The Goblet of Fire Read online

  ‘You!’ he gasped.

  But Wormtail, who had finished conjuring the ropes, did not reply; he was busy checking the tightness of the cords, his fingers trembling uncontrollably, fumbling over the knots. Once sure that Harry was bound so tightly to the headstone that he couldn’t move an inch, Wormtail drew a length of some black material from the inside of his cloak and stuffed it roughly into Harry’s mouth; then, without a word, he turned from Harry and hurried away. Harry couldn’t make a sound, nor could he see where Wormtail had gone; he couldn’t turn his head to see beyond the headstone; he could see only what was right in front of him.

  Cedric’s body was lying some twenty feet away. Some way beyond him, glinting in the starlight, lay the Triwizard Cup. Harry’s wand was on the ground at his feet. The bundle of robes that Harry had thought was a baby was close by, at the foot of the grave. It seemed to be stirring fretfully. Harry watched it, and his scar seared with pain again … and he suddenly knew that he didn’t want to see what was in those robes … he didn’t want that bundle opened …

  He could hear noises at his feet. He looked down, and saw a gigantic snake slithering through the grass, circling the headstone where he was tied. Wormtail’s fast, wheezy breathing was growing louder again. It sounded as though he was forcing something heavy across the ground. Then he came back within Harry’s range of vision, and Harry saw him pushing a stone cauldron to the foot of the grave. It was full of what seemed to be water – Harry could hear it slopping around – and it was larger than any cauldron Harry had ever used; a great stone belly large enough for a full-grown man to sit in.

  The thing inside the bundle of robes on the ground was stirring more persistently, as though it was trying to free itself. Now Wormtail was busying himself at the bottom of the cauldron with a wand. Suddenly there were crackling flames beneath it. The large snake slithered away into the darkness.

  The liquid in the cauldron seemed to heat very fast. The surface began not only to bubble, but also to send out fiery sparks, as though it was on fire. Steam was thickening, blurring the outline of Wormtail tending the fire. The movements beneath the cloak became more agitated. And Harry heard the high, cold voice again.

  ‘Hurry!’

  The whole surface of the water was alight with sparks now. It might have been encrusted with diamonds.

  ‘It is ready, master.’

  ‘Now …’ said the cold voice.

  Wormtail pulled open the robes on the ground, revealing what was inside them, and Harry let out a yell that was strangled in the wad of material blocking his mouth.

  It was as though Wormtail had flipped over a stone, and revealed something ugly, slimy and blind – but worse, a hundred times worse. The thing Wormtail had been carrying had the shape of a crouched human child, except that Harry had never seen anything less like a child. It was hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs were thin and feeble, and its face – no child alive ever had a face like that – was flat and snake-like, with gleaming red eyes.

  The thing seemed almost helpless; it raised its thin arms, put them around Wormtail’s neck, and Wormtail lifted it. As he did so, his hood fell back, and Harry saw the look of revulsion on Wormtail’s weak, pale face in the firelight as he carried the creature to the rim of the cauldron. For one moment, Harry saw the evil, flat face illuminated in the sparks dancing on the surface of the potion. And then Wormtail lowered the creature into the cauldron; there was a hiss, and it vanished below the surface; Harry heard its frail body hit the bottom with a soft thud.

  Let it drown, Harry thought, his scar burning almost past endurance, please … let it drown …

  Wormtail was speaking. His voice shook, he seemed frightened beyond his wits. He raised his wand, closed his eyes, and spoke to the night. ‘Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son!’

  The surface of the grave at Harry’s feet cracked. Horrified, Harry watched as a fine trickle of dust rose into the air at Wormtail’s command, and fell softly into the cauldron. The diamond surface of the water broke and hissed; it sent sparks in all directions, and turned a vivid, poisonous-looking blue.

  And now Wormtail was whimpering. He pulled a long, thin, shining silver dagger from inside his robes. His voice broke into petrified sobs. ‘Flesh – of the servant – w-willingly given – you will – revive – your master.’

  He stretched his right hand out in front of him – the hand with the missing finger. He gripped the dagger very tightly in his left hand, and swung it upwards.

