There were originally supposed to be six Horcruxes. Harry had already dealt with one of them. Dumbledore took care of another one for him.

And there was at least one joker in the deck. The one that they just brought back from the sea cave was a fake.

Which led us all to Regulus Black.

And, given time, would undoubtedly lead Harry to Regulus Black, as well.

By the time DHs was pending, it was yet again time to — once more — re-evaluate what we thought we knew about the problem of the Horcruxes.

The pertinent round of this continuing re-evaluation cycle was set off over the months of July and August, 2006, when I spent a good deal of my free time working with LiveJournalists Swythyv and Professor_Mum, as well as John Granger of the HogwartsProfessor.com board, and a couple of others, on a collection of essays related to the events that went on in HBP. (The book, ‘Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?’ is still available from amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Zossima Press and other sources.)

As usual, some of their theories turned out to make fine launching pads for adjustments to existing theories of my own, some of which then spun off in rather different directions from their originals. But between the three of us, Swythyv, Professor_Mum and I, we’d managed to draft out a backstory which, amazingly enough, accounted for just about all of the screwy details related to the Case of the Hijacked Horcrux.

It may not have been Rowling’s intended backstory, but it was at least a viable one, and was supported by what we had to work from by that date, on enough points to make a plausible theory, even if it later turned out not to be correct.

The whole question of Lord Voldemort’s Horcruxes was burgeoning out of control by that time, so the essay has been split. This particular portion now concentrates on our extrapolations of Regulus Black and his implied Indiana Jonesy adventure concerning the Dark Lord’s sea cave and the stolen Horcrux. My speculations on the other Horcruxes, and Horcruxes in general can now be found in the two essays entitled ‘Horcrux Redux’ (parts 1&2).

****

For the previous several months, it had looked like any attempt to sort out the issues attendant upon this particular component of the “find the hidden objects” problem concerning the adventure of Harry Potter and the Seven Riddles pretty much had to start from the adventure of the sea cave. And with Regulus Black, aka; R.A.B.

By that point I was no longer quite as convinced that this was the real starting point as I had been when I started. Although it still obviously mattered. And, to be fair, with Harry finishing Book 6 determined to find out who R.A.B. was, and what he did with the stolen Horcrux, it was almost certainly where Rowling would initiate the next part of the quest.

But by then several rounds of dominoes had toppled since HBP came out. And new possibilities had opened up in areas which looked like they might turn out to be relevant to this seemingly irresolvable problem.

Because the problem, as Rowling set it up, did appear to be irresolvable. Just as with the bloody Potions book, whatever pattern you attempted to lay out all the pieces in, you always seemed to be stuck with one left over. Always one which didn’t seem to fit anywhere, but which could not be safely dismissed.

The first question, of course, was whether or not we could safely assume that Regulus Black and the mysterious R.A.B. were the same person.

I really did think we could. And if I had turned out to be wrong, I would have had plenty of company. The fandom as a whole had pretty well unilaterally accepted that Regulus Black was R.A.B. and I could see no reason to raise objections. Rowling had not given us anything upon which a reasonable objection could be based.

In fact, in the joint interview of July 2005, Rowling had tacitly admitted that R.A.B. was Regulus Black. Insofar as she had stated that as of that point in the series we had met or heard of pretty well all of the cast of significant characters, (which turned out not really to be true. Ariana Dumbledore, much?) and that while we might discover more about some of the ones we’d already met, and there may be some minor characters added in passing, the major players were all known to us by then. So I had a certain degree of confidence in continuing to reason from the standpoint that R.A.B. and Regulus Black were one and the same.

So. We already knew that if Regulus Black was indeed R.A.B., then he had certainly known about at least one of the Horcruxes.

Either that knowledge alone, or something else about either Voldemort himself, or his activities, his objectives, or his methods, sent Reggie into a tailspin. We had too little direct information to be able to really determine what it was exactly that set him off. Fanfic writers and my fellow theorists all still had a few more months to play with this. But I thought we were all getting a lot closer to a unified theory which, while it may not be correct, was at least internally consistent.

As I stated at the time; we had not yet heard quite the last of Regulus Black, even though we had been told the end of Regulus Black. Or, what everyone in the books seemed to confidently believe to have been his end.

I was not entirely convinced of that, either. Although I was a lot more convinced of it than I had been a year or so earlier. If the final book of the series was built to what appeared to be Rowling’s recent pattern and was being set up to echo the 3rd book, then we were certainly being invited to expect to find out that somebody had at some point faked their own death. And Reggie was one of our top candidates to have done it. Although it didn’t necessarily follow that he was the one who did. After all, we had never even heard of Peter Pettigrew, until we got a few chapters into PoA, and by this time we already had a list of casualties.

But, we did need to find out for certain what R.A.B. did with the real Horcrux. And we could be confident that this was not an issue that Rowling was going to dodge.

In HBP Dumbledore had strongly implied to Harry that no one else knew about Lord Voldemort’s Horcruxes, but with the evidence of R.A.B.’s “Boo! Sucks!” note staring us in the face we just couldn’t accept Dumbledore’s statements on the subject at face value. I suggested that maybe, despite what Rowling tells us in her interviews, we needed to stop assuming that Dumbledore was always right, even if he was “never very wide of the mark”.

