Running Close to the Ground

Chapter Six: My Brilliant Career as a Death Eater

His eyes were two slits, making a snake proud,

With a face that any painter would paint as he walked through the crowd ...

Do I need your permission to turn the other cheek?

If you can read my mind, why must I speak?

No, I have heard nothing about the man that you seek ...

- Bob Dylan, "Angelina"

London, 1980

They come for Remus first: letters dropped at our breakfast table by owls that do not stay for food or drink. They are silent of wing and white as ghosts. (You were expecting the Dark Lord would choose black, maybe? That isn't his style. White for purity. I don't know if he believes what he preaches himself, but he expects his followers to have complete faith in it.)

He crumples up the letter and throws it into the fire without a word, pretending not to notice that Sirius and I are staring at him.

"Sacked again," he says when he comes home from Flourish and Blotts that evening. "Same old story."

It is a familiar story to all of us by now, but he usually lasts a few months before his employers put the clues together. He's been working at the book shop for less than three weeks.

He brushes his hair out of his eyes and forces a smile. "Well, let's go drink up my severance pay."

I remember that night later as our last normal evening. The seven of us sitting at a corner table in a Muggle pub: James and Lily; Sirius and Dorcas; Remus and Em; and me. We form a couple of teams for the quiz (and don't do very well - what wizard knows about football?) I do much better taking on a couple of Muggles at darts; a little flick of the wrist and a whispered Wingardium Leviosa can work wonders. (Lily, who is very pregnant and therefore the only one of us who's sober, smirks when she notices what I'm up to.) And we laugh at all the familiar wartime jokes that aren't really funny when you stop to analyze them. Moony seems to be in a good mood, tossing off ironic toasts to his ex-employer and buying round after round of drinks.

"Where's the money coming from?" asks Sirius, who is still fairly steady on his feet, unlike the rest of us. He's always held his liquor well.

"Never min' about the money," says Remus, slurring his words slightly. "Give me a bowl of wine, in this I bury all unkindness, Cassius. Not that your name's Cassius, but you get the point. Lemme buy you another."

Sirius follows him with his eyes as he stumbles to the bar. He frowns.

Just before closing time, Em takes Remus by the arm, and they slip outside for a walk. I expect they'll end up at her place and we won't see him again before morning; but around one o'clock, as Sirius and I are sitting around the living room of our flat having a last drink, we hear Remus' key turn in the lock.

"Miss Emmeline Cressida Vance," he announces in a cool, measured voice that no longer betrays any trace of drunkenness, "has just purchased a new set of living room furniture and now appears to be on the market for a boyfriend who can be trusted not to chew it up at the full moon. I have informed Miss Vance that her priorities appear to be somewhat misplaced, and that she needn't bother looking him up if she changes her mind."

Sirius places a hand on his shoulder. "Well, better you find out sooner than later. Good riddance to her, and good on you for telling her the truth."

"I didn't."

"What?"

"Somebody else relieved me of the trouble."

"Who?"

Remus shakes his head and gives him a sort of odd half-smile, but doesn't say anything. He goes into his room and starts throwing things into a battered suitcase.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"Packing. First my employer, then my girlfriend. It'll be our landlord next. And I won't have you and Sirius thrown out in the street on my account."

"Where are you going? Your parents' place?"

"No. I can't bring that kind of trouble on them."

"James and Lily's?"

"No!" His voice is horrified, as if I've just suggested that he celebrate the baby's first full moon by having him as a midnight snack. He snaps the suitcase shut and walks out without a proper goodbye.

"A bit funny, him leaving like that," says Sirius, staring at the door and glowering.

We don't see Remus again until the next Order meeting, weeks later. He looks like he hasn't shaved or washed in days, and he's got a painful, hacking cough.

"I don't know where you're staying these days, but I don't think it agrees with you, mate," I say. "Come on home and stop being a stubborn old idiot before you make yourself ill, why don't you?" But he only shakes his head and crosses the room to talk to Alastor Moody.

Then another white owl arrives with a letter for Sirius, who scowls, swears, and scrawls a hasty reply informing the Dark Lord which portion of his anatomy he can stick his threats in.

The next owl bears a Howler. Sirius makes the mistake of opening it over breakfast. A minute later, I'm holding his head while he throws up in the kitchen sink. The voice is distorted and twisted by torture, but still recognizable. It's Regulus.

That's what courage and honor get you when the Dark Lord is taking over. A cardboard box under a bridge and your baby brother's dying screams.

And then Dorcas Meadowes, Sirius' girlfriend, doesn't come back from a routine mission one night. I don't know whether she'd been getting letters as well, or whether it's just one more way of putting pressure on Sirius, but there isn't much of her left to bury when we find her.

On the morning of her funeral, the first white owl comes for me, and I hold the Dark Lord's letter in my hand for only a moment before composing a reply. I've already seen enough of the instruments of torture.

