Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror

Part IV: Apart

Suddenly the world was on fire.

They had known something was brewing, something dark and evil, and that the sorcerer stirring the draught and poking the fire called himself Lord Voldemort. But they had underestimated him, not believing that any one wizard could harness enough power to pose a serious threat to the Ministry, and, through it, to the stability of the entire magical community. Besides, many wizards and witches who had a say in politics were, initially at least, of two minds about the situation. What they saw was a rogue who went after Muggles - a psychopath, yes, but one whose actions had no serious repercussions on the well-being of the wizarding public. It was, they thought, a case for the Hit Wizards, which meant the Ministry did not expect the kind of trouble that required handling by their Auror elite troops.

That was until wizards got killed, and Lord Voldemort turned out to have gathered, in all discretion, a private militia who called themselves Death Eaters. Among their first victims were the old Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and his wife, Hector and Amanda Bones. Their deaths hit Stephen hard; he felt that, after his parents, he had lost his surrogate father and mother to Dark wizards too. He wondered how Septimia had reacted to the news.

It was a bitter irony that Bones's death propelled Stephen upward. The new Head of Department was Bartemius Crouch, elected because of his stern views on morality and law enforcement, and a man who knew how to value Stephen's particular qualities. He needed, he said, a brisk and dependable servant of the law who would deal firmly with those criminals; a man who would not be swayed by offers of wealth or promises of glory to defect from the course of justice. He had made him Chief Hit Wizard.

It was Crouch, too, who had brought in the Aurors, because they were better qualified to do any actual fighting, and it looked as if such action would be necessary. Stephen was asked to cooperate with the famous Alastor Moody, a collaboration that urged him to do his utmost if he did not want to be spectacularly outshone - and a Hit Wizard had his pride. So if he had thought that reinforcement would have made his task any easier, he was proved wrong. The Ministry was reduced to a state of permanent crisis, and Stephen found he could not spare the time to lead a life outside of his job. He took to spending nights in his office, and looking back it seemed that he had, during that period, mainly sustained himself with strong coffee.

It was a war, and a bitter one at that. People grew so frightened that they no longer dared to speak Voldemort's name, as if he were some kind of demon who would appear by your side when you mentioned it. They were nervous. In the papers and on the wireless, the terror was the only topic; there was no time or space for sweetness and light in a society in a constant state of alarm. It was hard to know whom to trust.

Even at Hogwarts the panic did not fail to filter through. But young Stephen did not write anxious letters, as the children of his father's colleagues did. His notes were short and businesslike, stating his marks and saying all was well. It made Stephen proud. His boy kept a level head and generally seemed fairly happy. He was not surprised that, with Septimia gone, the boy no longer objected to coming home for the holidays. There were no more fights to run from, after all; and perhaps the child was more affected by the events of the war than he let on to and needed the reassurance of home. Stephen had then seen himself as a tower of strength, a rock in the midst of an ocean in turmoil - the rules he set would keep the boy steady. But whenever he made remarks about his son's docility and common sense to fellow parents, they looked at him pityingly and told him to expect a change any day soon, because his child had become a teenager.

Stephen could not remember much of his own teen years, then about half a century ago. He had hardly noticed them passing; as far as he knew, they had been nothing special - none of the upheaval, anxiety, or hormonal blasts people made such a fuss about had marred his adolescent life. All this special treatment they had recently begun advocating for young adults was so much foolishness for wimps, and it certainly had no bearing on him or his son. The only way to bring up a child was with the firm use of reason, intolerant of nonsense. The boy could test how far his leash would stretch; the point was to make him accept it was there and to keep him from biting through it.

The testing period had eventually announced itself with young Stephen's sudden refusal to wear his hair short anymore. His father had no idea why that could be; it was probably one of these fashion fads youngsters were so fond of. And though Stephen objected to the impracticality and effeminacy of it all, he had let the boy have his way. After all, if you forced a wizard to have a haircut, he just grew his hair back before you could say 'neat', so there was little he could do anyway.

But the boy's appearance did become a nuisance. Stephen, who was one of these men who are continually flicking imaginary specks of dust from their immaculate clothes, had to watch in distaste as his son's dress grew ever shabbier, and the detested long hair hung in greasy strands about the boy's face. The worst of it was that it all seemed so deliberate. The boy couldn't help having oily skin. He couldn't help the fact that his nose became more and more pronounced and his features unattractive. But he could wash his hair, and he could do something about his clothes. Ugliness was one thing, but carelessness quite another, and Stephen was the living proof of that. After a few heated arguments, however, he had let the matter rest. There were more serious things a boy could do wrong than cultivating a head of dirty hair.

