Chapter 11: Dark Knowledge

He took the old quill because the new one was too honest.

It split sometimes at the tip and left the faintest hairline of extra ink along the upstrokes, the sort of flaw a man might not notice in his own hand. Tom tried a line of plain capitals first, warming his fingers, and watched how the nib scraped a whisper out of the parchment. The classroom was empty but for him and a chalk smell that never quite left the stones. Down the corridor, someone laughed, too loud for the hour; the sound came thin through the door and died.

“Professor H. Slughorn,” he said under his breath, to hear how the name fell. He thought of the yellowing notice, the one with Slughorn’s round, hopeful hand that had invited “promising young witches and wizards” to a Friday tea. The neat loop of the g, the soft, lazy tail. Tom chose a sheet with the watermark just visible when he held it to the lamp and set the tip down.

Warm regards—

The nib bent, eager to please, and he frowned. It was too firm, the downward stroke of the l too close and prim. He had watched Slughorn sign half a dozen permission slips after class; the man never pinched the letter in that careful way. He slashed a thin line through Sincerely, Sinc—no, that was wrong, Slughorn never wrote Sincerely; that was Mr Cole’s style, thin and nervous, and it had crept in like a draught under a door.

He pressed his thumb to the page while the ink settled. The skin smelled a little of the charmed polish from the staircase banister and faintly of soap from the morning, and there was the bite of iron from the inkwell. He tried again.

Warm regards, H. Slughorn

There. He widened the loop of the g until it lounged on the line as if it belonged there, and let the final n tail off as though Slughorn had already turned away to address the room.

Tom raised the paper to eye level. It would pass in a stack, with other pages to keep it company. Alone, shown with a flourish, it would ask to be looked at for too long. He blew delicately across the ink and laid the slip aside.

Mrs Cole had always patted at the corners of papers after she signed them, to dry the ink and to make it clear that the business was done. He had patted at her papers as a child when she left them lying about, feeling the words through the page under his palm and thinking of the way they changed what one could do. He set his hand down now, fingers splayed, and pressed just hard enough to leave the faint warmth of himself.

He folded the page twice so the signature lived inside and the edges matched. He did not tuck it away at once. He wrote the library ledger line, Tom Marvolo Riddle, First Year, and the reason in Slughorn’s rounder hand: Charms theory; professor’s recommendation.

His jaw clicked as he shut it and there was a small sound in the silence. He smiled at it and blew out the lamp.

Madam Pince watched the castle as if it might make a mess while her back was turned. Tom could feel her attention before he reached the desk. It had a shape to it, like a hand held just above his cheek.

“Professor Slughorn,” he said, mild, and placed the folded slip on the counter.

Her fingers were narrow and dry. She unfolded the page with the care of someone opening old letters. Her eyes went to the bottom at once, to the scrawl, and then up and down the page again, as if the words had faces. She made a small cluck in her throat.

“Time,” she said, without looking at him. She nudged a ledger nearer to herself, dipped her quill into a bottle of ink with a tiny screw top, and wrote his name—each letter exact, straight as book spines—and the hour in a narrow column. The clock over her shoulder had brass hands and a chipped face; when the long hand moved to the quarter it sighed in a bell no louder than a teacup tapped with a spoon.

“Until the quarter bell,” said Pince. “Restricted Section upon presentation. No touching of bindings with unclean hands. No removal. No dawdling.”

“Yes,” said Tom, for politeness. He slipped the permission slip back into his pocket when she pushed it towards him; it came back with her stamp in purple, neat as a bruise, and the time underneath. She had not kept it, then. He liked that.

Her gaze pierced him once, through the pocket and skin and fabric, then slid away to the boy at the end of the counter with a stack of Herbology texts that smelled of damp. She flicked one of the lamps above them with her wand and it softened a little, like a breathing thing. The far lamps, in the older rows, were already dimmer.

Tom walked very quietly towards the rope. Day students called it a rope when they saw it the first time, some of them reaching to poke their fingers at it like children in a shop. It was rope-shaped. It was not a rope.

He stopped two feet away and let his eyes slip to half-lidded, as if he were simply thinking. The wards were old. They did not mind being known as long as you did not name them. If he stepped close with nothing to show but eagerness, they would hum up his bones and make his teeth ache and send Pince’s head turning with that neat, small cluck.