Particularly if the mysterious R.A.B was Regulus Black. Regulus Black was a wet-behind-the-ears raw recruit who didn’t make it to his 18th birthday. If he could figure it out, how could we say that somebody else hadn’t?

****

Needless to say, I doubted very much that Regulus’s repudiation of Lord Voldemort and all of his works was motivated by the same kind of squeamishness on the subject of Horcruxes as had been demonstrated by Horace Slughorn. It does not fit with anything that we were shown concerning the Death Eaters’ (let alone the Black family’s) presumed total acceptance of all aspects of Dark magic.

Another thing which appeared to be self-evident is that Regulus not only learned of the existence of a Horcrux, he seems to have learned what had been done with it. Which is to say that he appears to have learned about the sea cave. And, from the information at our disposal, we were invited to believe that he also managed to figure out how to retrieve the Horcrux from where Voldemort had hidden it.

None of which I continued to be convinced of, by that time, either.

But it threw us a considerable curve.

From our own trip into that cave we had been given to understand that getting a Horcrux out of that basin is a two-person job.

If, that is, what Dumbledore told us about it was strictly on the level. It wouldn’t be the first time that information from Albus Dumbledore, in fact, wasn’t.

And, unless we had all been fed either deliberately false — or honestly mistaken — information, all appearances suggested that Regulus Black did manage to get the Horcrux out of the cave in time to later be killed by his fellow Death Eaters.

Our information on that point was suspect, however. Neither of our primary informants on the matter are people who were in a position to actually know the truth of the report. Sirius Black’s statements, (he who’d had nothing to do with his family for about 5 years by that time) were at 2nd hand and tended to be extremely biased. Remus Lupin’s are less biased, but likely to be even more distant from any reliable source.

Sirius clearly did not know who actually killed his brother, nor does he say anything about having attempted to find out, although Regulus was allegedly murdered close to two years before his own imprisonment in Azkaban. Remus states only that Regulus survived the Dark Lord’s wrath no more than a few days.

Which suggested that this was the kind of information that must have filtered back to Sirius over the grapevine. And who knows how much it may have morphed by the time it reached him.

In the wake of DHs, I now suppose that it was only when Regulus’s fanboy scrapbooks of Lord Voldemort turned up in his room after his death was recorded by the Black family tapestry that his family concluded that he had been swept up in the DE movement, which must have directly contributed to his death. Since he had not been killed by Aurors or in any known bit of DE action, the family assumed that he must have been killed by his associates on their leader’s orders. In actual fact, he simply went missing, and a death date appeared on the tapestry. No one other than Kreachur knew anything further.

With the release of the Black family tapestry sketch, showing the last 6 generations of the Black Family Genealogical Tapestry, which Rowling donated to a charity auction in February of 2006, we finally had what we believed to be the dates of Regulus Black’s life recorded as 1961 to 1979.

This came as a considerable surprise, since from the textual evidence of OotP we had earlier calculated that his death had occurred in 1980. However, if Rowling was serious about the dates on the sketch, it is clear that if born in ’61, he would have had to have started Hogwarts in ’72, finished with the class of ’79 and been dead by the end of the same year. We certainly got no indication, either then nor even directly from Kreachur’s tale that he was killed while he was still a student. Although upon further examination that must have been the case.

It is also clear that the tapestry sketch’s dates must now be dismissed as unworkable due to their direct contradiction to canon. My proposal as an adjustment which would fit with our current information as given us in the text of both OotP and DHs are 1963–1980. Leaving his father Orion’s death, as it is recorded, in 1979.

We were also directly told in OotP that Sirius’s parents threw every knut they could spare into layering protections on their home and apparently cowered there in virtual hiding throughout the years of Voldemort’s rise. However, upon the posting of the sketch of the tapestry mentioned above we discovered that Regulus and his father, Orion, supposedly died the in same year, and that Orion Black and his wife, Walburga, were never the Heads of the Family at all. Orion’s father, Arcturus, outlived all of them. One has to wonder why Sirius did not mention this, for it would appear to be of some importance. At that point, we had no certainty as to whether Reggie predeceased his father or not. But by this time I am inclined to believe that he did not. That, indeed, he was not even approached for recruitment by the DEs until his father was safely dead.

In 1979. When Reggie was 16.

A reconsideration of the problem posed by the absentee Head of the House of Black suggests a comfortably non-dramatic possible solution to that conundrum, at least.

Arcturus Black, the Head of the family, may have simply chosen to live with his married — and childless — daughter Lucretia, leaving the family home to his son, Orion, and his growing family, since Orion’s branch of the family would inherit it eventually, and the boys could then be brought up in the Black family’s primary residence.

Particularly if Arcturus had been widowed by that time. It should be noted that nowhere in what we have of the Black family tapestry sketch has any member of the family ever embarked upon a second marriage. It is possible that among the most narrowly pureblooded circles such a practice would be frowned upon, due to an extreme shortage of eligible prospective marriage partners already. It should also be noted that a fairly high number of the Black family in every generation appear to have remained unwed. A lack of eligible potential partners is probably the cause of this as well.

