Touchdown

'Ron!' breathed Harry.

He crept to the window and pushed it up, so that they could talk through the bars. His head swam when he stood. It was hard to make his eyes stay on anything.

'Ron, you came?'

His friends hadn't forgotten him. The bitter canker in his chest that had been clenched for three days let go all at once, and then his mouth fell open, because the rest of what he was looking at had caught up with him.

Ron was leaning out of the back window of an old turquoise car, the car was parked in mid-air, level with the gutter, as calmly as if it had been standing at a kerb. In the front seats, grinning at him, sat Fred and George, Ron's elder twin brothers.

'All right...' Fred began.

Whatever else he'd meant to say died in his mouth. The grin went with it. He was looking at the bars on Harry's window, and then past them, at Harry, who hadn't seen a mirror in three days and didn't need one to know what he looked like.

'What's been going on?' said Ron. His voice had gone careful. His eyes went from Harry's face to the room behind him, to the bowl by the cat-flap and the bars and back again. '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 was that bloody house-elf. And wait, how did your dad know about that?'

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

Harry waved the rest of that away and pointed at the car.

'Oh, and that's not magical at all, Ron,' he said sarcastically.

Ron looked at him, and then he laughed, properly, and Harry hadn't heard anybody laugh like that in six weeks.

'Oh, Harry. I missed you, mate.' He slapped the door of the car. 'This doesn't count. We're borrowing it off my Dad. He's mental for Muggle things. He enchanted the car. But doing magic in front of those Muggles you live with... I saw what they were like at the station, mate...'

'I didn't do a bloody thing!' Harry hissed. He was too tired to be angry and too indignant not to be. 'It was that bloody damned house-elf, and when I get my hands on him he'll wish he was still just shoving his ears into ovens.'

Ron gave him a look. It was a puzzled look, and a worried one, and Harry realised that Ron had never heard him talk like that about anything, not even Snape. He made himself calm down.

'Look, Ron. It's a long bloody story. Never mind for now. Can you explain to 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.'

'Ron, these are solid metal bars. And if I can't use magic, you can't either, mate. Unless you can get Superman on the phone, or that green bloke I saw on the news, I reckon I'm stuck.'

'Who's Superman?' said Fred, interested.

'Never mind.'

'We don't need to,' said Ron, and he jerked his head at the front seats and grinned. 'You forget who I've got with me.'

And Harry remembered. Fred and George Weasley were famous at Hogwarts, or infamous, depending on who you asked,. There wasn't a locked door in the castle they hadn't been through, or a caretaker they hadn't outrun, or a corridor they hadn't rigged. The thing in Harry's chest let go a little more. If there was anybody in the world who could get him out of this room, it was the two people in the front of that car.

'Tie that round the bars,' said Fred, and he threw the end of a rope through the window.

Harry caught it, and stood holding it, and a very cold thought went through him.

'The Dursleys. If they find out... I can't...'

He trailed off. Three days of the locked door had got into him deeper than he'd known. He could hear Uncle Vernon on the stairs already, and he wasn't even on them.

'Don't worry,' said Fred. 'And stand back.'

Harry knotted the rope round the middle bar with fingers that weren't working properly, and backed away into the shadow beside Hedwig's cage. Hedwig, who seemed to understand that this was no time for noise, sat as still as a stuffed bird and didn't make a sound. The engine revved, and revved again, louder, until Harry was sure the whole street would wake, and then with a crunch of splintering sill the bars came clean out of the wall, and the car went straight up with them swinging underneath it.

Harry ran to the window. The bars dangled a few feet above the lawn. Ron, panting, hauled them up hand over hand and dragged them into the back seat.

Harry listened. Nothing. No creak from the Dursleys' room, no light under the door. He said a silent thank-you to God, and to Merlin, and to anybody else who might have been on duty.

'Get in,' said Ron.

'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 passenger seat. 'Out of the way, Harry.'

The twins climbed in through the gap where the bars had been, carefully, one after the other, and stood up in Harry's bedroom. And then they stopped.

It was the smell, first. Harry had stopped noticing it, but it had been three days of a boy and an owl in a shut room in July, with a cat-flap for air. Fred looked down at the cat-flap. George looked at the lock on the door, which was the size of a man's fist and had been screwed through the frame.

