Chapter Text
1913-1914.
One.
Credence was standing at the wash basin with the drying rag and a chipped mug when the Papist devils came for him. Out of the nothing they’d come, out of their incense, their satanic Papist smoke they all swung about their heads at meetings, he had seen them do this once through the door when he was skulking around the St. Something church like he wasn’t supposed to, hoping for a cup of soup, which he did regret now, which he was certain must have something to do with the way it had all turned out. Because one moment he was drying dishes and the next he knew, he was watching his Ma shout herself pink at them all and the evil Devil-lickers waving their sticks at her and his sisters crying beneath the table, and then he was away from them all, however far away nobody would tell him, nobody would tell him anything anymore only that he should quiet down and dry his eyes and eat something and stop putting up such a fuss all of the time.
He was sure that they were Papists because those were the true witches. This, Ma had not told him. He was quite proud to have worked this out entirely for himself in watching them through the window of the St. Something all of the time. Didn’t they all do their magic with smoke and oils and all sorts of candles and other fiery, pretty things, and wear those long gowns like women, those purple gowns and now in many colours and sometimes they were disguised as any normal kind of folk, too, he knew. The soup was surely a trick, he saw that now. How easy he’d been to fool with the clawing hunger in his belly. He saw now especially how they could be tricky and sneaky, like, dressing themselves as kind nurses in long white robes so that he wouldn’t try to run away home anymore or shout anymore or fight at them like he’d tried to do.
And sometimes they would bring him things, bewildering letters from strangers wishing him happiness and a bright future, little toys like the tin toys he kept now in the box. He shouldn’t keep them. Ma would have tossed them out of a window and whipped him soundly, but he kept those toys in the little box, the yellow tin duck that quacked like a real one beside his pillow, the little grey mohair elephant that shifted its head from side to side in his arms when he hugged it beneath the blankets where no one could see him acting like such a frightened baby, the tin witch on the little broom that flew circles over his palm and laughed her squeaky witch’s cackle at him when he caught her in his tight fist and shoved her back into the box in alarm.
And he kept the glittering wrappers from the sweets that changed colours. He’d flattened them over the top of the box like shining jewels and sometimes he would sit when he was alone and open the lid with his fingernail and look at them all, his beautiful things.
He was sure that it was a sin, but there was nothing else to do in this place besides sit and look at his treasures and try and claw at the flat faces of the false nurses whenever they came to bring him his food or to ogle him. He had tried praying and was certain now that God had forsaken him. Like Job, he was intended only to suffer.
He was weak, he liked their toys. He sometimes ate their hot food, their oatmeals and their honeyed milk, and when they gave him quietening drinks, he even let the nurse in the largest wimple sit with him and hold him with his elephant tucked under his arm and sing him sleeping songs until his heart stopped its thundering track through his chest, sounding less like the elevated, distant to him. He let her comb his hair flat with her broad hands and straighten his collar. She was gentler than the others, touched his cheek before shutting off the light. She brought him pyjamas and read him stories. When she smiled, her eyes were like copper pennies in her wide, red face, so unlike Ma who could make him tremble just with looking. He was sure that it was another trick of theirs, and that he was falling for it.
You make such trouble, she told him. They won’t send you to school until you can calm yourself. Why do you go on making such a ruckus, sweet boy like you? Bathilda won’t even come into this jinxy room anymore, says you nearly took off half her face with those claws of yours.
He looked at his hands, at the round moon nails which had been cut short by some evil magic they did to him in retaliation for his scratching. He tried to remember Bathilda, but all of their faces were hazy and warbled to him, like he was looking at them through the bottom of a glass the way he had sometimes done at home in pretending that it was a telescope and that he was a faraway explorer.
Now, he’d had a taste of the bitterness of faraway, he only wanted to go back home where he thought that he would do his best to be good forever. He would never again pinch Chastity for her taunting, or covet the food they gave out to others even if his own belly felt wrung out like damp laundry. He’d be so good, his mother would never have any cause to beat on him ever again, and he’d pray daily, even harder than he had already, for God in his mercy and wisdom to scourge out all the coal dust and oily badness of him from the inside, all of the badness he’d let in when he was lonely, the monster-limb that made him scratch and kick and fight so that it wouldn’t have to come out and do it for him.
Two.
They had the scourer boy posed beside the window where the light washed his pale face into milk. Someone had dressed the weedy corpse of him in a pair of black robes cut for a much larger child, scraped his black hair down flat over his forehead with the comb lines still raked into the damp top, pressed eyebrows down into two flat lines devoid of human expression. Chip did not notice, or pretended not to notice, the way that the boy stepped back to cringe beneath his hand when Chip clasped his shoulder firmly as he would with Percy or with any of his other sons, shaking, the little body shaking beneath him, teeth rattling in its little skull.
“Had to see him in person,” Chip said. “Had to come and see him in person,” he said in the same loud sportsman’s voice that made his wife’s lips thin around the gold rim of her gin tumbler at parties. “Very exciting news.” Clapping the boy again on the shoulder, kneading his upper arm like tough bread. “Lucky boy,” he said, “isn’t he? We’re going to make him a very lucky young man soon. We’re going to pay for his schooling, his clothing, everything. We’re going to cover absolutely everything, like one of our own. Yes, I have four children. You could say five now. You absolutely could say that. Yes, write that down.”
A camera beam caught Percy’s gaze and seared it. Clatter of locks in the open door, disturbed by the passage of another congressional official bearing coffees for the new guests, slither of leather-soled shoes and of robes over chipped linoleum, journalists stepping back to allow their passage as the photo slid out onto a heap of other photographs scattered over the floor, all black-and-white shots of the scourer boy and his glass bowl eyes and his severe haircut with Percy’s genteel smile now frozen over them like a scab.
The room where they were keeping the boy was small and sallow, a rectangular chamber like an engorged shoebox, more cell than refuge. A single bed cut the place in half beneath the single window, which let no light in to illuminate the dirty landscape tacked onto the otherwise bare plaster walls, the scuffed linoleum printed in cheap approximation of Turkish carpet.
