The Morgoth in the Details

It was raining in Liverpool, which was the first thing that had gone right all day.

John Constantine stood under a broken streetlamp at the corner of two roads that nobody in their right mind would have walked down at a little after eleven at night. He had a white Tesco carrier bag in one hand. He had been awake, by his best reckoning, for more than twenty-eight hours, and the reckoning had been made difficult by the fact that most of those hours had happened in other places, in the wrong order.

He had started the day in a desert. He had come home by the back roads, the old ones that ran from one midnight crossroads to the next round the turning of the world, and every one of them had taken something out of him. You stood at a crossroads where four ways met, with salt on your shoes and the right words in your mouth. You stepped across. Then you came out at a crossroads where four other ways met in another country, with a sick feeling in your stomach like a lift that had dropped a floor. It worked best at midnight. At any other hour it still worked, but it charged you extra, and he had paid extra all the way home. It was cheaper than a plane. It was quicker than a plane. On the other hand, a plane didn’t leave you wondering, every time, whether some nasty thing had been waiting on the other side with its mouth open.

Nothing had been, tonight. In John’s experience, that sort of luck went on the slate, and sooner or later somebody always came round to collect.

He needed a fag.

He needed one so badly that his hands had started to shake. He set the carrier bag down between his feet, very carefully, the way another man might have put down a baby or a bomb, and he fished a crumpled packet of Silk Cut out of his raincoat. He shook one out. He lit it, cupping the flame against the rain, and he drew the lighter back from his face with the sort of reverence most people saved for church.

Then, because there was no rest for the wicked, and he was very wicked indeed, he reached into his inside pocket with his other hand. He brought out his wand.

It lived in there between a pawn ticket and a packet of chewing gum. It was a long time since it had seen much use. He held it out over the gutter, as you were meant to, like a man trying to hail a taxi with a stick.

He could have Apparated, in theory. After the day he had had, he would have arrived in Hogsmeade in several instalments, and not all of them in the right order. The old roads were no use, either. None of them ran within twenty miles of Hogwarts. The castle itself had seen to that, a thousand years ago, and John didn’t blame it.

He had the fag halfway back to his mouth for the first proper drag when the night went BANG.

A great purple triple-decker bus came out of nowhere, so close that the wind of it flattened his coat against his legs. It slammed to a halt a yard from his shoes, with its headlamps blazing and its brakes shrieking. A little shower of gutter water sloshed over his toes. The doors flew open. A conductor in a purple uniform leapt down the steps. He spread his arms wide and began to address the dark street at the top of his voice.

‘Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Just stick out your wand hand, step on board, and we can take you anywhere you want to go. My name is Stan Shunpike, and I will be your conductor this- oi! Oi!’

He had seen the cigarette.

‘Non-smokin’ bus, this is, mate! Says so on the door! Put that out, or you ain’t gettin’ on!’

John looked at him.

The conductor couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. He had ears like the handles on a trophy and a scattering of spots across his chin. He was pointing at the fag with the righteous fury of a curate who has found a dirty magazine in the vestry.

Bloody universe, John thought, quite clearly. It had brought him, John Constantine, to a wet corner in the city of his birth at eleven at night, with a cigarette he had not been allowed to smoke and a book he had not wanted to steal. Bloody spotty Cockney gobshite, he thought next, at Stan. Him an’ his mam both. Most of all, he thought about Albus Dumbledore, with a long, slow, private bitterness that would have stripped paint.

He didn’t say any of it. He dropped the fag in the gutter, where it hissed, and ground it out under his heel.

‘Sound,’ he said. ‘Sorry, la. Didn’t see the sign.’

‘’S on the door,’ said Stan, mollified, and jerked a thumb at a little brass plate that said so. ‘Where you off to, then?’

‘Hogsmeade,’ said John. ‘Just outside Hogwarts, if it’s all the same to youse.’

‘’Ogsmeade!’ Stan whistled. ‘That’s a fair old way, that is. Still, it’s eleven Sickles wherever you’re goin’. Firteen an’ you get ’ot chocolate.’

John put his hand into the pocket where he kept money and pulled out a fistful of it.

That was the trouble with money, in his line of work. You picked it up wherever you went. He sorted through the handful under the bus’s headlamps while Stan watched, and the rain dripped off the end of his nose. There were three American Dragots, heavy and bronze, with an eagle stamped on them that looked as though it wanted a fight. There was a Japanese coin with a hole in the middle. There was a little square of something that might once have been silver and had certainly once belonged to a man who was now dead. There was a token from a launderette in Peckham. There was a halfpenny from before decimalisation, and a smooth black stone that was very definitely not money, which he put back in his pocket quickly before Stan could ask about it.

He had been a wizard for thirty years, near enough, and he had never got the hang of wizards’ money. Twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle. Seventeen Sickles to a Galleon. It was like something a mad uncle had made up at Christmas to keep the kids quiet.

At last he found eleven Sickles, mostly from the lining of his coat, and counted them into Stan’s hand.

‘Ta,’ said Stan, beaming. ‘On you get, then.’

John picked up his carrier bag and got on.

There were no seats. There were brass bedsteads instead, half a dozen of them, lined up beside the curtained windows like a ward in a cottage hospital, with candles flickering in brackets beside every one. Most of the beds were empty. Right at the back, a tiny wizard in a nightcap was snoring with his mouth open. A narrow wooden staircase went up from beside the driver, towards whatever horrors lived on the upper floors.

The driver sat in an armchair in front of the steering wheel. He was an elderly wizard with glasses as thick as the bottoms of milk bottles, and he gave John a slow nod.

‘That’s Ern,’ said Stan. ‘Ern, this gent’s for ’Ogsmeade.’

‘Ar,’ said Ern.

John sat down on the edge of the bed nearest the staircase. He put the carrier bag on the mattress beside him. Then he laid his hand on it, flat, and kept it there.

‘Take ’er away, Ern,’ said Stan.

There was another tremendous BANG. John was flung backwards across the bed so violently that his head hit the brass rail. By the time he had got himself upright again, swearing, the soaking wet corner in Liverpool had gone, and the Knight Bus was hurtling down a moonlit lane between two black hedges, somewhere he didn’t recognise at all.

‘Nottingham,’ said Stan, helpfully, from his armchair. ‘Got a lady wants pickin’ up in Nottingham, then it’s Wales, then we’ll see. You ain’t in an ’urry, are you?’

‘No,’ said John, who was in a great hurry to have the whole thing over with, and in none at all to arrive.

He braced his feet against the bedstead opposite. Then he looked down at the carrier bag under his hand.

It was an ordinary bag. It was the thin, white, slightly see-through sort that you got with a pint of milk and a loaf. You could have carried the Crown Jewels about in it without anybody looking twice. What it actually held was a book. It was a big, heavy, old one, bound in brown leather, with a single word stamped into the front in gold.

Myst

John didn’t like it.

He didn’t like what he knew about it, and he liked what he didn’t know about it even less. He had done his reading before he went over, as much of it as there was to do, which wasn’t much. Who had written this particular book, he hadn’t the faintest idea. There had been a people called the D’ni. That was about as far as anybody who cared to know agreed. They had lived for ten thousand years in an enormous cavern under the desert in New Mexico, isolated from the muggle and magical tribes above, they’d created whole sciences and technology centuries ahead of those who lived above, and they had known how to write books that were doors. You wrote a world into the pages, if you were good enough. Then you opened another book with a picture of that world in it. You laid your hand on the picture, and you went there. There was no wand involved, nor anything a wizard would have called a spell. Even though some would say it was. He knew that the D’ni people being some kind of magical race or human offshoot, was a topic of some debate among the four or so people who cared to debate it.

Then, about two hundred years ago, the D’ni had fallen, some disease spread and killed the lot apparently. Their cavern had stood empty ever since.

It wasn’t empty any longer. Somebody had found the way in. There was a dig going on out there now, under the desert, run by a handful of amateurs who meant well with clipboards and good intentions, which in John’s experience was the most dangerous combination in the world. Things were coming up out of that hole. Some of them were books like this one. Most of them had gone straight out of the back door into the hands of whoever would pay for them, the way things always did.

They were knocking about all over the place by now, in junk shops and rich men’s glass cases, waiting for some idiot to open one up for a look at the picture. Ordinary idiots John could live with. It was the powerful ones that kept him awake at night, because there was never any shortage of those.

In America, a thing like that usually drew flies. There was the organization that would prefer you wouldn’t know their name was Delta Green, with their nice suits and their nasty smiles. There was whatever was left of Majestic 12, if anything was. There was even the SCP Foundation, those nutters with their cells, their numbers and their filing cabinets. They collected dangerous objects, dangerous people and the occasional demon the way little boys collected football cards. John had got in and out before any of them had done more than park a van up the road. That was something, at least.

Some of it was luck. The rest was that he had been told exactly where to go.

He had been told by Albus bloody Dumbledore.

John shut his eyes.

Like most of John’s troubles, it went back to a demon. This one had turned up in 1985.

It had been a big one. It had been a very old one. It had fed on light, the way some things feed on fear, and John had needed something that could take the light away from it before it took the world’s. There was only one object he knew of that could do that. It belonged to the Headmaster of Hogwarts. It looked like a silver cigarette lighter, and Dumbledore called it a Deluminator. One click and it sucked every light in a street into itself, like a child sucking up spaghetti.

