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***
Before the world went black, she was looking at two women's faces, and a small creature covered in blood, and the cracked plaster ceiling of a London orphanage.
When she opened her eyes, she was looking up at a perfect sky, its celestial blue splashed with cotton-wool clouds. The sun shone warm on her skin. She felt at peace for the first time since September, when Tom had stormed out of their Knockturn Alley bedsit, taking care to kick her in the stomach as he did.
Maybe she would go to sleep. She'd just feed the baby first.
She rolled over onto her side, presuming she'd find the other Tom, scrubbed and swaddled, in a Moses basket by the bed.
What she saw instead was the dingy façade of the Hanged Man, and the shocked faces of a crowd of people looming over her.
‘You alright, love?’ said a man, with an enormous black moustache. He’d been the butcher once, she thought, back when she was really little. Or maybe the baker. Her father had avoided Muggle shops, but he'd always made sure to press a scrap or two into her and Morfin's grubby hands when the winter winds really started to bite.
But he’d died when she was still just a girl, torn to pieces in that Muggle war. They'd carved his name on a stone cross in the centre of the village, and her father had flogged her raw when she'd left a bunch of wilted daisies on it.
Surely that didn’t mean -
‘I’m meant to be in London,’ she said. The people exchanged a look.
‘Sorry, love,’ said a woman, in the long, trailing skirts of a Victorian, ‘but no. You’re meant to be here. You can't go back.’
‘But my boy. I need to get to my boy.’
There were sympathetic murmurs from the crowd.
‘He’ll be alright, love. It’s all out of your hands now,’ said the butcher-or-baker. 'Let me get you something to eat.'
***
They handed her a piece of paper.
Complications from childbirth, it read. Just like her own mother before her.
'What am I supposed to do now?' she asked the Victorian woman.
The woman shrugged. 'Whatever you want. This is your party.'
What she meant by that, it turned out, was that death suited those with active imaginations. Little Hangleton was filled with ridiculous houses - with pink walls or turrets or a stable full of elephants - which it would never have tolerated in real life. She discovered that her father, a serial fantasist, who had spent her entire childhood convinced that the family would imminently be restored to its former glory, had fashioned for himself a private, snake-filled island in the middle of Hangleton Water, on which he had built a solid gold house.
'How did he die?' she asked the Victorian woman.
'Starved to death about six weeks ago, the daft apeth. Couldn't even boil an egg.'
Merope wondered if she ought to feel ashamed about that. She decided the answer was no.
'Will I have to see him?'
'No. If you just ignore his stupid house it disappears.'
Merope spent the rest of the day standing by the lake-shore, watching the golden house flicker in and out of existence according to her whims. But, as the shadows began to lengthen, she knew she would have to find somewhere to rest for the night.
But she could not summon up a fabulous castle or shimmering palace. She had never had any experience of fairytales or fantasy, unless you counted the elaborate stories she had used to comfort herself after Tom left, all of which featured him turning up on her doorstep and offering to drink the Amortentia of his own free will.
Even in her dreams she was unloveable.
Perhaps that was to be expected. She had never had an inner life. She had never truly been free. Her entire destiny had been written out as a child - she would serve her father, and then when she was old enough she would be forced to bear children with Morfin, and then she would drag those children up in squalor until she died, toothless and lonely, an old woman who had never really lived a day.
Well, she had died a young woman, and her child had been born by a different man, but the outline remained the same. She had never been anywhere or seen anything or done anything which had truly made her happy. Even when Tom had been in love with her everything had been fragile, and she had never been able to picture the places he spoke of - Paris, Rome, Preston - as anything other than formless white light.
So, when she felt the universe nudging her to choose the place she would spend eternity, there was nothing else for it.
She walked up a dirt lane, the hedgerows foaming into being in front of her, until she came to a little gap in a pair of blackthorns. There, the shack, with its leaky roof and overgrown garden, waited for her, looking exactly the same as it had on the day she'd left it, hand in hand with Tom.
