Chapter Text
March, 1933
‘Tomkins you puh-woh-mithed you’d take my toothy!’
‘Did not!’
‘Did too! Tomkins is ever a devilish fibber! Tomkins take my toothy now!’
Even at the age of six Tom Marvolo Riddle knew he had a good memory. He knew that he had, at no point in the recent few days – or for that matter at any moment since the inception of his memory proper, which he pinpointed in the summer of 1930, when he was three – made any ‘puh-woh-mith’ to his twin sister Mary about the extraction of her ‘toothy’. He knew, also, that she – being his twin sister, and thus in possession of a similarly endowed brain as his own – also knew she was lying about his having made such a ‘puh-woh-mith’; that she was acting exclusively out of malice.
‘If you keep fibbing, Mimsies, I shall smack your head and pull your head,’ Tom intoned severely.
‘Stwoopid Tomkins! Smacking Mim-thees head is just as much twouble as taking Mim-thees’s toothy.’
‘No you’re stupid! You look stupid! you sound stupid!’
It was true; Mary, who could, in Tom’s estimation, sometimes look veritably like an angel, what with his own harmonious face rendered in the delicate girlish ideal, and her overabundant black hair falling with an intimation of Edenic plenitude – looked utterly stupid with a wobbly incisor which she endlessly showed off with her prodding puppylike tongue.
‘Tomkins I’m waiting. Bad Tomkins huwwy up!’
The corner of the orphanage they occupied was partially shaded by an otherwise thin willow tree whose spring leaves were only then returning belatedly. Tom cunningly looked to the right and the left to ensure they were alone, before he passed to the act.
‘Fine. There!’
With a precise but rough tug of his thumb and forefinger, Tom snapped the offending tooth from offensive mouth of his offending sister –
‘Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!’
‘Shut up, Mimsies! There I did it for you now shut up –’
‘Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
‘Shut up you’ll get me collared smelly Mimsies you –’
‘Ha!’
Tom suddenly found himself on the floor. As recompense for his finally succumbing to her extortion, his twin sister had shoved Tom to the floor, and then sprinted away in a fit of giggling. Liberated of the tooth Mary’s voice resumed its habitual gregarious lilt. ‘That’s what sinful little boys who are ever so rough with their sisters get!’
‘Mimsies I’m going to kill you!’ Tom snapped. He was back on his feet immediately and chasing her. ‘Mimsies you are dead!
‘How can Tomkins kill Mimsies if Tomkins can’t even catch her because he’s ever so bad at running?’
It was a strange fact of nature that Tom was, indeed, the less physically sprightly twin. Perhaps it was simply that he did not like the sensation of sweat on his skin, whereas Mary, like an animal, was totally indifferent to it. Nonetheless she was behaving badly, and had to be punished; he threw the tooth into the dirt and chased her around the tree.
'Tomkins is slower than a hundred slugs in a jar of jam!'
'That – makes – no – sense,' Tom yelled between breaths. ‘They’d drown!’
‘Tomkins is slower than a pigeon with no wings!’
‘Mimsies is deader than a pigeon with no head.’
Since he could not beat her through sheer velocity, Tom strategised; he stopped, then ran the other way. He stopped again and reversed course again. He did this non-rhythmically; but Mary, who seemed to be able to look into his head, foresaw all of his moves, and turned on her heels the exact same second he did on every occasion. Nonetheless Mary had to get it right every time, while Tom only had to catch her off guard once; so after a minute Tom caught her arm, tackled her to the ground, and got on top of her like a dog mounting a bitch.
'Toothless little idiot,' Tom said, smiling now because he had won and she was warm and wriggly beneath him and he could feel her heartbeat which was also his. ‘Now Mimsies is dead.'
As Mary turned her head around, Tom expected an expression of sheepish abashment or irritation or some other suchlike look, as befits the vanquished – but instead there was a smirk. She said nothing, conceded nothing, then – in less than a second – disappeared.
Tom blinked. His hands, which had been pressing her little wrists into the cold courtyard earth, now pressed only into mud. The weight, warmth, smugness, and wigglingness of her had all evaporated instantly. Tom scrambled up.
‘Up here, slowest Tomkins!’
Mary was sitting on one of the tree’s branches. Not the lowest branch, which even the older boys could sometimes reach jumping – but one two feet above that, which was more than twice Tom’s height from the ground. Her pale little legs swung. Her toothless grin was very wide, and very stupid. She had not, and could not have, climbed. She had deployed The Thing to get up there; The Thing which permitted Tom to make matchsticks strike without touching them and manipulate games of marbles; The Thing which permitted Mary to sometimes see into rooms through the eyes of insects. The Thing was, monthly, showing them new particular things they could do – yet nothing approximated, in splendour or absurdity, what Mary had just done.
‘How did you do that?’ demanded Tom, red-faced.
‘I wanted to be up here,’ Mary said smilingly, ‘and then I was. Easy-peasy pudding and pie.’
Embarrassment and jealousy shot through Tom. If Mary could do it then so could he. He was never worse than his sister at anything important; he was better at reading and sums, better at sitting still, better at making the carers like him. He would not be worse at The Thing, which was the most important thing of them all.