He took the fold of paper out of his pocket again and showed the purple stamp to the hollowed star carved into the upright post. Madam Pince had once tapped that star with her wand in front of a Sixth Year and said, in an offhand way, “It sees.” Tom did not think it saw like a human eye. It watched. He could feel it now, a thin, bright pressure on the slip, and when he stepped forward it slid aside over him as a draught will shift around a table leg.

There was another ward underneath. He knew of it the way one knows an old tooth—sour and stubborn, low in the tongue. Tom touched two fingers to his temple as if he had a sudden pain, and when he brought his hand down he let the needle he had brought ride between third and fourth finger, hidden by his knuckles. It had taken him three days to coax it out from under a parchment strip in Slughorn’s supply cupboard without anyone noticing. Steel, very fine; it had pricked him a dozen times just to make clear that it could.

He put the needle to the pad of his ring finger, hesitated only as long as it took to make sure Madam Pince had turned to take a book from the Gryffindor boy, and pressed. It went in with very little resistance. The tiny jump of pain felt bright and close; his breath wanted to change. He did not breathe for a count of two. He touched the warm welling to the cut edge of the purple stamp. The ward took it without ceremony. The humming in the air settled into whatever it was it had been before he came.

It cost more than he had thought. The world went white at the edges for a second, as if someone had shaken off a snow globe and set it down too fast. He put his finger to his mouth and tasted iron. When he took it away again, it was numb and stubborn, as if the blood were sulking at not being where it preferred to be. He curled the hand into the cuff of his sleeve.

The rope was still not a rope. It brushed cold along his shoulder as he slid past and left a feeling behind as if he had been too near a thunderstorm.

He had counted the rows with his eyes months ago, as one counts rafters in a ceiling while pretending to cough. He did not go to the shelves that students whispered about most. He went one shelf over, to a spine that made nothing of itself: dry leather, the colour of old tea, the title sunk into it with dull gold leaf that had lost heart. He pulled it out and it made a small stick of sound as it left its place. Dust rose very obediently.

There were no illustrations. He liked that. The pages were thin and ragged at the edges, like something chewed and spat out by an attentive animal. He opened the book and turned two pages at once on purpose, then another, as if he were clumsy, so that Madam Pince, if she were watching for pace, would think he had no patience for it. The words had that old flavour in them, like a sour rind around something sweet. He read, and the thought came up of its own accord: here were people who had not wished to be pushed around by time.

He kept his eyes forward and did not hunch his shoulders and did not bring the page close. The lamps behind him dimmed and brightened as someone passed down the main aisle; he waited until that little change stilled. He slid his left forefinger—not the numb one—down the margin and stopped it when he came to a line that felt like the stone under his hand on the orphanage stairs, solid, secret. He read it again without moving his lips, and then one more time. The words fitted against his teeth.

Anchor the self.

He did not need the rest at once. The book had decorations of thought around it, clever little knots and old warnings that snorted out their breath and shut their eyes as they spoke; there were essays that liked to pretend they were arguing against themselves. He did not need them now. He only needed that phrase. He wrote it very carefully onto the scrap of paper he had tucked in his cuff, the scrap with the peppered edge where he had torn it from the end of an old letter in the common room bin. His pen trembled, not with fear. His ring finger had gone from numb to hot, a slow ache as if a very small animal were biting it without letting go.

He kept the scrap under the page as he wrote so the wards would not notice a piece leaving that had not come in. He noticed the way the ink touched the fibres; he noticed a dot of blood where the edge of the paper kissed the crease of his hand. He turned the page slightly and the dot left the faintest kiss on the margin. His stomach pinched; not fear, just irritation. He took his handkerchief, folded to a clean square, and used the unmarked corner to blot. The spot faded to the colour of old tea.

The quarter bell sighed behind him. Madam Pince coughed once, dry as paper.

“Five minutes,” she said, at the desk.

Tom looked at nothing for a second and put his breath back down. He smoothed his hair back with his clean hand. One more line to look away from, one to let slide under the eye, and then he closed the book and set it back with care, leaning it just slightly so that the next hand to take it would feel the tug and know that someone had been thoughtful with it.

