They Are Afraid To Eat And To Drink And To Breathe

Chapter 2b

So many bases, and so few people who were running around screaming and waving their arms because the end of the world had come. A lot of them looked grumpy, or were shouting into phones, but you wouldn't look at any of the tableaux and conclude that war had broken out. I was confused.

"Voldie," I said, "how come they don't know what's happened?"

"Because they are hapless drones who have no more of an executive role than we do," he said absently, still writing at warp speed on his pad. "If Blair were the driver, which he isn't, this lot would be the flies on the windscreen." Then he gave me a complicated breakdown of the chain of command, which seemed to be more like a big pile of barbed wire. When he'd finished I was both unsatisfied and bored. I decided not to ask any more.

We found just one bloke who presumably had had an inkling of what was coming, and Voldie said so; "Ah," he said from inside a little office, "this guy obviously knew what was going to happen."

I stood up curiously, walked towards the door. Long before I could see the man himself I could see how red the grey carpet was. The bloke had cut his throat.

"Who is he?" I said wonderingly, trying not to look at his neck. Perhaps Avada Kedavra was better after all. "Did he get the news first, or..."

Voldemort said, "Well, we won't find out now, will we?"

000

Our final Secret Base had flashing lights, dancing robots and pink potted pelicans. No, I jest; it was pretty much identical to the previous ones, except with, fortunately, no bodies. I was beginning to get disorientated by the beige metal maze, but Voldie seemed reasonably happy there; although for the life of me I couldn't think why, because the computers were even worse.

"These computers are so shit," I said, unable to believe my eyes. "We had better ones at primary school."

"I love your idea of government cash flow."

"They look like they were made in 1953."

"You should have seen the ones we actually used in 1953. I can't get the hang of these new ones."

"'We' used... you..."

"I worked for the MGB." Pause. "And the CIA, and MI6."

"Er... the MGB's..."

"I was a spy for the Americans, the Russians, and the British."

"They were on, like, opposite sides...?"

He hooted with laughter for some time, apparently greatly cheered by my stupidity, and said, "I was a triple agent, dear."

"But the government didn't find out?"

"I had several different names and appearances."

"The Ministry for Magic?" I began. "And the Russian Ministry for Magic? And the American Ministry for Magic!"

"There wasn't one Soviet Ministry for Magic," he said. "There was (and still is) the Ukrainian Ministry, the Estonian Ministry, the Russian Ministry, blah blah blah, so whenever I crossed a former state line, I was someone else's responsibility. They were divided about whether to bring in the Aurors, as well. I remember the Belorusians declined to bother; they said whatever I was doing, I was doing it to Muggles, not magicians, so it wasn't their lookout. Where was I? Oh, as for the British, I expect they knew someone was out there," he concluded, "but you're severely overestimating international relations if you think they could cooperate on something like that."

"I saw Cornelius Fudge trying to cooperate with one of the Bulgarian Ministry," I remembered.

"Really?" said Voldemort, suddenly showing his fangs in great amusement. "What did he say."

I tried to remember. "He said, 'THIS... IS... HARRY... POTTER. You know, the Boy-Who... oh, come on, you must know who Harry Potter is...'"

Voldemort collapsed on the floor and hugged his ribs, crying with laughter. I was very impressed with my own ability to amuse.

"That's about it," he said when he finally stopped laughing. "'HAVE – YOU – SEEN – A – SPY – AROUND – HERE?' I mean, Harry, forget it."

"Who did you spy on?" I asked after a while.

"Various nuclear projects."

"Did you sabotage them?"

"Sometimes."

I sat slowly absorbing this (please forgive me for this word choice) bombshell. Eventually it occurred to me that perhaps he was lying. Did that matter? I wasn't sure. I kicked my heels vaguely and kept Voldemort amused by reading out the Dilbert strips someone had taped to their monitor.

Eventually I got up and walked towards the door.

"Don't go out," he said sharply.

"I only wanted to find the toilet."

He dithered. I crossed my legs and bounced up and down. "Hurry up," he muttered.

"Will I get killed by escaped radiation?" I asked, which earned me another hate-filled stare and the words, "Don't be so ridiculous. I need you here, that's all."

"I'm not doing anything!"

"I'm afraid to be here on my own," he mumbled, and shoved his head violently into his notebook to escape the embarrassment of this admission.

He carried on working there, occasionally scribbling notes and muttering to himself, for some hours. The work was no doubt vital, but from my perspective it was also extremely boring, and I eventually pushed three chairs together and fell asleep.

Some time later I suddenly woke up, not sure why I was awake, but certain that something undesirable was going on; and I sat there in complete perplexity for a good two seconds, listening to silence, looking at stillness, and unable to figure out what had woken me.

