the riddle of Snape’s discomposure. He suggested, “Well, it’s upsetting that he should be of your own house, I suppose, indeed of Hogwarts training at all, and not a foreigner as was generally rumored. Still, we already knew that most of his followers were Slytherins, so I don’t see that this news would do your house’s reputation more damage even if it did get out….”
Severus’s shoulder’s twitched, but he was silent. Filius finally just asked. “Severus, why should it be so terrible that You-Know-Who might once have been a Hogwarts boy named Tom Riddle?”
“Because the name Riddle is not to be found in Nature’s Nobility.”
“Nor is Snape,” Filius pointed out. Was that the problem then? That Severus was seeing himself in the monster?
Snape said, “Riddle came from a Muggle orphanage, Silvanus said. It’s wildly unlikely that he should have been a Pureblood. Why then did the adult You-Know-Who so vigorously promote a Pureblood supremacist agenda? And-how many of his followers would have joined him, had they known him to be less ‘pure’ than they? Can you imagine the Lestranges calling a Muggleborn or half-blood ‘master,’ still less joyfully flinging themselves into Azkaban in his service?”
He took a breath. “The waste-appalls me. Had You-Know-Who’s background been known, he could never have accumulated the power base that he did. Mind, he might simply have acquired an entirely different one…. But if only an influential wizard had known his true identity and publicized it at the right time, there might never have been any Death Eaters.”
Filius followed him in silence for a few paces, reflecting on this. They finally reached the hole in the tunnel, with the rope and plummet dangling out. Severus nodded for Filius to go first; Filius secured the rope around his waist. Then he offered, “Dumbledore has always said that You-Know-Who might rise again, little though Fudge or the general public cares to believe this. We can at least publicize Riddle’s identity now, both to discredit the Pureblood supremacist faction and to deter any former followers from returning to his side should he manage a resurrection.”
Severus regarded him somberly. “Yes. That would seem to be the obvious way to utilize this information now.” He tapped the rope with his wand, and it recoiled and drew Filius slowly up.
To Filius’s utter delight and relief, the headmaster awaited him at the top. The loo was otherwise deserted, save for the ghosts.
“Severus?” the headmaster inquired quickly.
“Unharmed,” Filius answered. “He’s following. The basilisk is dead and so is Riddle. At least, I don’t mean dead exactly….” His rambling apparently clued Dumbledore in to his exhaustion; the headmaster said, “Let me untie you, Filius; you rest and have some chocolate.”
One pass of Dumbledore’s wand unfastened the rope and sent it back down the hole. Filius let himself lean against the wall, holding Dumbledore’s wriggling chocolate frog in his hand, and asked, “Miss Weasley?”
The headmaster beamed. “Woke while Silvanus was bringing her back. Nothing amiss, I daresay, that hot chocolate and sleep won’t cure. Silvanus took her to the Hospital Wing, and her parents will be here soon. Now, no further discussion until Severus has joined us.”
The chocolate did help a bit. To Filius’s mild surprise, Mistress Flint popped out of the hole next, not Severus. Filius supposed the young man insisted on seeing all the others safe out first. It was a minute or two before the straining rope snaked back up with the weary wizard. Snape stumbled a little when he caught sight of Dumbledore awaiting him. He steadied himself by grasping the sink, closed his eyes, and said, “Miss Weasley?”
“Has already recovered consciousness and should make a full recovery.”
Severus let his head fall for a moment. Then he straightened, opened his eyes, and informed the headmaster, “It was a cursed diary. Tom Riddle’s diary. It had taken possession of the child; Riddle was-”
Out of the corner of his eye, Filius saw that one of the ghosts had started. But the headmaster raised one thin hand commandingly, and Severus halted in mid word. “Not here, Severus. I know that you all must be weary and have well earned your rest, but I must insist that we discuss this extraordinary matter in the privacy of my office. Will you three come now and join Professor Kettleburn and Miss Winter?”
Severus inclined his head; Filius nodded wearily; the ghost bobbed a courtesy. The headmaster smiled at all three. “Hogwarts is extremely fortunate to be served by such courageous staff and ghosts. Severus, I must insist you have some chocolate to restore yourself. Better than Pepper Up!”
Snape grimaced and accepted a frog. By his face, he’d prefer the potion.