I’ll have to say that in Arcturus’s place, given the choice of living with a childless (or possibly even widowed) daughter and the shrieking Walburga and her two screaming infants, I certainly know which residence I would choose.

But then we were also handed the oddity of the fact that Sirius Black seems to have inherited the house, despite having been blasted off the family tapestry and not (so far as we could tell) reinstated.

For the House was certainly the property of Sirius Black by the time Harry was escorted there in the summer of 1995. If, at the point that HBP was released, the property had automatically passed to the next male with the surname of Black still listed on the tapestry, then upon Arcturus’s death in 1991, it ought to have passed to his first cousin Pollux’s younger son Cygnus, the father of the three Black sisters, who was originally recorded in the sketch as having survived until the following year. Yet it appears to have done nothing of the sort.

At this point Real Life interrupts all of our speculations with the information that a full year after posting their version of the tapestry sketch with the dates of Cygnus Black, Sirius’s uncle and the three sisters’ father, recorded as 1938–1992 the HP Lexicon abruptly changed these dates to 1929–1979, duplicating those of his 2nd cousin Orion’s.

I do not know the original source of these new numbers. The Lexicon took them from a tour of the film set and a close look at the prop tapestry that was to be used in the film. But we do not know where the film designers got their numbers. The numbers are assuredly not in the books themselves, and may not even be from Rowling.

The adjustment does, however, resolve a couple of problems which were built into the chronology as depicted in the original sketch. First, it gets rid of one of the 13-year-old fathers which had been the cause of so much hilarity, and exasperation, across the fandom since the sketch was released. And it does resolve the problem of Sirius Black inheriting the house. If Cygnus Black were to have died at any point before about 1980, then it would be clear that apart from Arcturus himself, and his cousin Pollux, both of them well into their elder years (and, just possibly, Marius the Squib), Sirius would have been the only male Black left. And the choice was either to reinstate him as heir, or to see their name become extinct upon their own deaths. At that point there was still no stain upon Sirius’s character (regardless of his supposed rejection of Dark magic), and it might have been expected that the boy would settle down and marry eventually.

As we discovered early in HBP, the Black family holdings could be left by a formal will to someone who was not on the tapestry. And even the family House Elf could not gainsay such a will. Indeed it now seems likely that this must have been done in Sirius’s case as well as Harry’s. Certainly Kreachur’s service to Sirius Black was every bit as grudging as it was to Harry. Sirius, after all, was not on the tapestry, either.

So, despite the prior disowning of the elder son of the family, and the death of the younger son and their father (and, evidently, the last surviving male cousin), upon the previous Head of the Family’s death, the property did not pass to Walburga’s eldest niece, Bellatrix Lestrange.

This seems most likely to have been deliberate, and to have been old Arcturus Black’s doing, for all that Sirius dismisses his grandfather at every mention.

Apparently this is one of those stories “between the lines” of the tapestry which Rowling has left it to us to fill in for ourselves.

And for the moment, at least, I suppose we will have to let the film designers’ adjustments to the tapestry stand.

****

Which brings us to Bellatrix.

She doesn’t come across as an exceptionally clever woman, does she?

She’s not particularly discrete, either. Can’t resist boasting, in fact.

Even in Spinner’s End among people who know the truth of the matter, she can’t resist airing her own importance. “He shares everything with me! He calls me his most loyal, his most faithful —” “...The Dark Lord has, in the past, entrusted me with his most precious — if Lucius hadn’t —”

Wait a minute. Run that one past us again. The Dark Lord has, in the past, entrusted this loose cannon with his “most precious...”

Most precious what?

We know he entrusted Lucius with a Horcrux.

And, so, much belated, another penny finally dropped. Someone posted on the HogwartsProfessor.com discussion boards a quote that makes it clear that in HBP Dumbledore comes right out and tells us that Lucius was only entrusted with that Horcrux shortly before Voldemort’s first defeat. Which is to say, not until 1981. To wit:

In response to a statement of Harry’s that it had been Voldemort who had wanted the Diary smuggled into the school, Albus’s response was:

“Yes, he did, years ago, when he was sure he would be able to create more Horcruxes, but still Lucius was supposed to wait for Voldemort’s say-so, and he never received it, for Voldemort vanished shortly after giving him the diary... ” (HBP, US hardcover edition, page 506)

Which raises the previously unasked question as to just when Voldemort actually hid his Horcruxes.

We’d assumed that he hid them when he made them.

It looked like we may have been wrong.

****

And now we are going to go skittering off and chase wild geese down blind alleys for a bit. I’ll bring this back on track eventually.

Albus tells us that Riddle allegedly likes things that come complete with a history, with a tradition, with some level of grandeur as bases for his Horcruxes. That’s why he was so eager to use relics associated with the Founders themselves.

Well, that’s why he was eventually so eager to use artifacts associated with the Founders for bases for his Horcruxes.

When you stop to think of it, the first three Horcruxes that we were told about were primarily significant only in their connections to himself. It seemed to have been only when poor, silly Hepzibah Smith waved the Hufflepuff cup under his nose that he decided to branch out and collect the whole set.

