Take up Serpents

There were more Parselmouths in the United States of America than anywhere else in the world. Tom Riddle unearthed this fact during his sixth year at Hogwarts, in a book he wasn't supposed to be reading, searching for knowledge he wasn’t allowed to have. The discovery planted the first seeds of a future plan in his mind, and for the next year and a half he spent his time -- all that wasn't taken up with classwork, homework and desperate revising for the N.E.W.T.S. -- poring through tome after forbidden tome in the Restricted Section, absorbing every tiny drop of information on America that he could find.

It didn't take long to discover that "more than anywhere else in the world" meant "at most one or two a century." Tom was disappointed, but he'd learned enough by then to know that, Parselmouth haven or not, America was where he needed to go as soon as he was free. The Wizarding schools there -- some of them, anyway -- taught proper Dark Arts, not the watered-down, defensive version offered at Hogwarts, producing wizards whose names seemed to slither off the yellowed parchment pages as Tom read them. Marie Laveau. Jeremiah Loden. Absalom Brown. Of the top European schools, only Durmstrang had a tradition that strong, and Durmstrang had shut down two years before when the idiotic Muggle war raged too close, its students and staff dispersed as refugees across the ravaged continent.

Tom's first idea was to present himself at one of the likely schools as a visiting scholar, or even as a candidate for a professorship. Upon reflection, he decided that would be too public. Albus Dumbledore was keeping an eye on him, and Dumbledore was growing in power. He would almost certainly be the next headmaster of Hogwarts once Dippet retired, and Dumbledore was big on international cooperation. He would keep in close contact with headmasters at all the other top schools. And Tom's plans did not include having Albus Dumbledore watching his every move. An individual apprenticeship would be a much more sensible option, Tom decided. And the decision led him, inevitably, to the search for Absalom Brown.

At first glance, Brown seemed to be the perfect candidate to teach Tom what he wanted to know. At second glance, he looked even better. His public reputation was spotless; some of his works were even taught in the N.E.W.T.-level classes at Hogwarts. But Tom Riddle had a knack for reading between the lines. He looked at the footnotes and bibliographies of Brown's writings and saw, beneath the innocuous academic façade, the connecting threads of a far more interesting and useful research. The fact that Brown was also a potions expert specializing in snake venom derivatives only added to the attraction.

Tom wrote polite, serious letters to Brown's old school, to his publishers, to the editors of the journals that had printed his articles. The Americans were very responsive. Tom noticed, with a mild contempt, that most of them appeared to be personally flattered to discover that a top Hogwarts scholar was looking to one of their own for an apprenticeship. But for all their responsiveness, they were of very little help. No one seemed to know where Absalom Brown was. Owls directed to Brown himself came back tired and disgruntled-looking, the unopened letters still tied to their legs. Brown's last publication had come out during Tom's fourth year, and the trail went cold shortly thereafter, somewhere in the American South.

Well, it was a start. Tom left Hogwarts, with his twelve N.E.W.T.S. and his Award for Special Services, and Imperio'd a Muggle ticket agent into giving him a free first-class ticket on a trans-Atlantic ship.

From the moment Tom first set foot in America, he hated it. The New York City skyline had looked exciting enough when viewed from the deck of an approaching luxury liner, but up close, the city was disgusting. Muggles. Muggles of all shapes and sizes, white, black and yellow, rich and poor, more Muggles than the rest of the world put together, it seemed, all crammed shoulder to shoulder into gridlined streets of asphalt and glass and steel. Filthy, noisy, oblivious to anything outside itself, it was the least magical place Tom had ever seen.

He made cautious overtures toward the two main magical communities in Manhattan. But the absinthe-sipping bohemians in Greenwich Village annoyed him with their eccentrically-cut robes and their aping of Muggle customs decades out of date, and the Negroes in East Harlem unnerved him with their suspicious stares and their unfamiliar, sing-song spells. A number of wizards and witches in both places had heard of Absalom Brown, but no one admitted to knowing anything useful about him. Tom stayed only a few days before catching a southbound bus.

