Hollywood or What?

“Okay,” Harry said, as they sat panting on the grass where the vortex had dropped them. “You can come.”

Ginny’s face lit up. She glanced furtively around, finding the woods behind the Burrow devoid of potential interruptions, and rolled Harry onto his back, a move which reminded him that she had left her t-shirt on the floor of the bathroom. With a muttered “Told you so,” she kissed him.

They postponed their return to the Burrow, at least for a few hours.

Clough rolled to a stop, thudding painfully against a wall. Everything hurt. His back hurt, his head hurt, his brain hurt. He wasn’t entirely convinced that he knew who he was any more, either. But he knew his mission. He knew what he’d been told to do and where it had led. He knew who had told him to do it.

And he was bloody annoyed.

Several hours later, after a long, brisk walk, he entered the ancient crypt system below the ruined abbey in a small village named Kirkpevril. He identified himself to the Death Eaters who challenged him as he entered the lower level – they seemed curious about the large, shrouded object hovering before him, but he ignored them – then descended a long, curving staircase.

He continued into the bowels of the crypts, until a set of old, dark oak doors swung open at the end of the corridor. Within lay the Dark Lord’s lair, the inner sanctum, the centre of operations. He left the strange draped thing outside and sauntered in.

“Mr Clough,” the wheedling voice drifted through the gloom. “You have the Weasley girl?”

Clough looked at him for a moment, then, with an accent that he did not recognise...

“I’ll be back.”

Voldemort stared in astonishment at Clough’s retreating back.

“Lucius, has he gone insane?”

“If he hadn’t got the girl he would surely not have returned, my Lord. Not voluntarily, at least.”

“Very well,” Voldemort muttered. “And don’t call me Shirley,” he added, though he could not for the life of him tell why.

Malfoy glanced at Voldemort for a moment, surprised. He was about to speak, when a rumbling sound drifted in from the corridor.

“Um... what’s that?” a cowled Death Eater in the corner said, voicing the assembled Death Eaters’ shared concern.

The roar was increasing in volume, a deep, throaty growl, like a whole herd of giant mutant lions purring.

“My Lord,” Malfoy hazarded, “You don’t suppose...”

The great oak doors, which had stood for almost eight centuries, erupted into splinters. In a cloud of smoke and dust, an angry, snarling beast of chrome and deep red metal skidded into the chamber, mere feet in front of Voldemort.

It was a large motorcycle. It skidded round almost 180 degrees to face in the general direction of the door.

The beast sat in the centre of the room, oozing the sort of effortless menace that says to all present something along the lines of “I know where you live, and the only thing stopping you from being killed to death is that right now I’d rather be snoozing”. But what shocked the Death Eaters more than that was the figure sitting astride it.

It was Clough. Somehow – and heaven knows why, given how dark it was in the chamber – he had acquired a set of dark glasses that now covered his eyes, concealing any flicker of emotion that might once have resided there. He turned, looking over his shoulder at Voldemort.

He drew a heavy-looking lever-action shotgun from a pannier on the bike and spun it round his hand, cocking it. Somehow, the move – which should by rights have broken his knuckles – instead ended with the gun aimed squarely between Voldemort’s eyes.

“Hasta la vista, Voldy.”

The gun fired, with a thunderclap like a cross between a cannon and the end of the world. And then, before Voldemort’s headless body had time to hit the floor, there was a screech of tyres, and in a cloud of white smoke, Clough and his bike had disappeared back down the corridor.

The Death Eaters, stunned, gradually started edging forwards.

“Is he...?”

Lucius stepped forward, gesturing for them to keep away from the corpse. The drops of gore and shreds of flesh were rolling across the ground, coalescing and joining, all heading for Voldemort’s lifeless cadaver.

“No. The Dark Lord is protected by powerful magic. He will-” Already Voldemort’s head was reforming, life returning to his limbs. “-soon be alive again. He cannot die, not for long.”

(In a dark cupboard in a dark house on Grimmauld Place, a locket crumbled into dust.)

Slowly, shakily, Voldemort stood, his head lolling to one side; the force of the shotgun slug impacting his face had shattered several vertebrae in his neck. He rolled his head lazily, a bony crumbling sound as his spine healed itself. He stood for a moment, face turned towards the ground, eyes closed as the final pieces of flesh slotted into place.

Then, slowly, he opened his eyes and raised his glowing eyes to the door.

“Whoever let Clough back in,” he hissed, “kill them. And if he has the temerity to return, he will not leave.”

Three Death Eaters headed for the door, anxious to be the first to carry out their master’s bidding – and of course, if they hurried, there was always the chance of capturing Clough.