‘Poor Tomkins,’ sang Mary from the tree. ‘Heavy Tomkins. Stuck-on-the-ground Tomkins.’
Tom closed his eyes. Even if he had only been consciously exercising it for a year or two, he already had a theory of theories for how The Thing worked. There was the wanting part of it – he wanted very badly to be where his impudent twin sister was, right now. Then there was the design part of it – he needed to figure out how to get there. The two had to go together. He thought of things that moved suddenly; small lizards and cockroaches, when you tried to step on them; sparrows and swifts when you blinked; the electricity going from a switch to the light. He put all of these sensations, together, with his wanting to be by his horrid, impudent, ingrate of a twin sister –
The world clenched.
A nauseating sensation went from Tom’s centre to the tips of his fingers like spreading waves, and that’s how he knew it worked. He opened his eyes to find himself behind Mary, his feet and hands steady on the very branch she was on, his nose grazing against her long hair. She was still looking down at where he had been, still composing some new taunt –
Tom grabbed her round little bottom and pushed.
‘Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!’
Mary landed badly. Her legs crumpled wrong under her, and her face scrunched, like tissue paper, into tears. Tom’s sense of victory at once evaporated into dread. He wanted to be down – simply down (here, the design: thunder striking the ground, water falling from a faucet, men jumping from unicycles) – and then he was, the nauseating circle from his centre emerging again, his feet striking earth.
‘Let me see,’ Tom murmured.
Mary was wailing and clutching a considerably bloodied knee.
‘It hurts, Tomkins, it hurts ever so much –’
Tom pried her little fingers away. The scrape was grotesque enough to contain more colours than the mere red of bruising. Tom had seen wounds before, worse ones even – one could not grow up a boy at Wool’s without seeing wounds – but this one he had caused, on so tender a creature as the only sister he had in the world.
‘Sorry Mimsies,’ he said, hugging her. ‘My poor Mimsies. I’m sorry.’
The words were inadequate. Tom did not know what else to do; he was hesitant to call for help because he was reluctant to get into trouble. And so – because the gesture was old, older than memory, something they had always done, even in their shared cot in the nursery before they were made to go to the boys’ and girls’ dormitories at the age of three – he kissed her knee.
Mary’s blood was warmer than he expected and tasted saltier than the saltiest gravy. Her skin, which should have been smooth, was all ridges and ripples and very, very wrong. Tom felt a wrench in his chest – but the emotion of it made him think better. It often did, with The Thing. Kissing, he made a design – the older girls knitting; water washing away dirt; vaccination needles going into arms – and willed his wanting stronger. Mary’s flesh was his flesh; the wounding of her was the wounding of him. The spilling of her blood was, quite objectively, the spilling of his blood in other ways. He needed it to stop.
The Thing moved through him – more powerfully this time, the ripples of dizziness this time emanating from a higher position in his chest – and when he pulled back, Mary’s knee was whole. A little bit of blood surrounded where the scrape had been, but the knee itself was unscraped; it was as if it had never been. Mary flexed her nubile little leg and did not groan; she was, once again, her annoying, flexible self. They stared at each other and Tom grinned.
‘Tomkins, you fixed it,’ Mary whispered.
October, 1935
The Headmaster’s office was on the second floor of the Oaktun Heath Council School; it was the first time in his two years at the institution that eight-year-old Tom Marvolo Riddle had been summoned to this room typically reserved for truants and troublemakers. Tom, who could not remember having done anything wrong – or at least nothing that could possibly have earned the suspicion of any teacher – kept his hands politely clasped behind his back.
Headmaster Hume was writing something. He had been writing for three minutes now, since the moment Tom was admitted in by the school secretary, and Tom was beginning to suspect that the Headmaster was doing it simply to impress upon Tom the sense of his own importance. Yet it was not just Tom in the room. There was also Mr Pembroke, the small council man, standing against the far wall, holding a leather folio and stroking his overlong, cockroach-like moustache; and the young Reverend Ashworth – why was he here? – who was the only adult in the room who appeared to be aware that a child had entered it.
Tom waited. Tom was good at waiting. By now Mary would have shuffled, or faked a cough, or faked a sneeze, or asked the Headmaster where he intended to look up sometime before the Second Coming – but Tom simply studied the room. A glass-fronted bookcase contained dust-covered volumes that had not been disturbed for some years; a framed photograph of the 1919 school cricket eleven, all thin and serious and likely dead by now; a sampler in a wooden frame above the Headmaster’s desk embroidered with the words DILIGENCE AND DUTY in faded red.
‘Riddle’, said the Headmaster at last, without raising his eyes.
‘Sir.’
‘I am told you are exceptional.’
Hume set his pen down at last and looked at Tom over the grey mass of his Victorian whiskers. Tom’s heart skipped a beat – suspicions of The Thing had hitherto been kept only to the adults at Wool’s; at school it should have been pure hearsay – if the Headmaster took such allegations seriously –
‘I understand you would like to skip a year of your education,’ the Headmaster continued, for Tom had not yet spoken.