It was the first in an endless succession of buses, winding their way down narrow, badly paved roads. The scenery changed from city to suburbs to farmland, with miles of greenery stretching between increasingly small and shabby towns. The weather grew hotter and more humid with every day. Inside the buses, it was sweltering. Tom sweated into his cheap Muggle suit and cursed the necessity of following a trail, instead of being able to simply Apparate where he wanted to go. He did his best to ignore everything around him: the sweaty, smelly Muggles, the dusty roads, the overgrown landscape. His first sight of the Blue Ridge mountains looming against a crystal blue sky provided a brief distraction, but Tom refused to be impressed.

He got off at towns with names like Piney Mountain and Flat Rock, drank cheap, bitter coffee in bus station restaurants, trudged into post offices and general stores to ask his questions. He had a picture of Brown, clipped from the dust jacket of one of his books. Tom had spelled the photo not to move and cropped it to conceal the fact that Brown was wearing robes. That way he could question Muggles as well as wizards. This proved useful, since this part of the country was almost entirely Muggle. Tom couldn't imagine what a wizard of Brown's caliber could be doing here.

And yet, every couple of days or so, he would come across somebody who would recognize the picture. Oh, yes, they would say in their drawling, idiot-slow accents. I seen him round these parts. No, sir, not lately. Heard he'd moved on to Rusty Creek. Or was it Red Stone Gorge? Hard to remember after all this time.

Palmer's Hollow was more of a wide patch in the road than a town, nestled in a gap between two mountains. Tom climbed off the bus in front of a rickety tin-roofed shack fronted by a rotting porch. The peeling sign over the steps said "General Store." A smaller sign below it said, "U.S. Post office." The porch steps creaked ominously beneath Tom's feet. He pushed the screen door open with a corner of his suitcase and went inside.

The girl at the cash register greeted Tom with a smile, wary at first, more welcoming once she got a good look at him. Tom, accustomed to receiving that reaction from women, returned a practiced flirtatious smile of his own. He set down his suitcase on top of a lidded bucket labeled "Live Bait" and placed Absalom Brown's picture on the counter.

The girl chewed her lip as she peered down at the photo, and twisted a strand of mousy brown hair around her fingers.

"Hard to say," she drawled after a while, "him being clean-shaved in the pitcher and all, but I do believe that's Prester Abe."

"Prester Abe?" Tom repeated blankly. What kind of a name was Prester? "Are you certain that's him?"

"Not for sure, no. But the eyes have the right look about them, and the nose. I reckon the only way to know is to ask him."

"Does he live in town?" Tom demanded. The girl shook her head.

"No, he only comes in twice a week, once on Wednesday to get his groceries and once on Sunday."

It was a Saturday. Tom stifled a growl. "Where does he live, then?"

"He's got a cabin to himself a little ways up Yandro."

"Up yonder?" Tom frowned. The girl giggled and made herself speak even slower, as if Tom was the dim-witted illiterate, rather than herself.

"Yandro," she said and gestured toward the window. "The mountain."

A few more minutes of questioning, punctuated by more idiotic giggling, got him detailed directions to Prester Abe's cabin. Tom snatched up his suitcase, refused the offer of a "coke drink" and left. Out on the porch he paused, glanced around the empty street, then pulled out his wand and cast a quick hex through the window. Inside, the girl went right on stacking tins on a shelf, oblivious to the pale pink spots that had started to bloom on her skin. In a few hours, the spots would turn into painful, oozing sores that no Muggle remedy would heal. That would teach the little bitch to giggle at her betters.

The climb up Yandro Mountain was grueling. Tom had hiked in Scotland and the Lake District on an occasional holiday, but those outings had not prepared him for North Carolina in late August. Even in the woods, where the shade should've kept the temperature down, the heat was stifling, the humidity so thick it seemed as if the air itself was sweating. Tom cast three Cooling Charms on himself in the space of an hour as he struggled up the trail. He might as well have been a Squib for all the effect they had. Tom's feet blistered inside his good English walking shoes and his clothes plastered to his skin. He smelled the reek of his own sweat even over the rotting smell of the forest. Tom mopped his face with a handkerchief and entertained thoughts of casting the Killing Curse on Absalom Brown when he finally found him.

The air shimmered almost imperceptibly as he clambered across a muddy ditch that might've been a stream at one time. Tom stopped, tense and watchful. After a few seconds he cast a simple detection spell, and watched the woods ahead of him light up with magic. Wards against concealment, hostile magic, Apparition -- at least two or three years old, fraying at the edges a little but still powerful. Tom kept his wand in his hand as he walked on.