***
She inspected herself in the back of a frying pan - it didn’t occur to her to conjure a mirror - trying to see if she had changed since she was dead.
She hadn’t. She supposed that it was too much to ask for her looks to have been improved by the afterlife. Or maybe she was supposed to imagine any changes, maybe she was supposed to ask for eyes which focused or hair which did something other than hang, lank as an oil-slick, down her back.
Maybe she was supposed to ask to look like Cecilia, with the long, pale legs she had seen wrapped around Tom's waist while she was skulking about in the bluebell wood.
Oh well, no point dwelling on the past. She would make do with the face she had.
She thought that decision would have upset her more. It had not taken her long to realise - it had been apparent from the way Morfin gagged whenever he looked at her - that she was considered grotesque by both magical and Muggle standards, even when she was a little girl. The bright young things who hung around Tom were all short hair and tight curves, with pouting red lips and scandalously short dresses. They were real women, she had always thought, while she was just a thing, an attenuated slip of skin and hollows, with nothing beautiful to be found in the wasteland.
Tom had called her hideous, inhuman, unfathomable when he left. Not a woman, but a witch.
She'd still managed to die like a woman, though, hadn't she? And she still felt the phantom ache of the pregnancy which had finished her off.
But, nevertheless, still disoriented from her unceremonious dumping in the afterlife, she was glad of her body. It was still long and thin and shapeless, but it was hers. She welcomed it like an old - if unconventional - friend.
***
Time ticked on and her life in Heaven fell into the pattern it had on Earth. She went for long, meandering walks through the bluebell wood. She dipped her feet in the stream. She looked across the valley and imagined the brown-sugar glitter of the walls of the Riddle House, listening as the wind carried the spectre of Tom shouting at his servants across the veil between life and death, listening and hoping that she'd receive some evidence that he'd come to his senses and liberated his son from the orphanage.
The only difference between her afterlife and her life-life was that she was finally free from having to deal with her father and Morfin. She cooked what she wanted and ate when she liked. She slept in the bedroom, rather than in a nest of blankets on the kitchen floor. She mended the window frames, and imagined cheerful furniture and brightly-coloured pottery, and soon the shack looked like a real house. She dreamed of a garden, and a garden appeared.
She went into town and found that she had money. She bought a pair of gold hoops for her ears, and a red shawl with white roses on it. When it rained, she wished for a pair of shoes, and a set of chestnut-brown boots clattered onto the kitchen floor.
One day, a grey-and-white rabbit appeared in the garden and ate all the dandelions, before it hopped happily away.
***
A girl, with dirty-blonde hair and freckles and a threadbare grey dress, appeared at the garden gate one morning. She looked to be around thirteen. She was absolutely covered in blood.
'Excuse me,' she said, while Merope gazed at her in horror, 'do you know how I get to Isleworth?'
Merope found that she did. 'You need to walk to the end of the lane and then turn left. There's a bus stop.'
'Thank you. My grandma lives in Isleworth. I lived with her until I was three, but then she died of the Spanish Flu and I had to go into an orphanage. I'm going to go back to be with her now.'
Merope felt her blood run cold. 'Did they do this to you at the orphanage?'
The girl shook her head. 'No. I - something happened to me. In a cave. I can't remember it, but I know it was bad. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. I just wanted to make the nightmares stop.'
Merope gave her a cherry cake, to take with her on her long journey.
***
One day, Merope found herself suddenly doing everything for two people.
When she cooked, she served two plates, and she would sit and wait and wait and wait, until her own dinner was stone cold, before she accepted that no second person was coming to eat with her.
***
She returned from a walk one evening to find a girl sitting on her front step, blinking owlishly up at her through a pair of thick glasses. She was plump and pimply, and she was wearing a pair of shapeless black robes. A witch, then.
'How do I get back?' she said, in a sulky voice.
'You can't get back. You need to work out where you need to go on to.'
'I have to get back. Or Olive Hornby will tell everyone that I died in a toilet.'
'I don't think that matters now.'
'You're not listening, I have to go back.'
