Chapter 6c: Hi John

Voldemort snoozed for a very long time; well, only about four hours, I suppose, but believe me, by his standards that was a lot. Fair enough; he must have the worst hangover of all time. When I'd said we should get pissed and wear women's underwear, that hadn't been what I meant. I passed the time by washing his robes (which, in a stream, turned out to be rather more difficult than I had expected) and thinking up imaginative new tortures to use on John when he came back for his wand.

Sure enough, after a couple of hours he shuffled dolefully across the garden, with his face as long as his general chubbiness would allow. I was sitting under the washing line to allow Voldie's robes to dry properly, reading some more of Unclear Physics; when I saw the first flash of paisley I sat up, marked my place with a leaf, and lay back to glare at John as he dithered uncertainly towards me.

"Uh, I'm sorry I hit your friend with the teapot," he began forlornly.

"Not as sorry as I am," I snarled. "Don't you know you could have disrupted the stasis spell and started the war again?"

"Uh, well, I do now," he grimaced, "but I kind of didn't realise that then... he ain't gonna kill me, is he?"

"No. He's asleep. Which is lucky for you... I've got half a mind to do it myself," I muttered.

"Hey, now!" he protested. "You don't realise how creepy it was, you're talking to a guy and a snake-man, and they start talking some snake-language, and he gets a look on his face like he's going to BITE like a rattler..."

"He doesn't bite people," I said in annoyance. "He's very fastidious."

"Right," John said dubiously. "Well, anyways, sorry, and uh, if I could maybe have my wand back..."

"Yes, you can," I said, and then, as he brightened, "once you've answered all my questions. And don't think you can mug me for it," I added, since he was looking at me with a transparently calculating expression, "because I hid it. So. What's that blue glow?"

Panic struggled with wand-hunger in his face for several seconds before he said, "I can't tell you that!"

"Why not?" I demanded.

"Uh... because I'll be punished?" he said in a cautious voice, looking up at the sky, and then added in a much happier voice, "Guess that was OK."

"What?!" I said.

"I wasn't punished! Nuthn happened when I told you that! I don't think I could tell you much more, though."

I was tempted to point out that he hadn't told me anything, but restrained myself. "So, you've taken an Unbreakable Vow, or something?"

"Oh, it ain't that simple," he said at once. "Break an Unbreakable Vow, poof, you die. The Blue Stair, it's kind of temperamental – aaargh!" he said as a giant azure fist coalesced out of nowhere, punched him in the face, and faded out of existence.

"Salutifera," I said blankly as John sat down on the grass, his eyes watering and his hand on his nose. "Or possibly consanesco... temperamental. Yeah, I see what you mean. What did you call it again? The Blue Tear?"

John glared up at me through his tears; my healing spells had not, it appeared, been so successful that he wanted to risk saying the name again.

"This is worse than saying Voldemort," I muttered. "The Blue Stair. Right?"

John stared around in horrified anticipation. Nothing happened.

"I can say it," I said triumphantly. "So is it the Blue Stair that you walk up, or a Stare that, you know, looks at you?"

He glared at me again and refused to answer.

"Fine. Is it the first one? Stair that you walk up?"

He looked around carefully, then nodded. For a long moment, nothing happened, and he began to smile broadly just as a large blue welly appeared and booted him up the bum. "AAGH!" he wailed. "I didn't even say nuthn! I didn't say a word!"

"The Blue Stair," I said, satisfied. "So it's like the Floo Network, except it's an invisible blue staircase you walk up and down? And it's alive?"

John contemplated me miserably, his head on one side. I sighed and said, "Stay quiet if the answer's yes."

He stayed very quiet. Nothing happened this time, and there was much rejoicing; from him, anyway, while I stood and contemplated all that this implied.

"So where does the Blue Stair go to?" I demanded. "Where do you live?"

A pleading look was the only response. I decided it didn't matter anyway.

"Do you hang around with other witches and wizards?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, bemused. "Not really anyone else to talk to."

"With ordinary witzies?" I demanded. "On Earth? Because it took you a hell of a long time to figure out that time had stopped."

"Uh... well," he mumbled. "Possibly not on Earth as such..." and a large blue watering can appeared above his head and gave him a good soaking. He howled a bit more, and I made sympathetic noises, which would possibly have been a bit more sincere if I hadn't been remembering the teapot.

"So that's why you didn't turn up at the Chinese Ministry," I decided. "You don't know any ordinary people. You hang around with that élite."

"What élite?" he said, bemused. "I didn't know we were an élite. Just... don't want to be bothered by everyone else."

