Death in the mask

      Fear is inherent to human nature. It is a survival mechanism, an amplification of perceived external threats, a nervous tension that drives the victim to flee, seek protection and salvation. During this process, adrenaline and noradrenaline flood the bloodstream, pulse and breathing quicken, pupils dilate and blood pressure rises. The body is ready to fight, though not for life, but for death, or run at full speed, depending on its master’s will.       Tom Riddle did not experience such feelings. He almost never did. Clearly, something was wrong with his amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for feeling fear. That was why now, at sixteen years old, the teenager stood over the three fresh corpses of the people he had killed with his own hands. He examined them with detached curiosity, suddenly sensing excitement gradually filling his body. His chest tightened with exhilaration and his breathing unfamiliarly faltered as his body tried to saturate his brain with oxygen through dilated blood vessels. Such unfamiliar sensations, exploding in a bright firework after the usual evenly-cool greyness for him.       And how did he end up in this situation? It was a long story, but the ending was the same — rage growing in his chest, cold words slipping from his lips, the dull thuds of bodies falling onto the expensive oak parquet. No pangs of conscience, no fear, only unclouded elation. The feeling that there were no limits and he was practically omnipotent. After all, what were power and strength? The ability to control other people’s fates. The ability to change the world. The ability not just to drift with the current, but to steer that flow, which short-sighted commoners called destiny.       Tom realised from an early age that he was different from others. At first, he realised that those around him behaved strangely, although how else could orphanage children act? But they were all...different.       They passionately craved love, but there was nowhere to get it from — a couple of carers with faded eyes for a whole group of toddlers could barely provide for their basic survival needs. Tom observed all this with detachment. He did not understand what this love was that everyone craved. He did not see why friendly ties were needed if you could not use a person. He did not know what to be afraid of in the darkness, which was just an absence of light. But when someone violated his boundaries or tried to mock him, he responded viciously, with all the instantly flaring rage. And then he realised that he differed from the others in something else.       He possessed powers. He was able to do what others were not capable of — bend the world to his will. Over time, the children realised it was better not to mess with Tom, and the adults began to notice the oddities happening around him, but no one ever caught him red-handed. True, he had walked a tightrope over the hanged rabbit Billy, but he had really provoked him. And yet, no one could prove anything, Tom always got away with his little pranks.       And then Professor Dumbledore appeared in his ridiculous purple velvet suit, and Tom Riddle's world flipped upside down, and suddenly everything fell into place. He had always known he was better than the people around him. Above them. Here was the riddle solved — he was a wizard. And he was far from the only one in the world. The stupid Muggles around him simply could not comprehend his greatness, mistaking it for freakishness.       When he arrived at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he finally felt what it was like to have a real home, the kind the other orphans at the orphanage dreamed of. An ancient, magical castle full of tantalising secrets, tables laden with food, the glint of gold and magic that flowed everywhere, sparking and suffusing the space. Tom could practically see this magic, feel it on his skin. And he also felt like he belonged there.       Of course, the Slytherins, with their obsession with blood purity, were initially suspicious of the boy with the unfamiliar surname. But Tom smiled politely, made friendly connections, helped classmates with homework, and earned a ton of points for his house, Slytherin. Thanks to his brains and diligence, Tom quickly became the top student in his year. The professors considered him a model student, his classmates a true friend, and the head of house Horace Slughorn adored him and made him a part of the elite Slug Club at an unbelievably young age. Only Professor Dumbledore, who had heard rumours at the orphanage where Tom lived before and glimpsed his true face, sometimes looked at him warily.       Tom was talented and intelligent, with powerful magic flowing steadily within him. He tried to charm people so they would act as he wished. Despite his gifts, he felt practically nothing inside. He was untouched by the classmates' love for him, which had turned into near idolization by the later school years. He felt nothing for his "friends", which did not stop him from using them for his own interests — Slytherins came from noble families, with connections and wealth.       