Blood of Elves, Rage of Man

Harry went down to breakfast the next morning to find the three Dursleys already sitting round the kitchen table.

They were watching a brand-new television, a welcome-home-for-the-summer present for Dudley, who had been complaining loudly about the long walk between the fridge and the television in the living room. Dudley had spent most of the summer in the kitchen, his piggy little eyes fixed on the screen and his five chins wobbling as he ate continually.

Harry sat down between Dudley and Uncle Vernon. There was a plate in front of his chair. There was always a plate now. Aunt Petunia's eyes had flicked to it as he came in, and away again, and her neck had done the thing it did. Far from wishing Harry a happy birthday, none of the Dursleys made any sign that they had noticed Harry enter the room, but Harry was far too used to this to care. He helped himself to a piece of toast and then looked up at the reporter on the television, who was halfway through a report on an escaped convict.

'...The public is warned that Black is armed and extremely dangerous. A special hotline has been set up, and any sighting of Black should be reported immediately.'

'No need to tell us he's a maniac,' snorted Uncle Vernon, staring over the top of his newspaper at the prisoner. 'Look at the state of him, the filthy layabout! Look at his hair!'

He shot a nasty look sideways at Harry, whose untidy hair had always been a source of great annoyance to Uncle Vernon. Compared to the man on the television, however, whose gaunt face was surrounded by a matted, elbow-length tangle, Harry felt very well groomed indeed.

The face went. The reporter came back, with a different picture behind him now, a map with a great deal of red on it.

'And now to the continuing crisis in South Asia. Overnight, forces loyal to the self-styled warlord Khan Noonien Singh completed their advance on New Delhi, and the Indian government is understood to have withdrawn to Bangalore. It brings to an end a siege of the capital that has lasted eleven weeks. Khan, who is believed to be one of a group of genetically engineered individuals created in a programme that has never been officially acknowledged, now controls territory stretching from the Afghan border to the Bay of Bengal, and has declared what he calls a new order for the subcontinent. Western intelligence sources describe him as, quote, "exceptionally intelligent, physically formidable, and entirely without scruple". The Foreign Office has advised all British nationals to leave the region.'

The map changed to a podium with two flags Harry didn't recognise, and a man in a very good suit reading from a sheet of paper.

'Pressure continues to mount on the world's two largest superhuman organisations to intervene. But in a joint statement issued late last night from New York, the Avengers and the Justice League said that the terms of the United Nations accord under which they operate, quote, "expressly prohibit unilateral action in any ongoing conflict between sovereign states", and that they would act only, quote, "at the request of the Security Council, and under its authority". The statement was greeted with anger in Delhi. The Security Council meets again on Thursday.'

Harry chewed his toast and watched the map go red.

He hadn't been keeping up with the Muggle world. He never did, in the summer; it all seemed to happen a very long way off, to other people, in a language he'd half forgotten. He had no idea who this genetically augmented warlord was, or what genetically augmented even meant, exactly, except that it sounded like something off one of Dudley's satellite channels. But he knew the look. The man on the screen, standing on a balcony somewhere with a crowd beneath him and his chin up and his eyes half closed, as if the whole of India were a dog that had finally learnt to sit, had the look of somebody who'd decided a long time ago that he was better than everybody else and had never once been given a reason to think otherwise.

He and Voldemort would've got on, Harry thought. For about ten minutes. And then one of them would've had to kill the other.

'Hang on!' barked Uncle Vernon, staring furiously at the reporter. 'You didn't tell us where that maniac's escaped from! What use is that? Lunatic could be coming up the street right now!'

'I'm sure you'll be his first target, Uncle Vernon,' said Harry, buttering a second piece of toast. 'I heard this bloke's got it in for you specially. Something about a faulty drill.'

Uncle Vernon's head came round like a gun turret. His mouth opened. His chest swelled. Harry had seen the whole performance a thousand times and knew every beat of it, and he braced himself for the roar.

It didn't come.

Uncle Vernon stopped. His mouth stayed open. Something went across his face, behind the purple, the way a cloud goes across a field, and it was not anger. It was the look of a man who has just remembered in the middle of shouting at a waiter, that he has left the gas on at home. He shut his mouth. He swallowed. He turned back to his newspaper and lifted it up between himself and Harry like a wall, and the top edge of it was trembling very slightly.

Harry looked at the trembling newspaper for a moment, and then at Aunt Petunia, whose eyes had gone to her husband and then down to her plate, and he wondered, for about the four-hundredth time that summer, what on earth Dumbledore had done to them.

Aunt Petunia, who was bony and horse-faced, whipped round and peered intently out of the kitchen window. Harry knew Aunt Petunia would simply love to be the one to call the hotline number. She was the nosiest woman in the world and spent most of her life spying on the boring, law-abiding neighbours.

'When will they learn,' said Uncle Vernon, pounding the table with his large purple fist, so hard that the toast rack jumped and the newspaper came down, 'that hanging's the only way to deal with these people?'

'Very true,' said Aunt Petunia, who was still squinting into next door's runner beans.

Uncle Vernon drained his teacup, glanced at his watch, and added, 'I'd better be off in a minute, Petunia. Marge's train gets in at ten.'

Harry, whose thoughts had been upstairs with the Broomstick Servicing Kit, was brought back to earth with an unpleasant bump.

'Aunt Marge?' he blurted out. 'Sh... she's not coming here, is she?'

Aunt Marge was Uncle Vernon's sister. Even though she was not a blood relative of Harry's (whose mother had been Aunt Petunia's sister), he had been forced to call her 'Aunt' all his life. Aunt Marge lived in the country, in a house with a large garden, where she bred bulldogs. She didn't often stay at Privet Drive, because she couldn't bear to leave her precious dogs, but each of her visits stood out horribly vividly in Harry's mind.

