The Sandman Riddle

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    The story I have to tell is not a pretty one. It is not the sort of ghostly tale meant to be told in the company of those who will only half-listen, nor is it to be told to those who would believe it too readily. In fact, I hope that you will scoff at my story. If you cannot believe me, then the horror of it may touch me less and less. But its shadow clings to me still. And it sinks its talons into the frantic muscles of my shoulders, forcing me to free it into the air. I have no choice.

    I stand in the darkened hallway, surrounded by the crowd of other students, all of whom are whispering frantically as they read the words written in shaky red over and over again. 'The Chamber of Secrets has been opened.' I feel the thick fingers of my comrade Goyle poke into my back, and I open my mouth.

    "You'll be next, mudbloods!" I say the words mechanically, without feeling, knowing that the only reason I say them at all is because I know it is what is expected of me. Despite my demeanor, my arrogant stance, I am as terrified as all the rest of the mass huddled before the torchlit omen.

    To me, it says nothing of the Chamber of Secrets.

    To me, it means only that the Sandman has come again.

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    When I was a child, I saw very little of my father. He was always out and working, and spent precious little of his time at home. I can remember the time I did pass with him, learning to fence and fight, lecturing me from one of the many volumes which populated our library. These were diversions of the daytime hours.

    More prominent in my memory were the evenings. My mother, father and I would sit in the stillness of the greatroom after dinner, my mother occupied with needlepoint or something else with her hands. My father would either sit and tell me stories, or he would sit motionless in his chair and smoke his pipe, the acrid scent of tobacco and woodsmoke from the fireplace twining around us all in the dying light. He would stare into space with an unreadable expression on his face. It was these nights that I abhorred.

    Without fail, on the nights that my father sat moored alone in his thoughts, I would hear a faint thumping from far off in the corridor outside. My mother's eyes would widen with fear and anxiety, and she would cast a glance at my father, who would be stonily regarding the door, refusing to meet her eyes. She would drop her gaze with a sigh and turn to me.

    "Come, my dear. The Sandman has come, and you can barely hold your eyes open."

    I would rise and follow her to my room, where she would tuck me in for the night. Far off, in the great room, I could hear my father talking low and quiet with someone, and then I heard the two of them make their way to his private study. All these things I could hear despite my mother's attempts to hold my attention.

    From what my mother said each of these nights, I knew that the solitary intruder had to be the Sandman she spoke of. I could hear the irregular tapping of a cane, and the slow, dragging footsteps that marked his arrival, and these things conjured up in my mind an image of the most terrible of creatures... perhaps like the awful muggle monster Quasimodo that had figured into one of the stories told to me by my father.

    One night, after these nocturnal visits had gone on for some years, I gathered my nerve and asked my mother who the Sandman was.

    "He is no one, darling," she answered me, her eyes both wide and wise. "It is simply an expression I use when I mean to say that you are tired." She patted my hand in a consoling fashion. Although my mother had never lied to me before, I could not believe her now: not when I could hear the devil in question scraping about the corridors downstairs.

    Since my mother would not answer me, I decided to ask the only other person I knew who might give me a true answer. I crept the next day to the kitchen, and begged Dobby, my favorite of all our house elves, if he knew who the Sandman was. His already round eyes grew even larger, and he gasped.

    "He is a very bad man, Master Draco. Dobby is always been much fearing him." he shook his head. "He throws sand in the eyes of the poor sleepless children, sir, and when they opens their mouths to scream, he steals out their souls and leaves their little bodies empties." He paused here, obviously disturbed by the fear he saw in my face. Was this the thing that crept about below me nearly every night while I slept?

    "What does he do with their souls, Dobby?" I asked.

    "He takes them to his castle, sir, on the far-away side of the moon, and feeds them to his monsters, the Death-Eaters, they is called."

    "Death-Eaters? Where do they come from?"

    "They is the little children with no souls, all grown up. Since they have none of their own, they have to keep eating and eating the souls of the innocent." Dobby cut his eyes at me, suddenly distrustful. "Why does young master want to know these terrible things?"

    I left without saying a word. I was now determined, despite the better part of my fear, to find out exactly who it was who stole my father away from me on those tense nights. The next time I noticed my father's far-away stare and my mother's grief-stricken face, I myself professed my fatigue and intention to retire early. Once I had passed sufficiently far away from the greatroom, I made my way to my father's study and closeted myself inside, hiding in a tall cabinet of ebony that was filled with great hanging cloaks. I did not have to wait long.

    Soon I could hear the dragging footsteps that had come to light a terror in my eyes. As the shuffling noises got closer and closer, I began to hear voices as well.

    "Master, you are not yet strong enough to take on these tasks yourself. Let me help you," I heard my father implore.