'Oh, Merlin, what were they doing to you, Harry?' said Ron, through the window, and there was something in his voice that Harry hadn't heard there before, and didn't want to hear.

Harry would have laughed, if he'd had the strength.

'Nothing. That was rather the point,' he said sadly. 'They left me in here to rot as punishment for that damned house-elf ruining their business meeting.'

Fred and George looked at each other, and neither of them said anything, which from Fred and George was saying a great deal.

'Well, we're here to get you out,' said Ron. 'Mum was right about those people, Harry.'

He said it firmly, the way he'd have said that Gryffindor were the best house or the Cannons were due a good season, as something that wasn't up for argument, and it went through Harry like warmth through cold hands. He'd never had anybody stand on his side like that. He'd never had anybody who'd fly a car to his window.

There was a click behind him.

Fred and George had done the lock. No wand, no spell, nothing but a bent bit of wire out of George's pocket, and the lock Uncle Vernon had told Harry was fitted in prisons up and down the country and couldn't be picked by anyone had opened for them in under a minute.

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

The door swung open on to the landing.

Harry started towards it, to get the trunk, and his legs went out from under him. He caught the end of the bed. The room tipped.

'I need to... get the trunk.'

'No,' said Fred.

'We'll get the trunk. You get what you need from your room,' said George.

'Can you stand?' said Fred, and he had Harry under the arm before Harry could answer.

'Were... were they starving you?' asked Ron, from the window. The horror was climbing up his face as he said it.

'N-no. No.' It came out weak and stammering, and Harry heard, with a sort of distant surprise, that he sounded like Professor Quirrell. He didn't want Ron to worry. He waved a hand at the empty soup bowl by the cat-flap. 'They gave me bread and things like that.'

Ron looked at the bowl, and at Harry, and plainly didn't believe a word of it. If anything, he looked worse.

'Watch out for the bottom stair, it creaks,' Harry whispered, as the twins went out on to the dark landing.

He went round his room as fast as he could manage, which wasn't very fast, gathering things up and passing them out through the window to Ron. Schoolbooks. The photograph album Hagrid had made him, which he'd kept under the pillow. The Weasley jumper. Then he went to the top of the stairs to help with the trunk.

Somewhere below him, Uncle Vernon coughed.

Everything stopped. Then the cough turned into a snore, and the trunk came on up, a step at a time, with Fred and George straining under it and Harry doing what he could from behind. They got it across the landing and through the bedroom and up to the window. Fred climbed back out into the car to pull with Ron, and Harry and George pushed from the room, and inch by inch the trunk slid out over the sill.

Uncle Vernon coughed again.

'A bit more,' panted Fred, from inside the car. 'One good push...'

Harry and George put their shoulders to it, and the trunk went out through the window and down into the back seat with a thump that Harry felt in his teeth.

'OK, let's go,' George whispered.

Harry got a knee on the windowsill, and from behind him came a sudden, piercing screech, and on its heels the roar of Uncle Vernon's voice through two walls.

'THAT BLOOMING OWL!'

'I've forgotten Hedwig!'

Harry tore back across the room as the landing light clicked on under the door. He snatched up the cage and ran it to the window and shoved it out into Ron's arms, and he was scrambling back up on to the chest of drawers when Uncle Vernon's fist hit the door, found it unlocked, and sent it crashing open against the wall.

For one long, swollen second Uncle Vernon stood in the doorway. Then he bellowed like a bull and came across the room and got Harry by the ankle.

And something in Harry gave way.

He'd had enough. He'd had enough of all of it, of the cupboard and the frying pan and the door and the three days, and he twisted round on the sill and went for the hand on his ankle with both of his own, clawing at it, tearing at it, with every ounce of rage and strength he had left.

'Get away! I'm not coming back! I'm never coming back! Get off of me! I hate you!'

He was spitting as he said it. Ron, Fred and George had him by the arms, all three of them, pulling for all they were worth.

'Petunia!' roared Uncle Vernon. 'He's getting away! HE'S GETTING AWAY!'