At Dudley's fifth birthday party, Aunt Marge had whacked Harry round the shins with her walking stick to stop him beating Dudley at musical statues. A few years later, she had turned up at Christmas with a computerised robot for Dudley and a box of dog biscuits for Harry. On her last visit, the year before Harry started at Hogwarts, Harry had accidentally trodden on the tail of her favourite dog. Ripper had chased Harry out into the garden and up a tree, and Aunt Marge had refused to call him off until past midnight. The memory of this incident still brought tears of laughter to Dudley's eyes.

It did something quite different to Harry. It made his chest go hot and tight, and for one bad moment he found himself back in the Chamber, with Tom Riddle smiling down at him and offering, in the most reasonable voice in the world, to help him hurt them back. He'd said no. He'd been proud of saying no. Sitting at the Dursleys' table with Aunt Marge's train already on its way, he wondered, very briefly, whether it had been a mistake.

He put the thought away. It frightened him a little that he'd had it.

'Marge'll be here for a week,' Uncle Vernon snarled, 'and while we're on the subject,' he pointed a fat finger threateningly at Harry, 'we need to get a few things straight before I go and collect her.'

Dudley smirked and withdrew his gaze from the television. Watching Harry being bullied by Uncle Vernon was Dudley's favourite form of entertainment.

'Firstly,' growled Uncle Vernon, 'you'll keep a civil tongue in your head when you're talking to Marge.'

'I'll be the very example of civility, Uncle Vernon,' said Harry drily. 'But it would help if she could do the same to me. Just saying.'

He said it as conciliatingly as he could manage. It wasn't very. Uncle Vernon's moustache quivered.

'Secondly,' said Uncle Vernon, acting as though he had not heard Harry's reply, 'as Marge doesn't know anything about your abnormality, I don't want any... any funny things while she's here. You behave yourself, got me?'

'Bear in mind I can't do anything magical even if I wanted to,' said Harry through gritted teeth. 'But I will if she does.'

He watched the word land. He'd meant it to. Magical. Uncle Vernon's shoulders went up as if somebody had dropped an ice cube down his collar, and Aunt Petunia's teacup chattered once against its saucer, and the two of them exchanged a look over Harry's head that was not their usual dark one at all. It was quicker than that, and smaller, and had fear in it. Harry found he enjoyed that. He wasn't proud of enjoying it, but he did.

'And thirdly,' said Uncle Vernon, his mean little eyes now slits in his great purple face, 'we've told Marge you attend St Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys.'

'What?' Harry yelled.

'And you'll be sticking to that story, boy, or there'll be trouble,' spat Uncle Vernon.

Harry sat there, white-faced and furious, staring at Uncle Vernon, hardly able to believe it. Aunt Marge coming for a week-long visit. It was the worst birthday present the Dursleys had ever given him, including that pair of Uncle Vernon's old socks.

Incurably Criminal, he thought. Right. Yes. Of course. Because the other option was telling her I'd gone to a school for the gifted, and she'd have had a stroke. A whole week. A whole week of St Brutus's and Ripper and still here, are you, and he was supposed to sit there and take it, with his mouth shut, like a Muggle. He had about six things to say and every one of them was nasty.

He said none of them.

He didn't want to push on whatever it was Dumbledore had said to the Dursleys. He didn't know how far it stretched. He had a feeling, watching Uncle Vernon's hand shake on the newspaper, that it might not stretch to very much more. And there was a form upstairs, under a loose floorboard, with a line on it for a parent or guardian to sign, and he needed the fat man in front of him to put his name on that line more than he had ever needed anything from him in his life.

So he ate his toast, and said nothing, and the six good things went round and round inside him like wasps in a jar.

'Well, Petunia,' said Uncle Vernon, getting heavily to his feet, 'I'll be off to the station, then. Want to come along for the ride, Dudders?'

'No,' said Dudley, whose attention had returned to the television now that Uncle Vernon had finished threatening Harry.

The news had moved on again. The red map had gone and in its place was a shaky bit of film, taken from a helicopter, of a city centre Harry didn't recognise, with a round tower block in the middle of it and smoke coming off a shopping centre, and something in the middle of the smoke that was pink and enormous and had far too many arms. Five people in coloured suits and helmets, red, blue, black, yellow and pink, were running across a rooftop towards it in a line, and behind them, over the tops of the office blocks, something the size of a cathedral was standing up out of the canal, with lights where its eyes should be.

'...Birmingham city centre was evacuated for six hours yesterday afternoon,' said the reporter, 'after the creature, described by eyewitnesses as a raping starfish roughly the size of a double-decker bus, emerged from the canal basin near Gas Street and began attacking the Bull Ring shopping centre. The Californian team, who came straight over, engaged the creature with their combat vehicle shortly after four o'clock. There were no fatalities, though a number of shoppers were treated for shock, and West Midlands Police have asked anyone with information about the creature's origin to come forward...'

Dudley had gone very still, with a sausage halfway to his mouth, and his piggy eyes had gone round and shining in a way Harry had only ever seen them go for a new bicycle. He was watching the five coloured figures leap off the roof as though he'd like to be one of them. It was, Harry thought, the first time he'd ever seen Dudley want to be anything.

Harry had seen that lot before, in bits, on the news and on the backs of cereal packets. He'd always thought they were for little children. The suits were silly and the robot was sillier and there was something about the way they did a pose, all five of them together, before they hit anything, that made him want to look away in embarrassment. But Dudley was thirteen, and hadn't hit him once this summer, and Harry supposed a boy could like what he liked. It was none of Harry's business as long as Dudley didn't bother him.

'Duddy's got to make himself smart for his auntie,' said Aunt Petunia, smoothing Dudley's thick blond hair. 'Mummy's bought him a lovely new bow tie.'