He had studied almost the entire Restricted Section of the library, and his knowledge was more extensive than that of most teachers. He was also unaffected by the teachers' respect — he took the prefect badge and status of top student as something that went without saying. The only thing that stirred something in his soul was magic, gushing out of him in a stream, when he practised long-forgotten ancient spells, many of which were unlikely to be considered light by anyone. Magic was his passion, his love, knowledge became his holy grail. Tom always knew he was above others. And he would become not just the best, but the Greatest.       The only thing that lingered on the edge of his consciousness and caused discomfort was an obsessive idea. Who were his parents? How had he ended up in this orphanage? Once at Hogwarts, he realized his parents must have been powerful wizards, because how else could it be? He was sorted into Slytherin, the house of purebloods, which meant they definitely were not filthy Muggles. And his gift — Parseltongue, the ability to speak to snakes — also clearly indicated heredity and great magical power.       Even at the orphanage, he had chosen a moment and asked Mrs. Cole about his parents, to which the fool told revolting fabrications — that he was born to some penniless tramp right there and was asked to name him Tom Riddle after his father, Marvolo after his grandfather. This story could not be true — if his mother was a witch, she could not have simply died. Simply abandoned Tom all alone. No, there must have been some tragic accident. Or she and his father were murdered.       And in his fifth year, Tom finally found a massive tome with wizarding family trees tucked away in a distant corner of the library, published quite recently. He studied it long and hard, analysing, and after a couple of months found only one thin thread. A certain Marvolo Gaunt, died in 1927, the year after Tom's birth. The date of death for his daughter Merope was listed as Tom's birthdate, December 31, 1926. The Gaunts traced their line back to Salazar Slytherin himself, one of the Hogwarts founders, a powerful wizard and famous Parselmouth. But about the last members of this family — Marvolo and his children Morfin and Merope — there was almost no information to be found.       Merope was most likely his mother. Tom latched onto this idea, for it explained so much: his power, his talent, his ability to speak to snakes. He was the heir of Salazar Slytherin himself! And he simply had to find proof of his noble lineage.       All that remained of Slytherin after so many centuries was the legend of the Chamber of Secrets. This Chamber must surely contain something that would help prove his kinship to the great wizard, for according to legend, it could only be opened by the heir. He turned the castle upside down over the course of his fifth year. And he wouldn't be Tom Riddle if he hadn't found it. He didn't want to remember which nooks of the castle he had crawled through and how he had ended up in the girls' bathroom after curfew. But methodically combing through Hogwarts had borne fruit, and he discovered the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets.       Inside, to Tom's great disappointment, there was nothing useful except a sleepy basilisk. Tom didn't just get angry, he, usually calm and cold-blooded, flew into a rage. And the giant serpent wasn't averse to snacking on some Mudblood. And so a few minutes later Tom suddenly found himself standing in the middle of the girls' bathroom with the geeky Myrtle splayed out in a puddle in front of him, arms absurdly flung out, utterly and completely dead. He stared at her, stunned — this was not at all how he had imagined murder.       He immediately realised his mistake when talk began of the supposed closing of the school due to a monster-killer roaming the corridors. Tom couldn't, having just found his home, return to that goddamn orphanage where he was already forced to languish every excruciating summer, and without even being able to do magic.       And he very quickly figured out how to get out of it. He set up that dim-witted half-giant Hagrid, who, luckily, had just smuggled another dangerous creature into the castle. The basilisk was locked up again, Tom received the school's award, Hagrid got a broken wand and barely avoided Azkaban. But Tom didn't care — he always used people for his own purposes, what else were they good for, and empathy wasn't part of his emotional range. The threat of closing Hogwarts passed, he returned to his ancestry research, deciding to act more cautiously now. Through one of his friends, Abraxas Malfoy, Tom accessed the Ministry archives and found the residence of the last descendant of the Gaunt family — Morfin.       The half-collapsed shack on the outskirts of Little Hangleton stunned him. Its poverty was visible even in the moonlight, the only thing illuminating the rural backwater that late evening, or early night. Tom, barely lifting his feet in shock, entered the unprotected building, pushed open the rickety sagging door, glancing at the dried snake nailed to it only in passing.       