DMD: Dobby Must Die

Harry stared at the creature on his bed, and the creature stared back, and for a long moment neither of them had anything to say.

It was small and skinny, no taller than the bedside table, with a pair of enormous green eyes that bulged out of its head like tennis balls, and long, floppy, bat-like ears that twitched as it looked at him. Harry knew, in the instant he saw those eyes, exactly what had been watching him out of Aunt Petunia's hedge that morning.

Dudley's voice came floating up from the hall.

'May I take your coats, Mr and Mrs Mason?'

The creature slid off the bed and bowed so low that the end of its long, thin nose brushed the carpet. Harry saw that it was wearing an old pillowcase, with holes torn in it for the arms and legs.

'Er... you alright?' said Harry nervously.

The effect was as though he'd pressed a button. The creature sprang up, quivering from ears to toes with excitement, and the voice that came out of it was high and carrying and, Harry was quite sure, audible from the dining room.

'Harry Potter!' it cried. 'So long has Dobby wanted to meet you, sir... Such an honour it is... Dobby is fine, Dobby is excited that Harry Potter is concerned for Dobby!'

'I didn't... okay. Whatever. Uh, thanks, I guess.'

Harry looked over at his desk. Hedwig was asleep in her cage with her head under her wing, which seemed to him a remarkable thing to manage with this going on. He sat down in the desk chair, mostly so that he'd be between the creature and the door. He had a great many questions. He wanted to know what the thing was, and where it had come from, and what the bloody hell it thought it had been playing at, stalking him out of the privet all morning. But it had bowed to him, and it was looking at him as if he'd hung the moon, and Harry had been brought up, whatever else you could say about the Dursleys, not to be rude to visitors. So he settled for the simplest thing.

'Who are you?'

'Dobby, sir. Just Dobby. Dobby the house-elf,' said the creature.

'Oh, right,' Harry said dryly.

He hadn't the faintest idea what a house-elf was. Nobody had covered them in first year, and if Hermione had mentioned them he hadn't been listening. He had the vaguest idea he'd heard of them before. But from who?

'Well, uh... Dobby. I have to be brutally honest with you here...'

He trailed off and turned his head towards the door. Dobby was being very loud, and the stairs at number four carried sound like a drainpipe, but for the moment there was still a murmur of Mr Mason's voice from below and no sound of Uncle Vernon's chair going back. Harry turned back to the elf.

'Look, I really don't want to be rude here. But I don't need a house-elf. I'm pleased to meet you, but...'

Dobby didn't let him finish. He flung both arms in the air and cried out at the top of his voice, which really, really wasn't helping.

'Harry Potter? Pleased to meet Dobby? Oh, what an honour this is! Oh, how magnanimous Harry Potter is! Truly, you are a champion of the Light!'

Harry winced. Downstairs, Aunt Petunia's high, false laugh rang out, the one she kept for people she wanted something from, and he knew it wouldn't take much to turn it into something else. This blubbering little creature was going to get him skinned.

'Is there any particular reason you're here?' he asked, as curtly as he could.

'Oh, yes, sir,' said Dobby earnestly. 'Dobby has come to tell you, sir... it is difficult, sir... Dobby wonders where to begin...'

'Sit down,' said Harry politely, and nodded at the bed.

To his horror, the elf burst into tears. They weren't quiet tears. They were the loudest tears Harry had ever heard come out of anything that size.

'S-sit down!' Dobby wailed. 'Never... never ever...'

Harry was sure he heard the voices downstairs falter.

'I'm sorry,' he whispered, both hands up. 'I didn't mean to offend you or anything.'

'Offend Dobby!' the elf choked. 'Dobby has never been asked to sit down by a wizard. Like an equal...'

Harry got up and did his best to steer Dobby back on to the bed, with Dobby sobbing into the pillowcase the whole way, and sobbing loudly, loudly enough that Harry could picture Uncle Vernon's head coming up from his soup like a bull's. He couldn't be angry, though. He'd meant to be, and found he couldn't. There was something about the way the elf had said it, like an equal, that had gone straight to Harry's heart, despite himself.

At last Dobby got himself under control and sat on the edge of the bed with his enormous eyes fixed on Harry, swimming with a sort of watery worship.

'You can't have met many decent wizards,' said Harry, to cheer him up.

Dobby shook his head.