(ETA: Well, okay, now that we know that Godric's Sword had a habit of turning up in emergencies, and Tom had already sweet-talked the general location of the Ravenclaw diadem out of the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw, he had probably already formed his plans to use Founders’ relics before Hepzibah waved the cup at him. But I suspect the cup’s turning up was a surprise. Having come down through Hepzibah’s family it wouldn’t have been in any records accessible to B&B.)

But grandeur and antiquity are clearly what he prefers, if he can get it.

I’ll bet he likes that kind of thing in the guardians for his Horcruxes as well. When he entrusts them to guardians.

The Blacks, after all, are a very old family.

And there is no question that Bellatrix is utterly loyal.

And it turns out that we were on the right track in suspecting that she also had custody of one of the Horcruxes, too. We were just wrong about which one.

****

Dumbledore appears to have never questioned the reading that Voldemort created the inner chamber of the sea cave in which the Locket was allegedly first hidden. But Dumbledeore admits that he makes mistakes. And that when he does they are apt to be huge ones. I thought this may turn out to be be one of those, although probably not a truly significant one.

But I suspected that the sea cave is far, far older than Tom Riddle.

It is certainly designed to a far older tradition.

We already know that Voldemort likes to pay visits to the scenes of what he regards as his triumphs. He takes possession of those places too, if he can. We know he returned to the Riddle house, and he probably owned it. He returned to the Gaunt hovel to hide the Ring, unless he entrusted that job to an underling — which I doubt — and he probably owned the Gaunt property too. At least it would probably say so if you went looking through the land records.

And, if he also returned to the sea cave in which he had terrorized two of his fellow orphans, he may well have realized upon his return as an adult, as Albus did, that this was a place that had “known magic”.

It is not difficult, rereading Dumbledore and Harry’s journey into that cave, to draw the conclusion that the potion Dumbledore had to drink to reveal the Horcrux forced him to relive every action and every mistake he had ever made over a very long life.

That, in particular, he was forced to relive any action that exacted a cost from others, particularly in the suffering of innocents. For, to Dumbledore (at least as we thought we knew him) those would have been his very worst memories.

(Relived his very worst memories? And ended in a suicidal despair?)

And it ultimately would have ended, indeed, it may have ended, in drawing the soul out of his body.

(That progression sounds awfully familiar, you know...)

Or, conversely, it has been postulated elsewhere that the potion caused him to relive whatever may have been done in that place by others.

Or to see the future consequences of his own actions.

But whatever it actually did, I really, really doubt that this was quite the fountain’s original purpose or function. It has been tainted.

Such fonts of knowledge, or of self-knowledge, or of wisdom (or unwelcome truths) go back in folklore for a very, very long way. And they are usually tucked away in secret places very much like that sea cave.

And such places in folklore are often womens’ places. And the “crudeness” of the door that demanded a payment in blood for entry (another bit of female-related symbolism) may be less an indication of the shallowness of Tom Riddle’s character, than of the age of the place that he had co-opted for his own purposes. Very old magic is often tied to blood. Only consider the sort of protection that Lily left upon Harry. And which Dumbledore compounded by adding an additional layer of protection based upon Lily’s blood.

Albus Dumbledore, after all, was an authority on blood magic.

(Pot? I’d like you to meet my dear friend, Kettle.)

Plus that inner cave is just too blooming big, and seems too thumping old to have been built from scratch less than 50 years ago by an upstart like Riddle.

But it’s not a foregone conclusion that it was Bellatrix who told Tom about the cave and assisted him in his defiling of it; filling the lake with Inferi and poisoning the knowledge that the font provided (although if the font was originally of the variety that contributes to personal enlightenment, then it is self-renewing, and it must have been poisoned at its wellspring).

For one thing that would imply that Voldemort didn’t hide his Horcrux in that cave until after Bellatrix was out of Hogwarts, and since we still believed she was born in 1951 (in the Autumn too, probably), she would not have finished at Hogwarts until 1970, about a decade after he had already returned to the ww and had already launched his rise to power. Which sounded an unlikely progression.

But not an impossible one. Hold that thought.

****

Since the Locket had probably already been converted into a Horcrux before Tom Riddle’s return to the wizarding world, which took place by the early 1960s, you might have expected him to have put the Horcrux into the cave before his return as well.

We have nothing to tell us he did so (and post-DHs know for certain that he didn’t). He may just as easily have hung on to the whole collection for the sake of security and in order to gloat.

After all, he would have hardly been the first wizard with a collection of such “objects of virtue”. There would have been nothing even remotely remarkable in that. Not even if the objects were suspected of being stolen. And even if someone got the bright idea that one of them might be a Horcrux, they would hardly have leaped to the conclusion that five of them were. (Or, four, more likely. The Diary was probably tucked away in his sock drawer, and not out on display.)

The fact that he couldn’t have handed the Diary over to Lucius until Lucius left Hogwarts with the class of ’72 or ’73 suggests that distributing the Horcruxes into other hands, or off to secure hiding places may have been a fairly late development. With little, on the face of it, to suggest why he should have so abruptly done such a thing.

Unless he didn’t do it until the end of 1979, or early 1980.

