Chapter 2 — My Birthday Comes with a Locked Box

The anaesthetic wore off on the drive home. My tooth resumed work before I had finished congratulating myself on surviving, although the ache was duller now. I leaned against the window and tried to find a position that did not press on my jaw.

‘Sleep if you want,’ Emma said. ‘We're not stopping anywhere else.’

‘Good. I've exceeded my weekly quota for medical courage.’ I closed my eyes before she could remind me that I had spent most of the appointment lying down.

The next thing I knew, she was shaking my shoulder in the garage and calling me birthday boy. It was 4 April, my eleventh birthday, and I would have preferred to celebrate the next few minutes asleep. I followed her inside and spent much of the afternoon recovering.

By evening, I could think about something other than my tooth. That was when I found the dining room dark, with eleven candles glowing above a strawberry cake. Emma had bought it during her errand while I was in the surgery.

There were no guests, hired musicians or distant relatives remembering that the Mercer estate contained money. Emma waited beside a small pile of presents with a smile that began to fade when I failed to come through the doorway.

‘Oswald?’ She left the cake and came towards me. ‘Is your tooth hurting again?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I'm fine.’

My voice disagreed, and the first tear escaped before I could turn away. The second made pretending pointless. I had spent nearly two years learning how to be alive again, and somehow eleven candles had found the part I had not learnt to explain.

When I first woke in this body, the adult memories had arrived among a child's grief and fears. I remembered military competitions and police training while being afraid to sleep alone. Some mornings I could recall the inside of a barracks more clearly than the sound of my father's voice; on others, I missed Ken and Mary so badly that everything I had known before seemed remote.

For months, I barely spoke unless Emma made me. I moved through familiar rooms as though I had been given the wrong key, then became angry when something was not where I expected it. Once I woke calling for my mother and could not tell which mother I meant.

The confusion lasted more than a year. Gradually, the memories stopped pulling against each other, and I became one person. The older life remained part of me, but it did not stop embarrassment arriving too quickly or happiness catching me over something as ordinary as a birthday cake.

Emma had stayed through the silences and nightmares. She had sat beside me when I stared at photographs of Ken and Mary without knowing how to speak about them. Now she had put eleven candles on a cake, and I was making a mess of thanking her.

‘This is your fault,’ I said, wiping my face with both hands. ‘You could have warned me.’

‘I thought you'd like strawberry.’ She sounded uncertain enough that I reached for her before she could apologise.

‘I do,’ I said against her shoulder. ‘That's the problem.’

She held me while I tried to get the rest out. In my first months here, I had thought of this life as somewhere I had landed, a second chance that still belonged to someone else. With Emma's arms round me and candle wax dripping towards the icing, that distinction felt impossible to maintain.

Ken and Mary were my parents. Emma was my family, and this was my birthday. I held on until she murmured that we ought to save the cake.

‘Unless you want wax as a topping,’ she added. I pulled away, laughed through the last of the tears and blew out the candles.

We ate two slices each, though I kept every bite away from the sore tooth. Afterwards, I opened the presents: new trainers, two books and a watch. By ten o'clock I had begun stacking the wrapping paper, and Emma went upstairs to fetch something else.

She returned with a wooden box about the size of a briefcase. It had no ribbon, and she set it between us with both hands before letting go. I stopped folding the paper.

‘Your mother asked me to give you this after your eleventh birthday,’ she said. ‘Mary was very clear about that, and your father agreed.’

I waited while she rested her hands on the lid again. Whatever she had rehearsed was taking more effort than wishing me a happy birthday.

‘I never knew everything inside,’ she continued. ‘Only that it concerned their side of the family. There are things about your parents I haven't been able to tell you.’

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

I recognised the careful hesitation. It belonged with the things I had discovered in my father's diaries six months earlier, and with the questions Emma had never quite answered.

‘Magic,’ I said. ‘I already know Mum and Dad were wizards.’

She stared at me, one thumb resting against the edge of the box. When she asked how I knew, I admitted I had been searching the attic.

‘You were told not to go through the old trunks,’ she said. The familiar reprimand gave me somewhere easier to begin.

‘I found Dad's diaries and Mum's school things,’ I told her. ‘I wasn't looking for a secret. I wanted to know more about them.’

Emma closed her eyes. I expected anger, but her shoulders dropped, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter.

‘Half a year,’ she said. ‘You've known all that time and said nothing.’

‘You were keeping a promise to them.’ I reached across the table and touched her hand. ‘I wasn't going to make you break it. Whatever they hid, I'm not blaming you.’

Her eyes filled before she could answer. She covered my hand with both of hers, and I waited while she found the words.

