Chapter 1c: Uh-Oh, This Is Going To Be Some Day

I found myself in a sunlit kitchen; an expensive, streamlined kitchen that made a most unlikely domicile for half-snake dictators. I was too tired to care. Voldemort let me go and I collapsed at the nearby breakfast bar with all the resilience of a five-foot bolster full of sawdust.

"Hungry?" said Voldemort. "I am. I'm going to get some vegetables out of the larder."

"Vegetables?" I said, suddenly roused. "You're not cooking beetroots again, are you?"

"Well, I have to. It's the only thing I can make. Borscht and weichselstrudel."

"I'll do the cooking," I said very firmly, "and you do important nuclear physics stuff. OK?"

"Perfect," he said. "I didn't know you could cook. Let me explain what everything is."

I thought he meant where, but he really did mean what everything was. There was no fridge, just a larder with thick stone walls; and Voldie had set up another Primus stove in the empty fireplace. He fetched me a bucket of water from somewhere, and that was me sorted; I set a vegetable curry going and before long it was bubbling happy away on the stove.

Unnecessary for the moment, I peered around the kitchen. There was a pile of stuff in the corner, personal effects and pot plants, that Voldemort seemed to have moved out of the way. On the dining table, conversely, was a vast mountain of nuclear textbooks, all of them bristling with bookmarks, and an equally vast pile of notes. I tried reading the notes, but they practically all seemed to be written in Sciencese and I had to stop because they were making my brain bleed. Then I saw something else.

Sitting on the corner of the table was a fat little metal box with a handle. It was shaped vaguely like a public telephone, although obviously much smaller; there was a body and a thing like an earpiece, connected by a cord. It was otherwise distinguished only by being the single most battered object I had ever encountered. Half the orange paint had been scratched or flaked away, and the case itself was heavily dented. Written on it was gibberish in letters that were half English, well, y'know, European, and half weird. I found a switch and turned it on. It crackled like a detuned radio.

It suddenly occurred to me that this was some kind of important scientific apparatus, and an extremely superannuated one at that; and if I assumed that the weird writing was Russian, then that suggested Voldemort had been carrying it around with him for the whole of the Cold War. I knew he liked to hoard things, but this seemed extreme; ergo, it was a possible Horcrux.

I lifted it cautiously and wondered how you were supposed to tell. Dumbledore, I realised, hadn't actually been very helpful with the identifying and destroying bit. Perhaps it would make my scar hurt? I held it against my forehead. Nothing. I closed my eyes and concentrated: was that a faint twinge? No. Nothing at all.

"Er, Harry," came a strained voice from the door, and I spun round to see Voldie leaning against the doorjamb, his face a study in disbelief. "Harry, dear, I think we can safely say your scar isn't radioactive. If you want, I can cast a Röntgen Charm..."

"Oh, shut up," I said, blushing like neon. "I thought this was... some sort of Dark artefact thing."

"Oh, lord," he moaned, "you're not going to try and destroy it, are you? Look, Harry, please, not the dosimeter. We might need it. Oh, and you use the phone to measure radiation. You don't have to pick up the whole thing."

"Well, I wasn't," I said. "You do like collecting stuff, though, don't you?"

"So?" he said, nettled. "You get attached to humans. I get attached to things. Things and snakes," he said, sitting down at the breakfast bar. "Oh, and you might have noticed that the stove only works if you're standing close to it."

I whirled round, looked at the stove. The blue flames were quite immobile. "Bugger!"

"It's all right. It won't have gone cold. It just won't have got any hotter."

"Yes, well," I muttered. I walked closer to the Primus and watched the flames leap into motion. "Why do we use the Primus, anyway?"

"Don't you want to?" he said in mild surprise. "I like it. And besides, I don't know how to cook with fire."

I didn't, either, so that ruled out magical cookery. I sat next to the stove for the next twenty minutes and resolved not to try any baking. I also watched Voldemort's face; or I say Voldemort's, but it didn't look like him. The scaffolding that supported his features appeared to have been rearranged. On the brief but memorable instances on which we had previously met, he had gloated, and sneered, and grimaced with hatred; but now his face was relaxed and soft. He still frowned, and glared, and screamed, of course; but he sat and brooded over Button Mushrooms: The Terrifying Simplicity Of Mechanised Warfare like a person, not a murderous monster. This was odd and disturbing. It was as if there were two Voldemorts.

Moving all the papers off the dining table was clearly a fool's errand. We sat at the breakfast bar and ate our curry.

"Don't you want to ask me anything?" Voldemort said abruptly. "You've been helpful, boy. I can answer your questions, if you want."

It was a bit of a question of where to start, wasn't it? I found my mind was suddenly blank. I ate a bit more curry.

"Why don't you want to steal the bombs and use them against your enemies?" I said thoughtfully.

"ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?" he screeched.

"Well, plenty of insane dictators do."