Another quarter of a mile up the trail, he saw the cabin. It looked relatively new and well-built, though the glass in the single window needed a good washing. There was a small vegetable garden off to one side, and a few chickens milling listlessly behind a wire mesh fence.

A man sat on top of an overturned crate near the open door, sipping Coca Cola from a bottle. He wore the clothes that the local Muggles wore: dungarees and a blue work shirt, floppy-brimmed hat, sturdy boots. Only the black silk gloves on his hands added an odd note, appropriate for neither the rustic setting nor the weather. Tom didn't see a wand, but that didn't mean there wasn't one. The dungarees had an awful lot of pockets. Tom tucked his own wand into his belt, and leaned on the fence that separated the vegetable garden from the edge of the trail.

"Absalom Brown?" he asked.

The man took a long swallow of drink, wiped his mouth and set the bottle down before replying.

"Who's asking?" He had a bushy brown beard that started high on his cheeks and made it hard to compare his face against the one in the photograph. Still, the eyes did look similar. And though Tom was no expert on American speech, he thought the man's accent was slightly different from the local drawl.

"My name is Tom Riddle," he said. "I came from Hogwarts." If this was Brown, he'd recognize the name.

"An English scholar, eh?" Brown smiled lazily, a gleam of toothy white against the beard, but his eyes were wary. "You're a long way from home."

"I've been looking for you." Tom gave the hopeful, earnestly intelligent look he'd perfected over seven years of charming special favors from his professors. "I'm a great admirer of your work. Your paper on using cobra venom and acromantula secretions to prevent organ decay in aged--"

"That's mighty kind of you." Brown was no longer smiling. "But I don't do this anymore. I've found more important work to do."

"What is it, then?" The fence creaked as Tom leaned further into the yard. When Brown didn't answer right away, he allowed a hint of not-entirely-feigned boyish enthusiasm to creep into his expression. "I was hoping you'd teach me," he said. "Give me an apprenticeship."

Brown dug a pipe from a hip pocket, a pouch of tobacco and a box of matches from a chest pocket, and began to fill the pipe. His movements were slow and deliberate, his forehead creased in concentration. He was clearly taking his time on purpose, and not about to speak till he was finished. Tom gritted his teeth and forced himself to maintain his earnest expression and relaxed pose. He fully intended to make Brown pay for all this aggravation eventually -- not just for the dawdling, but for the whole exhausting, demeaning, endless trip -- but not until he'd learned what he needed. Tom liked to think of himself as a patient man, good at long-term planning. He'd waited fifteen years to take his revenge against his father's family. If he had to wait out the course of a one-year apprenticeship in order to make Absalom Brown regret having lingered over a pipe on a hot Sunday afternoon, then he would do it.

Finally, Brown sat back with a contented sigh, ground the spent match into the dirt with his boot toe, and blew a smoke ring in Tom's direction.

"Don't know if you're ready to learn what I have to teach," he said.

Tom bounced on the balls of his blistered feet. "Try me."

Brown braced one gloved hand against the wall and rose to his feet with a grunt. "Come on in, then."

Inside, the cabin was all one room, sparsely furnished and spotless. There was a rough plank table, three mismatched chairs, a wood-burning stove, a metal frame bed draped with a quilt, and a few long, wall-mounted shelves. Another overturned crate next to the bed served as a nightstand. A silver-framed oval mirror on the wall opposite the window looked more valuable than the rest of the furnishings put together. Tom wondered if it was a Foe Glass and endeavored to think harmless thoughts.

A pot simmered on the stove, and Tom's stomach rumbled at the smell of cooked meat and onions. Brown waved Tom to a chair and took down a pair of bowls from a shelf. He disappeared out the back door for a moment, and came back carrying another bottle of Coca Cola, which he set on the table in front of Tom.

"We can eat as we talk," he said. Tom reached for the spoon, but froze awkwardly when Brown bowed his head and folded his hands in front of his face.

"Thank you, Lord," Brown intoned, "for this food and this drink, and for bringing Tom to my table to share it. Amen."

