Chapter 16: The Gaunt House

He came into Little Hangleton on a morning that had mislaid the sun. The damp went straight through coat and shirt as if it had been told his bones were the quickest road, and the hedges along the lane were black with old rain. The station platform had emptied of its handful of faces; the porter had told him, without asking questions, that the village lay down and to the left, and the grand house up and to the right, and had watched him with the half-lidded stare of someone who knew there were stories in a place and did not want to be the one to start them.

The paper in Tom’s pocket had softened at the fold, as if it had been handled too much. He kept his hands out and his shoulders narrow, the way one did in crowds, although there was no crowd; only the low hiss of wind through hedgerow and the occasional slap of a loose gate against its post. His shoes took on a crust of pale mud that cracked when he flexed his toes.

From the rise he saw the village first, square roofs and little chimneys hunched together as if they had been built by people who had not liked to be watched by the hill. A church spire poked at the sky and gave up. Above and behind it, the larger house – not a castle, but trying – showed its windows like blank eyes, and the lawns lay shorn as a soldier's head. There was no one moving up there. It could have been painted.

He did not go up to it. There was a pull there whose string he kept between forefinger and thumb and did not let tug his arm. He had not come to knock on a door and be recognised by the wrong face. He had come because there was a piece that had always fitted in his hand and he had not yet seen where it had been cut from.

He turned away from the hill and followed the other line the porter had pointed. The lane narrowed into a track that could not make up its mind whether it wanted to lead anyone anywhere. It sidled between thorn bushes that had been left to go to ruin, and the ground sank. The smell changed: damp that had found a home; the iron stink of old water; something sour that might have been cabbages or old cloth.

The house – shack, really – made itself known by failing to be a hedge. You could put a hand on it and the whole thing might go over, was Tom’s first thought, and then, when he was close enough to see the honesty of rot under the grey boards, that someone had put work into making it look like no one had put work into it. The window had no glass. There was a door because there had to be, and over the lintel, cut by someone who had cared about that and not much else, a long, childish snake. The curl of it had once been neat. The rain had got in.

He put his hand on the door, knuckles light. The wood had old splinters in it like teeth.

There was movement inside—a scraping, a pause, a small sound that might have been words in a language he had never been taught and had always known.

“Who’s that?” a voice demanded, swollen with sleep and satisfaction at its own unpleasantness. English, this, through a throat that did not like it. “Who’s there? Get away.”

Tom held the door with his fingers and did not push. He kept his back quiet and his face without expression and said, in English first, because it cost him nothing, “Family.”

The silence on the other side turned into interest, the way a snake lifted its head when the air changed. The bolts—there were bolts—were dragged back and one stuck and was hit and went; the door swung inward on a hinge that tried to protest but had long since lost enthusiasm.

The man in the doorway could have been any age between twenty and fifty. Dirt made a second skin over the first; his hair lay greasy on his skull and had been cut with a knife for spite. His eyes—yellow, and then not; not the right colour, but familiar in their shape. He breathed as if he had been climbing, though he had been asleep.

“What family?” he said, and did not say, you’re nothing. He did not say it because Tom’s mouth had made a shape and a sound before anything else could come, a slow hiss with the tongue tapping the teeth twice, the way one spoke to something that would understand you if you were patient.

Something in the man broke open. He smiled, showing teeth that had been let to go their own way. “Who taught you that,” he hissed back, in the language that had no grammar and did not by right belong to the human mouth. “Who taught you, boy?”

“No one,” Tom said, still and easy, both in that tongue and not. “It was always mine.”

The man’s eyes flicked to Tom’s face and held there. There was a moment, then—the kind of moment when two hands, not touching, balanced a weight between them. Tom could have stood there for a very long time without moving, and perhaps the man could have as well, for he swayed in the doorway like a plant that had grown up in a corner and did not know what was holding it. Then he stood aside.

“Come in, then,” he said, and said in a different voice, in the other tongue, “You look like him.”