So John had nicked it, out of the old man’s own pocket, at a Ministry dinner he had gatecrashed for the purpose.

In fairness, he had given it back the very next week, with a bit of scorching on one side and the demon safely put away in a place where it wouldn’t be troubling anybody for a thousand years. He had even tried to say sorry. John Constantine did not say sorry to many people. Especially to their face. He had stood in the back room of the Hog’s Head, with a goat looking in at the window, and tried to say it out loud, like a schoolboy.

It had made no difference at all.

People thought Dumbledore was a kindly old man with a long beard and a soft spot for sweets. People were wrong. John had seen him angry exactly once, that day in the Hog’s Head, and he had no wish to see it again. Dumbledore had let him get about three words of the apology out. Then he had shouted him down, in language John wouldn’t have thought a headmaster knew. He hadn’t hexed him, quite. Afterwards, he had put the whole business away in his desk drawer, like a man putting a good cheque away for a rainy day.

Eight years later, it had rained.

So here was John Constantine, heading back to Hogwarts.

He hadn’t set foot in the place since the day he left school. On that last morning he had stood on the front steps with his trunk and bellowed it at the castle: ‘I’m never comin’ back to this dump, d’you hear me? Never!’ He thought about it as little as he possibly could. That was a great deal less than you might expect, for a man who had once spent seven years there. He didn’t think about the long tables, or the floating candles, or the ceiling that looked like the sky. He most definitely did not think about the dungeons.

The Knight Bus banged. John’s eyes came open. His hand tightened on the bag, and for a moment, in the swinging candlelight, it was 1964 again.

They had been put in a small chamber off the entrance hall to wait. There were thirty or forty of them, all first years, all in brand new black robes, packed in tighter than the Kop on derby day. A stern witch with her hair in a bun had told them to smarten themselves up. Then she had gone away, and left them to frighten each other.

John Constantine was eleven years old and small for it. He was frightened, though he had decided on the train that nobody would ever know it. He had grown up in a terraced house in Liverpool with a father who blamed him, every day of his life, for killing his mother by being born. John had been knocked across a kitchen by a grown man more times than he could count. After that, a hat shouldn’t have seemed like much to worry about. It did, all the same.

The boy next to him had plainly never been knocked across anything in his life. He looked ready to faint.

He was a thin, pale little thing with white-blond hair, even smaller than John, and he was shaking. His hands were clasped in front of him so tightly that the knuckles had gone yellow. Every time somebody behind them whispered the word troll, he flinched.

John looked at him for a while. Then he nudged him.

‘You all right, la?’

The boy jumped about a foot.

‘I- I’m p-perfectly well, th-thank you.’

‘You look it,’ said John. ‘You look like someone’s told you the hat bites.’

‘D-does it?’

‘Nah.’ John considered. ‘Well. It might. But only if you’re a Tory.’

The boy stared at him. John might as well have been talking Gobbledegook.

‘They s-say,’ he whispered, ‘that you have to f-fight a troll. To get s-sorted. M-my cousin said.’

‘Your cousin’s having you on,’ said John. ‘Where would they keep a troll? In the bogs?’ He jerked his head at the door. ‘Anyway, if there’s a troll out there, I’ll go first. I’ll tell it you’re only little and you’re no good to eat. Then I’ll flog it a snide watch while it’s not lookin’.’

For a moment the boy simply gaped. Then, quite suddenly, he laughed. It was a high, startled, unpractised sort of laugh, as though he didn’t get to do it very often.

John grinned at him. He had been told, at home, that he had a face that could talk a bishop out of his trousers. It was usually said with a belt in the other hand. It was nice, for once, to use it on somebody who laughed.

‘John,’ he said, and stuck out his hand. ‘John Constantine.’

The boy looked at the hand for a second. Nobody had ever offered him one before, by the look of it. Then he shook it, very formally.

‘L-Lucius Malfoy,’ he said. He drew himself up, and some of the shaking went out of him. ‘Of the n-noble and ancient house of M-Malfoy.’

‘Ooh, get you,’ said John. ‘Of the noble and ancient house of number seventeen, me. Two up, two down, and a lav in the yard.’

Lucius laughed again. This time it sounded more like a real one.

Then the stern witch came back, and they were led out into the Great Hall.

John had been listening on the train. He had listened to the older ones in the corridors, too, and to the twins in his compartment, who had cousins in every house. He had worked it all out. Gryffindor was for the brave ones, which meant the thick ones who didn’t know any better. Hufflepuff was for the nice ones. Slytherin was for the posh ones with the long family trees. Ravenclaw was for the clever ones.

John had always known he was clever. He had been clever enough to stay out of his dad’s way most nights, and that took real brains. He was going to be a Ravenclaw. He had more or less made up his mind about it.

‘Constantine, John!’

He walked up to the stool with his chin in the air. He sat down. The witch with the bun lowered the hat over his head.

It had barely touched his hair.

‘SLYTHERIN!’ shouted the hat.

John sat there for a second, too surprised to move. Then he got up and walked to the table that was clapping for him. It was clapping rather slowly, he thought, as though it had just been handed a parcel and wasn’t sure what was in it.

He sat down at the end of the bench. A few minutes later the hat shouted ‘SLYTHERIN!’ again. Lucius Malfoy came hurrying down the Hall towards him, pink with relief, and squeezed on to the bench at his side.

‘Y-you’re here,’ he said. ‘Oh, g-good. I’m so glad you’re here.’

They were friends from that moment. They would stay friends for a good long while yet.

There was only one problem, and it took John until the pudding to notice it.

‘Constantine,’ said the prefect at the top of the table. He was a tall, smooth, glossy sort of boy, with a voice like expensive cutlery. ‘I don’t know the name. What’s your father?’

‘A drunk,’ said John.

There was some laughter. The prefect didn’t join in.

‘I meant,’ he said, ‘what sort of wizard is he?’

‘He isn’t one,’ said John. ‘He’s a docker, when he’s in work. Me mam’s dead. She wasn’t one either.’

The laughter stopped.

It stopped all the way down the table, in a sort of ripple, the way the sound in a room stops when somebody drops a plate. John looked round at the faces. He didn’t understand it yet. He would understand it very soon.

He was a Muggleborn in Slytherin. It almost never happened. Nobody at that table could remember a time it had happened, and that night, in the dungeon dormitory, they made it quite clear that they did not intend it to happen again.

They started on his first night.

His bed had been charmed so that it tipped him out on to the stone floor every hour, on the hour, until dawn. On his second morning, he found that every one of his school robes had shrunk to the size of a doll’s. He had to go to his first Potions lesson in his school jumper and grey flannel trousers. The whole class sniggered, while old Slughorn peered at him over his waistcoat as though he were an interesting stain. In the third week, somebody stole the letter his dad had sent back with the school owl. A boy from the sixth year read it aloud to everybody at the Slytherin table, doing the accent. ‘Don’t bother coming home at Christmas, lad,’ he read, while the whole table howled. ‘Nobody’ll notice if you don’t come home at all.’

John didn’t cry. He had stopped doing that when he was six.

At Hallowe’en they locked him in a broom cupboard in the dungeons and forgot to let him out until the following lunchtime. In second year, somebody put a Jelly-Legs Jinx on him at the top of the marble staircase, in front of half the school. In his third year, a gang of fifth years dangled him by his ankles out of a tower window over the lake, for so long that the giant squid came up to have a look at him. They painted MUDBLOOD across the lid of his trunk in letters a foot high. When he scrubbed it off, it came back again the next morning, in a different colour.

The trouble was that John fought back. He fought back cleverly.

He had always had a sharp tongue and a nasty imagination. At Hogwarts, both of them grew sharper by the week. When a boy called Rookwood shrank his robes, John put a powder he had found in the back of the potions cupboard into Rookwood’s underpants. Rookwood scratched for a month. When the boy from the sixth year read his dad’s letter out at breakfast, John waited until Valentine’s Day. Then he stole the boy’s own love letter, a dreadful thing full of poetry, and pinned it to the noticeboard in the Entrance Hall, with the name of the girl in the margin. The girl laughed for a week. The boy never forgave him.

John always paid them back with interest. It was never enough. It only made them try harder.

By fourth year it was proper hexes in empty corridors. By fifth, somebody had put something in his pumpkin juice that kept him in the hospital wing for nine days, with his skin going slowly green.

Then there were the exams.

John was clever. He could have passed every one of them honestly, if he had cared to put the work in. The thing was, it took far less effort to cheat, and it was safer, too. If you cheated, you knew what was coming. You didn’t have to sit there in the Great Hall and hope.

So he cheated. He cheated beautifully. The examiners put Anti-Cheating Charms on the quills, and he worked out how to get round the charms in his second year. They put wards round the Hall to catch notes, whispers and copied answers. John found the gaps in the wards like water finds the gaps in a roof. He was never once caught. Everybody knew anyway.

If a pure-blood had done it, the Slytherins would have sniggered along with him and called it cunning. Coming from John, it was the work of a filthy little Mudblood cheat.

He supposed it had made him, in the end. It wasn’t the only thing that had. His life had been hard well before Hogwarts, and it had been harder since. But it was Hogwarts, more than anything, that had taught him to sit with his back to the wall. It had taught him that everybody was lying to you, and that the only real question was about what.