The Weasleys gave one enormous heave, and Harry's leg came out of his uncle's grip like a cork out of a bottle, and he went backwards into the car in a heap of arms and elbows. He got the door shut. He got one hand up to the window and made a gesture at the Dursleys that Dudley's friends would have recognised, and Ron yelled, 'Put your foot down, Fred!' and the car shot up towards the moon like a rocket.

Harry couldn't take it in. He was free.

He wound the window down, and the night air hit him in the face and tore at his hair, and he looked back at the roofs of Privet Drive shrinking under them, and at the three of them, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia and Dudley, hanging out of his bedroom window with their mouths open.

'I hope you die of diabetes, you fat-'

The rest went into the wind, because the car gave a lurch and a jerk, and Harry's head hit the roof.

'Sorry. Dad taught me how to make this thing go, but I'm still figuring on how this bleedin' Muggle contraption works,' said Fred, waving a hand at the steering wheel.

The Dursleys were far too far behind to hear any more of Harry's language, however colourful, so he gave it up and sat back in the seat.

And that was when the tears came.

He couldn't help them. He didn't try very hard. They were tears of relief, and they came in a rush, and he put his face in his hands so that the others wouldn't see.

'I'm free,' he said. 'I'm finally free.'

'It's okay, Harry,' said Ron. He put a hand on Harry's shoulder and left it there, which was more than Harry could have asked of him.

'I thought I'd never be let out again. They... they wouldn't let me go to Hogwarts. I was trapped. It was like being in the cupboard again.'

And then everything in him pulled tight.

'All because of that evil little house-elf!' Harry hissed.

'What do you mean by being in the cupboard, Harry?' said Ron. His face had gone very serious.

Harry looked at him and remembered, with a lurch, that he'd never told Ron. Not about the cupboard, not about the ten years in it, not really anything at all about what the Dursleys were. He'd stopped telling people a long time ago, because nobody ever believed him, and after a while the not being believed was worse than the thing itself. He didn't want to start now, in the back of a flying car at three in the morning with his face still wet.

'Let Hedwig out,' he said. 'She can fly behind us. She hasn't had a chance to stretch her wings for ages.'

George passed the hairpin back, and Ron worked it in the padlock, and a moment later Hedwig went out through the window in one long, joyful sweep and settled in beside the car, gliding on the night air like a ghost. All four of them watched her. It was beautiful enough, Harry was glad to see, to take Ron's mind off cupboards.

'So. What's the story, Harry?' said Ron, when Hedwig had settled into their slipstream. 'What's been happening?'

Harry told them. All of it. Dobby, and the warning, and the letters down the front of the pillowcase, and the pudding, and the owl on Mrs Mason's head. When he'd finished there was a long silence in the car.

'Very fishy,' said Fred at last.

'Definitely dodgy,' George agreed.

'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 near letting something out he started banging his head on the wall.'

He saw Fred and George exchange a look in the front.

'What, you think he was lying to me?'

'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 masters' say-so. I reckon old Dobby was sent to stop you coming back to Hogwarts. Somebody's idea of a joke. Can you think of anyone at school with a grudge against you?'

'Yes,' said Harry and Ron, together, without a pause.

'Dracina Malfoy,' Harry explained. 'She hates me.'

'Ah, yeah,' said Fred. 'She was going round the whole school whilst you were in the hospital wing last year. Telling us all she was going to get you all back for the Body-Bind spell you did on her.'

'I didn't do it,' said Harry automatically. 'Hermione did it.'

'Not what she was telling people.'

'That's Lucius Malfoy's girl, right?' asked George.

'Must be. It's not a very common name, is it?' said Harry. 'Why?'

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

'And when You Know Who went,' said Fred, twisting round in the driver's seat to look at Harry, which did nothing for the steering, 'Lucius Malfoy came back saying he'd never meant a word of it. Load of dung. Dad reckons he was right in You Know Who's inner circle. The Malfoys have always been Dark wizards, even all the way back to the Norman conquest. When they first came over here.'

Harry had heard that part before, from Hermione, in a corridor, with Dracina's cheeks going pink. And then another memory came up out of nowhere, and he sat forward.

'Oh, God, I remember now. Dracina... Malfoy, I mean... she talked about having a house-elf when we had detention with Quirrell in the Forbidden Forest.'

