The Dog in the Dark

Harry made it to the end of Privet Drive on rage alone.

The trunk weighed about as much as he did. It bumped and scraped over every join in the pavement and the handle bit into his hand and Hedwig's cage kept swinging round and banging his knee, and he didn't care, he didn't care about any of it, because if he stopped moving he'd have to start thinking, and he wasn't ready to think yet. He turned the corner into Wisteria Walk and kept going, past the identical hedges and the identical cars and the identical dark front windows, with his trainers slapping the pavement and his breath coming in hot, furious gulps, and he talked to himself. Out loud. He didn't notice he was doing it until he'd been doing it for some time.

'Drunk, I expect.' He hauled the trunk over a kerb. 'Drunk. My mum. She called my mum a bitch! He just sat there. More brandy. He sat there and poured her more brandy. Twelve years she's been coming to that house and he's never once, not once...'

The trunk caught on a drain cover and he wrenched it free so hard the hinges squealed.

'And mug. Be a mug, Harry. Grunt, Harry. Nuffink, Harry. Six days. Six days I did it. I did everything he said and I did it properly, I was good at it, and for what? For a form. For a bit of paper. So I could go to a sweetshop.' He laughed, and it came out wrong, high and cracked, and a cat on a wall looked at him and left. 'Well done, Harry. Well done. One more night and you'd have had it and you went and blew her up.'

He was angry with the Dursleys. He was angry with Aunt Marge, in a deep red way. But most of all, he found, as he stormed along under the streetlamps with his shadow swinging round him, he was angry with himself. Six days of swallowing it and his own temper had done the thing Uncle Vernon couldn't, and taken the form away, and he'd let it. He'd known it was coming. He'd felt it filling up behind his eyes all through the salmon and the pie, and he'd sat there and let it fill.

And underneath that, lower and colder, was the thing he didn't want to look at, so he looked at it.

He was angry with Muggles.

Not Hermione's mum and dad, not the dentists; he didn't mean them. He meant the Dursleys and Aunt Marge. The man who'd come to put the bars on his window, and the woman at the primary school who'd always believed Dudley, and the whole long row of them going back as far as he could remember. Every one of them had been able to hurt him. Any time they liked. With a slipper or a stick or a word, with a cupboard, with a box of dog biscuits at Christmas, and he had never once, not in twelve years, been able to hurt them back. He had a wand in his trunk that could turn Aunt Marge into a toad and he'd sat at her table and grunted. That was the deal. That had always been the deal. They did what they liked, and he took it, and if he ever, ever gave a bit of it back, it was him that was the monster.

Don't you want to hurt them back? a voice said in his memory, warm and reasonable, in a chamber under the school.

'Shut up,' Harry told it, and turned into Magnolia Crescent.

Then he remembered the Hogsmeade form, and the anger left. Leaving Harry sober.

Then, a second after that, he remembered that the form didn't matter. The form was nothing. The form was the least of it. He'd done magic.

He stopped in the middle of the pavement with the trunk behind him and the cage under his arm and stood quite still while it sank in. He'd done magic, outside school, in a house full of Muggles, on a Muggle. Accidental or not. He hadn't said a word or raised his wand, but he'd felt it go out of him, and he knew what the Ministry had said about further spellwork, and he knew what the Ministry was like.

'No,' he said, to the empty street. And then, louder, because there was nobody to hear it and because it was that or cry, he swore. He used every word he'd ever heard Uncle Vernon use at the television, and two he'd learnt from Fred, and he said them at the top of his voice, and the sound went up between the dark houses and came back off the pebbledash and nobody so much as twitched a curtain.

She deserved it. He knew that. He'd have done it again. But he had an idea the Ministry of Magic would not see it that way at all. These were the people who'd come to Hagrid's hut in the middle of the night, nicked him, and had taken him to Azkaban, without a hearing, without a trial, without so much as a cup of tea first, because fifty years ago somebody might have been responsible for something. With Dumbledore standing right there, saying Hagrid had his complete trust, and Fudge nodding and nodding and taking him anyway. Hagrid had had nothing to do with it and everybody knew it, and they'd taken him all the same, because it looked good. Because they had to be seen to be doing something.

What would they do to a boy who'd blown up a Muggle in Surrey?

Snap his wand, probably. That was what they did when they expelled you. They'd done it to Hagrid, fifty years ago, and Hagrid had been innocent, and all he had left to show for his wand were the pieces Harry reckoned Hagrid had hidden inside that pink umbrella. Snap his wand in two and send him back to Privet Drive, for good, with no Hogwarts and no Hedwig and no Ron and no anything, and Aunt Marge in the spare room every summer until he died.

He'd messed it up. He'd really, completely, messed it up this time.

He sat down on the garden wall of number two, because his legs had gone, and after about ten minutes alone in the dark the anger finished draining away and something else came up to take its place, and it was worse. It was panic.

He turned it every way he could and it came out the same. He was on a wall in Magnolia Crescent at going on midnight. He had nowhere to go. He had no one to go to. He was alone in the whole dark Muggle world with a trunk and an empty birdcage, and he'd broken the Decree for the Restriction of Underage Wizardry so thoroughly that he half expected a squad of wizards in Ministry robes to come round the corner any second and take him by the elbows. He looked up and down the Crescent for them. Nothing. Dark hedges, dark houses, one streetlamp buzzing.

What were they going to do with him? Arrest him? Was that a thing that happened to thirteen-year-olds? Or would they just... shut the door? Snap the wand, wipe the slate, and leave him out here on the Muggle side of everything forever, with his memories and nothing else?

He thought of Ron, and Hermione, and his heart went down another floor. They'd help him. He knew that without having to think about it; criminal or not, they'd want to help, Ron would already be arguing with his mother about the car. But Ron was in Egypt and Hermione was in Brittany and Hedwig was somewhere between here and Egypt with Errol, and he had no way in the world of reaching any of them. He didn't even have any Muggle money. He had a little wizard gold in the bag at the bottom of his trunk, and the rest of what his parents had left him was in a vault under London, and he could no more drag this trunk to London than fly.