Uncle Vernon clapped Dudley on his porky shoulder.

'See you in a bit, then,' he said, and he left the kitchen.

Harry, who had been sitting in a kind of horrified trance, had a sudden idea. Abandoning his toast, he got quickly to his feet and followed Uncle Vernon to the front door.

Uncle Vernon was pulling on his car coat.

'I'm not taking you,' he snarled as he turned to see Harry watching him.

'Like I wanted to come,' said Harry coldly. 'I want to ask you something.'

Uncle Vernon eyed him suspiciously.

'Third-years at Hog... at my school are allowed to visit the village sometimes,' said Harry.

'So?' snapped Uncle Vernon, taking his car keys from a hook next to the door.

'I need you to sign the permission form,' said Harry in a rush.

'And why should I do that?' sneered Uncle Vernon.

'Well,' said Harry, choosing his words carefully, 'it'll be hard work, pretending to Aunt Marge I go to that St Whatsits-'

'St Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys!' bellowed Uncle Vernon, and Harry was pleased to hear a definite note of panic in Uncle Vernon's voice.

'Exactly,' said Harry, looking calmly up into Uncle Vernon's large, purple face. 'It's a lot to remember. I'll have to make it sound convincing, won't I? What if I accidentally let something slip? Like that membership card for the BNP that fell out of the wallet a couple of weeks ago.'

Uncle Vernon's face fell. It was a remarkable thing to watch. All the purple drained out of it from the top down, like a glass being emptied, and his eyes went past Harry to the kitchen door, and the stairs, and the front window, as though the whole of Privet Drive might have been listening.

'Y-you never mind that, boy,' he said hoarsely. 'I told you why I joined. Those ruddy...golli- gah, never you mind!'

'Yeah, and after some of the things I saw in London when I was eleven, I'm not even that bothered by it.' said Harry, who'd had put the card back exactly where he'd found it and said nothing for a fortnight for precisely this moment. 'I know Aunt Marge would agree with you, anyway. Probably has a card herself. But what about poor Aunt Petunia? What would the neighbours think, Uncle Vernon?'

Uncle Vernon looked anxiously through the door towards the kitchen, where Aunt Petunia could be heard running the tap.

'You're blackmailing me,' he said slowly. 'Aren't you, boy.'

'Uncle Vernon, I've learnt a lot from that abnormal school I go to,' said Harry. 'St Brutus's, I mean.'

His tone was as sly as his grin. He hadn't known he had either in him. He suspected, from the way it sat in his mouth, that he'd caught it off somebody with white-blonde hair.

Uncle Vernon went purple again, all at once, from the collar up, as if somebody had thrown a switch. His chest filled. His fists closed. Harry saw the roar coming up through him like a train through a tunnel, and then, at the very mouth of the tunnel, he saw it stop.

Uncle Vernon gagged on it. Literally gagged, with a noise like a drain. He stood there with his face working and his hand pressed flat over his mouth, and his eyes, over the hand, were not angry any more. They were wide, and wet, and looking at something that wasn't in the hall.

'...torture,' he muttered, behind the hand. '...psychological damage... said he'd know... what sort of a...'

Harry couldn't make out the rest. He had the strong feeling that he wasn't meant to, and that Uncle Vernon wasn't talking to him at all, but to an old man with a long silver beard who'd sat in his front room, on his sofa, with his hands folded, and said something to him in a quiet voice that had made him look exactly the way he was looking now.

Uncle Vernon took the hand off his mouth and pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, and breathed in through it.

'Right then,' he said. He sounded defeated, and about ten years older. 'You keep behaved with Marge and I'll...'

He stopped. Harry waited, looking at him expectantly. Uncle Vernon's mouth opened and shut. Harry could see him trying to find a way to say it that didn't mean Harry had won, and failing, and trying again, and failing. The veins in his temples stood out like cords. For a moment Harry honestly thought he might rather burst than finish the sentence.

Then the dam went.

'I'll sign the bloody form, you cursed child, just do what I say about Marge!'

He was somehow shouting and whispering at the same time, through his teeth, with his whole face shaking, and a fleck of spit landed on Harry's glasses.

Harry nodded.

'Of course, Uncle Vernon,' he said. 'I'll act like a complete mug. She won't suspect I'm an all-powerful wizard at all.'

Uncle Vernon nodded, anxiously, too many times, with another look at the kitchen door, where Aunt Petunia's shadow was moving behind the frosted glass. He pointed at Harry, accusingly, with a finger that wasn't quite steady, and opened his mouth, and shut it, and looked at the floor instead, and mumbled something in which the words bloody school and bad habits were the only ones Harry could pick out. Then he snatched his keys off the hook, wrenched open the front door, and was gone to collect Marge, with his car coat flapping.

Harry stood in the hall for a moment, listening to the car start.

He'd won. He knew he'd won. He'd never won anything in that hall before. He waited to feel good about it, and found that he mostly felt sick, and didn't know why, and went upstairs.

He didn't return to the kitchen. If he was going to act like a real Muggle, he'd better start now.

Everything was still under the loose floorboard where he'd shoved it in the small hours. He got down on his knees and lifted the board and took it all out again, one piece at a time, and laid it on the bed, and looked at it: the Sneakoscope, which was still dark; the servicing kit, with its tiny brass Snitch on the compass needle; the Monster Book, still belted, which growled at him; Ron's card, and Hermione's letter, and the cutting with the Weasleys in it, grinning in front of their pyramid; Hagrid's note; the Hogwarts letter with the form inside it. The thick creamy envelope, and the letter inside it with the serpent through the M, that still smelt, very faintly, of cold flowers.

He read Dracina's letter again. He hadn't meant to. I would not be quick about it. I would be careful and thorough and it would take a very long time. It shouldn't have cheered him up. It did.