'Well, whoever owns that elf 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.'

'Woah, wait. You have a ghoul in the attic?' asked Harry, horrified.

'Yeah,' said Ron, matter-of-factly. And that was all he said.

'And you're not all that bothered by the flesh-eating monster in your attic?' Harry asked dryly.

'We tried to get him out, but we need a proper professional, and for a ghoul it's too bloody expensive. We're saving up, though. Mum feeds it the gnomes sometimes. And he doesn't ever come out of the attic,' said Ron, who seemed to think this settled it.

Harry decided to put the ghoul out of his mind, and his thoughts went back to Dracina Malfoy, which wasn't where he wanted them.

She'd always had the best of everything, so her family had to be rolling in it. He could picture her perfectly, strutting the halls of some great manor house with her nose in the air and that smug, silver-eyed look on her face, snapping her fingers at some poor creature in a pillowcase. And sending the family servant to keep Harry away from Hogwarts was exactly the sort of thing Malfoy would do. It had her fingerprints all over it. Whoever Dobby's master was, though, Harry had already made up his mind that if he and the elf met again, Dobby would be sorry for every one of those three days.

And he'd made up his mind about something else. He was never going back to the Dursleys. Never. The voice in his head laughed at that, the way it laughed at most things, and told him exactly how long that resolution would last. Harry set his jaw and ignored it.

'I'm glad we came to get you, anyway,' said Ron. 'I was getting really worried when you didn't answer any of my letters. I thought it was Errol's fault at first...'

'Who's Errol?'

'Our owl. He's ancient. It wouldn't be the first time he'd collapsed on a delivery. So then I tried to borrow Hermes...'

'Who?'

'The owl Mum and Dad bought Percy when he was made a prefect,' said Fred, from the front.

'But Percy wouldn't lend him to me,' said Ron. 'Said he needed him.'

'Percy's been acting very oddly this summer,' said George, frowning. 'Ever since Mum took away that statue Charlie gave him, he has been sending a lot of letters and spending a load of time shut up in his room... I mean, there's only so many times you can polish a prefect badge... You're driving too far west, Fred,' he added, pointing at a compass on the dashboard.

Fred twiddled the wheel.

Something had just occurred to Harry.

'So, Ron...'

'Yes?' said Ron innocently.

'I'm just wondering, for my own benefit, but when you "borrowed" your Dad's flying car, you did ask him first, right?'

Ron's face dropped.

'Well... um.'

'No, then,' Harry answered his own question. 'No, you didn't.'

'He was busy at work, mate. I couldn't get to him in time. Hopefully we'll be able to get it back in the garage without Mum noticing we flew it.'

'What does your dad do at the Ministry of Magic, anyway?' Harry asked.

'He works in the most boring department there is,' said Ron. 'The Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office.'

'The what?'

'It's all to do with bewitching things that are Muggle-made, you know, in case they end up back in a Muggle shop or house. Like, last year, some old witch died, and she had this tea set given to her by a formerly cursed Muggle French nobleman and his peasant wife, and her tea set was sold to an antiques shop. This little old Muggle lady bought it, took it home, and tried to serve her friends tea in it. It was a nightmare. Dad was working overtime for weeks.'

'What happened?' asked Harry.

'Well, they came alive and started dancing and speaking to one another. The little old lady died of shock. The other people went mad. Dad was going spare about it all. It's only him and an old warlock called Perkins in the office, and they had to do Memory Charms and all sorts to cover it up...'

'Dancing,' said Harry.

'The teapot sang, apparently.'

'But your dad... this car...'

Fred laughed.

'Yeah, Dad's mad about everything to do with Muggles. Our shed's full of Muggle stuff. He takes it apart, puts spells on it and puts it back together again. If he raided our house he'd have to put himself straight under arrest. It drives Mum mad.'

'That's the main road,' said George, peering down through the windscreen. 'We'll be there in ten minutes... just as well, it's getting light...'

A thin pink line had come up along the eastern edge of the sky. Fred took the car down, and Harry saw a dark quilt of fields, and hedges, and clumps of trees.

'We're a little way outside the village,' said George. 'Ottery St Catchpole...'

Lower and lower. The rim of a red sun showed through the trees.