It would have been all right, he thought, if Lucius had stuck by him.

For a long time, Lucius had.

Lucius stayed small and quiet for years, stammer included. The other Slytherins picked on him for it, as well as for his choice of friend. He put up with it without a word of complaint. He sat next to John in every lesson and at every meal for four years. In fifth year he came and sat at the end of John’s bed in the hospital wing, reading aloud, while John’s skin went green. He had been, John thought, the best friend a boy could have had.

There had been one thing, though.

In public, Lucius had always said what every other Slytherin said. Blood mattered. Some families were better than others. Muggleborns were a pity, at best, and a danger at worst. John had heard him say it in the common room, a hundred times, with his chin up, sounding exactly like his father.

In private, Lucius always said the same thing afterwards.

‘You’re d-different, though, John. You know that. You’re an exception.’

‘Ta, Lucius,’ John had always said, with a grin. He had never told Lucius what it was like to hear it. He had barely admitted it to himself. It had felt, every single time, like being patted on the head and told you were a very good dog.

Then they had both turned fifteen.

It happened to the two of them in the same summer. They had gone home small, skinny, spotty boys. They came back to school in September tall, broad in the shoulder and, to their own astonishment, handsome.

That was when the girls had started.

The Slytherin girls held out longest. The Hufflepuffs went first, then the Ravenclaws, then even a few Gryffindors, who took to looking at John across the library with looks that made his ears go hot. He wasn’t sure, at first, what it was they saw. Then he worked it out. He was the bad lad. He was the Slytherin rebel, the boy from the docks who smoked behind the greenhouses and swore like his father. He played Muggle records in the empty classroom on the third floor, on an old Dansette he had charmed, with a great deal of swearing, to run without electricity. It was the Stones, mostly, because every lad in Liverpool had a cousin who had been at school with a Beatle, and John wasn’t giving them the satisfaction. There was some blues, too, and a few things that wouldn’t have a name for another ten years. He wore his tie loose and his hair long. When a teacher told him off, he said, ‘Fair enough, Professor,’ and did it again the next day.

To a pure-blood girl who had grown up on harp music and table manners, it was like being offered a cigarette by a pirate. It was all Muggle, which made it forbidden. That made it irresistible. Even the occasional Slytherin girl crept up to the third floor when she thought nobody was watching. None of them would ever have owned up to a quick tumble with some filthy Mudblood, of course. They had come to him all the same, John thought, for comfort, or to take whatever it was they wanted. Then they had gone back down to the dungeons and sneered at him at breakfast.

He had basked in it like a cat on a warm wall. Nobody had ever wanted him before, not at home, not anywhere. He had been chasing that feeling round other people’s beds ever since, and he had never once caught it for longer than a night.

Lucius, meanwhile, had found other friends.

He had grown tall too, and handsome, but he had stayed small in the way he held himself. He was still quiet. He still went unregarded. The girls looked straight past him to John. So Lucius had started sitting with a different set in the common room, a set with old names and cold eyes. They talked in low voices about Mudbloods, and about what ought to be done with them. They had a word for themselves, later. They had a master, later, and a mark burnt into their arms to prove it.

John had known, even then, where that road went. It was a mug’s game. Lucius had been a lot of things, but he had never been a mug, and he should have known better.

He could tell the Mark of the Beast at a glance. He had seen the real thing since. He had sat across a table from the Devil himself, who had worn a good many names since the day he first sang out of tune. He had come as close as any man alive to tricking him, and he had walked away with his soul still in his own pocket, more or less. He thought God was a bastard, on the whole. He had good reason. But the Devil was worse, a great deal worse. By comparison, the bloke the wizards called Voldemort was only a scally with a flick knife and a fancy name. Lucius Malfoy stood about as much chance of getting one over on Voldemort as Voldemort did of getting one over on Lucifer.

By sixth year, it had all curdled. Lucius had stopped stammering, mostly. He had stopped looking at John, too, except when he thought John wasn’t watching. Then it was a jealous, sour, sideways sort of look, the look of a boy peering in at a party through somebody else’s window.

By seventh year, it had come to blows.

There had been a girl. She was a Ravenclaw, with a laugh you could hear across the Great Hall, and she was going out with John. Lucius had wanted her. He had wanted her for a year without ever saying so. One night in March, in an empty corridor on the fourth floor, he stepped out in front of John with his wand drawn.

‘She’s too good for you,’ he said. His voice was shaking, and the old stammer had come back into it. ‘You know she is. She’s too good for a M-Mudblood.’

It was the first time Lucius had ever called him that. John had his own wand out before the word was finished.

It began as a duel. It was a nasty one. It ended with both of their wands across the corridor somewhere, with the two of them rolling about on the flagstones like a pair of dockers outside a pub at closing time, punching each other in the face. Old Pringle, the caretaker, found them at last, both bloody, both still swinging. He had them by the collars, one in each fist, when Lucius spat blood on to the flagstones.

‘On my b-blood, Constantine,’ Lucius said. ‘You’ll p-pay for this. Every drop.’

‘On mine, then, la,’ said John, through a split lip. ‘Every drop.’

Neither of them had ever taken it back.

The funny thing was, the girl had chucked him anyway, a month after they left school. John had been in love with her. He had really thought he was. He had written her a letter about it, which he still blushed to remember.

Puppy love, he told himself now, sourly. That was all. There was no such thing as the real kind. It was something they put in songs to sell records, and John had stopped buying records years ago.

He hadn’t seen Lucius since, apart from the odd photograph in a wizarding paper that somebody had left on a bench. Once, in 1977, a parcel had come for him with no name on it, and a curse inside that would have taken his hands off at the wrists. John had sent it back. He had never found out who opened it. He didn’t give him much thought. John hardly had anything to do with the wizarding world at all, if he could help it. He must have been one of the few wizards alive who never wanted to go back to Hogwarts, or even think about the place. He had a great deal else to think about.

He had better enemies than Lucius Malfoy, for a start. He had far bigger ones. At this very moment, three of them were each under the firm impression that John Constantine’s soul belonged to them alone. Every one of them knew about the other two, which was the only reason he was still breathing. He had spent years in the company of people who wore their underpants over their tights and flew. He had shaken hands with Superman. Superman had made the very dangerous mistake of owing him a favour.

After that, it was hard to get excited about somebody who could shoot sparks out of a stick.

That was what the wizarding world looked like to John these days. It looked like a toddler in his dad’s suit, stamping about, quite sure he was a big lad now. John hardly used his wand any more. He preferred the older stuff: the occult, the chalk, the candles and the blood, which wizards turned up their noses at because Muggles could do it too.

He had to admit that the Muggles didn’t help. There were a great many of them about who called themselves witches and warlocks, with silver rings on every finger, who couldn’t have lit a candle with a box of Swan Vestas. And said Satan was an alright lad really. That was a bit galling, if you were the real thing.

John rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

The Knight Bus went to Nottingham, where a large witch in a fur hat got on and went straight upstairs. Then it went to Wales. Then Stan went upstairs with an armful of hot water bottles. When he came back down, the bus gave another BANG. It stopped dead, somewhere in a quiet suburban street that smelt of cut grass and creosote.

John looked out of the window.

It was the sort of street where nothing had happened for a hundred years and nobody wanted it to. There were square houses with square gardens, with no cars in the drives and no lights in the windows. A streetlamp buzzed. Sitting on the pavement beneath it, in the glare of the headlamps, was a boy.

Stan was already on the steps, arms out, giving it the speech.

‘Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard...’

The boy on the pavement sighed. It was a long, heavy sigh, the sigh of somebody who felt very hard done by. He had already had a very bad night, by the sound of it, and could see that it was going to get worse. Stan broke off, halfway through the word evening.

John liked the lad already.

He listened through the open doors, without much interest, while the boy picked himself up off the pavement. He was a skinny, scruffy lad of twelve or thirteen, with glasses and hair like a bird’s nest. He had a big trunk with him, with an empty birdcage on top of it. He was holding a wand in one fist as though somebody might take it off him. There was something familiar about him, too, though John couldn’t have said what. He might have seen the lad’s face in a paper somewhere, once, without bothering to read the story.

‘What were you doin’ down there?’ said Stan.

‘Fell over,’ said the boy.

‘’Choo fall over for?’

‘I didn’t do it on bloody purpose, for God’s sake,’ said the boy.

John’s mouth twitched.

The boy was staring back over his shoulder at a dark gap between a garage and a fence. ‘There was a big black thing,’ he said, pointing uncertainly into the gap. ‘Like a dog... but massive...’

John’s mouth stopped twitching.

He didn’t like black dogs. He had never met a man in his line of work who did. There was Black Shuck on the Norfolk coast and the Barghest up in Yorkshire. There was the Grim, the Gytrash and a dozen others with a dozen names. They all came to the same thing in the end. A big black dog that looked at you at midnight was never good news for somebody. John glanced at the gap in the fence. There was nothing in it now but dustbins.

Not my problem, he told himself firmly. Not my dog.

‘Woss that on your ’ead?’ said Stan.

‘Fell over when I was six,’ said the boy quickly, flattening his fringe. ‘Nasty but nothing to worry about.’

John closed his eyes in pain. It was the worst lie he had heard in a month. He had been lied to by the bizzies, by a cardinal, by three separate demons, the Devil himself, and by a man who sold second-hand cars in Croydon. Every one of them had made a better job of it than this.