Unless...

He looked down at the wand in his hand. He'd been holding it so hard his knuckles had gone white.

If he was already expelled, and his heart was going so fast now that it hurt, then a bit more magic couldn't make it any worse. Could it? He had his father's cloak. He could make the trunk light, tie it to the Nimbus, put the cloak over himself and go. Fly to London in the dark. Get the gold out of Gringotts in the morning. And then...

And then begin his life as an outcast.

He didn't like that at all. But he couldn't sit on this wall till morning, either, or the first thing to find him would be a Muggle policeman wanting to know what a boy was doing out at midnight with a trunkful of spellbooks and a broomstick. Harry had no good answer to that.

He knelt and opened the trunk again, and started shoving things aside, looking for the cloak.

He'd got as far as the spellbooks when he stopped.

He didn't know why he stopped. His hands simply did it, on their own, and then the rest of him caught up. Something had happened to the back of his neck, a crawling, prickling tightness, as if every small hair there had stood up at once to look at something. He straightened slowly and turned his head.

The Crescent was empty. No lights in the big square houses. No cars. The streetlamp buzzing. He told himself that, and he believed it, and he bent back over the trunk, and he'd got his fingers on something silky at the bottom when his whole body stood up again without asking him, and his hand closed on his wand.

He hadn't heard anything. And he was absolutely sure, in the way you're sure of a hand about to touch you in the dark, that there was something in the gap between the garage and the fence behind him.

He made himself turn round and look.

The gap was about four feet wide and as black as the inside of a mouth. The streetlamp didn't reach it. The garage wall was on one side and a high larch-lap fence on the other and between them there was nothing, nothing at all, a slot of dark. He stared into it until his eyes ached. Nothing moved. And that was somehow the worst part, because a cat would have moved. A fox would have moved. Whatever was in there was not moving, and the only reason he could think of for a thing to hold that still was that it was looking at him.

The night was very warm. Harry was cold all down his back.

If it would just move, he thought. Just once. Then I'd know.

It didn't.

'Lumos,' Harry muttered, and the tip of his wand burst into light so sudden and white that it half blinded him. He flung it up over his head.

The Crescent jumped into being around him. The pebbledashed walls of number two sparkled like frost. The garage door gleamed. Every leaf on the hedge had an edge. And in the gap between the garage and the fence, lit from above and casting a shadow that went back and back into the dark behind it, something was standing that was far, far too big.

It was black. It was the size of a bear. It had the shape of a dog, more or less, if a dog could be built like that, all shoulder and skull, standing with its head low and its forelegs planted, filling the gap from one wall to the other. And its eyes caught the light and threw it back, two wide flat discs of it, pale, unblinking, fixed on him. They didn't look like an animal's eyes. He couldn't have said why. There was something behind them that was paying attention.

It didn't growl. It didn't bare its teeth. It just stood there in the light and looked at him, and Harry had the sudden, lurching, completely unreasonable conviction that it knew exactly who he was.

He stepped backwards.

His heels hit the trunk and his legs went from under him. His wand flew out of his hand as he threw his arm out to save himself, and he came down hard, on his back, in the gutter, with the lit wand rolling away across the tarmac and the light swinging wildly over the fence and the garage and the gap, and in the gap, for one half-second as the beam went across it, nothing. Nothing at all. An empty black slot between two walls.

There was a deafening BANG, and Harry threw up his hands to shield his eyes against a sudden blinding light.

With a yell, he rolled back onto the pavement, just in time. A second later, a gigantic pair of wheels and headlights screeched to a halt exactly where Harry had just been lying. They belonged, as Harry saw when he raised his head, to a triple-decker, violently purple bus, which had appeared out of thin air. Gold lettering over the windscreen spelled The Knight Bus.

For a split second, Harry wondered if he had been knocked silly by his fall. Then a conductor in a purple uniform leapt out of the bus and began to speak loudly to the night.

'Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Just stick out your wand hand, step on board, and we can take you anywhere you want to go. My name is Stan Shunpike, and I will be your conductor this eve-'

Harry sighed.

The conductor stopped abruptly. He had just caught sight of Harry, who was still sitting on the ground. Harry snatched up his wand again and scrambled to his feet. Close up, he saw that Stan Shunpike was only a few years older than he was, eighteen or nineteen at most, with large, protruding ears and quite a few pimples.

'What were you doin' down there?' said Stan, dropping his professional manner.

'Fell over,' said Harry.

''Choo fall over for?' sniggered Stan.

'I didn't do it on bloody purpose, for God's sake' said Harry, annoyed. One of the knees in his jeans was torn, and the hand he had thrown out to break his fall was bleeding. He suddenly remembered why he had fallen over and turned round quickly to stare at the alleyway between the garage and fence. The Knight Bus's headlamps were flooding it with light, and it was empty.

Empty. Bins, a drainpipe, a coil of hose. He stared at the place where the eyes had been, and the back of his neck went on crawling anyway.

''Choo lookin' at?' said Stan.

'There was a big black thing,' said Harry, pointing uncertainly into the gap. 'Like a dog... but massive...'

He looked round at Stan, whose mouth was slightly open. With a feeling of unease, Harry saw Stan's eyes move to the scar on Harry's forehead.

'Woss that on your 'ead?' said Stan abruptly.

'Fell over when I was six. Nasty but nothing to worry about,' said Harry quickly, flattening his hair over his scar. If the Ministry of Magic was looking for him, he didn't want to make it too easy for them.

'Woss your name?' Stan persisted.

'Neville Longbottom,' said Harry, saying the first name that came into his head. 'So... so this bus,' he went on quickly, hoping to distract Stan, 'did you say it goes anywhere?'

'Yep,' said Stan proudly, 'anywhere you like, long's it's on land. Can't do nuffink underwater. 'Ere,' he said, looking suspicious again, 'you did flag us down, dincha? Stuck out your wand 'and, dincha?'

'Yes,' said Harry quickly. 'Listen, how much would it be to get to London?'