The year 1979 has not, to our knowledge, ever been directly mentioned in the course of the books. But we had at least two statements, one from Sirius Black (which has since been rewritten) and one from Severus Snape, which when added up land us in that year. As well as a piece of known Ministry policy which is as likely to have been instituted in that year as not.

And right about Halloween of 1979 is also the earliest possible date that Sybill Trelawney is likely to have made her first Prophecy. IF the Prophecy was made around the time of the child it foretold’s conception. And while this is far from a done-deal, I have used this possibility as a base point for many of the theories throughout this collection.

Because if that’s the case: that it was toward, or after the end of 1979 that Tom Riddle suddenly started distributing his Horcruxes into safe hiding places, then we have a very good idea why he might have suddenly chosen to diversify his “insurance”.

That’s right. He started hiding them when he learned that he was the subject of a bona-fide Prophecy. Regarding his own downfall.

But the cave itself might not have been a secret from the Death Eaters at all. Riddle manifestly had another use for that cave, one which he evidently shared with them.

Or did he?

****

Which sends us back to the problem of Regulus, and how he discovered that there was a Horcrux in that cave (if he ever did, and if there ever was), and how he managed to get the Horcrux out of the cave. And whether he ever told anyone of what he was doing. Or why.

It’s not, after all, information that he had anything to gain by keeping it to himself. Not if Sirius’s version of the matter is right and Voldemort had already ordered his death. But, so far, an awful lot of Voldemort’s enemies, Albus Dumbledore first and foremost among them, seem to be determined to keep his secrets for him, in clear defiance of any kind of common sense. Whether this general epidemic of folly is intentional on Rowling’s part or not I could not say.

And, intentional or not; we had tacitly also been told something else fairly significant about this particular problem.

Regulus also seems to have known that the Horcrux in the cave was a locket. He may even have known whose locket. Leading me to wonder whether Bellatrix may only be a competent Occlumens when she knows she is being tested. Or if Reggie came across this information by accident when she was teaching Occlumency to him.

It is an idea. But by that time I doubted it was the right one.

Still, that decoy locket had to have been prepared in advance. Can you seriously imagine that Regulus got into the cave, made his way to the island, managed somehow to drink the potion and discover; “Damn! I’m going to have to raid Mum’s jewelry box and make another trip!” Or even that he just transfigured a pebble into a locket, arbitrarily pulled a piece of parchment, a quill and bottle of ink (which he just happened to have on him) out of his pocket and composed his “Boo! Sucks!” message at the last moment? Scribbling it out on the edge of the basin? Hardly.

Which brings one back around to the question of why Voldemort should have chosen to share the location of any of his Horcruxes, with anyone else in the first place. The Diary, which was also a weapon, could have been an exception (or was it?). It needed to be kept safe, but it also needed to be kept where it could be easily retrieved, against the time he decided to deploy it. For he clearly someday intended to deploy it.

But why would he share information, any information at all, about the others? And yet it seems as if he must have shared it with somebody, or how would a wet-behind-the-ears rookie Death Eater like Regulus Black ever manage to find out enough about it to figure it out?

Regarding the bigger puzzle, however; how did Regulus manage to steal the Horcrux?

****

On that issue, we have to thread our way through a whole jungle of questions.

First: did he actually succeed in what he intended? Had that Horcrux already been destroyed? Was the Horcrux the locket itself, or something that was in the locket?

For that matter, was it the Locket at all? In that kind of a mise-en-scène, wouldn’t you have expected the Horcrux in the basin to be the Cup? You cannot see what is in the bottom of the basin through that potion. All you can see is the glowing green potion. It’s opaque. (Or is it? Maybe not) Maybe R.A.B. just used a locket for his fake Horcrux because a locket would protect his message from the potion.

For all the information we had at that moment, the sea cave Horcrux could even have been the “mystery Horcrux” about which we had no textual clues at all.

Conversely, did Regulus only manage to steal the Horcrux and substitute the decoy? The message in the decoy locket must have been prepared ahead of time. It tells us what he intended to do, but not whether he lived long enough to accomplish it.

Regarding this particular issue there had been no shortage of fans to have pointed out that, early in OotP, a heavy locket which no one could open, was found in one of the display cases in the parlor of #12 Grimmauld Place along with a cursed music box and any number of other items, all of which Sirius Black threw out. If that locket was the real Horcrux we would have a fine time trying to find out what became of it. There was no shortage of possibilities.

Just for starters:

It could have been thrown out and may now be in anybody’s hands, or even in a landfill (or whatever the Brits in London do with their rubbish).

Mundungus Fletcher may have stolen and sold it. Or kept it. And now he was off in Azkaban. We don’t know what happened to his stash. Albus might have even retrieved it already.

Aberforth might have bought it off of Dung when Dung was peddling his swag on the streets of Hogsmeade.

Kreachur may have rescued it from the trash and hidden it in his nest.

And, for my own part, by this time, I was somewhat inclined to agree that the mystery locket from Grimmauld Place probably was the Horcrux. It was a little late in the series to be introducing an additional wild goose chase, when we already have four of the bloody things to sort out and only one book left to do it in. But I’d been wrong on any number of other points. That particular locket could still turn out to just be a locket.