There were no toys, no boots tossed before the door or beneath the bed, no rumpled clothing or half-read books on the nightstand or any other indications that the room housed a twelve year-old child. Inside were now crammed ten, maybe twelve bodies. Healers, journalists, officials, the two Graves delegates whose spontaneous appearance in the wing had summoned the others like fruit gnats to suck the juice from the story, and here the scourer boy with his sullen little face a smudge beneath the window, the sticks of him all gathered up into his billowing robes that were too large and too short at once, he and his skinny white ankles only freshly liberated from the wizard-haters who’d kidnapped him, raised him, adopted him legally, however the story went. In the office beyond, a small heap of letters, charmed and jinxed trinkets, well wishes and Howlers. The room: grey, oily, worn down by so many sickly bodies like the bed of a municipal river. All of this was funded primarily by their own annual endowment, Percy remembered. This wing of the hospital bore his family name.
Somewhere nearby now, his father was telling everyone about the great success his eldest had been having out West. “We’re all proud of Pip, aren’t we, Pippy?” Percy saw the his sleeve blur above the head of another journalist, the flash charging. He watched the scourer boy blink as another leaf of spent film fell to the floor. His face, in black and white, blinked back up at the room, trapped in its loop of perpetual surprise. Chip was saying loudly, “Time for him to come home now, of course, our Pip. He’s had his fun. Nineteen’s a fine age to enter in service to your country, that’s what I always say. You can write that one down, certainly. Young men need their fun before they settle in. Pippy’s a fine boy, and we’re really just thrilled, just absolutely thrilled - and I’ll tell you, this boy here, this young fellow, his whole life is about to change, and he doesn’t even know it yet, do you, son?”
Whatever the boy mumbled back from beneath Chip’s bearlike paw was eaten up by the fevered crowd. Finished photographing and interrogating him, they left him perched on the edge of his bed alone with the little box of charmed tin toys and candies that Percy had snagged from a cart on Dragon Street when Chip explained where they were going. Only then did Percy notice the glassy emptiness to his eyes, his funny slow way of hanging his head and wringing his hands into the black fabric on his lap, each movement a shadow of the life propelling it. On the lone table beside the bed, a glass of milk and a spoon. A bottle of something unlabelled. The Healer who had let them in had said, you’d save yourself the money and the trouble with this one by putting him in a zoo, he is a wild animal.
The room was too full of people, Percy thought. It was never intended to hold this many, designed instead for the public-charge patients to recover from their illnesses and injuries and hexes and curses in the kind of solitude you could rarely get in all their teeming hive of tenements.
He would much rather have ended their day at lunch with quiet drinks and an hour or so in which to tell Chip all about his time out West before returning home, where they would all be waiting anyway to begin their own interrogations, the whole family. Bitsy would be on the tips of her toes waiting to get a bite out of old Chip for making all the big decisions again without consulting her, like Percy’s new job in Maj-Sec. This boy. Speaking to the press on his own. That was likely the one to do her head in most and earn the old man his exile for the night, the cot in his valet’s closet. His father had always had a rough and common way of speaking that drove them all just absolutely blinkers. She would never forgive him for making her find out about it all through a clunky quote in the Ghost.
Three.
They packed Credence up after the visit from the big man with the bell-clapper hands and all of the cameras that had made his eyes ache the whole day after and all the talk of his life changing forever, what a gift they were giving him if only he knew what it was. Only the nurse in the big wimple would come to see him anymore. She laid out the new suit for him on the bed, blue serge iron-pressed into the straight up-and-down shape of the boy he was meant to be now. He still felt sleepy from the hubbub of the day before, his dry tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he stooped to let her comb his hair a final time, to touch his cheek and wipe away the wetness there with her thumb.
Don’t be clawing the eyes out of any of your teachers up at that school, she told him bewilderingly, winking.
And then she was gone from him somewhere in the soupy warmth of someone’s arm, the fresh drink they gave him for the journey to calm him. With this creature we’ll be lucky to make it there in one piece, he heard someone say to laughter. Their laughter spread and rumbled in the torso of the body of the man at his side. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the man’s arm shifted to clasp his shoulder, and they began to walk. Above him the same voice said, You’ll see all about it when you get on the go. Jinxed kid. Another: And they want to send him off to school! Crazy. You’ll only get trouble from him, and he takes a full dose of that Calming Draught, mind you me. Never seen anything like it from a boy of that size. Nasty little scourer beastie.
All of these words he swallowed down deep inside of him. When he walked, he thought he could feel them jangling, he felt their weight, but maybe it was only the potion they kept force-feeding him with his milk making such a heavy thing of his soul. He felt like a bundle of rags held together in the shape of a body by a lot of knotted string, like he would fall apart when released from the constraints of the new wool suit scratching all over him. The hand on his shoulder squeezed, they reached the salt-bright light of outside. You’ll have to watch him, said the same voice again, all of the adults above him dark shadows, their words darting overhead like flocks of pigeons he couldn’t keep up with. He’s a runner, the voice said. Got the slip on two aurors when they brought him in, had to jinx that little beastie flat on his back to get him down from the roof, imagine that.
Don’t see how it could do a lick of good to anyone, teaching a little scourer brute like this one to do magic.
They’ll be sending him back within the week, mark my words.
Four.
Somewhere north of the city, Credence learned, later following the route they had travelled by train on his finger over the printed lines of a map, was a state called Massachusetts. In that state were two places which would become the most significant to him in all of his short life.
The first, the Cottages, were a little cluster of plastered stone houses on Plum Island along the coast, all whitewashed with blue doors and nests of seagulls in their rafters. He was given a metal-frame bed beneath the window in the middle boys’ dormitory, third in a row of six houses with back gardens and front plots where they grew vegetables for the supper table. All of the houses overlooked waves of green seagrass rolling out towards the white sand of the shore. All looked out from the back on waves of grass rolling out towards nothing. From morning until evening they were out of doors, the littlest in the sand and the high grass, the other slipping off to swim or to picnic, to draw on paper scraps in the garden or on the back of the house with bits of chalk, or to shirk the chores assigned to them by the matron and play dumb whenever she came calling. Each house had a matron, so there were six in total, all of them older ladies.
Mrs. Beamish, from the baby’s house on the far end, was built like a sloping hill of hard flesh with curved shoulders and a red frizzy bun at its peak. Her nose echoed the slope of her body, drooping down beneath her spectacles like a piece of modelling wax that had melted just at the tip. There was always a baby on her hip and another at her skirt, and they took up all of her softness; she had no patience for the older children and a particular dislike of boys even though she spent most of her time smoking cigarette roll-ups in the middle boys’ cottage with Mrs. Campbell.