Then, without any warning at all, he leapt off the bed and began slamming his head against the window frame, shouting, 'Bad Dobby! Bad Dobby!' at every blow.

'Oi, oi, pack it in, pack that in, you're going to get me in trouble. What are you doing?' Harry hissed, trying to shout and whisper at once, which can't be done. He sprang across the room, got the elf under the arms and hauled him back on to the bed. Hedwig had woken up with a screech that could have taken the paint off the ceiling and was beating her wings against the bars of her cage.

'Dobby had to punish himself, sir,' said the elf, who'd gone a little cross-eyed. 'Dobby almost spoke ill of his family, sir...'

Harry looked at Dobby, who'd gone cross-eyed from the blunt force trauma. He wondered whether all house-elves were like this, or whether there was something particularly wrong with this one. Harry was reminded of the kids in his old muggle primary school who had to have a special classroom and wore helmets to stop themselves banging their heads on walls or each other. Harry hoped other house elves weren't like this. Maybe Dobby was equally as 'special' as those other kids.

'Your family?'

'The wizard family Dobby serves, sir... Dobby is a house-elf. Bound to serve one house and one family, forever...'

'Do they know you're here?' Harry asked curiously.

Dobby shuddered from top to bottom.

'Oh no, sir, no... Dobby will have to punish himself most grievously for coming to see you, sir. Dobby will have to shut his ears in the oven door for this. If they ever knew, sir...'

'Right... and they won't notice that?'

'Dobby doubts it, sir. Dobby is always having to punish himself for something, sir. They lets Dobby get on with it, sir. Sometimes they remind me to do extra punishments...'

Harry thought of the cupboard under the stairs, and of Aunt Petunia's frying pan, and found, to his surprise, that he was angry on somebody else's behalf for once.

'If that's what they want, that's not right, Dobby. But why don't you leave? Escape?'

'A house-elf must be set free, sir. And the family will never set Dobby free... Dobby will serve the family until he dies, sir...'

Harry stared at him.

'There I was thinking I had it rough here with the Dursleys. Bloody hell... Can't anyone help you, mate?'

Dobby's eyes lit up like a pair of lamps, and the whole of him seemed to go off at once, every bit as loud as before.

'MATE? DOBBY IS HARRY POTTER'S MATE? NEVER HAS A -'

'Shut up, Dobby! You'll get me in trouble. Calm down!' Harry hissed, but it was no good. Dobby had dissolved into a chorus of sobbing wails, very loud sobbing wails, and all Harry could do was sit on the bed next to him and wait for them to pass and listen to the dining room with every nerve he had.

'Dobby has heard of your greatness, sir,' the elf gasped at last, 'but of your goodness, Dobby never knew...'

Harry, whose face had gone very hot, said, 'Whatever you've heard about my greatness is a load of rubbish. I'm not even top of my year at Hogwarts. That's Hermione, she...'

He stopped. Thinking about Hermione hurt.

'Harry Potter is humble and modest,' said Dobby reverently, and his great eyes glowed. 'Harry Potter speaks not of his triumph over He Who Must Not Be Named.'

'Voldemort?' said Harry.

Dobby clapped his hands over his ears and moaned, 'Ah, speak not the name, sir! Speak not the name!'

'I'll say the bloody name if I want. Dumbledore says fear of a name makes it powerful.' Then Harry softened. 'I do understand it, though. My mate Ron...'

He trailed off again. Thinking about Ron was no better.

Dobby leaned in close, with his eyes as wide as headlamps.

'Dobby heard tell,' he said hoarsely, 'that Harry Potter met the Dark Lord a second time, only weeks ago... that Harry Potter escaped him yet again.'

Harry nodded, and Dobby's eyes filled with tears all over again.

'Ah, sir,' he gasped, dabbing at his face with the corner of the pillowcase. 'Harry Potter is valiant and bold! He has braved so many dangers already! But Dobby has come to protect Harry Potter, to warn him, even if he does have to shut his ears in the oven door later for defying the Master. Mistress was very clear on Dobby telling Harry Potter this... Harry Potter must not go back to Hogwarts.'

Silence. Downstairs, knives and forks chinked, and Uncle Vernon's voice rumbled on about something.

'Mistress?' said Harry.

Dobby's head jerked towards the wall. Harry grabbed the elf's shoulder before it could get there.