'Eleven Sickles,' said Stan, 'but for firteen you get 'ot chocolate, and for fifteen you get an 'ot water bottle an' a toofbrush in the colour of your choice.'

Harry rummaged once more in his trunk, extracted his money bag, and shoved some Galleons into Stan's hand. Rather more than fifteen Sickles' worth. He wasn't quite sure why he did it. Some part of him hoped that a handful of gold might buy a bit of silence, if Stan ever did put the scar and the name together, and the rest of him was ashamed of thinking like that, and told itself that it wasn't being suspicious. Not really. Just careful. Stan looked at the Galleons, and at Harry, and his eyebrows went up, and he put them in his pocket without a word.

He and Stan then lifted his trunk, with Hedwig's cage balanced on top, up the steps of the bus.

There were no seats. Instead, half a dozen brass bedsteads stood beside the curtained windows, with their covers turned back and their pillows dented, like a hospital ward that had been got up in a hurry by somebody who'd only ever had a ward described to them. Candles were burning in brackets beside each bed, and the light of them slid about on the wood-panelled walls as the bus rocked on its springs. A tiny wizard in a nightcap at the rear of the bus muttered, 'Not now, thanks, I'm pickling some slugs,' and rolled over in his sleep.

There was one other passenger awake.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed by the staircase with his elbows on his knees, and he didn't look up when Harry came in. He was a Muggleborn. Muggles must not use the Knight Bus but he was dressed like one, in a crumpled grey suit that had been slept in and a long tan raincoat that had been slept in more, with a tie pulled down to the second button and a shirt that had been white once. He had rough blond hair and a face that needed a shave two days ago, and he was perhaps thirty-five, and he looked as though he'd had the sort of day that goes on for a week.

On the bed beside him was a white plastic carrier bag, the thin, slightly see-through kind you got from a corner shop, and he had one hand resting on it, flat, like the thing would just run away. There was something square and heavy in it. A book, Harry thought, from the shape. A big one. As the candle swung, he thought for a second that there was a faint light coming through the plastic, a soft greenish flicker, like a television left on in another room. Then the candle swung back and it was only a bag.

The man looked up. Not at Harry. Through him, and out of the window, and back down at his own shoes. It was the most complete don't talk to me Harry had ever seen on a human face, and he had grown up with Uncle Vernon. He didn't talk to him.

The man fished in the raincoat, brought out a crumpled packet, and shook a cigarette out of it, then put it between his lips, and had got his lighter halfway up before Stan's head came round from the front of the bus.

'Oi! Oi! Non-smokin' bus, this is! Says so on the door! You can read, mate?'

The man looked at Stan for a long moment with the unlit cigarette in his mouth. It was a flat, tired, dangerous look, and Harry, who was watching from behind his trunk, found that he'd stopped breathing. Then the man took the cigarette out, slowly, and put it back in the packet, then put the packet back in his coat, and said something under his breath in an accent from somewhere a long way north of Surrey, Liverpool perhaps, that Harry didn't catch and was fairly sure he wasn't meant to. He went back to staring at his shoes. His hand didn't leave the bag.

Harry decided, with the certainty of a boy who'd spent two years learning which corridors not to go down, that this was a dodgy bloke, and that whatever he was doing on a bus full of sleeping wizards at midnight with a book in a Tesco bag, Harry wanted no part of it.

'You 'ave this one,' Stan whispered, shoving Harry's trunk under the bed right behind the driver, who was sitting in an armchair in front of the steering wheel. 'This is our driver, Ernie Prang. This is Neville Longbottom, Ern.'

Ernie Prang, an elderly wizard wearing very thick glasses, nodded to Harry, who nervously flattened his fringe again and sat down on his bed.

'Take 'er away, Ern,' said Stan, sitting down in the armchair next to Ernie's.

There was another tremendous BANG, and the next moment Harry found himself flat on his bed, thrown backwards by the speed of the Knight Bus. Pulling himself up, Harry stared out of the dark window and saw that they were now bowling along a completely different street. Stan was watching Harry's stunned face with great enjoyment.

'This is where we was before you flagged us down,' he said. 'Where are we, Ern? Somewhere in Wales?'

'Ar,' said Ernie.

'How come the Muggles don't hear the bus?' said Harry.

'Them!' said Stan contemptuously. 'Don' listen properly, do they? Don' look properly either. Never notice nuffink, they don'.'

'Best go wake up Madam Marsh, Stan,' said Ern. 'We'll be in Abergavenny in a minute.'

Stan passed Harry's bed and disappeared up a narrow wooden staircase. Harry was still looking out of the window, feeling increasingly nervous. Ernie didn't seem to have got the hang of the steering wheel at all. He held it like Aunt Petunia held a spider, at arm's length and with distaste, and he turned it very little and very late, so that the Knight Bus spent as much of its time on the pavement as off it. It never hit anything. The things it was about to hit got out of the way. Harry watched a whole row of lampposts lean back from the kerb like people avoiding a puddle, and a pillar box hop smartly onto a garden wall, and a line of dustbins scatter and regroup behind them like startled hens, and nobody in the dark houses on either side so much as stirred.

Stan came back downstairs, followed by a faintly green witch wrapped in a travelling cloak. She was very old and very small and she held the banister with both hands, and Stan came down behind her with his arms out on either side, not touching, ready.

'Ere you go, Madam Marsh,' said Stan happily, as Ern stamped on the brake and the beds slid a foot or so towards the front of the bus. Madam Marsh clamped a handkerchief to her mouth and tottered down the steps.

'Steady, now. Steady. Mind that one, it's a big 'un.' Stan went down ahead of her and gave her his arm at the bottom. 'There we are.'

'Thank you, dear,' said Madam Marsh, into the handkerchief. 'Thank you. You're very good. I'm going to see my grandson, you know. He's seven on Sunday. He's got a bicycle.'

'Is 'e, now?'

'He's a very clever boy. He can do his tables.'

'Course 'e can. You tell 'im Stan said 'appy birthday.' Stan straightened her cloak on her shoulders, where it had slipped, and then went back up the steps and threw her bag out after her, so that it landed on the verge with a thump. 'Mind 'ow you go, Madam Marsh. You tell us 'ow it all went when we come back for you, all right?'