He walked out with his face set to dull schoolboy. He held the permission slip at the level of his knee, stamp outwards, as he passed the star; the ward recognized its own stain. The rope brushed his sleeve again; he felt it like the memory of being cold.

Madam Pince had not moved far. She had her ledger open again and a pencil for once instead of a quill, and she tapped it twice on the left margin where his name was written.

“Return of slip,” she said, and he pointed out the stamp without bringing the paper up high. She made a very small note he could not see. She swept the pencils into a pot, the movement tidier than any he had seen. He thought she might smell the iron in the air; her nostrils went a fraction narrower.

“Finger,” she said, as if speaking of a species.

“I caught it on a hinge,” said Tom. He looked at his own hand as if in mild surprise. It hurt enough now that the lie had an easy shape. “It is nothing.”

She made a noise that could have meant anything and looked at the clock. The long hand lifted itself down a fraction. The lamps on the old side of the room answered and went one degree lower.

He stepped back into the corridor and it felt like a held breath let out. The flagstones were not so eager to be noticed as the floorboards at Wool’s; they gave up no groans for him. He put his back to the wall in the shadow of a frieze of empty suits of armour and let the ache in his finger burn away to something he could fold. He slid the scrap of paper into the seam of his trousers, under the waist where it would not be found in a search for ordinary things.

He pictured it there as one pictures a coin tucked into a shoe: his, and hot with walking.

Anchor the self.

It tasted like a hard sweet does when it knocks against your teeth. He held it in his mouth without moving his lips and let the shape of it fit the space behind them.

He did not hear Avery until Avery meant to be heard.

“Riddle,” said the boy, from the angle of the stair. He had waited in the wedge where torchlight and shadow made a line down his face. Avery had a pale look to him most days, like milk gone thin. Tonight his cheeks were a little flushed, as if he had held his breath too long. His tie was perfect; it always was. His hair had the kind of parting that refused to change.

Tom did not stop where Avery might have wanted him to. He stopped two steps above, so that their eyes came level, and let the hand with the throbbing finger rest lightly on the banister behind him, as if only to balance.

“Good evening,” said Tom.

“Good?” said Avery, as if tasting it. “I suppose.” He looked past Tom into the library. Madam Pince had her head down and the lamps on her side of the room made a ring around her that looked like a spell drawn in chalk. Avery’s mouth twitched, not a smile.

“You’re lucky,” Avery said.

“At what?” said Tom. He preferred to make people colour in their own outlines.

“Some of us,” said Avery, “would not be granted a pass to the Restricted Section. First-years.” He said the last like a paper-cut.

Tom slid the slip up a fraction from his pocket so the purple stamp winked. He saw Avery’s eyes catch on it like fish at a surface. Avery did not reach for it; his hands stayed where they were: one in his pocket, one on the polished ball of the stair post. He had ink on his cuff where his hand touched the wood. Not the school ink. Green.

“Professor Slughorn is very obliging,” said Tom, polite.

Avery’s jaw did a small, pleased thing, as if he had been waiting to have that named so that he could set down what he had saved.

“Is he?” said Avery. “He didn’t use to be. He doesn’t sign with Sincerely, anyway.” He looked up, and his eyes glittered with something a little like triumph.

Tom did not look down at his pocket. He did not look anywhere but Avery’s face. He let Avery have his little triumph without interruption. Avery was the kind of boy who needed to see his own cleverness reflected.

“I think you crossed it out,” Avery went on lightly. “And the l in Slughorn—he pinches it less. See, when he writes the name, the loop of the g is open, not closed. And he likes that silly little flourish under his name when he’s pleased with himself. There isn’t one.”

Tom’s slow breath made no sound. His finger hurt very steadily, a metronome. It helped.

“You’ve been watching him very closely,” said Tom, as if amused. “Have you been practising?”

Avery coloured. He was pleased and angry about it. “Detention,” he said, in that tone that says, I chose it. “In his office. I had to copy a list. Twenty-three permission slips, he signed them in front of me. He uses green ink when he bothers, did you know? You used black.” His eyes flicked down. “He writes Warm regards, always. Didn’t you know?”

There was a boy’s whisper behind the curve of the corridor. Tom heard it and filed it; he did not turn his head. He moved his sore hand off the banister and folded both hands together in front of him, as though he were about to be helpful to an adult. The movement made the pain flare and sit down again.