*
It had been a clever device, that diary. Filius wished he could have examined it before destroying it. He suspected there must have been a Heart’s Desire charm worked into it, the way the diary’s simulacrum had looked so much like an older, more handsome (and probably much more attentive-to-little-girls) Harry Potter. Everyone knew about that little girl’s crush after those dreadful singing Valentines. Presumably anyone foolish enough to write in it would have conjured the shape of his own ideal confidante. Filius would have liked very much to have examined that work, although not the mechanism by which the diary possessed the unfortunate writer.
Filius sighed as he took off his boots. The child rescued alive, the Chamber found, the monster and that monstrous diary destroyed, Dumbledore back…. He should be feeling unalloyed satisfaction, not least for his own role and the headmaster’s unstinting praise. Yet there was a shadow on his heart he couldn’t shake.
What had been the name that the simulacrum had used, again? For some reason the thought tugged at Filius that it was significant. Yet he knew it was one he’d never heard before, and he couldn’t now bring it to mind.
Filius sighed again and let it go.
As the headmaster said, they had well earned their rest.
A/N: Actually the title ought properly to have been “Hunter’s Hunter’s Hunters;” you may thank me for not inflicting that on you.
After a frustratingly long time Miss Winter returned. “There’s nothing at the bottom; the pipes will shoot a body out into a tunnel of some sort. Mistress Flint has gone ahead to scout, she told me to tell you. You will probably need a cushioning charm for the bottom.”
Severus frowned and secured a rope to one of the pipes with an absent strengthening charm. Then he attached a plummet and sent it down. Finally, he turned to Kettleburn. “Will you go first, Silvanus?”
Filius was last; he had to acknowledge that going in order of reverse weight made some sense, in the circumstances.
When he finally shot out the bottom, the others were up and waiting, wands drawn and lit, examining the tunnel in which they found themselves. There was a very faint ambient glow, apparently from the greenish slime that covered the stones. “Nox,” said Severus finally, extinguishing all their wands. “Miss Winter, will you lead us?”
The three wizards crowded together in the tunnel, following Miss Winter’s Will-o-the-Wisp. Realizing this, Snape said sharply, “Spread out more! I’m first; Filius, you take rear.”
They moved through the tunnel in silence for a time.
“That was a dirty trick to play on the boy, Severus,” Silvanus finally muttered.
Snape snorted. “I should have risked a child’s life for the forlorn chance of recovering another child’s body? I think not.”
Kettleburn’s shoulders sagged a trifle in the dim green glow. Had he truly never thought about the basilisk’s known diet and the little girl’s chances? Perhaps he’d seen himself as part of an expedition to triumphantly bring back a living child to the light.
They strode on in heavy silence; the tunnel twisted and turned. Another light bobbed to meet them; Severus gestured Filius behind the last bend in the tunnel, while he and Silvanus flattened themselves against the slimy walls. But it was only Mistress Flint, reporting back. “The tunnel ends in a solid wall carved with serpents, and I cannot pass that wall. No side passages this direction that I can find.”
Snape nodded, and they continued, the ghost leading and lighting the way. When they reached the dead end, the wizards lit their wands again to examine the wall. Two serpents were carved in it, entwined like a caduceus.
‘Well, we’re certainly gamblers, and we hope to be thieves.’ thought Filius irreverently. ‘Pray that neither we nor the Weasley child need the services of the guide for the dead.’
The emeralds in the serpents’ eyes glinted in their wand light. Filius and Severus tried a few of the most common opening spells, to no avail whatever; Silvanus, meanwhile, ran an admiring hand over the carvings. “Basilisks, these are, for sure,” he said admiringly. “See the crest on that male?”
Severus snorted. Filius said, “If we can’t open this-maybe, like the top entrance, it requires Parseltongue to open-Severus, do you really think we three can blast open Slytherin’s private sanctum? We might need to bring Potter down after all to get in.”
Severus smirked. “That won’t be necessary. Spread out! Should something be waiting to greet us, no need to present a single target.” He pulled the parcel from his pocket and unwrapped the headmaster’s miniaturized pensieve. Snape set it on the ground, enlarged it, and then closed his eyes, pulling a strand of memory from his head. He cast it into the pensieve, muttering. The Potter boy’s silvery form rose up and hissed like a serpent.
At the sound, the wall cracked open silently, the two halves sliding apart. The wizards and ghosts found themselves at one end of a vast chamber. It was lit by a stronger, but still dim, version of the greenish glow that emanated from the tunnel. Two rows of pillars carved with more snakes supported the high ceiling.