‘Woss your name?’

‘Neville Longbottom,’ said the boy.

Oh, son, thought John. Oh, son. You can’t even keep your face still while you say it.

The boy paid. He didn’t pay with Sickles, either. He shoved a fistful of gold Galleons into Stan’s hand, far more than the fare, with the face of a boy who hoped it might buy him a bit of quiet as well as a bed. Stan looked at the gold, then at the boy, then put it in his pocket without a word.

Amateur, thought John. You never paid more than you needed to, not in front of anybody. It told people you had something to hide. It also told them you had money, which was worse.

They heaved the boy’s trunk up the steps between them. The empty birdcage banged against the rail of John’s bed as it went past. Then the boy looked at him.

The book shifted under John’s hand. The bang that had brought them to this street had jarred it, and one of the covers had fallen back an inch inside the bag. Through the thin white plastic came a faint, greenish flicker, like a television left on in another room. That was the window. That was the picture, moving. John pressed the cover shut through the plastic, without looking down, and the flicker went out. He was told not to open or touch it. He’d already teleported a few times today…or was it yesterday now, and he didn’t want to chance going somewhere he couldn’t easily come back from. The candle in its bracket swung back. It was only a bag again.

John looked up, straight through the boy. He looked out of the window, then down at his own shoes. He had perfected that look in the Slytherin common room at the age of twelve. It said, as clearly as words, I am not here, and if I were here, you would not want to talk to me. The boy got the message. He didn’t say a thing.

Stan had gone up to the front of the bus for a word with Ern. The boy was still standing behind his trunk, looking about him for somewhere to sit. Nobody was looking at John.

Now, thought John.

He had the packet out of his coat before he had finished thinking it. He had a fag between his lips. He had the lighter halfway to his face, with his thumb on the wheel, when Stan’s head came round from the front of the bus.

‘Oi! Oi! Non-smokin’ bus, this is! Says so on the door! You can read, mate?’

John looked at Stan.

He took his time about it. He looked at Stan over the unlit cigarette the way he had once looked at a Duke of Hell across a card table in Soho, shortly before the Duke lost his shirt.

Stan went slightly pale, but he stood his ground.

Slowly, John took the cigarette out of his mouth. He put it back in the packet. He put the packet back in his coat.

‘One of these days, soft lad,’ he said under his breath, in a voice that went straight back to the Dingle, ‘I’ll feed you to somethin’ with a lorra teeth. An’ I’ll sell tickets.’

He went back to looking at his shoes.

‘You ’ave this one,’ Stan whispered to the boy, shoving the trunk under the bed right behind Ern’s armchair. ‘This is our driver, Ernie Prang. This is Neville Longbottom, Ern.’

Ernie nodded. The boy flattened his fringe again and sat down on his bed.

John spent a pleasant minute or two after that working out, in some detail, exactly which demon he knew who would take a cocky lad from a purple bus without asking too many questions. He worked out what it would do with him, and for how long. He got as far as the price before he made himself stop. That sort of thinking was a bad habit. It had cost him a good deal more than a few fags over the years. He chased it out of his head.

‘Take ’er away, Ern,’ said Stan.

BANG.

John had braced himself this time. It made no difference. The Knight Bus took off like a shell out of a cannon. He slid backwards across the bed until his shoulders hit the window. Across the aisle, he saw the boy go flat on his back on his own bed with his arms flung out.

‘This is where we was before you flagged us down,’ said Stan, enjoying himself enormously. ‘Where are we, Ern? Somewhere in Wales?’

‘Ar,’ said Ern.

‘How come the Muggles don’t hear the bus?’ said the boy.

‘Them!’ said Stan contemptuously. ‘Don’ listen properly, do they? Don’ look properly either. Never notice nuffink, they don’.’

Neither do wizards, la, thought John. That’s how come I’m still alive.

‘Best go wake up Madam Marsh, Stan,’ said Ern. ‘We’ll be in Abergavenny in a minute.’

Stan went off up the narrow wooden stairs. Ern drove on.

The Knight Bus did not drive. It leapt. It went a hundred miles at a time, with a noise like a bomb going off. In between leaps it careered along the roads with two wheels on the pavement and one in the hedge. Ernie Prang held the steering wheel like it was a dead rat. Lampposts jumped out of its way. Postboxes hopped on to walls. A whole row of dustbins scattered like hens in front of it and came back together behind. Every time it stopped, the beds slid a foot towards the front. Every time it started, they slid a foot back. None of it seemed to bother Stan or Ern in the least.

It bothered John a great deal.

Presently a very old, very small witch in a travelling cloak came down the stairs. She was faintly green, and she held the banister with both hands. Stan came down behind her with his arms out on either side, not touching, ready to catch her if she fell.

John could hear them at the door. ‘I’m going to see my grandson, you know,’ the old witch was saying into her handkerchief. ‘He’s seven on Sunday...’

Then, a little later: ‘He’s a very clever boy. He can do his tables.’

‘Course ’e can. You tell ’im Stan said ’appy birthday.’ Stan straightened her cloak on her shoulders, where it had slipped. Then he went back up the steps and threw her bag out after her.

John watched the whole performance. It was very annoying. It made the lad a good deal harder to hate. He decided to hate him anyway, on principle.

There was another BANG, and they were thundering down a narrow country lane with the trees leaping out of the way.

John had sailed the Styx. He had been carried down to Hell in a lift made of screaming. He had once driven a hearse over the Pennines in a snowstorm, with the corpse sitting up in the back giving him directions. None of it had been as bad as the Knight Bus. He wedged both feet against the bedstead opposite. He wrapped his free hand round the brass rail at the head of his own bed until his knuckles went white. The other hand stayed flat on the carrier bag.

Every time the bus banged, he swore.

He did it quietly. He did it steadily, without fuss, and without once repeating himself. He had a great many words to choose from, after all. Some of them were Liverpool words, like knobhead and divvy, which he had learnt from his father. The rest he had picked up from priests, or in places he did not like to think about, in languages that hadn’t been spoken above ground for three thousand years. The boy across the aisle was listening, he could tell. John didn’t care. The lad might as well learn something.

Once, when the bus jumped particularly hard, the carrier bag tried to slide off the bed. John’s hand clamped down on it so hard that the plastic creaked.

He felt for the cover through the plastic. It was still shut, the way he had left it in Surrey. He kept his hand on it anyway. If the bag tore, if the book fell open, if some idiot put their hand on the page...

The boy was looking at the bag. He looked away very quickly, at the window, before John could catch him at it.

Clever lad, thought John. Clever lad. Now don’t ask.

The boy didn’t ask.

Then Stan unfolded a newspaper.

The boy across the aisle sat up and stared at it.

‘That man!’ he said. ‘He was on the Muggle news!’

John didn’t look. He didn’t read the Daily Prophet. He hadn’t read it for twenty years. As far as he could tell it was written by idiots for idiots, The entire Wizarding World, really. and the only thing it had ever been good for was wrapping chips. He heard Stan say Sirius Black. He heard Azkaban, thirteen people and one curse. He kept his eyes on his shoes. He had heard of Sirius Black. Everybody had. It was nothing to do with him.

Then the boy said, quite clearly, ‘What, Voldemort?’

John’s head came up.

Stan’s spots had gone white. Ernie had jerked the wheel so hard that a farmhouse had to leap out of the way. Nobody said that name. John had been at school when the war started, and he had kept as far away from the rest of it as he could. It hadn’t been far enough to miss grown men who had duelled dragons going pale at the sound of it. They still did. Only the very brave said it, or the very stupid. That, or they had been brought up a long way from anybody who would have told them not to. The name was bloody cursed with the blackest of dark magic. The foolish boy.

John looked at the boy. It was only for a second. He looked at the cheap glasses, mended with tape, and the jeans that had been bought for somebody a great deal bigger. He looked at the wrists, thin as broom handles, and the way the lad sat, hunched in a little, as though he expected at any moment to be hit.

John knew that way of sitting. He had sat like that himself, at a kitchen table in Liverpool, every night for eleven years.

Somebody’s been leatherin’ you, son, he thought. Not feedin’ you, neither.

Then he looked down at his shoes again, because it was no business of his. He had enough to carry. He wasn’t going to pick up a stray on the Knight Bus, at one in the morning, just because the stray reminded him of himself.

The boy was still watching him. John could feel it. He turned his head away and looked at his own reflection in the black window instead.

It was not a comforting sight. You look like a bag of shite, his father would have said, and for once in his miserable life his father would have been right. John looked at the face in the glass: the two days of stubble, the bloodshot eyes, the blond hair plastered dark with rain. He looked about thirty, he thought, if you were being kind. A rough thirty, and a tired one. The boy across the aisle would probably have said thirty-five. On the calendar he was forty.

As for how old he really was, John had no idea any more.

He had spent too much of his life in places where time didn’t work properly. There had been Hell, more than once, where an hour could last a year and a year could go past in an hour. There had been other dimensions, which were worse. There had been a bit of time travel, which he had not enjoyed. There had been the times he had been dead, which he had enjoyed even less. Between them, they had muddied the waters until he couldn’t see the bottom. Some nights, he felt about four hundred. He felt every day of it, too, whatever the face in the window said.