This was almost exactly how Hagrid had explained the witzyworld to me when I was eleven. I had a sudden vision of a second, more powerful witzyworld hidden inside the first; but, looking at John wringing out his jacket on the lawn, I had to conclude that they couldn't be that powerful if they were all like him. He reminded me a bit of Hagrid, now I came to think about it, except considerably less endearing.

"But I assume your lot have figured out there's a war on now."

"Uh, well," he said, fidgeting.

"Well, you have," I pointed out.

"Yes, but, uh, I don't think anyone else is especially interested," he mumbled, and was promptly smacked over the head by a blue tennis racket.

"Not interested," I said, stunned.

"Owww," John moaned, massaging his head, but I was not in the least sympathetic. Poking him in the shoulder, I demanded, "How can anyone not be arsed about a fucking nuclear war?"

After a pause, he said, "I don't know if it would affect us up there... or some of them may not have realised."

While he ran all over the garden, yelping, as he was punished, I digested this. He inhabited, it appeared, a whole new dimension, not just a different society; when you went up (or down) the Blue Stair you were safe from thermonuclear war on Earth. This, frankly, seemed bad. It seemed only a matter of time before some mental pureblood (or Voldemort, in fact) started a war and then retreated off up the Stair to watch smugly as all the Muggles were destroyed. Perhaps that was even what had happened.

Well. I couldn't make a decision based on current information. I waited for John to stop hooting and said, "Why can't you tell me about the Blue Stair?"

"I told you–!"

"No. I mean, how do I join the club? If me and Voldemort join the élite, you'll be able to tell us all this stuff without being hit over the head, won't you?"

He gaped at me and said "Well – you'd have to go up it."

"Is that difficult?"

"Kinda," he said, subdued. "You don't just walk up it, bud. It decides whether it wants you to go up or not."

There was no punishment. The Stair clearly approved of this communication.

"What happens?" I asked.

"All kind of whacked-out stuff. Just gotta keep on going."

It didn't sound terribly difficult to me. "How d'you start? I mean, how d'you get to it in the first place so that you can go up it?"

Dubious again. "Uh, I'm not sure I can tell you. I mean, I know where the nearest point on the shoreline is, and I could show you how I swam down to it, but it probably wouldn't let me without a damn good reason."

For some reason, this had the same effect on me as a bent paperclip poked into my fillings. "A good reason. A good bloody reason? SUCH AS A FUCKING NUCLEAR WAR, FOR EXAMPLE? Do you have any idea how long Voldemort's spent getting ready for this thing? And that if it happened it would wipe out the WHOLE BIOSPHERE – not just the human race and stuff – EVERYTHING WOULD BE DEAD? Voldemort has been going BONKERS sorting this out and you come swanning in a week later and say we DON'T HAVE A GOOD FUCKING REASON?! – "

Perhaps unsurprisingly, John grew fed up of this tirade and decided to take action. He melted away with the usual blue glow, leaving me thinking "What a silly man, he forgot his wand again," regrettably unaware that he had reappeared directly behind me. The next thing I knew he had jumped onto my back and wrestled me to the ground; taken by surprise, and entirely unaccustomed to hand-to-hand combat, I was swiftly annihilated, and John purloined my wand and used a Summoning Charm to bring his own soaring out of the pigsties. Clearly I should have found a better place to hide it, I thought absently as he vanished in bewanded triumph. Still, unlike Li Hsu-Deng, he did at least leave mine behind. I picked it up and used it to scratch my head while I thought.

Well. The teapot escapologist had slipped through my fingers once again. I did know a bit more than I'd known before, but I doubted Voldemort would be very happy. Still, at least I'd prevented his killing John horribly.

His robes were nicely dry now. I took them inside before they got cardboardy and started cooking his tea.

000

At length, poor Voldie woke up and came tottering quietly out of his bedroom in his borrowed dressing-gown. He was surprised and gratified when I gave him a clean robe; evidently he'd assumed I'd just cut them all up to use as dishcloths or something. Trauma, concussion and intoxication had greatly improved his personality, I decided. Perhaps we should do this every day. Or, y'know, not.

He then Apparated briefly to India and came back with Lakshmi Bhattacharya, who briefed him endlessly on the current submarine situation while I gastronomised in the background. As it turned out, things were going well; his science-related explanations had been so clear that nobody had blown themself up so far, and if they kept arguing over who got to do the Russian subs and who the American ones, well, that was their lookout.

"You are better after your problems this afternoon, sir?" Lakshmi said in her usual distant tone. "I am informed that you were attacked by Wrackspurts."

Voldemort gave me a sidelong look. "Harry messed up my Calming Potion," he informed her grimly. "I'm punishing him by making him cook dinner. He hates cooking," he confided.

I did my best to look woebegone. Lakshmi nodded approvingly.

