Doctor's Call

by Pseudo Cerberus

"The creature Lut'z stared down at shouldn't have existed" When an old doctor receives a letter begging his assistance he responds, unaware it is the last journey he will make in this life. (One-shot. What might have happened to Voldemort if he had fled at the final encounter.)

In the fading half-light of evening, Lutz's eyes did their best to keep locked to the path and not to wander to the dense shadow of the conifers either side. His old legs creaked as he did his best to hurry; to be out of the woods and at the house, whose address he clutched in his hand.

The letter had been vague, a simple plea, begging his assistance to come aid an unspecified medical urgency. The directions listed in the letter were minimal, yet Lutz felt guided and he soon found himself at the front of a small house. Staring up, he saw its patched tile roof in silhouette against the sunlight; which was just so blinking down behind the trees. On some mysterious wings he had been delivered to the door and he took no time in rapping at its lichen encrusted surface. There was no answer.

He stowed the letter deep into his coat pocket and made to try and push the door open; but before he had even raised his hand it swung back on itself and creaked to a stop, pulling dust and crisp leaves with it. Lutz cleared his throat and picked up his case. The house was as cold as the autumn air outside, and Lutz, although not a skinny man, wished the warmth of his sheep lined coat would creep up into the small hollows of his cheeks. With suspicion he tread carefully along the corridor and peered into each of the ground rooms. Spoiled furniture and forest litter lay scattered in all of them. The place was derelict. Surely no one could live here - he must have made a mistake.

Lutz called out in German and then again, his hand reaching for the wooden banister, filmed with dust, when a voice answered him.

'I have no patience for your language. Speak English.'

Lutz couldn't make out the direction of the voice, whether it was behind him, above him or below him. With his hands still on the banister he called back, 'Yes Madame'.

'–Sir', the voice corrected him tartly.

Before he had the chance to apologise the voice enounced he must come upstairs. Slowly, Lutz made his way up, careful not to trip on the shapes he was only half aware of in the gloom. The further he climbed the more he felt heat creeping through the air, growing steadily stronger until his skin beneath his clothes began to itch uncomfortably.

The man's high voice caught in his ear again, 'What is your name?' it demanded.

'Dr Lutz.'

'and your name?', repeated the cold voice.

With a small scowl Lutz said his name was Erhard, deliberately pressing his irritation into his reply.

'-ah. Erhard Lutz. So is it Hardy?

'No – it is Erhard. For my patients it is Dr Lutz. Who am I speaking too? What is your name – sir?

Lutz couldn't understand how the voice was so loud, so clear, yet trembling on a whispers note. At the top of the stair he crept along the upper corridor, not trusting the old floor creaking underfoot, or the strange man he was about to meet. At the mention of returning his own name, Lutz heard the other man give a snort, and was sure he replied with his mouth twisted up in a grin, for his high voice wavered with cold amusement.

'Mine? Let's not speak of what is lost - you wouldn't like it. Mine? Why, you may call me Mr Riddle.'

Singling out the furthest room, as the heat felt strongest here, Lutz knocked, and he was invited to come inside. A flood of hot air rolled past him, accompanied by the stink of stagnation, curdled by the crackling flames at the far side of the room. A bed was placed directly in front of the fire, away from the door and forward facing, so Lutz could only see the back of the bed; making sense of the heaped bulk as a mass of blankets and pillows.

'Are you the man that requested me? This letter speaks of urgent medical assistant. I am a retired Doctor you know. I live too far – I could not have gotten anyone else – and the phone is not working ', Lutz paused, 'I came because it was urgent. I ask: Who is in trouble?'

Lutz imagined the man's face to be smiling as the lips let slip a crack of mirth.

'Well?!', Lutz was beginning to lose patience, 'Who needs me? Who sent for me?' The hairs on the back of his neck rose stiffly as the gentle taping of instinct told him to start feeling afraid.

'I. I did. I need assistance. Pardon me – please. Giddy thoughts ail me sometimes – they distract my conversation – please come in, seat yourself. Please.'

Lutz moved into the seat placed back from the bed and close to the fire. High above the alcoves danced in flame-light. The fire, so unbearably hot, sucking all oxygen from the air and expiring a breathless heat, made Lutz's brain swell with stale nonsense. Once, the room seemed to have been elegant, restrained in its decoration, with modest white walls. Now, a mouldering mess, the fungus clinging to the walls cooked in the heat of the room, creating an odour that one might imagine dank compost warmed would smell like. Lutz coughed and sweated.

