Chapter 25: The Transformation

The bell above the door trembled without ringing.

It made a dry, reedy sound in its throat as Tom eased the door to so that the fog did not follow him in. The street was a scrape of tyres and feet and the wet hiss of rain on soot. Inside, the shop held its breath. Lamps in the window burned low, the colours of the glass dulled by a glaze of old grime. Somewhere at the back a coal burned with the patient sigh of something that meant to go on all night and most of the morning if no one told it otherwise.

He stood still and let the quiet stop thinking about him. The bell’s tongue swayed once more and came to rest. Only then did he move, slipping the folded newspaper from under his coat and laying it on the counter with the column he wanted already turned up.

The date, 17 October 1948, sat as neat as a rebuke at the top. BELOW: MINISTRY REORGANISES AUROR OFFICE. NEW OVERSIGHT COUNCIL ANNOUNCED. Two inches above, the seller’s hand had stamped a pale blue OLLIVANDER’S ADVERTISEMENT into the margin. The ink had bled where a raindrop found it and thought nothing of carrying Ministry and wandmaker into one smudge.

“Evening,” said Mr Burke from the doorway of the back room, and made evening sound like a trap to step into or step past. “You’re late.”

“I came when I was finished,” Tom said. His voice came out cool and even. He set the paper flatter with his palm so that the top right corner stopped trying to curl. “Still open?”

“For you,” Burke said. “For a price.”

Tom glanced at the bell on its wire. It looked innocent. He walked past it.

The glass counter was crowded with velvet trays and little boxes under domes, sprigs of tarnished jewels and a locket that had forgotten what it meant to protect. A lamp sat at the far end with its wick turned down to a peep. Tom turned it up. The flame blinked and tried to be brave, then settled into a steady oval of light that threw shadows where he wanted them.

“Close the blind,” Tom said.

Burke closed it without remark. The street vanished; there was only the room, the smell of bitumen and camphor and cold iron, and the steady tick of a clock with no numerals on its face.

“Tea?” Burke offered, out of habit or calculation. “There’s some left from this afternoon.”

“No,” Tom said. He did not look up from the paper. “A tray, though. And the back room.”

Burke hesitated, only enough to have done so, and then fetched what was asked. The tray was pewter and scratched with a history of things set down too carelessly. The back room had a hearth and a chair that creaked when you breathed too near it. He liked the back room for the hearth and for the fact that the front door could not be seen from there and yet was close enough to hear.

Tom took the lamp through and set it on the mantelshelf. The mirror on the opposite wall threw the lamplight back and made a stripe of it down the floorboards. It was an old mirror that had given up trying to be kind; it showed everything in what it was and where. Under it stood a narrow table, and on that table the tray. Burke placed the tray down with the solicitude of a man setting down a living animal that might bite.

“What’s the occasion, then?” Burke asked, in the tone of someone who expected to be told nothing and planned to learn it anyway.

Tom did not answer him. He put the newspaper on the tray, smoothing the page where the ink had run, and reached for the scissors lying beside the ledger. Their edges had been sharpened down by many years and many hands so that the blades were not quite of a piece anymore. He tested them against his thumb. They bit with a fine, clean pressure.

“Something official, is it?” Burke persisted. “You’ve brought the Prophet like it matters what they’re saying. Whitehall’s on and on about—” he twitched a fat hand, seeking a word— “legitimacy.”

“Whitehall always is,” Tom said, and began to cut.

It was steady work, neat and small. He made a square of space around the headline and then cut down through the thick letters, the blade parting paper and silence together. A strip of O, a drop of I, the clean angles of an A. He cut Tom, though the paper meant someone else when it said it; he cut other letters and laid them out in a row on the tray.

Burke watched as if the tray might tell him what Tom would not. “You can do that with ink,” he said at last. “There’s quill and parchment enough in my drawer.”

Tom arranged a T and an L and a long sliver of R into an order that pleased him for a moment and then did not please him at all. He moved them again. The tray ticked faintly under his fingers as the pewter remembered every old knock. “Ink is cheap,” he said. He did not look up. “Paper can burn. This will be enough to see it.”

“To see what?” Burke asked.

“Myself,” Tom said, and the steadiness of his own voice made his skin tighten along his wrists. He had the oddest sensation that his mouth and his hands belonged to different boys. His right thumb had a breath in it that was not his own. He pressed the thumb flat to the tray until the feeling stopped.

Burke shifted. “Don’t see the difficulty in a name. Your mother gave you one, didn’t she? Your father—”

Tom’s gaze lifted then, and Burke shut his mouth on the last word as if he had bitten it. The chair gave its habitual creak, as if taking the weight of something not placed on it.

"Names are not given," Tom said. He fitted a D and an L in beside each other and considered them. "Names are taken. You know that. They call me the boy who doesn't lose in Manchester. Our revolutionary in Glasgow. In Cardiff they say him from Borgin's. None of it is mine."

