The Observer Effect

      As soon as Harry crossed the threshold, the door banged shut behind him with a metallic clang, like the spring of a trap snapping. Pitch darkness closed in. The heavy, stale fug of an abandoned house wrapped itself around him—it smelt of mould, damp mustiness, old rags, and caked dust. He whispered, a little nervously, ‘Lumos,’ and gave his wand a flick.       If Tom’s cupboard at the orphanage had been unpleasantly coffin-like, this was a proper crypt. It felt as though the dead were lurking somewhere in the house. The first word that sprang to mind at the sight of the place was ‘funereal’. The second was ‘filthy’.       The hall, tiled the colour of soot and papered in dark grey stripes, turned out not to be all that large—it barely had room for a coat stand and a bulky, oddly shaped stand for umbrellas and walking-sticks. Off to the left loomed a pair of massive double doors; just beyond them, a staircase rose steeply and ended at a carved gallery from which, by the look of it, you could get to the floor above. In the corner beneath the stairs a small table lurked with a tray for calling cards. Two corridors—one straight ahead, the other to the right—led off from the hall, and in the pier between them hung velvet curtains, plainly moth-eaten; they must have been hiding yet another doorway. From the very high ceiling a chandelier dangled on a chain, swaddled in a whole veil of cobwebs. On the walls Harry noticed odd metal contraptions he couldn’t at first place—only when a yellowish flame suddenly sprang up in them, shaped like a forked fish-tail, did he realise they were gas sconces.       By their light, Lumos was no longer needed, and Harry let it fade, though he was in no hurry to pocket his wand—it lent him the confidence and sense of safety of a loaded pistol in the hand. Tom appeared at his side silently, like a ghost. He hadn’t followed Harry through the door; he simply materialised beside him as he had when travelling by Floo, only this time with a slight delay, as though something—the magic of the house, or something else—had got in his way. Harry didn’t have time to ask.       Those very curtains in the pier to the right suddenly drew themselves apart, and Harry was blasted by a piercing shriek, as loud as a klaxon and as pleasant to the ear as a nail scraping on glass, ‘Mudblood! Filthy rabble! How dare you defile—’       ‘Silencio,’ said Tom, and Harry found himself faintly surprised by how easily his quiet, measured voice carried over the hysterical screeching.       In the sudden hush Harry caught his breath, and only then noticed something he had at first taken for a window. A heartbeat later he realised it was a portrait, life-sized—the most realistic and at the same time the most ghastly portrait one could imagine (not that Harry had seen many in his life, but this one would have stood out among the rest if only for its ability to wail like a siren), and it was this, it seemed, that the threadbare velvet rags had been hiding.       ‘Merlin,’ he mumbled. ‘Tom, what is it?’       ‘Ah,’ Tom answered almost cheerfully, ‘something new—wasn’t here in my day. Meet, Harry, a magical portrait. You see, in the wizarding world it’s common practice to enchant canvases so the people painted on them behave as if alive.’       He put his wand away, stepped forward, and studied the silenced picture with interest. From the canvas an elderly woman in a widow’s cap glared at Harry, shaking a tiny withered fist and moving her lips in silence. A heavy, almost square jaw with a stubborn dimple, and brows set low over eyes that were altogether too pale, did nothing to make her a beauty; nor did the jaundiced cast of her skin, unflatteringly set off by a lilac dress, add to the old lady’s appeal. Cocking his head and shoving his hands in his pockets, Tom went on in the tone of a seasoned guide, ‘They can move, talk, even shift from picture to picture. And to lend verisimilitude, a cast of the man’s personality is embedded in the portrait during its making.’       The last words rang uncannily familiar. Harry started.       ‘A “cast of personality”? Rather like…’       ‘Yes,’ Tom smiled grimly, ‘rather like me—only, of course, far more primitive.’       