The Man Outside the Church

Number four, Privet Drive, had become a very strange place to live.

Harry Potter had been back there for five weeks, since the end of his second year at Hogwarts, and in those five weeks he had come to understand that something had happened to the Dursleys while he was away. He didn't know what. Dumbledore had given him his word, on the steps of the castle with the sun on the lake, that his aunt and uncle would never mistreat him again. Dumbledore had said he'd been to Privet Drive himself, sat in the front room, and made quite sure of it. Harry had wondered, all the way home on the train, what that could possibly mean.

He still didn't know. But whatever it was, it had worked.

Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were as rude and as smug as ever. They still went rigid whenever Harry mentioned magic, or Hogwarts, or owls, or anything that began with M. But in five whole weeks, neither of them had raised a hand to him. Not a hand, not a frying pan, not a rolling pin, not a rolled-up newspaper, not Uncle Vernon's old slipper with the mould on the heel that he kept behind the kitchen door specially. Not once. They let him do his homework in his room without so much as a knock. They let Hedwig out of her cage. And on the third night, at dinner, the strangest thing of all had happened.

Aunt Petunia had been dishing up. Pork chops, mash, peas, the lot. She'd put a plate in front of Uncle Vernon and a plate in front of Dudley and sat down with her own, and Harry had stood in the kitchen doorway, as he always did, waiting to be told to get out, or to be handed a crust and sent upstairs.

And Aunt Petunia had twitched.

It was a very odd twitch. Her whole thin neck had jerked, as though somebody had whispered something in her ear, and her face had gone the colour of the mash, and she'd looked at Uncle Vernon. And Uncle Vernon had gone purple, and then grey, and then purple again, and then he'd twitched too, exactly the same way, as if the same thing had been said to him. The two of them had sat there for a moment with their knives and forks in the air, looking as though they'd both just remembered something truly horrible.

Then Aunt Petunia had got up, without a word, and fetched a fourth plate, and put a chop on it, and mash, and peas, and banged it down on the table in front of the empty chair so hard the gravy jumped.

'Sit,' she'd said.

Harry had sat.

It had been like that every evening since. They never said anything about it. They never looked at him while he ate. Uncle Vernon chewed with his eyes fixed furiously on the wall, and Aunt Petunia's lips went so thin they vanished, and the cutlery went down on the table like a slap every single time. Sometimes it was only bread. Sometimes it was what Dudley hadn't finished. But there was always something, and there was always a plate, and there was always that twitch first, from both of them, as though a hand had been laid on the backs of their necks.

Harry wouldn't have called it pleasant. Dinner at Privet Drive was never going to be dinner at the Burrow, with a tableful of Weasleys talking at once and Mrs Weasley putting a third sausage on his plate when she thought he wasn't looking. But it was food, and it was every day, and nobody had hit him.

Harry would have given a great deal to know what Dumbledore had said in that front room.

He missed the Weasleys terribly. For most of a year he'd thought he was going to the Burrow for the summer. Mrs Weasley had said as long as you want with her hand on his head, and Ron had said you're ours now, deal with it about a hundred times. Harry had let himself believe it, right up until Dumbledore stepped out of the shadow of the castle doors. Being taken in and then sent back was worse, somehow, than never having been taken in at all. He knew that wasn't fair. He thought it anyway.

He missed Ron. He missed Hermione. He even, at odd moments, in the long empty afternoons, spared a thought for Dracina Malfoy, which surprised him every time it happened. He'd sat on the end of her bed in the hospital wing at one in the morning and they'd talked for the first time in two years. She'd giggled, and he'd told her he liked it. He hoped that had stuck. He hoped that when he got back in September there'd be a slightly nicer Dracina waiting, one he could call a friend without having to brace himself first.

And there was something else on his mind. Something he'd been carrying about for five weeks like a stone in his shoe.

Just before he'd killed the Basilisk, when he'd been lying on the floor of the Chamber with its venom in his arm and the dark coming up over him, Harry had heard a voice. A warm voice. A kind one, but firm, and wise, and old, in a way that had nothing to do with years. Your work is not yet done, my child. And then the pain had gone, all at once, as if somebody had lifted it off him, Fawkes the Phoenix had come, he'd stood up, and he'd pulled a sword out of a hat then he took the head off a fifty-foot snake. And afterwards, when the searing pain came back and he thought he was dying whilst lying beside Dracina, he'd seen a man.

A man with long brown hair and a beard and a plain white robe, standing by a fallen pillar, looking at him.

The rational part of Harry's mind, the part that had been raised in Little Whinging on Uncle Vernon's opinions and Aunt Petunia's Channel 4 documentaries, had a perfectly good explanation for all of that. He'd been dying. He'd had Basilisk venom in his blood. People saw things when they were dying. Everybody knew that. It was the same part of his mind that had once told him, quite firmly, that there was no such thing as pixies, or unicorns, or centaurs, or magic of any kind, and had gone on telling him so for two years while he'd seen and experienced all of it.

It was a very confident part of his mind. It was wrong about nearly everything.

Harry Potter was a wizard. He was the Boy Who Lived. He'd beaten Lord Voldemort as a baby, because of what his dying mother had done for him. And Dumbledore had sat him down in Professor McGonagall's office with the sword across his knees and told him it belonged to an ancient and noble bloodline, and that it had had a few names before that. And then, on the steps, with the lake blazing behind him, explaining why Harry had to go back to Privet Drive, he'd said something about Harry's mother's protection that Harry had been turning over ever since. Old magic. Older than anything I can do. The magic of Elves, Harry. And of Númenor.