Lutz tried to make out the man's face, but it was difficult. The fire did not illuminate the others visage, but worked with the shadows to further confusion; with the mound of blanket casting lots of shades, like a hilly valley casts at sun set. Small and ridiculous at the centre of the mound Lutz spied the face: he made sense of the slanting eyes, (although they seemed ginormous), the high cheekbones, (of which the contours seamed unreal, as they swelled, curving out and down into a thin, sharp, chin), and of a flat, flat nose (it must be small and squashed); looking again to the eyes that seamed purple in the flickering light; watching him fixedly with the beady-black stare of a vulture.

'I am so glad you came. Now that I know your name, I can thank you - Dr Erhard Lutz. Thank you for responding so quickly to my plea, for your trust and your sacrifice', the man in the bed breathed softly.

Unusually, Lutz could place no age to the voice, (or gender), and did not know if he was talking to a man his senior or to one entering his thirties. 'It is my job as a doctor – but the isolation of this house … it causes suspicion in me. I hope your need is genuine Mr Riddle, if I am not back - my family will know.'

The blankets burst out in laughter and Lutz was forced to listen to it, feeling stranger in the heat - like the musky odour of the room acted as a drug to dull his senses. He pulled at his coat, finally shedding it as he bent to open his case. Lutz considered the man in the bed to have a distinctive laugh: a formal ring, laced with a susurrating hiss. In fact the hiss, like the sound of softly escaping steam, seemed to be at the background of all his words, still left spooling in the air long after the mouth had stopped moving.

The lungs could be infected, thought Lutz, taking his stethoscope up out of his case. One of the only instruments still left in his possession. He was a retired doctor.

'Oh – you have a family do you? You sure you don't live alone? Alone and remote? - too strange, too cold for company?', the soft voice lingered, amused, as did the eyes of Riddle, staring down on the back of the old doctor as he lent low over his case. 'Are you sure that anybody would want to keep you? How full is your address book? Is there any pet by your side at night? Are you sure you have a family?'

'What are these questions? Why would you know-', and Lutz broke off, succumb to a torrent of coughs while he clutched his chest, fighting for breath. It was the heat. Slowly his confusion grew and he stared at the stethoscope, unsure why it was dangling from his hand.

'I pick my Doctors carefully. I have seen you quite in your home. You enjoy few comforts in your retirement, with no people in your life and lots of time', Riddle let the words hang clear in the air, speaking them with crystal certainty and with no trace of amusement. On the contrary he was watching the Doctors increasingly confused movements with anticipation; letting the tip of his tongue poke just so out of his mouth, enjoying the taste of the man's sweat, leached and fettered on the air, landing like drops of wine: a tantalizing bead of what was to come.

'I knew you could spare me with a visit. A good Doctor always spares time for his patient – and you did not disappoint me. Did you Erhard?'

'No.'

'Will you examine me Erhard? Will you pull back the covers and tell me what's wrong?'

'Yes. The lungs are infected…I must take your temperature.' It was becoming more difficult to remember English, but just as Lutz thought he had forgotten the word it came floating up to him, up through the haze that filmed over his mind and through the heat causing rivulets to run from his forehead and down the long crook of his nose.

Lutz's old and crooked fingers found the edge of the blanket, and he swayed, keeping his balance only just, as he had to crawl across the bed to reach it. His face was inches from that of the man's. Ruby-red glowed dully at the corner of his eye and he felt something like wet silk brush his cheek. With effort he crawled back, pulling the edge of the blanket with him and off the bed entirely as he stumbled backwards. Recovering, he turned back to the bed.

His patient was exposed. The creature Lut'z stared down at shouldn't have existed. He knew its form was not an aberration of nature, not a defect science could explain away… what Lutz was looking at was a fantasy: a living, breathing fantasy. More terrible than any pickled unfortunate he had seen on a laboratory shelf, and more wonderful than any illustrated beast he had seen in the pages of a fairy tale.

Lucidity returned to the doctor and he took a slow step back, his face blank, stepping out of the magic that had swaddled him senseless. All he could do was stare.