‘You always sound older when you say things like that,’ she said. I almost laughed, then thought about what it would cost to try to explain why.

‘Only when it helps,’ I told her. She squeezed my hand once more before opening the box.

The smell came first: old paper, dry wood and something faintly medicinal. Inside lay notebooks, loose sheets tied with string, two wrapped bundles, stoppered bottles and stiff brownish paper cut into narrow rectangles. Nothing glowed or moved. Magic appeared to require a great deal of stationery.

I opened the top notebook and found Ken Mercer written inside the cover. My throat tightened at the sight of his handwriting, but curiosity kept me turning the pages. These were research notes, far less orderly than the diaries I had found in the attic.

Those diaries had already given me the broad history. Ken and Mary had attended Hogwarts and joined the Order of the Phoenix to fight Voldemort. They had survived that war, then died while I was still young enough for most of my memories of them to remain brief flashes.

The names had also suggested what sort of world this might be. Harry Potter had reached my previous life through short summaries, internet clips, jokes and conversations I had only half followed. I had never read the books or watched the films from beginning to end.

I remembered the boy who survived an evil wizard, a school called Hogwarts and friends named Ron and Hermione. Other fragments involved houses, a giant snake and a prisoner. Later events were less useful still; my memory had evidently given sports results priority over information that might one day keep me alive.

Voldemort had attacked Harry as a baby and somehow lost. I was reasonably sure of that, and that the danger eventually returned, but I could not remember reliable dates, causes or even the order of several events. Until Hermione stood in front of me, I had not connected her surname with the girl in those memories.

That was the quality of prophecy available to me. I had spent six months wondering how much to trust it, with Ken and Mary's diaries providing a further complication.

Neither parent appeared in any summary I remembered, yet their accounts placed them beside people whose names I recognised. Perhaps the summaries had simply left them out. Perhaps this world was different. Meeting Hermione made it harder to dismiss the connection, but it did not supply all the missing pages.

Emma stayed opposite me while I skimmed the notebook. When she asked whether I knew what Hogwarts was, I told her it was a school of witchcraft and wizardry, somewhere in Scotland.

‘Your father loved it,’ she said. ‘Your mother complained about the stairs.’

‘That sounds like useful intelligence,’ I replied. The thought of Mum being cross with a staircase brought back Emma's smile, and for a moment the school seemed less distant.

I lifted one of the wrapped bundles and unfolded it carefully. My father's wand lay inside, dark and smooth from years of use. All the questions I had been preparing stopped when I held it.

Nothing happened. I turned it between my fingers, trying to picture the hand that had worn the wood smooth.

Ken's diaries said a wizard's magic settled properly around eleven, although children could produce accidental effects before then. He had underlined the word accidental twice. Wanting a spell and knowing how to cast one were separate problems, and a wand was a personal thing.

That explained a few childhood memories I had never quite believed. A toy had appeared where I was sure I had not left it; a cupboard had opened after a tantrum; a glass had cracked when I was furious. None of it told me how to repeat the result.

Still, I pointed the wand towards an empty teacup and tried the one harmless spell I trusted myself to remember. ‘Lumos,’ I said, concentrating on the tip.

It remained dark. I tried again, then unwrapped Mary's wand and gave it the same opportunity to disappoint me. Emma watched without commenting until I laid both carefully back in their wrappings.

‘Either magic dislikes me or I'm doing this very badly,’ I said. The second possibility seemed more likely, which did nothing to make it less irritating.

‘Your parents said Hogwarts would teach you,’ Emma reminded me. ‘You have nearly five months before September.’

‘Five months is a long time to spend looking at a box you can't use,’ I said. I glanced at the notebooks, where pages of diagrams waited behind my father's untidy handwriting.

‘It won't kill you to wait.’ She caught my expression and sighed. ‘Poor choice of words.’

I grinned and returned to the research. There were potion measurements, diagrams and arguments crowded into the margins, with one name recurring beside Ken's own. He had written it so consistently that it took me several pages to realise it must be a nickname.

Dead Face. My father had apparently conducted serious magical research with someone he addressed like an opponent in a school quarrel. I gathered the notebooks into a stack, suddenly less interested in the failed light.

‘I'm taking these upstairs,’ I said. ‘It's still my birthday.’

‘That doesn't suspend bedtime.’ Emma gathered the loose sheets and laid them on top of my stack. ‘You can read more tomorrow.’

I carried the first stack up with the rest of my presents waiting below. Magic was real, my parents had fought a war with it, and somewhere in Britain there was a school full of people whose names I half remembered from another life.

At the moment, neither of their wands would produce enough light to find my socks. I had nearly five months, several notebooks and an increasing suspicion that sleep would be difficult.