Tom pointedly said nothing as he picked up the spoon. The matrons at the orphanage might've forced him to thank God for bad food and unwanted charity, but no one else was ever going to.

The stew was mostly potatoes and onions. The meat was of unknown origin, stringy and gamy. Tom ate it anyway, washing the food down with gulps of oversweet drink. Brown ate as slowly as he did everything else, watching Tom across the table with thoughtful eyes.

"So," he said in between bites, "why do you want me to teach you?"

Tom put on his earnest face again. "As I said, I've admired your work. Your methods of combining potions with charm work are brilliantly original. And the results you've published are just a fraction of what's actually possible, aren't they?"

"I see." Brown scratched at his beard, which now had bits of stew in it. "You've noted the implications, then."

"I could hardly miss it!" Now that the conversation had taken the desired turn, Tom no longer had to feign his excitement. "Get the potion effects just right, and the same technique could be used to slow the effects of aging, make one immune to most curses and hexes that affect the flesh as well as many non-magical diseases, increase physical strength.... and that's only the beginning. I think you could actually--"

"You're wrong," Brown said in a flat voice. "It's not the beginning. It's the end." He pushed back his chair and stood, bottle in one hand. "You want me to teach you? Here's your first lesson." He finished the rest of his drink in two noisy gulps, slammed the bottle down on the table, and took off his gloves.

Tom kept his body still and his face impassive, but his stomach gave an unpleasant lurch. Brown's right hand looked normal enough, if a little hairy around the knuckles. But the left one was covered in small, blue-grey scales instead of skin, the fingers tipped with what looked like black claws with the tips filed flat and short. The scales gleamed with a smooth metallic sheen, except for a mottled dark band around the wrist that separated reptile flesh from human.

"I once thought as you did." Brown paced the floor, from the table to the fireplace and back. "I saw the implications of my work, the possibility of eternal life, boiling up out of a cauldron. I saw what could be done and never stopped to wonder if, perhaps, 'could' might not be the same as 'should.' I toyed with the balance of ingredients, trying to enhance the effects. When I thought I had the formula right, I used it on myself."

He stopped and held his hands out in front of him, fingers splayed wide. Seeing them side by side like that, Tom could see that the left hand was longer and narrower than the right one, and its thumb was almost as long as the index finger. Brown made a fist, and the scales over his knuckles gleamed in the light from the window.

"When I woke the next morning," he said, "both my hands looked like this. I tried every spell I could think of to change the scales back to skin, but nothing worked. Then it began to spread."

"Does it hurt?" Tom asked. Brown shook his head.

"It feels cold," he said. "Not numb, exactly, but all sensation is dulled. The scales spread up my arms, a few inches more every day. I went to every Healer I could find, but they couldn't help me. No one in this world could help me."

"Something obviously did," Tom pointed out. Brown nodded and began to pace again.

"I had gone to Knoxville, to see a Healer specializing in Transformation accidents. I thought, perhaps, that my Animagus form was a serpent and the potion was bringing it out somehow. But he was no help, either. I left his house and went walking, turning into street after street at random. I didn't know what I was looking for. The scales were up to my shoulders by then, with patches coming out on my legs and chest. There was a serpent coiled deep inside me, taking over, and all I could think was, help me, somebody please help me."

Tom saw with a twinge of disgust that Brown's face was streaked with tears. It really was a bit much, he thought. The scaled hand had been an unnerving sight at first, but there was something sleek and beautiful about it, too. Snakes were so much more beautiful than humans in many ways, after all. And Brown had said it didn't hurt…

"...Into a dead end street," Brown said, and Tom forced his wandering attention back to the story. "It was dark by then, I was lost, as lost as any soul had ever been. I saw an open door ahead of me, with light spilling out, and I walked right in, without even thinking about it. The light seemed to draw me somehow. I walked through that door, and I saw I was in a church."

Tom frowned. His memories of church consisted of Sundays at the orphanage, of sullen, clean-scrubbed boys in ill-fitting suits fidgeting in the pews, heads bowed while the vulture-faced vicar told them all the ways they were going to hell. Tom remembered the prayer before their meal and hoped Brown wasn't some sort of religious nutter. They had a lot of those in America, didn't they?