An internal ripple of relief permeated through Tom. He had, indeed, made such an offhand comment to the Reverend Ashworth some several weeks ago during the aftermath of a weekly service; the Reverend was one of the few adults who had a positive appreciation for, rather than a suspicious wariness of, Tom’s intelligence. Tom had not possibly thought that such a proposition would be considered seriously, and had dismissed it from his mind in the intervening time.
‘I was not aware that was the purpose of this meeting, sir,’ Tom said cordially. ‘But if such a thing were possible, I should be most grateful for the opportunity.’
Hume glanced at Ashworth. ‘He talks like that all the time, does he?’
‘He does, Headmaster.’
‘Extraordinary.’ Hume opened a drawer, withdrew a pipe, and lit it. ‘Very well, Riddle. You have been put forward on the Reverend’s recommendation. Mr Pembroke is here in his official capacity as Council witness. I shall examine you. If I find your abilities sufficient you may advance to Standard Five come spring and sit the County Council Scholarship Exam a year early, and thereby have two opportunities for it, as opposed to the overwhelming majority of boys in these parts. If I find them insufficient, you will return to your class and we shall hear no more about this. Is this understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then let us begin. What are the Beatitudes?’
'The Beatitudes are the blessings pronounced by Our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, sir. Saint Matthew gives nine, beginning with ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ but Saint Luke records only four, and sets against each a corresponding woe.’
‘Arithmetic. A farmer sells nine bushels of wheat at one shilling seven ha’penny per bushel. What does he receive?’
‘Fourteen shillings and sevenpence ha’penny, sir.’
Hume’s back seemed to straighten very slightly; his voice, as it delivered the next question, became clearer. He asked a question about the Danube as it related to the various countries of the continent. He asked about Dotheboys Hall and whether Tom thought Mr Squeers a realistic portrait of an educator. He asked, with what Tom perceived to be genuine curiosity now, what distinguished a stalactite from a stalagmite; and Tom answered that one hung from above and one grew from below. He asked a question about the Corn Laws. He asked about the arrangement of not only the planets but their moons. He no longer consulted the question sheet Pembroke had set out before him, whether because it was too simple or already completed Tom could not determine; the questions, judging by his cadence, seemed to be his own.
Tom had not permitted a single wall to fall.
‘That will do,’ Tom said at last. He had been leaning progressively further forward throughout the questioning and was now hunched forward, with his elbows on the desk. ‘Ashworth, your judgement appears to have some basis.’
‘I am most gratified, Headmaster.’
‘Don’t be. Gratification is premature.’ He looked at Tom. ‘You are a bloody clever boy, Riddle. I have known many clever boys who came to nothing because they thought that cleverness was sufficient. It is not. You will advance to Standard Five on the understanding that you work harder than any boy in the form, and that you will bring pride to Oaktun Heath on the County Scholarship Examination whether in the next year or in ‘37. Is that clear?’
‘Perfectly clear, sir.’
‘Good. You may go.’
Tom understood that he was now supposed to bow and leave. Instead, he made a polite but inquisitive face to the headmaster.
‘I said you may go, boy.’
‘There is an inquiry I would like to –’
‘Very well. Out with it.’
‘My sister, sir.’ Tom’s voice did not waver. ‘Might she also advance?’
A short, uncomfortable silence befell the room.
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes, sir. My twin sister, Mary Melusina Riddle. She’s just as clever as me, I promise. Might she also advance, and sit the examination twice like I shall?
‘She shall not even sit it once!’ Hume snapped. ‘The girls’ curriculum is structured quite differently from the boys, as you should very well know! Domestic science, needlework, that sort of thing. How is she to undertake the scholarship examination when such is her formation?’
‘But sir, if you placed her in the boys’ Standard Five she would learn just as well –’
‘That may be the case, Riddle – though I hold my reservations – but I am not empowered to dismantle the structure of education in England for the convenience of one orphan girl, not even for you. The matter is closed.’
‘Sir –’
‘Riddle! The matter is closed! Now remove yourself, I have duties to attend to.’
‘Mimsies, I am to skip Standard Four.’
Mary pressed her face to the gap between the two fence-posts that separated the boys’ yard from the girls in the supervised recreation area behind the school. It was the interval between luncheon and afternoon lessons, and they were permitted twenty-five minutes of fraternisation. She had, in the two years since she was pushed out of the tree through a shove to her buttocks, grown more than Tom; she was slightly taller than him now, but also thinner – and by virtue of her fine feminine face – felt to be the more fragile of the twins, even if she was still both the faster runner and the twin more disposed to running.
‘I will go directly to Standard Five, come September,’ Tom continued, as she had said nothing but instead just stared at him with a small, false smile. ‘They say I have two chances at the scholarship exam this way.’
‘That’s ever so nice for you, Tomkins.’
The sardonicism in Mary’s voice cut Tom; and he knew she knew that he knew it cut him.
‘You don’t have to be a beast about it,’ he said. ‘I’m just trying to tell you something good that happened.’
‘Something good for you.’
‘Is not anything that’s good for me, good for the both of us?’
Now Mary’s smile became wider, and took on its serpentine mode – she had long, thin lips.
