How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Lord Voldemort

Chapter 2: They Are Afraid To Eat And To Drink And To Breathe

In the morning, or rather, when I awoke into the static sunlight and continued where I'd left off the previous day, I wandered into the garden. In Wales the sun was only just rising; yet another surreal note: drops of dew strewn poised under the first rays of a motionless sun. I touched a droplet on the end of a long plant thingy, and it detached itself obligingly onto my finger; I gave a start of surprise at the sight of something actually following the laws of physics, and the water fell off my finger and onto the shining lawn. It was bizarrely beautiful.

I trundled back towards the house, wondering as I did so why Voldemort was living in such a palatial gaff; then I rounded a corner and got a horrible shock as I looked into a slit-pupilled red eye accompanied by an enormous white saucer. After a brief myocardial infarction I managed to identify this apparition as Voldie, who was glaring at me from the other end of an enormous telescope.

"Might as well give up at this point," he drawled, still staring at me down the telescope as though I were a particularly interesting constellation. "It's much too light to make out anything other than the most basic information. I could have calculated most of this anyway from star charts."

"What are you looking for?" I managed, trying to get over the shock.

"Strong reading from Mars – any idiot could have told me that... no, it's impossible in daylight. To do a proper forecast I'd have to Apparate to somewhere on the dark side of the Earth. And I am not doing that," he said with sudden vehemence, releasing the telescope very abruptly so that it swung downwards and mashed my knuckles against the windowsill.

"So you're making a star chart?" I said, since he obviously couldn't be bothered to tell me. For a moment I'd thought he was searching for airborne missiles. "Why can't we go to the dark side?"

He glared at me again, then grumbled "I am afraid of the dark," and walked off into the kitchen.

"This is a very posh house," I observed, joining him at the breakfast bar and rooting around for the cornflakes.

"It's the first thing I did when it all went off."

"First thing you did?" I said blankly.

"I ran around like a headless chicken," he said, and then paused with a sour expression, apparently rolling this concept around his mouth and finding it unpalatable.

"And then what?"

"Just looked for a place where there were no people. I didn't want to see frozen bodies everywhere. And I also needed everything to work properly, which in a normal house would be quite difficult. This is an environmental centre, a sustainable earth-block house with a composting toilet. Just the thing, really... I needed a base, preferably one that wouldn't frighten me even more."

"Frighten you?"

"Well, I wasn't exactly going to camp under a silo."

"Dumbledore said darkness and dead bodies were nothing to be afraid of," I said doubtfully. "That they only represented the unknown."

"Dumbledore was an idiot," said Voldemort.

"Fuck off."

"Take your head out of his backside, Harry. Surely even you can't think he was right about this. All right," he conceded, with the expression of one undergoing root canal surgery, "he knew about Transfiguration, and probably a lot of other things, although actually admitting it nearly kills me. But he knew fuck all about insanity."

I pondered what an odd statement this was. "He wasn't insane."

"But I am, and so are you."

"I am not mad!"

"Madness, mental illness, call it whatever you like. I have a phobia, and you have... Harryitis, a rare form of depression causing despair, anger, and fits of loud shouting."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome. I suppose it comes from his growing up in the mid-nineteenth century. Not a good time to be mad... if there ever is a good time to be mad... Anyway, he failed to perceive that the logical way of looking at things is not always the correct way."

"He liked music," I said absently.

"But he hated madness. Saw it as weakness, refusing to shoulder one's burdens."

"It doesn't sound like him," I said uncertainly.

"He was very out of date about a lot of things."

I decided that was enough of that, and ate my cornflakes in silence before slamming the spoon down and saying "Right. What are we going to do today?"

Glare. "We're going to pick flowers, Potter."

"Yeah, I know we're doing bombs and stuff, just what, all right?"

"I don't know," he admittedly shortly, taking the dishes to the sink with a shrug.

Bad, bad news. "Well, if you don't know, then..."