Mrs. Campbell went by Auntie Camp amongst the wider populace of the Cottages. She was tall and broad-chested, with shovel-like hands often engaged in dragging boys out of the kitchen by their collars. Her hair, kept in neat braids coiled around the back of her head, was dyed deepest black with potions she ordered in off the catalogue owl each month. There was a certain hardiness to her that cowed even the boldest boys and made them follow her with their heads hung low into the house when it was time for chores or supper.
She was smoking at the kitchen table on the day they brought Credence in. “Sure if there isn’t a sorry tale to tell about this one,” came her pronouncement almost as soon as he was through the door. Then she had listened to the story; some of it was news to Credence.
No one had told him yet, for example, that he was meant to have attended some kind of wizarding school from the age of eleven and had been passed over, lost to something called the Makooza for reasons yet undiscovered. It was all of this that had put everyone in such a sour mood with him, this and his Ma, who was the thing they called a scourer, same as they’d called him. He took this to mean a person who hated wizards, which his Ma was, which he reminded himself that he was, too. No one had bothered to tell him either that his mother and sisters were still alive. He wanted to cry from the relief of this news, but the drink made him drowsy and the drowsiness made it so that the tears slipped out onto his cheeks without his noticing. He imagined Ma must be wild from looking for him, for making her worry. He was likely better off in this place, whatever it was, than with her, who would beat an inch of leather into him for each day he’d been missing before he even had a chance to explain himself.
He listened alongside Auntie Camp to all the bits he had known about the hospital, and his rages, and the wealthy man with the awful name who had promised to pay to send him to school, and the whole time she listened, her look grew darker and more troubled, until he felt a little stab of worry in his gut to see that look passed onto him, and he trembled despite the quietening drinks he’d had again on the train, and when they spoke the words they’d used about him in the hospital, scourer beastie, when they called him wild animal and told her how much of a ruckus he’d kicked up there, she went away from the table to stand facing the fire and stayed like that a long time, until Credence was sure that she would tell them to take him back, not to leave him here where he was unwanted.
“You’ll take that boggin’ potion back with you,” she said instead to the man who had brought him. “I don’t stand with such a treatment.”
“With this one, you will,” the man said. “Jinxed animal tore out a bunch of my hair on the train, like he was picking daisies. And they were full of all kinds of stories about him back there, if you’d heard, missus.”
As he said this, he gestured his own oiled head with a jerk of his chin at Auntie Camp. She touched the braid at the nape of her neck and looked again at Credence, still trembling at the shadows in her gaze, and frowned. There was something off about this wean that didn’t sit well with her, but she was a practical kind of woman. Whatever was wrong with the wean, it was still a wean, and her life’s work was to care for them in the way that she did, keeping them fed and clothed and more-or-less with all of the same parts they’d come in with. If they did manage to dent and scratch themselves along the way, then that was their own doing, it was not her job to pass judgments. Merlin knew what they’d all undergone before they got to her kitchen.
“Even so,” she said. “Draughts and potions for a little upset. I won’t see it done to any of the weans here. Not to any of mine, and this one’s mine now. You give that wean here to me, and take that glass of dragon’s boke with you when you leave.”
Five.
She was not a mama or a mother of any kind, as she would be the first to remind them all. I am not yer mammy, she would say, ye haven’t got one and there’s no use looking here and now for a replacement. She did not sing sleeping songs or tell bedtime stories. You’d have had better luck going off to cry alone on a dune overlooking the sea than to her; her patience for tears was limited. She kept an endless supply of handkerchiefs in her trouser pockets for cut fingers and sodden faces, but the only rightful place for tears, she said, was in the eyeballs to keep them clean. If you couldn’t get a handle on your leaky eyes, you’d not make it far in the world.
For all the summer birthdays, she set aside a bit of the grocery money to order cakes through the same catalogue that delivered her black hair dyes and her purple smoking tobacco. They came thick and oily in tins with beautiful ladies and fields of wildflowers printed on the lids that she let them beat on later as drums while the boys whooped and danced, and then she would hang the dented tin lids from the walls for fine art, so that they were all covered in the same printed, toothy smiles and riots of mayweed and pimpernel for the boys to peruse on rainy days, and she called this Arts & Sciences. She was not a baker or a cook of any remarkable talent. Her food was edible for the fact that it was hot and ready when they needed it three times a day, and she did not make them give thanks to anyone for it, not even to God, though she let Credence dip his head in quiet prayer and shushed the others with a fierce look whenever they went to laugh at him for this oddness.
But, she never raised her hand to any of them, not even when they were bad. And they were often bad. Credence thought so. The boys in this place were wilder than any who had ever crossed his mother’s threshold at home. They shouted indoors and wrestled on the furniture and never made their beds. They said yes and no without a hint of the word ma’am, forgot their thank yous, and laughed when they should be ashamed. They went swimming all day when they were not to and tore their clothes and came back in the evenings sun-tanned, covered in all kinds of organic material, but she only smudged their dirty cheeks with a spitty thumb and laughed and told them to get themselves to the wash basin if they wanted their suppers hot, and she never starved them, and she never held any of their badness over their heads or called them beasts or animals, and she always smelled like woodsmoke and tobacco when she pulled him from the middle of his shouting fits into the surprising softness of her belly, though it was not a hug just something to keep him still and from hurting himself, and she never told the other boys he was hiding in the jelly cupboard when they came hunting for him, and she’d have a cup of tea waiting for him beside hers on the table whenever it was safe to come out again, and she never expected him to be grateful for it, and for all of that, Credence was prepared to love her for the rest of his life, without question.
Six.
The second place was Ilvermorny, which all of the children talked about incessantly, those who had already been and those who longed to go alike. It was all anybody cared for, the school on the mountain, the castle full of magical children the same as all of them, only with magical parents waiting home for them at holidays and summers.
None of the boys was allowed a wand at home, Credence learned, but they really did use magic wands, little wooden sticks, to do their spellwork. He watched Auntie Camp wave hers around the kitchen regular enough while he busied himself untangling the skeins of yarn she set before him, or rolling up little tobacco soldiers for her smoking box and licking the paper shut, pressing just so as she marched the dishes back into the cupboard. He wondered if they would ever let him have a stick of his own, or if he would burst into flames the moment he touched one, having failed the test, God’s and the witches’ alike.