The shack did not improve inside. It managed, somehow, to be both empty and cluttered. There were broken things that had not been mended because they had not been worth the bother, and the things that worked had been made to suffer for it. A fire that was not a fire anymore sat in the grate under a crust of whitish ash that was damp to the touch. Something in a pot had given up and gone to water days ago. On the table there were two knives, both sharp, and a coil of wire, and a mouse skull. There was a smell that might have been the room itself.

Tom’s eyes moved and did not linger. He had the habit of people not noticing he had seen everything they had to show. On the mantel—a shelf that called itself a mantel because it could not think of a better name—was a box with a broken hinge and inside it dull metal, hooks, and something that had been an armlet once and, underneath, a square of wood where a ring would fit if a ring had lived here.

The man had the ring on his finger.

It sat there like a small coin someone had pressed where it did not belong and forgotten. The gold had known better days but had not quite agreed to give up looking like gold; the stone—black, flat, a circle inside a triangle inside a circle again if the light caught it and, if it did not, only a darkness that stayed dark. There was a nick on the band as if someone had set teeth to it once.

The man saw where Tom was looking and held up his own hand to admire it, rubbing it with the thumb of the other hand like a lover might, or a miser. “Marvolo's,” he said, and said, all in a rush, decades of words that had never found someone worth being said to. “Marvolo’s ring. My father’s. Worth more than anything anyone in this rotten valley owns, and not for the gold neither. It’s ours.”

Tom’s fingers remained still at his side. “Marvolo,” he said, trying the shape of it. The sound scraped something old in his mouth; it did not feel like his. The thought that came with it had the light of candle-wax on dirty walls; a hand he did not like to think of as clumsy; a ring that had caught that light and sent it back once, before a boy asleep had shut his eyes and kept it.

“Marvolo Gaunt,” the man said, stabbing a filthy thumb at his own chest. “My father. This is his house and that is his ring and no one will take it off me while I’m warm. You’ve got his eyes, you know. You know that? Look at me. Look like that through all the muck, do you? Knew a girl with those eyes. Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid. I told her, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell her? He’ll not have you. He thinks he’s clever, the high-and-mighty from up on the hill. He’ll not—” He broke off to laugh, a dry sound that could have been a cough. “He did, though,” he said, with enjoyment. “He did, for a bit. And then off. Back to his kind with his neckcloth and his hair in place and his—” He made a small, graceful gesture with his wrist that was almost beautiful, and almost a sting.

Tom could have put all those words in his mouth himself. He had had them in his pocket a long time and had been checking they were still there, rolling them between thumb and forefinger until the skin went shiny. There was a house up the hill where men wore shirts that were ironed until they could hurt you if you touched them wrong; there was a girl with a name like a mouth of pebbles that had tasted sweetness once and then been left. There was a man whose name was his own name and who had shut a door and walked away.

He did not say any of this. He said, “What was her name.”

The man looked at him as if he had asked for a whole loaf and been offered one; surprised and greedy both. “Merope,” he said, rolling the r as if it were something to be tasted and spat. “Merope. My sister. Couldn’t do proper magic if you lit her wand for her. Eyes though. Eyes like that. Stared like you. Stared at him until he—” He snorted. “I told her,” he went on, relish in his mouth. “I told her to turn his hair blue and be done with it. But she wouldn’t. No. She did it the proper way, didn’t she? Stupid girl. Stupid. He went back, didn’t he? He went back to them. And she had you and died for it.” He looked pleased with this; he looked pleased in the way someone looked pleased when a thing they had said would happen had gone and done it, even if it had cost them something they had not thought they had.

The air had got heavier; Tom had the sudden sense that if he said anything at all, the words would drop to the floor and lie there like stones. He did not look at the hand with the ring; he looked at the man’s face, the cracked, resentful mouth and the eyes that could not quite make up their mind which way to settle. “He left,” Tom said, calmly. It was not a question.