The old woman abruptly ceased her antics, froze, and then, with a strangely helpless, almost childlike gesture, lifted her clasped hands to her mouth, as if about to burst into tears. Her eyes flicked to Tom and stuck to his face—it was as though she had only just noticed him and simply couldn’t believe what she was seeing.       ‘So it’s… an alarm, is it?’ Harry rubbed his forehead.       Tom shrugged. ‘Likely. This particular specimen is inordinately loud, but usually they’re fairly biddable, though given to gossiping among themselves. Hogwarts is full of them. Do bear in mind that many a portrait is only too keen to tattle to the staff when it gets the chance, so keep an eye on the walls and don’t get caught.’       ‘Got it. “Don’t get caught”!’ Harry nodded, echoing Tom’s Slytherin motto. The gaps in his own knowledge of the wizarding world weighed on him—there seemed no end to them, and Harry hadn’t the faintest idea where or when the next one would ambush him.       Tom turned his head. ‘This way.’ He ran lightly up the stairs. ‘Skip the second step from the bottom—it used to bite. And careful—that clock doesn’t care for strangers; let me bring it to heel first.’       Harry followed Tom carefully, just as he’d been told.       The whole house was like a training ground or an obstacle course rigged up by a desperately bored madman. Something in the window curtains gave off an unpleasant droning; the sideboard clacked in a way that put one in mind of dentures; behind the skirting boards came the patter of scurrying clawed feet (Harry instantly thought of Trunk he’d left at the Leaky Cauldron with strict instructions to sit tight and behave). Along the staircase, like hunting trophies, hung carefully medallion-framed, mummified heads of small humanoids with long snouts and large triangular ears (‘house-elves,’ Tom identified them in passing, without embarking on an explanation of so exotic a form of final repose). All told, the place was a perfect fit for a family famed as utterly unhinged Dark wizards. Even so, the self-styled Fomalhaut Black, as it turned out, could feel comparatively safe here.       Every so often Harry heard, ‘step away’, ‘freeze’, ‘don’t touch’—it was as if Tom carried in his head a map of all the traps and surprises hidden here; he navigated them with the easy assurance of someone who knows every crack in the wallpaper, though he didn’t stop grumbling that everything had been shifted round and changed.       Tom piloted Harry through the rooms like a harbour pilot along a well-known channel—the drawing room, a large bedroom, two smaller ones, three smaller still, an attic crammed with junk, an incredibly old-fashioned lavatory (Harry took the opportunity to check it was in working order—the magic did what it ought), a sumptuous temple to ablutions you could hardly bring yourself to call merely a bathroom, an empty dressing room (‘there’s a boggart in there,’ Tom clicked his tongue, nodding at the trembling wardrobe). They worked their way through every storey from bottom to top, and from the top down again, until they found themselves back on the ground floor, where the dining room was—those double doors near the entrance led into it. The old woman’s portrait was still staring, wringing her hands, but she made no further attempt to deafen them—either the alarm was a one-off and had spent itself, or the silencing curse was still holding. Tom towed Harry past and turned into one of the corridors—the shorter one.       ‘And now for the really interesting bit,’ he announced briskly. ‘Let’s see if the old password still works.’       ‘Password?…’ Harry rubbed his forehead again. The dense, almost reconnaissance-grade tour had set his head spinning. ‘How is it you know this place like the back of your hand? It feels like your house, not the Blacks’.’       Tom bestowed a patronising smirk on him. ‘I lived here. Stayed with Orion in the holidays, once for three weeks and another time for nearly four.’ He folded his arms, tapping his elbow with his fingers. ‘Our darling Headmaster Dippet, I’ll have you know, chose to ignore the rather pressing fact there was a brutal war on. Muggle-borns and I were still packed off home for the hols—in my case, to the orphanage—and whoever survived the Luftwaffe’s bombs, survived. Others weren’t so lucky. But that’s a tale for another time.’       