Someone in the meantime had sent him a trunk full of things that really were his. Books of magical history and of potion making and charming, candies in wrappers that flashed and fizzled. A cauldron filled with ingredients in tiny jars no larger than thimbles, others in parchment paper, which he was not to touch until the school term began in September, for they were costly. They had also sent him a set of witch’s gowns in the school colours, new boots to replace the cracked ones he’d worn from home, stockings, books with funny pictures that moved and told him new stories whenever he cracked them open, sports clothes, new underthings, drawing paper, pencils, and an ivory hair comb with his name misspelled, Creedence Barebone, on the handle.
These were the gifts he had been promised by his wealthy benefactors. They baffled and frightened Credence. No one had yet taken the time to explain magic to him, how it differed from the Satanic influence he’d been told it was, how it might not damn him. They all seemed to take it for granted that he would be as pleased as they were about his luck. They called it luck, and it earned him the ire of the other boys in the dormitory, as he was the only one not in secondhand anything, for the first time in his life.
The presents were also the only correspondence he’d had since that day in the hospital all those weeks before, in the spring. He tried to remember what he looked like, this Mr. Graves, but all of his memories from those days had been washed out of his mind by the caustic effect of the quietening drinks, a recipe for which he had found in the back of the American Standard Book of Potions, Grade Two, under ‘Calming Draughts’.
Those times had been bleached out like sheets left on the line in bright sunlight. All he remembered from then was his own fear and misery in blurry sound and colour, which he decided to put behind him. There was no use in dragging around such a heavy weight with him of the time, he decided, not to put that on his body which was already traitor enough to him, which moved differently in some to-him imperceptible way that the other boys had already picked up on like city rats on his scent, his body which bore all the marks of Ma’s old justice-keeping on its pale flesh, all of the tithes he’d already paid in motherlove before. He decided that it was better, after all, to be an orphan.
For much of the day here, he was left on his own to do as he pleased, and then he was fed for it, no questions asked. Even the other boys, when they promised beatings, could only hurt him if they caught him, and he had become adept at hiding himself in the smallest and least conceivable of crevices around the house, or else in the high grasses overlooking the sea, and could spend all day there on his own discovering the joys of his moving-picture books and his new schoolbooks and the tin duck and witch and the mohair elephant he had on him regularly as his only and best and first friends, and his first gifts, besides.
Thus passed the summer.
In two months, more or less, it ended, and he found himself sitting at the end of the long dining table at supper with his head bowed over a plate of oily cake crumbs, his cake having been snatched off by other hands while he prayed, though he didn’t mind. He wasn’t used to the taste of cake yet, and he was busy worrying about tomorrow, when they would all take their trunks with them and pack off for the mountain school. They had a special means of travelling there, the Cottage orphans, through the fireplace someone had said, which worried Credence. Throughout supper he had warred with his own tight stomach, forcing himself to eat. He could not escape the nagging thought that this would be his end, that it had been written for him. It was a dramatic and almost Biblical way to go, and he supposed it was only fair for all the badness he’d done, but now that he’d had a taste of freedom, he was reluctant to die.
The worry followed him around all through evening chores as he washed dishes, and then as he brushed his teeth and turned the sheets down on his bed and dodged the fist that appeared from the ether to knock him flat onto his pillow.
“Scourer Sally won’t even get in to school, just you watch,” someone said. He was the owner of the fist, a boy with white-blond hair like the wild chamomile that grew in the grasses around the back garden, one tooth chipped in the front, a spill of freckles over his sun-browned nose as though someone had scattered beach sand there and it stayed. His name was Fritzy, and Credence had stumbled into him one night on his way to the lavatory, crying over his non-magical mother and a brother he missed, and was not yet forgiven for this sin.
“Oh, baby, maybe the Floo’ll just burn him all up,” someone else suggested, which made Fritzy laugh, “You heard that, Sally? You’re toast.”
A pillow appeared in his line of vision shortly before impact with the side of his head. Ignoring it, Credence climbed into his bed and tugged the sheets up to his chin. He heard the swish of footsteps near the door and stilled his breathing. The light went out, bathing the membranes of his eyelids in blackness, and the footsteps retreated along with Auntie Camp’s stern reminder that they were all of them to stay in bed at all costs, or else they’d miss the departure tomorrow, and whose fault would that be?
He tried to comfort himself with the thought that she alone would not let him be burnt to a crisp in the fireplace tomorrow, but then, there had been no promise of that, either. She was only kind to him, but no one loved him, he reminded himself. He had always been clumsy, and prone to bouts of sullenness, and unlovable, even before, and now he was a scourer, as it turned out, and could never belong anywhere or with any other kind of people. He had read all about them in the History of North American Magic, in the chapters well after the First Nations people, when the Europeans came over and did all their badness, he’d learned, the scourers had been no better than the people without magic. He had even found his name there, Barebone, a dull confirmation of his worst fears. There really was something awfully, dreadfully wrong with him always. And his Ma had lied to him, besides, for the books had also confirmed her own family legacy of witchery.
“Yoohoo,” someone hissed. “Sally. If you burn up in the Floo, can I have your hair comb and your picture books?”
Credence opened his eyes to find the source of this voice in the bed across from his. “Please,” the voice said.
He squinted at its body, too dark to make out the individual features, but he already knew its owner as Albert, a redhead and a known telltale and oddball with as few friends as Credence had. Despite their similarities, they were not friends, but because ratfink Albert could not help himself, he was always off telling Auntie Camp whenever the other boys had managed to gang up and flick their toothpaste into Credence’s face, or take turns punching him through his pillow so that it wouldn’t leave marks, and she’d always come running in then to catch and scatter them like rats in sudden lamplight, and take Credence with her to the kitchen to hold her yarn while she knitted or to roll her cigarettes for her, leaving Albert the rat fink behind to their mercies. He was also the telltale, though, whenever Credence had one of his fits, and it was because of this that they were not friends. This and the fact that Albert also called him Scourer Sally just like all of the others, and laughed along at the same jokes any of the rest of them told about him being something called a puffskein, which no one would explain to him at all as they all said he should know it, he was one already.
“Can I at least have one of your books?” Albert asked again, when Credence told him to be quiet. “Please,” he said. “I never get anything. Even at Christmas, they’re always taking my things, please.”
“They take your things because you’re a blabbermouth,” Credence reminded him.