Soon after they had left, Voldemort had developed a variant shielding charm which, he resolved, he would cast if Clough tried to point another of those muggle devices at him. Barely had he completed that thought before there was an actinic glow outside, a rippling light filtering through the fug in the corridor. It was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and then...

...Clough stood in the doorway. He was pushing before him what looked like a muggle office chair, with a television and a large quantity of modelling clay attached to the seat with sellotape.

Voldemort watched in amazement as Clough, seemingly unperturbed, rolled the chair into the centre of the chamber. He stopped there, cocked his head like a curious animal, and looked straight at Voldemort, a manic gleam in his eye.

“Not even a scar...” he mused, seemingly to himself. Then he cleared his throat and spoke.

“Didn’t take, I suppose. Whoops.”

The Dark Lord raised a questioning eyebrow at the strange contraption. Clough – or was he? He wasn’t sure any longer – raised a foot and kicked the chair towards Voldemort, a mad smile creasing his face. Strange and unfamiliar thoughts hurtled through his increasingly schizophrenic mind, and it may have been one of them that made him grasp for a suitable phrase to utter.

“Yippie-ki-yay, mother Hubbard,” he spat, wandlessly blasting a hex towards the chair.

Things suddenly happened very fast. The television imploded, sending a sharp current into the eight blocks of C4 strapped to its side, and the device detonated in a flash of light and smoke, silhouetting shadowy forms against the blast.

(Deep beneath Gringott’s Bank, in a vault owned by Bellatrix Lestrange, Hufflepuff’s cup fell apart, its smouldering shards blasted by an invisible explosion.)

The smoke eventually dissipated, revealing a scene of carnage. Those Death Eaters who had been nearest Voldemort lay unmoving on the ground. Others cowered, covering their ears, rivulets of blood trickling from ruptured eardrums. Lucius Malfoy had been all but vaporised. And scattered over the floor and walls of the chamber, slowly rolling and coalescing and reforming, were the constituent parts of Voldemort.

In the centre of the chamber, shrinking into thin air, hung a brightly glowing silver rectangle.

Nobody ever saw Edwin Clough, two-time member of the exclusive Slayers Of Voldemort club, ever again.

“If Clough managed to do what he said, we should have an easier job of it with the Horcruces now,” Harry said. It was several hours later; after he and Ginny (wearing Harry’s jumper) had eventually returned to the Burrow (and they had been in no rush), they had called a meeting to summarise the events of their adventure. After finding to their surprise that they had been absent for less than a day – Professor McGonagall had theorised that it had something to do with the “dramatic compression of time necessitated by the medium”, but Harry had tuned out – they had explained all about Clough’s promise to destroy Voldemort at least twice.

“So we’ll head out to kill Voldemort once and for all as soon as we’re packed. And Ginny’s coming with us.”

This didn’t get nearly as many objections as he had expected; the meeting disbanded soon afterwards, and he and Ginny were left alone in the kitchen.

Or almost alone. Ron sat there, a thoughtful frown on his face. Something seemed to be eating at him.

“Harry...” he began.

Harry raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Well, you know I don’t really mind you and Ginny, y’know... yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Just as long as it never, under any circumstances involves any... y’know...”

“I’m getting that impression.”

“So... just to help me decide whether or not to belt you one in the teeth – in all friendship, and all that – I was wondering...”

“What?”

“Why did you want a locksmith?”

Clough – except he wasn’t Clough, was he, not any more – opened the door, stepping into the apartment. It was snowing heavily outside, and through the window he could see dozens of tall buildings, their bright lights shining through the driving snow. On his way here he had seen, shining out into the night from an island in the harbour, a vast statue, thrusting a bronze torch skywards. He didn’t know what it was, he just knew that it was familiar.

His feet, similarly, had seemed to guide him to the apartment he had just entered, the old familiar sensation of part of him knowing, another part not knowing, suffusing him. He had got used to it over the past few weeks, which – to his perspective – he had spent jumping from universe to universe. He had no clear memories of any of them. The only thing he remembered with any certainty from those other realities was that what he once considered reality would be a bad place to go back to.

He continued walking through the darkened apartment, when a pair of smooth female arms wrapped around his shoulders.

“Welcome home,” a voice breathed from behind him. Somehow, he found himself surprised to hear an English accent, but he pushed it aside.

“Hello, Sara.” He turned, not pausing to wonder how he knew her name, or why he seemed to have acquired an American accent. As with knowing where to go, he put it all down to serendipitous chance. “I’ve had quite a day.”

“Oh?” She smiled at him, flirting. The conversation, he somehow knew, really didn’t matter. “Jonathan, where have you been, then?”

He knew the answer to that one. Somehow, only one seemed to fit.

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”