The creature laid still, the muscle along its stomach caught in tension. Its eyes widened and Lutz now saw how they were silted like a cat. Each a lurid pool of deep, unblinking, crimson.

Surprise, alarm and fear: emotions they each felt and saw reflected back at them in the rigid pose of the other. Both frozen and hypnotized in their places.

'The last one screamed', Riddle said quietly, finally breaking the silence, though he spoke more to himself than to the doctor. Regaining a little more of his haughty composure, Riddle, the fiend and unnameable, tilted his head a fraction to the side and narrowed his scarlet eyes; letting bitter amusement curl the edges of his mouth into a dreadful almost-smile.

'Well? Tell me what you see Dr. Then, consider…and tell me why you see what you see…'

Lutz blinked. The returning ice of Riddle's voice twitched the hairs on his neck, pulling him from trance and back into the moment. He could never have imagined the situation he now found himself in, but, to his surprise, had no problem in believing it was real.

'I don't know why', and the doctor paused, unaware his hand had come to touch his chest, where just under his heart beat strong but steady. 'My instincts tell me corruption is the symptom…an-and magic (?) is the cause…', his brow pulled up as he questioned his own reply, '…and what do I see…I will tell you what I don't see. I don't see a man in this bed, and I don't see a snake. I see coils and bone, and skin that hangs in all the wrong places…a-and no pair of legs to go with the arms – if – are they arms?'

Lutz let out a steady breath. The flames and dancing shadows cast were the only movement, the only source of life, in the small and closing room. The creature was so still that Lutz wondered how it was still breathing. A growing need to know overcame him and Lutz automatically stretched out his hand; helpless, he had to touch.

'FOOL!' Like a viper burned by the tip of heated steal, Riddle pulled back with sudden violence, and Lutz saw further evidence of mutation: two large curved teeth, paled, like translucent ivory.

'How dare you!', Riddle's shriek struck Lutz like a blast of hail.

'How dare I?' Aware of how hoarse his voice sounded but unable to speak level, Lutz had to force himself to continue speaking. 'Why did you call for me?' and he added, pressing what authority he could into each quivering word, 'I am not getting out of here alive, am I Mr Riddle. You don't need a doctor, do you?'

The creature lying in the bed said nothing. Its only response was to shift its coils and settle itself back down. Back down, to stare at the doctor in bitter accusatory silence. A viper amongst folds of musk and dirt; he did not affirm or deny the doctor.

'Then, you will tell me – it is my right to know what you are…mein Gott…'

The creature's eyes glittered with malevolence. Lutz could not tell whether the thing smiled or if the line of its mouth was simply formed that way. The more he looked at the pale face, the more mask-like it seemed.

As if to prove a point, the creature slid its tongue out, deliberately flicking the purple fork slow and sticky; its tapered points glistening in the fire light.

'Do you know how hot you are Dr?', asked Riddle softly, his breathy tone just above a whisper. 'The tips of your ears and nose glow. And you sweat. Oh – you sweat.'

The creature continued to gaze at him, looking for the thread that would unravel him. 'You sweat fear as much as you sweat salt. I taste both, old man – old flesh…To be so very afraid and so composed takes courage Dr…I admire you for that. Not many have shown me such steadfast nerve as you have– of course not many have been as ignorant as you…muggle man.'

'Were you a man?', the question slipped out and for the first time the doctor's voice trembled.

Yes, now the creature smiled; its lipless mouth pulled back and it tittered lightly through it's needle teeth.

'I imagine that question is debatable among many…if you're asking if I ever looked like a man then the answer is yes. If you're asking if I ever felt like a man, well then, dear doctor, I would have to give you a different answer…but yes, I was once a boy, an infant, a human being…'

Lut'z nodded and took a gulp of air. 'When did this start?- Why-'

'If we are going to do this, Dr, I suggest you take your seat.' Riddle's eyes shifted to the flames and then back to the doctor's sweaty, flushed face. 'Forgive me, but I am doing nothing about the fire. I need its heat', then he added with the meanest trace of a salacious sneer, 'you can strip if you like'.

Turning around to look at the chair Lutz considered his options, concluding the only hope left to him was that he might be able to gain a small portion of reason and illuminate some of this madness before he died. Eventually Lutz took his seat.

'After you tell me, what then?'

