Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (3 page)

      “Then Dobby must do it, sir, for Harry Potter’s own good.”

      The pudding fell to the floor with a heart-stopping crash. Cream splattered the windows and walls as the dish shattered. With a crack like a whip, Dobby vanished.

      There were screams from the dining room and Uncle Vernon burst into the kitchen to find Harry, rigid with shock, covered from head to foot in Aunt Petunia’s pudding.

      At first, it looked as though Uncle Vernon would manage to gloss the whole thing over. (“Just our nephew —very disturbed — meeting strangers upsets him, so we kept him upstairs.…”) He shooed the shocked Masons back into the dining room, promised Harry he would flay him to within an inch of his life when the Masons had left, and handed him a mop. Aunt Petunia dug some ice cream out of the freezer and Harry, still shaking, started scrubbing the kitchen clean.

      Uncle Vernon might still have been able to make his deal — if it hadn’t been for the owl.

      Aunt Petunia was just passing around a box of after-dinner mints when a huge barn owl swooped through the dining room window, dropped a letter on Mrs. Mason’s head, and swooped out again. Mrs. Mason screamed like a banshee and ran from the house shouting about lunatics. Mr. Mason stayed just long enough to tell the Dursleys that his wife was mortally afraid of birds of all shapes and sizes, and to ask whether this was their idea of a joke.

      Harry stood in the kitchen, clutching the mop for support, as Uncle Vernon advanced on him, a demonic glint in his tiny eyes.

      “Read it!” he hissed evilly, brandishing the letter the owl had delivered. “Go on — read it!”

      Harry took it. It did not contain birthday greetings.

      Dear Mr. Potter,

      We have received intelligence that a Hover Charm was used at your place of residence this evening at twelve minutes past nine.

      As you know, underage wizards are not permitted to perform spells outside school, and further spellwork
on your part may lead to expulsion from said school. (Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery, 1875, Paragraph C).

      We would also ask you to remember that any magical activity that risks notice by members of the non magical community (Muggles) is a serious offense under section 13 of the International Confederation of Warlocks’ Statute of Secrecy.

      Enjoy your holidays!

Yours sincerely,

Mafalda Hopkirk

IMPROPER USE OF MAGIC OFFICE

Ministry of Magic

      Harry looked up from the letter and gulped.

      “You didn’t tell us you weren’t allowed to use magic outside school,” said Uncle Vernon, a mad gleam dancing in his eyes. “Forgot to mention it.…Slipped your mind, I daresay.…”

      He was bearing down on Harry like a great bulldog, all his teeth bared. “Well, I’ve got news for you, boy.…I’m locking you up.…You’re never going back to that school…never…and if you try and magic yourself out — they’ll expel you!”

      And laughing like a maniac, he dragged Harry back upstairs.

      Uncle Vernon was as bad as his word. The following morning, he paid a man to fit bars on Harry’s window. He himself fitted a cat-flap in the bedroom door, so that small amounts of food could be pushed inside three times a day. They let Harry out to use the bathroom morning and evening. Otherwise, he was locked in his room around the clock.

Three days later, the Dursleys were showing no sign of relenting, and Harry couldn’t see any way out of his situation. He lay on his bed watching the sun sinking behind the bars on the window and wondered miserably what was going to happen to him.

      What was the good of magicking himself out of his room if Hogwarts would expel him for doing it? Yet life at Privet Drive had reached an all-time low. Now that the Dursleys knew they weren’t going to wake up as fruit bats, he had lost his only weapon. Dobby might have saved Harry from horrible happenings at Hogwarts, but the way things were going, he’d probably starve to death anyway.

      The cat-flap rattled and Aunt Petunias hand appeared, pushing a bowl of canned soup into the room. Harry, whose insides were aching with hunger, jumped off his bed and seized it. The soup was stone-cold, but he drank half of it  in one gulp. Then he crossed the room to Hedwig’s cage and tipped the soggy vegetables at the bottom of the bowl into her empty food tray. She ruffled her feathers and gave him a look of deep disgust.

      “It’s no good turning your beak up at it — that’s all we’ve got,” said Harry grimly.

      He put the empty bowl back on the floor next to the cat-flap and lay back down on the bed, somehow even hungrier than he had been before the soup.