"There are other wizards," he said in a frustrated voice. "That's the only thing I'm sure of. There are a few wallies I've met over the years who are probably making some effort to do something useful, but there seems to be this élite, this clique, that are rather relevant and that I know almost nothing about..."

"More powerful than you?" I said, startled.

He turned round from the sink, smiled at me as if I were his favourite person in the world and said "I love how you think that's amazing."

"Well," I said.

"But what to do today," he said, frowning. "I don't know if you've noticed, child, but I haven't actually got a plan."

"You mentioned it yesterday," I agreed.

"I can't..." he began, and then broke off with a sigh that made my hair stand on end; it sounded less a human exhalation than a building crumbling into ruins. He turned back to the sink and braced his arms on the worktop. "I can't do it," he muttered. "I just can't do it."

I sat and thought about how incongruous his snake skin and black robes looked like against the innocent sun, and how this would be a good time to administer comfort if one were talking to a normal person; and I wondered how one comforts a death-eating maniac in any case. Perhaps I should offer him a Muggle to kill? I said, "You did fine yesterday."

He started puking delicately, making little dry heaves over the sink, and I went rather resignedly to pat his back. It was only when my hand made contact with the cloth that he turned to face me, grinning, and I saw that he wasn't puking at all; he was giggling hysterically.

"Oh, Harry," he said, "yesterday I really was not doing very well at all. If I had any sense or sanity, I'd have checked the planes' locations using the computers at the base, and then... well, I don't know what we'd have done then, but I'm sure it would have been better. Or, in a vastly superior scenario, I could have made a proper plan well in advance and Imperioed Yeltsin and Clinton and Netanyahu and forced them to act sensibly, but no, I was too scared, and now it's a bit late."

Oh dear. "Well, anything's better than nothing, right?" I said, trying to be pragmatic. "So what can we do today?"

"Well," he said, getting a glass of water, "I suppose the logical course of action would be to remove the bombs from Trident, since we've done the planes, but I've no idea how we're going to do that."

"Er?"

He gulped down his water and looked at me pityingly. "Submarines. Big. Heavy. Underwater."

"Planes big and heavy and up in the sky," I pointed out.

"They deploy lightweight gravity bombs, you fool. Trident missiles weigh about two hundred times as much. And they'll all be at sea, so we're buggered anyway."

"You said we could find them using the computers."

Voldemort fixed me with a hate-filled glare, his irises resembling molten magma, and said, "They are UNDERWATER."

"What – "

"I AM NOT GOING UNDER THE SEA!" he shouted, banging his glass on the worktop so hard he made the dishes rattle. He breathed hard for a while, apparently speechless, then continued, "NOT DOWN THERE IN THE DARK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN! I MIGHT DIE DOWN THERE AND NEVER COME BACK UP AGAIN! NEVER FUCKING EVER!"

OK, he didn't like oceans. I got the hint. "Can't you say Accio Bomb?" I suggested hastily.

Slightly calmer now, he rolled his eyes at me and said scornfully, "An ingenious plan, Harry, with only the minor flaw that in the unlikely event of our successfully Summoning a thing that weighs about sixty tonnes, it would smash through the side of the submarine and blow up the west coast of Scotland."

"Oh."

"'Oh!' Yes, boy, oh. So..." he drummed his fingers for a bit and said, "All right. We can't do anything with the Muggles or most of the magicians, seeing as they're all frozen. We can Vanish the weaponry and try to find whatever other magicians there are who've withstood the temporal stasis spell. Oh, and gather information. Better not spend too much time wanking about, though, if there are dragons rampaging around destroying everything."

"How do we find the other magicians?" I said.

"Haven't got a clue," he admitted, "so I think now is a good time to gather information. Ministry or Muggle?"

"What are we doing at the Ministry?"

"Trying to find out whether they've done anything, first," he said. "But seeing as the answer is almost certainly No, we'll have to check up on the prophecies."