He nodded at a fresh pair of double doors, even more massive and ornate than the previous ones. The carving on the dark wood formed a pattern in which you could make out horned serpents snarled in the branches of a flowering shrub.       ‘Say “Toujours pur”,’ he told Harry; thanks to Natural Nobility, Harry recognised the Blacks’ family motto.       ‘Toujours pur,’ he repeated obediently, but the doors remained unmoving. Like the front door, as Harry only now noticed, there was neither handle nor keyhole.       ‘Well, it’s been a good long while; no wonder they’ve changed the password.’ Tom frowned, disappointed, then instructed, ‘Try calling the house-elf. What was her name… Nanny. Go on. Say it.’       ‘Nanny?’ Harry called uncertainly. Silence answered.       ‘Hm. Quite. She was already old,’ Tom rubbed his lower lip, thoughtful. ‘What about… Kreacher.’       ‘Kreacher!’ This time Harry’s cry was followed by a soft pop.       The stunted, almost naked creature that appeared before them looked a match for the neglected, quietly crumbling house. Bald, stooped, with drooping ears and red, watering eyes, with scaly patches on his skin, altogether ill and crooked-looking, Kreacher inspired in Harry at first glance an irresistible urge to whisk him off to the vet’s and have him put to sleep, to spare him the suffering. The house-elf rubbed his shrivelled paws and began swaying and muttering—like a frog beginning to croak—in a low, half-intelligible voice, ‘My mistress’s house defiled, oh, poor mistress, if she only knew, if she only knew what she would say to poor old Kreacher…’ For all the plaintive words, his tone was angry, almost threatening. ‘Standing there and gawping, filthy Mudblood spawn, Kreacher doesn’t even know its name. What is it doing here? Kreacher doesn’t know…’       ‘Er…’ Harry looked helplessly at Tom. Surely this wasn’t normal for a house-elf? He’d imagined them… rather more user-friendly.       ‘There’s something seriously wrong with him,’ Tom answered his unspoken question. ‘I imagine he’s gone soft in the head from loneliness and age. Introduce yourself.’       Harry cleared his throat and turned to the house-elf. The creature seemed to be off in a world of his own—alas, it looked as though Tom was quite right.       ‘Oh, the shame… Poor old Kreacher, what is he to do…’       ‘My name is Harry James Potter, Kreacher,’ Harry cut into the unbroken mutter. ‘I’m… a relation of your master’s, as it were.’       ‘Can it be true?’ the elf babbled, even more agitated than before. ‘Is it Harry Potter? Kreacher sees the scar—then it is true, it is the boy who stopped the Dark Lord… Kreacher wonders how he did it…’       ‘If only I knew! I wonder myself how I did it!’ Harry snapped. The last thing he needed was a house-elf harping on about his ‘deed’, honestly.       ‘Enough,’ Tom cut across them both. His wand was already in his hand—Harry hadn’t noticed him draw it. ‘I shall show myself to him now, and you tell him to look into my eyes.’       But Harry didn’t get as far as giving any order. An instant later Kreacher dropped to his knees and began fervently sweeping the floor with his drooping ears.       ‘Mistress!’ he wailed. ‘Mistress did not live to see her joy! Oh, how she would have rejoiced, my poor lady… Old Kreacher is so glad… Mistress would have been so happy…’       ‘Ah,’ Tom murmured, a slightly cruel smile curving the corners of his mouth, ‘it seems I carry some weight in this house. The mistress is Walburga?’       Still bowing like a wind-up toy, Kreacher mumbled assent. Tom’s smile grew harder.       ‘Remind me,’ he said to Harry, ‘what was it they sent Sirius down for life in Azkaban?’       ‘Blew one Peter Pettigrew to bits and, for good measure, a dozen Muggles as well,’ Harry reported. ‘Did the slaughter right in the middle of a crowded street, and when they arrested him he laughed his head off and yelled, “I did it!”’ Harry snorted, then added on his own account, ‘I reckon he was on something… I mean—drunk as a lord. Think he was one of your followers?’       ‘A touch over the top, but we are speaking of a Black,’ Tom sighed, almost meekly. ‘And many others dashed off to do foolish things the moment I died.’       