‘Good for us until you go off to some school for toffs, because you’ll pass the first time. Clever Tomkins. Off to someplace with boys who have mothers and fathers and proper suits and never slept twenty to a room with bed-wetters. Won’t that be nice.’
‘Don’t you want to leave this place, Mimsies?’
‘Yes, but as far as I can see it is only you who shall leave.’
This answer made Tom’s heart do an unpleasant thing, but rather vocalise such discomfort, his mind reined itself in. ‘Then see farther! If, in six years, I become a university man then I shall become a parliamentarian – a colonel – a director of a bank – then we’ll both have left here, together.’
‘In six years,’ Mary repeated tonelessly.
Tom wanted to clarify that, were he to succeed in the county scholarship and go somewhere like Westminster School, he would still see Mary during Easters and Christmases and summers, and possibly even weekends; that six years is a short span of time for a life that could span sixty, seventy, eighty years; that to get both of them out of Oaktun Heath meant one had to come first, and that the task – not necessarily a pleasant one – fell to him simply because that was how it was; they only gave these things to boys – but found that he, too, dreaded the prospect of six years apart from his dearest Mimsies. So he said nothing.
Then the bell rang.
‘I have to go,’ said Mary.
Supper – like breakfast and tea – at Wool’s Orphanage involved the segregation of the boys to one long table, and the girls to another. Tom and Mary had long had the habit of sitting on the outer bench of their respective tables so that they could look at each other. The fare, that evening, consisted of boiled potatoes, pork scrapings in a thin gravy, and crusts of bread. Mary touched none of it; her hands were folded elegantly in her lap.
'Not hungry, Mary?' said Mrs Cole.
'No, ma'am.'
'You must eat. How else would you grow into a woman?’
'Yes, ma'am.'
But she did not eat.
Tom watched her across the room with irritation. He had already – as he had always – eaten slightly more than his allotted fare by means of coercion and thievery. Tom had every intention of growing physically strong. However his twin sister’s mouth remained firmly closed. After supper, after their evening chores and prayer – Tom detained Mary in the corridor outside the girls’ dormitory.
‘Here,’ he said, presenting her with a handful of stolen crusts.
‘No thank you.’
‘Mimsies –’
‘I don’t want it,’ said Mary plainly, turning to face him. Her expression was one of moderate indignation, but then Tom saw her eyes – slightly bloodshot with swollen lids. She had been crying. Pity shot through Tom’s stomach but he had to quell it down; it would do no good to baby her.
‘Is your plan to starve yourself to death because you’re cross with me?’ Tom asked coolly.
‘I’m not cross with you.’
‘Mimsies is a devilish fibber.’
‘I’m just not hungry.’
‘Liar.’
‘Traitor.’
The accusation struck Tom like a slap to the face. All the remorse then reddening his cheeks drained from him like water from an overturned bucket. ‘You think I’ll be sorry for you? That I’ll say no to getting on ‘cause you’ve gone and made yourself sick like a stupid ninny? Is that what you want?’
‘I don’t want anything from you,’ Mary murmured, more composed now. ‘Not anymore.’
Autumn in London supplied more rain than anyone cared for. Every outdoors surface became permanently hazardous; moss grew in the corners of the courtyard; water pooled in the uneven flagstones and bred a thin scum of filth; and the refuse bins behind the kitchen overflowed with something approximating sewage. The children of Wool’s Orphanage were, obviously, kept inside on such days, but Mary Riddle had found her way out – had stood herself among the bins and the mildew and streaming wet, without even a jacket.
Tom had ran out the door to try and drag her back inside, but she had – likely through use of The Thing – made herself impossibly heavy; and the more he pulled, the more steps she took from the orphanage. So he retreated and recruited the help of Mrs Cole.
‘Idiot girl! Have you gone mad?’ yelled the matron.
‘No, ma’am.’ Mary’s voice was but a whisper in the distance occluded by the tumult of the rain colliding with ground.
‘Come back this instant!’
‘I prefer to stay here, ma’am.’
‘You will catch your death!’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Yet Mary did not move. Mrs Cole’s mouth opened and closed. She looked at Tom, as though he might explain such unreasonable comportment; he could not and did not.
‘What do you mean, yes ma’am?’
‘I mean yes, ma’am, I expect I shall catch my death. That’s rather the idea.’
‘The idea –’ Mrs Cole sputtered. ‘You wicked, ungrateful child!’
Mrs Cole stomped outside, got the entirety of the rim of her dress wet, and – with her adult strength – seized Mary roughly by the arm and dragged her back.
Two days later, Mary had developed a cough. Four days later, a fever. On the fifth day, she could no longer rise from her bed.
If Tom were to name the Room for the Fevered, he would have called it the Room for the Dying. A small chamber on the third floor of the orphanage, it was distinguished from the other chambers by its single window – which faced south and admitted sparse light – and its three iron bedsteads, spaced at intervals supposedly just adequate for the prevention of viral transfer. Most people who entered the Room for the Fevered never came out. Tom had entered it once, at the age of five, for a rather nasty bout of flu himself; Mary had visited him daily, fed him, and annoyed him with her endearing conversation before Mrs Cole shooed her away. Another boy had died the same day he recovered; he had long suspected that The Thing had saved him.