'You can't -'
'Argh!' said the girl, throwing up her hands. 'Nobody ever takes me seriously.'
And Merope watched as she stomped back up the lane, in entirely the wrong direction from the way she needed to go.
***
One day, a second bedroom materialised in the shack. It had white-washed walls and a black-and-white tiled floor, and contained no furniture other than a rickety iron bedstead, a wardrobe, and a hard wooden chair. She opened the wardrobe, and found nothing in it except an empty shoebox.
'This place needs some cheer,' she thought, and was unsurprised when a set of paint pots appeared in front of her.
It took her weeks to paint the mural, of all the wildflowers she saw in the woods. Then it took her weeks to knit a blanket for the bed. Then it took her weeks to fill the room with little trinkets she bought in town or found in the lanes.
Sometimes, she would lie on the narrow bed and cry. She didn't know why.
***
She stepped onto the lane one morning and walked right into a tall man in evening clothes. It took her several moments to realise who he was - he was so much older, and even thinner, than he had been the last time they'd seen each other.
He looked petrified. ‘Am I never to be free of you?’ he whispered.
'Tom -'
‘Even in death you’re torturing me. What will it take for you to leave me alone?’
'I -'
'I never wanted any of this! I was going to marry Cecilia and run the estate and be content. I was perfectly happy before you - you violated me.'
'But -'
'You've ruined my life. And you don't even care.'
He was right. She hadn't cared, never able to see herself as anything other than a victim of Tom's capacity for cruelty, famous across the village. But she did now, the force of her shame hitting her like a Muggle freight train.
'Tom, I'm so sorry.'
The words were insufficient. How could they be anything but?
'You can choose where you want to go,' she said to him. 'And I won't be able to follow you there. You'll be happy. Safe.'
He looked at her with his cold blue eyes. 'I want to go to Oxford.'
She remembered the conversation, one of the few genuine ones of their disastrous marriage, when Tom had told her about his time at university, and how he'd experienced peace for the first time floating down the Isis.
'At the stream, just before the wood,' she said to him, resisting the urge to stroke his beautiful raven's-wing hair, 'there will be a punt waiting.'
Tom nodded and started to walk, never taking his eyes off her.
'Wait,' she said, ignoring the fact that he flinched when she spoke. 'I just have to know. Did you go and get him? Tom? From the orphanage?’
‘Of course I bloody didn’t!’
‘You just left him there?’
‘Listen, that damned son of yours is the cause of all this!’
‘He’s your son too!’
‘Believe me, you can tell,’ said Tom, under his breath. ‘Although I didn’t get the impression he was grateful.’
The air was getting heavy, as if building towards a thunderstorm.
'I'll be off,' said Tom.
'Yes.'
'I - I didn't realise you'd died. I didn't know he was in a -'
'It's alright. I don't know why I expected you to.'
'Goodbye, then.'
‘Goodbye, Tom.’
***
Everywhere she went she saw magpies.
They were always in ones and fours.
***
Nobody visited for a while. Then she seemed to have a frankly enormous number of people coming to call. People from all walks of life and all corners of the world. Men, women, children. Wizards, witches, Muggles. All of them looking for directions.
She helped a fussy old woman who had been crammed into a silk corset find her way to Bath. ‘I was poisoned, if you can believe it, by the most beautiful boy you’ve ever seen,’ the woman said to her, in a scandalised voice. ‘And all I did was show him my locket.’
Merope hoped that wasn't a euphemism.
She told a family of peasants to walk across the valley, where, for some reason, she knew the Lancashire countryside would transform into Albania.
She embraced a sharp-faced woman, who had died of breast cancer, and gave her directions for Coleraine, unable to find the words to explain how grateful she would always be for the fact that she had held her hand while she was dying.
She wiped the face of a terribly young boy, who had drowned, and who kept asking for his mother, and told him where he could catch the Hogwarts Express.
***
She was awoken one morning by a hammering on the door.
She opened it to find Morfin. He looked withered, as though he had died by wasting away.
‘Where’s dad?’ he said, without preamble.