“I’m not a blabbermouth,” Albert said. “I can keep all of my own secrets, if I want to. I never told Auntie Camp what you do in the water, with that dark thing.”
A coldness came over Credence, as though someone had replaced his blanket with a sheet of ice, though he did his best to mask it, thankful for the dark.
“You’re a liar and a telltale,” he told Albert, though they both knew, in this case, that it was not true. He always went off to the very far end of the shore, out of sight of the Cottages and away from the others, when the badness in him needed to come out. It liked the ocean. It would slither over the water like a slick of oil and make shapes there, catch fish. It liked to play that it was a wave and chase him and wash over him, and though he’d grown more tired and wary of its play here than he had been at home in New York, when it was all that he had, he knew somehow that there was no getting rid of it. The badness was stuck inside him, was part of him like any of his other organs.
“I could tell Auntie Camp,” Albert said in a wise voice that was closer now. He’d climbed out of his bed to hover over Credence’s in the corner. “I could tell her what you do with your shadow out there,” he hissed. His breath came out in little puffs of dampness over Credence’s nose and cheeks. “Then they really won’t let you go to school. They’ll send you to jail. That’s what they do with people who break the law and do magic they’re not supposed to do.”
“Liar,” Credence breathed. The breath caught around a lump of panic in his throat. He tugged the blanket up to his cheeks.
“I don’t even have to tell on you, though,” Albert said softly. He’d leant down until they were nearly touching noses. His breath smelled like peppermint and earth, his hair a tangled shadow in the dark air above Credence’s head. “I read all about it in the History of Magic,” he said. “What you have inside you, it’s so rare they almost never see it anymore in America. You’re only lucky you made it this far, Sally. That thing’ll kill you before you make it back here next summer, and then I’ll get all your books, and your stupid baby toys you hide under your pillow.”
Credence lie there shaking long after he had gone back to bed, the stupid, awful rat fink blabbermouth. The liar. There had been no such thing about him in the history book, he was sure of it. He’d read the same book, and the only thing that sounded even a bit familiar was a little footnote he’d read about something called an Obscurus, which didn’t exist anymore. They’d stamped them out by taking all of the magical children away from their non-magical families whenever it came up, so there was never a chance for any of them to grow this dark appendage. It was an old-timey illness, ancient, extinct through civilization. And even as he thought these things to comfort himself, he felt cold all over because he knew, of course he knew. He had always known.
Seven.
Despite all worry and predictions to the contrary, he passed through the fireplace without incident, landed on the flagstone floors in the entrance hall of the school castle, walked up to the great carved statues with everyone watching from the balcony when it was his turn, and got himself sorted into a house called Pukwudgie along with Albert the blabbermouth, who grinned at him.
Eight.
Then the darkness did not make an appearance for three months, though Credence felt it behind his rib cage like a hibernating animal, its slumbering claws in his belly and his lungs. Its coldness still punched the breath from him sometimes when he least expected it, but it did not try to come out, and there were no fits, either. He was much too busy scrambling to make up for a missed first year and all of the things he did not know, and his magic was unreliable, coming out in bursts too strong for the assignment sometimes, or else not at all.
Joining the magical world was not as easy as people had led him to believe. For example, even Auntie Camp had assured him he would only have to pay attention in his classes, read his books, do his homework, and work hard in to do well, but it was not so. No matter how hard he tried in lessons, it was like walking up a hill of marbles. He’d take one step, read a chapter of a book, and slide down the rest of the way with his cheeks burning pink shame and humiliation as the class stopped waiting for him to get it right over their stifled giggles, and soon his teachers stopped calling on him at all. No one spoke to him or tried to be his friend. He could see that most of the others had already formed little groups, or at the very least, paired off at mealtimes and in corridors, how the girls walked with arms linked and the boys with their heads bent close to whisper. When they did speak to him, they called him Sally Scourer, a character from a children’s book everybody seemed to have read long ago. There were no copies in the library, but Credence could surmise from the words they flung out at him that she was not a beloved character and had died at the end in some wretched and pleasurable way that made them all laugh when they saw him in the corridors.
At the worst of times, they repeated the things the other boys had said at the Cottages about him being a puffskein. He tried to pay them no mind, because it was ridiculous. He had read all about puffskeins now in the Zoological History of Europe and Western Asia. They were funny little creatures covered in fur, illegal in America, of course, none of which he was. Of all the wretched things anyone could ever say about him, this was the least likely to hold any amount of truth, so silly it was almost laughable, but there was something else implied in these jokes that Credence didn’t like, even if he didn’t understand it. He thought of Ma often, then, and what she would have done if she’d heard, and the thought struck fear like a spear of ice through his belly.
From his benefactor, only silence. Whatever Chip Graves, with his shovel paws and thick breath, thought about Credence, if he was pleased with him or angry with the poor progress he’d made at school, if he’d come to hate him for being a scourer or else considered him a puffskein too, remained a mystery. There were no letters or parcels to follow up on the riches of his school trunk. No one had written, as so many boys’ mothers and fathers seemed to, to ask Credence how he was getting on. He reminded himself that he preferred his lonesomeness to the idle chitchat that swamped the Pukwudgie common room in ceaseless din, but it was cold comfort.
At Ilvermorny were three students called Graves. He’d located their names with his finger in a trophy case dedicated to sports players in the school library, Felix, Charles III, and Percival. Percival’s dates placed him in the school a few years before Credence’s arrival, but Felix he had seen about with his friends in Thunderbird robes, carrying a broomstick or pretending to duel with pencils in the corridors between classes. He was a willowy branch of a boy with thick eyebrows and an ovular face turned brown by the sun. On the sole occasion they’d ever spoken, it was Felix who’d approached him, introduced himself promptly as Flip, and asked Credence to stop staring at him all the time, it was making his friends laugh.
“Oh,” he said, “and watch out for my brother, Trip. He’s a rotten egg. He’ll hex you into next week if he catches you looking at him like that. He’s already decided to hate you. There’s nothing you can do about it, anyways.”