Burke let out one of his little laughs, which were never quite laughs. “Taken, bought, stolen—call a drake a lizard and it will bite you just the same,” he said. “You’ll want the rights for it if you mean to parade in it. I can draw a contract.”

“I will want a thing on paper, yes,” Tom said, because Burke’s mind moved on paper with lines and sums on them, and there was no profit in telling him yet that some papers mattered and some did not. “Not tonight.”

“You’ll not burn anything in here,” Burke warned, as if the thought had been loud. “I’ve just blacked the hearth.”

Tom touched the edge of the mirror. The silvering at the back was rough where the frame had shifted over years. His finger came away with a necking of grey on it. He wiped it against the pewter and the lines he had laid out ghosted a fraction darker. He put the T in one place, the O in another, then stopped with his hand suspended above the tray, the scissors balanced in the air.

He re-arranged them again. The letters hopped obediently across the dull metal and sat to attention where he put them. He took up an M and a V and something in him prickled with recognition and impatience both. Too blunt. Too honest. Too bound to a boy who slept with his face to the wall and his hands curled as if at any moment he might be called to get up and go.

“Read it out then,” Burke said, unable to help himself from trying to hurry a thing he did not understand. “You’ve set a good many names there that don’t yet exist.”

Tom lifted one letter away and the tray sighed at the change as if the weight mattered. He put it back with meaning and the sigh was less.

“No,” he said. He drew the tray nearer and dragged the pad of his finger through the little dusting of ash on its surface, leaving a thin, dark line. He drew again, a slow curve and a cut through. He drew the line through and up, the shape that would have been lost if he had been less careful. He had seen boys forget carefulness and bleed for it. He had bled for it.

“Here,” Burke said, softer now. He lifted the lamp from the shelf and brought it down to the tray so that the light lay straight across the letters and the line he had drawn over them. The flame flared with the movement and the smell of hot oil pressed close against the back of Tom’s palate.

Tom stood very still. His mouth was dry. He swallowed and it did not help. His fingers were steady only to someone who did not know him.

The mirror watched him. It threw his face back to him and the lamp-light set new angles under his cheekbones. The scar on his hand, the pale line he rarely noticed, showed where it lay, raised as white thread.

“Say it,” Burke said, the greed in him unable to keep out of any moment that mattered. “I should like to hear how it sounds.”

Tom placed the last letter and let his hand rest there a heartbeat, in cover. It might have looked like affection. It was not.

The bell out in the shop gave a minute stir on the wire, the small dry voice testing a note that did not reach the air. He saw Burke cut his eyes to the door and back.

“Lock it,” Tom said.

Burke stood as if to argue. The look Tom gave him was enough. Burke went out, the floorboard in the threshold clicked under his heel, and a second later the bolt gave a clean, good sound as it went home. Burke came back slower than he had left, as if he had decided not to hurry when he was told. He took his chair and held his breath without being asked.

Tom drew in air until his chest ached at holding it, let it go in a thin strip through his teeth, and turned his head enough to take himself from himself. When he said the name it was quiet and whole.

"Voldemort."

The syllables tasted of old stone and cold water and something that had been waiting a very long time to be spoken. Vol-de-mort. Flight from death. He had carried it since he was twelve, since a lonely boy in a dormitory bed had rearranged the letters of a name he hated into something that belonged only to him. I am Lord Voldemort. Not Tom—that was his father's name, the Muggle who had left, the absence that had shaped everything. Not Riddle—that was a joke, a puzzle without an answer, a thing to be solved and discarded. But Voldemort was his own. Voldemort was what he had made when he took the wreckage of his inheritance and built something new.

It lay on the room like a piece of iron set down on velvet.

On the tray the letters did not move. The drawn line through them looked suddenly like something that had always intended to be there and had only been waiting for someone to arrive who could tell it so. In the mirror the shape of his mouth was not strange. It was right. He said it a second time to be certain. Burke’s hands, folded over his stomach, tightened without his consent.

“Well,” Burke said, a half-whisper he could not stop from being impressed. He had the sense to stop there.

Tom did not look at him. There was a ringing in his own ears. It was not noise, not entirely. It was a pressure at the point where his jaw met his skull, a shake in his teeth. He pressed his tongue to the palate to steady it and the taste of oil was there again, bitter. He found the taste stubborn and that made him calmer.

The thin, uncertain voice of the bell in the shop decided itself and spoke. It gave a single true note as if something had come in from the street. Burke flinched and half rose. Tom lifted a hand without turning.

“Leave it,” he said.

The bell gave another note, not as sure, and fell still.

“You’ve put a charge in the air,” Burke said. He tried and failed to make it accusation. “There’ll be traces. Wards feel that. Tired wards, perhaps, but they’re not dead.”

