How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Lord Voldemort

Chapter 7: I Always Knew The Sky Was A Prison

In June 1997 there were about a dozen nuclear bases in Europe. I know, because the next day Voldie and I visited each of them in turn to disarm their missiles. Voldemort ticked off each one on a little shopping list: Volkel, Kleine Brogel, Ghedi, Aviano, Istres, Toulon, Brest... AHAHAHAHA!!!! Ahem. Sorry. Indeed, Voldie also became fed up of my cackling at Brest, and conjured up a large hand that slapped me around the head. At that point even I had to admit that I could be rather immature.

The constant Apparition was awful, and caused gurgling nausea on my part; on the plus side, Voldemort was coping well with the missiles and hadn't screamed and wet himself once, so I dared to speculate that his phobias had gone away. (As you can no doubt imagine, I was wrong.) Albert turned up when we were at Brest and edged very cautiously towards Voldie, obviously expecting to be greeted with a Cruciatus; Voldie just barked "Oh, stop being so ridiculous, Albert. We're not playing hide and seek," and they had an extremely long argument. Then Albert gave him the latest progress report on the submarines, which apparently was good, because when Voldie finally Apparated us off to Spangdahlem he was whistling the theme tune from Muffin The Mule.

So at this point we arrived in Spangdahlem. Spangdahlem, dear cohorts, is in Germany. This may not initially seem of much relevance, but I was soon to find out that it was; specifically, as soon as we had Apparated to the airfield, Voldie stared upwards as if having a vision and said, "What. The. Fuck."

I was still out of sorts due to the Apparition. Sitting down hard on the runway, I looked giddily up at the sky. The grey clouds above were occluded by a sparkling, shifting sheen of rainbow magic, like a giant soap bubble.

I wrenched my brains around until I developed the vague ability to give a damn. "Cool," I managed to burble. "What is it?"

"Well, if I knew that I'd..." he stopped and spluttered, apparently unable to think what he would do. "What exactly is this and who put it there?"

"D'you think it's appeared in Wales as well?" I pondered, mildly worried. A permanently day-glo universe would be a bad thing, I decided, because it would exacerbate my headache. "Or is it just here?"

"Good point," Voldie said absently, and he Apparated us back to Wales before I could say "Nooooo". The sky there was still completely blue; or, at least, so I gather from what la Morte told me later, because at the time I was too busy telling him how much I hated him.

"You have no business to fucking Apparate me every two seconds, you piece of shit. I – Christ," I said, puking.

"Yes, yes," Voldie said absently, patting my back while I heaved into the sink. "Well, you'll be happy to know I want you to get out your horrible broomstick and fly to Germany, because I need to know how far that shield extends. What I don't understand is," he continued, ignoring my plight as I tried to snort stomach acid out of my nose, "how come we haven't heard about it before now? Did those Finns not go to Estonia before?"

"They were pissed as farts. They probably saw pink elephants as well," I said shortly, glugging some water and spitting it into the bucket. Voldie Vanished the vomit and said "Well, true. But why didn't we notice it when we were flying after the Eagles? I'm sure we went over Germany, and it looks pretty large."

"There was too much cloud cover and you had your eyes shut the whole time," I purred with affectionate contempt.

"You still think I was being a ninny," he said. "Ah, well. Maybe one day you'll learn."

"What, learn to be frightened of flying?" I snorted, and regretted it as my nose caught fire again. "No thanks."

"Learn that the only appropriate way of seeing some things is with, to put it bluntly, horror. You don't comprehend these things the way I do. Or even how most others do. How d'you see the world, boy? Flattened, monochrome, inconsequential?"

"What?" I said, discombobulated.

"How d'you see the world? You're depressed, aren't you? It's one big sea of grey."

"Of course it isn't!" I said indignantly.

"Yes, it is. You're off your trolley. Didn't you know that?"

"NO! Because I'm NOT!"

"A lot you know. You just don't understand that the way you think is unusual. Have you ever seen inside someone else's mind, boy? It's a shock. Perhaps the greatest shock you'll ever have. Their lives are like pastel watercolours. You take a look, and you realise you have nothing in common with them and never will."

He sounded, as I later realised, rather vainglorious about this; proud. I certainly wasn't proud. I was busy digesting this and thinking that, if true, it confirmed all my worst fears. I really was a freak.

"For your sake, boy, I hope you never defeat me," he said, now sounding faintly mocking. "Your obsession with destroying me is all that keeps you going. If you bump me off I predict a nervous breakdown, a series of unsuccessful relationships and several failed careers in something ridiculous like professional Quidditch, culminating in death by alcohol poisoning by the age of fifty."

"You needn't sound so pleased about it," I said absently, wondering if what he said was true. To be quite honest I had a tremendous certainty that it was. Not the relationships and alcoholism bit, but the sense that, when Voldemort was dead, there would be nothing left. In a sense, the nuclear bomb quest was a microcosm of my life. If we succeeded in defusing all the bombs (and don't say it out loud, because you'll only tempt fate and Voldemort will wash your head again), it seemed that going back to a normal life would be unthinkable. As he said, one big sea of grey.