The man laughed again. “Of course he did," he said. “Course. Think I didn’t go up and show him? Oh, I did. Put a little present on him while he sat there with his friends and his fancy. Gave him a thing to remember me by. He would have remembered if he were the sort that remembered. He weren’t. He told the police on me, didn’t he. Came and took me in for my fun. Couldn’t keep the wrists tied, mind,” he added with pride, holding up his hands as if the cuffs were still there to rattle. “They never can. But he told, and he ran, and he took his name with him and left her to it.” He cocked his head like a crow. “You’ve got his name. You’ve got ours too. You can’t have both. Which is it, then? Which is it?”

There was a little seed of cold that had been left in Tom long ago and never thawed. It moved, like something turning in the soil because it had felt the season shift. He could see the hill house through the shack wall; he could see the polished knocker, the genteel rage of a house interrupted to deal with a girl it had not wanted to think about, and a man walking away from something he had begun and then decided he had not quite. He could hear, if he listened, the brush of Dumbledore’s voice somewhere far back inside his head, even though the man was not here and would not be here, a voice that said, it is a choice, the way a thing said you could not change what it was and lied.

He took his glove off and put it into his pocket, folded. He looked at the ring as if he had never looked at anything before. “Give me that,” he said.

The man’s smile got wide and then wide again until it seemed to lose its grip on his face. “It’s mine,” he said. “It’s ours. You give me something and I’ll think about it.”

Tom took a step forward. He did not raise his wand. He said, in the other language, very quietly, “You will put it down.”

The man rocked. He had the ringed hand half-lifted and then forgot what he had meant to do with it. “No,” he hissed, stubborn as a boy with his toy. He caught up a knife with the other hand, because there was always something sharp to hand in a house like this. He moved stupidly, with the confidence of someone who had never had to learn where harm comes from.

It would have been simple to draw and flick and be done. Tom had practised until the motion had become him. He did not do that at once. He stepped sideways instead, quick enough that the knife found nothing but air, and the man stumbled past him with a small grunt of surprise that was almost boyish. Tom caught his wrist, the one with the ring, with his left hand and held tight. He could feel the bones in it move; he could feel the ring’s edge digging into his palm. The man twisted and spat something without words, and the knife flashed, and Tom let it take a line of skin off his forearm because it cost less than the other thing. Then he moved, finally, the way he had wanted to, and said something anyone would have understood, and the knife became the table with a clatter.

The man gaped at him, mouth opening to make more noise. Tom brought his right hand up very fast and hit the man with the heel of it just under the ear. The man went down like furniture.

The shack breathed. Tom stood with his back to the door for a moment and listened to the sound of his own breath. He touched the cut on his arm. It stung all along the line and already the blood had learned to be neat about it, well-behaved. He reached down and took the man’s hand. The fingers fought and then stopped. The ring came away. It left a pale circle where the skin had been kept from dirt, and that was the cleanest thing in the room.

He held the ring between thumb and forefinger and let it hang, so that it swung once and the heavy stone did not catch the light because there was none to catch. He had not thought it would be light; he had been right. He had not thought it would be cold—it was, as if it had been lying in a bucket in winter. He nearly put it on. He did not. He was not wearing any name today.

He did not stay to tidy. There was no tidy here. He set the man’s hand down at his side as if he were asleep and closed the fingers into a loose fist so that they would not look empty, because there was no point in leaving signs when you did not have to. He stepped over the fallen knife and went out into the air again, which had warmed not at all and was still thick as cloth.

He did not look at the hill house when he came back into the lane. He felt where it was. The pull came again, like a string trying to tell his hand what to do. He stood in the middle of the mud with the ring in his pocket and waited until that tug became something else, not a demand but a note held too long, and then he let it go.

He walked back to the station with the flat steps of someone walking away from a bed he had made up and refused to lie in. The porter was not in evidence. There was a woman on the far side of the platform who had a child buttoned into a coat two sizes too big and the kind of hat that had cost more than a dress; she looked at Tom once. He kept his face clean of anything she would find to talk about later.

The train came in with its own weather and swallowed him.

On the journey back he had a compartment to himself. The countryside went past with a kind of exhausted dignity. He took the ring out and laid it on the seat beside him, just there, so that if anyone came in they would see nothing and he could put his hand on it and it would stop trying to speak. It did not, properly, speak; it was only that the weight of it kept reminding his fingers that he had them. The cut on his arm had dried and tightened into a line that told him where his sleeve brushed it, as if he could ever otherwise forget.