“If you’re concerned for the proper forms,” said Tom, “you could speak to him about it.” He made his own voice light. “You could let him know that he does not sign his name properly. He would enjoy the assistance.”

Avery's mouth closed and opened, a quick fish. He did not like being teased, but he liked even less the thought of walking into a professor’s office to correct him. Still, the triumph was not ready to be put away; he had brought it far.

“I should tell Madam Pince,” Avery said. He kept his voice steady, and it did not crack on should, but it wanted to. “Forgery,” he said, as if the word did not feel too big in his mouth. “Any old boy could try such a thing. There are rules.”

“There are,” said Tom agreeably.

He let the silence stretch. The corridor was long, and the tapestries along one side played out their little scenes in quiet. A unicorn bent its neck to drink and the thread of water had a hiss in it like paper pulled firm. Tom watched the space between Avery’s eyebrows change shape. He knew that shape. It was the one people made when they were adding up what they could do to you and what you might do back, and the sums kept coming even.

“Or,” Avery said abruptly, “I could tell Slughorn. He would—he would be disappointed.” That last was almost a question. Tom did not think Avery believed that Slughorn could be truly made dangerous by disappointment, but he liked using the word. It felt like a grown-up tool.

“If you wish,” said Tom. He let his eyes drop now, not to the slip, but to Avery’s cuff where the green ink had touched and dried. “Though, if you tell him about the permission slips in his office,” he went on, mild as milk, “he may ask how you came to be in there watching him sign them, and that might bring along the rest of it. The jar,” he added, as if recalling. “With the little plant that bit, and your thumb. He will not be pleased about that.”

Avery tucked his thumb further into his pocket without meaning to. A narrow strip of pink skin showed where a scab had peeled early. Tom had seen the geranium in its glass—a fanged thing, Slughorn’s particular pet—and he had seen Avery touch everything he was not to touch.

Avery lifted his chin. “Detention,” he said again.

“Of course,” said Tom. “For coming back when he was absent, to try the fangs once. That wasn’t detention, though.”

Avery went very still as he thought very fast. His particular pride did not allow him to admit fright in the corridor. He looked down the passage and then back, and his throat moved as he swallowed too quickly.

“All the same,” Avery said. “It’s a serious thing. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of librarians.” He tried a smile that did not get into his eyes. “They remember everything you owe them.”

“They do,” said Tom. He thought of Madam Pince’s pencil tapping the column. He thought of the purple stamp with a faint shadow of his blood in it. The ache had deepened into his palm now. “We owe each other things all the time,” he added, conversational.

Avery watched him. He would not ask. He wanted it to be offered. Tom let him have that, too; he did not mind.

“You could tell him,” said Tom, as if the idea had just occurred to him. “You could tell Pince.” He let the name be a soft, papery sound. “Or you could come and see the thing I found. Tomorrow. After supper. And decide then what you prefer to do.”

Avery’s face moved as if something inside it had tugged a string. Greed looked bad on him; it sat awkward on his neatness and made him loosen his mouth. He tried not to show it.

“What thing?” he said. He was almost casual.

“In the library,” said Tom. His voice was mild as ever. “In a place you will not go alone, because of the rope.”

Avery shifted his weight. “What shelf?” he said.

“There is a book, and a phrase in it worth more than rules,” said Tom. He leaned a fraction forward, as if sharing a joke. He said nothing else. He let the space after his words grow until it had a shape like a step down. Avery took it.

“I could simply follow you,” Avery said, and there was something pleading and sharp together in it which he hated and tried to salt away with disdain. “You forget you are a first-year.”

“Do,” said Tom. He smiled without moving his mouth much at all. “Come along with me to Madam Pince and say so, and we can go together. You can hold the rope for me.”

Avery stared at him, breathing a little faster. His eyes did a quick dance, left to right, like a boy’s wilful thought slipping free of its tether. He wanted the thing; he wanted it quite badly. He also wanted to be the person to bring down the curtain on another boy’s trick. Those two wants tugged him sideways, and he had not the weight yet to resist both.

“What is it?” he said again, lower.