There were a lot of things, he was learning, that were beyond his control. Apart from the introduction of magic into his daily life, little had changed since the Cottages. Excepting Alberrt, none of the other boys in his dormitory were orphans, and they had subtracted this difference from the sum tally of everything they deemed wrong with him, which included his scourer heritage and his wealthy oaf of a benefactor, so that he found himself again the target of a group of boys’ boredom, again hiding in the library or on the grounds outside from their roving gangs, or biting his lip to hold in his cries when they took turns punching him through his pillow, a trick Albert had taught them to get them off his own neck. The only new addition to this routine was magic. Though they were not allowed to take their wands with them in the hallways between classes, some of them still managed, on a routine basis, to pelt him with stinging hexes from underneath their desks, and so his skin often felt raw and burned all over well after the learning hour had ended and until he could soothe the sting in a cool bath on his own at night.
This was the first three months. He was failing his classes. He’d had detention the week prior for calling out when a stinger had hit him in Potions, and he often skipped dinner in favour of using the time to find himself a hiding place until curfew, snacking on stale sandwiches he’d stuffed into his pockets at lunch, reading his books in dark cupboards and crushing the soft mohair of the elephant’s paw in his pocket between finger and thumb while he practiced incantations, or prayed.
Still, the darkness stayed put in his chest. Sat there while he suffered, purring. In truth, he was not sure that the darkness would ever have come out again if it had not been for Trip Graves, who really was a rotten egg and the kind of bully that Credence could only imagine growing up to work in a bank. At sixteen, he strut about the castle as though he owned it, and his family’s money, Credence learned, was imbedded in everything, like the roots of an old tree, so he probably did. He’d long mastered the art of the wandless stinging hex and cast them with reckless abandon whenever Credence was anywhere nearby, turning only when he’d heard a yelp to give Credence an evil look that could almost have been a smile, except that he seemed to derive all of his pleasure and joy from the torment of others. Whenever he missed, or when Credence managed to bite down his cries, Trip would storm off in anger only to redouble his efforts the following morning.
It was turning into one of those mornings; Credence could feel the dark pinprick eyes searing hate into his forehead as he packed bread rolls into his pockets. Weekends were always the worst, because there were no classes, and all of the docents seemed to disappear without work. Left to their own devices, his bullies would hunt for him until the dinner bell rang. He had every intention of disappearing into the woods all day, where he had learned to climb as high as possible into the branches of the pine trees there, hugging the trunks with his chest and between his knees until they ached in a deep way from joint to joint, but the ache was worth it, no one had ever found him there.
He made it to the grounds before the first hex tripped him up, stinging like belt lick across his ankle. That one he shook off. They were an annoyance, he reminded himself, but they left no marks, unlike what Ma had done to him, and the pain would go away once he’d reached the woods. The weather had turned sour and grey, pinched at him through his school robes and the blue serge of his suit underneath. He was beginning to think that the rumors his bullies spread about the old alkie, his benefactor Charles Graves II, might have some truth to them. Maybe he had forgotten all about Credence, and maybe he hated him. In his trunk had been no winter things, and nothing had come for him by post, even as Trip and Flip Graves walked around now like a pair of overgrown rabbits in fuzzy angora, silk scarves around their throats with their initials monogrammed at the corners.
By the time he made it to the mouth of the woods, Trip was behind him at a further distance, never bored by casting the same hexes every day, tossing out the same insults. Where his brother Flip was soft and brown, Trip was sallow, all hard angles and sturdy body, like a tree stump someone had cut down and left to wither. Credence wondered who he took after, his mother or his father. But he was a stranger to the woods, while Credence was not, and he was not a climber. Credence watched from his perch around the pine trunk as Trip’s fuzzy sweater wandered back and forth, throwing hexes from the palms of his hands whenever an animal darted past, or a breeze rattled the leaves of a bush.
It had snowed the week before. The tree cut like ice into his chest, refusing to take on his warmth as he hugged it. His fingers burned from holding on so tightly, and his cheeks had gone numb. He watched as Trip gave up on the hunt and sat down beneath the same tree to whittle at a stick with a folding knife withdrawn from his robe pocket. Credence’s heart thud against the bark scratching at his chest, at the scrape of the blade over soft wood. He hugged tighter.
“I know you’re here somewhere,” Trip said from below, “you little scourer bastard. You think you can go on taking my family’s money away from me, but I know something about you now. Your little orphan friend Albert is a real tattletale, isn’t he?”
Of course, Albert. Credence closed his eyes. He felt the rise of what Auntie Camp called boke in his throat, like he wanted to vomit, but it was a cold sickness he knew well. He clamped his jaw shut to stop it from coming out, pleading with it on the inside of him to let him be. On the ground below, Trip had begun to shoot sparks onto his peeled twigs to light them up. He dropped two, softly burning, at the bottom of the tree and looked unseeingly skyward.
“You’re up there somewhere,” he called out in satisfaction. His voice echoed rings off into the silent forest. “Won’t you come down? Aren’t we half-brothers now that my father pays for everything you have?”
A third twig joined the others, its flames licking up the bark of the tree, spurned on by the breeze that rocked Credence where he hid. He felt all of the breath go out of his body as Trip went on, “I own you, anyway, you little scourer baby. My family owns you. Without us, you have nothing, don’t you? You’re just some Mudblood trash someone found. I own that suit, those robes - ” the flames spread upwards an inch as another twig joined them, then a fifth, “ - your stupid little wand, your whole jinxy little self.”
When the darkness came out, it ripped bark clear down the tree trunk in a clean sheet, missing Trip by a lick which cut his face in passing. He watched in horror as the little stick body of the scourer boy followed, landing with a crack in a pool of school robes at his feet. He hadn’t believed the little Mudblood telltale, Albert, in truth. He’d just wanted to give the boy a fright. It wasn’t fair to him that his father spent money on this orphan brat while Trip’s own inheritance dwindled with each failing mark in school, or went off to the golden brother, Pippy with the government career oh so conveniently picked out for him and laid out like a golden f*cking road to success, well in advance. And there were all those nasty things everyone had been saying for weeks about his father and the drinking that had, admittedly, gotten worse over the summer. Chip was an old lush, and he was an embarrassment on the best of days, but the things Trip had heard tittering around his school friends’ heads had put a rage into his heart and hardened it.
Now the boy lay crumpled in a carpet of dead leaves like a tin toy Trip had once tossed into the fire in his nursery at home, to watch it squeak as it melted. He mutely watched the skinny body heave at his feet, the dark thing flying back, twisting its awful shape batlike, flat, crackling fury as it hurdled into the crooked body of the scourer boy on the forest floor, and the little eyes flew open, white, and the awful stick limbs shook and shook, and as Trip ran screaming back up to the castle, he was sure that the boy had died, and he almost felt sorry.