Harry had thought of Dobby, at the time, and had known at once that that wasn't what Dumbledore meant. And he'd never heard the other word in his life. He'd been fairly sure of that. The trouble was that he'd been wrong, because he'd found, in the pile of Dudley's unwanted Christmas presents in the second bedroom, an enormous doorstop of a book with all three parts of The Lord of the Rings bound into one, which Dudley had been given by Aunt Marge and had used to prop up a wobbly table. Harry had read the first part of it years ago, in a corner of the school library, hiding from Dudley, and never finished it. He was finishing it now. And Númenor was in it. It was a great kingdom in the West, drowned under the sea before the story even started. And there were Elves in it, who had nothing whatever to do with Dobby. And there was a sword in it. A sword that had been broken, and made again, and given a new name, and carried by a man who looked like nobody much until you needed him to be a king, and whose line went back and back and back, to that same drowned kingdom.

Harry had had the strangest feeling, in the Chamber, with the thing in his hand, that he'd read about it before. He had it worse now. And Riddle had said something, right at the end, with the ink coming out of him. A borrowed sword from a long forgotten ancestor. Harry had thought it was just spite. He wasn't sure any more that it had been.

How could a sword out of a book be anything to do with him?

He was getting off the point. He knew he was. He suspected he was doing it on purpose, because the point was a very uncomfortable one, and it was this.

Harry was almost sure that the man in the Chamber had been Jesus Christ.

He'd been sure on the platform at King's Cross. Sure enough to stand in the middle of the concourse with his trunk and his owl and cross himself, clumsily, in front of everybody, feeling a fool and doing it anyway. Five weeks of Privet Drive had worn that down to something a good deal shakier. He didn't know why he'd been sure. He'd only ever seen the face in a window, once, when he was seven, through a gap in the carols. But he'd known it when he saw it again, in the green dark, by the pillar, and the man had looked at him with pride. As if he'd always known Harry could do it. As if he'd been waiting for Harry to prove him right, and Harry had, and he was glad.

It was exactly how Harry had always imagined his father would look at him, if he'd had one.

He'd have put the whole thing down to the venom, buried it, and never thought about it again. Except that Dracina had seen him too. She'd described him, lying in the hospital wing with her hair full of dust, before Harry had said a word. The robe. The hair. The look. Two people couldn't hallucinate the same man.

And yet.

You're not a Christian, said the rational voice. You never have been. You don't believe any of it. You don't know the first thing about it. Why on earth would somebody like that bother with somebody like you?

Harry didn't have an answer.

Three times in the last month he'd walked to St Michael's, the Anglican church at the end of Magnolia Crescent, the one with the lych-gate, the yew trees and the noticeboard about the jumble sale. Three times he'd stood on the pavement outside with his hands in his pockets, looking at the door. And three times he'd turned round and walked home again.

It was nonsense. It was silly. There was no God, and there was no Jesus, and there was no point going into a cold stone building to look for them. He didn't know what you did in there anyway. He didn't know when you stood up or sat down or what the words were. He'd only been inside a church once in his life. He'd feel a fool.

The Dursleys weren't Christians. They'd gone to church perhaps twice that Harry could remember, once because the Polkisses had started going and Aunt Petunia wasn't going to be outdone, and once, leaving Harry at Mrs Figg's, because a man Uncle Vernon wanted to sell drills to was a churchwarden. Beyond that, the Dursleys thought about God precisely as much as most of Little Whinging did, which was not at all, except to feel rather superior to anybody who did. Uncle Vernon laughed at the television whenever a vicar came on the news. He had a particular snort he kept for it. Bloody God-botherers, he'd say, and look round the room to make sure everyone had noticed how much cleverer he was than them.

And if Harry was honest, that was more or less what he'd always thought too. He'd never had any reason to think anything else.

The wizarding world didn't seem to have much time for it either. The homework he was trying to do at that very moment made it quite clear.

He was sitting at his desk under the lamp, with the door shut and the house dark and quiet around him, writing an essay. One of the very few good things about the Dursleys' house, as against Hogwarts, was that it had pens. He'd never thought about pens until he'd spent two years with a quill. Pens didn't need an inkpot. Pens didn't blot. Pens didn't leak down your sleeve in the middle of a sentence. He had a biro in his hand and a roll of parchment under it, and he thought it was the finest combination in the world.

The essay was for History of Magic. Witch Burning in the Fourteenth Century Was Completely Pointless. Discuss.

A History of Magic, by Bathilda Bagshot, was propped open against the lamp. It had a good deal to say on the subject.

The non-magical population of medieval Europe (see Chapter Three, Muggles) lived in considerable terror of witchcraft, and was almost wholly incapable of detecting it. Of the many thousands put to the stake between 1300 and 1400, the overwhelming majority had no magic whatever. On the rare occasions when a genuine witch or wizard was taken, the fire did them no harm at all: a simple Flame-Freezing Charm turned the flames into a mild and rather agreeable warmth, and the condemned had only to shriek convincingly for the benefit of the crowd. Wendelin the Weird is recorded as having found the sensation so delightful that she contrived to be arrested and burned on no fewer than forty-seven occasions, under a variety of names and hats.

Harry copied it down, and chewed the end of the biro, and read on.

A History of Magic was full of this sort of thing. It was full of frightened, superstitious, irrational Muggles who'd thought magic was the devil's work and set fire to anybody who looked at them sideways, and who nearly always got the wrong person, and who, on the rare occasions they got the right one, did them no harm at all. The book made it very plain that this was all because of the Church. Christianity, as far as Bathilda Bagshot was concerned, was the main reason wizards and Muggles should never have mixed in the first place and the main reason they'd stopped. It came up every few chapters, in the same tone Aunt Petunia used for the neighbours' bins.