Then, slowly and sadly, he put it all back. He found an old pillowcase at the bottom of the wardrobe and put the lot in it, letters and kit and cutting and cards, and laid it under the board with the Monster Book on top as a sort of guard dog, and pressed the board down flat, and sat back on his heels and looked at the bare carpet where his birthday had been, and felt about eight years old.

Then he went to Hedwig's cage.

Errol seemed to have recovered; he and Hedwig were both asleep, heads under their wings, Errol inside the cage and Hedwig on top of it. Harry sighed, then poked them both awake.

'Hedwig,' he said gloomily, 'you're going to have to clear off for a week. Go with Errol. Ron'll look after you. I'll write him a note, explaining. And don't look at me like that,' Hedwig's large amber eyes were reproachful, 'it's not my fault. It's the only way I'll be allowed to visit Hogsmeade with Ron and Hermione.'

Hedwig looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at Errol, who had fallen off his perch, and back at Harry, with an expression that said quite clearly that she was being asked to escort a very elderly relative across a very large desert and would be wanting something for it later.

'I know,' said Harry. 'I know. It's Egypt. It's a long way. You're a clever owl. You found Hermione in France without anyone asking you to, you can find Ron.' He scratched the top of her head with one finger, the way she liked. 'Please.'

He sat down at the desk and tore a strip off the bottom of his History of Magic essay, which was still lying where he'd left it at midnight, and wrote on the back of it with the biro.

Ron,

Thanks for the Sneakoscope and the cutting, it's brilliant, tell your mum I said congratulations, I'm really glad, and I miss her terribly. I'm fine. Honestly. Nobody's touched me all summer, I don't know why, I think Dumbledore said something to them. So you can stop worrying and tell Hermione to stop worrying.

Can you look after Hedwig for a week? Uncle Vernon's sister is coming and she doesn't know about me. So I've got to pretend to be normal or he won't sign the Hogsmeade form. He HAS said he'll sign it. I'll explain how when I see you, you'll like it.

Don't let Fred and George put beetles in anything of hers.

Harry

He tied it to Hedwig's leg. Ten minutes later, Errol and Hedwig soared out of the window and out of sight, Hedwig flying slowly, with a great many backward glances, so that Errol could keep up.

Harry, now feeling thoroughly miserable, put the empty cage away inside the wardrobe.

But Harry didn't have long to brood. In next to no time, Aunt Petunia was shrieking up the stairs for Harry to come down and get ready to welcome their guest.

'Do something about your hair!' Aunt Petunia snapped as he reached the hall.

Harry couldn't see the point of trying to make his hair lie flat. Aunt Marge loved criticising him, so the untidier he looked, the happier she would be. He pushed a hand through it anyway, for form's sake, and it sprang straight back up, and Aunt Petunia looked at it as if it had done it on purpose.

All too soon, there was a crunch of gravel outside as Uncle Vernon's car pulled back into the driveway, then the clunk of the car doors and footsteps on the garden path.

'Get the door!' Aunt Petunia hissed at Harry.

A feeling of great gloom in his stomach, Harry pulled the door open.

On the threshold stood Aunt Marge. She was very like Uncle Vernon: large, beefy and purple-faced, she even had a moustache, though not as bushy as his. In one hand she held an enormous suitcase, and tucked under the other was an old and evil-tempered bulldog.

'Where's my Dudders?' roared Aunt Marge. 'Where's my neffy-poo?'

Dudley came waddling down the hall, his blond hair plastered flat to his fat head, a bow tie just visible under his many chins. Aunt Marge thrust the suitcase into Harry's stomach, knocking the wind out of him, seized Dudley in a tight one-armed hug, and planted a large kiss on his cheek.

Harry knew perfectly well that Dudley only put up with Aunt Marge's hugs because he was well paid for it, and sure enough, when they broke apart, Dudley had a crisp twenty-pound note clutched in his fat fist.

'Petunia!' shouted Aunt Marge, striding past Harry as though he was a hat stand.

Aunt Marge and Aunt Petunia kissed, or rather, Aunt Marge bumped her large jaw against Aunt Petunia's bony cheekbone. Uncle Vernon now came in, smiling jovially as he shut the door.

'Tea, Marge?' he said. 'And what will Ripper take?'

'Ripper can have some tea out of my saucer,' said Aunt Marge, as they all proceeded towards the kitchen. 'Lord knows I need one. Vernon, I have never in my life had a journey like it.'

'Bad, was it?' said Uncle Vernon.

'Bad?' Aunt Marge stopped dead in the kitchen doorway, so that Dudley, who was behind her, had to stop too, and Harry, who was behind Dudley with the suitcase, walked into him. 'I'll tell you how bad. I got on at Didcot and I sat down in a perfectly good seat, and by Reading I was the only English person in the carriage. The only one, Vernon. I counted.'

'Never,' said Uncle Vernon, shaking his head heavily, as a man does when he hears that his worst opinion of the world has been confirmed yet again.

'Jabbering away. Half a dozen languages and not one of them ours. Some woman with a towel over her head took the seat opposite me, with three children, and not one of them said excuse me, not one. They smelled of curry. And the smell of whatever it was she had in her bag, I had to put my handkerchief over my face.' Aunt Marge put Ripper down, and he waddled off under the table. 'And nobody asked us, that's what I say. Nobody has ever asked us whether we wanted them. One day you look up and the whole carriage has changed and nobody ever asked.'

'That's it exactly, Marge,' said Uncle Vernon. 'That's it exactly. Nobody asked.'

'Forced on us,' said Aunt Marge. 'That's the word for it. Forced. I said as much to the ticket inspector and he looked at me as if I'd said something wrong.'

'Well, you can't say anything these days, can you,' said Aunt Petunia, in her most refined voice, filling the kettle. 'Not without somebody who wasn't born here and hates the country telling you why they belong and you don't.'