"I sat myself down in the nearest pew," Brown said, "and I started to cry. I couldn't stop. I thought I would sit there and cry forever. But then the priest approached me. He asked me what was wrong and I told him. I took off my gloves and showed him my serpent hands, and I told him everything."

Tom put his spoon down with a clang. "You told a Muggle priest about the Wizarding World?"

Brown shook his head. "No, only about myself. I told him I did magic, but I didn't say how, or where I'd learned it. He didn't care anyway. He only cared about me.

He understood what was wrong with me, you see. I had tasted the fruit of forbidden knowledge. I had sought eternal life here on earth instead of in God's heaven. I had let the serpent into my soul, and the stain of it was poisoning my body."

Yes, definitely a religious nutter. Tom instantly dismissed all thoughts of an apprenticeship. Still, Brown might have things he could use. Notes, spell books, samples of past work... memories, at the very least. A judicious questioning under Imperio might turn up something useful. Tom fingered his wand under the table, but made no move yet. He wanted more information before he began asking questions.

"He made me kneel at the altar," Brown said, "and pray for forgiveness. Then he laid his hands on me and told me to be healed. He said God would take the stain away if I was truly repentant in my heart. And I was. I truly was."

Brown was crying openly now, blubbering wetly into his beard. Tom wanted to throw up. He ducked his head to hide his expression, hoping it made him look reverent and respectful, and asked, "What happened then?" in a suitably hushed voice.

Brown wiped his face with his human hand, struggling visibly to regain control of himself. When he spoke again, his voice was steady. "I went home and slept," he said. "First good night's sleep I'd had in weeks. And when I woke in the morning, the stain was gone. Except for this." He held up his left hand.

Tom could no longer keep his objections in check. "If God healed you, why couldn't he finish the job?"

"It's a sign." Brown spoke immediately and with utter conviction, like a man who'd thought the matter out long and hard beforehand. "A reminder that I might be forgiven, but I'm not free from sin. No one is."

"If no one is free," Tom said, "why do you rate a special reminder?"

"To keep me focused." Again, not the slightest hesitation. "Keep me remembering what I've done, and what I still must do."

"And what," Tom said, no longer even bothering to hide the contempt from his voice, "must you do, exactly?"

"I'll show you." Brown walked to the bed and took a thick, leather-covered book from the nightstand. Tom thought it might be a spell book at first, but then Brown thumped it down on the table and he saw the words "Holy Bible" tooled in peeling gold letters on the battered leather. "Mark 16," he said. "Look at the passage that begins, 'And these signs shall follow them that believe.'"

"I don't need to look," Tom said resentfully. Endless hours of childhood Bible study brought the words to him now, accompanied by a vivid sense memory of a birch rod cracking across his knuckles. "'In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.'"

"That's right." Brown stoked his fingers gently across the book's cover. "That's how I knew I--"

That was already more than Tom wanted to know about Absalom Brown's religious conversion. "But what about your work? Did you abandon it? Did you destroy it? Is there--"

Someone knocked on the door.

"Excuse me, please," Brown said politely, as if they'd just been discussing the weather. He picked up his gloves from the table, put them back on, and went to answer the knock. When he opened the door, Tom saw an elderly woman in a dusty blue dress wringing her hands on the doorstep.

"Mrs. Rixon." Brown's face creased in concern. "Is something the matter?"

"It's Nellie, Prester Abe," the woman shrilled, plucking at Brown's sleeve with a bony hand. "She's been struck ill. Ben and I prayed over her for hours, just as you say we should, and I thought maybe you could--"

"Of course. Give me a moment." Brown came back into the cabin. He fetched a cloth-wrapped bundle from a shelf, long and thin enough to contain a wand, and stuck it in the same pocket where he'd kept his pipe. "I must go a while," he told Tom. You're welcome to wait here if you like. Do a spot of reading, maybe." He nudged the Bible closer to Tom's hands on the table. "We could talk some more when I get back."

The opportunity couldn't have been better if Tom had planned it himself.

"I would be happy to wait," he said.

He watched from the window as Brown and the old woman climbed into a battered white pickup truck and drove off, with the woman at the wheel. As soon as they were out of sight, he sprang to his feet and set about searching the cabin.