Now, it was Mary who lay in the middle of the rickety little beds. She looked tiny, as though something had sucked blood, moisture, and even flesh from the girl who had formerly been Mary. Her breath came in ugly, rattling gasps which made it sound as though there were holes in her throat. The physician had come, intoned the diagnosis of ‘pneumonia’ whose prognosis was, ‘we must wait and see’, and left Mrs Cole a bottle of murky black liquid to administer every four hours.
‘You may visit for up to thirty minutes at once every two hours,’ Mrs Cole told Tom in a voice uncharacteristically gentle. ‘She needs rest.’
What Mary needed, Tom thought with spiteful clarity, was to not have refused food over several days until her wrists began to visibly thin. To not have stood in the rain for two hours like a sickly sparrow courting its own death. Stupid girl. Impossible girl. He could have snapped her arm with only one hand, now, probably. She had done all this to make him feel precisely as he felt now – more horridly anxious than he had ever been in his short life – and it had worked. Tom sat on the edge of his sister’s bed and watched her struggle to breathe, and felt the urge to compress her little chest with his firm boyish hands, to break her lungs. Stupid, impossible girl.
But there was no need to do any of that, for Mary was dying quite of her own accord. Instead, Tom murmured, ‘Mimsies, I got you something.’
The semi-cadaverous little girl in the bed failed to respond.
‘A pretty thing,’ said Tom, drawing the hairpin from his pocket. It was a slender silver shaft, four inches in length, topped with a cluster of tiny seed pearls arranged in the shape of a flower. Tom had found it three days ago in the donation bucket of the Methodist Hall; he had nicked it while Reverend Ashworth was conversing with some fat woman after a service about the arrangement of flowers to be had for the fifteenth anniversary of the Hall’s opening. ‘For your hair, when you’re well. You could pin it up like a lady.’
Mary did not open her eyes. She sputtered again, and Tom could not bear to hear it. He placed the hairpin beside her bed, used The Thing to clear the skin of dust on her glass of water, and left the room suppressing tears.
Mary was falling, and her chest was full of needles. She would have liked to cry for the pain in her chest, but crying only made the needles get pricklier, so she reined herself in. Instead she just fell, fell, fell –
– falling, falling, falling –
Through an interminable, cold dark at a pace that was slow enough to make her not scream, but fast enough to make her hair and dress billow, as if she were being pushed around by waves in the ocean perhaps.
Then she landed. The fall was peaceful. She was in the corridor outside the girls’ dormitory, except it could not have been so, for there was no ceiling; as Mary looked up she saw simply endless black. Moreover the walls were white, and clean, and made of marble, rather than the brown brick of Wool’s. It was a strange place, and Mary decided to explore it. She passed the washroom; the door was ajar and she could hear water running – too much of it, as if every single pipe was rushing at full volume. She pushed the door open, only to find that she was now outside.
It was definitely not Wool’s. Possibly not even London.
For one, she could see miles into the distance in every direction. The door behind her had disappeared. There were things in the shape of Wool’s – the faucet’s washrooms, random chairs and tables, the sewing kits and cheap cosmetics of the other girls – but the size of everything was wrong. A stick of lipstick the size of a motorcar stuck from the ground like a tree, and the horizon was blacker than night. Yet it was not dark; everything was basked by a moonlight without a moon. It was very silly, but very beautiful.
Mary kept walking. The flagstones beneath her feet were, like the walls of the corridor, white, marble, and clean; far from the tired grey of Wool’s. The path was very wide; as wide as Oxford Street or Kingsway, which was very silly indeed because on both sides there was very little at all; just the implements of the other girls, faucets, here an empty potato-sack, there a large puddle of water which invisible raindrops increased.
Then she saw the church. St. Hester’s – as it was known in The World Above – yes, that was it; the world before Mary got sick was The World Above, and now she was in The World Below, which contained its spare bits and pieces – St. Hester’s, Oaktun Heath’s old Anglican chapel abandoned some several decades hence, was in The World Below more glorious than it was in The World Above. The chapel itself was more polished, gleaming white and not even slightly decayed, but what struck Mary most of all was its belltower. The bell was ten times larger than its analogue in The World Above. Mary quite wanted to ring it, but it was ever so large and the tower ever so tall; she didn’t have the energy to climb it.
Her chest was full of needles. She needed to rest, and so she entered St. Hester’s chapel, which, for some reason, was deprived of doors. However, rather than finding any pew to sit on, the interior of the chapel was entirely vacated – was in fact much, much, infinitely larger than a chapel; larger than the Methodist Hall; larger than Wool’s; larger than St. Paul’s; larger, probably, than the interior of Westminster Palace, but entirely vacated.
Mary could not sit, and the needles in her chest sharpened and sharpened. It was while she was clutching her heart to prevent its puncturing that she saw the Winged Knight for the first time. He was one of many, but he was the nearest.
‘Hullo,’ Mary said. ‘You look rather queer.’