    "No. They must be completed by my hand or they are of no use at all." A voice as cold as the west wind froze into my bones. It was the voice of the Sandman. I heard my father begin to say something in reply when the door to the study opened and I caught a glimpse of the spectre through the little crack in the open cabinet door. He was wearing a long, black cloak that seemed to be made of the midnight itself. I wondered, not idly, if it was the color light on the far side of the moon.

    "Then let us be quick, master. There is much to be done." My father moved to help the Sandman take off his cloak.

    "Yes, Lucius. That there is," the cold voice answered. My father seized a hold of the shoulders of the cloak as the man pushed back his hood. My body stiffened in the confines of the cupboard, a scream frozen in my throat by the fear of what would happen to me should I be discovered.

    The man's face was as pale as the underbelly of a dead fish, his eyes cut slantwise into it like a serpent's. They were as red as blood and sparkled in their depths with a cold flame. The pupils, vertical slits like a cat's, narrowed and swelled as he spoke. His rimless lips were tight and dry, and he had no nose-- only nostrils perforating the clammy expanse of skin that stretched between eyes and mouth. His hands were long and spidery, perfectly suited to throwing stinging whips of sand into eyes and teasing the fine threads of an unruly soul to twist like wool around his long, thin fingers. He was the Sandman indeed.

    "You may begin, Lucius." I watched, horrified, as my father built up the fire in the grate, adding to it materials I could not recognize until the flames burned a bright, eerie green. Meanwhile, the Sandman was scrawling frantically in a leatherbound book, muttering under his breath all the while. My father turned back, and the Sandman rose from his seat, and began muttering louder, waving his hands over the book.

    "Vivarus totalus! Temporum vivarus!" His voice brought a wind into the room, though the windows were sealed tight. The fire roared to life. I bit down on my knuckle hard to keep in the wild cries of fear echoing in my mind. As the wind wreaked havoc in the study, I began to notice a figure slowly emerging from the fire. A handsome, dark-eyed boy had stepped from its depths to stand before the Sandman.

    "You have come," the Sandman said.

    "I have come." The boy was answering a question that I had not heard in the words. He reached out and laid a transparent hand on the book. He looked the Sandman in the eyes. "Cast my soul into this body!"

    "NO!"

    And suddenly the wind stopped. The boy vanished, and the fire resumed burning in its natural red color, although still considerably stronger than a normal fire ought. The Sandman and my father had stopped dead at the sound of the cry. When they turned to stare at the cupboard, I realized that I had been the one to make the sound. I had one tremor of horor before the Sandman opened the door to the cabinet with a fearful hiss, and dragged me out of it by my hair. I cried out in pain. The fire roared even higher, its crazed red glow the only light in the room.

    "Is this your son, Lucius?" The Sandman crooned, looking into my face. I shrank away from him. His breath smelled of something dead and rotting.

    "Yes, master." My father sounded somewhat frightened as well. The Sandman's face hardened. He was angry.

    "Then what was he doing in here?"

    "He was only curious, I'm sure, master. But you will not harm him? He was, after all, made to be given to you." My eyes rolled wildly in my father's direction. I was terrified. Had I been bred to be given to this despicable creature. The clawed hand in my hair whipped my head around to face its owner.

    "And you, boy? Do you wish to grow up and become a Death-Eater like your father?" he mocked me. My terror overran my senses.

    "No! You can't have it!" For the first time, the Sandman looked somewhat confused.

    "What can't I have? Though, I warn you, it is not wise to deny me anything."

    "My soul," I whimpered at last. The thin mouth split into a grimacing smile, and the Sandman laughed cruelly. He threw me hard against the wall, and took up the little black book again. He turned to look at me with an expression of evaluation.

    "Riddle will inhabit the book, it is certain," he said to my father. The room had begun to whistle with the wind again, and the fire had began to flicker intermittently with red and green. "But who can I trust to open the Chamber?"

    In three quick steps he was upon me again, and he lifted me by my throat to look in his eyes. They burned into me like a frostbitten arrow. He smiled again, baring teeth filed to irregular points.

    "Yes," he crooned again, "I believe this soul will do. Legilimens!"

    The whole world went black.

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    I hope that you have been able to cast aside this tale as easily as you thought you would, Potter. I know you don't like to believe anything that goes against your precious preconceptions of me. You like to imagine I am malicious of my own intent, and that I am cast in exactly the same mold as my father and those before me.

    I am now, certainly. Whatever essence I was born with was digested by my father or his companions long ago. But the soul that the Sandman took out of me that night was one as filled with goodness as pure as any of those that you call 'friend.' And now one of those, the sister to that impoverished imbecile, has gone and landed herself in the Chamber with him.

    You had better hope that she stays asleep, Potter. Look what he does to the wakeful ones.