  Harry realised what Wormtail was about to do a second before it happened – he closed his eyes as tightly as he could, but he could not block the scream that pierced the night, that went through Harry as though he had been stabbed with the dagger too. He heard something fall to the ground, heard Wormtail’s anguished panting, then a sickening splash, as something was dropped into the cauldron. Harry couldn’t bear to look … but the potion had turned a burning red, the light of it shone through Harry’s closed eyelids …

  Wormtail was gasping and moaning with agony. Not until Harry felt Wormtail’s anguished breath on his face did he realise that Wormtail was right in front of him.

  ‘B-blood of the enemy … forcibly taken … you will … resurrect your foe.’

  Harry could do nothing to prevent it, he was tied too tightly … squinting down, struggling hopelessly at the ropes binding him, he saw the shining silver dagger shaking in Wormtail’s remaining hand. He felt its point penetrate the crook of his right arm, and blood seeping down the sleeve of his torn robes. Wormtail, still panting with pain, fumbled in his pocket for a glass phial and held it to Harry’s cut, so that a dribble of blood fell into it.

  He staggered back to the cauldron with Harry’s blood. He poured it inside. The liquid within turned, instantly, a blinding white. Wormtail, his job done, dropped to his knees beside the cauldron, then slumped sideways and lay on the ground, cradling the bleeding stump of his arm, gasping and sobbing.

  The cauldron was simmering, sending its diamond sparks in all directions, so blindingly bright that it turned all else to velvety blackness. Nothing happened …

  Let it have drowned, Harry thought, let it have gone wrong …

  And then, suddenly, the sparks emanating from the cauldron were extinguished. A surge of white steam billowed thickly from the cauldron instead, obliterating everything in front of Harry, so that he couldn’t see Wormtail or Cedric or anything but vapour hanging in the air … it’s gone wrong, he thought … it’s drowned … please … please let it be dead ….

  But then, through the mist in front of him, he saw, with an icy surge of terror, the dark outline of a man, tall and skeletally thin, rising slowly from inside the cauldron.

  ‘Robe me,’ said the high, cold voice from behind the steam, and Wormtail, sobbing and moaning, still cradling his mutilated arm, scrambled to pick up the black robes from the ground, got to his feet, reached up, and pulled them one-handed over his master’s head.

  The thin man stepped out of the cauldron, staring at Harry … and Harry stared back into the face that had haunted his nightmares for three years. Whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes, and a nose that was as flat as a snake’s, with slits for nostrils …

  Lord Voldemort had risen again.

  — CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE —

  The Death Eaters

  Voldemort looked away from Harry, and began examining his own body. His hands were like large, pale spiders; his long white fingers caressed his own chest, his arms, his face; the red eyes, whose pupils were slits, like a cat’s, gleamed still more brightly through the darkness. He held up his hands, and flexed the fingers, his expression rapt and exultant. He took not the slightest notice of Wormtail, who lay twitching and bleeding on the ground, nor of the great snake, which had slithered back into sight, and was circling Harry again, hissing. Voldemort slipped one of those unnaturally long-fingered hands into a deep pocket, and drew out a wand. He caressed it gen
tly, too; and then he raised it, and pointed it at Wormtail, who was lifted off the ground, and thrown against the headstone where Harry was tied; he fell to the foot of it and lay there, crumpled up and crying. Voldemort turned his scarlet eyes upon Harry, laughing a high, cold, mirthless laugh.

  Wormtail’s robes were shining with blood now; he had wrapped the stump of his arm in them. ‘My Lord …’ he choked, ‘my Lord … you promised … you did promise …’

  ‘Hold out your arm,’ said Voldemort lazily.

  ‘Oh, master … thank you, master …’

  He extended the bleeding stump, but Voldemort laughed again. ‘The other arm, Wormtail.’

  ‘Master, please … please …’

  Voldemort bent down, and pulled out Wormtail’s left arm; he forced the sleeve of Wormtail’s robes up past his elbow, and Harry saw something upon the skin there, something like a vivid red tattoo – a skull, with a snake protruding from its mouth – the same image that had appeared in the sky at the Quidditch World Cup: the Dark Mark. Voldemort examined it carefully, ignoring Wormtail’s uncontrollable weeping.