'You cannot. You cannot say a blessed thing.' Aunt Marge lowered herself into Uncle Vernon's chair, which creaked. 'I'll tell you what I think, Petunia. I think it's a disgrace, and I think the people who let it happen ought to be ashamed of themselves, and I think in ten years' time you won't be able to find an English face in London for love nor money, and that's the truth, and I don't care who hears me say it.' She looked round the kitchen for agreement, and her small eyes landed on Harry, who after seeing London as an eleven year old with Hagrid would've agreed with her. Harry was standing in the doorway with the suitcase. 'You. What are you gawping at?'

Harry had been thinking about Dean Thomas, who sat two seats along from him in Transfiguration and was the best drawer in Gryffindor, and about Parvati and Padma Patil, and about Angelina Johnson, who'd scored against Slytherin while Harry did loop-the-loops over her head, and about Hermione's mum and dad, who were dentists despite their large noses, and about how, as far as he could tell, They weren't bad people at all. As long as you didn't get Dean started on football, or the Patil twins on India, which they had never been too but felt very passionate about, or as that strange ravenclaw girl in the year under Harry had found out, when she started going on about crime statistics to Angelina. She was very sensitive about that sort of thing for some reason. Dean too. Regardless, Aunt Marge was a dreadful woman and that had nothing to do with race. Harry had a great many things he could have said, But he promised Vernon he'd be a Mug. So a Mug He would be. He thought about the form.

'Nuffink,' he said, and let his mouth hang open a bit, and his eyes go dull.

'Hmph,' said Aunt Marge. 'Looks half asleep. Does he always look like that?'

'Always,' said Uncle Vernon.

Harry grunted, as a boy might who had not understood the question and did not much care, and heaved the suitcase up the stairs into the spare bedroom, taking as long as he possibly could.

He sat on the end of the spare bed for a while, when he'd got there, with Aunt Marge's suitcase at his feet and the sound of her voice coming up through the floor, and he was surprised to find that his hands were shaking. Not with fear. He had a good deal of practice at being frightened and this wasn't that. It was the sharp and bubbling feeling he'd felt in Hagrid's hut when Fudge had taken him away, and in the hospital wing when he'd put his fist into the stone wall by the door with Hermione lying there behind him, the hot, swelling, useless thing that had nowhere to go. He'd grunted. He'd stood in a doorway and said nuffink while Marge talked about Windrush and rubbish on the streets that didn't used to be there, and he'd grunted, and Uncle Vernon had nodded at him approvingly as though he'd done well.

Six days, he thought. Six and a half. Then she goes, and he signs, and you never have to do that again.

He went back downstairs with his face arranged.

By the time he got back to the kitchen, Aunt Marge had been supplied with tea and fruitcake, and Ripper was lapping noisily in the corner. Harry saw Aunt Petunia wince slightly as specks of tea and drool flecked her clean floor. Aunt Petunia hated animals.

'Who's looking after the other dogs, Marge?' Uncle Vernon asked.

'Oh, I've got Colonel Fubster managing them,' boomed Aunt Marge. 'He's retired now, good for him to have something to do. But I couldn't leave poor old Ripper. He pines if he's away from me.'

Ripper began to growl again as Harry sat down. This directed Aunt Marge's attention to Harry for the first time.

'So!' she barked. 'Still here, are you?'

'Yes,' said Harry.

'Don't you say "yes" in that ungrateful tone,' Aunt Marge growled. 'It's damn good of Vernon and Petunia to keep you. Wouldn't have done it myself. You'd have gone straight to an orphanage if you'd been dumped on my doorstep.'

An orphanage, Harry thought. Yes. I met a boy from an orphanage last month. He'd have liked you. He was bursting to say it, or something like it, something short and sharp about the Dursleys and Aunt Marge and doorsteps and who exactly had done the dumping. But he could see Uncle Vernon out of the corner of his eye, and Uncle Vernon's small eyes were on him, and the form was upstairs under the floor.

Be a mug, he told himself. Mugs smile.

He forced his face into a painful smile.

'Don't you smirk at me!' boomed Aunt Marge. 'I can see you haven't improved since I last saw you. I hoped school would knock some manners into you.' She took a large gulp of tea, wiped her moustache, and said, 'Where is it that you send him, again, Vernon?'

'St Brutus's,' said Uncle Vernon promptly. 'It's a first-rate institution for hopeless cases.'

'I see,' said Aunt Marge. 'Do they use the cane at St Brutus's, boy?' she barked across the table.

'Er...'

Uncle Vernon nodded curtly behind Aunt Marge's back.

'Yes,' said Harry. Then, feeling he might as well do the thing properly, he added, 'All the time. Got all the marks from it and everything.'

He looked to Uncle Vernon, who nodded approvingly. It was, Harry realised, the first approving nod Uncle Vernon had ever given him in twelve years, and it was for lying about being beaten. Bloody Dursleys.

'Excellent,' said Aunt Marge. 'I won't have this namby-pamby, wishy-washy nonsense about not hitting people who deserve it. A good thrashing is what's needed in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. Have you been beaten often?'

'Oh, yeah,' said Harry, 'loads of times.'

And that, at least, was true. He thought of the frying pan, and the rolling pin, and the slipper with the mould on the heel. He thought of a troll's club coming down in a girls' bathroom, and a rogue Bludger following him round a pitch like a dog, and a man with two faces, and a fifty-foot snake with its fangs in his arm. Loads of times. His chest went tight, and his hands went still on the table, and he said nothing at all.

Aunt Marge narrowed her eyes.

'I still don't like your tone, boy,' she said. 'If you can speak of your beatings in that casual way, they clearly aren't hitting you hard enough. Petunia, I'd write if I were you. Make it clear that you approve the use of extreme force in this boy's case.'