This was a just appraisal, for the Knight, rather than being in armour of metal, was made in armour composed of great stretches of the enamel of enormous teeth, faintly off-white; rather than wielding a sword, held the cane of Mr. Bassenthwaite, the burly and surly porter of Wool’s Orphanage; rather than standing as tall as a man, stood perhaps ten feet tall, and positively towered over little Mary; and rather than having a helmeted head, had a single, enormous eyeball for its entire head, without lids. It had huge wings, the wings of dragonflies, expanded some hundredfold.
Rather than say anything back to the girl, the intensely bloodshot, black – black like Mary and her brother’s eyes – focused upon her.
It was then that Mary realised the enormous chapel, did, in fact, have walls – each some eighty feet apart from her, and tall enough to stretch eternity. Walls made of white marble with an infinity of white alcoves, each sheltering a similar knight.
‘Can you take the needles out of my chest?’ Mary asked the Knight.
The Knight, having no mouth, could not talk, but its head vaguely lowered to suggest a response in the negative to the little girl’s inquiry. Mary was not disappointed by the knight’s incapacity – she had expected as much, it being so grave in so funereal a place – but gnashed her teeth at the intensification of the sharpness in her chest. She began to feel very cold.
She began to walk towards the far wall of the chapel, and as she walked the cold deepened. The needles were no longer merely in her chest; they had proliferated into her arms, her fingertips, the soft parts behind her knees. The Winged Knights in their alcoves watched her with their lidless, singular eyes, and Mary had the peculiar sensation that they were not guarding the chapel so much as guarding her from what lay beyond it.
For beyond the far wall – she could see it now – there was no wall at all. The marble simply ceased, and what began was nothing. Not darkness, precisely; darkness was a colour, or at least an experience, and this was neither. It was an absence so total that it made the black horizon outside seem positively festive. It was the Outer Dark.
Mary stopped walking. She was perhaps twenty feet from it. The needles had reached a pitch of agony that made her vision swim; yet the Outer Dark, paradoxically, seemed to promise their cessation. She could feel this promise emanating from it like warmth from a hearth – or rather like the memory of warmth, which is not warm at all but makes one wish to move towards its source. The Outer Dark would not hurt. The Outer Dark would not do anything. The Outer Dark was simply the end of falling, and Mary had been falling for such a very long time.
She took a step closer, then another.
Here the marble floor thinned to a strip no wider than a kerb. The Outer Dark lapped at its edges like a tide of ink. Mary knelt, and peered over.
There was nothing to peer at, and that was precisely the seduction of it. No needles. No chest. No falling. No Standard Five for boys and Standard Five for girls. No World Above at all, with its grubby flagstones and its pork scrapings and its insistence that girls learn needlework rather than the tributaries of the Danube. The Outer Dark offered only the most ancient and comprehensive of analgesics: the total cessation of Mary.
She leaned further. Her fingers whitened on the marble lip.
Then – absurdly, impossibly – she smelt gravy. Thin, metallic, faintly rancid gravy, of the kind ladled over pork scrapings at Wool's Orphanage on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The smell was so incongruous and so ugly amid the funereal splendour of the chapel that Mary almost laughed. And with the smell came, by some mental mechanism she could not have named, the image of Tom's face – not as she had last seen it, drawn and frightened above her sickbed, but as it had been that afternoon under the tree, when they were six years old: flushed, furious, triumphant, his hands muddy from where she had been pinned beneath him, his breath quick and warm against her cheek. Heavy Tomkins. Stuck-on-the-ground Tomkins, who had pushed her off the tree by her bottom.
Mary withdrew her fingers from the edge.
'No thank you,' she said to the void. 'It's not that I'm ungrateful. Only I think my brother would be ever so cross.'
She turned and walked back. The needles did not abate, but she found she could bear them. The Knights' eyes followed her with what she chose to interpret as approval, though it may well have been indifference; it was difficult to read the expressions of creatures who consisted principally of a single eyeball. Mary sat down in the centre of the chapel floor, drew her knees to her chest, and shivered, and waited for someone to fetch her.
In The World Above, Tom Riddle sat on the floor of the orphanage library – if the word could be applied to a single shelf of donated volumes, most missing their spines, wedged between the boot-room and the water closet – and read with the desperate, furious attention of a boy attempting to outrun a bull in heat.
The encyclopaedia was a 1919 Harmsworth, donated by a local solicitor's widow and visibly dated. Its entry on pneumonia occupied two-thirds of a column in small type and said a great deal about the morphology of pneumococci but nothing of practical use. The crisis typically occurs between the fifth and tenth day of illness, after which the patient either rallies or succumbs. The mortality in untreated lobar pneumonia has been variously estimated at between twenty and forty per centum of cases, though this figure is substantially higher among the very young, the very old, and those already debilitated by malnutrition or prior illness.
Tom read the passage three times. Twenty to forty per centum. Mary was eight years old, had refused food for the better part of a week before falling ill, and was now on her sixth day of fever. He did the arithmetic and did not like the result.