'All right. All right, forget I asked.'

Then what Dobby had actually said caught up with him, and when he spoke again his voice had gone very dark.

'No one will ever stop me from going to Hogwarts.'

He meant every word of it. He'd have walked there, if it came to that. Anything to be out of this Muggle hell.

'Term starts on September the first. It's all that's keeping me going. You don't know what it's like here. I don't belong here. I belong in your world. At Hogwarts.' The longing in his own voice embarrassed him, and he didn't care.

'No, no, no,' squeaked Dobby, shaking his head so hard that his ears slapped his cheeks. 'Harry Potter must stay where he is safe. He is too great, too good, to lose. If Harry Potter goes back to Hogwarts, he will be in mortal danger.'

'Why?' said Harry, startled.

'There is a plot, Harry Potter. A plot to make most terrible things happen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this year,' whispered Dobby, and he'd begun to shake all over. 'Dobby has known it for months, sir. Harry Potter must not put himself in peril. He is too important, sir!'

'What terrible things?' said Harry at once. 'Who's plotting them?'

Dobby made a strangled noise, like a drain, and then threw himself at the wall and began banging his head against it.

'I told you to pack it in, bloody hell.' Harry dragged him off it. 'Fine, you can't say. I understand. But why are you warning me?'

A nasty thought had just occurred to him.

'Hang on. This hasn't got anything to do with Vol... sorry... with You Know Who, has it? You could just shake or nod,' he added hastily, as Dobby's head started to tilt towards the wall again.

Slowly, Dobby shook his head.

'Not... not He Who Must Not Be Named, sir.'

But his eyes had gone huge, and he was looking at Harry as though he were trying very hard to tell him something without any words at all. Harry, for his part, was completely at sea.

'Oh, he's got a brother, hasn't he?'

Dobby shook his head again, with his eyes wider than ever.

'Well, then, I can't think who else would have a chance of making horrible things happen at Hogwarts,' said Harry. 'I mean, there's Dumbledore, for one thing. You know who Dumbledore is, don't you?'

Dobby bowed his head.

'Albus Dumbledore is the greatest Headmaster Hogwarts has ever had. Dobby knows it, sir. Dobby has heard Dumbledore's powers rival those of He Who Must Not Be Named at the height of his strength. But, sir,' and the elf's voice dropped to a frantic whisper, 'there are powers Dumbledore doesn't... powers no decent wizard...'

And before Harry could get to him, Dobby had bounded off the bed, seized the desk lamp, and begun beating himself round the head with it, with yelps that could have split a log.

'Dobby, for the love of -'

Harry didn't finish. The dining room had gone deafeningly silent.

Two seconds later, with his heart hammering, he heard Uncle Vernon's chair go back and his feet come into the hall.

'Dudley must have left his television on again, the little tyke!'

'Quick! In the wardrobe!' Harry hissed. He got Dobby round the middle, rammed him in among the school shirts, shut the door on him, and threw himself on to the bed just as the handle turned, cursing Dobby silently the whole way in words that would have made Ron sit up and take notes.

'What... the... devil... are... you... doing?' said Uncle Vernon, through his teeth, with his face an inch from Harry's. 'You've just killed the punchline of my Japanese-golfer joke.' Harry had heard that one. He had to admit it was actually pretty funny, but not the sort of thing to repeat to people like Hermione. Who'd probably be scandalized by such a joke. 'one more sound and you'll wish you'd never been born, boy!'

He stamped flat-footed out of the room.

Shaking, Harry let Dobby out of the wardrobe.

'See what it's like here?' he said. 'See why I've got to go back to Hogwarts? It's the only place I've got... well, I think I've got friends.'

He was trying not to be angry. He'd begun to understand that there was something not right about Dobby, that the elf perhaps couldn't help half of what he did. But understanding it wasn't going to save Harry if the next yelp brought Uncle Vernon up the stairs.

'Friends who don't even write to Harry Potter?' said Dobby slyly.

'I expect they've just been... hang on,' said Harry. He frowned.

Then his face went darker than it had gone all evening.

'What does THAT mean, Dobby?' he hissed, and the elf shrank back from him as though, for one moment, Harry Potter were a more frightening thing to have in front of you than Voldemort.

Dobby shuffled his feet.

'Harry Potter mustn't be angry with Dobby... Dobby did it for the best...'