And it wasn't only the book. Harry had thought about it, this last month, and he couldn't think of a single pure-blood witch or wizard he'd ever met who'd mentioned God at all. Not once. Not Ron, not Mrs Weasley, not Hagrid, not Dumbledore. Nobody said grace at Hogwarts. There was no chapel. The nearest thing was Nearly Headless Nick's Deathday Party.

Wizards either turned their noses up at the whole business or, more often, simply didn't think about it, the way they didn't think about electricity or football or anything else Muggles did.

Harry put it out of his head. Firmly.

Even if it was real, he thought, he was a wizard, and Christians would never understand that. A History of Magic was quite right about that much. They'd burned people for less. It was stupid, and it was silly, and there was almost certainly a perfectly rational explanation for a man in a white robe in a sewer that he just hadn't thought of yet.

He sighed. He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his pyjamas and put them back on.

Then he bent over the parchment and wrote about Wendelin the Weird.

He'd got as far as forty-seven times in various disguises when the ache in his hand made him stop and flex it, and his eyes went, as they'd been going all evening, to the window.

Nothing. Dark garden, dark sky, the orange glow of the streetlamp on Privet Drive. No owl.

He'd had no word from anybody for five weeks.

It was his own fault, really. He'd made the mistake of thinking that a telephone number was the same as a telephone call, and that a telephone call was the same as a conversation. It had never occurred to him, sitting on the Hogwarts Express with his quill out, that the person who answered the telephone at number four might not be him.

It had happened on the fourth day. Harry had been upstairs, lying on his bed with the book of the three parts open on his chest, when the telephone had rung in the hall, and Uncle Vernon had answered it the way he always did, with his sales voice, as though whoever it was might want to buy a drill.

'Vernon Dursley speaking.'

Then there'd been a silence, and then Uncle Vernon's voice had changed.

'WHO IS THIS?' it had bellowed up the stairs. 'WHO ARE YOU?'

Harry had sat up so fast the book slid off onto the floor. He'd heard it even from his bedroom, tiny and furious and a very long way away, coming out of the receiver like something out of a tin. Somebody at the other end was shouting at the top of their lungs, and shouting the way people do when they've never used a telephone in their lives and are quite sure the thing has to be yelled across the whole distance in between.

'RON. WEASLEY! I'M. A. FRIEND. OF. HARRY'S. FROM. SCHOOL—'

Harry had been on the landing by then, with his hand on the banister and his heart going like a drum, and he'd seen Uncle Vernon's face. He'd never seen it quite that colour. It was the colour of a bruise.

'THERE IS NO HARRY POTTER HERE!' Uncle Vernon had roared, holding the receiver out at arm's length as if it might explode. 'I DON'T KNOW WHAT SCHOOL YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT! NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN! DON'T YOU COME NEAR MY FAMILY!'

And he'd slammed the receiver down so hard that the little bell inside the telephone had gone ting, and then he'd turned round, and seen Harry on the stairs.

For about two seconds Harry had thought it was all going to be the way it had always been. Uncle Vernon's hand had come up. His whole bulk had come forward with his moustache bristling and his small eyes almost disappearing into his face.

'HOW DARE YOU GIVE THIS NUMBER TO PEOPLE LIKE—'

And then he'd twitched.

It had been exactly the same twitch as at dinner. His neck had jerked, his face had gone from purple to the grey of old porridge, and his hand had stopped where it was in the air and hung there, trembling, as though it had run into a wall. He'd stood like that at the bottom of the stairs for a long, strange moment, breathing through his nose, with his eyes bulging at Harry and something very like fright going across the back of them.

'People like you,' he'd finished, in a much smaller voice. Then he'd turned round and walked into the living room, and shut the door, and Harry had heard the television go on, far too loud.

That had been the fourth day. And that had been the last Harry had heard of Ron Weasley, or anybody else.

He knew why, of course. Ron had heard Uncle Vernon. Ron had heard him bellow there is no Harry Potter here and never contact me again, and Ron, who'd seen the bars on Harry's window with his own eyes last summer, and had asked through them whether Harry was being starved, would be lying in bed at the Burrow at this very moment absolutely convinced that he'd got Harry into the worst trouble of his life. He'd be too frightened to write. He'd have told Hermione not to write either, in case it made things worse. He'd be waiting for the car to be needed.

It made Harry want to laugh and shout at the same time. I'm all right, he wanted to write. They don't hit me any more. I don't know why, but they don't. You could ring every night and nothing would happen except Uncle Vernon going grey. But he couldn't write it, because he'd have needed Hedwig to carry it, and that was the other thing.

The Dursleys had let Hedwig out.

They'd done it on the second night, without being asked, in the same stiff, furious, twitching way they did everything else now. Uncle Vernon had come upstairs after dinner and stood in the doorway of Harry's room, not looking at the owl, and said, to the wardrobe, 'That thing. You'll let it out at night. I'm not having it screeching. The neighbours.' And he'd gone away again.

Harry had lain awake for an hour afterwards, in case it was a trick. Then he'd opened the cage, and Hedwig had looked at him with her great amber eyes, as if she didn't believe it either, and she'd hopped onto the sill and gone out into the dark like a thrown snowball, and Harry had watched her go with a feeling in his chest he couldn't name.