He leant his head against the cold glass and thought, because he couldn’t stop himself, about the owl.

The owl had found him in the back bar of a pub in Soho, at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.

That was the first bad sign. Nobody knew about that pub. It was the sort of place where you could sit in a corner for six hours with one pint and a crossword. Nobody would ask your name, because nobody wanted you to ask theirs. John had chosen it for exactly that reason. The owl had come in through a window that didn’t open. It had landed in his pint. It had looked at him, with beer dripping off its feathers, as though the whole thing were his fault.

The second bad sign was the ink. It was green.

John had sat there for a long time without opening the envelope. Then he had bought a whisky. He had drunk it, and opened the envelope.

Dear John,

I do hope that this finds you well, or at any rate alive. I understand that in your case these are not always the same thing.

I have a small favour to ask of you. There is a book at present in the keeping of a Mr Ephraim Shacklewell, of Shacklewell House, New Mexico, some miles to the south of a place the people digging there call the Cleft. It does not belong to him. He does not understand it. I should very much prefer that nobody else ever comes to understand it either.

I should be most grateful if you would bring it to me at Hogwarts, before the middle of August. Please do not open it. Please do not, on any account, look at it for longer than you must.

I think of you often. I think of my Deluminator, too.

Yours, as ever,

Albus Dumbledore

P.S. I am told that you may find Mr Shacklewell’s wards troublesome. I am quite sure that you will not.

John had read it three times. Then he had folded it up very small and put it in his inside pocket, next to his wand. He had ordered another whisky.

I think of you often. He knew exactly what that meant. It meant I have not forgotten. It meant that the most powerful wizard in Britain, possibly in the world, had put a grudge away in a drawer eight years ago, like a good cheque, and had just taken it out again to cash it.

John had faced down things that would have sent most wizards running home to their mams. He had died, more than once, and come back, which most people only managed the first half of. He had looked Death herself in the eye. She was a lovely girl, all things considered. She had always been quite nice to him. She just had shocking taste in admirers. There was an enormous purple alien who was quite mad and had been mooning after her for longer than John had been alive, writing her very bad poetry. But she always came for you in the end, and John knew perfectly well that he was a long way overdue. She was only waiting for an excuse.

Not one of them had ever frightened him quite the way that green ink did.

The others were monsters. You knew where you stood with a monster. Dumbledore was something much worse. He was a good man who had decided you were in his way.

So John did as he was told. He always did, in the end, with Dumbledore. That was what he hated most of all.

New Mexico had been hot.

Even in the middle of the night, the desert gave the heat back up out of the ground like a stove. John had come out where two dirt tracks crossed, a little after midnight by the local clock, with the stars blazing over him in their millions and the red dust settling on his shoes. He stood there for a minute, getting his breath back. Then he lit a fag, because there was nobody about to tell him not to, and he started walking.

He passed the dig on the way.

There wasn’t much to see. There was a wire fence round a patch of desert at the foot of a long, black, broken ridge of rock. There was a sign painted by hand that said something about a geological survey. Behind the fence stood a couple of tents, a caravan in darkness and a deep crack in the ground with a ladder going down into it. That was the Cleft. Somewhere under there, so his reading said, there was a cavern big enough to hold a city, and a city still in it. Some poor sod had found a way down.

A mile further on, parked at the side of the road with its lights off, stood a black van with no number plates.

John walked past it without turning his head. He felt somebody watching him through the tinted glass, the way you feel a draught. Not tonight, lads, he thought. You’re not havin’ this one. He kept walking, at the easy pace of a man out for a stroll, until the van was a long way behind him and the road had bent round a hill.

Shacklewell House, from the road, looked like a derelict filling station.

There was a single rusted pump on the forecourt. There was a sign hanging off one hinge, which said LAST GAS FOR 90 MILES and creaked in the hot wind. Any Muggle who drove past it, or No-Maj, as the Americans had it, would have felt a sudden, powerful urge to keep going, and to remember an urgent appointment somewhere else. John stood in front of it and let his eyes go soft, the way you might look at a magic eye picture in a newspaper.

The filling station faded. Behind it, rising out of the desert like something off the front of a box of chocolates, stood a mansion.

It was enormous. It was built of pink adobe in the Spanish style, with towers, balconies and a long colonnade. There was a fountain in the courtyard shaped like a Thunderbird, spouting water out of its beak. There was a swimming pool shaped like a Golden Snitch, because Ephraim had once been to a Quidditch World Cup and never got over it. Every window was dark. It looked like what a pools winner would build if you gave him a wand.

John looked at it for a long while. Then he laughed, very quietly, round his cigarette.

He knew the type. He had done his reading on this one, too. The Shacklewells were pure-blood, all right. They had been in America since a great-great-grandfather had stepped off a ship in Boston with a wand in his pocket and a price on his head. What they had not been, for most of that time, was rich. The money was new. Ephraim Shacklewell’s father had made it in the sixties, after the Americans had finally done away with their daft old law against wizards having anything to do with No-Majs. He had sold a scouring potion to the copper mines of Arizona, through a string of front companies, as a miracle cleaning fluid. Nobody at the Magical Congress had ever quite managed to prove it. Ephraim had spent the money since on the house, the pool and the most expensive wards that MACUSA’s own security men could be bribed into building for him.

Pure-bloods spent their whole lives looking down their noses, John thought, and never once looked at the floor.

Every ward on that house had been built by wizards, to keep out wizards. It would be watching for wands and wand magic. It would be listening for the particular warm hum that came off a wand like heat off a radiator. It would know an Unlocking Charm the moment one was cast. It would scream the house down at a Disillusionment Charm. It had probably cost more than John would earn in his entire life.

It wouldn’t know what to make of a bloke with a bag of salt.

John walked a little way out into the desert, to a flat rock. He knelt down, scooped out a hole underneath it with his hands, and buried his wand.

He didn’t like doing it. No wizard did. There was a feeling, when your wand went out of reach, like stepping off a kerb you hadn’t known was there. But a wand gave you away. Without it, he was only a man. Wards built by wizards had never in their lives bothered to look at only a man.

Then he took his tools out of his pockets and laid them on the rock, one by one.

He had a stick of white chalk. He had a twist of salt in a paper bag and a stub of black candle. He had a small glass bottle of earth from a churchyard in Whitechapel, and a penknife. Last of all, wrapped in an oily cloth, he had a hand.

It was a dead man’s hand. It was a hanged man’s hand, to be exact, cut from the gallows in Prague two hundred years ago, pickled and dried. It was not the cheap sort that Borgin sold, with a candle stuck in the palm. Each of its brown, shrivelled fingers had been made into a candle itself. It was a Hand of Glory. He had bought it from a dealer in the Old Town, years ago, for more money than he had cared to think about, and he had sworn at the time that he would never use it. He had used it four times since.

Strictly speaking, the wizarding world knew about Hands of Glory. You could buy one in Knockturn Alley, if you had the stomach. The wizards had decided they were a curiosity. They gave light only to the person holding them, so they were handy for burglars, and that was all. The wizards didn’t know, or had forgotten, what the old thieves of Europe had always known. Light the fingers of a Hand of Glory in a house at night, with the proper words, and nobody in that house would wake until it was put out.

Not many people had the innate magic of Wizardry and the knowledge of a lifetime of Occultism, not well enough to make one do what the other couldn’t. Luckily for the rest of the magical world, there were three at the very most, as far as John knew, who could have walked into Shacklewell House that night. One was Victor von Doom, who would never have bothered. One was Stephen Strange, who would never have stooped to it. Dr Fate didn’t bloody count. On account of that damned helmet being asleep for a while.

Unluckily for Ephraim Shacklewell, the third was John Constantine. He needed that book as badly as he had once needed a certain Deluminator. If anything, he needed it more. The last time, it had only been the world at stake. This time, it was him.

Dumbledore could have taken the place apart brick by brick, of course, with MACUSA on the doorstep by breakfast and a diplomatic incident by lunch. That was not the same thing as walking in. It was certainly not the same as walking out again with nobody any the wiser.

He stubbed out his fag on the rock. Then he got on with it.

He poured a short line of salt along the foot of the wall, a yard of it and no more, just where the courtyard began. He stood the stub of black candle in the middle of it and lit it. He put a pinch of the churchyard earth on his tongue, which tasted exactly as bad as it sounded, so that he would walk as quietly as the dead. Then he laid his palm flat against the adobe. He could feel the wards running through it, humming like telephone wires on a frosty morning. No Muggle would have felt a thing. That was the part of the job that needed a wizard. He drew a sigil in chalk over the strongest of the lines, then pricked his thumb with the penknife and went over the chalk in his own blood. It was the seal of Andromalius, a Great Earl of Hell, whose particular talent was the catching of thieves and the return of stolen property. There was a certain poetry in that. As far as the wards were concerned, the mark said that the man standing beside it belonged to the house. He was the household’s own thieftaker, out on his rounds. Nothing to see.

Then he went to the front door, turned his back on it, and walked into the house backwards.

He went in reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards under his breath, from Amen to Father, which was a thing he would not have wanted his old parish priest to hear. Even though he’d left faith behind long ago. Wards were like bouncers. They looked very hard at the people coming in. They hardly ever looked at the ones they thought were going out.