Then there was a sharp prod to the back of my head, and I looked round to see a wild-eyed Voldemort wielding a ruler, taut with horror and clearly trying to stay as quiet as possible.

"There was a noise from the corridor, boy," he murmured, trying as hard as possible not to move his lips. "I know I heard something."

I listened, and heard nothing whatsoever. "It's nothing," I said patiently. "You're getting wound up." He looked quite irate, so I added hastily, "I'll go and have a look."

I got up and trundled into the corridor without much fear at all. I'd gone for so long without seeing any animate being, apart from Voldie, that it was becoming difficult to conceive of their existence. Also, there was the sunlight; if time had stopped at midnight, I expect it would have been different, but trapped in perpetual breakfast-time I found it difficult to take things seriously.

I strode confidently down the corridor, then hesitated. It had only been the faintest noise, like a bird ruffling its wing, but there had been a noise. I supposed, all the same, that it might just have been Voldie shifting his robes. I carried on.

Yep. Footsteps.

It didn't actually even occur to me to be frightened. I was intrigued that somebody else was animate. I walked excitedly in the direction of the noise, and the invisible person walked away again. The pseudo-hide-and-seek seemed so funny that I ran after them at full pelt; they ran away equally quickly, and I careered around a corner and smack into the door swinging open behind them. I reeled back, stunned, with one hand to my poor old right eye; and by the time I recovered, all sound had gone.

I peered round the door. The room inside was some kind of storage cupboard, quite windowless. In the dark, an ultramarine glow was slowly returning to black.

Rather late in the day, I felt a chill of unease. Mr/Ms Mystery presumably hadn't Apparated, since I would have heard them; Portkey perhaps? I didn't know, and I was wondering if I should have gone back and got Voldemort as soon as I heard the footsteps. I trundled back to him and his computer feeling unnerved and slightly sheepish.

Voldemort, poor sod, looked as if he'd been Petrified. When he saw me he sagged visibly back into his chair and gave a vast sigh of relief through his nose.

"Well?" he said. "Is everything OK?"

"I don't know," I confessed. "I heard someone, but they ran away before I saw them. I followed them into like a stock cupboard, but they'd already gone."

"Apparated?"

"Nope, no sound. There was just like a blue glow."

Voldemort jerked as if I'd shoved a fork in his testicles. "A BLUE GLOW? WHAT BLUE GLOW?"

I backed away, alarmed. "A glow. It was blue."

"WHERE WAS IT COMING FROM? HOW LONG DID IT LAST?"

"It wasn't coming from anywhere, it was just... in that room, and it faded away when I walked in!"

"Aparecio Dozimetr," he said tersely, and his battered telephone thing appeared out of nowhere. He switched it on, then detached the mouthpiece and swept it up and down my body. It emitted occasional crackles.

"You're not irradiated," he said suspiciously. "WHAT THE HELL BLUE GLOW ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, YOU MORON?!"

"GO IN THE FUCKING STOCK CUPBOARD YOURSELF AND LOOK!"

"What colour was it?" he demanded. "Light blue, dark blue?"

"Dark. Ish. Can light be dark?"

"Think about it hard," he instructed me, grabbing my shoulders with his cold claws, and he stared into my eyes. I stared back at him and tried to picture the blue glow, and tried not to blink; my eyes started to water horribly, but Voldemort seemed satisfied.

"Well, that wasn't the blue flash at all," he commented, releasing me at last. "You shouldn't say such stupid things. That was some sort of magic. I wonder what it was? And as for the person who cast it... who were they, and why didn't they stick around?"

"I don't know, do I?" I said, rubbing my shoulders. "And what the fuck's the blue flash?"

"Air becoming ionised during a criticality incident. And no, you don't know anything. I keep telling you that."

"Then why do you keep being SO SURPRISED when I BUGGER THINGS UP?!"

"Fine," he said between gritted fangs. "I thought you had been fatally irradiated by some sort of accident with fissile material. Since that was totally irrational and the fruit of radiophobia, just ignore it. What we need to concentrate on is this magical stalker, so take me to the stock cupboard."

This was the only sensible thing he'd said so far, so I marched off to the cupboard and flung the door open. Inside there was nothing remarkable whatsoever.

Voldie waved his wand around and said "There's nothing here."

"Thank you, Mr Obvious."

"Did you hear the crack of Apparition?"

"No, and I would have."

"Very advanced magician, then; but we knew that anyway."

"Well, if they're a very advanced magician," I said, uncomprehending, "why did they appear in this place and walk round the corridors watching us, instead of, like, casting a spell so they could see what we were doing?"

"Why indeed," he muttered, and his eyes took on an abyssal glint as he started obsessively cataloguing all sorts of dire reasons why somebody might be making walking noises in a military base. I watched with dismay, trying to judge whether this was a sign of demented paranoia or highly justified suspicion.