Tom’s way of saying ‘I’ when he meant Voldemort annoyed and muddled Harry no end. He sighed as well.       ‘Right, then, what do I do? Order him to look you in the eye?’       ‘No need now. I think he’ll be more obedient,’ Tom smiled again. ‘But saner—hardly. Kreacher, do you know the password to the library?’       ‘Kreacher does not know… Kreacher is bad…’ the elf whined. ‘Kreacher advises asking the mistress’s portrait… poor mistress, her plaits turned white with grief, oh, how she suffered, my unhappy lady, how sad she did not live to see…’       ‘Be silent,’ Tom said, with distaste, ‘and take me to the portrait.’       To both his and Harry’s surprise, they found themselves back in the hall.       ‘This one?’ Tom asked, in a curiously tight voice, looking at the jaundiced old crone in the cap. Kreacher muttered something affirmative.       ‘My lord,’ the old woman whispered, dropping into an old-fashioned curtsey. Tears glimmered in her eyes. For the briefest instant a flicker of horror crossed Tom’s face before it was smothered under a mask of chilly detachment.       ‘Walburga,’ he said indifferently. ‘The password to the library, if you please.’       ‘Je vis dans l’espoir,’ she answered, her voice slightly trembling. ‘My lord, I knew you at once… but how can it be?’       Tom did not deign to reply—he merely turned on his heel and headed back to the library, not even looking round to see if Harry was following. And Harry did follow—if only to say, ‘I thought she recognised you as well, by the way. Maybe not straight off, but when you silenced her—she stared as if her eyes would fall out!’       Tom grimaced. ‘Let me in, loquacious child.’       ‘Je vis dans l’espoir,’ Harry repeated carefully, hoping he hadn’t mangled the unfamiliar words. The carved door swung open without a sound.       ‘What you’re suggesting is impossible,’ Tom tossed over his shoulder as he made for the depths of a fairly large room, its walls crammed up to the ceiling with incredibly dusty volumes. Gas sconces obligingly flared in the piers, and Kreacher hopped off to yank the curtains apart. Harry, to his own surprise, burst into a ringing sneeze, and Tom, apparently noticing the filth about them for the first time, flicked his wand.       ‘Tergeo! Kreacher, clean the lot, at once.’       ‘Why impossible?’ Harry asked, easing himself onto the sofa in the middle of the room.       Opposite the sofa stood a carved rectangular table and two more armchairs. The floor was covered by a patterned Oriental rug with a fringe. Kreacher, still chuntering away to himself—it sounded exactly like a stomach rumbling—set to clicking his fingers. It looked daft, but it worked almost at once: the layer of dust and cobwebs smothering everything began to melt before their eyes.       ‘I become visible only when I choose to be so,’ Tom answered absently, running his fingertips along the spines on the shelf he had made for so determinedly, ‘and to those I choose to see me.’ He pulled out a book, then another, then another.       Harry thought for a moment. ‘And… are you sure that applies to portraits? I mean, given you were created—don’t take offence—by similar magic?’       Tom froze for a second and made a noncommittal noise.       ‘I’ve never examined the matter from that angle,’ he said at last—which, translated from Tom-speak into plain English, undoubtedly meant, ‘You’re probably right.’ Harry grinned. An Inquiry into the Possibility of Reversing the Physical and Metaphysical Consequences of Natural Death, in Particular, the Reintegration of Essence and Matter, proclaimed the quaintly florid title of the tome he had pulled at random. No wonder the Blacks’ library was locked behind a password.       ‘Kreacher,’ he asked briskly, ‘is the fireplace in working order? I’d like to fetch a few things from the inn.’       In the end, the fireplace wasn’t needed. It turned out a house-elf could go practically anywhere and fetch or bring his wizard’s belongings. What’s more, elves could Apparate with people in tow, though Harry held off on that for the time being, while making a firm mental note of it.       