Tom did not answer. He had his left hand on the edge of the tray and his right on the frame of the mirror, and when he turned the mirror a fraction—just enough to tilt the light—the old silvering pulled against the nails with a sound like breath under a door. The rough back-edge caught his thumb at the fold where the skin was thinnest and the pain was simple and clean. His mouth went tight without permission. He looked down and saw a dark bead swell and break. It ran into the ash line he had drawn and smeared the neat edge. The smear looked like a flaw until it did not.

Burke made a small noise and might have said something. Tom didn’t look up. He lifted his thumb and set it down again where he wanted it, marking the line until it was not smudged but deliberate. The sting was nothing. He breathed in the oily bitter smell and it had to do.

“Careful,” Burke said. The chair creaked as he leaned forward and then back. He sounded like a man talking round a sleeping child he did not know the temper of. “You’ll have yourself in the glass if you’re foolish with it.”

Tom let one word out that belonged to no shop and no clerk. Burke said nothing for a time after that.

The coal in the hearth shifted its weight. The lamplight went taller and then sure of itself again. Tom put the bloody thumb to his mouth and the iron taste steadied him as the oil had not. He did not flinch this time when the bell muttered on its wire. He could feel the weight of the name on his tongue as if he had swallowed something that would not digest.

It would do. It would not do politely or well in company that mattered nothing, but it would do for him.

In the mirror he lowered his hand and looked into his own face and did not hate it. The new name sat behind his eyes, not in front of them. He tried the smallest smile, and it did not look like a boy’s pretence of a man. It looked like a man who was learning what his mouth was meant to do.

“Contracts,” Burke said at last, sensibly. “If you want papers in the city to match your—” he gestured at the mirror, awkward, as if speaking to a man who had just put his hat on in some strange fashion— “your piece of theatre.”

“If I want Whitehall to stop getting in its own way,” Tom said. He flexed his right hand once, and the pain at his thumb answered him with a steady good sense that he found useful. “Yes.”

“Tomorrow,” Burke said, alert now. “Bank opens at nine. The typesetters are awake later than that. I have a cousin who minds the seals when the proper clerk is drinking his breakfast. It can be done.”

Tom was still looking at the letters on the tray. Already, he thought, a thing was happening. Letters around it did not want to sit near. The O at the end had rolled away as if it had seen something it had not meant to see. He put it back with his knuckle and it stayed where he put it.

“Not tonight,” Tom said again. He only said it once.

Burke sat back. “You’ll want ink on your own thumb for Whitehall,” he said. “They’ll ask. They always ask. I can bring you to the man who stamps when he shouldn’t.”

“They always ask,” Tom agreed, his eyes on the mirror. The lamp made a neat oval of light around his head like a joke the room had decided not to enjoy. “You will bring me to him in the morning. For now, draw up what you can without putting a foot anywhere that matters. Show me before you sleep.”

Burke muttered his assent. He stood up and went to the desk because the moment for looking had passed and now he wanted to count. There was comfort for Burke in counting.

Tom gathered the cuttings carefully. He did not hurry. He lifted each letter, wiped the ash from its edge with his forefinger, and set it down in a small stack in the exact order he had spoken them. The blood had dried on his thumb in a crisp ring. He liked the neatness of the ring and then disliked himself for liking it and then did not think about it anymore.

“Do you mean to tell them at the Ministry?” Burke said, pen scratching as it found its work. “Or do you mean to show them?”

“I mean to go to Whitehall,” Tom said, putting the stack of letters into the envelope that had once held a different paper. “I mean to take what is mine and to have them make it neat. They like neatness. It lets them pretend it was theirs all along.”

“And the boy—” Burke began, stopped, and chose a different route. “And the boy will not be on the paper anymore.”

Tom’s jaw moved like a man who had bitten something that fought back in his mouth. The urge to turn and look at the door came up his spine as certain as a reflex and he ignored it. He slid the envelope shut. “No,” he said. The word came out without heat. He put it away inside his coat where it would be the last thing anyone might find. “He will not be.”

Burke’s pen went on scratching. “There’ll be a cost,” he said, as if reminding Tom of something he’d not yet learned. “There’s always a cost for the thing that looks cheapest. Names stick. Names unstick. You can’t always say which until too late.”

Tom looked at the smear on the tray where the blood had been and saw, all at once and for no sensible reason, the stairs at Wool’s, polished with a kind of stingy pride and smelling of soap and old cabbage; the places where the bannisters had worn to a shine under a thousand small hands that had owned nothing and wanted everything just the same. He set his knuckles to the tray hard enough to make the pewter chime. It was a small sound. It set the hair on his arms up as if something had passed by him.

“I am not paying twice,” he said.