"Oh well," he said, suddenly snapping out of it. "I'm mostly finished here, and if that person was dangerous, we shouldn't hang around. Let's go."

"Good idea," I agreed. "Are we going home?"

"Well, we don't have to," he said playfully, wrapping his arm round me. "We could go to a beach in Cornwall, but of course the sun won't be properly up there yet, and up here it's too cold... no, let's go home."

000

Back at the house in Wales, I found I was once again exhausted. I wondered how much time had gone by; presumably my body was still trying to conduct itself by the twenty-four-hour clock. I staggered off to "my bedroom" and took a prolonged nap.

I woke up after a totally anticlimactic dream about Snape assigning me homework, and was disturbed at finding myself in Wales with a madman. I was even more disturbed to find he'd cooked himself some more borscht. He sat at the table and pored intently over his dull books while I opened the windows and tried to fan away the smell.

"That won't work," he said absently, playing tunes on his claws with a ballpoint pen. "The air can't flow normally due to the stasis spell. You'll just have to cook something else."

"If the air can't flow normally, how do we breathe?" I demanded as I got out the pans for sancocho, and was punished with an explanation that lasted the entire length of the boiling stage, so "Well, if you know all that, how come you didn't know the computers would stop working?" I grumbled as I put the lid on.

Voldemort ignored me ostentatiously from behind Trinity, Divinity: Nuclear Warfare In The Politics And Psychology Of The Developed World.

"You really didn't plan this very well," I said grumpily. "Isn't there some kind of spell you can cast to stop all the bombs detonating?"

He lowered the book, raised the best eyebrow of all time and said, "Such as what?"

I screwed my face up a bit and said "Isn't there a thing called Star Wars, and it shoots the missiles out of the sky?"

"That would never have worked," he said. "Or let me clarify: it doesn't work at present and I personally don't believe it ever will. Also, if it did function as planned, it would simply cause the bombs to detonate at extremely high altitude; which would reduce the damage enormously but is so far from a perfect scenario that we can safely rule it out."

"Then we need some kind of, some blanket spell," I said, pleased at having expressed it comprehensibly, "that affects the principle that makes them go off."

"Hm," he said through his nose in an dangerously superior tone, staring at a dead bluebottle on the windowsill. "And you want magicians to have that sort of control over reactions at the atomic level, do you? Think they'll use it responsibly? Confident that nothing will ever go wrong? Very likely."

"That's a no, then."

"That's a no."

"You still didn't plan it very well."

"I know."

When I'd put the pan on to simmer he flashed his eyes at me and said "Come over here and let me explain something."

"What, again?" I moaned, shuffling unwillingly over to the table. "Everything you tell me is so boring!"

"Yes," he said laconically. "The end of the world is so boring."

"All right, smart-arse. Come on, then."

"Thank you, Professor. Now, listen. When I was skulking about the nuclear projects in the forties and fifties, it became increasingly obvious that the expected people weren't always in control, Truman being the obvious example. So in between skulks I spent my time searching for secret élites."

"Magic or Muggle?"

"Clever boy. There was magic involved. It took a very long time to find it, though, I must admit. For every interesting thing I discovered there were fifty weirdos, psychotics and charlatans. I expect you know the Muggle governments in the mid-twentieth century – well, for the whole of history, actually – hired all sorts of so-called magicians and psychics to kill their enemies and preserve their lives and so forth. Needless to say, their discrimination left a lot to be desired; they would hire anyone, basically. A few of these quack types appear to have been near-Squibs – that's the kindest thing you can say about them – who managed to scrape together some kind of spell, but needless to say it was usually completely ineffective.

"Anyway, to sum up, I found all this ridiculous drivel, and I assumed that was the magical presence in nuclear science. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out (but then, I was barely in my twenties) that there was indeed a magical élite and that it was taking very great pains to stay hidden; not that it needed to, since all the quacks constituted a colossal smokescreen, but anyway, it was. As soon as I realised there was a secret, I decided I had to know what it was; although if I'd known how difficult it would be, I'd have thought twice.

"I had to look through book after book, and mind-numbingly boring it was, too, even when I found a spell that could flick through books detecting glosses. But, obviously, in the end I found it."

"And what was it?" I said expectantly, but he was walking off into another room; and he returned with a rather shabby-looking hardback book, which he slammed down in front of me, saying, "Look."

I turned the pages, which were so thin and nasty they felt like tracing paper. From what I could see, the book contained nothing but glosses; it was worse than the 'Half-Blood Prince''s Potions book.

"Page 124," said Voldie.

I turned to page 124. It had a load of mathematical equations and meaningless names dotted all over it, plus an arrow pointing to a line of the printed text. This was accompanied by three little blobs.