‘He lives in a gold house in the middle of Hangleton Water.’
‘Oh, yeah, I saw that.’
‘You can live with him. I don’t want you in here.’
Morfin trembled. ‘I’ve lost his ring, though. He’ll kill me for losing his ring.’
‘I don’t care. I sold his locket.’
‘You sold it? You little -’
‘I needed money. For my son.’
‘Your son is a waste of space.’
‘You could have gone to get him, you know. I gave him dad’s name.’
‘As if I’d have let a Mudblood into my house.’
‘Goodbye, Morfin,’ she said, as he stomped off down the lane to find their father.
***
She was preparing for bed, one dark October evening, when there was a tentative knock at the door.
‘Excuse me,’ said a young man - a boy, really - with unruly black hair, ‘do you know how we can get to Godric’s Hollow?’
He looked exhausted, as if he had been scraped out. A slim woman - no, a girl, really - with enormous green eyes, stood at his shoulder, in floods of tears.
This, Merope thought, was not an ordinary death.
The story, every terrifying, horrific detail, poured out while she sorted them their bus tickets. She was torn apart with grief for their son. She was struck by incandescent panic for Tom: he was a half-blood too; what if this Dark Lord, who had hunted the lovely young couple down for sport, decided to go after him?
'I just feel so guilty,' sobbed the girl. 'For leaving him.'
‘I died giving birth to my son,’ Merope said.
The woman hugged her. 'Maybe that's why you were the one to meet us.'
'Maybe.'
‘Do you think your son remembers you?’
She looked so desperate that Merope lied to her. ‘Yes. Of course he does. He thinks about me every single day.’
***
There was a lull in visitors for a while.
Then, a plump woman appeared, pushing her bleach-blonde hair out of her eyes. ‘I haven’t got the faintest idea where I’m supposed to be,’ she said.
‘How did you die?’ Merope asked her.
‘I haven’t the foggiest.’
‘Oh - er - right.’
‘I used to like going to Honeydukes. When I was alive.’
‘Take the right-hand path at the crossroads.’
***
A grizzly old man summoned the Riddle House, as it had been when it was whole and splendid, and took up residence in the gardener's cottage.
A solemn, handsome teenager wanted to go to Cornwall, and wait for his mother and father by the beach.
A hollow-eyed man with hair like straw wanted to go to the Quidditch World Cup.
***
'I'm coming, I'm coming,' said Merope, over the insistent fists hammering on her door.
A man with long brown hair and a haunted look in his eyes stood on her front step.
‘How do I get back?’ he barked. ‘To Earth. How do I get back?’
‘You can’t.’
‘But he’s going to kill Harry. I have to get back.’
‘You can’t get back. You have to move on.’
The man grabbed the front of her robes. 'You don't understand me. I have to get back or -'
There was the sound of a throat being cleared. The messy-haired young man she had met years ago was leaning over the garden gate. He appeared to be riding a Muggle motorcycle.
‘Hey - er - he’s with me,' he said, pointing at the wild-eyed man. 'Come on, Pads, I’ll explain everything.’
***
So many people seemed to be dying.
She got the story from one of them, a smug-looking man with an Eastern European accent, who wanted to spend eternity in his Siberian dacha.
The Dark Lord was back.
***
Merope was weeding when a man wandered into her garden.
‘Good morning, Mrs Riddle,’ he said, doffing his extravagant magenta hat.
‘Hello?’
‘My name is Albus Dumbledore.’
This meant nothing to Merope. She stared at the man, waiting for him to ask her for directions.
He seemed to have no intention of doing so. He simply hummed and started inspecting her delphiniums.
‘I must say,’ he said, after a while, ‘that the mechanics of death are absolutely fascinating. I suspect I shall not be bored.’
‘Er - right?’
‘Do you have any idea how I might get to Mould-on-the-Wold? I believe my sister is waiting for me there.’
Merope felt on firm ground again. ‘You just need to cross the river. A bridge will appear in the right place.’
‘Thank you.’