Aunt Petunia's teacup went down on its saucer with a small, sharp click, and her eyes went, very quickly, to Uncle Vernon, and Uncle Vernon's went to the window. Neither of them said yes, Marge. Harry noticed that.

Perhaps Uncle Vernon was worried that Harry might forget their bargain; in any case, he changed the subject abruptly.

'Heard the news this morning, Marge? What about that escaped prisoner, eh?'

As Aunt Marge started to make herself at home, Harry caught himself thinking almost longingly of life at number four without her. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia usually encouraged Harry to stay out of their way, which Harry was only too happy to do. Aunt Marge, on the other hand, wanted Harry under her eye at all times, so that she could boom out suggestions for his improvement. She delighted in comparing Harry with Dudley, and took huge pleasure in buying Dudley expensive presents while glaring at Harry, as though daring him to ask why he hadn't got a present too. She also kept throwing out dark hints about what made Harry such an unsatisfactory person.

On the first evening it was a video recorder for Dudley, which came out of the enormous suitcase in a box the size of a small coffin, and which Dudley unwrapped in front of the new television with Aunt Marge standing over him like a fairy godmother in tweed.

'There,' she said. 'For my Dudders. Because he's a good boy who deserves nice things.' She turned her head, slowly, until her small eyes found Harry in the doorway. 'Aren't you going to say anything, boy?'

'That's very kind of you, Aunt Marge,' said Harry.

'It is,' said Aunt Marge. 'It is very kind. Not everybody gets kindness. It has to be earned, in this life, by people who make an effort.' She looked at Harry's hair. 'Some people don't make an effort.'

Harry looked at the carpet, and thought about page nine of the Handbook, and grunted.

On the second day it was the news again, at breakfast, with Ripper under the table and Aunt Marge's elbows on it. The escaped man was on first, with his tangled hair and his dead eyes, and then the red map, redder than yesterday, and a column of tanks going along a dusty road under a sky the colour of brass.

'Hang him,' said Aunt Marge, through her toast, at the first man. 'Hang the lot of them. And as for that,' at the second, 'I don't know what the world's coming to. Men like that. Made in a laboratory, they're saying now. Made! I ask you. Didn't I always say, Vernon, there's no telling what you'll get when you go messing about with blood and genes that isn't right?'

'You always said, Marge.'

'I always said. You get what you breed for. Look at that face. Look at those eyes. You'd drown a pup with eyes like that.' She chewed. 'And those coloured clowns in the helmets are no better. Prancing about. Where were they, when that lot were marching into wherever it was? Dressing up in California, that's where.'

Dudley, who had been about to say something about the coloured clowns in the helmets, shut his mouth and ate his sausage.

Harry ate his toast and looked at the man on the balcony, and thought that the man on the balcony and Aunt Marge would have had a great deal to say to each other, right up until the moment he had her shot.

'What are you smirking at?' said Aunt Marge.

'Nuffink,' said Harry.

On the second night he couldn't sleep.

He lay in the dark with the window open and no owl on the headboard, listening to the house, and some time after eleven he heard the Dursleys' bedroom door, and feet on the landing, and then two sets of feet going down the stairs very quietly, which was not a thing the Dursleys ever did. He got up. He didn't know why. He went out onto the landing in his bare feet and stood at the top of the stairs in the dark, where he'd stood at eleven years old listening to them argue about his letters, and he listened.

They were in the kitchen, with the door not quite shut. Uncle Vernon's voice came up the stairs in a whisper that was very nearly not a whisper at all.

'...can't do it, Petunia. I can't sit there and watch her go at him and say nothing. She's my sister. She'll think I've gone soft. She'll think...'

'And what would you rather she thought?' Aunt Petunia's whisper was sharper, and higher. 'That, or the other thing?'

'He wouldn't...'

'He said, Vernon.' A chair scraped. 'He sat on my sofa and he said. He'd know. He said he'd know the moment it happened, wherever he was, and he said what he'd...' Her voice went thin and ran out. 'I believed him. You believed him. You went grey, Vernon, I watched you.'

There was a long silence. Harry stood on the landing with his heart going and his feet getting cold.

'It's not us, though,' Uncle Vernon said at last, and his voice had gone small and sulky, like Dudley's when he'd been refused something. 'It's Marge. He never said anything about Marge.'

'He said a word. Not a hand, not a word. He didn't say whose.'

Another silence.

'Five more days,' Uncle Vernon muttered. 'Five more days, and she's gone, and we needn't... Petunia, I'm not having that man in my house again. I'm not. Do you hear me? Whatever it takes. I'll sign the boy's wretched form, I'll give him a plate, I'll do whatever it... but I am not having him sit in my front room and look at me like that again.'

'Then keep your voice down with Marge,' said Aunt Petunia, 'and let the boy keep his.'

Harry went back to bed. He lay there for a long time, with his eyes open, thinking about an old man on a sofa, looking at Uncle Vernon. He didn't know whether to feel protected or frightened. He settled, in the end, on both.

'You mustn't blame yourself for the way the boy's turned out, Vernon,' Aunt Marge said over lunch on the third day. 'If there's something rotten on the inside, there's nothing anyone can do about it.'

Harry tried to concentrate on his food, but his hands shook and his face was starting to burn with anger. Remember the form, he told himself. Think about Hogsmeade. Don't say anything. Don't rise... I'm a Mug. I'm a Mug.

Aunt Marge reached for her glass of wine.

'It's one of the basic rules of breeding,' she said. 'You see it all the time with dogs. If there's something wrong with the bitch, there'll be something wrong with the pup-'

At that moment, the wineglass Aunt Marge was holding exploded in her hand. Shards of glass flew in every direction and Aunt Marge sputtered and blinked, her great ruddy face dripping.