She came back most mornings, before it was light, and sat in her cage with her feathers fluffed and the look of an owl who had eaten a great many voles. She hadn't come back for the last three. Harry had been telling himself, each morning, that there was nothing to worry about, that she was a sensible owl and knew her own business, and each morning he'd believed it a little less. He'd thought about sending her to the Burrow a dozen times. He'd even written the letter. But Hedwig would come down at the Burrow in broad daylight, white as a sheet, and if anybody from the Ministry had been told to keep an eye out for owls at Privet Drive, after the warning he'd had last summer, that would be that. He wasn't sure anybody was. But he wasn't sure they weren't, either. And he'd found, this summer, that he was very tired of being in trouble.

So he'd let her hunt, and he'd written nothing, and he'd waited.

Five weeks.

He flexed his hand again, and looked at the clock on the bedside table, and put the biro down.

He'd gone to the church again tonight.

The fourth time. He hadn't meant to. He'd gone out after dinner because the house was too hot and the twitching was too much to sit in, and he'd walked down Privet Drive, and along Wisteria Walk, and up Magnolia Crescent, the way you did when you weren't going anywhere in particular, and his feet had taken him to the lych-gate at the end of it all on their own, the way they always seemed to.

It had been a soft, gold, dusty evening, with the smell of cut grass in it and the swifts screaming round the tower. The door of St Michael's had been open. That was new. There'd been light inside, and the sound of an organ being played badly, the same few bars over and over, as if somebody was practising. The noticeboard said Evensong, Sundays, 6.30 p.m., under the jumble sale.

He'd stood on the pavement with his hands in his pockets and looked at the door.

Go on, said a bit of him.

Don't be stupid, said the rest.

He'd been standing there for a good five minutes, and had just about decided to go home, when he'd realised he wasn't on his own.

There was an old man sitting on the bench inside the lych-gate. Harry didn't know how he'd missed him. He wasn't small. He was, in fact, one of the tallest old men Harry had ever seen, long and thin and knobbly, with his knees sticking up because the bench was too low for him, and he was dressed in the most peculiar clothes. A short-sleeved shirt, grey, buttoned right up to the throat. Khaki shorts, the sort men wore in old films about Africa, that came down to his knees. Sandals, with socks. And a beard, a long grey beard, which he'd tucked down the front of the shirt as if he'd got tired of it, and which came out again at the bottom.

Harry had the odd impression that the clothes were a costume. That the man had put them on that morning after looking at a picture of what old men wore in Surrey in summer and getting it very nearly, but not quite, right.

The smell reached him a second later. It was herbs. Strong ones. Not a nice, kitchen, roast-dinner smell, but a raw, green, bitter, pungent reek, like a whole spice rack dropped in a bonfire, with something sharp and sweet underneath it that caught at the back of Harry's throat and made his eyes prickle. It came off the old man in waves. Harry wondered how the swifts could stand it.

The old man was watching him.

He'd been watching him, Harry realised, for some time. He had a stick between his knees and both hands folded on the top of it and his chin on his hands, and he was looking at Harry from under two of the biggest, bushiest, greyest eyebrows Harry had ever seen on a human being, and his eyes were very bright, and very blue, and very, very old, and they were studying Harry with an interest that was somehow neither rude nor friendly, but simply there, like weather.

Harry's neck went hot.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I wasn't... I'm just going.'

'Were you?' said the old man.

His voice was deep, and dry, and had a crackle in it like a good fire. It didn't sound like a Surrey voice. It didn't, Harry thought, sound like anywhere.

'You've been standing on that pavement,' the old man went on, 'for eleven minutes. By my count. You stood there for nine on Tuesday, and six the week before, and I have a feeling I missed a visit somewhere in between.' He didn't move. 'For a boy who's just going, you spend a great deal of time not going.'

Harry stared at him. He could feel his face burning.

'I wasn't doing anything,' he said.

'No,' the old man agreed. 'That's what I said.'

Inside, the organist got the bars wrong again, and stopped, and started.

'The door's open,' said the old man, after a moment. 'In case you were wondering. It usually is, this time of day. Nobody's going to ask you for a ticket.' The bright blue eyes went over Harry's face, and his hair, and, Harry thought, for a fraction of a second, his forehead. 'And nobody in there is going to set fire to you, whatever the history books may tell you. That went out of fashion a long time ago. Rather before my time, even.'

Harry's mouth had gone dry.

'I don't,' he started, and didn't know how to finish. I don't believe in it. I don't know what to do in there. I'm not the sort of person who goes in there. I'm a... 'I don't think it's for me,' he said.

The old man considered this.

'Hm,' he said. 'Well. You'd know, I suppose. Boys of thirteen usually do.' He lifted his chin off his hands, and the eyebrows went up, and under them, for the first time, there was something that might have been a smile. 'Though I've noticed, in a long life, that the ones who say it's not for me on the pavement are rarely the ones it isn't for. The ones it isn't for don't stop walking.'

He settled his chin back on the stick.

'Go home, lad,' he said, not unkindly. 'It's nearly dark. It'll still be here tomorrow. It's been here rather longer than you'd think.'

Harry went.

He didn't know why he did what he was told. He didn't know why his heart was hammering, or why his hands, in his pockets, were damp. He walked away down Magnolia Crescent much faster than he'd come, with that bitter green smell following him for twenty yards, and when he got to the corner he couldn't stand it any longer, and looked back.

The bench inside the lych-gate was empty.

The door of St Michael's was still open, and the organ was still going, and the swifts were still screaming round the tower, and there was nobody there at all.

He'd walked the rest of the way home very quickly indeed, and he'd gone straight upstairs and shut his door and got the History of Magic essay out, because an essay about witch-burning in the fourteenth century was, just at that moment, the most ordinary thing he could think of to do.

And now it was nearly midnight.

He looked at the clock again, his stomach gave a small, familiar, foolish lurch.

In a few minutes, he'd be thirteen.

