One Honest Heart

16. Vacant Vision

Rising from an uncomfortable yet
expensive armchair over which he had been draped since the end of his forced
and indecently filthy tale, Lucius drifted towards the hunched figure of his
lord, taking great care not to disturb the latter’s concentration. Still, the
closer he got, the less it seemed that Voldemort was concentrating.
Rather, he was staring into a stone bowl and at a potion displaying all the
properties of liquid silver, his eyes wide, jaws quivering.

He
had sat like this for some considerable time. Lucius had assumed Voldemort was
muttering quiet incantations but his mouth was set in a line so thin it was
near invisible on his pocked parchment features.

As
if this eerie paralysis were contagious, Lucius came to a dead, half crouching
stop, once more locked in the centre of the room. Silence froze in the air,
counting seconds and minutes as it fluttered to the restless floor. Lucius
waited for a command, a request, an exclamation of incoherent anger that never
came.

‘Is
there – a problem, my lord?’ he asked at last.

Voldemort
jerked backwards, his chair creaking. He offered no answer but stared as
unseeingly at the wall as he had stared at the potion, as perfectly still as a
man Petrified by a basilisk stare. Lucius wondered if his lord and master had
seen his own reflection in the glittering liquid and if, perhaps, he had
found it as paralysing as his followers always had.

When
the Dark Lord finally stirred again, turned and rose, one hand clutching the
back of his chair, his eyes held none of the basilisk power they once had.
Voldemort let go of the chair, took a step forward, and stopped, swaying a
little before his head twitched to one side, and he froze again.

Disturbed
by this stop-motion display and, even more so, by the slight slackness about
his master’s jaw, Lucius dared pose his question once again, if only to break
the silence. ‘Is – something wrong, master?’

The
bald head swivelled, eyes focused, ragged remnants of eyebrows rose in unison.
‘He’s dead,’ said Tom Riddle, voice hollow and tinny. There could be no
question of whom he spoke, but there seemed no joy in the declaration, no
relief, no elation. Only a strange emptiness, a sudden loss of point and
purpose.

Face
drawn and eyes wide, Lord Voldemort had never looked so much a dead man walking
as he did then, lurching out of the room, not even bothering to slam the door
behind him, a wretched cold invading the room in his wake.

Lucius shivered. But not from the cold.