The room inside resembled a pigsty more than a human dwelling, let alone a wizard's. Filthy, dark, cluttered with junk. Half the things were broken, unwashed dishes scattered everywhere gave off a stench, some food scraps lay right underfoot. Tom, flicking his lighter (getting the Attention of the Watch by waving his wand on vacation outside of school was unwise), in the flickering light of the thin orange flame barely noticed a man in the corner on a pile of rags, dead drunk and asleep.       He slowly approached the lying figure, listening to the steady snoring, pulled the man's wand from his hand quite indifferently and fearlessly. The man fretfully snorted and opened his eyes. He looked at the unexpected guest with his bleary slanted eyes for a few seconds, and then recognition suddenly dawned on his face.       "You," he hissed. Tom realised with some surprise that this tramp was addressing him in Parseltongue. He pointed his wand at him: "Legilimens!"       A stream of practically incoherent images flooded his mind. Pushing past his initial disgust, Tom tried to extract something useful, turning his opponent's mind inside out with no concern for his mental or physical condition.       The pale, plain-looking girl with dull chestnut hair, Morfin's sister Merope, was clearly his mother. Thomas Riddle, the charming son of the local squires, bore an uncanny resemblance to the young Tom — delicate facial features, sharp cheekbones, expressive blue eyes, dark wavy hair — leaving no doubt that he was looking at his father.       Feeling slightly nauseous, Tom emerged from the other man's consciousness. He clenched Morfin's wand convulsively in his hand and headed for the exit, leaving his half-dead uncle to moan in a pile of rags and suffer from a splitting headache. This wasn't what he expected from his summer trip to visit relatives, not at all what he expected. His father — a wretched filthy Muggle, his mother — from a family of downtrodden wizards who looked even filthier and more wretched.       Without even realising how, he covered the two kilometres to the mansion on the hill — the Riddles' manor. And then there was the ugly scene with his newly acquired relatives: yelling of "The vile freak has turned up!", "She bewitched me, the witch!", "You won't see a penny of our money, don't even open your mouth for it, you bastard!". He listened to all this, and the emptiness in his head was replaced by a dark tsunami wave, which rose in his chest. These wretched Muggles, seeing nothing beyond their estate and knowing nothing of the magic around them, dared to talk to him in that tone! They considered him dirt. The shock wave burst from his consciousness in a poisonous green flash through the wand, then another and another.       And here's Tom Riddle standing over three still warm bodies of his father, grandfather and grandmother. Elation rose inside him, a feeling of rapture, as if tickled by bubbles of exquisite champagne. Those same emotions he had almost never experienced before were now overwhelming, bringing ecstasy. If he had barely felt his first murder (after all, it was the basilisk that had really killed Myrtle, to be honest), now he felt the full reward he was entitled to threefold.       However, the excitement soon faded, and in place of those new divine emotions came the usual cold-bloodedness. He could not risk being associated with the murders, as it would ruin his flawless reputation, or end up in Azkaban. He had such grandiose plans for his own great future ahead.       After making sure no one was nearby, he left the manor and headed for Morfin's shack. His uncle would serve as a convenient scapegoat, making up for years of neglected family obligations. Tom would alter his memory and pin this triple murder on him.                            He was nearly halfway to the filthy shack when he felt a vague discomfort, as if someone was staring at his back. The cerebellar tonsil in his brain, heightened by magic, although it hardly allowed him to experience mundane fear, always signalled danger well. And Tom trusted his instincts unconditionally. He stepped sharply to the left, and a green flash of Avada whizzed past his right shoulder.       His wand was in his hand in a fraction of a second, a sharp flourish turning around, and here a fiery whip is already flying toward where the flash came from. Tom managed to make out a figure in the orange glow of the blazing lash. It easily pierced the standard Protego shield that the opponent nevertheless managed to throw up at the last second, and the next moment a scream of pain rang out. Then silence abruptly descended.       Having double-checked with the Homenum Revelio spell that there was still not a soul in sight (and where did this one come from?), Tom approached and crouched down, studying the corpse in the light of Morfin's wand. He felt neither fear, nor disgust, nor any emotions really, just mild interest and unease. What could someone want from him so badly as to cast the Killing Curse in the middle of the night in this godforsaken place? Did this wizard randomly attack him or was he specifically tracking Tom? If tracking, did he manage to see the Riddles' murder and report it?       