      Supposing he was still alive in another four weeks, hat would happen if he didn’t turn up at Hogwarts? Would someone be sent to see why he hadn’t come back? Would they be able to make the Dursleys let him go?

      The room was growing dark. Exhausted, stomach rumbling, mind spinning over the same unanswerable questions, Harry fell into an uneasy sleep.

      He dreamed that he was on show in a zoo, with a card reading
UNDERAGE WIZARD
attached to his cage. People goggled through the bars at him as he lay, starving and weak, on a bed of straw. He saw Dobby’s face in the crowd and shouted out, asking for help, but Dobby called, “Harry Potter is safe there, sir!” and vanished. Then the Dursleys appeared and Dudley rattled the bars of the cage, laughing at him.

      “Stop it,” Harry muttered as the rattling pounded in his sore head. “Leave me alone…cut it out…I’m trying to sleep.…”

      He opened his eyes. Moonlight was shining through the bars on the window. And someone was goggling through the bars at him: a freckle-faced, red-haired, long-nosed someone.

      Ron Weasley was outside Harry’s window.

THE BURROW

“
R
on
.” breathed Harry, creeping to the window and pushing it up so they could talk through the bars. “Ron, how did you —? What the —?”

      Harry’s mouth fell open as the full impact of what he was seeing hit him. Ron was leaning out of the back window of an old turquoise car, which was parked in midair. Grinning at Harry from the front seats were Fred and George, Ron’s elder twin brothers.

      “All right, Harry?” asked George.

      “What’s been going on?” said Ron. “Why haven’t you been answering my letters? I’ve asked you to stay about twelve times, and then Dad came home and said you’d got an official warning for using magic in front of Muggles —”

      “It wasn’t me — and how did he know?”

      “He works for the Ministry,” said Ron. “You know we’re not supposed to do spells outside school —”

      “You should talk,” said Harry, staring at the floating car.

      “Oh, this doesn’t count,” said Ron. “We’re only borrowing this. It’s Dad’s, we didn’t enchant it. But doing magic in front of those Muggles you live with —”

      “I told you, I didn’t — but it’ll take too long to explain now — look, can you tell them at Hogwarts that the Dursleys have locked me up and won’t let me come back, and obviously I can’t magic myself out, because the Ministry’ll think that’s the second spell I’ve done in three days, so —”

      “Stop gibbering,” said Ron. “We’ve come to take you home with us.”

      “But you can’t magic me out either —”

      “We don’t need to,” said Ron, jerking his head toward the front seat and grinning. “You forget who I’ve got with me.”

      “Tie that around the bars,” said Fred, throwing the end of a rope to Harry.

      “If the Dursleys wake up, I’m dead,” said Harry as he tied the rope tightly around a bar and Fred revved up the car.

      “Don’t worry,” said Fred, “and stand back.”

      Harry moved back into the shadows next to Hedwig, who seemed to have realized how important this was and kept still and silent. The car revved louder and louder and suddenly, with a crunching noise, the bars were pulled clean out of the window as Fred drove straight up in the air. Harry ran back to the window to see the bars dangling a few feet above the ground. Panting, Ron hoisted them up into the car. Harry listened anxiously, but there was no sound from the Dursleys’ bedroom.

      When the bars were safely in the back seat with Ron, Fred reversed as close as possible to Harry’s window.

      “Get in,” Ron said.

      “But all my Hogwarts stuff — my wand — my broomstick —”

      “Where is it?”

      “Locked in the cupboard under the stairs, and I can’t get out of this room —”

      “No problem,” said George from the front passenger seat. “Out of the way, Harry.”

      Fred and George climbed catlike through the window into Harry’s room. You had to hand it to them, thought Harry, as George took an ordinary hairpin from his pocket and started to pick the lock.

      “A lot of wizards think it’s a waste of time, knowing this sort of Muggle trick,” said Fred, “but we feel they’re skills worth learning, even if they are a bit slow.”

      There was a small click and the door swung open.

      “So — we’ll get your trunk — you grab anything you need from your room and hand it out to Ron,” whispered George.

      “Watch out for the bottom stair — it creaks,” Harry whispered back as the twins disappeared onto the dark landing.

      Harry dashed around his room, collecting his things and passing them out of the window to Ron. Then he went to help Fred and George heave his trunk up the stairs. Harry heard Uncle Vernon cough.