He wanted to take me to the Department of Mysteries. Specifically, to the room with all the prophecies in it, the one in which I had inadvertently doomed Sirius. How wonderful. "Muggle," I said.

Glare. "I knew you would say that. I hate you."

Er. "You don't want to do that?"

"Of course not. IT'S TERRIFYING."

"D'you think I like going in the fucking Department of Mysteries?" I snapped.

"Listen, you ignorant – "

"What do we need a prophecy for, anyway?! There's a war! We KNOW there's a war! How's a prophecy supposed to help?"

"Because it might tell us whether we are going to succeed!"

"Oh, yeah, fucking brilliant idea, and if it says we're NOT going to succeed? What're you going to do then?!"

"SHUT UP! NOW!"

"MY GODFATHER DIED THERE! YOU WOULDN'T REMEMBER THAT, OF COURSE, SINCE IT DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOU!"

Voldemort Vanished my private parts, and I responded with the first spell that came to mind, which was the Bat-Bogey Hex. This resulted in chaos as he crashed round the house trying to claw the bats out of his face, and I followed him while shouting at him to give my bits back; and he finally Restored them with very ill grace and things went kind of back to normal.

He cleaned the bits of snot off his robes, glared at me and said, "We will go to the Muggle bases today, but only because it's absolutely imperative that we do so. After that, we will go to the Department of Mysteries. No ifs or buts."

"All right," I conceded reluctantly, although I couldn't for the life of me see how a prophecy was supposed to help, and personally thought they did much more harm than good. Oh, and if one of us happened to trip and fall through the Veil, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be me.

000

There followed a strange, smelly and boring interlude in which Voldemort Apparated me to at least three different military bases; I couldn't say exactly how many, because they all looked the same. I observed that any secret military base must contain the following elements:

- Beige paint;

- Few or no windows;

- Terrifying, 2ft-thick blast doors;

- Indescribably ancient computer terminals that looked as if a '60s wireless had mated with the BBC Micro's grandma;

- Blokes in shirts and ties frozen in the middle of trundling placidly round as if they didn't have a care in the world;

- Weird, 100ft-high structures that I thought might possibly serve the same function as Easter Island statues, including pyramids and giant golf balls.

"Sit down here and don't do anything," Voldemort ordered, plonking me down on a decrepit swivel chair in the middle of the room. "I want you to keep quiet while I do the important stuff."

"So why am I here?" I said, baffled.

"I want company," he said shortly.

I sat around reading the birthday cards on the bulletin boards while Voldemort poked round the room, muttering to himself. Eventually he started to tap away at the computer keys; then there was an abrupt silence followed by a shout of rage.

"What?" I said, peering cautiously round a stationery cupboard to see him flinging coffee mugs at the antediluvian monitor.

"IT'S – FUCKING – FROZEN. THEY'RE ALL FROZEN. I can't bring up any information because they can't connect to their data source. And there might be some problems with regard to electricity, of course, but... FUCK."

I digested this. "So there's no point in us being here."

"In OUR being here. Of course there's a point. There are data on the screens and I can use them. Problem is, it'll be dribs and drabs and all entirely fragmented. GOD DAMN these stupid..."

But he couldn't seem to think what it what that god should damn, so he wandered round muttering again and taking notes with a pen and paper because the printers didn't work. I sat on the swivel chair and absently kicked my legs back and forth to pass the time.

After taking about a dozen pages of notes, Voldemort finally grunted in satisfaction, held out his arm and whisked us off to the next lair. Once there, however, he seemed less happy. The muttering took on a sardonic tone, then became pessimistic, and then silent altogether. At last he resorted to hiding behind pieces of furniture and suddenly jumping out at me. He stared at me with wild eyes, and I just sat and stared back; I couldn't think what else to do, really.

"Are you all right?" I asked as he shuffled back to his computer, hyperventilating. He cast a jaundiced look over his shoulder and didn't say anything.

"I'm really me, you know," I assured him. "I haven't been replaced by Barty Crouch using Polyjuice. I can tell you my favourite flavour of jam, if you like."