“Consider this,” he said, very softly, to the glass. “You have had one name pressed into you like a stamp into soft wax. The evidence suggests it was done by people who did not even know they were stamping a thing because they were too busy with their own names to look. Consider whether you want ink that fades or a mark that burns.”

He did not like the way his mouth looked when he said his father’s name. He liked even less that other people’s mouths had said it a thousand times with nothing to do with him at all.

He was at the castle by nightfall. The towers held their breath as they always did at that hour and the lights along the corridor doorways made sure that anyone who did not belong would feel it. He went the right way without thinking about it, because that was how one did not invite questions. He nodded once to a portrait that had not decided yet whether it was asleep.

The common room was full enough that he could slide in and around and leave again without needing to be spoken to. He climbed instead. The upper corridors had the cold in them like an idea; the windows were black and showed him himself if he looked long enough, so he did not. At a landing he stopped. He had not meant to stop there; his feet did it under him and then pretended that he had told them to.

House-elves had little lives, quick and efficient like birds, and they had ways to keep the castle running that did not pay attention to where students were meant to be. If someone in a white apron with a tea-towel over its arm came along now, Tom could ask for nothing and get it, because that was how those bargains were kept; if no one did, it did not matter, because he could keep a different bargain with the building itself.

He walked, once, the length of the corridor, and turned, and walked it again. It was the kind of walking one did when one came to the very edge of sleep and discovered that if one got up instead of lying down, one already knew the thing one had been trying to remember. It was not news; it was a door’s habit of being where it was needed. He put his thought to it like a key into a lock and he did not wonder when the first time had been that he had seen it because that was a question that didn’t help anyone.

When the door was there he knew. The seam of it did not catch the light because there was nothing to catch; his hand went to where a handle should be and found one.

Inside, the room had elected to be very plain. A table, uncluttered; a chair, no more comfortable than it had to be; a shelf with paper and a bottle of ink with its cork in place, and a pen that would do if one did not stand on ceremony. There was a square mirror on the wall that had been polished until it forgot the shape of the person who had polished it. There was nothing else. It made him smile a little, because it was honesty of a kind you rarely got for free.

He shut the door and the sound of the corridor did not exist any more. He did not have to hide his breath here. He took the ring out and set it on the table. It sat, decorously. He went to the mirror. The cut had left a faint line of dried brown along the edge of his sleeve. He rolled the cloth back and cleaned it, tidily, with the corner of a folded handkerchief. He did not watch his face while he did it.

He took paper and ink. He wrote his name because it had been given to him and because the letters were obedient. Tom Marvolo Riddle.

He looked at it. He did not, at once, break it.

He said, “It is nothing to do with them.”

The paper said nothing back.

He turned the pen round. He began to move the letters as if they were not stuck where they had been told to sit. M slid; D waited; he tried the O in places where it had not been. It made no difference; the O did not care. He put the L near the R and then decided the R wanted something else and decided again. He did not speak while he did it. He did not have to convince anyone here.

Lord sat there on the paper for a moment like a joke, and then like a memory of a joke that stopped being funny. He looked at it with a flat face. The word was older than he was. It would do for a while, because that was all any word did; it did not matter if it had been used up by other mouths before his, because the weight he would hang on it would be new.

He nudged the rest around it. He tried them in lines. He stacked them. He took the I out of TOM and put it where it could make a different thing. The name his mother’s father had given himself when he had put a ring on and pretended to be proper sat with the name of a house on a hill and wanted to be something else. It was not difficult, the work of rearranging something until it proved it had always wanted to be what one had decided it would be. It was only long. It was satisfying the way sharpening a knife was satisfying—the sound and the sense under the skin.

There was a point at which the letters made something that had the shape of the feeling he had had in the lane, when he had not looked up at the hill. He did not write the sentence. He had the right to it and he did not spend it tonight. The letters stood where he had put them and waited for him to say the last word. He could have. He chose not to. Power kept was more useful than power done. He laid the pen down.