Choosing as his bedroom a room almost under the roof—for no particular reason; traipsing up and down to the fourth floor every time wasn’t exactly convenient, but he simply liked the view from the window, and, besides, the room wasn’t under the stairs in any sense of the phrase—Harry told Kreacher to put it to rights or at least into a relatively clean state if perfection was out of reach. He had no wish to take up a rag himself, mindful of the solemn promise he’d made to himself in the house on Privet Drive never again to lay a hand on a rag or a sponge, and the cleaning charm wasn’t coming to him yet. In the course of tidying, Kreacher kept nipping up to the attic, shoving the former occupant’s things into corners, but Harry didn’t hinder him in the least—he understood how hard it must be for the old house-elf to accept the changes in his life. Senile even by the most charitable standards, Kreacher nevertheless loved and remembered the family’s second son, dead before his time.       Regulus. For this had been his bedroom, once.       The smaller of the two on the top floor, filthy and dilapidated, it still spoke of former splendour. Done out in every conceivable shade of green and silver, with the family crest and motto hanging over the headboard, it was every bit as pointedly Slytherin as the room across the landing was Gryffindor (Harry wondered who had slept in that one; all signs pointed to Sirius, which was… simply odd). A collage of yellowed newspaper cuttings—all about Voldemort—merely underscored what was plain enough already: the whole, now entirely extinct, family were fiercely taken with Tom’s ideas (another Tom, the elder—blast it, Toms were multiplying before his eyes, and no razor of Ockham’s would tame the plague).       Waiting until the last token of former days—a plaque reading ‘Do not enter without the express permission of Regulus Arcturus Black’—had vanished up into the attic, Harry climbed down from the wide window-seat where he had been passing the time flipping through Natural Nobility and whistled for Trunk. Unlike the Leaky Cauldron, here he had the use of an actual wardrobe—the pub had afforded no more than some wrought nails hammered into the wall—and, better still, here there was a house-elf, who could at last solve the pressing laundry problem; Trunk’s cleaning charms did have their limits. Making Trunk a nest by the window—it looked, of course, perfectly at home in the room—Harry breathed out in satisfaction and, all but whistling, headed back to the library.       That August Harry spent in the Blacks’ town house before setting off for Hogwarts could only be called merry. In truth, he would have named it one of the best months of his life—at any rate among those he could remember; the very early years didn’t count.       Most of the time he and Tom spent in the library. Cleaned by Kreacher’s efforts by the end of the first day, it had become almost cosy despite the general gloom of the décor—in its own particular, slightly sinister way, which was only lightly compromised by a heap of cushions, a tea-tray, and a basket of baked goods (caraway-seed cake Kreacher did to perfection; even Aunt Petunia would have been hard put to find fault).       Tom set about the study of necromancy in earnest—evidently he hadn’t been joking about it being ‘not too late to catch up’—breaking off only when some side-route to bringing back someone long dead presented itself along the way. Harry did his best to help, though his focus never lasted long; there was far too much else about that was interesting. Honestly—how’s one meant to resist a book gloriously titled Feeble-minded Muggles? Or Crackpot Magic for Barmy Warlocks? Quite. Even so, Harry tried not to spread himself too thin.       From time to time he and Tom compared notes.       ‘…the Philosopher’s Stone… no, it’s an excellent option, but recreating it’s out of the question—looks like Flamel’s success was sheer happenstance…’       ‘Or down to some irreproducible factors—a unique configuration of the heavenly bodies, say. Or he misremembered the list and order of ingredients. Sloppiness in one’s lab notebook never did anyone any good.’       ‘Or he sneezed into the cauldron and was too embarrassed to admit it. Or he dropped something in by accident, like Fleming when he discovered penicillin. Hang on, what other alchemist? Don’t tell me you don’t know Fleming?!’       ‘…from a living unicorn? That sounds utterly revolting.’       ‘And it saddles you with an irreversible curse, which, well, will kill you anyway.’       ‘I fail to see the point.’       ‘So do I.’       ‘…and, er, what happens to the host’s personality? It doesn’t just disappear, does it?’       ‘You’d have to keep it under control, yes.’       ‘Feels like a last-ditch option if ever there was one.’       ‘Have I mentioned the body will start to rot the moment you move in?’       ‘The very, very last ditch!’       ‘…the flesh of the servant, willingly given… hmmm.’       ‘Don’t you even think about it, all right? And let me see. So… Blood of the enemy… well, that won’t be a problem, I reckon… bone of the father…’       ‘That either.’       ‘What’s a “homunculus”, exactly? That’s something out of alchemy, isn’t it?’       ‘And there we shall have problems. Pretty serious ones. You see… Turn the page.’       ‘Ugh!’       ‘Quite. I’m not a vain man, but—ugh.’       ‘…perhaps we should simply rob Flamel?’       ‘“Rob”? What a provocative word… I’d prefer “expropriate”.’       ‘Meaning you’ve any ideas how to find him at all?’       ‘I’m working on it.’       ‘Well, I haven’t. What a pity…’       However, ‘most of the time’ didn’t mean ‘all the time’. Periodically Harry needed proper food, something more substantial than tea, and right after eating it was devilishly hard to concentrate on reading. And Kreacher simply couldn’t manage to put the whole house to rights on his own. His whingeing ‘Kreacher is old… Kreacher finds it hard…’ usually served as the signal for Tom to join the fun—if only in the capacity of a snide commentator.       Harry waged a stubborn war against Doxies—tiny winged beasts that looked like the unholy offspring of a biting fly and a Disney fairy; they were the ones responsible for the horrid droning in the curtains, and, as it turned out, they were the culprits chewing any fabric they could get their teeth into, not moths at all. The campaign was long and bloody—pedigree specimens, fattened on heavy embroidered tapestries, came swarming out of the folds, trying to take a chunk out of his fingers and neatly dodging the reeking jets of Doxycide—but Harry pushed them back methodically, floor by floor, until at last he had complete victory.       They also got rid of the spider colony—at least in the dining room sideboard; Tom declared their presence there unhygienic. The spiders were evicted to the attic, where they were shortly joined by Hole. Once ceremoniously released from her cage, the rat flatly refused to go anywhere at all, so she was left on her former rations and allowed to roam the house at will; she chose the attic of her own accord and settled in there comfortably, quietly nibbling on spiders (though she was never actually caught in the act, so this remained only one of Harry’s suspicions).       The most fun—and the most bother—was the boggart. As Tom explained, it was a spectre that, for the sake of feeding and self-defence, took the form of whatever the approaching person feared most of all. There was a charm specifically for banishing such a pest, meant to turn the terrifying into the ridiculous. One had to visualise one’s fear in as comic a guise as possible while saying ‘Riddikulus’, drawing a double circular motion with the wand. Harry became genuinely interested in the question of what a boggart looks like when no one’s looking at it, and he and Tom spent a while on the observer’s conundrum, which left Harry with a general grasp of Zen Buddhist koans and Tom with a superficial notion of superposition. Then it was time for practice.       Having learnt his lesson from previous experience, Tom flatly refused to say in which year at Hogwarts they learnt this spell (Harry knew only that it wasn’t first year—he’d thumbed the textbook). Tom’s evasions boiled down to the claim that the programme had been drastically simplified for the benefit of the thick. In addition—Harry ground his teeth, his foreboding proving spot-on—the Heir of Salazar ought to be ashamed not to excel here. Mustering all his courage, the Heir stepped out to do battle with embodied fear.       