It was a stupid thing to feel anything about. He knew that. Nobody at number four had ever marked his birthday with anything but a coat-hanger, and he didn't expect this year to be any different, twitch or no twitch. Last year his birthday had been the night Dobby turned up in his bedroom and the pudding went on the ceiling. Then the bars had gone on the window the morning after. The year before, it had been a hut on a rock in the sea, and Hagrid kicking the door down, and a squashed cake in a box. Before that, nothing. Eleven years of nothing.

But he'd found, lying awake in the long light evenings of this strange, quiet summer, that he couldn't help it. Something in him had learnt to look forward to the thirty-first of July, and it wouldn't be told.

He watched the clock.

Eleven fifty-eight. Eleven fifty-nine.

He thought, out of nowhere, of the old man on the bench. Boys of thirteen usually do. He hadn't been thirteen then. He wasn't thirteen now. He would be in...

The clock said twelve.

Thirteen, Harry thought. Happy birthday.

And from somewhere out in the dark, over the rooftops of Privet Drive, there came a soft, rushing, feathery sound that he knew in his bones, and before he'd even turned round, Hedwig had come in through the open window like a thrown snowball and landed on the end of the bed, and something in Harry's chest that had been knotted for three days came undone, and she was not alone.

There were four of them.

Hedwig was the first, and she dropped onto the bedspread with something large and lumpy clutched in her talons and a look of enormous self-satisfaction. The second came in behind her in a flurry and a flap and a bang and went straight into the lampshade, and bounced, and fell onto the desk in a heap of grey feathers on top of Harry's essay, and lay there with its legs in the air, panting. That one Harry knew too. That was Errol, the Weasleys' owl, who was about a hundred years old and had never in his life arrived anywhere without crashing into it. He had a parcel tied to his legs nearly as big as he was.

The third was a tawny, a sleek brown bird with a serious face, which came in neatly, landed on the back of Harry's chair, held out a leg with a letter and a parcel on it, and waited, the way school owls did, as if it were on a timetable.

The fourth took its time.

It came in last, through the window, slowly, with great sweeps of its wings, as if the window were slightly beneath it. It was enormous. It was an eagle owl, a huge, dark, barred thing with ear tufts like horns and eyes the colour of marmalade, and it looked round Harry's small untidy bedroom, at the peeling wallpaper and the broken wardrobe and the owl on her back on the desk, with an expression of the deepest disdain. Then it settled, very precisely, on the one clear corner of the bedside table, folded its wings, lifted one leg, to which a letter had been tied with a length of thin green ribbon, and turned its head away, as though it would prefer not to watch what happened next.

Harry had seen that owl before. He was almost sure of it. At the Slytherin table, at breakfast, every single morning for two years, delivering parcels of sweets from home, which she unwrapped at the table as though the whole Hall ought to be watching.

Malfoy's owl, he thought, and something very odd happened in his stomach.

He went to Errol first, because Errol looked as though he might not last, and got the parcel off his legs and set him the right way up and put him in Hedwig's cage, where he fell over again, and slept.

The parcel was addressed in Ron's spiky, slanting handwriting, which Harry would have known anywhere. He got the paper off with hands that weren't quite steady, and inside was a card, and a smaller parcel, and a cutting from a newspaper, folded in four.

He unfolded the cutting first, and found himself looking at the Weasleys.

It was a photograph, and it was moving, the way wizard photographs did. They were all there, all but Charlie. Mr Weasley, with his bald patch shining, and Mrs Weasley, and Bill with his long hair, and Percy standing very straight at the back with his chest out, and Fred and George, who kept pushing each other out of the frame, and Ginny, and Ron, in the front, grinning fit to split his face, with a hat on that looked like a fez, and a hand on the head of a small, fat, grey rat. They were standing in front of something enormous and three-sided and gold-coloured, with a sky behind it that was bluer than any sky Harry had ever seen over Surrey.

The headline said:

WEASLEYS WIN GRAND PRIZE GALLEON DRAW

A Ministry of Magic employee from Ottery St Catchpole has scooped the Daily Prophet's annual Grand Prize Galleon Draw, and will be spending every last Knut of the seven hundred Galleon prize on a month in Egypt, the Prophet can reveal.

Arthur Weasley, 43, of the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office, told our correspondent he 'couldn't quite believe it' and would be taking his wife and children to visit his eldest, Bill, who works for Gringotts Wizarding Bank as a curse-breaker in the tombs of the pharaohs.

'We've never been able to afford anything like this,' said Mrs Weasley. 'The boys want to go in the pyramids. I'm told there are things in there that would turn your hair white, but Bill says they're quite safe if you don't touch anything, and I've told Fred and George I'll know if they touch anything.'

The Weasleys return in August, in time for the start of the Hogwarts term, which five of their children will be attending. The youngest Weasley boy, Ronald, 13, is understood to be in his third year.

Harry read it twice. Then he looked at the photograph again, at Ron's face in the front, grinning, and at Mrs Weasley, who kept putting an arm round whichever child was nearest, and at Ginny, who'd got her colour back, and he felt two things at once, so hard he had to put the cutting down.

The first was gladness. Pure, simple gladness, the sort he didn't often get to feel about anything. Nobody deserved seven hundred Galleons more than the Weasleys. Nobody. He thought of the Burrow and its lopsided floors and the clock with one hand and no numbers and the way Mrs Weasley stretched one chicken round the whole table, and he thought good, with his whole chest. Good.

The second thing was smaller, and meaner, and he was ashamed of it as soon as he'd noticed it. It was that they'd gone without him.