It didn't take all that long to discover that there was nothing to discover. The cabin had no trap doors, no secret compartments in the walls, no magical items -- even the suspected Foe Glass turned out to be an ordinary mirror. The only books besides the Bible were well-thumbed Muggle novels, and the jars on the top shelf held nothing more magical than kitchen spices. Tom even got down on his hands and knees to look under the stove, but found only dust and mouse droppings. He was just climbing to his feet again when a faint, almost subliminal voice hissed into his ear.

"Sssso cold… musssstn't sssleep… ssso cold…"

"Who's there?" Tom demanded.

"Sssstay awake…" Several voices now, hissing in chorus. "Mussstn't sssleep... ssso cold..."

Parseltongue. They were speaking Parseltongue. And it was coming from the other side of the wall. Tom clambered to his feet and ran for the back door.

There was a huge glass tank, nearly a meter high and half again as long, propped up on wooden blocks against the back wall of the cabin. The top of the tank was covered with fine wire mesh on a metal frame. And inside, all tangled together on the sand-covered bottom, was a mass of snakes. Some were writhing sluggishly. Most lay still. In a much smaller cage nearby, a number of field mice scurried around, obliviously awaiting their future fate as snake food.

Tom knelt and laid his hand flat against the glass. Sitting there in direct sunlight, it should've been warm to the touch. Instead, it felt faintly cool. There must be a charm on it, Tom realized, keeping the tank cooled just enough to make the snakes sluggish without sending them into hibernation.

"What are you doing here?" Tom asked.

"Warm thing..." A single snake detached itself from the knot and slithered over to nuzzle the glass under Tom's hand, as if trying to absorb his heat through the barrier. It was a golden tan in color, banded with uneven chestnut stripes and shading to copper at the head. Tom didn't recognize the species, but he thought it was lovely to look at. "Warm thing," it hissed again. "You're a different warm thing than the other."

"You mean Brown? Why does he keep you here?"

"Brown thing, yesss." The snake seemed to interpret it as a color rather than a name. "Hairy thing. Keeps ussss here. Keeps usss cold."

"Why?"

"The brown warm thing feeds usss." The snake's tongue flickered against the glass. "It takes usss to the white cave, with light and noise. Many other warm things there. Pick us up. Dance with us."

"Dance with you?" Tom frowned. He'd never heard of people dancing with snakes. Was it a magic ritual of some sort? Did Brown spew all that religious blather as an attempt to distract Tom from his real work, his magical work? "What kind of dance? Is it a spell?"

"Dance," the snake repeated. "Lift us up. Spin around. Make noises."

"Does he speak to you?"

"Brown warm thing doesn't speak our tongue."

Tom considered the matter, his hand still pressed against the glass. It wasn't growing warmer beneath his touch, he noticed. Definitely a cooling charm. A few more snakes were slithering over to investigate the disturbance, their tongues flickering.

"Does it bother you?" Tom asked. "The lifting and the spinning?"

Snakes have no facial expressions, yet Tom was fairly certain that this one would scowl if it could.

"Yessss."

"Why don't you bite him, then?"

"Too ssssleepy. Too cold." The snake's head dipped a little in dejection. "Turnsss colder before dance. We try to ssstay awake. We can't."

"I see." Tom ran one hand through his hair. Whatever Brown was up to, he was being cautious about it. "And you really don't know what he's using you for?"

The snake swayed from side to side and gave no answer.

A car door slammed nearby. Tom jumped to his feet. Damn. He hadn't expected Brown to be back so soon, and the distraction of conversing with the snake had kept him from hearing the car drive up. Brushing the dust from his knees, he hurried back inside.

Brown was already inside, having come in through the front door. He had his wand in his hand, and the look on his face was grim. He glared at Tom with hard, narrowed eyes, and Tom was suddenly reminded that he was facing not a backcountry Muggle peasant, but a very powerful wizard well-versed in Dark Arts.

"Tom," Brown said in a soft, calm voice, "why did you curse Nellie Rixon?"

Tom blinked in confusion. "Who?"

"The girl at the store. She might've died or been permanently disfigured if I hadn't been here to cast the counterspell. Why did you do it?"

"Oh. Her." Tom had already forgotten the little chit. He considered trying to deny the accusation, but decided there was no point. Apprenticeship with Brown was no longer an option, and Tom was tired of pretending. "I didn't like her," he said. "She was disrespectful."