'Have you been STOPPING my letters?'

'Dobby has them here, sir,' said the elf.

He stepped nimbly out of Harry's reach, and pulled a thick wad of envelopes out of the front of the pillowcase. Harry could see Hermione's neat, upright hand, and Ron's scrawl, and a great splodgy scribble that could only have come from Hagrid.

For one second his heart went up like a bird. Then it came down again, like a stone, the stone landed on Dobby.

Dobby blinked anxiously up at him.

'Harry Potter mustn't be angry... Dobby hoped... if Harry Potter thought his friends had forgotten him... Harry Potter might not want to go back to school, sir...'

Harry wasn't listening. He lunged for the letters, and Dobby skipped out of reach.

'Harry Potter will have them, sir, if he gives Dobby his word that he will not return to Hogwarts. Ah, sir, this is a danger you must not face! Say you won't go back, sir!'

'No,' said Harry. He said it with more anger than a twelve-year-old ought to have had in him. 'Give me my friends' letters, or I'll make your master look kind compared to what I'm going to do to you!'

'Then Harry Potter leaves Dobby no choice,' said the elf sadly.

Before Harry could move, Dobby had darted to the bedroom door, wrenched it open, and gone down the stairs like a rat down a drainpipe.

Harry went after him with his mouth dry and his stomach turning over, trying not to make a sound, and finding it very hard with his blood up the way it was. He took the last six stairs in one jump and landed on the hall carpet like a cat, looking left and right.

From the dining room he heard Uncle Vernon.

'... do tell Petunia that very funny story about the American plumbers, Mr Mason, she's been dying to hear it...'

Harry ran up the hall and into the kitchen, and felt his stomach drop out of him altogether.

Aunt Petunia's masterpiece, the great white mountain of cream and sugared violets, was floating up near the ceiling. On top of the cupboard in the corner, Dobby crouched.

'No,' croaked Harry. 'Please... they'll kill me...'

'Harry Potter must say he's not going back to school...'

'Dobby... please...'

'Say it, sir...'

'I've got plenty to say to you, Dobby, and even more to do to you, but not that!'

Dobby had the cheek to look at him as if his heart were breaking. As if he weren't about to ruin Harry's life for good.

'Then Dobby must do it, sir, for Harry Potter's own good.'

It happened slowly. That was the worst of it. The pudding tipped, and hung, and fell, and seemed to take an age about it, and then it hit the kitchen floor with a crash that stopped Harry's heart. The dish burst. Cream went up the walls and across the windows and over Harry, and with a crack like a whip, Dobby was gone, a full half-second before Harry's hands would have closed round his throat.

There were screams from the dining room. Uncle Vernon came through the door and found Harry standing in the middle of the wreckage, stiff with shock and white from head to foot with Aunt Petunia's pudding.

For a minute or two it looked as if Uncle Vernon might carry it off. 'Only our nephew... very disturbed... meeting strangers upsets him, so we keep him upstairs...' He herded the Masons back into the dining room, and on the way past promised Harry, quietly, that he'd flay him to within an inch of his life once they'd gone, and put a mop in his hand.

Aunt Petunia dug a tub of ice-cream out of the freezer, and Harry, still shaking, began to scrub the kitchen. In his head he was swearing up a storm that would have had Fred and George taking their hats off to him, if they'd been able to hear it. Then even the swearing wore out, and what was left was a single word, going round and round like something on a loop. Kill. Kill. Kill. He'd kill Dobby the next time he saw him. He meant it as sincerely as a boy of twelve can mean a thing like that, which is to say completely, and without the first idea of what it would involve.

Uncle Vernon might still have had his deal. It was the owl that finished it.

Aunt Petunia was passing round the after-dinner mints when an enormous barn owl came in through the open dining-room window, dropped a letter squarely on top of Mrs Mason's head, and sailed out again. Mrs Mason screamed like a banshee and ran out of the house shouting about lunatics. Mr Mason stayed only long enough to tell the Dursleys that his wife had been terrified of birds of every size and description since she was a girl, and to ask whether this was their idea of a joke.

Uncle Vernon, trying to be diplomatic, asked whether 'their people' were always nervous of birds. Mr Mason went purple.

'Why, I never...!' he shouted, and the front door slammed behind him.