When he reached the garden gate, he turned to her. ‘I should say, Mrs Riddle, that I do not think it will be too long before Tom joins you.’
‘You know Tom?’
‘I know him very well. Far better than he thinks I do.’
‘How?’
‘He was my pupil. At Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.’
Merope's heart burst with pride. Her father had forbidden them from going to Hogwarts - too many Mudbloods - but she had heard all the stories about it. Tom had studied there. When he came to her, she would ask him to tell her everything.
‘What is he like?’ she asked, in a whisper.
Albus Dumbledore seemed to take a long while to decide what to say. ‘He is an extraordinary wizard. He has become quite famous.’
'Will he die because of this Dark Lord?'
'In a sense.'
***
Merope had never seen the lane busier than it was that spring evening. And she had never seen it so heartbreakingly full of children.
Luckily, eighteen years of fulfilling her father and Morfin's every whim had made her very good at multitasking.
She held the hand of a tiny, spindly boy who was terrified for his brother, while she gave a brave girl in glittery trainers directions to Harrods.
She helped a solid young man who had been burned to cinders find the farm he had tended as a child, while she comforted a fearful, freckly man who was demanding to see someone called George.
She gave a thin man a bouquet of lilies from her garden and told him how to get a train to Cokeworth, while grabbing a scrawny young man who was trying to run in the wrong direction and telling him he needed to go to King's Cross. Someone was expecting him.
She embraced two separate women who were crying over having left their babies behind, telling them the same lies she had told the green-eyed girl about their precious children always remembering them.
The first woman had riotous pink hair and a shell-shocked husband. 'I should have stayed at home,' she wailed. 'God, this is a shitter.'
The second had a haughty face and a mass of black curls. ‘I should have stayed at home,' she said, bitterly. 'Her father won’t want anything to do with her.'
‘I know the feeling.’
'Are you a pureblood?'
'Yes, but my son isn't.'
'Nor is my daughter. Although I haven't told him I know that. What’s your name?’
‘Merope.’
‘That’s a star.’
‘Yes.’
‘Everyone in my family is named after stars. Perhaps if I’d had another daughter, I would have named her Merope.’
***
She knew the battle had ended when the last child had climbed into a taxi. She had worked all night, and the dawn sky was the colour of strawberries.
Merope imagined a blanket and lay, exhausted, in the middle of the garden, letting the scent of roses and cherry blossom dance over her skin.
She did not fall asleep. For some reason, she knew not to. Instead, she waited, hardly daring to breathe, until the sun was high in the sky and she heard a rustle in the hedgerow.
'What has happened to me?' said a soft, unnatural voice. She could not see where it was coming from, but it made her break out into goosebumps.
'You're dead.'
'That's what I was afraid of.'
'You can choose where you -'
'This is where the Gaunts lived. In Little Hangleton.'
There was a swirl of wind, and a man - no, a monster, really - materialised in front of the shack, regarding her coldly through unblinking red eyes. He looked nothing like either of them. He looked like nothing other than Death.
And, suddenly, all her excitement to meet her son vanished, and she knew exactly who he was and what he had done, and she was ashamed.
'How could you?' she said to him, voice trembling. 'How could you live with yourself?'
He sneered. 'I don't see why how I conduct myself is any of your -'
She wanted to hit him, to curse him. She wanted to send him away; to send him back, or down, or out, or whatever it would take to get him away from her. She wanted to kill him again. She wanted to see him punished.
But then his expression morphed, as he realised why he was there, and the look of mingled shock and awe - even on his featureless death-mask of a face - was all Tom. It was the look he had worn the first time she had shown him magic.
'Mum?' he said, and the word sounded absurd in his snake's voice, and Merope was unable to stop herself from bursting into tears.
She wanted to turn him away. That would be the right reaction. That would be the normal thing to do, wouldn't it?
But he was hers. No matter what else he was, he was hers. And she'd been waiting such a long time.
There was really nothing else for it.
And so, decades later than she had initially planned, she stepped forward, and took her son in her arms.
***