Snape shrank and pocketed the pensieve, then cast a Revelo Hominem. There was one living human within. It was futile to imagine they hadn’t been noticed, but still Severus murmured quietly, “The ghosts first; then Silvanus to the right. I’ll take the left. Filius, you’re rearguard again.”
Mistress Flint and Miss Winter drifted in, bobbing up to the high ceiling. Silvanus went right, Severus left; Filius waited in the tunnel, covering them all with his wand, then finally followed Silvanus to the right. He slid down the long chamber, using the pillars as cover where he could. But nothing moved.
Eventually Filius reached the last pillar in the chamber, behind which Silvanus was inadequately covering himself. Miss Winter swooped down silently. She murmured almost inaudibly, “The child is alive. The basilisk is not presently within this chamber. But there is another being here, not a living human, but-well, we can’t tell exactly what it is. Be ready.”
Filius craned to see around Silvanus’s bulk. The open area in front of them reminded him of the proscenium of a temple. And before them was a towering statue which should then logically be of a deity. Filius looked up; it depicted an elderly wizard in medieval-styled robes. Salazar Slytherin, presumably. A tiny black-robed figure lay crumpled at the statue’s feet, hair fiery even in the dim light.
Severus’s Revelo had showed only a single living human within this chamber. So if the Weasley child were still alive, what then were they dealing with?
An indistinct silhouette stirred near the statue. “Hello, Professor Kettleburn. And I think you must be Professors Flitwick and Snape. I’ve heard about you.”
The blurred figure strolled forward. It took the form of a dark-haired youth in student robes. It wasn’t transparent like a ghost or silver like an invoked memory. It was as though the shape were sketched on fog, waiting to be filled in more fully. Filius had never seen the like.
Silvanus squinted at the form and said sorrowfully, “Riddle? Tom Riddle? Did you die then, and come back as a ghost? I never heard that, and I’m right sorry to think it now. At least-it is young Riddle, is it not?”
Filius put out an arm, barring Silvanus from rushing forward. Across the room, Snape snapped, “What are you, and what are you doing here?”
The boy-figure smiled insolently in Severus’s direction. “You’re supposed to be the head of Slytherin House? Standards have really been lowered, haven’t they? Why are you working to counter Slytherin’s will?”
Mistress Flint said sharply, “That’s never a ghost, but it does look and sound like young Riddle. A sweet talker, he could be, but only when he chose. Got on the Baron’s good side, and that’s not so easy.”
Snape demanded harshly, “Silvanus, what does this-entity-seem to you to be? Tell me everything you know of him!”
Kettelburn fumbled for words. “Tom Riddle, it seems to be-best student I ever taught, best Hogwarts student ever in some subjects, they said. They say he bested even Dumbledore’s performance on his Defense and Charms NEWTS…. Slytherin, he was, and Head Boy in his time, of course. Fifty years back now. He was an orphan, no word ever about his family, and you’d have thought they’d have wanted to claim him. Raised at a Muggle orphanage, of all places. But he was conjured from air and he went back to air, as the saying is. He disappeared shortly after he left Hogwarts; he worked a couple of years in a shop, a shop, mind you, with his abilities, in Knockturn Alley, and then he just vanished, no one ever had word of him again. Dippet thought perhaps he’d killed himself in some experiment gone wrong.”
Silvanus straightened suddenly, staring harder at the figure. “But-Riddle-I just realized, it was you who caught young Hagrid with that Acromantula, what everyone thought was the monster that killed Myrtle Jennings. You got an award for catching him. Only it wasn’t ever an Acromantula that killed Miss Jennings; we know that now.”
He paused. “Did you ever really think it was? What are you doing here, in Slytherin’s Chamber?”
The boyish figure laughed. “So you’ve got there at last, Professor Kettleburn? Only took you, what, fifty years? Slow but sure, that was always you. Or, slow and unsure, I suppose. That old fool Dumbledore at least had the wit to suspect me, though he could never prove anything to my discredit.”
Snape stepped out from behind his pillar and snapped his wand at the shape. “Verum dice,” he hissed, then demanded again, “What are you, and what are you doing here?”