They couldn't have taken you, he told himself. You were here. Dumbledore put you here. It isn't their fault.

He knew that. He picked up the card.

Harry,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY. We're in EGYPT. Did you see the cutting? Dad won the Prophet draw, seven hundred Galleons, Mum nearly fainted. We're staying with Bill and it's brilliant, I mean it, you should see what the Egyptian wizards put in the tombs, there's one with a curse on the door that turns you inside out if you say the password wrong and Bill let us look through the door at the mummies. Mum wouldn't let Ginny go in. She's fine now, by the way, Ginny I mean, she's completely back to normal and she asks about you about nine times a day so don't say I didn't tell you.

Listen. About the telephone. I rang. You know I rang, you must have heard him. Harry, I'm really sorry, I didn't know you had to talk quietly on them, nobody told me, Dad said afterwards you only have to use your normal voice and I'd probably deafened your uncle. I heard what he said. I heard him say you weren't there. Are you all right? Did he do anything? Mum went completely white when I told her. She went and had a row with Dad about it that went on for an hour and then she wrote to Dumbledore. I don't know what she put but the owl came back with scorch marks. She says if you say the word, one word, Dad'll borrow a car from the Ministry and come and get you that night, bars or no bars, Dumbledore or no Dumbledore. She said to tell you that. She said to put it in CAPITALS. So: ONE WORD.

I didn't dare write after the phone thing in case it got you in worse trouble. I told Hermione not to either. She's in France. She wrote to me about four times asking if I'd heard from you and I kept saying no. I hope that was right. I didn't know what else to do.

The other news is Percy's Head Boy. HEAD BOY. He got the letter the day we left and he hasn't stopped polishing the badge since, Fred and George say he sleeps with it. He's being an absolutely smug git about it all. Bill says it's the worst thing that could possibly have happened. He's going to try and get him into a tomb then shut the door.

I'm getting a new wand when we get back. A proper one, from Ollivander's, since the old one blew up with Lockhart in it. Mum says it's about time, which is something, coming from her.

We're back about a week before term. Mum and Dad are going to get the Diagon Alley stuff and we're staying in London for the last few days so if you can get there, GET THERE, and if you can't, say the word (see above).

Don't let the Muggles get you down.

Ron

P.S. The thing in the parcel is a Pocket Sneakoscope. It's supposed to light up and go off if there's somebody untrustworthy nearby. Bill says it's rubbish, they sell them to tourists, and it went off all through dinner last night, but that was when Fred and George put beetles in his soup, so I don't know. I thought you might want it anyway. You know. With the Malfoys and that.

P.P.S. Don't forget the Hogsmeade form. Dad says it's the best thing about third year.

Harry read the postscript three times, and grinned, and then stopped grinning, and then grinned again.

The smaller parcel was a thing like a tiny glass spinning top, which sat in his palm and did absolutely nothing. He turned it over. He held it up to the lamp. He put it on the bedside table next to the enormous owl, which glared at it, and it stayed dark, and silent, and still.

'Well, that's reassuring,' Harry told the owl. 'Apparently I'm trustworthy.'

The owl looked away.

Hedwig had been waiting through all this with the patience of an owl who knows she's brought the best thing, and when Harry finally turned to her she held out the lumpy parcel with an air of great dignity. There was a letter tied on top of it. It was flat and heavy and smelt faintly of polish. Her writing was as neat as print.

Dear Harry,

Happy birthday! I'm sending this with Hedwig because she turned up on the balcony of our hotel three nights ago, looking very pleased with herself, and wouldn't leave. I don't know how she found me. I don't think you sent her, did you? I think she came on her own. She's a very clever owl, and I've told her so, and she's had rather a lot of my croissant.

We're in Brittany. It's lovely, though the Muggle history here is terrible, there were witch trials everywhere, I've been to three museums about them and they've got nearly everything wrong. I've been doing the History of Magic essay, I expect you have too, I do hope you haven't left it until the last minute again. (You have, haven't you.)

Ron says you may be in trouble because he shouted down the telephone. I told him that was completely his own fault and that you'd have warned him if he'd given you half a chance, which you would, and he went quiet about it, so I think it sank in. I haven't written before because he said we shouldn't, and I decided he probably knew the Dursleys better than I did, having seen the bars. I'm sorry. I didn't like it. I've looked up the Muggle law on it, by the way, in case you ever need to know, and there's quite a lot they can't do.

The parcel is a Broomstick Servicing Kit. I saw it in a wizarding shop in Rennes (yes, there is one, you'd never find it). I thought of your Nimbus and how you never clean it. So I thought, well, he'll be playing again in September, and Oliver Wood will shout at him if the tail's all bent. There's a handle polish and clippers for the twigs and a compass you fix on for long journeys, and a book, which I expect you'll ignore, but I'm sending it anyway.

Ron says he hasn't heard a word from Dracina Malfoy all summer, not that he would, and I don't suppose you have either. I only mention it because she seemed so very attached to you by the end of term, and I wondered. It's none of my business.

See you at Diagon Alley, I hope, or on the train. Don't let the Dursleys be beastly. And do the essay.

Love from

Hermione

Harry put the letter down, and unwrapped the kit. He looked at it and his heart gave a small happy thump, because it was the nicest thing anybody had ever bought him that wasn't a broomstick. The book was called Handbook of Do-It-Yourself Broomcare, and the compass had a tiny brass Snitch on the needle.

He didn't think about the paragraph before the parcel. It had been an odd thing for Hermione to write, and he had a feeling, which he couldn't have explained, that it had been odd for Hermione to write it too.

He put the kit on the bed beside the Sneakoscope, which still hadn't lit up, and turned to the tawny owl.