'Patience dear Dr, patience.'

Lutz thought about the two teeth curled back in the creature's mouth. '- and you will answer any question I have to ask you?'

Red eyes considered the doctor; like smouldering coal, Lutz knew them to contain a heat deceptively hidden in the stillness of their surface. Turning over each of his thoughts carefully, Riddle flicked his tongue, unaware its trace fluttered about his lips. 'I will answer any question bar one: don't ask me for my name.'

In silence the doctor agreed with a jerk of his head.

'What I am is a result of loss. I broke the second promise I made to myself and I almost broke my first.'

'Lost what?'

'Myself, my soul and my promise to conquer and lead the people too weak, too stupid to realise the importance of life,' and then Riddle let out a sigh pained with self-loathing, 'I was defeated, and so I did what I could: I fled and I hid, and I left everything…all my hopes and my problems and my responsibility…I fell from the shadow of greatness into something less, much less – and still I continue to fall…'

The doctor synthesised what he could of Riddle's words; his speech was a riddle in itself and so Lutz decided to work from the beginning of what the creature had told him. 'What was your first promise?'

Riddle smiled, 'To live for ever, no matter what'.

'And the second?'

A frown creased the mask-like face slightly; the skin too stiff or muscles too wasted to further the expression. 'You said it yourself: "Magic is my cause". There is no greater privilege to invent; to study and to push creation further. I lived for that honour, and all around me I had to watch fools, like yourself, without the ability, or, worse still - fools without the inclination to better their practice - robbing the world of its meaning. Squatting in the abundance magic provided, never offering to give anything back. The human race is made of small minds and bigger minds are made small by emotion. Why waste such precious resource by loving another when you could love yourself reflected through the world around you, by the magic that you perform? So… my second promise was to magic: to its study and to its progress and so to the domination and leadership of the people threatening it.'

The fire crackled and Lutz watched the reflected flames dance in the creatures eyes; made oddly gentle in the quite emptiness of his stare. Riddle let another whisper sigh from his nostrils and inclined his head, allowing it to rest partly on one of his coils and partly on a patch of pillow. He inhaled and extended a tongue, tasting goose down through the smell of musk and mould.

'You were a politician – a leader? A magician?'

Riddle gritted his teeth, feeling the muscles in his jaw swell. He should end it now, but he didn't, and part of him, despite his pain and anger, enjoyed telling the muggle doctor about the society of wizards living unknown among common people. He talked about Hogwarts, about history and about all the places he visited; all his greatest achievements. Ignoring the scornful laugh internally roving in his head, he instead focused on the pride he felt and on the warmth that the marvel on the old muggle's face brought him. Eagerly his mind came in to brush what little of the emotion he could off the doctor for himself. His magic was waning. Every day a little more trickled away from him. Every day his coils grew a little heavier.

' – but how were you defeated? You had so much power. What stopped you?'

'Youth. Luck. A mother's ignorance - and an old fool too stupid to know when he had been beat.' Riddle replied carefully, deliberating each word with a certainty one does not argue with.

'But who? – what-'

To his sudden surprise Lutz forget where he was. Aware only that he felt a terrible pain. As if wax was being forcibly pumped around his veins, bruising his insides and pooling over his eyes, till he saw only the blurred bulk of something coiled back in the far corner.

xxx

After the strike Riddle retracted like lightening and spooled his mass over his head. His arms clenched to his sides, as he protected his eyes, his tongue and hollowed fangs - which still tingled with the acidic warmth of venom.

Through the vibrations reverberating along the wooden floor Riddle felt the man thrash. He had watched enough snakes strike out at rats and could easily picture the doctor contorted at absurd angles, his body quailing in shock before it finally gave out. The smell of urine hit his nostrils and then minutes later so did the smell of starved flesh: the slightly sweet smell made when every cell had suckled its last molecule of oxygen away.

His pleasure shamed him, but it was the most this wretched world afforded him; and he took great care to saver all the details of old man. Each part of Lutz's body wafting up in little parcels of distinct smell.

His small arms struggled, but he did his pest to pull the clothes off the corpse. Pulling at them with the same excitement one might pull wrapping paper of a present that they know what's inside of, but that has been kept hidden from them.