Harry stood in the kitchen with both hands on the mop handle to keep himself upright as Uncle Vernon came through the door with a look in his tiny eyes that was very nearly demonic. It had been Vernon who'd said it. Not Harry. It didn't seem to matter.

'Read it!' Uncle Vernon hissed, and he thrust the owl's letter into Harry's face. 'Go on. Read it!'

Harry took it. It wasn't a birthday card.

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 which risks notice by members of the non-magical community (Muggles) is a serious offence 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 swallowed. The rage had gone out of him, quite soberly, and what was left was cold.

'You didn't tell us you weren't allowed to do magic outside school,' said Uncle Vernon, and a mad light was dancing in his eyes. 'Slipped your mind, I expect... forgot to mention it...'

He came at Harry like a bulldog, with every one of his teeth showing.

'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 your way out, they'll throw you out of it!'

And laughing like a lunatic, he took Harry by the back of the neck and dragged him up the stairs.

'You can't do that, Uncle Vernon!'

He could. Harry heard the key turn, and the bolt go across, and Uncle Vernon's feet go away down the stairs.

Harry banged on the door. He begged through it. He shouted. And it wasn't the wizard Harry Potter who'd faced Voldemort in his first year doing the shouting. It was a small boy who'd been locked in a cupboard for being a freak, who'd never once been let out by asking. He swore at the Dursleys until he ran out of words. He hammered on the door until his knuckles split, and he screamed, and he sobbed, louder than Dobby had, and nobody came, and nobody answered, and when at last there was nothing left in him he curled up on the floor by the door and slept there.

Uncle Vernon was as good as his word.

The next morning he paid a man to put bars on Harry's window. He fitted the cat-flap in the bedroom door himself, so that food could be pushed through three times a day. It was very little food. A slice of bread, mostly, and a cup of water. Sometimes they forgot the bread. They let him out to the bathroom morning and night, and shouted him down if he so much as opened his mouth to them, and the rest of the time he was locked in, round the clock.

Three days went by. The Dursleys showed no sign of giving in, and Harry couldn't see any way out. He lay on his bed and watched the sun go down behind the bars and wondered, miserably, what was going to happen to him. What was the use of magicking himself out, if Hogwarts expelled him for it? He couldn't save himself. He was entirely at the Dursleys' mercy, and life at Privet Drive had hit a low he hadn't known it had in it. Now that they knew they weren't going to wake up as fruit bats, he'd lost the only weapon he'd ever had against them. Dobby might have saved him from whatever was waiting at Hogwarts. At this rate, he'd starve to death in Little Whinging instead.

The cat-flap rattled and Aunt Petunia's hand came through it, pushing a bowl of tinned soup across the carpet. Harry was off the bed and on it before the hand had gone. They'd forgotten him altogether the day before. No food, no bathroom, nothing. The soup was stone cold and he drank half of it in a single swallow. Then he carried the bowl over to Hedwig's cage and tipped the soggy vegetables from the bottom into her empty tray.

She ruffled every feather she had and looked at him with the deepest disgust.

'It's no good turning your beak up at it,' said Harry grimly. 'That's all we've got.'

He put the empty bowl back by the cat-flap and lay down again, hungrier, somehow, than he'd been before the soup.

Suppose he was still alive in four weeks. What would happen when he didn't turn up at Hogwarts? Would they send somebody to find out why? Could whoever they sent make the Dursleys let him go?

The room went dark round him. Worn out and empty, with the same questions going round his head and no answers to any of them, Harry slid into a thin, uneasy sleep.

He dreamed he was in a zoo. He was lying on straw in a cage with a card on the bars that said Underage Wizard, and people were filing past and goggling at him through the bars, and he was so weak with hunger he couldn't lift his head. He saw Dobby's face in the crowd and shouted for help, and Dobby called, 'Harry Potter is safe there, sir!' and was gone. Then the Dursleys were there, and Dudley was rattling the bars, and beside Dudley, with her white-blonde hair and her silver eyes and her nose in the air, stood Dracina Malfoy, laughing at him.

'Stop it,' Harry mumbled. The rattling was going straight through his sore head. 'Leave me alone... cut it out... I'm trying to sleep...'

He opened his eyes.

Moonlight was coming in through the bars. And somebody was goggling through them at him. A freckled, red-haired, long-nosed somebody.

Ron Weasley was outside Harry's window.