The stranger turned out to be a young man, maybe in his early twenties, with a twisted expression of pain and horror frozen on his face. He wore a light T-shirt with short sleeves, now slit open across the chest by the demonic whip, under the charred shreds of fabric gaped a long deep blackened wound that cut through the body nearly to the spine. The skin was slashed, the ribs smashed, with only white splinters of bone jutting out of the black and red mess. There was almost no blood — all the severed blood vessels had been instantly cauterised.       He also wore blue jeans, like workers wore in America, although of a somewhat unusual cut. And strange footwear, made of fabric, leather and rubber, vaguely resembling tennis shoes. With a thick rubber sole of an amusing shape, crisscrossed by winding grooves and holes. Tom pensively poked at it with his wand — it seemed hollow, he had never seen such footwear before.       Tom switched the wand to his left hand and began searching the man's pockets by Lumos light alone with his right hand, first checking diagnostically for protective charms. None were found, but the right pocket of the jeans, as it suddenly turned out, was magically enlarged. Tom pulled out a wallet with money and transferred it to his bag without much hesitation. He also discovered a heavy book in a thick smooth cover. With difficulty he extracted the folio through the slit of the enchanted pocket and gasped in shock when he saw the cover.       His own face was looking back at him from the colour photograph, although he didn't remember ever being photographed like this: a charming handsome guy with perfectly styled wavy hair. The title along the top edge read: "Tom Riddle: A Failed Flight Over the Death of the Dark Lord." The author was listed as Rita Skeeter.       What was this book and how did it end up with this guy? Could it be some kind of joke? "Flight over death" was a literal translation of the French word "Voldemort", a word Tom had devised from the letters of his name and unknown last name. A new name that, as he dreamed, would one day be known throughout the world.       With fingers shaking from adrenaline, Tom opened the first page and stared in disbelief at the publication date — 2000. That's impossible, it's only 1943 now! Impossible, was it? Putting the book aside, Tom absentmindedly continued searching as his thoughts wandered far away. His fingers found a chain around the dead man's neck. He pulled out a fragment of thin golden braiding, examining what had once hung on it but was now a warped half-melted something. He turned the broken pendant over in his fingers, studying the rings of precious metal and shards of glass. Which seemed to be from a round vial or container.       He glanced thoughtfully at the book, then back at the object in his hand. The conclusion was already made. This thing was nothing less than a Time-Turner. Except modern Time-Turners could only go back three hours at most, as far as he knew from scientific journals. But the year 2000... Could Time-Turners be invented by then that can go back years, decades?       Tom also took the stranger's wand for himself. Besides that, nothing useful was found in his pockets, the Time-Turner was irreparably broken. Tom tossed the object onto the corpse, shoved the book into his battered canvas shoulder bag. He had to get rid of the body to avoid drawing more attention to the Riddles' deaths. At his command, the earth under the body gaped open, greedily swallowing the recently alive, and now completely dead, man, pulling him down into the depths until only pale fingers briefly flashed and disappeared from sight. When it was over, Tom neatly levelled the soil, replanting it with blades of grass with a single wave of his wand. As if nothing had happened.       Once again making sure no one was around, he continued on towards Morfin's shack, absorbed in thought about what all this meant. So much so that he didn't even notice the sudden appearance of another person. But the loud cry of “Expelliarmus!” was hard to miss. Tom managed to reflexively ward it off with a nonverbal shield, immediately sending back a violet lightning bolt in response. The electric charge jolted the wizard's body, briefly highlighting his hair standing on end and teeth clenched tight, outlining in the night darkness the silhouette frozen stiff from convulsive muscle contractions. The man fell to the ground when his heart stopped.       Frowning warily, Tom checked again that there wasn't a soul around, now slightly doubting his ability to cast Homenum Revelio. Slowly, sideways, he approached the motionless body. And then exhaled in resignation through clenched teeth:       "Not again..."       The inscription on the second attacker's colourful T-shirt read: "Arsenal — Champions! English Premier League 2002."