Harry hadn't moved. He hadn't touched anything. But rage had gone out of him, across the table, sharp and hot and fast as a thrown knife, and he knew exactly what it was and exactly where it had come from.

The bitch. She'd meant his mother. She'd sat at Aunt Petunia's table and called his mother a bitch, as if she were talking about one of Colonel Fubster's kennels, and his mother had died standing between him and Lord Voldemort.

And Dumbledore had said, on the steps, in the sun, that his mother had come down from Elves. Somehow. He hadn't said how. Not house-elves, not that damned Dobby with his tea-cosy and his bandaged fingers. The other kind. The kind in Dudley's doorstop of a book, who were tall and graceful. They sang under the stars, lived forever and made things so beautiful that men went to war over them. It sounded like nonsense. It sounded like exactly the sort of thing you'd say to a boy to make him feel better about being sent back to a cupboard. But sitting there with wine dripping off Aunt Marge's chins, Harry found he'd take it. He'd take it gladly. Because whatever his mother had come down from, it was a great deal better than whatever had produced Uncle Vernon and Aunt Marge.

He had a strong suspicion about that. He suspected ogres.

'Marge!' squealed Aunt Petunia. 'Marge, are you all right?'

'Not to worry,' grunted Aunt Marge, mopping her face with her napkin. 'Must have squeezed it too hard. Did the same thing at Colonel Fubster's the other day. No need to fuss, Petunia, I have a very firm grip...'

But Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were both looking at Harry, and it wasn't quite suspicion. Suspicion would have been easier. They looked at him with the look of two people who have been told exactly how a dangerous animal behaves and have just watched it do it, so they're working out how far away the door is. Harry decided he'd better skip dessert and escape from the table as soon as he could.

Outside in the hall, he leaned against the wall, breathing deeply.

It had been a long time since he'd lost control and made something explode. He couldn't afford to let it happen again. The Hogsmeade form wasn't the only thing at stake. If he carried on like that, he'd be in trouble with the Ministry of Magic. Harry was still an underage wizard, and he was forbidden by wizard law to do magic outside school. His record wasn't exactly clean either. Only last summer he'd got an official warning, after Dobby's pudding, that had made it quite clear that any further spellwork on his part might mean expulsion from Hogwarts.

He heard the Dursleys leaving the table and hurried upstairs out of the way.

He didn't calm down. He sat on his bed and went over it, and every time he went over it it got worse, not better. Something wrong with the bitch. He thought of the album Hagrid had made him, and the page where his mother stood in a garden with his father's arm round her, laughing at something out of the picture. He thought of a flash of green light so bright it hurt, and a woman screaming. He thought of Aunt Marge's great red face, chewing, and the word going into him like a hook, and he wanted, very badly, with a clear hard want he didn't recognise as his, to go back downstairs and make her take it back.

He didn't. He sat on his hands, literally, and read page twelve of the Handbook four times, and didn't take in a word.

Harry got through the next three days by forcing himself to think about his Handbook of Do-It-Yourself Broomcare whenever Aunt Marge started on him. This worked quite well, though it seemed to give him a glazed look, because Aunt Marge started voicing the opinion that he was mentally subnormal.

'Gormless,' she said, on the fourth day, watching him clear the table. 'Look at him. Gormless. You can see there's nothing going on behind the eyes.'

'Nothing,' agreed Uncle Vernon, with a quick glance at Harry.

Harry stacked the plates, and grunted, and went on thinking about tail-twig alignment, and behind his eyes a great deal was going on indeed.

At last, at long last, the final evening of Marge's stay arrived.

Aunt Petunia cooked a fancy dinner and Uncle Vernon uncorked several bottles of wine. They got all the way through the soup and the salmon without a single mention of Harry's faults; during the lemon meringue pie, Uncle Vernon bored them all with a long talk about Grunnings, his drill-making company; then Aunt Petunia made coffee and Uncle Vernon brought out a bottle of brandy.

'Can I tempt you, Marge?'

Aunt Marge had already had quite a lot of wine. Her huge face was very red.

'Just a small one, then,' she chuckled. 'A bit more than that... and a bit more... that's the ticket.'

Dudley was eating his fourth slice of pie. Aunt Petunia was sipping coffee with her little finger sticking out. Harry really wanted to disappear into his bedroom, but he met Uncle Vernon's angry little eyes and knew he would have to sit it out.

One more night, he thought. She goes at ten tomorrow. You've done six days. You can do one more night.

'Aah,' said Aunt Marge, smacking her lips and putting the empty brandy glass back down. 'Excellent nosh, Petunia. It's normally just a fry-up for me of an evening, with twelve dogs to look after...' She burped richly and patted her great tweed stomach. 'Pardon me. But I do like to see a healthy-sized boy,' she went on, winking at Dudley. 'You'll be a proper-sized man, Dudders, like your father. Yes, I'll have a spot more brandy, Vernon...'

'Now, this one here...'

She jerked her head at Harry, who felt his stomach clench. The Handbook, he thought quickly.

'This one's got a mean, runty look about him. You get that with dogs. I had Colonel Fubster drown one last year. Ratty little thing it was. Weak. Underbred.'

Harry was trying to remember page twelve of his book: A Charm to Cure Reluctant Reversers. He was trying very hard not to think about the thing he wanted to say to Aunt Marge about which of the two of them was healthy-sized, and what exactly a vet would make of her, and whether Colonel Fubster had ever been asked to drown anything of her weight. It was right there on his tongue. It would have taken half a second.

Be a mug, he thought, with a sort of desperation, while the anger came up him like water filling a bath. Be a mug. Be a mug. Be a mug.

'It all comes down to blood, as I was saying the other day. Bad blood will out. Now, I'm saying nothing against your family, Petunia,' she patted Aunt Petunia's bony hand with her shovel-like one, 'but your sister was a bad egg. They turn up in the best families. Then she ran off with a wastrel and here's the result right in front of us.'