Remus says all the proper things to Sirius that day, but he watches him with suspicious eyes, and as the last mourner walks away from the grave he draws Professor Dumbledore aside and speaks to him for a long time in an undertone.

I do nothing to poison their minds against each other. I don't have to do anything. Because my friends both have the same brand of courage, as hard as flint and as cold as steel, and when flint and steel clash they send up enough sparks to set our little world on fire.

After I write back to the Dark Lord, there are no more mysterious deaths among our circle, and when I see Remus again he's decently dressed and he tells me he's found a place to stay, though he won't say where. Even Sirius loses a bit of the haunted look he'd had since his brother and Dorcas died. For a little while things are almost normal, and the crumbs of information I pass on to my contacts seem a small price to pay...

Death Eater Headquarters, 1981

The first time I come face to face with the Dark Lord, the fragile illusion of normality shatters. He is a tall, well-favored man, some fifty-odd years of age, dark-haired but pale-complexioned. His voice is strangely high-pitched; listening to him makes me feel as if someone is running his fingernails along a blackboard. I don't know whether it's the voice that chills me, or the reactions of the others, the masked men who accompany him. In his presence they stiffen like statues.

And he asks me about René Lupin.

"You have, I think, frequently been a guest in his house?"

"Yes, but the man's mad," I tell him. "He hasn't held a steady job in fifteen years. Nobody in the scientific community takes him seriously."

The Dark Lord fixes me with an unblinking stare. "I take him seriously. His ideas about aconite are, I think, less mad than most people realize. But what interests me most is his other work. My contacts in Knockturn Alley tell me that he has made certain purchases that suggest his experiments are taking a military turn. He was in Grindelwald's service once, was he not? He has both the knowledge and the inclination to place powerful weapons in the hands of our enemies."

"Yes! Exactly! He worked for Grindelwald!" I say desperately. "He can be corrupted. Blackmailed."

But a small voice in the back of my head says, As soon harness the lightning as blackmail a Lupin. If the son didn't crack, the father sure as hell won't.

"Liar," says the Dark Lord softly. "He married a mudblood, did he not? He will never be one of us. But if you are suffering from a lingering case of scruples - of which I advise you to divest yourself as swiftly as possible - you may rest assured that he is a dead man already. All that remains for you is to tell me everything you can of their household: the floor plan, the entrances and exits, his habits, and the best time to attack."

"It w-would be better to attack him in the P-potions lab instead of the house, my Lord." (Where did that stammer come from? Words have always come readily to my tongue, until now.) "His wife is a p-powerful witch herself, and it would be safer not to have to deal with two of them."

"He will be alone in the laboratory?"

"Yes. All day, nearly every day."

I tell myself I have saved Celia, at least. Is one life enough? I don't know.

* * *

"You have been to visit the family, Pettigrew?" the Dark Lord asks only days later. "You can confirm that he is dead and that his executioners have left no clues to their identity?"

"Yes, my Lord."

"Have you got the papers I asked you to take from his laboratory?"

"Here." I have done nothing, I tell myself; it was not my hand that took his life. And if the Dark Lord really wanted those papers, and wanted their author dead, he would find some way to make it happen with or without me.

As my new master stares at me, the scene in the Lupins' kitchen on the morning after René's murder flashes through my mind. Mother and son, sitting slumped over the table after a sleepless night. They would sooner die than cry in front of a visitor, but their eyes are red-rimmed and their faces bear the marks of raw undignified grief.

I just can't believe he's gone, says Remus, looking dazed. I mean, it's Dad, he was one of the most alive people I know. He can't be dead. It doesn't make sense. And then later, after his mother leaves the house to see about the funeral arrangements: Peter, I haven't told anybody this, but Lord Voldemort tried to recruit me as a spy. It was last summer, just before Harry was born. And I ... I think that's why he did ... this. I know Dad wouldn't have wanted me to do anything else, but ... Oh hell. He stares up at me, white-faced, with dark smudges under his eyes.

"A small part of you enjoyed seeing what you had wrought, isn't it so?" says the Dark Lord softly. "You felt a little thrill of satisfaction at bringing those brave, proud people down to their knees ... and a secret pride at knowing what none of them knew. And in your heart you cherished the thought that you had the power to kill either of them, but you persuaded me to spare their lives instead."

"No!" I protest. How can he say that? (How can he know that?)

"Do not lie to me, Peter. I always know when my servants are lying," he says. "Know that I do not fear the feeble powers of a mudblood, nor am I swayed by petty considerations of mercy. I spared the woman's life to give you a taste of power. Power, my little Gryffindor, is sweeter than honey and more intoxicating than wine. Did you not find it so?"

I say nothing. A rush goes to my head as if I'd just taken a sip of firewhiskey, but a moment later my mouth feels full of ashes.

"Power is sweet ..." his eyes widen as he regards me, "but ... I think revenge is even sweeter. Don't you agree?"

