For a moment I simply stood stunned. Then I began to feel my legs turning to jelly.

Dumbledore smiled, apparently a little perplexed. He didn’t seem to recognize the man who had killed him (well, technically Severus killed him, but whatever).

Just as I was beginning to babble, Tito steered me down an aisle, away from the apparent apparition. I leaned against a pile of boxes, my breath coming in short gasps.

“Wh-what-he-can’t-manager-dead!” I knew I was making no sense. “How? He’s dead!”

“Listen,” said Tito. “He doesn’t remember you or know anything about the Wizarding world.”

“Why?” I asked hoarsely. My heart was still lodged somewhere in my pharynx.

“Well, I can’t actually tell you,” said Tito slowly.

“What?”

“I took an Unbreakable Vow!” said Tito. “All you need to know is that he’s harmless and he is going to be your new manager.”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Deal’s off. I won’t work for him. Won’t do it, Tito.”

“Come on,” said Tito, taking a wheedling tone that I despised. “You need this job. And think about it this way. If you work here, you can keep an eye on Dumbledore. Maybe you can even figure out why he’s back.”

These arguments were at least somewhat persuasive and I had opened my mouth to respond when Tito grabbed my arm again and frog-marched me to a small office in the back of the store.

The nameplate read ALBUS DUMBLEDORE in curly letters. I saw a back issue of Crochet Today on the desk and snorted. Some things never changed.

The office was currently empty and while Tito and I awaited the return of “The Manager,” I mentally flicked through the possible ways that Dumbledore might still be alive.

As I saw it, there were four options: 1) Snape had double-crossed me and kept him alive and wiped his memory for some reason, 2) some of the man’s devotees--including Potter?--had somehow resurrected him, 3) he was a cyborg sent across time or 4) someone had taken his appearance, probably through expensive cosmetic surgery (and I know how much that sort of thing costs. Having my tramp stamp removed cost a pretty Galleon, let me tell you).

The door opened and Dumbledore ambled in. He looked just as I remembered him--although he’d traded in his snazzy robes for a rather hideous yellow polo shirt and too-tight blue jeans.

“Good morning,” he said, settling himself down in a regal kind of way. “I believe you’re Voldemort Riddle?”

“Mm-hmm,” I said. I wasn’t going to give the old man too much to work with.

“My brother here has fallen on hard times, financially,” said Tito. “He needs a job. I was thinking he would be a natural for the sales department.”

“Oh, really?” said Dumbledore. “Do you have any sales experience?” That last was addressed to me, of course.

“Of course,” I said, getting a bit puffed up. “I could sell gold to a goblin.”

“How about computers?” asked Dumbledore, those stupid little eyes of his twinkling.

“I practically invented pomcuters,” I said--not strictly true, of course, but I wasn’t going to tell Dumbledore that I had no idea what the hell they were.

“Excellent,” he said. He started fooling around in a drawer, and eventually pulled out a stack of manuals roughly as tall as Big Ben. “You can take these home and read up on what you’ll be selling. You can start tomorrow.”

I picked up the manuals without any complaints. “Thank you,” I mumbled.

“You’re very welcome,” said Dumbledore, all smiles and warm fuzzies. “Do you have any questions?”

“Do I really have to wear the polo shirt?” I asked. It had been bothering me for some time.

“I’m afraid so,” said Dumbledore.

I took the pile of manuals back to Tito’s flat and started pawing through them. Terms like ‘motherboards,’ ‘ink cartridges,’ ‘Pentium processors’ and ‘MP3 players’ turned up with alarming frequency. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, so I turned on Coronation Street.

Two murders and an elopement later, Tito got home, tired from a long day of work, apparently not in the mood to see his brother enjoying himself with good, clean soap opera fun.

“Did you even read the manuals?” he asked.

“Some of them,” I said.

“You do realize that tomorrow you have to sell this stuff, don’t you?” asked Tito.

“Don’t you worry about me,” I said. “I will be selling up a storm tomorrow. I will sell more than I have since that lemonade stand.”

“What lemonade stand?” asked Tito.

“We started a lemonade stand a year or two back. The Death Eaters. Well, actually it was a venom-ade stand. No repeat customers.”

Tito, displaying disgusting amounts of sarcasm, rolled his eyes.

Despite my bravado, I woke up the next morning with a sinking feeling in my stomach. The polo shirt waited. Tito had brought it home. It was a far cry from my usual stylish robes. At least it had my name under the pocket--

I looked closer.

“Tito!” I yelled. “Come in here!”

Tito came in.

“They. Got. My. Name. Wrong.” I thrust the shirt into his face. “My name is Voldemort, not Voldewort.”