“A word,” said Tom. He tasted it again and did not let it out. It sat on his tongue and made a small clicking sound against his teeth when he moved. He could be generous when it cost him nothing. He could be generous when it paid him.

"You will tell me now," Avery said.

"No," said Tom, simply. "Tomorrow."

Avery's smile changed. It became something older, something his father might have worn when a deal turned.

"I've been thinking," he said, "about the Prendergast boy. The one in third year. His father works in the Department of Magical Education. Very close to the scholarship committee, I'm told."

Tom felt the temperature in the corridor drop by several degrees.

"Prendergast mentioned that your bursary review is coming up in March," Avery continued, examining his fingernails. "Such a shame if someone were to suggest that a scholarship student had been... overreaching. Forging documents. Accessing areas meant for his betters."

"You have no proof," Tom said, and hated how thin his voice sounded.

"I don't need proof. I need a whisper in the right ear." Avery's eyes gleamed. "My father taught me that. You can destroy a man's reputation with far less than proof. All you need is doubt."

Tom stood very still. He had miscalculated. He had assumed Avery was simple—greedy and easily managed—and he had been wrong. Avery was not simple. Avery was his father's son.

"What do you want?" Tom asked.

"Tomorrow," Avery said, echoing Tom's own word back at him. "You show me what you found. And you remember, going forward, that some of us have resources you do not."

He walked away before Tom could answer. Tom watched him go—the neat line of his shoulders, the confident stride—and felt something cold settle in his chest.

It was not anger, exactly. It was education.

Remember this, he told himself. Remember that they have weapons you do not. Remember that you must acquire those weapons, or forge new ones they cannot imagine.

He would show Avery the book. He would give him the phrase. He would make Avery feel clever and included and necessary.

And then, slowly, over months and years, he would make Avery forget that he had ever held a knife to Tom Riddle's throat.

That was the lesson. That was always the lesson. You did not win by destroying your enemies. You won by making them believe they had never been your enemies at all.

But first, you had to survive the moments when they still remembered they were.

There was that boy's whisper again, behind the curve, farther this time. The castle had ears, and they were not all human. Tom pulled his weight from the wall and walked toward the common room, his face carefully blank.

The ache in his hand sent a small bell of pain up his arm; it seemed to ring in the length of the corridor. He did not mind the ring. It reminded him that the library had not been fooled, only bargained with—and that he had not fooled Avery either.

He allowed himself one last roll of the phrase in his mouth, quiet as swallowing.

Anchor the self.

He thought the words would leave a taste. They did. It was not sweet, exactly. It was clean and cold; it had the tang of keys held in the mouth during a game and kept there too long, the metal bite and the delight of not dropping them no matter what anyone said. Outside, the wind went down the corridor like a hand stroking stone, and the portraits pretended to sleep. Tom tucked his hurt hand into his pocket, felt for the slip with Pince's purple stamp and the scrap of paper with the neat, careful words, and walked towards the common room with his face entirely ordinary.

But his mind was already elsewhere—down in the Chamber, where a hungry thing waited. Avery could be useful. Not as a friend; Tom did not need friends. But as a witness. As someone who had seen him go into the Restricted Section and come out with knowledge worth hoarding.

If things went wrong with the Basilisk, if Myrtle Warren kept giggling in the pipes at the wrong moment, if someone noticed the way Tom always knew which drain to avoid—Avery would remember this night. He would remember the forgery and the phrase and the way Tom had turned a threat into an invitation.

Leverage, Tom thought. The word fit nicely beside anchor.

Somewhere below, in the wet dark beneath the castle, he imagined he could feel the Basilisk stir in its sleep. His cut finger throbbed in answer, a pulse of shared blood and old magic.

Soon, he thought at it, though he knew it could not hear. Soon I will show you what I found. And then we will both be harder to kill.

He climbed the stairs to the common room, and if the portraits watched him pass with eyes that seemed less sleepy than they pretended, he did not notice. He was thinking about immortality, and what a boy might trade for it, and whether the price would be worth paying when the bill finally came due.

Tomorrow. Avery. The book. The Chamber.

The pieces were moving now, and Tom was the hand that moved them.

He saw Eileen at breakfast the next morning. She was sitting alone at the end of the Slytherin table, her plate barely touched, her eyes fixed on a letter she was reading for what looked like the third or fourth time. When he sat down across from her, she did not look up.