'I will, dear,' said Madam Marsh faintly, and bent for her bag.

Stan watched her go a few steps up the lane, with her bag in both hands and her cloak trailing, before he turned back inside.

'Sweet old lady, that,' he said to Ern, earnestly, and rammed the doors shut. There was another loud BANG, and they were thundering down a narrow country lane, trees leaping out of the way.

Harry wouldn't have been able to sleep even if he had been travelling on a bus that didn't keep banging loudly and jumping a hundred miles at a time. His stomach churned as he fell back to wondering what was going to happen to him, and whether the Dursleys had managed to get Aunt Marge off the ceiling yet.

He wasn't the only one finding it hard going. Across the aisle, the dodgy bloke had both feet braced against the bedstead opposite and his free hand white-knuckled on the brass rail, and every time the bus banged he swore, under his breath, steadily and without repeating himself, in a long low stream of words that Harry had mostly never heard before and that Fred and George would have given a month's pocket money to take down. The other hand stayed on the bag. When the bus jumped, the bag tried to slide off the bed, and the hand didn't let it, and Harry saw the square shape through the plastic and thought again, book, and thought, what sort of book do you hold onto like that?

He looked away before the man could catch him looking.

Stan had unfurled a copy of the Daily Prophet and was now reading with his tongue between his teeth. A large photograph of a sunken-faced man with long, matted hair blinked slowly at Harry from the front page. He looked strangely familiar.

'That man!' Harry said, forgetting his troubles for a moment. 'He was on the Muggle news!'

Stanley turned to the front page and chuckled.

'Sirius Black,' he said, nodding. ''Course 'e was on the Muggle news, Neville, where you been?'

He gave a superior sort of chuckle at the blank look on Harry's face, removed the front page, and handed it to Harry.

'You oughta read the papers more, Neville.'

Harry held the paper up to the candlelight and read:

BLACK STILL AT LARGE

Sirius Black, the most dangerous man ever to be held within the walls of Azkaban, remains at liberty tonight, three days after his escape, and the Ministry of Magic has conceded that it does not know where he is.

'Every resource at the Ministry's disposal has been turned to this,' Cornelius Fudge, Minister for Magic, told the Prophet in the early hours of this morning. 'I would ask the wizarding public not to give way to alarm. The guards of Azkaban are on his trail and they do not tire.'

The Minister has nonetheless come under sharp criticism from within the International Confederation of Wizards for his decision to brief the Muggle Prime Minister on the escape, a step unprecedented in peacetime.

'I had no choice, and I'd do it again,' Fudge said, visibly irritated by the question. 'Black is not a man who distinguishes between wizard and Muggle when he kills. The Prime Minister has given me his word that he will say nothing of what Black truly is. And frankly, who would believe him?'

Muggles have been told that Black is armed with a gun, a kind of metal wand with which they are accustomed to kill one another. Within the wizarding community, however, the fear is of something a great deal worse than a gun. It is twelve years since Sirius Black stood in a crowded street and killed thirteen people with a single curse, and nobody who remembers that morning has forgotten it.

Harry looked into the shadowed eyes of Sirius Black, the only part of the sunken face that seemed alive.

He'd never met a vampire. He knew people who said they had. Lockhart had claimed to have fought several, including something he called a Tzi-mi-see, and had made Harry stand at the front of the class with his arms up pretending to be one, and Professor McGonagall had told him afterwards, quite deliberately, that a Tzimisce didn't fall down when you hit it but came apart and walked off in several directions, which was a thing Harry had tried hard not to think about since. And Hermione, who was the most sensible person he knew about nearly everything, kept three pictures of a vampire called Angelus folded inside one of her books, and looked at them under the table in Charms with an expression Harry had never been able to account for, given the butchery and dark deeds detailed in her vampire books, over several pages, Including what Angelus had done in Romania, and to a whole convent in London. Harry found the whole business strange and a bit off-putting. He'd never said so. But Black, with his waxy white skin and his eyes like two holes, looked as though he'd have fitted into those pages without anybody noticing the join.

'Scary-lookin' fing, inee?' said Stan, who had been watching Harry read.

'He murdered thirteen people?' said Harry, handing the page back to Stan. 'With one curse?'

'Yep,' said Stan, 'in front of witnesses an' all. Broad daylight. Big trouble it caused, dinnit, Ern?'

'Ar,' said Ern darkly.

Stan swivelled in his armchair, his hands on the back, the better to look at Harry.

'Black woz a big supporter of You-Know-'Oo,' he said.

'What, Voldemort?' said Harry, without thinking.

Even Stan's pimples went white; Ern jerked the steering wheel so hard that a whole farmhouse had to jump aside to avoid the bus. Across the aisle, the dodgy bloke's head came up for the first time, and his eyes went to Harry, and stayed there for about a second, narrow and interested, before they went back to his shoes.

'You outta your tree?' yelped Stan. ''Choo say 'is name for?'

'Sorry,' said Harry hastily. 'Sorry, I... I forgot...'

'Forgot!' said Stan weakly. 'Blimey, my 'eart's goin' that fast...'

'So... so Black was a supporter of You-Know-Who?' Harry prompted apologetically.

'Yeah,' said Stan, still rubbing his chest. 'Yeah, that's right. Very close to You-Know-'Oo, they say. Anyway, when little 'Arry Potter got the better of You-Know-'Oo...'

Harry nervously flattened his fringe down again.

'...all You-Know-'Oo's supporters was tracked down, wasn't they, Ern? Most of 'em knew it was all over, wiv You-Know-'Oo gone, and they came quiet. But not Sirius Black. I 'eard he thought 'e'd be second-in-command once You-Know-'Oo 'ad taken over.

'Anyway, they cornered Black in the middle of a street full of Muggles an' Black took out 'is wand and 'e blasted 'alf the street apart, an' a wizard got it, an' so did a dozen Muggles what got in the way. 'Orrible, eh? An' you know what Black did then?' Stan continued in a dramatic whisper.