Nothing screamed. Nothing stirred. The great dark hall of Shacklewell House was quite silent, apart from the trickle of the fountain in the courtyard behind him.

John breathed out. Then he struck a match and lit the Hand of Glory.

‘Let those who rest more deeply sleep,’ he whispered. ‘Let those awake their senses keep...’

One by one, the dead fingers caught. They burnt with a thin, greasy, yellow flame that gave no light to anybody but him.

The thumb wouldn’t light.

John froze in the dark hall, with the Hand held up in front of him, and swore under his breath, without moving his lips. He knew what that meant. Everybody in the trade knew. If one finger of a Hand of Glory wouldn’t burn, there was somebody in the house who was still awake.

He waited. Nothing happened. Somewhere above him, a clock ticked.

Sod it, he thought, and went on.

There was a Wampus cat asleep across the foot of the stairs. It was the size of a small horse, black and sleek, with eyes that would have glowed yellow if they had been open. It had six legs, all of them twitching gently as it dreamt. John stepped over it very carefully. He didn’t look at it. He had dealt with worse in his time, though he couldn’t, just at that moment, remember when.

The trophy room was on the first floor.

It was a long, low room, panelled in some dark American wood, with glass cases down both sides like a museum. Every case had a little brass label. John held up the Hand of Glory and read them as he went. A lump of twisted grey metal was labelled NO-MAJ FLYING SAUCER (FRAGMENT), ROSWELL, N.M., 1947. It was, as far as John could see, half a hubcap off a Ford. John knew a Mi-go who’d have a chuckle about that. A shrunken head in the next case had a label that said TALKS (OCCASIONALLY). There was a stuffed jackalope. There was a pair of boots that had belonged to somebody called Wild Bill, and a jar of something that moved.

The book was in the last case, at the end of the room.

It lay on a cushion of red velvet, as though it were the crown of a small country. It was big and old, bound in brown leather that had cracked with age, with a single word stamped into the front in tarnished gold. The label in front of it said: NO-MAJ PICTURE BOOK (NATIVE?). CHARMED PHOTOGRAPH INSIDE, MOVES. FROM THE DIG. $50.

John read the label twice. Then he had to put his hand over his mouth.

Fifty dollars. The man had paid a digger fifty dollars for it. He had put it on a velvet cushion in a glass case, next to a hubcap, because it had a pretty picture in it that moved. He didn’t have the faintest idea that he had in his house a door out of the world, with the latch off. For whatever reason, the idiot never touched it once. Which was lucky for him.

The case wasn’t even locked. Why would it be? Nobody could get into the house.

John lifted the lid. He picked up the book, very carefully, with both hands.

It fell open.

He hadn’t meant it to. The leather was old and the spine was loose. The cover swung back on its own, the way the covers of old books do. On the right page there was a dark oblong, like a little window. In the window, a picture was moving. It was the sea, greenish grey and rolling, seen from high up, the way a gull sees it. The picture was sweeping in, low over the water, towards an island with pine trees on it...

John felt it pull.

It was only a little tug, like a current round your ankles when you have waded out a bit too far. Come and see, said the picture. Only come and see. Put out your hand.

John slammed the book shut.

He stood there for a moment in the dark, breathing hard, with his heart going like the clappers. Then he took the white carrier bag out of his coat pocket, slid the book into it and tied the handles in a knot.

He reached into his other pocket and took out a paperback. It was a Jackie Collins, rather battered, which he had bought at Lime Street station for exactly this purpose. He laid it on the red velvet cushion, where the book had been, and closed the lid of the case.

Fair swap, he thought. It’s a better read, anyway.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ said a voice behind him.

John turned round, very slowly.

A man was standing in the doorway of the trophy room. He was large and pink, with a moustache like a yard brush. He was wearing a silk dressing gown, a hairnet and a pair of slippers with his initials on them. He had a wand in one hand and a glass of warm milk in the other. Of course. The thumb. The great Ephraim Shacklewell himself had never been able to sleep.

There was a long pause.

John had about two seconds to decide. He used one and a half of them. Then he reached into his coat, quite calmly, and took out a little card in a plastic sleeve. He held it up.

It was his library card from Liverpool Central Library. It had run out in 1979. It also had, worked into the plastic, a very old and very small glamour, which meant that anybody who looked at it saw exactly what they were most afraid of seeing on a card like that.

Ephraim Shacklewell looked at it. He went white under the pink.

‘MACUSA,’ John said. He said it in the best American he could manage, which he had mostly learnt off Kojak. ‘Magical Security, Artefacts Division. Sorry to call so late, sir.’

‘M-MACUSA?’ Shacklewell’s moustache was trembling. ‘But... but I...’

‘This item’s on our register, sir. It came out of that dig up the road, which means it’s not yours to keep, technically.’ John held up the carrier bag. ‘It’s dangerous, sir. Very dangerous. We’ll be confiscating it.’ He let a little pause go by. ‘We’ll say no more about the business with the copper mines.’

He saw it land. Shacklewell’s eyes went wide. Then a great wave of relief went over his face, so that he looked, suddenly, like a man who had been told that the tax inspector at the door was only the milkman.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course, officer, of course. Take it, please. It was only a little No-Maj picture book, you understand, I had no idea, I gave a fellow fifty dollars for it... Can I get you something? A cup of coffee? It’s no trouble...’

‘Very kind of you, sir,’ said John. ‘I’m on duty.’

‘Of course. Of course you are.’ Shacklewell was almost bowing. ‘Is there... I don’t suppose there’s some kind of receipt?’

John looked at him for a moment. Then he took a pen from the man’s own desk and wrote one out, on the back of an envelope, in large clear capitals.

RECEIVED WITH THANKS FROM MR E. SHACKLEWELL, ONE BOOK. SIGNED: J. LENNON, MACUSA.

He went out by the front door this time, forwards, past the sleeping Wampus cat, with Ephraim Shacklewell waving him off from the step in his hairnet. He walked back out into the desert, dug up his wand and put out the Hand of Glory. As he came back on to the road, the sun was just coming up behind the black ridge of the Cleft. A mile ahead, the black van was still waiting where he had left it. Nobody in it so much as turned a head.

John lit a fag. He gave the van a cheery little wave as he went past it.

Then he walked to the nearest crossroads, and began the long, long road home.

The Knight Bus banged again, and John opened his eyes.

They had been to Anglesey. Somewhere along the way Stan had remembered the boy’s hot chocolate, then poured it all over his pillow when the bus jumped from Anglesey to Aberdeen. One by one, the passengers from the upper decks had come down the narrow stairs in their dressing gowns and slippers. They had all got off, each of them looking enormously glad to go. John stayed where he was. He stayed with his feet braced, his jaw set and his hand on the bag. Every time the doors opened, he looked at them. Then he looked away again. Hogsmeade was right at the bottom of Stan’s list, it seemed, and John was in no hurry at all to get there.

‘Right then, Neville,’ said Stan at last, clapping his hands. ‘Whereabouts in London?’

‘Diagon Alley,’ said the boy.

BANG.

They were rattling along Charing Cross Road. The sky over the rooftops had turned the colour of dishwater. It was nearly dawn. Ernie stamped on the brake, the beds slid forward a foot, and the bus came to a stop outside a small, grubby pub that most of London had never noticed in its life. John hadn’t been inside the Leaky Cauldron since 1971. He didn’t intend to go in now.

The boy got off. Stan helped him down with his trunk.

‘Well,’ said the boy. ‘’Bye then!’

He said it far too brightly, like a lad who has nowhere in particular to go and doesn’t want anybody to know.

‘There you are, Harry,’ said a voice.

‘Blimey!’ Stan shouted. ‘Ern, come ’ere! Come ’ere!’

John looked out of the window.

A portly little man in a long pinstriped cloak had come out of the shadows by the pub door. He had put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He was not letting go. John knew the face vaguely, from the front of other people’s newspapers. It was the Minister for Magic, out on a pavement at dawn, looking cold, exhausted and very pleased with himself.

The boy looked up at him.

‘Nah mate, I’m Barry Trotter,’ he said. ‘This has already happened once before. I look a bit like that Potter berk but me and him are two different young wizard boys.’

John made a strangled noise and turned it, with some difficulty, into a cough.

Barry Trotter. He would treasure that for the rest of his life. He had heard men lie to save their souls, in places where souls were the only currency going, and not one of them had ever had the nerve to say Barry Trotter to a government minister with a straight face.

The Minister laughed. It was a big, jolly, official laugh, the sort that had been to a great many dinners and shaken a great many hands. John winced at the sound of it.

‘Very good, very good,’ said the Minister. ‘Neville?’ He frowned at Stan. ‘This is Harry Potter.’

‘I knew it!’ Stan shouted. ‘Ern! Ern! Guess ’oo Neville is, Ern! ’E’s ’Arry Potter! I can see ’is scar!’

Harry Potter.

The name rang a bell, somewhere at the back of John’s head. It rang it faintly, the way a name does when you’ve seen it in a headline years ago and never bothered to read the story underneath. There had been a baby, he remembered. There had been a baby, in 1981, who had done in Voldemort, or had it done for him, which in John’s experience was more likely. There had been a great deal of fuss in the wizarding papers. Then John had been busy with something in Hell for a while, and he’d forgotten all about it.

So that was who the lad was. Well, well.