He replaced the Harmsworth and tried the only other possibly relevant volume: a copy of Enquire Within Upon Everything, the 1903 edition, which had been his and Mary's secret favourite for years on account of its exhaustive and frequently bizarre counsel on matters ranging from the removal of iron-mould stains to the proper mode of addressing a Bishop. Its section on pulmonary complaints recommended a poultice of linseed meal applied to the chest at intervals of four hours, the inhalation of steam from a basin of boiling water into which a teaspoon of Friar's Balsam had been introduced, and – with a delicacy that Tom found almost insulting – the early summoning of medical counsel, as delay in such cases is attended with the gravest consequences.
Medical counsel had been summoned. Dr. Hargreaves, the consulting physician provided gratis to the orphanage by the local Poor Law authority, had visited twice. Tom had stationed himself outside the Room for the Fevered during the second visit and intercepted the man on his way down.
'Will she live, sir?'
Dr. Hargreaves was a tired, decent man with a ginger moustache and a leather bag that clicked when he walked. He looked at Tom with the expression of someone accustomed to fielding such questions and disliking every instance.
'Your sister is a resilient girl,' he said. 'She has youth on her side.'
'But will she live?'
'We must be hopeful, my boy.'
'Hopeful is not the same as confident, sir.'
'No,' said Dr. Hargreaves, after a pause. 'No, it is not.' He shifted his bag from one hand to the other. 'Has she been eating? Before the illness, I mean. Mrs Cole mentioned some concern.'
'She wasn't eating properly, no, sir.'
'Ah.' The doctor's mouth did something complicated. 'That does make things rather more difficult. The body requires reserves, you understand. Fuel for the fight. When those reserves are depleted –' He stopped. He seemed to remember that he was speaking to an eight-year-old, and adjusted his register accordingly. 'We shall do everything we can, Riddle. You must pray for her.'
'I don't think prayer will be sufficient, sir.'
Dr. Hargreaves looked at Tom for another moment, then set a hand briefly on his shoulder, and left without another word.
Mrs Cole brought the paper on the seventh day, when Mary's breathing had acquired a new sound – a deep, wet, percussive rattle, like someone shaking a jar half-full of water – and when Mary's intervals of consciousness had narrowed to a few minutes per several hours.
'Mary, dear,' Mrs Cole said, with an awkwardness that Tom, watching from the doorway, found almost touching in its inadequacy. 'I've brought you a pencil and a bit of paper. In case there's anything you'd like to – to set down. Any wishes. About your things.'
Mary's eyelids barely parted.
'It's only a precaution, mind,' Mrs Cole added quickly, reddening. 'Just in case.'
She placed the pencil and a single sheet of foolscap on the bedside table, beside the hairpin which Tom had left there and which Mary had not yet acknowledged, and retreated. Tom remained in the doorway. He watched his sister's trembling hand reach for the pencil; watched her bring it to the paper with the laborious, quivering effort of a girl lifting a barbell. He expected words – some testament, however childish, to the distribution of her few possessions: her hair-ribbons, her marbles, her beloved tattered copy of At the Back of the North Wind. He expected, perhaps, his own name.
What Mary drew, in slow, shaking lines, was a knight. It was crude and wrong in its proportions – the body too narrow, the wings too wide, the head a mere circle suggesting enormity without achieving it – but it was unmistakably a knight. A knight with dragonfly wings and a single staring eye.
Tom came and sat beside her. The drawing stared up at him with its single pencilled eye.
'What's that, Mimsies?' he asked quietly.
'My knight,' Mary whispered, without opening her eyes. 'From The World Below. He can't talk but he watches me. There's hundreds of them, Tomkins. All in a big white church.'
Mary's hand was still loosely wrapped around the pencil, as though she might, at any moment, add some further detail – a second knight, a landscape, a caption – but she had already slipped back under. Her breaths came in that awful, hydraulic rhythm. Twenty to forty per centum. She had not eaten in nine days. She was eight years old and weighed less than a large dog.
Tom picked up the foolscap and folded it carefully into his pocket.
Billy Stubbs was two years older than Tom and proportionally bigger – a ruddy, dull, piggish boy who slept three beds from Tom in the boys' dormitory and who had, on more than one occasion, attempted to commandeer Tom's supper by force. Tom did not like him but did not especially dislike him either; Stubbs was simply a creature of the orphanage, part of its fauna, no more remarkable than the cockroaches in the washroom or the rats behind the kitchen. But Tom had been observing him for two days now with a new and clinical attention, as one might observe a sheep before the shearing – and had noted, with satisfaction, that Stubbs was in excellent health. Flushed skin, strong appetite, a perpetual and slightly bovine energy. Reserves, Dr. Hargreaves had called them. Fuel for the fight.
'Stubbs,' Tom said. 'I need your help.'
It was after evening prayers. The other boys were in the recreation room; Stubbs had lingered in the corridor, chewing on something illicit – a bit of toffee, probably, stolen from one of the helpers. He looked at Tom with suspicion.
'What sort of help?'
'My sister is very ill. You know that, don't you?'
'Everyone knows that. Cole says she might snuff it.'
The crudeness of this observation made something cold move through Tom's chest. He suppressed it. 'The Reverend says that prayer can help the sick. Communal prayer, he means – more than one person praying for the same soul. I should like you to come and pray with me at her bedside.'