'What?' said Harry.

'Laughed,' said Stan. 'Jus' stood there an' laughed. An' when reinforcements from the Ministry of Magic got there, 'e went wiv 'em quiet as anyfink, still laughing 'is 'ead off. 'Cos 'e's mad, inee, Ern? Inee mad?'

'If he weren't when he went to Azkaban, he will be now,' said Ern in his slow voice. 'I'd blow meself up before I set foot in that place. Serves him right, mind you... after what he did...'

'They 'ad a job coverin' it up, din' they, Ern?' Stan said. ''Ole street blown up an' all them Muggles dead. What was it they said 'ad 'appened, Ern?'

'Mutant attack, Stan.'

'No, no. It was a gas explosion, right?'

Ern shrugged, focusing on what passed for the road to the chaotic bus.

'An' now 'e's out,' said Stan, examining the newspaper picture of Black's gaunt face again. 'Never been a breakout from Azkaban before, 'as there, Ern? Beats me 'ow 'e did it. Frightenin', eh? Mind, I don't fancy 'is chances against them Azkaban guards, eh, Ern?'

Ernie suddenly shivered.

'Talk about summat else, Stan, there's a good lad. Them Azkaban guards give me the collywobbles.'

Stan put the paper away reluctantly, and Harry leaned against the window of the Knight Bus, feeling worse than ever. He couldn't help imagining what Stan might be telling his passengers in a few nights' time.

'Ear about that 'Arry Potter? Blew up 'is aunt! We 'ad 'im 'ere on the Knight Bus, di'n't we, Ern? 'E was tryin' to run for it...

Yes, Harry thought sourly. Running for it. On a purple bus with a bloke who thinks he's Neville Longbottom. Sirius Black blasts half a street to bits and laughs about it, and I inflate one woman who had it coming, and I'm the one sitting here feeling sick about the guards. Brilliant.

He, Harry, had broken wizard law just like Sirius Black. Was inflating Aunt Marge bad enough to land him in Azkaban? Harry didn't know anything about the wizard prison, though everyone he'd ever heard speak of it did so in the same fearful tone. Hagrid, the Hogwarts gamekeeper, had been sent there only last year, and Harry wouldn't soon forget the look on Hagrid's face when he'd realised where he was going. Not Azkaban. Not... not Azkaban. Hagrid had wrestled a three-headed dog and raised a dragon in a hut and walked into the Forest after whatever was killing the unicorns without turning a hair, and he'd gone the colour of porridge at a word.

The Knight Bus rolled through the darkness, scattering bushes and litter bins, telephone boxes and trees, and even the odd bicycle, which went end over end into a hedge and stayed there. Nobody liked cyclists. Harry couldn't bring himself to count it as any great loss.

He lay, restless and miserable, on his feather bed. After a while, Stan remembered that Harry had paid for hot chocolate, but poured it all over Harry's pillow when the bus moved abruptly from Anglesey to Aberdeen. One by one, wizards and witches in dressing gowns and slippers descended from the upper floors to leave the bus. They all looked very pleased to go.

The dodgy bloke didn't go. He sat on through Aberdeen and whatever came after Aberdeen, with his feet braced, his jaw set and his hand on the bag. Harry had the impression, from the way he looked at the doors every time they opened and then away again, that wherever he was going it was somewhere a long way up the list, and that he was not looking forward to arriving.

Finally, Harry was the only passenger left on the lower floor who was going anywhere.

'Right then, Neville,' said Stan, clapping his hands, 'whereabouts in London?'

'Diagon Alley,' said Harry.

'Righto,' said Stan. ''Old tight, then...'

BANG!

They were thundering along Charing Cross Road. Harry sat up and watched buildings and benches squeezing themselves out of the Knight Bus's way. The sky was getting a little lighter. He would lie low for a couple of hours, go to Gringotts the moment it opened, then set off... where, he didn't know.

Ern slammed on the brakes and the Knight Bus skidded to a halt in front of a small and shabby-looking pub, the Leaky Cauldron, behind which lay the magical entrance to Diagon Alley.

'Thanks,' Harry said to Ern.

He jumped down the steps and helped Stan lower his trunk and Hedwig's cage onto the pavement. He'd decided, somewhere around Aberdeen, that he liked Stan. Stan talked too much and laughed at people falling over and had very probably worked out exactly who he was somewhere around Abergavenny, but he'd also carried an old woman's cloak down a staircase with his arms out ready to catch her, and told her to say happy birthday to a grandson he'd never meet, and Harry had seen enough of the other sort of person lately to know the difference.

'Well,' said Harry. ''Bye then!'

But Stan wasn't paying attention. Still standing in the doorway to the bus, he was goggling at the shadowy entrance to the Leaky Cauldron.

'There you are, Harry,' said a voice.

Before Harry could turn, he felt a hand on his shoulder. At the same time, Stan shouted, 'Blimey! Ern, come 'ere! Come 'ere!'

Harry looked up at the owner of the hand on his shoulder and felt a bucketful of ice cascade into his stomach. He had walked right into Cornelius Fudge, the Minister for Magic himself.

For one second his mind went completely white. Then, out of nowhere, from the same place the sly grin had come from in the Dursleys' hall, something else arrived.

'Nah mate, I'm Barry Trotter,' said Harry. 'This has already happened once before. I look a bit like that Potter berk but me and him are two different young wizard boys.'

Fudge laughed. It was a jovial, official and all too fake laugh, a laugh that had been to a great many functions and shaken a great many hands, and it reminded Harry so exactly of Percy Weasley being a Prefect at somebody that for a second he half expected Fudge to tell him to tuck his shirt in.

'Very good, very good,' said Fudge. He was a portly little man in a long, pinstriped cloak, and he looked cold and exhausted, and the laugh had taken more out of him than he'd have liked anyone to know.

'Neville?' he repeated, frowning at Stan. 'This is Harry Potter.'

'I knew it!' Stan shouted gleefully. 'Ern! Ern! Guess 'oo Neville is, Ern! 'E's 'Arry Potter! I can see 'is scar!'