We asked her to stay for tea. She declined, and I gave her the doggy-bag I had prepared for precisely this eventuality, which contained pies and a cheesecake to take back to her beloved Ministry. She stared at these doubtfully as if thinking "mmm, blandest thing on the menu", but did accept them; we were making progress on the elf/food thing.

Then she departed and we were left in blissful solitude to eat our tea. I couldn't understand why I was so happy; then I realised, to my great embarrassment, that I had been looking forward to this restful Voldetime all day. Over the last few days we had established a routine of nattering in the "evenings" after getting up to our bonkers shenanigans during the "day", and it was an intense relief to discover that the customary chinwag, or in this case companionable silence, still existed. I wasn't too sure about Voldie's mental state, though, so I spent the second half of the meal staring speculatively at his frosty pow (and, incidentally, comparing him to a beansprout).

Without looking up, he suddenly said, "Wibblywibblywibblywib, wibblywib, wibblywibblywib."

"What?!" I said.

"I wanted to disturb you," he said mildly. "Did it work?"

"You silly sod," I fumed. "Here I am thinking you're going bananas and you're being an idiot. Eat your tea."

"I've finished now," he said, demolishing the remainder of his stir-fry in two decisive bites. "I give you permission to ask about my mental health."

"Fine. Are you mad?"

"Mad as always."

"Drunk? Head bashed in? All that stuff?"

He snickered. "Mostly recovered."

"Good," I said, feeling shattered. "I expect I had loads of things I wanted to say to you, but it's so long since you were halfway sane I can't remember what they were. Anyway, Bad Waistcoat John came back."

Voldie's reaction was just as one would have expected: "WHAT! He came back? Why didn't you wake me up? I'd have strung him up with his own intestines," etc. Eventually I managed to persuade him that the torture scenario might have been a bad idea, since we would then never have got any information out of the tubby one; and Voldie finally registered that I had heard John say something useful, which struck him quite speechless.

I took advantage of the silence: "He's part of the élite, except they don't call themselves the élite, and they live at the top of a thing called the Blue Stair. It's blue. And it doesn't like being talked about, and whenever he dropped hints about it, it hit him."

"Good," Voldie said absently.

"You can join the élite, kind of, by walking up the Stair and seeing whether it lets you, but I don't know where the entrance is. He knows, but he got away before I could make him say."

"Have you still got his wand?"

"No," I said, and before he could call me a dimwitted waste of DNA I told him how John had appeared behind me and sat on me head. This called forth mutters and snarls, which, pleasingly, appeared to be aimed at John rather than me; I wasn't bothered, because this gave me time to think about the invulnerability of the Blue Landing and how best to approach it.

During a hiatus in the swearing I said, "And they haven't done anything about the war because they haven't noticed it's going on, or possibly because they don't care."

"Christ!" Voldie said. "We're well out of that, then."

My heart lifting, I said, "So you're not going to sneak off into Blue Stair land and leave the rest of us to get fried?"

He gave me a glare, which changed into a look of alarm, and then said, "You're not joking? You actually thought I would do that?"

"Well, I don't know," I said, filled with inexplicable happiness. "We don't really know much about this blue place. It might be dead boring or full of paisley waistcoats or something."

"It sounds horrible," he said. "I would be all on my own."

I wondered when he'd started desiring human company. He'd never given the slightest hint that this might be the case. "I don't think you'd want to go there anyway," I said. "The entrance is under the sea."

There was a silence. Voldie stared at me for a moment as his eyeballs made sustained efforts to escape his skull. Then he screamed like a bandsaw, "UNDER THE SEA!"

"It's all right – "

"UNDER THE SEA!"

"Calm down, I'm not suggesting we – "

"I MIGHT DROWN! I MIGHT GET LOST DOWN THERE IN THE DARK! UNDER THE WATER! UNDERWATER! NO! NO! NO!"

I decided to stay quiet and just to sit there rubbing his back until he stopped hyperventilating and calmed down. I also made a mental note never to mention the sea again, and possibly never even to suggest he take a bath; any amount of BO would be preferable to all that screeching. "We don't have to do anything about it, Vol. We're doing all right without them. The crumblies haven't even blown themselves up yet."

"True," he wheezed faintly. "But you'd better wash your mouth out. If you say we're doing all right, something'll go wrong."

"Oh, for god's sake," I said, stumping off to the sink and leaving him to rub his own back.

"And you see, blue was your lucky colour," he realised amid the waterworks. "We know where the blue glow comes from now. Although it isn't very dramatic. So that horoscope this morning was right."

"You're very superstitious," I observed in between gargles, and turned round to find myself facing a solid-oxygen glare as he said, "Was that a dig?"

A dig? "What?"

