Eyes wide open. Stiff limbs. Tough, forced blinks with what felt like sand in his eyes. Harry was trembling all over, and was having trouble maintaining a sane train of thought.
One side of the room was filled with people – not just any people, but his people. All his people. The ones he loved. His mum, his dad, standing with what must have been their parents – his grandparents. Sirius. Lily was protectively holding a young baby – tinier than any Harry had ever seen before. It had long, fluffy red-brown hair and hazel brown eyes. Lily and James. Their baby?
His sister. Killed before she had even had a chance at life.
Harry could see all this quite clearly, but they did not seem to be able to see him. They were all milling around – blinking and breathing and laughing just as naturally as they would have in life.
This was not the side of the room that most strongly affected him, however.
The other side was a mirror image, practically – James, Lily, Sirius and the older couples all positioned in the exact same way, moving at the same time. These people were not the same though. Their flesh was clearly grey, and looked broken and red in a multitude of places. Their actions were jerky and their eyes flat – like they were posing for a photograph they didn't really want to be in.
His brain whirled with incomprehension. The two sides of the room...did they represent the past? Or the present? Or merely a possibility? His eyes flickered back and forth between the two, wondering what on earth it all meant. Suddenly, harry began to feel a familiar pressing sensation behind his scar, and watched his family helplessly as he sank into an uncomfortable blackness.
"So potter..."sneered a tall, pale man with red eyes whom he had seen not half an hour ago, "I see you have discovered my experiments. you should be proud of my advancements, you know...after all, this is the first time I have spoken directly to you in a vision. You should have paid attention to Dumbledore when he told you to work on your Occlumency..."
Voldemort waved skeletal hand and the visions backdrop changed. Harry and Voldemort were back in the room of requirement, with both sides of people exactly as they were before. Voldemort flipped his hand sharply, bringing a stone archway down on either side of them. Another flick of his boney fingers covered the archway in a waft of thin, silky material. Once this was done, nothing else could be viewed around the arch. Mere blurry figures and whispers were perceivable.
"This is the Voile de Mort or, as the Ministry renamed it, the Veil of Death. That is, of course, the exact same name, but I believe they did not even want a mere anagram of me residing in their precious building. It was one of my greatest projects during my rein, as you can imagine. Everyone I killed's soul was automatically sent to the Voile, appearing in their human form should I need to turn them into an Inferius. It could have been one of the greatest weapons of all time! However, I was defeated, by you - the so-called Chosen One. My project was taken by the Ministry, where half of it was kept - the soul containing half. The other half, the Inferi half, was sent to Azkaban.
As you are not a smart wizard, I shall have to continue my explanation. When the death Eaters broke out of Azkaban, they simply resided in the shapeless passage between the two halves, until such a time that they could break through the other half of the veil - the one in the Ministry. This is how we entered. This is how we escaped. And this is how we regained full control of my Voile.