And that was that, Harry thought. Stan's shout went up and down Charing Cross Road and bounced off the shuttered shops, and with it went Neville Longbottom and the hair over the scar and the handful of Galleons and the whole stupid, flimsy, half-hour-old idea that he might somehow slip through. He was rumbled. He was completely, publicly, Minister-for-Magic rumbled, on a pavement, at dawn, with a torn knee. And the hand on his shoulder was a Ministry hand, and it hadn't let go. He knew what came next. He'd watched it come for Hagrid.

'Yes,' said Fudge testily, 'well, I'm very glad the Knight Bus picked Harry up, but he and I need to step inside the Leaky Cauldron now...'

Fudge increased the pressure on Harry's shoulder, and Harry found himself being steered inside the pub.

A stooping figure bearing a lantern appeared through the door behind the bar. It was Tom, the wizened, toothless landlord.

'You've got him, Minister!' said Tom. 'Will you be wanting anything? Beer? Brandy?'

'Perhaps a pot of tea,' said Fudge, who still hadn't let go of Harry.

Got him. Harry heard it, and his stomach turned over. You didn't say got him about a boy who'd wandered off. You said it about a naughty boy who'd just been caught.

There was a loud scraping and puffing from behind them, and Stan and Ern appeared, carrying Harry's trunk and Hedwig's cage and looking round excitedly.

''Ow come you di'n't tell us 'oo you are, eh, Neville?' said Stan, beaming at Harry, while Ernie's owlish face peered interestedly over Stan's shoulder.

'And a private parlour, please, Tom,' said Fudge pointedly.

''Bye,' Harry said miserably to Stan and Ern as Tom beckoned Fudge towards the passage that led from the bar.

''Bye, Neville!' called Stan. Then his face changed. 'Better make sure that bloke didn't light a fag whilst I was here.' And he was off, out of the door and up the steps of the bus at a run, shouting, 'Oi! Oi! I can smell it!' Leaving Harry to his doom.

Harry watched the purple doors slam on him, and found, in spite of everything, that he was very nearly smiling.

The parlour was small and had a fire in it, and two armchairs, and a table, and a door that Fudge shut. Then Fudge turned round and held out his hand, as if they'd just been introduced at a party.

'I am Cornelius Fudge, Harry. The Minister for Magic.'

Harry already knew this, of course; he had seen Fudge once before, in Hagrid's hut, but as he had been wearing his father's Invisibility Cloak at the time, Fudge wasn't to know that. He shook the hand. It was soft and slightly damp. He sat down in the chair Fudge pointed him to, on the very edge of it, with his hands between his knees, and waited for it to start.

He knew how it went. He'd heard it in the hut, through the cloak, in that same fussy, regretful, nothing personal voice. I'm afraid I've got to take you, Harry. Not a punishment, more a precaution. Decree for the Restriction, you understand. Have to be seen to be doing something. And then the long walk out to wherever they took you. He wondered if they'd snap the wand here, in the parlour, in front of the fire, or whether there was a room for it at the Ministry. He wondered if it hurt. He wondered if it made a noise.

Tom the innkeeper reappeared, wearing an apron over his nightshirt and bearing a tray of tea and crumpets. He placed the tray on a table between Fudge and Harry and left the parlour, closing the door behind him.

'Well, Harry,' said Fudge, pouring out tea, 'you've had us all in a right flap, I don't mind telling you. Running away from your aunt and uncle's house like that! I'd started to think... but you're safe, and that's what matters.'

Fudge buttered himself a crumpet and pushed the plate towards Harry.

'Eat, Harry, you look dead on your feet. Now then... You will be pleased to hear that we have dealt with the unfortunate blowing-up of Miss Marjorie Dursley. Two members of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad were dispatched to Privet Drive a few hours ago. Miss Dursley has been punctured and her memory has been modified. She has no recollection of the incident at all. So that's that, and no harm done.'

Fudge smiled at Harry over the rim of his teacup, rather like an uncle surveying a favourite nephew.

Harry, who couldn't believe his ears, opened his mouth to speak, couldn't think of anything to say, and closed it again.

Punctured, he thought. Right. He had a sudden vivid picture of two wizards in Ministry robes standing on the Dursleys' dining table with a pin, and Uncle Vernon watching from the doorway with his trouser leg in rags, and he had to look at the fire quite hard.

'Ah, you're worrying about the reaction of your aunt and uncle?' said Fudge. 'Well, I won't deny that they are extremely angry, Harry, but they are prepared to take you back next summer as long as you stay at Hogwarts for the Christmas and Easter holidays. I believe Dumbledore has had another word with them.'

And Fudge shivered. It was a small thing, a quick shudder through the shoulders, and he covered it at once with his teacup, but Harry saw it, and saw his eyes go for a moment to the fire, as if whatever he was remembering was in there. The Minister for Magic had shivered at the thought of Dumbledore having a word.

What did he do to them, Harry thought. The first time. And now this time. What on earth did he say?

Harry unstuck his throat.

'I always stay at Hogwarts for the Christmas and Easter holidays,' he said, 'and I don't ever want to go back to Privet Drive.'

He heard himself say it and heard, under it, a boy saying the same thing in the Burrow's kitchen a year ago, with Mrs Weasley's hand on his head and as long as you want still in the air, and Ron, a hundred times since, saying you're ours now, deal with it. They'd meant it. They still meant it. ONE WORD, Ron had written, in capitals, from Egypt. Harry found he was smiling, in spite of the Minister and the parlour and everything, because the Weasleys really were the nicest family in the whole world and there was nothing Cornelius Fudge could do about that.

'Now, now, I'm sure you'll feel differently once you've calmed down,' said Fudge in a worried tone. 'They are your family, after all, and I'm sure you are fond of each other... er... very deep down.'

'Mr... uh, Minister,' said Harry. 'With respect, I can go down to the deepest pits of hell and shake hands with the Devil himself and I won't find any love between me and the Dursleys there.'

Fudge nodded officiously, as if this were a point that had been raised in committee and minuted.

