16. Vacant Vision
Rising from an uncomfortable yet expensive armchair over which he had been draped since the end of his forced and indecently filthy tale, Lucius drifted towards the hunched figure of his lord, taking great care not to disturb the latter's concentration. Still, the closer he got, the less it seemed that Voldemort was concentrating. Rather, he was staring into a stone bowl and at a potion displaying all the properties of liquid silver, his eyes wide, jaws quivering.
He had sat like this for some considerable time. Lucius had assumed Voldemort was muttering quiet incantations but his mouth was set in a line so thin it was near invisible on his pocked parchment features.
As if this eerie paralysis were contagious, Lucius came to a dead, half crouching stop, once more locked in the centre of the room. Silence froze in the air, counting seconds and minutes as it fluttered to the restless floor. Lucius waited for a command, a request, an exclamation of incoherent anger that never came.
'Is there – a problem, my lord?' he asked at last.
Voldemort jerked backwards, his chair creaking. He offered no answer but stared as unseeingly at the wall as he had stared at the potion, as perfectly still as a man Petrified by a basilisk stare. Lucius wondered if his lord and master had seen his own reflection in the glittering liquid and if, perhaps, he had found it as paralysing as his followers always had.
When the Dark Lord finally stirred again, turned and rose, one hand clutching the back of his chair, his eyes held none of the basilisk power they once had. Voldemort let go of the chair, took a step forward, and stopped, swaying a little before his head twitched to one side, and he froze again.
Disturbed by this stop-motion display and, even more so, by the slight slackness about his master's jaw, Lucius dared pose his question once again, if only to break the silence. 'Is – something wrong, master?'
The bald head swivelled, eyes focused, ragged remnants of eyebrows rose in unison. 'He's dead,' said Tom Riddle, voice hollow and tinny. There could be no question of whom he spoke, but there seemed no joy in the declaration, no relief, no elation. Only a strange emptiness, a sudden loss of point and purpose.
Face drawn and eyes wide, Lord Voldemort had never looked so much a dead man walking as he did then, lurching out of the room, not even bothering to slam the door behind him, a wretched cold invading the room in his wake.
Lucius shivered. But not from the cold.