This only elicited some terrified rolling of eyes. Evidently he was going radiophobic again. I sighed, looked round the room, and conceded that it really wasn't a very cheerful atmosphere. "Tell you what, Vol," I said, "we should go outside and have a cigarette or whatever. It's getting stuffy in here."

He didn't respond, but when I stood up and waited by the door, he did come out with me.

Outside, things were much better. The base was set between moors and farmland, with a beautiful, sunny view, and I was amused to find that the immediate vicinity was an expanse of rough white sedge that was being grazed by sheep. I couldn't decide if this was disrespectful or simply pragmatic. Then I was terribly disconcerted when I turned round to see a little mountain range of about twenty enormous white golf balls, as if vast mushrooms had decided to grow out of the moor.

"Er, Voldie," I said, "there's giant white things here."

"Yes," he said absently. "They have radar dishes inside."

"Oh. I thought they were really big mushrooms."

"'But unless they could transform this tiny mushroom into the biggest and strongest thing on earth, the people would not consider themselves happy... And anyone... who smelled the bad odour, died.' Excuse me," he said, and puked everywhere. After what had happened yesterday, this wasn't really unexpected. I silently hoped it wouldn't start coming out of the other end as well.

"You're doing really well," I consoled him. "It's been – " I checked the time – "an hour and forty minutes."

He spat for a long time, Scourgified his mouth and conjured a glass of water with which he gargled loudly. Then he sat and sourly surveyed the countryside.

"I hate Apparition," he said. "You get the destination without the journey. If we'd travelled here Mugglewise, or by broom, we'd have travelled across that moor there, maybe past all those reservoirs. D'you think wizards realise that? Maybe they don't understand that there's supposed to be a journey."

"THEN WHY DID YOU APPARATE US HERE?" I said between gritted teeth.

"I said I didn't like it," he said loftily. "I didn't say it wasn't necessary. D'you want me to leave that dragon to eat all the Romanians? Shut up then. As I was saying: witzy society must suffer terribly from travelling instantly to wherever they please. It's dangerous to get what you want."

"Is it useful, the stuff you're finding?" I asked.

"No," he said, "but it's better than nothing. Confirms what I already knew. I had plenty of time to read the papers before you arrived."

Before I arrived? I hadn't arrived. He'd come and found me. I wondered if he was losing the remnants of his feeble sanity. Mind you, he said I was mad as well. It could be true, I supposed. "I thought the papers were full of tits."

"Bollocks, I think you mean," he said. "But it's possible to pick out the salient bits from amongst the rubbish." He took another swig on his glass of water, maintaining an amusingly revolted face as though it were vinegar. "NO WIND," he shouted. "No bloody wind. In all the nuclear war books and films and what-have-you, they trundle outside and it's completely silent (because everyone's dead or frozen, obviously) and there's only the wind to make a noise and they stand and listen to the wind and it underlines their isolation and what-have-you. And distributes fallout. And now it finally happens in real life – and we might be the only people who'll ever experience this, mark you! For all I know, anyway – and there isn't any wind. Ha ha! Take that, Raymond Briggs."

I was sitting on a rock. I wondered if I should stand up and start backing away slowly. At this rate I would get covered in brains when Voldie's head exploded.

"So," he sighed, taking a drink from his glass of water. "Feeling a bit better now. Nice out here, isn't it? It's a good thing you took me outside."

"You just take your time," I said cautiously. "You don't have to go back in just yet."

"Not much point," he said. "I've got almost everything worth getting in there... God, my head hurts. I hate VDUs."

"What's the charm that cures headaches?" I said absently.

"NO! NO!" he shouted. "I HAVE TO SUFFER!"

I decided this conversation wasn't really getting anywhere. "Can I have a drink too?"

He conjured up some pumpkin juice. We sat and drank in silence and stared at the view; the sheep and the sunny moors, and the nuclear power stations on the horizon.