  ‘It is back,’ he said softly, ‘they will all have noticed it … and now, we shall see … now we shall know …’

  He pressed his long, white forefinger to the brand on Wormtail’s arm.

  The scar on Harry’s forehead seared with a sharp pain again, and Wormtail let out a fresh howl: Voldemort removed his fingers from Wormtail’s Mark, and Harry saw that it had turned jet black.

  A look of cruel satisfaction on his face, Voldemort straightened up, threw back his head, and stared around at the dark graveyard.

  ‘How many will be brave enough to return when they feel it?’ he whispered, his gleaming red eyes fixed upon the stars. ‘And how many will be foolish enough to stay away?’

  He began to pace up and down before Harry and Wormtail, eyes sweeping the graveyard all the while. After a minute or so, he looked down at Harry again, a cruel smile twisting his snake-like face.

  ‘You stand, Harry Potter, upon the remains of my late father,’ he hissed softly. ‘A Muggle and a fool … very like your dear mother. But they both had their uses, did they not? Your mother died to defend you as a child … and I killed my father, and see how useful he has proved himself, in death …’

  Voldemort laughed again. Up and down he paced, looking all around him as he walked, and the snake continued to circle in the grass.

  ‘You see that house upon the hillside, Potter? My father lived there. My mother, a witch who lived here in this village, fell in love with him. But he abandoned her when she told him what she was … he didn’t like magic, my father …

  ‘He left her and returned to his Muggle parents before I was even born, Potter, and she died giving birth to me, leaving me to be raised in a Muggle orphanage … but I vowed to find him … I revenged myself upon him, that fool who gave me his name … Tom Riddle …’

  Still he paced, his red eyes darting from grave to grave.

  ‘Listen to me, reliving family history …’ he said quietly. ‘Why, I am growing quite sentimental … But look, Harry! My true family returns …’

  The air was suddenly full of the swishing of cloaks. Between graves, behind the yew tree, in every shadowy space, wizards were Apparating. All of them were hooded and masked. And one by one they moved forwards … slowly, cautiously, as though they could hardly believe their eyes. Voldemort stood in silence, waiting for them. Then one of the Death Eaters fell to his knees, crawled towards Voldemort, and kissed the hem of his black robes.

  ‘Master … master …’ he murmured.

  The Death Eaters behind him did the same; each of them approaching Voldemort on his knees, and kissing his robes, before backing away and standing up, forming a silent circle, which enclosed Tom Riddle’s grave, Harry, Voldemort, and the sobbing and twitching heap that was Wormtail. Yet they left gaps in the circle, as though waiting for more people. Voldemort, however, did not seem to expect more. He looked around at the hooded faces, and though there was no wind, a rustling seemed to run around the circle, as though it had shivered.

  ‘Welcome, Death Eaters,’ said Voldemort quietly. ‘Thirteen years … thirteen years since last we met. Yet you answer my call as though it was yesterday … we are still united under the Dark Mark, then! Or are we?’

  He put back his terrible face and sniffed, his slit-like nostrils widening.

  ‘I smell guilt,’ he said. ‘There is a stench of guilt upon the air.’

  A second shiver ran around the circle, as though each member of it longed, but did not dare, to step back from him.

  ‘I see you all, whole and healthy, with your powers intact – such prompt appearances! – and I ask myself … why did this band of wizards never come to the aid of their master, to whom they swore eternal loyalty?’

  No one spoke. No one moved except Wormtail, who was upon the ground, still sobbing over his bleeding arm.

  ‘And I answer myself,’ whispered Voldemort, ‘they must have believed me broken, they thought I was gone. They slipped back among my enemies, and they pleaded innocence, and ignorance, and bewitchment …

  ‘And then I ask myself, but how could they have believed I would not rise again? They, who knew the steps I took, long ago, to guard myself against mortal death? They, who had seen proofs of the immensity of my power, in the times when I was mightier than any wizard living?

  ‘And I answer myself, perhaps they believed a still-greater power could exist, one that could vanquish even Lord Voldemort … perhaps they now pay allegiance to another … perhaps that champion of commoners, of Mudbloods and Muggles, Albus Dumbledore?’