'Yes, I unfortunately saw when I went to explain things with Dumbledore to them. But Harry, Professor Dumbledore has described how that strange blood ward works. It really is the safest place for you there. I agree with Dumbledore on that much.'

He really was like an older Percy, Harry thought. The same fussing with the teacup. The same way of saying I agree with Dumbledore on that much as though it were a concession he'd fought hard for and expected to be thanked for. The same terrible, well-meaning certainty that whatever had been decided had been decided correctly, by the right people, through the right channels, and that the person it had been decided about would come round in time. The difference was that Percy had once, on a staircase on Valentine's Day, plucked a diary out of Dracina Malfoy's hands and given it back to Harry with a small satisfied smile, and had a girlfriend he was embarrassed about, and was Ron's brother, and could be forgiven. Harry wasn't sure what Fudge had.

He was still waiting to hear what was going to happen to him now. He was beginning to think he was going to have to ask.

'So all that remains,' said Fudge, now buttering himself a second crumpet, 'is to decide where you're going to spend the last three weeks of your holiday. I suggest you take a room here at the Leaky Cauldron and...'

'Hang on, hang on,' blurted Harry. 'Mr... uh, sorry, Minister, what about my punishment?'

Fudge blinked.

'Punishment?'

'I broke the law!' Harry said. 'The Decree for the Restriction of Underage Wizardry!'

'Oh, my dear boy, we're not going to punish you for a little thing like that!' cried Fudge, waving his crumpet impatiently. 'It was an accident! We don't send people to Azkaban just for blowing up their aunts!'

But this didn't tally at all with Harry's past dealings with the Ministry of Magic.

'Last year, I got an official warning just because a house-elf smashed a pudding in my uncle's house!' he told Fudge, frowning. 'The Ministry of Magic said I'd be expelled from Hogwarts if there was any more magic there!'

Unless Harry's eyes were deceiving him, Fudge was suddenly looking awkward.

'Circumstances change, Harry... We have to take into account... in the present climate... Surely you don't want to be expelled?'

'Of course I don't,' said Harry.

'Well then, what's all the fuss about?' laughed Fudge. 'Now, have a crumpet, Harry, while I go and see if Tom's got a room for you.'

Fudge strode out of the parlour and Harry stared after him.

He took a crumpet, because his hands wanted something to do, and didn't eat it.

There was something extremely odd going on. Why had Fudge been waiting for him at the Leaky Cauldron, at dawn, in a cold cloak, if not to punish him for what he'd done? And now Harry came to think of it, surely it wasn't usual for the Minister for Magic himself to get involved in matters of underage magic? Fudge was the top. Fudge was the man the warning letters were written on behalf of, not the man who turned up to deliver them. He was, as far as Harry could make out, the Muggle Prime Minister, only with a bowler hat, and Harry tried to imagine John Major standing outside a pub at five in the morning waiting for a thirteen-year-old who'd been rude to his aunt, and couldn't.

Uncle Vernon loathed John Major. He'd loathed him for about a year now, since something had happened to the pound and something called the ERM, which Uncle Vernon had tried to explain to Harry and Dudley over dinner one night with the salt cellar and the pepper pot standing in for things, and which neither of them had understood a word of, except that it was a disgrace, and that a man who'd let it happen ought to be executed. Harry had watched the man show his face on the news a good deal since, and had never been able to see anything wrong with it. It was a grey, careful, reasonable face, that always seemed to be apologising for something before anyone had asked.

Fudge had the same face. That was it. That was what was bothering him. Underneath the crumpets and the my dear boy, Cornelius Fudge gave off exactly the same thing as a Muggle politician, which was the feeling that whatever he was telling you, he'd decided what to tell you before he came into the room, and that the real reason was somewhere else.

Fudge came back, accompanied by Tom the innkeeper.

'Room eleven's free, Harry,' said Fudge. 'I think you'll be very comfortable. Just one thing, and I'm sure you'll understand... I don't want you wandering off into Muggle London, all right? Keep to Diagon Alley. And you're to be back here before dark each night. Sure you'll understand. Tom will be keeping an eye on you for me.'

'OK,' said Harry slowly, 'but why...?'

'Don't want to lose you again, do we?' said Fudge with a hearty laugh. 'No, no... best we know where you are... I mean...'

Fudge cleared his throat loudly and picked up his pinstriped cloak.

'Well, I'll be off, plenty to do, you know...'

'Have you had any luck with Black yet?' Harry asked.

Fudge's finger slipped on the silver fastenings of his cloak.

'What's that? Oh, you've heard... well, no, not yet, but it's only a matter of time. The Azkaban guards have never yet failed... and they are angrier than I've ever seen them.'

Fudge shuddered slightly.

'So, I'll say goodbye.'

He held out his hand and Harry, shaking it, had a sudden idea.

'Er... Minister? Can I ask you something?'

'Certainly,' said Fudge with a smile.

Harry arranged his face.

He knew exactly which face he wanted. He'd watched Hermione put it on last year, in front of Gilderoy Lockhart, when she'd needed a signature for the Restricted Section and had decided, quite coldly, to get one. She'd put on her sweetest smile like a mask before a bank robbery, and her shoulders had hunched and her steps had gone small and shy and her voice had gone breathless, and she'd said she'd had to put Gadding with Ghouls down and walk round the room, and Lockhart had signed. Then she'd turned round, and the face had gone, and she'd been Hermione again, quiet and a bit sad, hugging Gadding with Ghouls to her chest, and Harry had felt something cold go down the back of his neck, because it had been so good. He'd never said so. But he'd watched, and he'd learnt.

He let his shoulders come down. He let his eyes go wide.

'It's just,' he said, 'I wanted to say thank you. Properly. I was so frightened, sir, you've no idea. I thought that was it, I thought I was finished, I've been sitting on a wall in Surrey thinking about having my wand snapped. And then it's you. Not some, some clerk. The Minister himself. Up all night. In the cold.' He shook his head slowly, as if he could hardly take it in. 'I don't think most people realise what you do. I didn't.'

Fudge's chest went out about an inch.