He watched the boy’s face. The Minister was steering him towards the pub door with that hand clamped on his shoulder, and the boy was going. He went without fighting, with his chin up, his shoulders braced and his face gone grey. He looked like a lad being walked out to the gallows. He looked as though he had always expected it to come to this, and was only surprised it had taken so long.

Ah, you poor little sod, John thought, before he could stop himself.

No, he told himself. None of that.

It was none of his business. Whoever the lad was, he was obviously important, and in John’s experience important people were a curse. He was always bumping into them. He couldn’t nip out to the corner shop for a packet of fags without tripping over some chosen one or other. Half of them ended up trying to kill him, and the other half ended up dead. There was a queue of his enemies that stretched round the block already. He didn’t need to add a skinny lad in glasses mended with tape to the end of it.

The boy went into the pub. A moment later, Stan and Ernie went in after him, carrying the trunk between them, with the empty birdcage balanced on top. They were talking nineteen to the dozen.

The bus was empty, apart from the little wizard in the nightcap, who was still snoring at the back and didn’t count.

John sat motionless. He listened. Upstairs was silent, and so was Ern’s armchair. There was only the snoring, a pigeon on the roof and a milk float whining past at the end of the road.

He had the packet out in one second flat. He had a fag in his mouth in two. He lit it with hands that were shaking. Then he drew on it, long and deep, all the way down to his shoes.

It was bliss.

It was the best thing that had happened to him in a day and a half. It was better than the Hand of Glory. It was better than Barry Trotter. The smoke went down into his lungs like a warm bath. All the knots in him came undone at once, and for about four seconds John Constantine was entirely at peace with the universe.

‘Oi! Oi! I can smell it!’

Stan came up the steps of the bus at a dead run, red in the face, waving his arms like a windmill.

‘I knew it! I knew it! The minute my back’s turned! What did I say? What did I say, mate? Non-smokin’ bus! It’s on the door! It’s on the flamin’ door! You can read, can’t you? You want me to read it out for you? N, O, N...’

‘All right,’ said John. ‘All right, la, keep your hair on...’

‘Out! Out o’ the window with it! Now!’

John looked at him. He looked at the cigarette. It was the most beautiful thing he had seen all day.

He threw it out of the window.

‘’Old tight,’ said Stan, with grim satisfaction, as Ernie came puffing back up the steps behind him. ‘’Ogsmeade, Ern. An’ don’t spare the ’orses.’

BANG.

John held on to the brass rail with one hand for the rest of the way. The other stayed flat on the bag. He shut his eyes and swore. He did not stop swearing until they got there.

Hogwarts was nearly empty.

It was the middle of the summer holidays, and the place had the hollow, echoing air of a school with no children in it. The whole castle seemed to be dozing. John walked up the lane from Hogsmeade in the early sunshine, with his carrier bag in one hand. He went in through the great iron gates with the winged boars on top. They swung open for him without a sound, which he didn’t like at all. Then he walked up the long drive, past the lake, with the castle growing bigger in front of him at every step.

He had forgotten how big it was. He had forgotten how it looked in the morning, with the sun on the towers and the mist still lying on the water. He had forgotten on purpose.

He was halfway up the lawn when a voice like a ship’s foghorn bellowed across it.

‘JOHNNY? Johnny Constantine? Is that you?’

John stopped.

A gigantic figure was coming towards him from a wooden hut at the edge of the trees, at something between a stride and a run. It had a wild black beard, a moleskin overcoat and arms like tree trunks. The closer it got, the bigger it got. John had time to think, oh, no, quite fondly. Then Hagrid had reached him. He flung both enormous arms round him and lifted him clean off the ground. John did not hug people, as a rule. He hugged Hagrid back anyway, as much of him as he could reach.

‘Gerroff,’ said John, into the overcoat. ‘Hagrid. Hagrid, you great soft lump, put me down, you’re crushing me ribs...’

Hagrid put him down. His black beetle eyes were glistening.

‘Johnny Constantine,’ he said. ‘Look at yeh. Jus’ look at yeh. How long’s it bin?’

‘Twenty-two years,’ said John. ‘Give or take.’

‘Twenty-two years! An’ not so much as an owl!’ Hagrid held him at arm’s length, the way you might hold up a puppy to see how much it had grown. ‘Yeh look terrible, Johnny.’

‘Ta, Hagrid.’

‘No, I mean it. Yeh look like summat the cat dragged in. Yer not eatin’ properly, are yeh? I can tell. Yeh never did.’

‘I had a butty at Lime Street,’ said John. ‘Tuesday, I think.’

To his surprise, John was grinning. It was a real grin, too, the first one in days.

He had never been able to stay sour with Hagrid. Nobody could. When he was eleven, twelve or thirteen, and the Slytherins had locked him out of the common room again, he had gone down to Hagrid’s hut. He had gone when they hung his robes from the Astronomy Tower, or put something in his food. Hagrid had been younger then, a great shaggy gamekeeper in his thirties, and he had never once asked what was wrong. He’d simply put the kettle on. He had given John tea, rock cakes that broke your teeth, and somewhere warm to sit where nobody called him anything at all. Hagrid had known what it was like to be the odd one out. He had known it better than anybody in that castle.

John didn’t say thank you for it very often. He didn’t say thank you to anybody very often. But he had never forgotten it, either.

‘What yeh doin’ here, anyway?’ said Hagrid. ‘Yeh swore yeh’d never come back. I heard yeh. Whole school heard yeh.’

‘Business,’ said John. ‘I’ve got a parcel for the old man.’

Hagrid’s face lit up. ‘Dumbledore? Yer here ter see Dumbledore?’ He lowered his voice to what he probably thought was a whisper. It carried about half a mile. ‘Great man, Dumbledore. Great man. He’s gone an’ made me a teacher, Johnny, did yeh know? Care of Magical Creatures, startin’ in September! Me! A proper teacher!’

‘Ah, Hagrid, I’m made up for you,’ said John, and meant it. ‘That’s boss, that is. They’ll never know what hit them.’

Hagrid beamed so hard that his beard went up at the corners. ‘Got a book fer the class an’ all,’ he said happily. ‘It bites! Took a lump out o’ me thumb this mornin’. Lovely thing.’

He talked for ten minutes after that, without stopping, about flobberworms and hippogriffs. John let him. Nobody had talked at him for ten minutes without wanting something since about 1971.

‘Yeh’ll keep in touch, now?’ said Hagrid, when at last he let him go. ‘Yeh’ll write? Promise me yeh’ll write, Johnny.’

‘I promise,’ said John. ‘Ta-ra, Hagrid. Mind how you go.’

He meant it, at the time. He always did. John Constantine’s promises were like paper aeroplanes thrown into a full bath. They flew beautifully for a second or two. Then they were wet paper, and worth even less.

The stone gargoyle was exactly where he had left it, twenty-two years ago. It looked at him with exactly the same expression of stony contempt.

John looked back at it. He knew the old man was up there. He knew it the way you know there’s somebody in a room before you open the door. He hadn’t sent word that he was coming, and he hadn’t asked Hagrid to send it for him, either. He was going to walk in unannounced, with his parcel, and catch the old devil on the hop for once in his life.

He was afraid of Dumbledore. He had admitted that to himself in the pub in Soho. But he had never let anybody have one over on him without a fight, and that included the Devil. It could include Albus Dumbledore as well. If he couldn’t refuse the job, he could at least choose the moment.

It was always a sweet, with the old man. He remembered that much.

‘Sherbet lemon,’ said John.

The gargoyle didn’t move.

‘Acid Pop,’ said John.

The gargoyle sprang aside. Behind it, the wall slid open on a spiral stone staircase, which began, as he stepped on to it, to move smoothly upwards like an escalator.

Got you, thought John, with a small, sour flicker of satisfaction.

At the top was a polished oak door with a brass knocker shaped like a griffin. He didn’t knock. He opened it and walked straight in.

The office was just as he remembered it. It was large, round and full of light. The portraits of old heads of the school were snoozing in their frames all round the walls. Silver instruments whirred and puffed on spindly tables. On a golden perch beside the door, a big crimson bird was dozing with its head under its wing. Behind an enormous desk with clawed feet, in a chair like a throne, sat Albus Dumbledore. He was wearing a pair of half-moon spectacles and robes of a deep plum colour. He was filling in a form.

He didn’t look up.

‘Ah, John,’ he said pleasantly, finishing the line he was writing. ‘I have been expecting you.’

John tutted. He did it at himself, mostly. He might have known. You couldn’t surprise Dumbledore. John never had, not in seven years at school and twenty-two since. The Deluminator didn’t count, and look where that had got him.

Dumbledore put down his quill and looked up at last. He smiled, a small, warm, knowing smile, as though John had said every word of that out loud.

‘It is very rare, you know,’ he said, ‘for anybody to walk through this castle without my noticing. It isn’t impossible. A few people have managed it, over the years. But you are not an Animagus, John. Nor, if you will forgive my saying so, are you anything like as powerful as the few who have.’

John heard the knife in that, even under all the velvet. John let that one go. He crossed the room to the desk instead. He dropped the carrier bag on to the blotter, book and all, with a heavy thud.

‘There y’are,’ he said. ‘One book, as ordered. Are we quits now, or what?’

Dumbledore looked at the bag without touching it. Then he looked up at John again, and his blue eyes were very gentle.

‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘I am far too old for grudges. I simply asked you for a favour.’

John laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. It came out of him short and hard, like a bark.

‘You think you’re dead clever, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You always did. A favour. Nobody sends a fella to rob a house full of wards in the middle of the desert as a favour, Albus. You do it ’cause you’ve got it in for him. That job could have got me killed, easy. You knew that when you sent the owl.’

Dumbledore’s face changed.

The gentleness left it in an instant, like a light being switched off, and what was underneath was something John had seen once before, in the back room of the Hog’s Head, eight years ago. The air in the office seemed to grow colder. On the perch by the door, the crimson bird lifted its head from under its wing.

‘I have asked braver men than John Constantine to go to their deaths,’ said Dumbledore softly. ‘Better men than you, too. I have watched them go. If I must, I will do it again, for the greater...’

He stopped.

He stopped dead in the middle of the phrase, with his mouth still open. John watched the anger drain out of his face. What came in after it was worse. It was a sort of sick, grey horror, the look of a man who has caught sight of himself in a mirror and not known his own face.

John knew those words. He had seen them once, carved over the gate of a black fortress in the mountains of Austria. They were Greta Grindelwald’s words, and that fortress was her prison now. There were whispers, in the sort of pubs John drank in, that she had once been a great deal more than an enemy to the young Albus Dumbledore. John had never believed them until now.

Dumbledore closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, the horror had gone. So had the anger. He looked, suddenly, very tired, and very old indeed.

‘Forgive me,’ he said quietly. ‘That was unworthy of me. You are quite right, of course.’ He took off his half-moon spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his long, crooked nose. ‘I meant what I said, John, though I said it badly. I am too old for grudges. I am too old for wrath, for ruin, and for all the rest of it. I have lived far too long for any of it to matter. Far too long.’

He said the last two words so sadly that John, who had come up the stairs ready for a fight, didn’t know what to do with his hands.

‘I was annoyed with you, I confess,’ Dumbledore went on, more gently, ‘over the business of my Deluminator...’

‘Annoyed?’ John couldn’t help it. ‘You weren’t annoyed, Albus, you were bloody livid. I remember. I stood in that back room and tried to say sorry. You called me things me arl fella never thought of, and he thought of plenty. You said you’d hex me inside out. You said you’d turn me liver into a pair of slippers.’

For the first time, the corner of Dumbledore’s mouth twitched.

‘Did I really? How very creative of me.’ Then the smile faded. ‘Anger can become comfortable, John. Very comfortable, if one keeps it long enough. It is like an old leather armchair. One sinks into it, and one forgets that one could ever stand up. And a coward will nearly always choose comfort over the harder road.’

John hesitated. Then, very carefully, the way you might poke a sleeping dragon with a long stick, he said, ‘D’you reckon you’re a coward, then? No offence, like.’

Dumbledore didn’t answer at once.

He sat there in his great chair, with the sun on his white beard, turning his spectacles over and over in his long fingers. The portraits round the walls had all gone very quiet. John had the feeling that most of them were only pretending to be asleep.

At last Dumbledore sighed.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That is the honest answer, John. I don’t know. If there were not a certain thing I know that I shall have to do, one day, before the end...’ He stopped. He looked, for a moment, at nothing at all. ‘I should say that I was not a coward in the least. But I am an old man now, with more regrets than I care to carry. There are a great many things I might have done differently. I sit up here at night and count them. The count never comes out any smaller. I honestly do not know, and I shall have to live with that.’ He put his spectacles back on. ‘I suspect that not knowing means that I am.’

Then, quite suddenly, he leant forward and pushed a little cut-glass bowl across the desk.

‘Sherbet lemon?’

John looked at the bowl. Then he looked at the old man behind it.

John looked at the old man properly, for the first time in his life. He thought about the two wars. He thought about all the bright young things who had gone off to fight in them because this old man had asked them nicely, and how many had come home. He thought about the strings Dumbledore pulled, and all the lies he must have told for everybody’s own good. John knew that sort of thought. He had sent people to their deaths too, for the best of reasons. He had a churchyard of his own inside his head, full of friends whose only mistake had been knowing him. He thought the thought most nights, with a bottle. It came to him, with a nasty little jolt, that there might be nobody else alive who understood what it was like to sit up here and count.

Two of a kind, you an’ me, he thought. He wished he hadn’t. Only I’ve never gone round makin’ out I’m a good man.

He wondered whether he might be just as old as Dumbledore, really, once you counted all the years he had spent in other places. He decided that he didn’t want to know. He had always been rather vain where his age was concerned.

He took a sherbet lemon.

‘Thank you, John,’ said Dumbledore. He drew the carrier bag towards him across the blotter. He laid one hand on it, very lightly, as another man might have rested his hand on a sleeping dog. ‘Its owner will be extremely glad to know that it is safe.’

John stopped with the sherbet lemon halfway to his mouth.

‘Its owner?’ he said. ‘Last I saw of its owner, la, he was stood on his front step in a hairnet, waving me off. Got a receipt off John Lennon an’ all, he has.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Dumbledore mildly. ‘Mr Shacklewell is not its owner. He is merely the last person who happened to have it, which is a very different thing. The book was written by a very old acquaintance of mine. It belongs to him, as it always has. I rather think he would like it back sooner rather than later.’

‘Acquaintance,’ said John. ‘Not a mate, then?’

‘I hardly know him at all, I am sorry to say.’ Dumbledore looked faintly wistful. ‘We have exchanged a few letters over the years, on the subject of the Art. Mine were rather long, I am afraid. His were short and very courteous, in a far steadier hand than mine. He is a great deal older than I am, John. He has been writing books of that kind for longer than either of us has been alive.’

The Art. John had come across those two words in his reading, in one of the few scraps there were to find. It was what the D’ni had called the writing of those books. They always gave it a capital letter, like a name. He opened his mouth to ask how a man came to be swapping letters with somebody like that. Then he shut it again. There were some things you were better off not knowing. In his experience, that covered most things, especially the interesting ones.

Dumbledore had opened a drawer in the desk. It was the same drawer, John supposed, where he kept his grudges. He took out a second book and laid it beside the carrier bag. It was a small book, no bigger than a pocket diary, bound in plain leather gone dark and soft with handling. It had no title on the cover, and no name.

‘That will be going back to him as well,’ said Dumbledore, ‘when the time is right. He wrote it a long while ago, for a traveller who had done him a very great service. It leads from his island back to this world. He meant it to take the poor man home.’

John looked at the little book. Even from where he stood, he could feel it, a faint, steady warmth, like the last of a fire in a grate.

‘Thought them things stayed behind when you went through,’ he said. ‘That’s what I read, anyway. You put your hand on the picture, you go, an’ the book stops where it is.’

‘So it does,’ said Dumbledore. ‘That is precisely why it is still here. The traveller never used it. He found his way home by another road entirely, a rather more alarming one, I gather. He kept the book all the same. People do keep things, John, as you of all people know.’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘It was handed down through his family for a great many years, from one person who did not know what it was to the next, until at last it came to me.’

‘So he gets the pair of them, then,’ said John.

‘He gets both,’ Dumbledore agreed. ‘One way there and one way home. It seems only fair.’

‘Shacklewell won’t see it that way,’ said John. ‘He paid for his, didn’t he? Fifty dollars, fair and square. It was on the label, like.’

‘He paid fifty dollars to a man who dug it out of a hole in the ground,’ said Dumbledore. ‘The hole did not belong to that man. Neither did anything he found in it. Mr Shacklewell had no more right to that book than a magpie has to a wedding ring, John. One cannot really steal a thing from somebody who never owned it. One can only give it back.’ He folded his long fingers together on top of the carrier bag. ‘I should hardly call what you did a burglary at all. I should call it a kindness.’

John laughed.

He couldn’t help it. This time it was a proper laugh, the helpless kind that comes all the way up from your belly. He had to grab the back of the armchair to stay upright. He was thinking of the old man in the back room of the Hog’s Head eight years ago, purple in the face, promising to turn his liver into a pair of slippers. That had been over a cigarette lighter. Here was the same old man, calm as a vicar at a christening, telling him that breaking and entering was a kindness. Dumbledore’s conscience, John thought, worked like a turnstile. It only ever went round the one way.

‘You’ve got some front, Albus,’ he said, when he could talk again. ‘I’ll give you that. Eight years you’ve had a cob on with me over a ciggy lighter. Eight years, la! Now you’re sat there telling me robbing doesn’t count, as long as you’re the one who wants the stuff.’

‘The Deluminator belonged to me,’ said Dumbledore serenely. ‘This book did not belong to Mr Shacklewell. I really cannot see the difficulty.’

‘No,’ said John, wiping his eyes. ‘Course you can’t.’

‘Now, do sit down, before you fall down,’ said Dumbledore. ‘You look as though you have had a very long day.’ The blue eyes twinkled at him over the half-moon spectacles. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’

John hadn’t had anybody be kind to him for a very long time. He hadn’t let anybody, which was not quite the same thing.

He sat down in the chintz armchair in front of the desk. He put the sherbet lemon in his mouth. Then he put his feet up on the edge of the Headmaster’s desk, crossed his ankles, and grinned.

‘Long day?’ he said. ‘Albus, la. You’ve no idea. It started in a desert...’