Looking back, Stephen saw that the change of style had only been a prelude. Next had come the letters from Hogwarts, warning him that his son was displaying maladjusted behaviour. His knowledge of nasty spells was worryingly extensive. He had apparently developed a habit of maliciously hexing fellow students, which was not, in itself, exceptional in an apprentice wizard; more alarming, his teachers thought, was that, whereas other little rascals were shielded by their peers, this boy was continually given away, which pointed to an inability to make and keep friends. When called to account, the boy claimed in his defence that he was being badly bullied, making Stephen wonder about cause and effect. He could not blame the boy for knowing so many curses; they were remnants of Septimia's infernal teachings. But he had lectured his son rigorously about their use, and it seemed that after that his quarrelsomeness abated to the level of acceptability. Stephen might have had to raise his voice, but his authority was still in effect.

Or was it?

He found out that one of his educational projects, at least, had failed, when he came home one evening to find his fourteen-year-old (who looked like an underfed vulture in those days, with his rounded shoulders and protruding shoulder blades) gloomily leafing through a copy of Witch Weekly. It soon became obvious why the boy was suddenly interested in a ladies' magazine: it featured an item on Rabastan Lestrange's young family - the Glamorous Life of the Upper Crust, With Photos.

"She's had another baby," the boy had said dejectedly. "It's a girl, this time: Lavinia. Radamanthus is two now. They look so perfect."

Stephen had picked up the magazine. There she was, Mrs Lestrange, holding a bouncing baby, and Mr Lestrange with a toddler in his arms and a hound at his feet. They looked disgustingly happy; even the dog seemed to be smiling.

"Good riddance," Stephen had muttered, snorting at the children's names; the reaction had earned him a withering look from his son.

"She was mine," the boy had said, "mine. But you chased her away and she became someone else's mother."

"She left you behind," he had replied stiffly. "She didn't care for you!"

"Only because you wouldn't let her," the boy had spat, and he had walked out of the room, leaving Stephen to glare at the pictures of Septimia's beautiful new family.

"Believe what you want!" he had shouted after his son. "But you're deluding yourself!"

They had not spoken for two days afterwards. It seemed that, no matter how hard he had tried, he could not erase the boy's mother from his life. Neither, it would turn out, could he remove the seed she had planted in her child's brain.

Besides a doubtful taste in books (Stephen kept coming across titles like the Decameron and Satyricon in the apartment; the only thing you could say in their favour was that they were classics), the boy developed an unhealthily rebellious attitude, which Stephen perceived as being directed solely towards the balance of his blood pressure. He had nearly choked on his buttered toast when, on a summer morning, young Stephen - he must have been around sixteen then - while scanning the Daily Prophet headlines had remarked:

"You know, maybe we should all back You Know Who and overthrow the Ministry. We could smash everything and start anew." He had said it very calmly, pensively sipping his coffee.

"What?" Stephen had stared at him. "Do you have any idea what you're saying?"

"I always do." The boy had smoothed out the newspaper and shown him a photo of a heap of rubble that had once been a government building. "You see the kind of thing he is capable of. I've never heard you say anything else than that the Ministry is too slow, too bureaucratic and too corrupt to be really efficient. All the power lies with a few old fogeys who are only interested in filling their own pockets. They make a mess of it but they can't be removed. That's what you said, right?"

"I never..."

"You did." The boy had frowned. "You said they kept you down because you weren't rich enough and wouldn't be bribed to boot."

"Well yes, but-" The boy's arguments were definitely going the wrong way, but he found it difficult to formulate his own.

"The only remedy against an old-fashioned power bastion is radical action. - That would be Mikhail Bakunin," he had added. "He was a Muggle, but that doesn't matter. He had admirable logic." He had been so cool about it; it was frightening. "Flatten the whole rotten business and build it up again from scratch, that's the only way. And here is a wizard who has the guts and the means to do it. This is our chance to finally establish a meritocracy. It'll be brains that count then." Stephen remembered thinking the gleam in his son's eyes was one of subdued fanaticism.