      At last, panting, they reached the landing, then carried the trunk through Harry’s room to the open window. Fred climbed back into the car to pull with Ron, and Harry and George pushed from the bedroom side. Inch by inch, the trunk slid through the window.

      Uncle Vernon coughed again.

      “A bit more,” panted Fred, who was pulling from inside the car. “One good push —”

      Harry and George threw their shoulders against the trunk and it slid out of the window into the back seat of the car.

      “Okay, let’s go,” George whispered.

      But as Harry climbed onto the windowsill there came a sudden loud screech from behind him, followed immediately by the thunder of Uncle Vernon’s voice.

      “THAT RUDDY OWL!”

      “I’ve forgotten Hedwig!”

      Harry tore back across the room as the landing light clicked on — he snatched up Hedwig’s cage, dashed to the window, and passed it out to Ron. He was scrambling back onto the chest of drawers when Uncle Vernon hammered on the unlocked door — and it crashed open.

      For a split second, Uncle Vernon stood framed in the doorway; then he let out a bellow like an angry bull and dived at Harry, grabbing him by the ankle.

      Ron, Fred, and George seized Harry’s arms and pulled as hard as they could.

      “Petunia!” roared Uncle Vernon. “He’s getting away! HE’S GETTING AWAY!”

      But the Weasleys gave a gigantic tug and Harry’s leg slid out of Uncle Vernon’s grasp — Harry was in the car — he’d slammed the door shut —

      “Put your foot down, Fred!” yelled Ron, and the car shot suddenly toward the moon.

      Harry couldn’t believe it — he was free. He rolled down the window, the night air whipping his hair, and looked back at the shrinking rooftops of Privet Drive. Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley were all hanging, dumbstruck, out of Harry’s window.

      “See you next summer!” Harry yelled.

      The Weasleys roared with laughter and Harry settled back in his seat, grinning from ear to ear.

      “Let Hedwig out,” he told Ron. “She can fly behind us. She hasn’t had a chance to stretch her wings for ages.”

      George handed the hairpin to Ron and, a moment later, Hedwig soared joyfully out of the window to glide alongside them like a ghost.

      “So — what’s the story, Harry?” said Ron impatiently. “What’s been happening?”

      Harry told them all about Dobby, the warning he’d given Harry and the fiasco of the violet pudding. There was a long, shocked silence when he had finished.

      “Very fishy,” said Fred finally.

      “Definitely dodgy” agreed George. “So he wouldn’t even tell you who’s supposed to be plotting all this stuff?”

      “I don’t think he could,” said Harry. “I told you, every time he got close to letting something slip, he started banging his head against the wall.”

      He saw Fred and George look at each other.

      “What, you think he was lying to me?” said Harry.

      “Well,” said Fred, “put it this way — house-elves have got powerful magic of their own, but they can’t usually use it without their master’s permission. I reckon old Dobby was sent to stop you coming back to Hogwarts. Someone’s idea of a joke. Can you think of anyone at school with a grudge against you?”

      “Yes,” said Harry and Ron together, instantly.

      “Draco Malfoy,” Harry explained. “He hates me.”

      “Draco Malfoy?” said George, turning around. “Not Lucius Malfoy’s son?”

      “Must be, it’s not a very common name, is it?” said Harry.

      “I’ve heard Dad talking about him,” said George. “He was a big supporter of You-Know-Who.”

      “And when You-Know-Who disappeared,” said Fred, craning around to look at Harry, “Lucius Malfoy came back saying he’d never meant any of it. Load of dung — Dad reckons he was right in You- Know-Who’s inner circle.”

      Harry had heard these rumors about Malfoy’s family before, and they didn’t surprise him at all. Malfoy made Dudley Dursley look like a kind, thoughtful, and sensitive boy.…

      “I don’t know whether the Malfoys own a house-elf.…” said Harry.

      “Well, whoever owns him will be an old wizarding family, and they’ll be rich,” said Fred.

      “Yeah, Mum’s always wishing we had a house-elf to do the ironing,” said George. “But all we’ve got is a lousy old ghoul in the attic and gnomes all over the garden. House-elves come with big old manors and castles and places like that; you wouldn’t catch one in our house.…”