The blood of Númenor, Harry thought, and didn't know where it had come from. Whatever that means. Better than you. Better than Vernon.

Harry was staring at his plate, a funny ringing in his ears. Grasp your broom firmly by the tail, he thought. But he couldn't remember what came next. Aunt Marge's voice seemed to be boring into him like one of Uncle Vernon's drills.

'This Potter,' said Aunt Marge loudly, seizing the brandy bottle and splashing more into her glass and over the tablecloth, 'you never told me what he did?'

Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were looking extremely tense. Dudley had even looked up from his pie to gape at his parents.

'He... didn't work,' said Uncle Vernon, with half a glance at Harry. 'Unemployed.'

'As I expected!' said Aunt Marge, taking a huge swig of brandy and wiping her chin on her sleeve. 'A no-account, good-for-nothing, lazy scrounger who-'

'He was not,' said Harry suddenly.

The table went very quiet. Harry was shaking all over. He had never felt so angry in his life.

'MORE BRANDY!' yelled Uncle Vernon, who had gone very white. He emptied the bottle into Aunt Marge's glass. 'You, boy,' he snarled at Harry. 'Go to bed, go on-'

It wasn't a snarl, quite. Harry heard that even through the ringing. There was something underneath it, something pleading, and Uncle Vernon's eyes, when they met Harry's, were saying something quite different from his mouth. They were saying please. They were saying go upstairs, for God's sake, before she...

'No, Vernon,' hiccuped Aunt Marge, holding up a hand, her tiny bloodshot eyes fixed on Harry's. 'Go on, boy, go on. Proud of your parents, are you? They go and get themselves killed in a car crash (drunk, I expect)-'

'They didn't die in a car crash!' said Harry, who found himself on his feet.

'They died in a car crash, you nasty little liar, and left you to be a burden on their decent, hardworking relatives!' screamed Aunt Marge, swelling with fury. 'You are an insolent, ungrateful little-'

And then the rage in Harry flew out of him.

It wasn't a decision. He would think about that, afterwards, in the dark, with his trunk bumping behind him, and he'd be quite sure of it. There was simply a moment when the six days and the grunting and nuffink and loads of times and the bitch and drunk, I expect all came together into one white point behind his eyes, and the only thing in the whole world he wanted, the only thing, was to hurt her. To hurt her for her words. To make the great red mouth stop. Hurt her back.

Aunt Marge suddenly stopped speaking.

For a moment, it looked as though words had failed her. She seemed to be swelling with inexpressible anger, but the swelling didn't stop. Her great red face started to expand, her tiny eyes bulged, and her mouth stretched too tightly for speech. Next second, several buttons had burst from her tweed jacket and pinged off the walls. She was inflating like a monstrous balloon, her stomach bursting free of her tweed waistband, each of her fingers blowing up like a salami.

'MARGE!' yelled Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia together, as Aunt Marge's whole body began to rise off her chair towards the ceiling.

She was entirely round, now, like a vast life buoy with piggy eyes, and her hands and feet stuck out weirdly as she drifted up into the air, making apoplectic popping noises. Ripper came skidding into the room, barking madly.

'NOOOOOOO!'

Uncle Vernon seized one of Marge's feet and tried to pull her down again, but was almost lifted from the floor himself. A second later, Ripper leapt forward and sank his teeth into Uncle Vernon's leg.

Aunt Petunia had not moved. She was standing with her back against the dresser and both hands over her mouth, and her eyes weren't on her sister-in-law bumping gently against the light fitting. They were on Harry. And they were the eyes of somebody watching the thing they had been warned about come true.

Harry tore from the dining room before anyone could stop him, heading for the cupboard under the stairs.

The cupboard door burst magically open as he reached it. In seconds, he had heaved his trunk to the front door. He sprinted upstairs and threw himself under the bed, wrenching up the loose floorboard, and grabbed the pillowcase full of his books and birthday presents. The Monster Book snarled inside it. He wriggled out, seized Hedwig's empty cage from the wardrobe, and dashed back downstairs to his trunk, just as Uncle Vernon burst out of the dining room, his trouser leg in bloody tatters.

'COME BACK IN HERE!' he bellowed. 'COME BACK AND PUT HER RIGHT!'

But a reckless rage had come over Harry. He kicked his trunk open, pulled out his wand, and pointed it at Uncle Vernon.

Uncle Vernon stopped.

He stopped so suddenly that he skidded on the hall carpet. He was a huge man, and Harry was a thin boy of thirteen with a stick, and for twelve years that sum had only ever come out one way. It didn't now. Uncle Vernon's eyes went to the wand, and his face did the thing it had done in the kitchen and at the bottom of the stairs, the thing where all the colour ran out of it and something old and frightened looked out from behind, and he took a step back. Then another. His hands came up, palms out, in front of his chest. Behind him, in the doorway, Aunt Petunia whispered, 'Vernon. Don't.'

'She deserved it,' Harry said, breathing very fast. 'She deserved what she got. You keep away from me.'

He fumbled behind him for the latch on the door.

'I'm going,' Harry said. 'I've had enough.'

Nobody tried to stop him. Nobody said a word. Uncle Vernon stood in his own hall with his hands up and his trouser leg dripping, and Aunt Petunia stood behind him with her knuckles against her teeth, and from the dining room came a slow, rhythmic bumping, and the sound of Ripper barking at the ceiling, and the two of them watched Harry Potter go out of their front door as though they were watching something they'd never be able to explain to the neighbours.

And in the next moment, he was out in the dark, quiet street, heaving his heavy trunk behind him, Hedwig's cage under his arm. And Harry's only thought was of how much he hated Muggles.