"Your mother?" he asked, nodding at the letter.

"My father." Her voice was flat. "He wants me home for Christmas."

"That's good, isn't it?"

She folded the letter with precise, angry movements. "He wants me home because my mother is unwell. He doesn't say what kind of unwell. He never does. He just says she needs me, as if I'm a tonic to be administered."

Tom reached for the toast and said nothing. He had learned that Eileen sometimes needed silence more than she needed answers. She had told him, once, about her father's rages and her mother's long silences, about the house on Spinner's End where the mills had closed and the streets had gone quiet and the magic in the blood was treated like a shameful secret, like a disease to be managed rather than a gift to be used.

"I'm not going," Eileen said. She was looking at him now, her chin lifted in that way she had when she was daring someone to argue. "I've written back. Told him the train schedules don't allow it."

"Do they?"

"Does it matter?"

He considered this. "I suppose not."

She unfolded the letter again, smoothed it flat on the table, then crumpled it into a ball and dropped it into her pumpkin juice. It sank slowly, the ink bleeding into the liquid like a bruise spreading.

"You think I'm a coward," she said.

"I think you're practical."

"That's not an answer."

He met her eyes. "I think you've decided what you can survive and what you can't. That's not cowardice. That's intelligence."

Something flickered across her face—gratitude, maybe, or something more complicated. She looked away, toward the enchanted ceiling where grey clouds were gathering.

"I've been watching you," she said quietly. "In the common room. In classes. You haven't been sleeping."

"I sleep."

"Not enough. And you keep touching your hand. The one you cut." Her eyes dropped to his fingers, wrapped around his toast. "You should let Madam Pomfrey look at it."

"It's fine."

"It's infected. I can see it from here. The skin around the cut is too pink."

He put the toast down. She was right, of course. The cut had begun to throb two days ago, and there was a heat to it now that wasn't fading. He had been telling himself it was nothing, that it would heal on its own, that going to the hospital wing would invite questions he didn't want to answer.

"I'll clean it properly tonight," he said.

"You'll go to Pomfrey."

"Eileen—"

"You'll go," she said, "or I'll tell her you've been sneaking into places you shouldn't be and cutting yourself on things that shouldn't exist. She'll have questions. Would you prefer those questions?"

He stared at her. In the weeks since she had discovered his secret, she had been careful—watching, judging, keeping her distance. She had not tried to stop him. She had not tried to help him. She had simply been present, a witness to whatever he was becoming.

This was different. This was her stepping forward, inserting herself into his plans, making herself necessary.

"Fine," he said. "I'll go."

"After classes. Before dinner. I'll know if you don't."

"How?"

She smiled, thin and without humor. "Because I know you, Tom. Better than you think. You'll tell yourself you're too busy, that it can wait, that you have more important things to do. And then the infection will spread, and you'll lose the use of your hand, and whatever clever plan you've been building will fall apart because you were too proud to let someone help you."

She stood, gathering her books. The crumpled letter still floated in her juice, slowly sinking.

"I'm not doing this for you," she said. "I'm doing it because whatever happens next—with the creature, with your plans, with all of it—I want to be able to say I tried. That I didn't just watch you destroy yourself without lifting a finger."

She walked away. Other students were starting to filter into the Great Hall now, filling the benches, reaching for food with the easy carelessness of those who had never gone hungry. Tom watched her go—the severe line of her hair, the square set of her shoulders—and felt that shift in his chest again, that feeling he couldn't name.

Not for you, she had said.

He wasn't sure he believed her. He wasn't sure it mattered whether he believed her or not.

He went to Madam Pomfrey that afternoon. The cut was cleaned, the infection treated, his hand wrapped in a bandage that smelled of herbs and magic. Pomfrey asked where he'd gotten the injury, and he told her he'd caught it on a bit of broken glass in the common room—an old lamp that had cracked.

She believed him, or pretended to. It didn't matter which.

That night, in the common room, Eileen looked at his bandaged hand and nodded once, very slightly. She didn't smile. She didn't say I told you so.

She simply went back to her book, and Tom went back to his plans, and between them stretched a silence that was starting to feel less like distance and more like understanding.

He wasn't sure which was more dangerous.