The boy’s-shade’s?-misty face froze for a moment and then contorted in anger, fixed on the Potions master. “You dare to use my own spell against me? Well, if you want to play like that….” His lips curved suddenly in a warm, teasing smile. The boy’s eyes fastened upon Snape’s. Severus couldn’t seem to look away; his stiffening was visible even across the dim chamber separating him from Filius and Silvanus. Snape raised his wand again, and it wavered drunkenly in the air.
The boy was filling in somehow, his shape suddenly more substantial.
Filius cast a stinging hex at the boy’s shape, hoping to distract him; the spell splashed uselessly against the floor behind the foggy form. Silvanus flung himself out from the pillar, charging at the figure. He went right through it and fell to the floor, landing heavily. He groaned and struggled to rise again, seeming a little disoriented.
Severus sagged against his far pillar; his fingers loosened, dropping his wand. His mouth twisted and opened soundlessly. The boy-shape was fully focused now on Snape, smiling, and becoming more sharply defined by the moment.
Filius considered, very coldly, Snape’s contorted lips and lax fingers, and the boy’s solidifying. What contest could cause this, and how could another intervene?
He cast a fiery explosion directly in front of the boy-figure.
The explosion did no harm, of course; the boy-figure wasn’t corporeal enough for that. The blast didn’t even throw him back a step. But the bang and flash in his very face startled him enough to break his concentration on Severus for a moment.
And the moment was enough.
Severus snatched his wand from the floor and stepped back into nearly a duelist’s stance, except that he avoided the ghastly figure’s eyes. His face was white and wet; he said rapidly, panting, “Don’t meet his eyes. A Legilimens at the least, and he-it-has powers of possession. In fact-” Snape muttered unintelligibly, and the three pairs of goggles suddenly flared with light and blurred slightly. Severus added urgently, “It’s not a full protection! Resist him-”
Filius understood what Snape meant when the boy-figure turned an ugly glare back on him. The lenses blurred his vision enough that Flitwick couldn’t make out the figure’s eyes at all, though he could see the boy’s arms waving threateningly. The boy snarled something unintelligible at Filius. Someone-some thing-hammered against Filius’s will, but with warning and without the binding of eye contact, Filius could fight it.
From a distance, Severus yelled, “Only physical attacks! He can turn any mental attack against you!”
Filius shook his head and was free. The additional charm on the goggles had been a very neat spur-of-the-moment adaptation, though it might hamper Filius in dueling this creature. Well, Filius had won one contest blindfolded, after all. But that reminded him-if Miss Weasley were not yet dead, she was wholly unprotected, from both this thing and from the basilisk. “Severus! Goggles for Miss Weasley!” Filius urged.
The boy-shape jeered, “Do you think your stupid goggles will protect her from ME? No, little Ginny poured out her very soul to me, and I have it now! Goggles won’t do a thing for her, and little enough for you, you fools.” It giggled-a very ugly sound-then pivoted to the statue behind him and started hissing. But Filius noticed that its outline had faded a bit, presumably when Severus pulled free.
Severus spat the incantation for the basilisk goggles once more, then added, “Silvanus! The child! Get her!”
The older man groaned; Filius’s blast, unfortunately, had knocked him back to the ground and he’d apparently hit his head. Filius cast a quick Ennervate, and Silvanus lumbered to his feet, swaying a little. Staggering, he made his way to the limp black figure. He picked her up and peered at her uncertainly, backing away from the hissing shape he’d called Tom Riddle. “She’s mortal cold, but she is still alive, Severus.”
Behind him, high above in the greenish gloom, the mouth of the gigantic statue of Slytherin was opening.
Severus snapped, “Get her out of here, then, Silvanus! Miss Winter, escort them.”
“And leave you lot alone to fight a basilisk and this… whatever he is….?” Kettleburn objected, continuing to back up.
“Get the child OUT of this!” Snape shouted, his eyes on the widening black hole, his wand ready.
Filius raised his.
Silvanus whirled and ran, cradling the girl’s limp form tenderly.
Severus and Filius remained, watching the black hole silently open. Something was stirring within the open mouth.
Mistress Flint hissed to Snape, “Fool boy! Can you make me a ghost-pair of those spectacles, or must I shut my eyes?”
“Shut them,” whispered Severus. She shot up before the hole and complied, plump silver face screwed up in defiance.
Filius’s last act as his goggles blacked was to throw a swarm of silver arrows at the hole. He heard a rustle and a hiss like the engine on the Hogwarts Express far above him, and then Snape cried out, “Avada Kedavra!”