'Pray?' Stubbs looked at Tom as though he had suggested they go and milk a hippopotamus. 'What, now?'
'Yes, now. It shan't take long. Five minutes.'
'Why me?'
'Because you're the biggest boy in our dormitory, and the Reverend says that God listens most closely to the strong.'
This was a fabrication of such transparent absurdity that Tom half expected even Stubbs to see through it. But Stubbs, whose theological sophistication was limited, seemed mildly flattered. He chewed his toffee thoughtfully.
'Five minutes?'
'Five minutes.'
'Right, then.'
They ascended to the third floor. The corridor was empty; Mrs Cole was downstairs doing accounts. Tom opened the door of the Room for the Fevered and ushered Stubbs inside. The older boy's ruddy face lost some of its colour at the sight of Mary – the small wasted shape beneath the sheet, the awful sound of her breathing, the chamber-pot and the black bottle and the general atmosphere of proximate death.
'Blimey,' Stubbs muttered. 'She looks done for.'
'Kneel,' said Tom.
They knelt together beside Mary's bed. Tom clasped his hands in what he hoped was a convincing posture of supplication. Stubbs, glancing sideways at him, did the same.
'Close your eyes,' Tom said.
'What are we supposed to –'
'Close your eyes and be quiet. I'll say the words.'
Stubbs closed his eyes. Tom did not close his. He looked at his sister – at the translucent, bluish skin of her eyelids; at the sharp new angles of her cheekbones, which had not been there a week ago; at the way her lips had dried and cracked into a map of tiny fissures. He leaned forward.
'Our Father,' Tom began, in a clear, steady voice.
Then he kissed Mary on the mouth.
It was not like kissing her knee three years ago beneath the willow tree. That had been instinct and pity and the particular, uncomplicating tenderness of small children. This was different. Tom pressed his lips firmly against his sister's cracked ones and felt – at once, and with a violence that made his stomach lurch – the full, septic weight of what was killing her. The Thing moved before he even designed it; it surged up from his chest like water breaking through a dam, and the fever poured into him in a single, searing draught. He could feel it in his blood – something alive and foreign and very, very greedy, coiling through his veins with an acquisitive, parasitic intelligence.
Tom pulled back. The room tilted. His forehead was suddenly slick and his hands were trembling. Mary's breathing had not changed; had perhaps, imperceptibly, steadied – but the disease was now in him, and it was hungry, and it would eat him exactly as it had been eating her.
He could not keep it. To keep it was to die, and if he died then Mary would be alone, which was the same thing as dying twice.
Tom turned to Stubbs, who still knelt with his eyes shut and his hands clasped, his lips moving soundlessly over something half-remembered from Reverend Ashworth.
'Thank you, Stubbs,' Tom said. 'That was very good. Now hold still.'
Before the boy could open his eyes Tom seized his face with both hands and kissed him squarely on the mouth. The design came to him with a clarity that was beautiful: a lock opening; a window thrown wide; a drain unclogged. He wanted the sickness out – wanted it with a purity that was beyond malice, beyond guilt, beyond even intention. It was simply the most important wanting he had ever wanted.
The Thing obeyed. The fever, the greediness, the coiling foreign presence – all of it rushed from Tom's mouth into Stubbs's with a force that sent the older boy reeling backwards onto the floorboards. Stubbs's eyes flew open. He tried to speak, and could not. He tried to stand, and could not. His face, which moments ago had been the picture of rude health, was already draining of its colour – going grey, then white, then a terrible, translucent blue that Tom recognised from his sister's eyelids.
Stubbs crawled to the door. Tom did not help him. He watched, standing quite still by his sister's bed, as the older boy dragged himself into the corridor, coughing – already coughing, that deep, wet, percussive sound – and then was gone.
Tom sat down on the edge of Mary's bed. He felt extraordinary – light, clean, emptied, as though someone had drawn a warm bath through the interior of his body. He placed a hand on Mary's forehead. Her skin was cool. Not cold, not clammy – cool, in the ordinary, pleasant way of a child who has been sleeping peacefully in a well-ventilated room. Her breathing, too, had changed: the rattle was gone, replaced by a soft, even rhythm.
Tom took the hairpin from the bedside table and placed it in her hand, closing her fingers around it. He bent to her ear.
'Mimsies,' he whispered. 'It's all right now. I fixed it.'
He remained there until Mrs Cole came looking for Stubbs, which was forty minutes later. By then Mary's colour had returned – faintly, but perceptibly, like the first suggestion of dawn in a window that has been dark all night. Billy Stubbs was discovered on the floor of the boys' lavatory, burning with a fever so sudden and so violent that Dr. Hargreaves, summoned for the second time in a week, could only observe that he had never seen pneumonia manifest with such celerity.
Stubbs died on a Sunday, three days later, while the other children were at chapel. Mrs Cole informed Tom and Mary of this fact over breakfast the following morning, as a matter of institutional propriety. Mary – who had risen from her bed two days prior, pale and thin but breathing easily and consuming, with a rehabilitant's appetite, everything placed before her – received the news with a solemnity appropriate to the occasion.