For that matter, since Regulus was clearly expecting to die soon when he wrote his message, just what time frame are we dealing with? Was he already on the run? It does sound like it. Or did he simply expect to die, sooner rather than later, of the potion? Or for some other reason altogether?

For that matter, as has been asked elsewhere online; did Regulus manage to fake his death, and then go back to remove the Horcrux from the cave after Voldemort fell? By then he would have had all the time in the world to figure out how to get at it. If he knew about the Horcrux, he would have known that Voldemort wasn’t really dead, which would explain the wording of his note.

Second: did he actually escape from the cave with the Horcrux, to be hunted down later by one of the other Death Eaters and killed as reported? Or was the report of his death only assumed to have meant that he had been murdered, presumably on Voldemort’s orders? Was he actually killed destroying the Horcrux? If so, does Voldemort know this?

Did Regulus even make it out of the cave alive? We saw that there was at least one wizard in that lake. And if Reggie is sleeping with the Inferi, is the real Horcrux in the lake with him?

Well, not necessarily. Regulus Black was the son of a family that owns a House Elf. He was one of Kreachur’s masters. A House Elf’s master can summon him. In fact, can summon him almost instantaneously. From almost any location.

House Elves can also Apparate and Disapperate where wizards cannot. If Regulus got to that island alone, and got himself into trouble, he probably could have called on Kreachur, to help him, or at least could have passed him the locket and told him take it away and to guard it, if he could not destroy it. In which case, Regulus probably is in the lake with the rest of the Inferi.

****

And as a possibly related side issue — or perhaps just another point of confusion: we have known the number of Sirius Black’s Gringotts’ vault since PoA.

It is vault number 711. Number 713 is possibly the School’s, but it is generally believed to have been Nicholas Flamel’s.

Who lived to be nearly 700 years old.

So how old is that genealogical tapestry in the parlor of the house in Grimmauld Place again? Oh, that’s right. About 700 years old.

That isn’t Sirius Black’s personal vault. That’s the Black family’s vault.

And now it’s Harry’s.

And if Reggie, dying, passed the Horcrux to Kreachur and told him to hide it safely where no one could get at it, would Kreachur necessarily have hidden it in the house?

Would Reggie’s family?

And, maybe, just maybe, Voldemort did entrust the Locket to Bellatrix, and it was not the cave Horcrux. And Bellatrix eventually entrusted it to her Aunt Walburga rather than take it with her into Azkaban. Or, she simply she wasn’t permitted to take jewelry with her into Azkaban. Walburga Black was still alive when Bellatrix was sentenced to Azkaban, after all.

In which case, Bella may have had her own reasons to be asking Snape about the secret headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix in the Spinner’s End chapter. And maybe the fact that she doesn’t still have custody of that Locket is one of the reasons that she is no longer very high in Voldemort’s favor.

But I can’t see any way the logistics of this script accounts for the locket in the cave.

Speaking of which; the very fact that it was Kreachur, an elf that everyone in the Black family knew, who was dancing all around Robin Hood’s barn attempting to pass information about the Order of the Phoenix to Narcissia would have given the Malfoys a mighty strong hint of just where those Headquarters were. (And just what happened to that thread in the official Kreachur backstory?)

And now the Order’s Secret Keeper is dead.

Rowling informs us that this does not change anything.

Convenient, that.

****

But, I digress:

Third: if Regulus anticipated the possibility that whatever he ran into in that cave might be something too big for him to handle on his own and took somebody with him in the first place, who did he go with? Did he take Kreachur with him? That would have assured an accomplice who would not give his game away. House Elves cannot directly betray their masters’ secrets.

Did he send Kreachur to fetch him a bezoar when he realized that there was a potion to be neutralized? Are House Elves immune to the potion in the Birdbath of Doom? Is drinking that potion on Reggie’s orders why Kreachur now acts like he is 2/3 round the twist and no longer even tries to take care of the house of the family to which he was apparently devoted? What is a House Elf’s purpose in life? Kreachur seems to have misplaced his.

And if Reggie did not go to the cave with Kreachur, and did not go alone, who did he go with? And where is that person now?

On the issue of who went with Reggie into the sea cave, if Reggie is really dead, and if his tale really needs to be told, and he didn’t go with Kreachur, and we can take Rowling at her word that we’ve already met all of the major players in this cast of dozens, we haven’t got a particularly wide field of possibilities, do we? In fact, we may be looking at a vast field of... one.

Yup. Him again. Our generic, all-purpose Man of Mystery, and Rowling’s favorite red herring.

****

Right about this point I found myself having one of my “wait a minute...” moments. There was something very strange going on here. And I could tell that I was clearly missing something.

From a strictly meta standpoint I had a lowering feeling that we are all being set up. I was beginning to suspect that if Regulus Black got the Horcrux out of the cave we would be handed, at most, some half-baked solution that just plain doesn’t work because it doesn’t connect to anything. A solution that essentially comes out of thin air “because the author says so”, without a proper backtrail that makes any kind of sense. Rather like the “confession” of Barty Crouch Jr. (ETA: HA! Called that one correctly. Go me!)