Filius’s goggles cleared as abruptly as they’d darkened. He looked up. The first few feet of an enormous bright green serpent lolled out of the statue’s mouth like an obscene tongue. One eye was pierced by one of Filius’s silver arrows. The ghost floated away from the body, looking satisfied.
The boy-shape stared at his monster and screamed, “That was mine, and Slytherin’s!”
He turned and rushed at Severus. “You filthy traitor to our house! You’ll pay for that!”
Severus stepped back from him, but jeered, “Crying over your pet, boy? How will you make me pay? You’ve no wand or body, and I’ve just killed your tame monster for you.”
Riddle’s shape tried to grab at Severus’s face; by Snape’s reaction, he could feel the fingers, but they couldn’t grasp him. Severus dodged, leading the boy back among the pillars. He mocked, “How will you make me pay, boy? You’ve no power, none at all!”
“I still have the power to possess you, you filthy traitor!”
Severus laughed. “You’ve already tried that and failed.”
Riddle snarled, “Yet you don’t dare to meet my eyes or let me touch you, coward!”
Severus retreated further, taunting, “Why should I make it easy for you, boy? Take me if you can….”
Mistress Flint hissed suddenly in Filius’s ear, “He’s distracting him for you, noddicock! What does he need you to do?” Closing his ears to Severus and the Riddle creature, Filius applied himself to think. The creature was capable of possessing humans…. Severus had made himself vulnerable to it by trying to cast a mental compulsion; it had turned the spell back against the caster, and become more solid as it ate at the Potions Master’s mind and will.
But it had already had a form when they had entered the chamber, and the girl had already been lying unconscious. So the Weasley girl had perhaps been the Riddle-creature’s victim, not the basilisk’s? Only how then had it claimed her? Scarcely by the same means as it had used to try to take Severus; no first year knew any mental magics. But then again, they had not heard whether another student was missing; there might be an older child down here in the gloom. Yet Severus’s spell had shown only one living human in the room…. Wand steady, Filius cast a Revelum Corpus, and sighed in relief that the spell found no human bodies within the room.
Then it probably was the Weasley child whose possession had powered the Riddle-creature’s appearance. Riddle’s possession of the child might, of course, have been effected by an amulet or such that the girl had been induced to wear, in which case the team upstairs should find it when they examined the child…. But the fact that the figure hadn’t faded further when Silvanus bore the child away suggested that the creature might still possess a physical anchor within this room.
Filius moved forward to examine the area where the child’s body had lain. In a moment, he had spotted something: a little book lying open, its pages blank, at the statue’s toes. Careful not to touch it, Filius closed the book with a whispered spell. Riddle, continuing his gruesome game of tag with Snape back among the pillars, didn’t react.
Filius grimaced. Not that he had expected it to be that easy, but it never hurt to try the obvious first. Closed, the book revealed itself to be a diary, a Muggle-made one at that, with the year 1942 stamped on its cover. Filius shook his head, guessing how this thing might have been spelled to seduce a naïve First-year.
Did he dare keep this intact for study and just try to disable the creature? No, any thing that could almost overpower Severus was too powerful to risk. Filius aimed his wand and thought, “Incendio.”
To his shock, the book reacted no more than the stones under it to his fire-spell. Nor did the Riddle-thing’s voice among the pillars so much as falter. Filius tried a cutting-hex next, to similar effect. Filius shuddered; this was even darker than it had first seemed, then. He steadied himself, levitated the innocuous-looking book a little, cast a containment sphere around it, and flung Fiendfyre.
This time, flames roared up from the little book. Distantly, Filius heard screaming, but his concentration was all on his containment spell. Flame-demons obligingly ate the book and then struggled to escape for a fuller feast. Filius fought them, white-faced, until they’d exhausted their fuel and died again. Then he slumped a little against the statue and let a small pile of ash sift to the floor.
“Bloody hell, Filius. Fiendfyre?” Severus had come up silently behind him.
Filius answered wearily, “Nothing less seemed to be working. It was a book, a Muggle diary; I imagine little Miss Weasley found it and started writing in it. And then it started writing her…. I thought of trying if there might be a way to deactivate and study it, but decided the risk was too great.”