Burke, to his credit, did not say, Aren’t you. He said, “You’ll want your coat brushed,” in a practical tone. “They like you to look as if you’ve always been the sort of man who ends up in a chair across from them. If you look like you had to get there, they’ll make it take longer.”

“They won’t have time,” Tom said. He had a small, precise smile on his mouth. He turned the mirror back so that the frame hugged the wall again, and the rough back-edge let his thumb go with a small kiss of skin that he did not acknowledge. “I have an appointment.”

“With who?” Burke asked, alarm pricking up like a dog that had heard its name.

“With a desk,” Tom said, and Burke laughed before he could stop himself.

He took the lamp and turned the wick down and the room decided itself towards dark. In the half-light, the mirror held a ghost of his face, the new mouth in the old skin, and he watched it until it smudged into a suggestion and then became nothing but a square of dullness on a wall. He listened for the bell. It did not speak again. He waited until his breath had found its ordinary size; he only then noticed that the back of his neck had sweat on it. He did not wipe it. He turned and went out to the shop.

Burke had his pen between his teeth and his eyes on the figures. He looked up when Tom passed and snatched the pen out as if he had been caught stealing. “Eight,” he said at once, before Tom could say anything. “Eight gallons, no question. For the labour, for the ink, for the cousin. Twelve if I am to roll a seal instead of asking a hand to lift it.”

Tom paused by the counter and imagined for an instant—he let himself have it, because there was no one to see—what it would be like to step behind and take the ledger and draw a line through every figure that was not his. The feeling the thought stirred in him was not clean or unclean. It was exact. He said, “Ten. Paid after.”

Burke opened his mouth. He shut it. “Nine now,” he said at last, “and the rest after.”

“Eight now,” Tom said. “Two after. If there is a delay that you could have avoided, one.” He picked a fleck of dried oil from the lamp’s base and found the smell of it up his nose again. “If there is no delay, three.”

Burke looked injured and then calculating and then bothered by his own calculation. “You’re a hard child,” he said, as if it were something he had not meant to say aloud, and then he could not take it back.

Tom lifted his eyes to him with a stillness that usually kept people from being careless twice. He said nothing.

Burke flapped a hand. “Man,” he said, reluctantly tidy. “You’re a hard man. Eight and three. And I’ll have two odds into the bargain for my cousin’s silence.”

“You’ll have nothing for silence,” Tom said, pleasant as he knew how. “He will keep it because you tell him to, and you will tell him to because you would like to continue owning the hand he eats with. I will give you the third because you said what I wanted when I wanted it. Don’t mistake a reward for something else.”

Burke grunted and put the pen down on the page so that the ink made a fat blot where the nib stuck. He looked at it as if the blot had been rude to him. “As you say.”

“As I say,” Tom repeated, not a question. He drew on his gloves because the coat collar itched the cut on his thumb and he did not care to feel it. He turned his head enough to look at the bell. It looked back.

“I’ll stamp the first paper now,” Burke said, watching him go to the door. “You’ll come back for it?”

Tom’s hand went to the lock. He stopped with his fingers on the metal. “Leave it under the ledger,” he said. He opened the door on rain and soot and a fog that had got itself organised. “If I am delayed, burn it at midnight.”

Burke gave an urgent cough. “You said not to—”

“In the hearth,” Tom said without looking round. He stepped out. The bell gave him that same small dry sound, as if it had wanted very much, for a moment, to speak an important sentence and had only made it to the first word before thinking better of it. The door shut him into the street.

The fog took him at once the way the castle had, years ago, and the street let him pass as if he had been here all along and had just now remembered himself. He stood a moment under the eaves and his hand went, before he knew it would, to the inside pocket where the envelope rode. He touched it with two fingers, found it where it was meant to be, and forced the hand to find his coat buttons instead. He did them up like a good boy would, one and then the next.

He started towards Knockturn’s mouth. By the time he reached the place where the alley wrung itself back into Diagon, the fog had wet his hair and his throat was an acid tightness from the cold. He went on anyway, and the faces he passed did not see him.

At the corner an Auror in a black coat turned his head to spit and the spit hit the cobbles with a sound like someone dropping a seed and missing the earth. Tom walked by him and did not change his step. The Auror did not notice. The old habits—how to be seen when he wanted and not when he did not—returned without needing to be asked.

Whitehall would have clerks who did not look up except to make sure their own names were on the right page. The Registry Office would have a woman with a line down the middle of her mouth from pressing it too often and ink on the second finger of her writing hand. He would say the name and it would sit in that room as if it had been meant for such rooms all along. He would leave it behind him as a fact neat enough to satisfy men who needed neatness before they could sleep.

Behind him, the bell in the shop—by then a long way behind—remembered itself and resolved the thought it had failed to carry. It gave a single thin note into the air, and the air kept it.

Tom turned his collar up against the fog’s hands and went on towards the part of the city where papers decided how things were called. He did not hurry. He would not be late.