Or; we were not going to be handed any kind of a solution at all, because the whole adventure of Regulus Black and the Dark Lord’s Sea Cave, is just one giant, gaudy, irresistible red herring.

And I had come round to thinking that this was the most likely possibility.

Because, looked at from any rational standpoint, Regulus Black just plain Knew Too Much. He certainly knew too much for any wet-behind-the-ears new recruit, and there just wasn’t time for him to have worked himself up through the ranks to be anything more than that.

He knew about the cave.

He knew where to find it.

He knew how to get into it.

He knew about the Horcrux.

He seems to have known about the locket.

HOW would he have known all of this? I was not convinced that he would have been able to learn all of this from Bellatrix. I wasn’t convinced that Voldemort would have shared all of this with Bellatrix.

So let’s take another look at the set-up, shall we?

And re-check our list.

****

He knew about the Horcrux. Check. He unquestionably knew about the Horcrux. He says so flat out in his “Screw you” message.

He seems to have known about the Locket. It really is hard to convince ourselves that his substitution was in the form of a locket by accident.

But did he know about the cave? How much did he know? And in what context?

What do we know about that sea cave that we can definitely trace to Lord Voldemort’s influence on it — and no one else’s? What is in the sea cave (other than the now-missing Horcrux) that we know Voldemort caused to be put there?

Not the blood-price door. Not the inner chamber. Like I say, I think both of those are much older than Tom Riddle. He found it, he took possession of it, and he made use of it. But we have no proof that he created it. I seriously doubt that he realized that there even was an inner chamber before his return visit there as an adult. He was only eleven, or — more probably — even younger, on his first trip there, and he didn’t even know that magic was real. Or that his power over the other children was magic.

Not the fountain, either I suspect. I think we can safely conclude that Voldemort tampered with the fountain, but mystic fountains in caves that have never seen the light of day are not that hard to cite in Real World folklore. The fountain, and the cave itself, might easily date back to Merlin’s day, or earlier. The wonder is that Tom didn’t come back and turn the Basin into a Horcrux. I would have. Founders, schmounders, if you want artifacts of historical significance for your Horcruxes, you don’t get much more historical than that fountain.

Probably not the lake either. That’s another traditional element, and the lake is clearly there to make access to the island and the fountain more difficult. Petitioners in such places of great Mystery such as that sea cave appears to be were supposed to find the access difficult, although not impossible. Or at least symbolic. And having to approach the fountain over water (fresh water, in a sea cave) from an antechamber that is only accessible at low tide, is the kind of symbolism that such quests usually entailed.

The boat. Now this is more like it. There probably has always been some kind of a boat in that cave, but it was probably not that boat. Dumbledore even tells us that he recognized Tom Riddle’s style in that boat. So that was almost certainly his. But the boat in itself doesn’t really get us much forwarder.

The Inferi in the lake.

Bingo.

****

Rereading the trip into the sea cave it is obvious that Dumbledore knew exactly what was lurking in that lake.

Before he and Harry even got into the inner chamber, Albus Dumbledore knew what was in that lake. He knew, from the outset, that they were going to have to bypass a lake full of Inferi. There was absolutely no question or hesitation in his statements or actions regarding what was floating about in that lake. He may try very hard to give us the impression that he never had been in that cave himself, but I just don’t buy it. At the very least, he clearly had advance information about what was in that cave.

He also tells us that Voldemort “killed enough people to make an army of Inferi”. Does he mean that he killed them all himself? Or that He and his followers killed enough people, on his authority and in his name to build themselves such an army?

For that matter, what kind of numbers, to a wizard, would constitute an “army”? Riddle has an “army” of Death Eaters, too. Which comes out to about 60, tops. The lake certainly sounds as if it is big enough to hold 5 or 6 dozen Inferi. Indeed, when Harry was trying to fight them off, the narrative even refers to them as an “army of the dead”.

So. Is this the same “army of Inferi”? How many armies of Inferi does your average Dark Lord need?

And furthermore we were told that the Voldemort’s army of Inferi had been used “the last time”. His followers, or at least some of them, almost certainly know about that cave and what is in that lake. He’s not the only one.

Or is he?

Did he keep the secret of where the Inferi were stashed to himself? And only called them up when he wanted them used?

Well, maybe. No one has seen hide nor hair of them since he disappeared the first time, have they? So maybe he was the only one who could control them. And if that is the case, then anyone he might have told about it would have felt themselves to be very highly favored indeed, wouldn’t they? And it’s possible that no one was ever so favored.

For that matter, in the wake of DHs we don’t even know whether the Inferi troops were ever put to use again after Riddle redirected them to Horcrux-guarding.

But it wasn’t (and still isn’t) exactly safe to assume that Tom was the only one who knew about the Inferi in that lake. Just that he seems to have been the only one who was ever willing to deploy them.

So. Okay. Do we know anything about the proper care and maintenance of Inferi? Can we make a guess?

Inferi are animate corpses. But they don’t seem to be rotting corpses, although they do seem to be gradually withering, even under water — which may slow the process.