“A diary… yes, that makes sense of Riddle’s comment that she’d ‘poured out her very soul.’ I’d expect that sort of exploit of a Muggleborn, not of someone wizard-raised. Had her parents taught her nothing? Little Gryffindor idiot, to be caught like that.”
Filius had thought much the same, but he roused himself in defense of the child. “Well, Flint did say that Riddle was plausible enough to get on the Bloody Baron’s good side-who surely must be considered more experienced in deviousness than any first-year, whatever her house. What happened to the simulacrum? I heard it scream, but my attention was-elsewhere.” Filius sagged a little more against the huge stone foot.
Snape snorted at that and stripped off his goggles. “And glad I am, Filius, that your attention stayed, ah, elsewhere. You do remember that there’s a prophecy that the world shall end in fire, which some have interpreted as meaning that some fool will let Fiendfyre go uncontrolled…? As to Riddle, screaming was almost all that he-it-had time to do. It turned, probably to try to attack you, but it vanished before it got a yard.”
Severus looked as weary as Filius felt. Moreover, he looked more grim than triumphant at their victory. Filius felt a stirring of fear; Severus knew far more than he about both Dark Arts and mental spells. “Severus-my destroying the diary-might I have damaged Miss Weasley, since she poured her soul into it?”
Snape’s eyes widened. That, then, had not been the danger he’d been considering. Severus straightened and looked away for a moment, pondering. Then he said, “No. It’s almost certain that destroying the physical vehicle of her possessor was the only, or at least the fastest, way to free her. She might already have been damaged by the possession, but your action would not have increased that damage. Most probably, whatever of her soul and energy Tom Riddle was feeding on returned to her when you destroyed that book. Consider a Dementor’s victim: if the soul’s already been sucked out, stopping the Dementor can neither heal nor harm the victim further. If one drives off the Dementor before that point, one does the victim nothing but good. And Silvanus confirmed that the child was still alive. But we won’t know more until she is examined.”
His gaze fell on the handful of ash; he grimaced, conjured a small lead box, and sealed the ashes within it, muttering, “Better safe.” He tilted his head back to stare up at Salazar’s grotesque new ‘tongue.’ “Merlin, the potions ingredients sitting there to be harvested… well, that can wait. We’re done here, and the child may need our further assistance.”
Filius pushed himself off the statue, stripped off his own goggles, and starting walking. He glanced up at Severus’s bleak face. “Severus-why are you so troubled, then, if you’re not worried that we might have further harmed Miss Weasley?”
They had reached the door of the chamber before Severus answered. “Riddle charged that I had turned his own spell against him. But the little known spell which I had used… the person who taught it to me told me that it had been invented, as a boy, by… You-Know-Who.”
Filius stopped walking for a moment as the implications crashed in on him; Mistress Flint, who had drifted ahead, hissed a little. Severus hadn’t broken stride; Filius hurried to catch him up. “That would at least answer Silvanus’s question of what had become of so-brilliant and talented Tom Riddle. But-do you actually credit it?”
“I do. That supposition … makes sense of many things, but it raises other questions.” Snape’s voice was flat. His head turned from side to side, scanning their surroundings. Filius reminded himself that just because two monsters were slain did not establish that there could be no more down here; they did need to stay vigilant. He was still rearguard; he fell back a little again, his eyes and ears at stretch.
So Filius could not give his full attention to the riddle of Snape’s discomposure. He suggested, “Well, it’s upsetting that he should be of your own house, I suppose, indeed of Hogwarts training at all, and not a foreigner as was generally rumored. Still, we already knew that most of his followers were Slytherins, so I don’t see that this news would do your house’s reputation more damage even if it did get out….”
Severus’s shoulder’s twitched, but he was silent. Filius finally just asked. “Severus, why should it be so terrible that You-Know-Who might once have been a Hogwarts boy named Tom Riddle?”
“Because the name Riddle is not to be found in Nature’s Nobility.”
“Nor is Snape,” Filius pointed out. Was that the problem then? That Severus was seeing himself in the monster?
Snape said, “Riddle came from a Muggle orphanage, Silvanus said. It’s wildly unlikely that he should have been a Pureblood. Why then did the adult You-Know-Who so vigorously promote a Pureblood supremacist agenda? And-how many of his followers would have joined him, had they known him to be less ‘pure’ than they? Can you imagine the Lestranges calling a Muggleborn or half-blood ‘master,’ still less joyfully flinging themselves into Azkaban in his service?”