The ring had not moved. He put the tip of one finger to the flat of the stone. It was cool; not cold anymore. He rotated it a fraction and the triangle shifted its angle and then was the same as it ever had been. He had the sense, suddenly, that it was one piece in a lock that did not yet exist; that he would have to make the rest of it himself. The feeling did not come like a gift; it was a thing he had put there by deciding things.

He lifted it at last and slid it onto his finger, not the left, and not the right; he tried the smallest of the fingers that would take it and let it sit there and get used to the skin it was touching. It was too big. That had been true for some time, and he had known it, and it did not stop being true because it was now. He took it off again and threaded it onto a length of old black ribbon from his pocket and tied it. It lay against his palm like a coin he would not spend.

He exhaled and the lamp flame went up a fraction and then steadied and then—because he told it to—went out, obligingly. He stood in the dark with the ring in his hand and the paper on the table silently rearranged itself back to the first name because he let it, because there was no need to have the shape of it showing when no eyes were on it.

He opened the door the way one did in houses one respected, quietly. The corridor took him back and the stone underfoot remembered his feet. He went down two flights and turned left where everyone else turned right because he did not want to see anyone, and the world complied. He came to the bottom steps and found that his mouth had found that small, contemptuous curve at the corner of it again, the one it put on like a collar when it remembered something it had not wanted to. He smoothed it away with the back of his teeth.

In the common room there were voices and the kind of laughter people used when they wanted to be overheard. He walked through them the way one walked through rain—without noticing it, because there were better things for noticing—and a boy said Tom and he did not stop and another said Riddle and he did, not because they had said it but because he had decided to, and turned his head a fraction and looked and then looked away. He went upstairs.

In his dormitory he shut his curtains and put his hand under the pillow for the space where a thing lived when it was safe, and the space was there and empty, and he filled it with the ring on the black ribbon and a folded paper with nothing on it that anyone else would read. He lay down on his back and did not shut his eyes for a while.

His arm told him where it had been cut every time the blanket stitched over it. He let it. He had made a choice to be stung by a knife rather than by something else, and the body was weather to be moved through while the mind did its work. He listened to the other breath in the room, regular, irritating; someone spoke a word and swallowed it whole and slept on.

He watched the space under the bed-curtain fill slowly with the dark of midnight. The castle breathed its quiet, many-chambered breath. Far away, perhaps, the portrait on Dumbledore’s wall that did not yet exist would have pretended to sleep, and the man himself, if he were awake, if he had any sense at all, would have known that the two names on the paper had been unknotted and knotted again and that the next time he looked it would not be the same. He would watch. He always watched. That was not a warning; it was a fact.

Tom’s fingers closed around the ribbon. The ring was a weight in his palm, not asking to be anything else. He lifted his hand and let the weight fall and catch, fall and catch, until his forearm no longer remembered to complain.

He did not say his father’s name again. Even in his head he did not spare it a letter. Names were not prayers. They were tools. He intended to have a better one.

He slept when he was done not sleeping. The last thing he saw was the line of the cut on his arm, neat, obedient, where the skin had agreed to meet itself. He thought, briefly, of the hill and of a door not opened and of a hand not lifted to knock. He did not regret it. There would be a time for that room and that face. There would be a time for the letters to sit where he told them to sit and for the world to find out what he had always known and never said aloud. There would be a time and then there would not be any other.

Below, the lake pressed its cold hand against the wall and held it there. Somewhere in the pipes something breathed and moved. He slept with the ring under his hand and his other palm empty, the way you did when you had finally decided that one name was not enough and another would have to be made.

Morning would come and be the same and be different. He would go to class. He would not say anything he did not plan to say. He would feel Dumbledore’s eyes slide across the back of his neck like a brush with a feather. He would not turn to give them any satisfaction.

He did not have to be anyone’s son. That had been true before today and would be truer tomorrow. He let the truth sit in him with the same steady weight as the ring, not heavy, only certain, which was better. When he woke he had decided nothing new. He had only arranged what there was so that it would look like what it had always meant to be.