The tawny had two things for him, a thick envelope with the Hogwarts crest on the back and a parcel done up in brown paper and a great deal of string, and it was the parcel Harry took first, because he knew the string. Nobody tied knots like that but Hagrid. There was a note stuck under it, in Hagrid's big untidy capitals.

HARRY,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY. THOUGHT YEH MIGHT BE NEEDIN THIS COME SEPTEMBER, WONT SAY WHY, YEH'LL SEE. KEEP YER FINGERS OUT OF IT TILL YEH'VE READ THE OTHER NOTE. HOPE THEM MUGGLES ARE BEHAVIN. IF THEY AREN'T, YEH KNOW WHERE I AM.

HAGRID

There wasn't another note. Harry looked. He turned the parcel over, and shook it. Nothing fell out, so he shrugged, and cut the string with the clippers from Hermione's kit, then the paper came off.

It was a book. A big one, bound in something green and hairy, with a title stamped on the front in gold that he just had time to read, The Monster Book of Monsters, before the book opened its covers like a mouth and bit him.

Harry yelled, and dropped it.

It hit the floor with a thump and scuttled under the bed, snapping. Harry sat on the edge of the mattress with his hand in his armpit and stared at the dark gap it had gone into, listening to it champ, with the horrible feeling that it was waiting for his ankles. Hedwig had gone up onto the top of the wardrobe. The tawny had closed its eyes, as if it had seen all this before. And the eagle owl, on the bedside table, had turned its head right round, very slowly, to watch, with an expression that said quite clearly that this was precisely the sort of thing it had expected from a house like this.

'Right,' Harry whispered. 'Right.'

He got his belt off. Then he got down on his hands and knees and lifted the edge of the bedspread an inch, and a hairy green shape came out at him like a terrier, and he fell on it. It was a very undignified business. It bucked. It gnashed. It got hold of his pyjama sleeve and tore it. But he got the belt round it in the end, and buckled it, and sat back on his heels with his glasses crooked and his heart going like a hammer, and the book lay on the carpet, trussed, and quivered, and went still, and he was fairly sure that if books could sulk it was sulking.

'What,' said Harry, to nobody, 'is he teaching us?'

He put the book on the desk, on top of the essay, where he could see it, and sat back down on the bed to get his breath, and opened the Hogwarts envelope with rather more care than he'd given the parcel.

There were two sheets inside. The first was the usual, the list of books, the reminder about the train, Professor M. McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress. He skimmed it. The second was something he hadn't seen before.

Third-year students will be permitted to visit the village of Hogsmeade on certain weekends throughout the year. Please note that no student may leave the school grounds without the written permission of a parent or guardian on the attached form. Students without a signed form will remain in the castle.

Harry read it. Then he read it again, and some of the gladness went out of the night.

Hogsmeade. He knew about Hogsmeade. Everybody did. Ron had been talking about it since the first week of first year, in the tone of voice other boys used for the Cup Final. The only all-wizard village in the whole of Britain, Fred said, and a sweetshop that had to be seen to be believed, George said, and a pub, Percy said, where third-years were technically allowed Butterbeer, though he personally didn't approve. All of them had been. Hermione would go. Ron would go. Even Neville's gran would sign.

Parent or guardian.

He looked at the form, and he thought about Uncle Vernon, and the colour his face had gone at the bottom of the stairs.

And then, slowly, he thought about something else.

Not a hand, not a word, not a locked door. Dumbledore had said that. And whatever Dumbledore had said in that front room, it had been enough to make Uncle Vernon stop with his fist in the air, let an owl out of the window, and put a plate on the table every night for five weeks with his teeth clenched. Harry didn't know what it would stretch to. He didn't know if it would stretch to a signature. But there was a thing in the Dursleys now that twitched when it was pushed, and he thought, turning the form over in his hands, that it might be worth finding out exactly how far it would twitch.

He'd ask. Tomorrow. He'd ask very politely, with the form in his hand and his face straight, and see what the twitch did.

He put the form inside the Hogwarts letter, and the letter inside the book list, and then, because there was nothing else left to put off, he turned to the eagle owl.

It regarded him with its marmalade eyes.

'All right,' Harry said. 'I'm getting there.'

It held out its leg as if it were doing him a favour.

The ribbon was green. Slytherin green, thin and silky, tied in a bow that had been done by somebody who knew exactly the correct and proper way of how bows should be done, and as his fingers found the knot the smell of it reached him. It wasn't owl, or parchment, or anything else he'd expected. It was scent. Something cool and flowery and faint, like the inside of a very expensive shop. It was on the ribbon. It was on the envelope. It was, when he got the envelope open, on the letter itself, so that the whole of his small hot bedroom suddenly smelt of it, and the eagle owl shut its eyes as if it had been putting up with this for the whole flight and had had quite enough.

The ribbon reminded him of something. He couldn't think what. He put it on the bed beside the Sneakoscope, which stayed dark, and unfolded the letter.

The parchment was thick and creamy and had a crest at the top, embossed, a letter M with a serpent through it. The handwriting underneath it was small, and neat, and spiky, and pressed so hard into the parchment that he could feel the words from the back with his thumb.

Malfoy Manor

Wiltshire

Potter,

You are not to imagine that I am writing to you because I wished to. I am writing because it is your birthday, and because it would reflect badly on my family if a person to whom my family is indebted were to pass his birthday unacknowledged. That is all. I would be grateful if you would read the rest of this letter with that understood.

I have not sent a present. I do not trust owls with anything of value, and Mother says one does not give a gift of any consequence by post. You will receive it in person, at school. I have already chosen it. You are not to try to guess what it is, and you may thank me when you get it, as is right and proper. But do not ever tell a soul I did this.