'Well,' he said. 'Well, now. One does what one can, Harry. It's a heavy office. People don't always appreciate-'

'They don't,' said Harry warmly. 'That's what I mean. You've got Black out there, and the whole country in a panic, and the Muggle Prime Minister to deal with, and the newspapers going on at you, and you still came yourself. For me. Ron's dad always says the Ministry's only as good as the man at the top, and I never really understood what he meant till tonight.'

Mr Weasley had never said anything of the kind in Harry's hearing. Mr Weasley's views on the man at the top, as far as Harry had been able to gather over a summer at the Burrow, were expressed mainly through the way he said the Minister, which was the way other people said the drains. Harry kept his eyes wide.

'Arthur Weasley says that?' said Fudge, visibly pleased. 'Does he? Well. Good man, Arthur. Sound. Not always the most... but sound.'

'And the way you handled Aunt Marge,' Harry went on. 'Sorted. In a few hours. Memory and everything. I'd never have thought of a Reversal Squad. I didn't even know there was one.'

'Ah, well, that's the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, you see, under the, ah, under my overall direction of course, there's a subsection specifically for...' Fudge caught himself, and chuckled, and waved the hand with the cloak in it. 'But you don't want to hear about departmental structure at this time of the morning, dear boy.'

'No, I do, honestly,' said Harry. 'I think it's brilliant.'

And it was working. It was working so well that Harry, somewhere behind the wide eyes, was starting to feel slightly sick about it. Fudge was glowing. Fudge had put the cloak down again. Fudge was a grown man, the most important wizard in Britain by his own account, and a boy of thirteen with a torn knee and no sleep was turning him round like a key in a lock, with nothing but the voice Hermione used on Lockhart.

And if Harry could do it, Harry thought, with a cold little drop in his stomach, then what exactly was stopping anybody else? What was stopping Lucius Malfoy, with his cane and his cold eyes and his my dear Minister, from standing in a room like this one and doing the same thing for an hour, with gold on the table at the end of it? What was stopping anybody with a smooth voice and a bad reason? Nothing, by the look of it. Nothing at all.

He filed that away with everything else, and went in for the kill.

'Well, third-years at Hogwarts are allowed to visit Hogsmeade, but my aunt and uncle didn't sign the permission form. D'you think you could...?'

Fudge was suddenly looking uncomfortable. All of Harry's flattery vanished out of the room as if a window had been opened.

'Ah,' he said. 'No, no, I'm very sorry, Harry, but as I'm not your parent or guardian...'

'But you're the Minister for Magic,' said Harry eagerly. 'If you gave me permission...'

'No, I'm sorry, Harry, but rules are rules,' said Fudge flatly. 'Perhaps you'll be able to visit Hogsmeade next year. In fact, I think it's best if you don't... yes... well, I'll be off. Enjoy your stay, Harry.'

And with a last smile and shake of Harry's hand, Fudge left the room.

Harry stood in the middle of the parlour and listened to the Minister's footsteps go away down the passage, and the front door of the Leaky Cauldron open and shut, and he thought: rules are rules.

Not two minutes ago, rules had been something you didn't punish a boy for a little thing like breaking. Now, with a form in the question, they were rules again, and flat, and final, and the Minister had gone slightly pink saying so and hadn't been able to look at him. And I think it's best if you don't. Best for whom? Harry turned that over, and didn't like any of the shapes it made.

He had the strangest feeling that he'd just been handled. Very kindly, and very expertly, and with crumpets. He'd walked into that room expecting to have the book thrown at him, and instead he'd been fed and soothed and put to bed like a feverish child, and told to stay in the garden, and he had no more idea why than he'd had on the pavement.

Tom now moved forward, beaming at Harry.

'If you'll follow me, Mr Potter,' he said, 'I've already taken your things up...'

Harry followed Tom up a handsome wooden staircase, with his torn knee stiffening at every step, to a door with a brass number eleven on it, which Tom unlocked and opened for him. Inside was a very comfortable-looking bed, some highly polished oak furniture, a cheerfully crackling fire and, perched on top of the wardrobe...

'Hedwig!' Harry gasped.

The snowy owl clicked her beak and fluttered down onto Harry's arm. She was heavier than he remembered. She gripped his wrist through his sleeve and looked at him with her great amber eyes as though she'd like to know exactly what he thought he'd been doing, and he found that his throat had gone tight, and that he had to look at the fire for a second.

'Very smart owl you've got there,' chuckled Tom. 'Arrived about five minutes after you did. Came straight in at the window and went up there and wouldn't come down for anybody. If there's anything you need, Mr Potter, don't hesitate to ask.'

He gave another bow and left.

'How did you know?' Harry said to Hedwig, when the door had shut. 'You were meant to be in Egypt. How did you know where I'd be?'

Hedwig gave him a look that suggested the question was beneath them both, and went up his arm to his shoulder, and settled there, and began, very gently, to pull at his hair with her beak, the way she did when she thought he'd been foolish and had decided to forgive him for it.

Harry sat on his bed for a long time, absentmindedly stroking her.

The sky outside the window was changing rapidly from deep, velvety blue to cold, steely grey and then, slowly, to pink shot with gold. Somewhere below, in the Alley, a shutter went up with a rattle, and a man's voice said something cheerful about cauldrons. Harry could hardly believe that he'd left Privet Drive only a few hours ago, that he wasn't expelled, and that he was now facing three Dursley-free weeks.

He thought, drifting, of a pair of pale eyes in a gap between a garage and a fence, that had looked at him as if they knew him. He thought of a man in a raincoat with his hand on a bag, who was on his way, by now, to wherever dodgy men in raincoats went at dawn. He thought of Fudge saying best we know where you are, and shivering at Dumbledore, and going pink over Hogsmeade. He thought of Aunt Marge, punctured. None of it fitted together. He had the feeling of a boy who's been handed all the pieces of two different jigsaws in one box.

'Bloody hell, Hedwig,' he yawned. 'It's been a very weird night.'

And without even removing his glasses, he slumped back onto his pillows and fell asleep.