"Nothing positive can come of terrorism," he had ground out. "Change has to happen gradually from within, and not by violence. You'll understand one day."

The boy had narrowed his eyes and looked him straight in the face.

"Oh," he had said contemptuously, "now that you've been promoted, everything is fine, isn't it? Better not bite the hand that feeds you, eh? You've become part of the system and now you eat your words."

"Listen here, son," Stephen had said warningly, "whatever the situation, there's nothing good to expect from a Dark wizard. I know that; you are young and foolish, you'll learn."

His tone had made it clear that this was final, and the boy had not pursued his point. In fact, he had never brought the subject up again. The lesson, it appeared, had been well absorbed; but Stephen had not realised exactly which lesson until Amelia Bones came by his office to tell him she had spotted his son in Knockturn Alley, carrying a package from Borgin and Burke's. It was the last day of August 1977; the boy was about to enter his last year at Hogwarts.

Stephen disliked Amelia; she had the same disposition as his sister (the one that had provided the reason for their falling out, in fact) and, which made it worse, she paraded it. She wore men's robes and an eyeglass, for Merlin's sake. At least Christina looked decent. But however he felt about Amelia, the news about his son had to be taken seriously. Stephen had started a private investigation.

After sending his son off to King's Cross' platform 9 ¾, he had put on a hooded black cloak and made his way to Knockturn Alley. He had strode into Borgin and Burke's and demanded to see the customer's ledger. Mr Borgin had rudely refused to show it to him because his customers relied on his discretion; but Stephen could be very persuasive when he wanted to, and Borgin had been forced to copy the entries headed S. Snape (Jr.), 16b Lisle St. down on a piece of parchment. At the sight of Stephen's Hit Wizard badge, he had also provided other addresses he knew the boy to frequent - bookshops, pharmacies, meeting-places.

By the time his enquiries were as complete as he could get them, Stephen held an impressive list of books, items and ingredients of which the boy had managed to conceal every trace in their flat and the value of which, to his amazement, amounted to a considerable sum. The boy's odd jobs during the holidays could not have earned sufficiently much, yet all had been duly paid for.

He had gone to his son's empty bedroom and furiously looked around. The clothes the boy had left behind were hanging in the wardrobe, carefully ironed and very clean, but threadbare and some of them several sizes too short. The linen was no longer white but grey with wear. The books that occupied the shelves taking up one wall of the room consisted, on the one hand, of schoolbooks the boy had outgrown, and on the other of handsomely bound copies of the more questionable literary classics, some of which Stephen had already encountered on various occasions. The room exuded a blandness, an inconspicuousness that felt unreal in its perfection.

Standing there, he had suddenly understood how he had been fooled; all the pieces fell into place.

The boy's clothes were old and shabby because he had spent the money he received for new ones on Dark things. Of course he was eager to come home during the holidays, when the best place to buy Dark materials was in London's Knockturn Alley. And if he had not contradicted Stephen's directions, it had been the better to subvert them in secret. As to the books - oh, that was a clever inversion of an old schoolboy trick! Stephen pulled out a tome of The Complete Works of Marquis de Sade, tapped it with his wand and spoke a countercharm, to find himself holding a volume entitled Dark Arts: A Road Less Travelled. In his days at Hogwarts, he had known fellow students to bewitch lewd books so that they looked like textbooks to anyone else; it went to show how devious the boy's mind was that he should have done the opposite and masked one vice as another.

Septimia's words had echoed in his mind: It is in him. He is a natural Dark wizard. Septimia had bad blood; there was no question about that, and she had infected the boy with it. But surely the child was as much his as he was hers, and he had hoped, he had desperately wanted to believe, that his own blood might have a mitigating effect. It was his side of the boy he had trusted in, that which he had sought to cultivate. But it appeared that he had fought a battle that had already been lost.

Frantic with rage, he had torn the books from their shelves, dragged them to the living room by means of the bedroom carpet, crammed them into the stove and burnt them.

When the boy came home for Christmas he was of age. On discovering what had happened to his precious books, he had started a flaming row, called Stephen a fascist and generally looked quite insane. They had shouted, fought, and hexed each other with bitter tenacity. Eventually Stephen had thrown the raging boy out on the street. It had felt like casting out a devil.

It was the first time Stephen had ever given up.

***