"Er..."

"There," he said, tapping the blobs with a claw. "They may not look like it, but they're zoi-Felderutian runes. Whoever wrote this has used them phonetically instead of ideographically in an attempt to hide the meaning."

"It's working. What do they say?"

"Didn't you do any Ancient Runes, boy? It says 'Ask Elke'."

I was less than impressed. "That's it?"

So was he. "THAT'S IT? THAT'S IT? You must be joking. This is like finding a note in Azerbaijani in a book from Uruguay. What are the chances of some Muggle just whimsically doing a doodle and it JUST HAPPENS to be the zoi-Felderutian for 'Ask Elke'? A million to one, that's what?"

"What's an elke?" I tried to intervene, dimly aware that it was some type of mammal.

"It's someone's name, you ignorant, stay-at-home fool. Don't you know any German?"

"Yeah, cos the Dursleys really love Germans."

He stared into my head for a moment and said "Hah! You think they're narrow-minded. You ought to have grown up in the thirties, boy. And now, the point is, we need to find Elke."

"Why?" I said, utterly baffled, and that infuriated Voldemort and he did that little dance again where he swooped around in circles and made impotent clutching motions with his fingers.

"You, Potter, are an absolute arse. I know a grand total of ONE magician who worked in nuclear physics in the fifties, which is me. And what am I doing at present?"

"Saving the world," I said obediently.

"So we need to find this other person and figure out what they're doing."

"Someone we don't know anything about."

"We do! We can – "

"Did you have to kill Dumbledore?" I bawled, suddenly losing all patience. "He could have helped us out of this! I could have passed messages between you or something! He was about the only one powerful enough to still be here, and you killed him!"

He sneered at me in fury, but the expected shouting match failed to materialise. Instead, the anger changed to a cold, malevolent glitter. "I killed Amelia Bones, too," he said dispassionately. "She wrote a groundbreaking tractate on the space-time continuum, which you probably don't know, and she would have been an immeasurable help with the stasis spell. Only I killed her. There were times when – " and he broke off and suddenly scratched his claws down his face, leaving livid red parallel rake-marks. Then he sat and stared at the wall.

"Times when what?" I demanded.

"Nothing to do with you," he said.

"TIMES WHEN WHAT? You've nobody else to talk to here! Don't you fucking brush me off like that – "

"IT'S MY HEAD, IT'S MY THOUGHTS, I DON'T HAVE TO TELL YOU ANYTHING!" he shouted even more loudly. "There were times in the first two days when I got disoriented, when I thought perhaps I hadn't killed her at all, so I went to check at her house, and I had! THEY'RE MY BLOODY THOUGHTS, HARRY POTTER!"

"You couldn't remember if you'd killed her or not?" I said, greatly disturbed.

"NO! It's not like that! It was just – patches. Episodes of confusion. I have all my memories intac..."

"What if you forget there's a war on, and cancel the stasis spell?" I demanded.

"I WON'T FORGET! I WON'T FUCKING FORGET, YOU IGNORANT MORON! AS IF I COULD POSSIBLY FORGET WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR! Do you have any idea – ha! I've been waiting for this to happen for FIFTY-TWO YEARS!"

There was a silence while I thought about Voldemort's mental state. I was not convinced. "We really are buggered," I said.

Glare. "No, we're not. What a stupid thing to say, after everything we did – you did yesterday. And stop depressing me. You're a Gryffindor, you're supposed to be brave. Say, 'Yes, Voldemort. We will definitely make it, even if we perish in the attempt.'"

"I think we'll skip the perishing. D'you want some sancocho?"

"What's sancocho?" he said suspiciously, and I retired to familiarise the Dark Side's only MGB operative with Cajun cookery.

He didn't have much to say during the meal, so while I ate I started cataloguing his various phobias. He was afraid, it appeared, of nuclear fission, being alone, darkness, flying up in the air, diving underwater, death and the colour blue. In short, he was afraid of pretty much everything, and I was amazed he'd ever managed to get anything done; perhaps that was why he'd made the Death Eaters do everything for him. Not that that had worked very well either, mind you.

At that moment he suddenly froze and stared at his plate. His eyes widened horribly; his mouth slowly opened. Then he gave a scream of horror and charged off through the house, leaving cutlery tinkling across the kitchen floor.

I wondered wearily if I should go after him, and what in any case was wrong with him this time; and glanced at his plate of sancocho. Frankly, I couldn't see any lumps of plutonium in it whatsoever. It was just a load of root veg and spices and cauliflower. Had I cooked a Magic Eye sancocho? I put my head on one side, then the other, and finally noticed that the cauliflower florets looked like a vegetal huddle of pale, bulging little mushroom clouds.

Defusing these bombs was going to be a very long job.