Nine.
Credence caught two glimpses of him through the stab of light penetrating his eyelids through a gauzy bandage. He was young and handsome in a bookish way, this Dumbledore, dressed in a light suit, with light like dropped stars in his blue eyes as he stared down at Credence in his hospital bed and scrubbed his jaw and frowned.
“Well, Al,” he’d whispered to someone unseen, “you’ve gone and done it now, haven’t you? Fool. The mess you’ve made of this creature. And for what?”
He’d stayed looking until the nurse swept in. There was a familiar gleam in his eyes that Credence took into himself and held there long after the room emptied, and sleep overcame his body.
The second time, Credence lie very still and feigned unconsciousness when Dumbledore reached out to push the hair back from his clammy forehead, mumbling. He was there for what felt like hours, reading books, taking notes, and speaking to himself, though it could not have been any longer than a minute, the length of time Credence could keep his eyes open. The hand stayed there, dry and warm, just barely touching, with the blurry frowning face floating somewhere above, as though they were part of two separate bodies. When Dumbledore’s hand finally removed itself into his pocket, Credence closed his eyes tighter, trying to hold its warmth to his face, but the stubborn chill of the infirmary stole it from his skin like a kiss, and he heard the man say in a faraway kind of accent to someone else in the room that he thought that Credence was going to live now, that the worst had passed, they were lucky the dark thing had not killed or hurt anyone, it could not do so anymore.
When he woke properly, it was with a body one-quarter full of new blood and pain in all of the deepest parts of him. He felt ground up, like potions ingredients, a human paste smeared over the starched sheets of his sickbed. Dumbledore did not return to him after that, and though they hardly knew each other, Credence felt a hole open up inside of his chest in grieving the loss of this man who had freed him.
After that, it was Albert who came in to sit beside his bed, his face pulled out long like soft wax, to tell him in whisper how Trip Graves had come running and screaming into the entrance hall of the castle about the dead boy in the woods and the dark creature that had killed him, and they had locked everybody inside while the docents went out with the groundskeeper and the caretaker to find his body enshrouded by the Obscurus. That was the true name of his badness. Credence listened quietly as these details slotted into place, filling in the gaps of his knowledge. He remembered falling. It had happened so quickly, he still half thought that his shadow would catch him, but it was gone from him, gone after Trip in vengeance, and then as he lie on the forest floor, it had put all of the broken bits of him back together and then stood guard, hissing like a cat when the rescue party came near him, holding him.
This young man, Dumbledore, had travelled all the way from Scotland to attend an alchemical conference in Boston. The Charms teacher suggested him, having read about his awards in the paper. When they told him what had happened, he came at once, whispering to the black shroud of the Obscurus something that sent it scurrying like a kitchen mouse into the palm of his hand as though it knew him. Docile now, it let him take Credence’s body in his arms to the infirmary, which had been emptied and fortified for his use. He had said that he could make no promises, the little boy had lost a lot of blood and was already so old for one of his kind, and yet here Credence was, alive as on the day he was born, the oldest living Obscurial just past his thirteenth birthday, and now free of it, an anomaly in the footnotes of history.
Whatever magical process it had required to free him of the beast had also taken something vital out of Credence, leaving him winded and weak in its wake. He stayed in the infirmary through January with Albert his one constant companion, watching the mountaintop outside grow whiter and thicker with fallen snow. Guilt had driven all malice out of the rat fink; he came bearing schoolbooks and homework for Credence to copy, took notes for him in their shared classes, brought him snowballs from outside and his post, including a parcel he claimed to have stolen from the breakfast table in November, containing Credence’s birthday gift from the Graves family. No apology, but he helped Credence’s weak hands tear into the parcel paper, clapping in celebration when out tumbled onto the woolen hospital bedspread a packet of never-pop gum balls and a tartan scarf that reeked of brandy.
Ten.
They were meant to be studying for their end-of-second-year exams, but Albert had cornered one of the girls from their class, a quiet one with short, brown hair named Tina, into coming out into the woods with them for lunch, and because she had said yes, albeit nervously, Credence had also agreed. It beat hiding from the relentless sport of his dormitory bullies, at any rate, and he was already confident in Albert’s assurances that they would face less trouble if they both failed at the same time. Anyway, Albert thought that had a good excuse to fail, having almost died. All of the docents had gone light on Credence since, as though the evil thing he’d shed might come back to haunt them at the merest hint of exertion on his part.
He’d been bathing in the foreign luxury of their leniency, so much so that Albert had taken to nudging him in class hours while he sat at his desk staring out the window, his head in faraway places. It seemed a very long time ago to him now that he had lived in Ma’s house, though only a year had passed, really. He had already read Auntie Camp’s letter congratulating him on his return to health three times, mumbling the words to himself beneath the bedsheets, imagining the Cottages surrounded by seagrass and the sweetness of salt in the air from the roaring ocean beyond, all of it waiting for him. The tinned oil cake he shared with Albert, who ate most of it.
They had both been relieved to establish that the situation between them was not one of friendship. Neither of them knew what to do with a friend, having never had one before. Credence had never played. He hardly imagined how he could start now, his childhood slipping away from him like water down the bathtub drain. Albert, for his part, was an interminable pest and still a blabbermouth, to boot. They spent time together in separate silence most days because it kept the bullies off their backs. This introduction of Tina to the dynamic was Albert’s idea, he had thought that it might simply make more sense for all of them to be alone together, and neither Credence, nor Tina could argue against.
They set out across the thawing lawns after the bell had rung to signal the end of breakfast. The earth crunched with old ice, soft where there was thick grass and wet with mud that clung to their boots and kicked up onto the hems of their robes while Tina fretted, was this not the same spot where -
“No,” Albert told her, all jolly for the raspberry jam around his mouth from the toast he’d snagged on his way out the door. “This is a different spot. Anyway, it’s gone now, isn’t it, Credence?”
“It is,” Credence assured her quietly. It was gone forever, leaving a long scar up the inside of him that still pained him in the night.
“It was awful what that boy did to you,” Tina said. “He’s such a rotten egg, Trip Graves. They’re a whole rotten family, really. They think they own everything just because they got here, oh, centuries ago and opened up a bank.”
“They kind of do own everything,” Albert told her. “Banks own everything. That’s how it works.”