Father has forbidden me to correspond with you. He says that it is unsuitable, and that whatever he may think of you privately, which he has not told me, a Malfoy does not have friends among the Potters. He has been in a peculiar mood since the end of term. He keeps saying 'fair play' at breakfast and then looking annoyed with himself. I do not know what you said to him that night and I would prefer not to. In any case he has gone to the Ministry today on business and will not be back until Thursday, so the question of what he has forbidden does not arise.

Mother, on the other hand, has been surprisingly helpful.

It was Mother who sent Ganymede, who is hers really, and who she says knows the way to Surrey, though I did not ask how. It was Mother who told me which day your birthday was, and I did not ask her how she knew. And it was Mother who insisted on the ribbon. I wish it understood that the ribbon was not my idea. In the old families, when a lady sends a green ribbon with a letter, it is a token of favour. It means that the recipient is regarded with approval, and may consider himself under her esteem. It is a very old custom and nobody keeps it any more except Mother, who keeps all of them. You are to keep it, because Mother says it is unlucky to throw one away, but I say you are not to read anything into it, because there is nothing to read.

I am telling you all this because you were raised by Muggles and would not otherwise know, and I should not like you to be ignorant in front of people. That is the only reason.

Which brings me to the Muggles.

Dobby told me about the bars, and the cupboard, and the bread, and I told you in the hospital wing that I did not understand it. I still do not. I have thought about it a great deal since, more than I would have liked, and I have decided that if they have done any of it again this summer, you are to tell me. Not Dumbledore. Not Weasley. Me. Father's collection in the cellar contains a number of items that have not been used in anger for a hundred years, and I have read all of the labels, and I know which ones are for what, and there are at least three I should very much like to see used on a fat man who locks a boy in a room and feeds him through a hole. I would not be quick about it. I would be careful and thorough and it would take a very long time. I am not joking. Please do not reply to tell me that I am joking.

If they have been civil, you may disregard the above paragraph. Though I should still like to know.

I do not miss you. The summer is long and dull and Pansy writes to me every day about nothing, and I find I have nobody to argue with, which is a different thing entirely from missing somebody, and you are not to confuse them.

I shall see you on the train. You are to look well. If you do not look well, I shall know why, and I shall act accordingly.

Dracina Malfoy

P.S. Ganymede will not wait for a reply. I did not ask for one, and Mother says it is not done to ask. If you were to write anyway, she says, he knows the way back.

P.P.S. Burn this.

Harry read it through to the end. Then he sat with it in his lap for a while, in the scented dark, with the three owls and the trussed book and the clock saying ten past midnight, and found that he was smiling, and couldn't quite make himself stop.

He didn't know what to make of it. He really didn't. Half of it read like a letter from a bank, and the other half read like a threat to commit murder, and in between there was a girl who'd got her mother to find out his birthday and then written two pages to tell him she didn't care about it. It was the most Dracina thing he'd ever seen. It was so completely, stiffly, furiously her that he could hear her voice in every line, with her chin up and her eyes on the far wall, and his hand remembered, without being asked, exactly what her shoulder had felt like under it in Professor McGonagall's office.

He'd never have said so to anybody. Not to Ron, who'd have been sick. Not to Hermione, who'd have gone very quiet and written something odd in her next letter. Not to Dracina herself, obviously, ever, under any circumstances, on pain of death.

But of the four things on his bed, it was the one he picked up again.

Fat man who locks a boy in a room, he thought, and laughed out loud, and clapped a hand over his mouth, and the eagle owl opened one eye and looked at him as though laughter were common.

'She's a bit much,' Harry told it. 'You know that, don't you? You live with her.'

The owl closed its eye. Then it opened both, stepped off the bedside table in one unhurried movement, spread its enormous wings so that the lampshade swung, and went out through the window into the dark without a backward look, exactly as its mistress would have done.

Harry watched it go until it was only a shape against the orange sky, and then nothing.

He got up, after a while, and shoved the Monster Book, belt and all, under the loose floorboard with the Sneakoscope on top of it, and then he gathered up the letters and the cards and the cutting, and Hermione's kit, and put them all under the board too. That left the ribbon. He stood with it in his hand for a moment, not sure why, and then he wound it round his fingers, and put it in the pocket of his pyjamas, and told himself it was because Mother said it was unlucky to throw it away, and that was all.

The tawny had gone while he wasn't looking. Errol was snoring in Hedwig's cage. Hedwig came down off the wardrobe and settled on the headboard and tucked her face into her wing, and Harry lay down under her in his torn pyjamas, with the window open and the warm night coming through it, and looked up at the ceiling.

On the wall by the door was a chart he'd made the first week, on the back of a piece of Smeltings letter paper of Dudley's. Every day of the summer, in a row, in biro, with a line through each one as it went, and under them, in capitals, SEPTEMBER 1ST. He didn't need to get up to see it. He knew exactly how many were left. Thirty-two.

He thought about the old man on the bench, and the open door, and it's been here rather longer than you'd think. He thought about the Weasleys in front of a pyramid, with the sky too blue behind them. He thought about a man in white, by a fallen pillar, who'd looked at him the way a father would. He didn't understand any of it. He had a feeling that this was going to be the sort of year where he understood even less than usual.

But he had a Sneakoscope that said he was trustworthy, a servicing kit for his broom, and a book that bit, and a form that might or might not twitch, and a ribbon in his pocket that he was not to read anything into, and for the first time in his life, lying in the dark at number four, Privet Drive, Harry Potter found that he was glad it was his birthday.