'Touchdown!' said Fred, and with a small bump they were on the ground.

They'd come down beside a tumbledown garage in a small yard, and Harry looked out of the window and saw Ron's house for the first time.

It looked as though it had started out as a big stone pigsty, and then somebody had kept adding rooms on to it, here and there and on top, until it was four or five storeys high and so crooked that it could only have been standing up by magic, which, Harry reminded himself, it probably was. Half a dozen chimneys sat on the red roof at odd angles. A lopsided sign by the gate said The Burrow. Round the front door was a heap of wellington boots and a cauldron gone rusty, and several fat brown hens were picking their way across the yard as though they owned it.

'It's not much,' said Ron.

'It's brilliant,' said Harry, and he meant it with his whole heart.

He thought of Privet Drive, with its clipped lawn and its hedge at exactly the right height for spying, and he didn't let himself have the stab of envy he'd had at Christmas, over the jumper. It still puzzled him, though, how Ron could look at this and shrug. The house was odd, and crooked, and the garden was a jungle, and every inch of it looked warm, and lived in, and glad to see you. Beyond it the fields went rolling away into a morning mist that was turning gold. And best of all, there wasn't a Dursley in it. Not a soapy frying pan, not a fat hand round an ankle, not for miles. Harry couldn't think of anywhere on earth he'd rather be, except for one.

They got out of the car.

'Now, we'll go up really quietly,' said Fred, 'and wait for Mum to call us for breakfast. Then Ron, you come bounding down going, "Mum, look who turned up in the night!" and she'll be all pleased to see Harry, and no one need ever know we flew the car.'

'Right,' said Ron.

Harry was so tired he could hardly stand. The yard was swaying gently, like the deck of a boat. All he wanted in the world was a bed.

'Come on, Harry, I sleep at the...'

Ron had gone a horrible greenish colour, and his eyes were fixed on the house.

The other three turned round.

Mrs Weasley was coming across the yard, scattering hens, and the kind woman who'd knitted Harry a jumper and made him fudge for Christmas was nowhere to be seen. What was coming across the yard was a mother bear. Harry hoped, from the bottom of his heart, that he hadn't upset her too badly.

'Ah,' said Fred.

'Oh dear,' said George.

Mrs Weasley stopped in front of them with her hands on her hips and looked from one guilty face to the next. She was wearing a flowered apron with a wand sticking out of the pocket.

'So,' she said.

'Morning, Mum,' said George, in what he obviously believed was a winning sort of voice.

'Have you any idea how worried I've been?' said Mrs Weasley, in a whisper that was far worse than shouting.

'Sorry, Mum, but see, we had to...'

All three of her sons were taller than she was, and all three of them shrank as she went off like a firework.

'Beds empty! No note! Car gone... could have crashed... out of my mind with worry... did you care?... never, as long as I've lived... you wait until your father gets home, we never had trouble like this from Bill or Charlie or Percy...'

She was upset, Harry thought. He'd done that. All he ever did was upset people, by showing them what he was. The voice had got very loud, and the yard was swaying worse, and he was so tired and so dizzy that he couldn't tell any more where the voice stopped and his own thoughts began. Ungrateful. Look what you've done. You've got Ron in trouble, and the twins, and she's angry at you too, she's only not saying it, and any minute now she'll tell you to go. Why would anybody let you stay anywhere?

'Perfect Percy,' muttered Fred.

'YOU COULD DO WITH TAKING A LEAF OUT OF PERCY'S BOOK!' Mrs Weasley shouted, and jabbed a finger into Fred's chest. 'You could have died, you could have been seen, you could have lost your father his job...'

Harry felt sick. The anxiety and the exhaustion had hold of him together, and he had to say something, he had to, before Mrs Weasley got really angry and turned round and did something to him.

'Mrs Weasley,' said Harry weakly. 'I'm really sorry. Really, really sorry. This is my fault. I'm sorry for getting Ron in trouble. I...'

The yard went grey at the edges, and then black, and the ground came up very gently to meet him, and he couldn't hold on to any of it any more. He heard voices, from a long way off.

'Harry!' screamed Ron.

'Oh, Merlin, what did those foul Muggles do to that poor boy?' said another voice.

Harry barely heard it. Everything went black.