“Well, everyone says the father is an old alcoholic,” Tina said with a sly glance at Credence, who shrugged. He had washed the tartan scarf carefully in the shower to rid it of the stench of liquor, having already decided that it didn’t matter. A Christmas gift had arrived for him in the infirmary too, and his tuition was paid in advance. He’d been promised more school supplies in the summer and a trip to the family home for a party on a long weekend, which frightened him, but he felt he could not pass judgment on this man who had decided after taking one look at the sorry state of him that there was something in him that was worth the investment.
He was quiet as they laid out the blanket Albert had ripped off the end of his bed, careful to avoid crushing any of the crocuses or snowdrops which had begun to poke through the dead leaves covering the forest floor like a crust. From Tina there was a thermos of hot coffee with three cups. Credence laughed to clear the air when Albert pulled a napkin-wrapped mess of jammy toast from his robe pocket, looking briefly crestfallen before shoving the whole lot into his mouth, and then he had laid out his contribution of bacon and sausage on waxed paper, and they all sat down to eat.
“It was kind of you to invite me,” Tina said, her nervousness returning as she nibbled at the edge of a strip of bacon. “Because we don’t know each other,” she said. “You didn’t have to invite me to eat with you, but you did.”
“Don’t be such a girl about it.” Albert wrinkled his nose. His hair was wilder than ever, an uncombed mass of red knots covering his forehead, and he’d grown an inch too quickly for the stretching charms Auntie Camp had placed on his robes to keep up with him. A strip of pale wrist hung out of them, jam smudged over it, as he wiped his chin.
“I am a girl.”
“Well,” Albert said, his eyes falling on Credence in silent plea for aid, “well, you don’t have to remind us about it, do you?”
“What’s reminding you? Me? Just sitting here, being a girl?”
“Oh, never mind.”
“No,” Tina said. She looked pretty, Credence thought, with her cheeks flushed faintly pink in indignation. Almost as soon as he had this thought, he felt wrong about it. He blinked it away. “You can go on and finish whatever it was you had to say, can’t he, Credence?”
The sudden introduction of his name into the middle of the argument knocked Credence off-guard. He swallowed his coffee in a messy gulp and looked at them both.
“You can’t take her side,” Albert grumbled, but it was already clear to all of them that he had lost. “Credence doesn’t even like girls,” he said.
“Blabbermouth,” Credence said, before he could stop himself. The realization of what this implied hit him just as quickly. He shook his head. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I like girls just fine.”
“Sure, Sally Puffskein,” said Albert. “I like them, too, and we both know so many. That’s how come we spend all day together, all the time.”
“Well, I thought you spent all day together because you were best friends,” said Tina.
She shrugged at both of their wide-eyed glances. The pinkness, Credence noticed, had shifted in her cheeks, and her dark eyes were bright and ringed by tiny curls of black eyelash that gave her the look of his favorite cake tin lady, the one in the purple hat with no rouge on her lips. He had sometimes fallen asleep imagining that she was his mother. How she would come up to the Cottages in her fine mink coat and ask for him, and Auntie Camp would wipe her eyes on the edges of a hankie from her trouser pocket as she patted his head goodbye. With her short hair, he thought privately, Tina looked more like a boy than Albert did. Albert was a winged insect, a pest, always wiping his nose with the back of his hand, food stains on his shirtsleeves. Though they were not friends, he offered the other boy his last strip of bacon.
“We are not friends anymore than Credence is a Graves,” Albert reminded them all stiffly, tearing it in half with his front teeth.
“Never,” Credence agreed.
“Well, that’s not clever of either of you,” said Tina. “If you hadn’t noticed, there’s not exactly a queue of people waiting to go around calling themselves your friends.”
“Oh we’ve noticed,” said Albert, while Credence nodded, fighting the urge to reach over and wipe the grease from around his mouth. “Credence is scourer trash, and I’m a blabbermouth,” said Albert. “We know perfectly well who we are.”
Something about this seemed to please him, because he sat back then and finished his breakfast in silence, grinning to himself all through the chatter that followed about exams and what they liked and didn’t like and what they’d do in the summer. Albert’s best subject, which wasn’t saying much, was Transfiguration, and Tina did all right in everything. Out of a sense of loyalty, maybe, or plain pity, neither of them commented on Credence, the sole lost cause and the only one with grounds to worry that he might be held back. Albert didn’t even tease Credence as he’d done all week about the summer invitation to meet the Graves family, though he still swore it was going to end badly. “Trip Graves’ll be there,” he reminded. “It’s probably all an elaborate plot to get you on your own and murder you.”
“That’s an awful thing to say,” Tina said, and then she added with a worried look at Credence, “Will they be upset with you, if you get bad grades?”
It was not something that he had yet considered. There had been too many other things to worry about, avoiding his bullies and the phantom pains he still felt since the removal of the Obscurus, and he had been doggish in his pursuit of information on Albus Dumbledore, so much so that it had drawn the attention of his Charms teacher, docent Hicks.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly, looking down at his hands folded into his lap. He could feel the pigeon wings of this new worry flapping somewhere overhead and blinked at them, willing them away. It circled him instead, drawing out the bile of old worry from down his throat, the pinch he’d always felt in his belly with Ma when she knew he was lying or had broken something or had done something differently than she would have liked.
He prayed quickly, pleasegodletthemnotbeconcernedwithmygradesamen, blinking more. The faces of the other two blinked back at him across the blanket, then Tina said, “I really didn’t mean it that way, you know, I’m sure it’ll be all right.”
And Albert added, “It’s not like they’re you’re family. At the very worst, you’re just plain orphaned without a benefactor, like me,” which did help a little. He reminded himself of the hospital and the people who had called him animal only months ago. Someone had predicted once, Credence remembered suddenly, that he would not last a week in his new home, but no one had sent him back yet. No one had proclaimed him unfit, at least no one with any real power to remove him. Relieved, he began to fold the waxed paper into neat squares over Albert’s jammy napkin. It was warming up near midday, birdsong rising up through the wood in echo.
“I suppose we could write to each other over the summer,” Tina said quickly as their hands met over the folded edge of the blanket. When he looked at her in response, she flushed again and stared hard at her shoes, but Albert took the blanket from them both and shook his head.
“Aw, I guess we can,” he said, “but we’re not friends, so don’t get any wise ideas.”