He calmed down. "So it wasn't. Superstition is a specific charge levelled against half-bloods. Didn't you know that? Humphrey Rice-Doogles, who was more pureblooded than the purebloods, used to sneer that half-bloods and Muggle-borns were addicted to superstition, which was 'neither good magic nor science'."

I found this bizarre. "Like you can talk about that. You hate Muggle-borns."

"But it's true. I am superstitious!... The English Muggles levelled it against the Irish as well, actually. Supposed to be proof that they were irrational, which doesn't make any sense because every culture has dozens of little rituals that they perform without thinking. Personally I feel that the concept of superstition is one of the ways the dominant culture mocks a minority for its entirely justifiable anxieties. Tsitsi Dangarembga mentioned it, talking about colonial Zimbabwe: 'The condition of the native is a nervous condition'."

I understood this lecture surprisingly well, and managed to distil the possibly rather crude summary that he was blaming his mental problems on his shit life. Distractedly juggling three oranges, I said, "But not everyone with a shit life has mental problems."

"In fact they do," he said calmly. "Lots of them do, but nobody pays them any attention. Why d'you think I never got diagnosed? People don't care about kids. They only take notice of your mental state if you start breaking things and killing people, or shouting very loudly, in your case."

"Are you saying that's why you killed rabbits?" I said in disbelief.

"What – consciously, to get medical treatment? Of course not. But... I suppose that did play into it to some... Harry, I don't know. It was a long time ago, and I was only seven."

"And now," I said absently, mimicking the way he had sneered at John only a few hours earlier, "you are sixty-nine." He had gone barmy, I calculated, sixty-two years ago. Ten years before the atom bomb, forty-five years before I was born. It did indeed seem a bit much to ask him to remember all the details.

"I am! And I did cast that spell when I was twenty-eight, whatever he thinks... I hate him, I hate him. Oh, and I haven't forgiven him for saying 'What are you?'," Voldie added vindictively, getting himself a chocolate bar and sitting in his favourite armchair. "What the fuck does he think I am? A cabbage?"

"Well, you don't look like a human, do you?" I said absently. "Centaurs look more human than you do. If they were stood behind a wall."

Voldemort found this unaccountably amusing.

"You've got red eyes," I continued, ignoring him, "you're bald all over – erm, possibly – and your skin's way too white."

"A good thing too," he said dispassionately, delicately snapping his chocolate into perfect little pieces. "The severity of thermal radiation burns is in direct proportion to the darkness of one's skin."

"What, you mean if you're dark you burn more?"

"Yes."

"Tight for Black people."

"Why d'you think South Africa started its nuclear programme?"

"Really?" I whispered, horrified.

Voldemort rolled his eyes. "No, dear."

I managed not to kick him.

"You look like those little aliens that come out of the ship that goes Dah Dah Dah Dah Dah," I noted.

"Wibblywib. Wibblywibblywib."

"Do you think the same way as other people?" I demanded. "Do you see the same things as us? Do you smell the same?"

He bared the fangs, put his chocolate down on the little table and said, "Smell me."

"That's not what I meant," I mumbled, but he was tipping his head over and pointing at the crook of his neck, so I leant over his armchair and put my face close to him. He didn't stink at all. There was no fragrance either, just a clean dusty smell like old books or a cat's fur. I sniffed it for a while, and by then I'd inhaled so much that I became light-headed and had to sit down. He laughed at me.

"Well," I said, "you don't smell the same."

"I'm not a human," he said. "I'm not a snake. I am something else altogether."

"Oh, give up. I wash your dressing gowns. You don't have to boast to me."

"I know," he said.

"I need a bath now myself," I said absently, wandering towards the bathroom to check for clean towels.

"Harry," came Voldie's voice from behind me, making me stop short.

"M-hm?" I said, poking my head round the kitchen door.

Voldie was holding the foil from the chocolate wrapper in his claws, carefully perforating it into a little silver colander. He looked at me with a faintly guilty expression and said, "Can I sleep in your bed tonight?"

"While I'm in it?" I asked.

"Well, yes. That's pretty much the point."

I thought about it. "Yes," I shrugged, and went off to have my bath.

This was a great luxury. I savoured the extravagance of being warm and comfortable, ensconced in bubbles and redolent of fairly-traded coconut. It seemed like months since I had last had the opportunity to relax this much. Actually, I realised, it had probably been years; as long as Voldemort needed me and the stasis spell held, I was safer than I'd ever been, which seemed a bit ironic. And god almighty, how he needed me! If that stasis spell depended on his mental state, I'd better get him in my bed as fast as possible and read him a bedtime story if he wanted one.

No, I decided, viewed in its proper perspective, doubling up with Voldemort wasn't much of a problem. Frankly, given everything that had happened to the poor old sod today, it seemed like the least I could do.