  At the mention of Dumbledore’s name, the members of the circle stirred, and some muttered and shook their heads.

  Voldemort ignored them. ‘It is a disappointment to me … I confess myself disappointed …’

  One of the men suddenly flung himself forwards, breaking the circle. Trembling from head to foot, he collapsed at Voldemort’s feet.

  ‘Master!’ he shrieked. ‘Master, forgive me! Forgive us all!’

  Voldemort began to laugh. He raised his wand. ‘Crucio!’

  The Death Eater on the ground writhed and shrieked; Harry was sure the sound must carry to the houses around … let the police come, he thought desperately … anyone … anything …

  Voldemort raised his wand. The tortured Death Eater lay flat upon the ground, gasping.

  ‘Get up, Avery,’ said Voldemort softly. ‘Stand up. You ask for forgiveness? I do not forgive. I do not forget. Thirteen long years … I want thirteen years’ repayment before I forgive you. Wormtail here has paid some of his debt already, have you not, Wormtail?’

  He looked down at Wormtail, who continued to sob.

  ‘You returned to me, not out of loyalty, but out of fear of your old friends. You deserve this pain, Wormtail. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, master,’ moaned Wormtail, ‘please, master … please …’

  ‘Yet you helped return me to my body,’ said Voldemort coolly, watching Wormtail sob on the ground. ‘Worthless and traitorous as you are, you helped me … and Lord Voldemort rewards his helpers …’

  Voldemort raised his wand again and whirled it through the air. A streak of what looked like molten silver hung shining in the wand’s wake. Momentarily shapeless, it writhed and then formed itself into a gleaming replica of a human hand, bright as moonlight, which soared downwards and fixed itself upon Wormtail’s bleeding wrist.

  Wormtail’s sobbing stopped abruptly. His breathing harsh and ragged, he raised his head and stared in disbelief at the silver hand, now attached seamlessly to his arm, as though he were wearing a dazzling glove. He flexed the shining fingers, then, trembling, picked up a small twig on the ground, and crushed it into powder.

  ‘My Lord,’ he whispered. ‘Master … it is beautiful … thank you … thank you …’

  He scrambled forward on his knees and kissed the hem of Voldemort’s robes.

  ‘M
ay your loyalty never waver again, Wormtail,’ said Voldemort.

  ‘No, my Lord … never, my Lord …’

  Wormtail stood up and took his place in the circle, staring at his powerful new hand, his face still shining with tears. Voldemort now approached the man on Wormtail’s right.

  ‘Lucius, my slippery friend,’ he whispered, halting before him. ‘I am told that you have not renounced the old ways, though to the world you present a respectable face. You are still ready to take the lead in a spot of Muggle-torture, I believe? Yet you never tried to find me, Lucius … your exploits at the Quidditch World Cup were fun, I daresay … but might not your energies have been better directed towards finding and aiding your master?’

  ‘My Lord, I was constantly on the alert,’ came Lucius Malfoy’s voice swiftly from beneath the hood. ‘Had there been any sign from you, any whisper of your whereabouts, I would have been at your side immediately, nothing could have prevented me –’

  ‘And yet you ran from my Mark, when a faithful Death Eater sent it into the sky last summer?’ said Voldemort lazily, and Mr Malfoy stopped talking abruptly. ‘Yes, I know all about that, Lucius … you have disappointed me … I expect more faithful service in future.’

  ‘Of course, my Lord, of course … you are merciful, thank you …’

  Voldemort moved on, and stopped, staring at the space – large enough for two people – which separated Malfoy and the next man.

  ‘The Lestranges should stand here,’ said Voldemort quietly. ‘But they are entombed in Azkaban. They were faithful. They went to Azkaban rather than renounce me … when Azkaban is broken open, the Lestranges will be honoured beyond their dreams. The Dementors will join us … they are our natural allies … we will recall the banished giants … I shall have all my devoted servants returned to me, and an army of creatures whom all fear …’

  He walked on. Some of the Death Eaters he passed in silence, but he paused before others, and spoke to them.