"I know that girl, Tom. She's never disrespectful."

Tom shrugged. "Maybe you and I have different ideas of what constitutes proper respect from a Muggle to a wizard. Not that I'm surprised." He gazed around the cabin with a sneer. "Seeing as how you're living in the dirt like one of them. Is this what your God told you to do? If I were you, I'd have spit in his face."

"I think you should go," Brown said. "I think you should leave this town, and this county, and these mountains, and never come back. You're not welcome here."

Tom's wand was still tucked into his belt. It wouldn't be too difficult to dodge and draw at the same time; he'd done it any number of times, practicing dueling with his housemates at Hogwarts. But he remembered the wards he'd encountered when approaching the cabin. Hostile magic cast here was likely to go dangerously awry, to do more damage to the caster than the target. Perhaps a temporary retreat was in order.

"What, not going to turn the other cheek to me, Prester Abe?" Tom sneered. "Not going to try and save my soul? Shall I pray for forgiveness? Take up some serpents? I see you have a whole tank full in the back."

"You want forgiveness?" Brown said. "Come to the church at noon tomorrow like any good soul. If the Lord doesn't bar you from entering, I won't either."

Tom edged toward the door, keeping his hand near his wand and not taking his eyes off Brown. "If God wants me in his house," he said, "He can invite me himself."

Brown let him walk out the door and away from the cabin without interference. Tom followed the road back down the mountain, silently fuming. By the time he reached the bottom of the slope, the sun was setting and the temperature was falling. The bus schedule in Tom's pocket said that the next bus going north wouldn't come through until Monday. Not that it mattered . Now that he no longer had a search to conduct, he could just Apparate back to New York in stages, and take a ship back to England. But he wasn't ready to leave yet, not while he still had unfinished business in Palmer's Hollow.

Tom found a relatively clear spot in the woods just outside of town, transfigured a fallen tree into a tent, and settled in for the night to dream of snakes.

The next day, he waited until a little after noon before walking into town. The main street -- which also seemed to be the only street -- was empty, the general store locked up and shuttered. But there were voices echoing from a white clapboard building at the end of the street. The building looked much the same as all the others, only slightly larger and better maintained, but a sign in front proclaimed it to be the Palmer's Hollow Church of God with Signs Following. The door was open, and Tom walked in.

Inside, there were rows of folding chairs instead of pews, and a cloth-covered table instead of an altar. The chairs were filled with men and women in plain, dull-colored clothes. All the women wore their hair long, covered with scarves or hats, and all the men had theirs cropped short. At the front of the room, Absalom Brown stood in a dark suit and white shirt, holding up his Bible in one hand. On the table behind him was the snake tank.

"Behold!" Brown lifted the Bible over his head like a battle standard. "I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you."

Several people whooped with joy. Somebody clapped. A few people rose to their feet, arms raised above their heads.

"And nothing shall by any means hurt you," Brown repeated slowly, emphasizing each word. "Remember these words, my brothers and sisters, for they are the promise of God's love. Have faith in Him, and you shall be protected from all evil. Though we all be sinners--" He stopped, apparently noticing Tom's presence for the first time, a look of mingled wariness and hope on his face. A few people nearest the door looked over their shoulders. They showed no shock at the presence of a stranger in their midst, only shifted to free a chair for him at the end of a row. Tom sat and folded his hands, looking meek. Brown looked straight at him as he continued preaching.

"Though we all be sinners, we are all in God's heart, and He will extend his hand to all of us who repent in our hearts. For did not the Lord say, 'If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him.' Lay your sins at His feet, and he will anoint you, and in his name you shall take up serpents."

More people were standing now, crying "Amen" and "Hallelujah." Tom remained seated, his eyes fixed on the tank where the snakes lay coiled in a limp knot.

Brown took off his suit jacket and laid it on the table next to the tank. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, then removed the glove from his right hand. Tom smirked. For all of Brown's posturing, he wasn't willing to show his "stained" left hand to his congregation. Apparently, that was just a little more sin than the Muggles could handle.