He's a Legilimens, I realize for the first time. Has to be. And his skill is such that I haven't even felt him probing the darkest shadows of my mind, shadows I'd hardly known were there myself.

He mustn't know I know. Almost by instinct, I drop my eyes to the ground.

"If you keep faith with me, little one, I can teach you how to bring down the powerful, the arrogant, the clever. I can make you my angel of justice." That high, eerie voice fascinates me against my will; it grates and mesmerizes. "Are you wholly and entirely mine?"

I have forgotten about trying to conceal my thoughts from him. Slowly, I lift my eyes and nod.

Little Hangleton, 1998

Always the stammer. It happens every time he questions me these days, makes it sound like I'm lying when I'm not. My tongue trips over the truth. When I first came back to him, I spilled my information freely, eager to hammer nails in the coffins of the men I resented and feared. It's different now. Now the Dark Lord is the one I resent and fear.

It's at its worst when he questions me about the Weasley family, or about my old friends. Or friend, rather. There's only one of them left now.

This time the Dark Lord is pumping me for information about werewolves, for what purpose I'd rather not know. He becomes so impatient with my inability to speak that he tortures me when I'm doing my best to cooperate.

"Speak up, fool!" he hisses as I fight for breath. "I asked you a simple question! What color is Remus Lupin when he's a wolf, and what are his identifying marks?"

I fight for control over my tongue and my thoughts as pain bursts through my head like exploding stars. "How the hell w-would I know? I've only s-s-seen him when I was a b-bloody rat! Rats are c-color-blind!"

"Goyle," orders the Dark Lord, "go to the library in the village and -" He breaks off, remembering that Goyle probably wouldn't be able to tell a library from a massage parlor at ten paces. "Never mind. Nott, you go and look up whether rats are really color-blind."

While he waits for Nott to return, the Dark Lord hands me over to Walden Macnair. With Macnair, it's Cruciatus if you lie, Cruciatus if you tell the truth, and more Cruciatus if you say nothing at all. It makes no difference to him; the man gets his jollies from inflicting pain.

I find that almost refreshing. At least you never have to wonder where you stand with Macnair.

I try to fight off the effects of the curse by savoring the absurdity of the situation: half a dozen of the Dark Lord's finest standing around waiting for Nott to report back from a Muggle library - but as always, the pain is stronger than I am. It clouds reason, distorts proportion, kills laughter.

Just as well. Safer that way. The Dark Lord is becoming less and less tolerant of irreverence lately - one of the things that makes me wonder if he's losing his grip.

"Well, Nott?" he asks when Jephthah returns.

"He's telling the truth, my Lord. Rats are color-blind."

"Bow when you address Lord Voldemort, Nott." (He's also taken to referring to himself in the third person. I think this is another sign he's losing it, and if the calculating look on his face is anything to go by, Lucius Malfoy thinks so too.)

Nott bows, perhaps an inch or two more deeply than necessary. "Yes, my Lord."

"Now, Wormtail, tell me more ..." On and on he quizzes me, asking about Remus' habits and vulnerabilities, and now, at last, I am so torture-weary that the words flow freely; I can no more stem or staunch them than I can walk away from it all.

I tried, Moony. Really, I tried.

* * *

I wake with a jerk, shaking and sweating.

"What's the matter?" asks Roo, propping herself up on one elbow.

"N-nothing. Bad dream." But it is no worse than most of my dreams; what's really troubling me is that it happened only a few days ago, and I don't want to know what the Dark Lord plans to do with the information I gave him.

"Tell me about it," she says softly. "Dreams never seem so bad when you talk about them."

"I can't. I'm sorry."

She sits up and turns on the light. "I don't like the look of most of those people who come into the pub these days. You're involved with something really bad, aren't you? Like ... like organized crime or terrorism?"

"Sorta. Don't ask me to tell you more. I can't do that either."

"I wasn't going to."

She offers me a cigarette, but my left hand is shaking too badly to light it, and my right hand is lying on a chair on the other side of the room. I'm not about to go to bed fully armed, if you'll pardon the awful pun. Roo lights the cigarette for me and rests her head on my shoulder, and I smooth her hair as best I can with my stump.

"Peter? How did you lose your hand?"

"Motorcycle accident. Long time ago." But that's the wrong story to make up, because it makes me think of Padfoot. Don't think of Padfoot.

She looks up at me with sadness gathering in her brown eyes, and I have a feeling she knows damn well that I'm lying, but she doesn't say a word, just scoops Hat-Trick the rabbit up from the floor and places him under my other arm. His nose twitches and his silly lop ears tickle. His weight is warm and comforting. I look up at Roo and manage a smile.

"Better?" she asks.

"Good enough," I tell her, and I curl up by her side until sleep overwhelms me again, for I am desperate and greedy for sleep these days, in spite of the dreams.