Like the cloud cover over Germany. "We shouldn't be sat around doing fuck all anyway. You wait here and I'll get my broomstick," I said, and set about fixing the holes in Ron's Quidditch gloves.

000

The rainbow bubbly thing initiated, abruptly and improbably, bang on the German border. Or within a few dozen feet of it, I suppose, anyway, since Voldie was using the Rhine as a reference point, and it was considerably larger, I thought, than any river had a right to be; and also sprawling and grey and full of rain, so the sight of that gaudy rainbow, a sparkling, shifting curtain neatly drawn across the river, was surreal in the extreme. Voldemort banged on my shoulder to tell me to stop, and I sat on my broom and stared down at the long skinny boat things that sat forever unmoving in the water, wondering why it was just Germany that had a magical umbrella.

"Stay where you are and don't fly through it," Voldie ordered, taking his gloves off and producing his wand; "I don't know what its function is yet." So he drew dozens of complicated magical patterns in mid-air, and I sat around and watched the colours sparkling on the umbrella because there wasn't much else to do. A rainbow, I thought, in a sea of grey; and wondered why that sounded familiar.

At last he said, "It's a protective shield. It's extremely weak."

"Can we go through it?"

"I'm not actually sure. There's no need to, anyway. We'll just Apparate to the other side."

"Aw, no!"

"It's not very far!"

"I hate you."

We followed the Rhine south-east under the glittering umbrella, passing houses with shutters and antique boats and a big chimney with an enormous amount of pollution pouring out of it; below, the water fluctuated occasionally between grey and milky-tea, then an intriguing sort of green colour. Eventually Voldie signalled for me to turn east, and we flew into Essen; as we entered its impressively green and woolly environs, the umbrella grew fainter, fainter, and disappeared. Voldemort whacked me on the shoulder again and we stopped.

"Ha," he said, taking off his gloves again and firing spells. "Well, that explains a lot."

"It does?" I said blankly, and he tapped my head with his horrid hard knuckles and said "Harry, dear. Initiate brain. I date this shield to somewhere over a hundred years old, and the Allies bombed Germany to bits rather more recently than that."

"Maybe they bombed their way through the shield," I suggested, rubbing my head.

"Pardon?! Magically? – oh. The blast might have... Ah, yes, yes, possibly, but it's still rather intriguing. Who would bother making a bombproof shield at a time when there weren't any aeroplanes, and how has it ingeniously managed to erect itself as soon as we reach Defcon 1? That's some very good forward planning if it was created in 1890 or whenever."

"Well – yeah – great."

He found that incredibly amusing, and gave a long series of titters and snickers as we flew and Disapparated around checking the shield's boundaries. We flew for several hundred miles; this increased my knowledge of Europe so greatly that I thought I would have to get a new head to keep it all in. This wasn't really how I'd pictured seeing the world, but hey, a journey is a journey.

The shield extended eastwards, most improbably, all the way to Lithuania, which seemed to make Voldie happy since it apparently confirmed that the shield had been created for Prussia.

"Prussia! Prussia! Think of that," Voldie kept saying, and other inane things of this type, all the time we were flying over Germany. "A secret umbrella shield for Prussia in the 1890s – or, at any rate, I've never heard of it – although it doesn't seem to have weathered the Second World War very well, and here it is, popping itself back up for World War III!... I really think this must be the mysterious Elke again. I can't think of anyone this powerful among all those nincompoops at the German Ministry... blah." He went on and on, but I decided I didn't really mind, because he didn't seem to have noticed that we were flying home instead of Apparating. I silently blessed the soul of Saint Elke.

"Well," he said as we climbed out of our Quidditch gear in the garden, "I see we never did get round to defusing the bombs in Germany, but I'm sure the others won't mind. You think?"

"Er," I said.

"Thought not," he beamed, leaping round in little circles and slapping Ron's Keeper's gloves together. "Right, so we'll go and tell Albert and all the others not to fly through the shield, since the resulting Grapsnackle explosion might damage it, and we'll ask them if they know anything about it, too, although I don't think they will. Then we'd better get down to the German Ministry and – yes?" he said, finally noticing that I'd been attempting to tell him something for most of this monologue.

"We?" I said. "We?"

"Well? You're coming, aren't you?"

"No!"

"Oh, god..." he gurned, rolling his eyes.

"I need to lie down after all that fucking Apparition!" I grumbled, bundling up all the Quidditch gear and hefting it towards the kitchen.

"Wimp. You could lie down at the Ministry."

"Not if it's anything like the British one," I muttered, dropping all the Quidditch gear on the floor and getting myself a glass of water. Voldemort conjured up a sack and started frenziedly flinging chocolate and oranges into it.

"What are you doing?" I spluttered, getting stomach acid up my nose again just when I thought I'd ejected it all. "Snotaculate," he shouted, and it all came snorting out again and hit the windowpane. "I'm packing you some food, of course. Then I'll cast a Sleeping Spell and Apparate you to the Ministry. It shouldn't bother you too much if you're asleep – "

"Then what's the point in taking me?!"

"Lazy bastard," he fumed, "you won't even go to sleep for me! You know I'm scared of being alone – "

"But if I'm zonked out, you will be alone!"

"Dorme!" he said peremptorily, and I knew no more. I hope he caught me before I hit the floor.