He took a breath. “The waste-appalls me. Had You-Know-Who’s background been known, he could never have accumulated the power base that he did. Mind, he might simply have acquired an entirely different one…. But if only an influential wizard had known his true identity and publicized it at the right time, there might never have been any Death Eaters.”
Filius followed him in silence for a few paces, reflecting on this. They finally reached the hole in the tunnel, with the rope and plummet dangling out. Severus nodded for Filius to go first; Filius secured the rope around his waist. Then he offered, “Dumbledore has always said that You-Know-Who might rise again, little though Fudge or the general public cares to believe this. We can at least publicize Riddle’s identity now, both to discredit the Pureblood supremacist faction and to deter any former followers from returning to his side should he manage a resurrection.”
Severus regarded him somberly. “Yes. That would seem to be the obvious way to utilize this information now.” He tapped the rope with his wand, and it recoiled and drew Filius slowly up.
To Filius’s utter delight and relief, the headmaster awaited him at the top. The loo was otherwise deserted, save for the ghosts.
“Severus?” the headmaster inquired quickly.
“Unharmed,” Filius answered. “He’s following. The basilisk is dead and so is Riddle. At least, I don’t mean dead exactly….” His rambling apparently clued Dumbledore in to his exhaustion; the headmaster said, “Let me untie you, Filius; you rest and have some chocolate.”
One pass of Dumbledore’s wand unfastened the rope and sent it back down the hole. Filius let himself lean against the wall, holding Dumbledore’s wriggling chocolate frog in his hand, and asked, “Miss Weasley?”
The headmaster beamed. “Woke while Silvanus was bringing her back. Nothing amiss, I daresay, that hot chocolate and sleep won’t cure. Silvanus took her to the Hospital Wing, and her parents will be here soon. Now, no further discussion until Severus has joined us.”
The chocolate did help a bit. To Filius’s mild surprise, Mistress Flint popped out of the hole next, not Severus. Filius supposed the young man insisted on seeing all the others safe out first. It was a minute or two before the straining rope snaked back up with the weary wizard. Snape stumbled a little when he caught sight of Dumbledore awaiting him. He steadied himself by grasping the sink, closed his eyes, and said, “Miss Weasley?”
“Has already recovered consciousness and should make a full recovery.”
Severus let his head fall for a moment. Then he straightened, opened his eyes, and informed the headmaster, “It was a cursed diary. Tom Riddle’s diary. It had taken possession of the child; Riddle was-”
Out of the corner of his eye, Filius saw that one of the ghosts had started. But the headmaster raised one thin hand commandingly, and Severus halted in mid word. “Not here, Severus. I know that you all must be weary and have well earned your rest, but I must insist that we discuss this extraordinary matter in the privacy of my office. Will you three come now and join Professor Kettleburn and Miss Winter?”
Severus inclined his head; Filius nodded wearily; the ghost bobbed a courtesy. The headmaster smiled at all three. “Hogwarts is extremely fortunate to be served by such courageous staff and ghosts. Severus, I must insist you have some chocolate to restore yourself. Better than Pepper Up!”
Snape grimaced and accepted a frog. By his face, he’d prefer the potion.
*
It had been a clever device, that diary. Filius wished he could have examined it before destroying it. He suspected there must have been a Heart’s Desire charm worked into it, the way the diary’s simulacrum had looked so much like an older, more handsome (and probably much more attentive-to-little-girls) Harry Potter. Everyone knew about that little girl’s crush after those dreadful singing Valentines. Presumably anyone foolish enough to write in it would have conjured the shape of his own ideal confidante. Filius would have liked very much to have examined that work, although not the mechanism by which the diary possessed the unfortunate writer.
Filius sighed as he took off his boots. The child rescued alive, the Chamber found, the monster and that monstrous diary destroyed, Dumbledore back…. He should be feeling unalloyed satisfaction, not least for his own role and the headmaster’s unstinting praise. Yet there was a shadow on his heart he couldn’t shake.
What had been the name that the simulacrum had used, again? For some reason the thought tugged at Filius that it was significant. Yet he knew it was one he’d never heard before, and he couldn’t now bring it to mind.
Filius sighed again and let it go.
As the headmaster said, they had well earned their rest.
A/N: Actually the title ought properly to have been “Hunter’s Hunter’s Hunters;” you may thank me for not inflicting that on you.