Brown was still prattling on about forgiveness and God's love as he lifted the mesh screen off the tank, reached inside and lifted out a snake slightly longer than his forearm, gripping it firmly just behind the head. The snake hung limp as a rope, and Tom could tell that it was too chilled to put up a struggle, even if Brown's hold had allowed it to turn and bite. Brown faced the congregation and raised his arms, Bible in one hand and snake in the other.

"Amen!" he cried, and threw his head back.

It was the perfect moment. Brown was looking upwards, and everyone else was looking at Brown. Tom drew his wand, holding it carefully out of sight against his leg, and cast a warming charm on the snake tank.

"Let the anointed come forth!" Brown cried. Tom jumped to his feet before anyone else could and hurried toward the table. Brown watched him with a worried frown. "Tom. You're welcome here, of course, but--"

"I want to know if I'm forgiven," Tom said. "Don’t you want to know?"

"If you really want to be forgiven," Brown said, "then you are. But this may not be the time to--"

"Have faith," Tom told him, and plunged both arms into the tank. The snakes were just beginning to stir as they absorbed the warmth from the charm. "Do you want out?" Tom asked them in Parseltongue. "Do you want revenge?"

The large snake he'd spoken to the day before coiled up his arm, nestling its head in the crook of his elbow. "Yesss."

Tom grasped three snakes at once between his hands, lifted them up and held them up before Brown, who had fallen back with a startled look when Tom began hissing in Parseltongue.

"Well, isn't that a surprise," Tom said, "I must be anointed." And he threw the snakes right at Brown.

Two fell to the floor before hitting their target, but the third snake ended up draped over Brown's left shoulder. It coiled its tail around Brown's neck and sank its fangs into Brown's cheek just above the beard. Brown screamed and fell to his knees.

Tom lifted more snakes from the tank and threw them into the crowd. Most people shrieked and scrambled away. A few tried to pick up the writhing snakes, only to stagger back screaming as they were bitten. Tom grabbed one edge of the tank with both hands and hauled it off the table to shatter on the floor. Snakes crawled away in all directions, scattering shards of glass out of their path.

Tom walked over to stand over Brown, who was twitching on the floor. The bite mark on his cheek was oozing blood and the skin around the punctures was turning red and swollen. Another snake had encircled his arm and bitten into his wrist, and two more were wriggling beneath his shirt, doing their share of damage, no doubt. Brown's breath was coming in short, agonized gasps, but the eyes that looked up at Tom were still clear.

"You're a weak-minded fool," Tom told him. "You didn't repent, you slinked away in fear. You had power and eternal life right there in your hand." He nudged Brown's gloved left hand with the toe of his shoe. "And you were too weak to take it."

"No," Brown said in a tight voice. "The kind of power you speak of means nothing. And I will have eternal life soon enough."

"Well, yes." Tom made a show of glancing at his watch. "In about ten minutes, I would say. But I need something from you first."

Tom had never before tried Legilimency on a fully trained and powerful wizard. He'd only experimented on other Hogwarts students, leaving them unconscious and Obliviated in dark corners. But this seemed as good an opportunity as any, and physical pain did weaken the mental barriers. Tom locked his eyes on Brown's, tightened his grip on his wand, and delved into the other wizard's mind.

Brown's mind was a jumble of images, scattering into smaller and smaller fragments as the venom crept through his blood stream. Tom brushed aside glimpses of a Muggleborn childhood and pathetic schoolboy romances to focus on Brown's memories of his work. He sorted out spells and formulas, experimental techniques, titles of books never seen at Hogwarts, not even in the Restricted section. He could feel Brown struggling to keep the information secret, but the weakling never stood a chance. Within minutes, Tom had everything he needed, filed away in his infallible memory. He broke the spell and grinned at Brown, who was now curled in on himself and whimpering.

"Thank you," he said politely and turned toward the door. The church was mostly empty now, overturned chairs scattered all over the floor, a few laggard snakes still crawling among the mess. Three or four ashen-faced men huddled by the door, looking as if they were torn between the desire to run and the impulse to protect Brown. Tom picked up a pair of snakes from the floor and walked toward them, grinning. He didn't have to take five steps before the men broke and ran.

Tom walked back to Brown and dropped the snakes on top of him. Brown didn't even twitch, though Tom could see he was still alive and conscious.

"I will succeed where you have failed," Tom told him. "And they shall take up serpents in my name."