"It's not the insane ones that are the problem," he said. "If you've noticed, it's elected mediocrities that are pushing the buttons at the moment. You think I'm the mad one? As far as I'm concerned, they've all got Icarus Syndrome. 'I wonder if I can make a weapon that'll destroy all my enemies in one enormous explosion?... oops, my wings have melted.'"

"How did the war start?" I enquired.

"Don't know, don't care."

"Oh." Now that he mentioned it, I didn't much care either, as long as the world didn't get destroyed.

"And in an attempt to give a serious answer to your previous question: the British magical community is microscopic. I suppose I could steal a bomb and, assuming I could manage to handle it without dying of terror, wipe out Central London; that would get rid of Diagon Alley, St. Mungo's and the Ministry. Then I could do in Hogsmeade; bye-bye Hogwarts. And where would that leave the Dark Lord, boy? There'd be nothing to rule. I'm not fighting against some Muggle country with millions of people, where I could bomb down two cities yet leave most of the population still alive. I'd have killed all the magicians."

This seemed logical. I very much doubted he would want to bomb Hogwarts. "Yeah, but the Muggles. You could wipe them out."

He glared at me sulphurously, showing his little lower fangs. "You are an absolute ignoramus, Potter. It's not your fault," he conceded, "since practically all wizards are, and most Muggles, too, but the fact still stands. In order to wipe out the Muggles I would have to destroy the entire habitable environment of this planet."

"Buggered."

"Quite."

"Right. OK. Why aren't you trying to kill me?"

"We've been through this. I need you."

Well, yes. However, it seemed to me that he didn't need an assistant and general dogsbody so much as a surrogate mother and psychiatric nurse. "Listen: I know this sounds like a stupid question, but why are you so scared?"

He glared at me. "It's not a stupid question," he said, and carried his empty bowl over to the pot sink. Placing it on the draining board, he drew himself up to his full height, head nearly scraping the oak beams, and announced, "I have radiophobia."

I waited for some kind of mental activity to initiate, but none did. I could only think how odd it was that Voldemort was afraid of radios.

"A phobia of radiation, boy! Of ballistic missiles and uranium and basically anything in any way connected with nuclear fission. So go on. Laugh at me."

He curled up in a ball on the floor and glared at me over his shoulder. "Well? Aren't you laughing?"

"Yeah, cos I find it really funny when the bloke who killed my parents has hysterics while we're getting bombed," I said, bemused.

He punched the flags in frustration. "Don't get any idea into your head about killing me, boy. Don't think to yourself 'I'll wait till all the warheads are disarmed but one, and then kill him in revenge for my parents'. We can't afford to do that."

"I wouldn't!" I snapped, monstrously offended.

"Oh," he said, peering more closely at me, "and I see you know it wouldn't work anyway. So you know about my Horcruxes? You're less incompetent than I thought."

Well, so much for my secret-keeping abilities, I thought. I managed to keep the fact I knew about the Horcruxes quiet for a total of eight or nine hours, and now Voldie knows everything. Just perfect. Then I realised it didn't much matter anyway; like he said, all bets were off until we could get the nuclear war cancelled. I said as much. That was a mistake.

"DON'T PRESUME! DON'T YOU DARE PRESUME, BOY! 'WHEN THE WAR IS OVER'! – WASH YOUR MOUTH OUT!"

"OK, sorry," I was starting to say, when I realised he was actually serious.

"Come here! Wash your mouth out! NOW!"

"What, literally?" I spluttered somewhat redundantly, as he'd already grabbed the back of my collar and was forcing me towards the sink.

"Fuck off!" I yelled as he jammed his wand in my face and cast Aguamenti.

"You tempted the fates! NEVER SAY IT AGAIN!"

"Fine, I won't say it again," I shouted in exasperation, and gargled a big mouthful of water. "Washed out. Happy now?"

"NO! MORE!"

When I'd been drinking and choking for a good minute, he muttered that it would have to do and let go of the back of my neck. I was in mild shock. I was starting to get what he meant when he said he was radiophobic. "Right," I said. "OK."

"It's not OK."

"Where are the people who live in this house?" I enquired, towelling my hair dry.

"In the shed."

"What were they doing in the shed?"

"Fixing a bicycle."

"Are they dead?"

"No," he said. "Dead Muggles don't really do much for the atmosphere."

"Yeah, right!" I said. "You love dead Muggles!"

"Not when I'm trying to relax!" he shouted, glowering at me horribly yet again.

"And where are we going to sleep?"

"There are four bedrooms," he said. "I've got the first one on the right. I'll cast a darkness spell for you if you can't sleep in the sun."

"I can do that," I said, monumentally offended.

"Then do it," he said shortly, and stalked off to the bathroom like a crow heading for a nice juicy battlefield; which, come to think of it, was precisely what we were doing.

I had no dreams at all.