Actually, they sound to me as if Rowling lifted them straight out of the Mabinogian, where they are referred to as the “cauldron-born”. So far as I can recall from Evangeline Walton’s version of the tale, the Lord of the Dead (who isn’t a bad guy, btw, just a grim one) gave as a gift to one of his mortal allies a giant magical cauldron large enough in which to lay the corpse of a man, and when this corpse had been “seethed” in the cauldron for the proper time, in the proper manner, it rose up and would obey its master.

(Now what does that description remind us of?)

In one of their wars somebody deployed an army of cauldron-born. It was an exceedingly nasty battle. Being already dead, they couldn’t be killed, and you had to hack them apart to stop them coming after you. In some retellings they would even collect and reform themselves overnight and come after you again the next day. The only way to destroy them was to destroy the cauldron which animated them.

Well, we already know that Rowling doesn’t necessarily adopt things from her sources verbatim. She often tweaks them. Her Inferi actively seem to want to avoid light and warmth, and are apparently more comfortable if not exposed to air, either. Well, they’re dead. They probably want to be buried. So keeping them in a cave where the sun never shines is a reasonable thing to do. And if they want to feel enclosed, or contained, it’s easier to call them out of water than it is to keep having to dig them up. And if you don’t need them for long periods they are safe enough there.

Is that how Reggie knew about the sea cave? Was he the low-ranker that ended up having to play errand boy; periodically sent off to the sea cave to retrieve a few Inferi whenever his Master decided he wanted to make use of them?

Did Dumbledore and Harry just break into Voldemort’s garage?

****

Okay: back to square 1.

Let’s play with some alternate possibilities.

We were originally invited to believe that at some point Regulus Black defied the Dark Lord. We are given the impression that either he refused orders, or he repudiated Voldemort and the whole Death Eater movement. In any case, he managed to get away without being killed right then and there, and he managed to keep ahead of the rest of them for a few days before somebody caught up to him and killed him.

Allegedly.

We were invited to believe that at some point during those few days he made a visit to the sea cave and retrieved the Horcrux, leaving a decoy. We don’t know whether he managed to destroy the real one.

I am not convinced of that reading. It just plain doesn’t make sense.

So let’s try to dismiss considerations regarding the sea cave for the moment and concentrate on the other main component of the equation. Reggie himself.

From the tone of the note he left with the false Horcrux, I’d say that he repudiated Voldemort himself and his entire movement, and was determined to strike at least one telling blow against him before he died. That note doesn’t sound particularly fearful, it sounds angry. And vindictive.

And we don’t know what set him off.

Or do we? Can we make a guess?

Regulus Black’s flashpoint may have had nothing whatsoever to do with the Horcrux. The Horcrux is just what he knew he could use to strike the most damaging blow to Voldemort with. Something related to Voldemort himself evidently pushed Regulus Black’s buttons and Madam Black’s baby boy was going to do damage.

Well, we still don’t really know for sure whether Orion Black (or Cygnus) predeceased Regulus or not, do we? I think he (they?) did. That could turn out to be relevant.

The “Screw you!” message taunts the Dark Lord with the information that it was R.A.B. who “discovered your secret”. I thought that Reggie must have done that before the alleged death warrant went out, since those few days on the run weren’t likely to have been a good time to have been making major discoveries of other people’s secrets.

But that discovery alone might not have prompted him to steal the thing.

Or did it?

Given how short a time Regulus was even in the organization (a maximum of six months, we first thought, Kreachur tells us a year), he must have been a very meddlesome little monkey indeed. Maybe he did go into the organization as another of Albus’s spies — as some fans were contending. I’ll admit I couldn’t get properly enthusiastic about the idea myself, but it wasn’t impossible.

What was more likely, however, is that he had come across some very exclusive source of information that none of the other characters had anticipated.

But, if he already knew about the cave, and knew about the Horcrux, (and knew about the locket?), how can we assume that he didn’t also know about the fountain, and, consequently, know about the potion?

And since he seems to have known he was going to die anyway, would he have cared about the potion, beyond making sure that he wouldn’t be so disabled by it that he couldn’t get away afterwards? Maybe he did take a bezoar into the cave with him.

Hm. We’re stuck in the damn cave again.

Let’s back up a bit farther, and try again.

Frankly, where the adventure of Reggie Black and the Dark Lord’s Sea Cave was concerned, we had a whole cornucopia of possibilities to play with. Rowling had packed so many variables into this puzzle that I doubted that anybody’s version was going to get it right. And that went for mine as well.

And, if the whole issue was a red herring, we were never going to find out, either.

So it was all ours to play with. A gift to the fanfic community.

To say nothing of the theorists.

In any case: we could not overlook the possibility that the locket at #12 may not have got there by way of Regulus Black. Or not directly.

We also need to remember that Reggie’s parents clearly loved him, and there is no reason to suppose that this love was not returned. Once he knew he had got himself marked for execution, he left home and never returned to Grimmauld Place lest he be followed and put his family in danger, too. And if his father was already dead, he would not want to endanger his mother as well.

Frankly, we don’t really know why Regulus would have bolted from what was probably one the most secure houses in the UK, but the fact is that he did bolt. Rowling tells us so, right there in the books (ETA: and then later pretended she hadn’t), and we have no choice but to accept this information as it is given. He was young. He may have panicked. I’m not convinced that we will ever be filled in on the details.