He felt less like a man in the current moment than he ever had, which in part was good; but while his inhumanity should have caused him to have risen like a god among men, the truth of the matter was only too event in his hunger for the late man on the floor. As his tongue flickered eagerly over the chest and groin, each smell, each nuance of mans sent caused his hunger to build and build, and his saliva to pool in his mouth…readying him to open wide and swallow the evidence that Dr Erhard Lutz had ever been there.

It took him the best part of an hour for him to push the body down his throat. At least he imagined it did. What was time without a clock? Without society to measure against?

Eating - engulfing - was a slow process. He had to thrust his trachea out of his mouth so he could breath, paying careful attention to each breath as he worked his mouth to push the meat down. Its bulk stretched his sides and swelled him in a way he imagined looked quite amusing; and he laughed, though its sound came out as a trickle of air, blown past his nostrils.

He had lost so much: everything bar his own life. Every horcrux he had consciously made.

His greatest loss, in part, had been Nagini. Not just his horcrux but the only other being he had had love for; though this in itself pained him to admit, sometimes, when the eyes of his old professor found him in the back of his mind and mocked him. But she was gone now and it was his fault, even though he spent hours thinking of ways he could blame others. Still his own coils reminded him of her, and so, in a sense, he carried her with him.

He was losing his magic. He had lost his reason.

And what had Potter lost?

His mudblood mother, his farther and his owl.

Well, he thought, smiling, Potter had lost a little more than that: thanks to the results of his own actions rippling out to claim Potter's godfather, Potter's headmaster and lots and lots of Potter's friends…but it wasn't enough.

During the final fight he had fled the battle. He had not expected his forces to be so overwhelmed. It was fight or die and he had chosen to pursue his highest honour: to live.

He had meant to travel further, find somewhere warmer…but a little more of his faculties had slipped from him each and every day.

Muggles swarmed in their numbers, filling every space of the globe with their rank lot. Soon nowhere would be safe for him. For shame he did not set out to find his followers. Anyway, most were banged up while the rest were being hunted. To be imprisoned or kissed or executed…he had failed them in a sense too, though they had little excuse for their own faults…so weak, so greedy - they had given nothing of what he gave to them back to him. Cowards and imbeciles the lot of them. They had submitted to his own enemy before him.

But he had figured it out…after the battle, in the silence of defeat he had figured out what the boy was. What his scar meant.

How ironic, that now in the spaces of cold and merciless time, stretching on and on, he spent his hours praying that the boy-who-lived, his chosen advisory, would survive. Once Lord Voldemort, he now pleaded with the fates. Earnestly he beseeched any measure of the universe able to help him; begging they would never let Harry Potter, his last horcrux, die.

He could not allow himself to think he was wrong about Potter. At last the child was his only hope.

In the hours not spent praying he coiled himself tight and allowed himself to mourn on his own bitter reflection of the past. What would they do with his world? How could they push magic without him there to push it where it needed to go? Potter would do nothing, blessed with neither the brains nor talent. Family was his only ambition. Civilisation may have been built on family, but its expansion was down to the pursuit of power. Power inflamed one and bullied those strong enough to claim it as their own.

Life had not been kind. He had often tried to convince himself that fate meant to harden him, better him, educate him for what was to come. Make him stronger; worthier still of the great task destiny had lain upon his shoulders.

He now suspected it wasn't true…

However, he did sometimes think he had been meant for his current state all along. If this was so then he vowed to be a great snake. What had the doctor thought him? –both terrible and wonderful? Yes, when he had shed the last of his skins he would emerge. A god of worms. King of maggots… and then from shadow lines he would creep, and hiss, and snatch men from the darkness. He would give fear to the wicked and the brave…and maybe then he could put all that had been behind him… and finally, finally close shut the jaws of his lost kingdom.

xxx

Slowly in the heat of the crackling flames, surrounded by dry blankets, Riddle lost his thought in dream. The doctor's clothes burned slowly on the fire and, only half aware, Riddle thanked the doctor for the heat he had provided him with. Vanishing the clothes would have taken too much energy and he needed to saver his magic. Everything took too much energy while he was now so full, and he shifted subconsciously, adjusting himself so the bulged in his stomach could lie more easily against the bed struts pressing up beneath him. He would sleep long and warm and well; and he began his dreams in the same way he always did; by repeating his one certainty: that whatever name theyleft him with, He-Would-Survive.