To my horror, Tito chuckled. “Voldewort. That’s pretty funny.”

I was outraged. “I need to be respected in that store. This just won’t do, Tito.”

It took Tito nearly forty-five minutes to bully me out of the apartment, and that was only after I’d pinned an old “Support Tony Blair” button over the misspelled name.

When we finally arrived at the dismal store, Tito showed me the inner workings: the so-called “break room,” the line of lockers, a baffling machine that dispensed sugary treats if you put a quarter in. I wasn’t very impressed with the place.

“So what am I supposed to do now that I’m here?” I asked Tito.

“You sell things,” he said shortly, and walked off, which I thought was rather catty of him.

I hung around the break room for a few minutes, bought a Chunky Monkey bar from the glass-walled machine and was in the process of eating it at a small plastic table when a fellow employee walked in.

Now, there’re three things you should know about this employee straight off: 1) she was a woman, 2) she was--in this Dark Lord’s opinion--a bit of a babe and 3) she had her cheeks puffed out like she was holding her breath.

She stood there holding her breath for a few seconds, until she finally released it with a giant gasp.

“Have you ever thought about breathing?” she asked suddenly, as though we had been carrying on a conversation for some time.

“Um, no,” I said, ever the smooth ladies’ man.

“Well, if you start to think about it, it kinda messes you up. I mean, you don’t breathe consciously. Your mind isn’t doing it. If you had to focus to do it, you probably couldn’t do anything else. But once I start thinking about it, it gets kind of hard to do. You know what I mean?”

“Um, no,” I said. “My name’s Voldemort, I’m new here.”

“I’m Jana,” she said. “I’m old here.”

I laughed at this witticism a little louder than was strictly necessary. This gal was apparently mentally ill, totally my type. She was pretty comely, too, if you get my meaning.

“Are you the new salesman?” she asked, displaying keen powers of observation, as I had ‘Sales Associate’ on my wretched polo.

“Mm-hmm,” I said.

“It’s tough. You have to know your electronics. I have a good relationship with my PC at home, so I do okay.” Jana laughed at this remark, which didn’t make the slightest amount of sense to me. Naturally, I laughed, too, banging the table with my fist a little for emphasis.

This startled her a little, so I covered by standing up, stretching and saying, “Well, back to the grind.”

She nodded and I left the break room. Our children were going to be beautiful as well as megalomaniacal.

For the rest of the day, I hung around the store, asking random people if they needed help. I generally did this by hiding behind a large box and jumping out, which I figured would be a pleasant surprise for customers. After one elderly lady went into a kind of seizure, I decided to switch tactics.

Unfortunately, nothing seemed to be working, not even approaching slowly and being polite. No one bought anything I recommended and most of them left the store after I’d ministered to them. When Tito told me that a percentage of what I sold went to my salary, I decided to get serious.

Around midmorning, I saw a young man with baggy pants and a backwards cap examining a printer. I sauntered over.

“May I help you?” I asked, the picture of courteousness.

The insolent young fellow frowned and said, “What happened to you, man? It looks like you got run over by a bus.”

“It was a clerical error,” I said (I’d heard Tito use the expression that morning, hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant). “I see you’re in need of a printer.”

“Not anymore, dude. You’re a freak.” This teenaged fiend began to walk off. I’d had it. I was going to make a sale, and I was going to make one right now. I grabbed him by the ear and pulled him close.

“Listen to me, dude,” I said, using my Death Eater-discipline voice. “I have enough power in one toenail clipping to jinx you into soup, to curse you into oblivion, to turn that idiot hat into a stick and then beat you with it. I could literally deconstruct your entire body until you were nothing but a pile of goo with eyeballs on top. I could set you on fire and keep you that way for a thousand years. I could kill you in five dozen ways, each one in turn, each one more unpleasant than the one before. I could make your nose and your navel switch places. I could turn you into a strip of bacon and create a dog to eat you. I am not going to put up with any more crap from someone so completely, utterly powerless. The only thing you can do right now to avoid a hundred horrible fates is to buy a freaking printer. Now, we have Toshiba and Lexmark. Which would you prefer?”

The guy was crying. It was either my impassioned speech or my coffee breath. “I’ll t-take the T-Toshiba,” he snuffled.

“That comes in two colors, black and white,” I said sweetly.

“B-black.”

“Excellent choice.” I pressed the box into his arms. “And for an extra seventy-three dollars, you can buy a year’s worth of ink, all colors. Is that what you want?”

“Uh-huh.”

I added a second box and set him off to the register in tears. Maybe I could make this thing work after all.