The boggart had holed up in a tall wardrobe in a desolately empty dressing room. Walburga had used this room once upon a time—her bedroom, the shrine to the late lady tenderly curated by Kreacher, was next door on the same landing, which also boasted two portraits of elaborately dressed ladies (one was called Araminta and the other didn’t speak English at all), and a long-dead ficus tree in a pot. Tom kept threatening to revive the ficus, hence its continued presence. Otherwise it was plain that the dressing room was far—really far—cleaner than on their first visit. The gas sconce burned welcomingly. The wardrobe shook, its door clattering. Harry clenched his wand tighter. He took a step and…       Any thought at all, every prepared line, the spell itself—everything flew out of his head.       This could not, simply could not, be made funny. Never, under any circumstances.       Harry, unable to stifle a gasp, turned away. He glanced into the doorway and found Tom with his eyes. The sight helped, a little. But to look back—there—took a monstrous effort. Slowly, forcing himself, in jerks, he made his gaze fall again on…       Tom Riddle’s dead body, lying on the floor before the wardrobe, mutilated, the head ruined, and yet recognisable enough that there could be no mistake. The body seemed horribly real. Even the blood smelt like blood. Harry felt sick.       ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, swallowing bitter saliva between every word, ‘I’m having trouble with the visualising. I can’t think of anything.’       ‘The standard advice in such cases is to work in a group, or at least as a pair,’ Tom, who had been waiting in the corridor so as not to throw off Harry or the boggart by accident, peered through the open door and took in the scene.       ‘However,’ he went on with a chuckle, stepping into the dressing room and strolling closer, ‘one must admit that in our particular case this advice is of somewhat limited use.’       He reached ‘limited use’ just as he stopped beside Harry, so close their robe sleeves touched and merged into one. The boggart showed no inclination to act—the corpse remained a corpse, dead and appalling.       ‘Why?’ Harry forced out, carefully controlling his breathing. The boggart was having a splendid dinner tonight.       ‘In the ordinary situation,’ Tom put a weight on the word ‘ordinary’, ‘two observers force a boggart to try to frighten both at once—the creature isn’t exactly bright—and the hybridised features are, in themselves, more amusing than frightening. The larger the group, the clearer the effect.’       ‘Not funny,’ Harry judged, taking off his glasses to polish them.       ‘Of course not,’ Tom agreed easily.       ‘Is that because you’re… bodiless? Not quite a person?’ Harry asked in spite of himself. Tom, standing beside him and discoursing matter-of-factly, calmed him. Better still would have been taking his hand—which was impossible.       ‘No,’ Tom grinned in his trademark way: wide, toothy, and joyless. ‘It’s simply that this is my boggart too. The details differ, but this will do nicely. As you see, it feels no need to change.’       ‘But you did this at Hogwarts, right? I don’t believe you failed the practical,’ Harry rubbed his forehead. ‘How did you manage to make your own death funny?’       ‘I didn’t,’ Tom raised his wand. ‘I burnt it to blazes. New lesson for today: we learn the Incendio charm.’       That one Muggle-ish ‘to blazes’ from fastidious Tom told Harry a fair bit. For instance, that of the two of them in that room, the boggart was not working only on him. When the writhing black blotches on the floor had finally burnt out—extra work for Kreacher there—Tom remarked, with melancholy, ‘Had you been in fourth year… Merlin take it, third would have done, and had I, of course, still been alive—you’d have been wearing my Mark before nightfall. For this alone. Do you see?’       ‘Your Mark?’ Harry didn’t catch on at first. ‘What mark… ohhh, wait. Even then?’ He didn’t know how to respond. Again, as with that ‘there’s no need whatsoever for a subjugation spell’, it was Tom’s way of saying good things in a very bad way. Harry considered it, considered it again—and decided he felt flattered.       ‘Thank you, Tom,’ he said. ‘I think I understand.’       Without a word, they turned and walked out, leaving the scorched patch behind them.