I'm dying and I know it. It's almost a relief to die considering the hell this world has become. You all don't remember what the world was like before because you all were much too young when it happened, when he took over, that was if any of you were even born then. The old man Dumsomethingorother told me that it was all my fault before our "Gracious and Magnanimous Lord" killed him. You know what? I believe him. It was all my and Petunia's fault. If I hadn't been lazy, and it Petunia hadn't set that fire things would have been different. I know they would have. God, the one time I was hoping, praying for the boy to use his magic, he didn't, he couldn't.

What does a fire have to do with the way the world is now you ask? Everything.

Me and Petunia were entrusted with the care of a boy who according to prophesy was supposed to defeat our Lord when he grew up. He didn't grow up because me and Petunia murdered him.

How, you ask?

It's a long story. But the boy, his name was Harry, was Petunia's sister's child. Petunia had been jealous over the fact that her sister was a witch, and after her sister died and the boy was left with us, that jealousy didn't go away. My opinion on magic was that it was unnatural, and I didn't want it in the house. Every time the boy did magic, or I thought the boy did magic, I would punish him. Usually I would punish him by locking him in the cupboard we kept him in for a couple days without food, or assign several chores I or Petunia didn't want to deal with.

Well, to make a long story short, Petunia liked seeing the boy get punished and - as I would learn after it was far too late - would often frame the boy. Maybe one in ten or less of the "Magical Incidents" I had punished the boy for had actually been done by the boy. On the night the boy died, Petunia had decided to frame her eight year-old nephew for starting a small trash fire. Petunia's plan had been to start a small fire in the kitchen trash, go back to bed, wait fifteen minutes, then wake me up claiming that she smelled smoke. She had been hoping to see me finally take a belt to the boy.

Her plan probably would have worked, if I hadn't been lazy earlier that day. You see, I had a bunch of old rags in the garage that I planned to throw out. The rags had been used to wipe down various things such as the lawn mower, a small turpentine spill, varnish from an old woodworking project and whatnot and as a result had several different chemicals on them. Instead of walking over to the outside trash, chucking them and then heading into the kitchen for a snack, I had just chucked them in the kitchen trash on my way to the fridge.

Petunia's small fire which on any other day would have just burned some food and maybe a bit of paper caught the rags alight, and as some of them had oil and petrol on them, you could just imagine what happened. What was supposed to be a small fire that would just get the trash and a bit of the wall, forcing me or rather the boy to repaint the kitchen like she wanted me to turned into a raging inferno pretty damn quick especially after it caught the ceiling and the cabinets, especially the cabinet under the sink in which the cleaning supplies were kept. In the fifteen minutes that Petunia sat waiting to wake me up, the fire had flashed over into the dining room.

By the time Petunia managed to wake me up most of the downstairs was an inferno. My first concern had been my son Dudley. In my panicked state, I completely forgot about the boy. By the time I remembered the boy, it was too late. The living room was already on fire as well as the front hall, making it impossible for me to go back inside and get him.

That had been the first and only time I had hoped, even prayed for the boy to use magic. As we waited for the firefighters I prayed that the boy would pop up somewhere unharmed. As the firefighters had gone into the house looking for the boy and failed to find him, I had thought he'd magicked himself away.

It had not been so. When investigators came to find the source of the fire the next day, they found him or rather what was left of him locked up in the remains of the cupboard under the stairs where we had left him.

There had been a time when I denied it was my fault. There had been a time when I'd blamed the boy for not magicking himself out of the cupboard. There had been a time when I placed all of the blame on Petunia who had been the one to start the fire. Now I know better. If I hadn't done my utmost to squash the magic out of the boy...If I'd just taken a couple of seconds to unlock the cupboard the boy was in and shake him awake before the fire got too bad...If I'd never locked the boy in in the first place...If I'd done something about Petunia framing the boy after I caught her bleaching one of my ties and later blaming it on the boy a week earlier...

It was bad enough that I helped kill a child, what's worse is that child was supposed to grow up and save us all. We're all slaves because I'd been squeamish about magic and because I had allowed Petunia to wallow in her petty jealousies for far too long.

What do you mean I can stop it all? How can I stop it all? I'm dying, and besides it's far too late.

What the ruddy hell is an unspeakable? How the hell can you be as old as me, you can't be more than middle aged. The only reason I lived so long was because it amused our Lord to make me see what I helped do to my kind by killing off the only one who could possibly oppose him. Seems that the old man had been cursing my name amongst others as our Lord killed him.

What do you mean I'm probably the only one who can fix things?

That's bloody ironic, me being the only one who is able to be sent that far back in time by magic because I don't have any ruddy magic.

When do we start? It better be soon mind you, I don't have long.

Now? Now's good.

Goodbye then.