Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (5 page)

He flung himself down at the kitchen table and faced Dudley and Aunt Petunia. The Dursleys appeared taken aback at his abrupt change of mind. Aunt Petunia glanced despairingly at Uncle Vernon. The vein in his purple temple was throbbing worse than ever.

‘Who are all these ruddy owls from?’ he growled.

‘The first one was from the Ministry of Magic, expelling me,’ said Harry calmly. He was straining his ears to catch any noises outside, in case the Ministry representatives were approaching, and it was easier and quieter to answer Uncle Vernon’s questions than to have him start raging and bellowing. ‘The second one was from my friend Ron’s dad, who works at the Ministry.’

‘Ministry of Magic?’
bellowed Uncle Vernon. ‘People like you in
government
? Oh, this explains everything, everything, no wonder the country’s going to the dogs.’

When Harry did not respond, Uncle Vernon glared at him, then spat out, ‘And why have you been expelled?’

‘Because I did magic.’

‘AHA!’ roared Uncle Vernon, slamming his fist down on top of the fridge, which sprang open; several of Dudley’s low-fat snacks toppled out and burst on the floor. ‘So you admit it!
What did you do to Dudley?
’

‘Nothing,’ said Harry, slightly less calmly. ‘That wasn’t me –’

‘
Was
,’ muttered Dudley unexpectedly, and Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia instantly made flapping gestures at Harry to quieten him while they both bent low over Dudley.

‘Go on, son,’ said Uncle Vernon, ‘what did he do?’

‘Tell us, darling,’ whispered Aunt Petunia.

‘Pointed his wand at me,’ Dudley mumbled.

‘Yeah, I did, but I didn’t use –’ Harry began angrily, but –

‘SHUT UP!’ roared Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia in unison.

‘Go on, son,’ repeated Uncle Vernon, moustache blowing about furiously.

‘All went dark,’ Dudley said hoarsely, shuddering. ‘Everything dark. And then I h-heard …
things.
Inside m-my head.’

Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia exchanged looks of utter horror. If their least favourite thing in the world was magic – closely followed by neighbours who cheated more than they did on the hosepipe ban – people who heard voices were definitely in the bottom ten. They obviously thought Dudley was losing his mind.

‘What sort of things did you hear, Popkin?’ breathed Aunt Petunia, very white-faced and with tears in her eyes.

But Dudley seemed incapable of saying. He shuddered again and shook his large blond head, and despite the sense of numb dread that had settled on Harry since the arrival of the first owl, he felt a certain curiosity. Dementors caused a person to relive the worst moments of their life. What would spoiled, pampered, bullying Dudley have been forced to hear?

‘How come you fell over, son?’ said Uncle Vernon, in an unnaturally quiet voice, the kind of voice he might adopt at the bedside of a very ill person.

‘T-tripped,’ said Dudley shakily. ‘And then –’

He gestured at his massive chest. Harry understood. Dudley was remembering the clammy cold that filled the lungs as hope and happiness were sucked out of you.

‘Horrible,’ croaked Dudley. ‘Cold. Really cold.’

‘OK,’ said Uncle Vernon, in a voice of forced calm, while Aunt Petunia laid an anxious hand on Dudley’s forehead to feel his temperature. ‘What happened then, Dudders?’

‘Felt … felt … felt … as if … as if …’

‘As if you’d never be happy again,’ Harry supplied tonelessly.

‘Yes,’ Dudley whispered, still trembling.

‘So!’ said Uncle Vernon, voice restored to full and considerable volume as he straightened up. ‘You put some crackpot spell on my son so he’d hear voices and believe he was – was doomed to misery, or something, did you?’

‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ said Harry, temper and voice both rising. ‘
It wasn’t me!
It was a couple of Dementors!’

‘A couple of
–
what’s this codswallop?’

‘De – men – tors,’ said Harry slowly and clearly. ‘Two of them.’

‘And what the ruddy hell are Dementors?’

‘They guard the wizard prison, Azkaban,’ said Aunt Petunia.

Two seconds of ringing silence followed these words before Aunt Petunia clapped her hand over her mouth as though she had let slip a disgusting swear word. Uncle Vernon was goggling at her. Harry’s brain reeled. Mrs Figg was one thing – but
Aunt Petunia
?

‘How d’you know that?’ he asked her, astonished.

Aunt Petunia looked quite appalled with herself. She glanced at Uncle Vernon in fearful apology, then lowered her hand slightly to reveal her horsy teeth.

‘I heard – that awful boy – telling
her
about them – years ago,’ she said jerkily.

‘If you mean my mum and dad, why don’t you use their names?’ said Harry loudly, but Aunt Petunia ignored him. She seemed horribly flustered.

Harry was stunned. Except for one outburst years ago, in the course of which Aunt Petunia had screamed that Harry’s mother had been a freak, he had never heard her mention her sister. He was astounded that she had remembered this scrap of information about the magical world for so long, when she usually put all her energies into pretending it didn’t exist.

Uncle Vernon opened his mouth, closed it again, opened it once more, shut it, then, apparently struggling to remember how to talk, opened it for a third time and croaked, ‘So – so – they – er – they – er – they actually exist, do they – er – Dementy-whatsits?’ Aunt Petunia nodded. Uncle Vernon looked from Aunt Petunia to Dudley to Harry as if hoping somebody was going to shout ‘April Fool!’ When nobody did, he opened his mouth yet again, but was spared the struggle to find more words by the arrival of the third owl of the evening. It zoomed through the still-open window like a feathery cannonball and landed with a clatter on the kitchen table, causing all three of the Dursleys to jump with fright. Harry tore a second official-looking envelope from the owl’s beak and ripped it open as the owl swooped back out into the night.

‘Enough – effing –
owls
,’ muttered Uncle Vernon distractedly, stomping over to the window and slamming it shut again.

Harry read this letter through three times in quick succession. The miserable knot in his chest loosened slightly with the relief of knowing he was not yet definitely expelled, though his fears were by no means banished. Everything seemed to hang on this hearing on the twelfth of August.

‘Well?’ said Uncle Vernon, recalling Harry to his surroundings. ‘What now? Have they sentenced you to anything? Do your lot have the death penalty?’ he added as a hopeful afterthought.

‘I’ve got to go to a hearing,’ said Harry.

‘And they’ll sentence you there?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I won’t give up hope, then,’ said Uncle Vernon nastily.

‘Well, if that’s all,’ said Harry, getting to his feet. He was desperate to be alone, to think, perhaps to send a letter to Ron, Hermione or Sirius.

‘NO, IT RUDDY WELL IS NOT ALL!’ bellowed Uncle Vernon. ‘SIT BACK DOWN!’

‘What
now
?’ said Harry impatiently.

‘DUDLEY!’ roared Uncle Vernon. ‘I want to know exactly what happened to my son!’

‘FINE!’ yelled Harry, and in his temper, red and gold sparks shot out of the end of his wand, still clutched in his hand. All three Dursleys flinched, looking terrified.

‘Dudley and I were in the alleyway between Magnolia Crescent and Wisteria Walk,’ said Harry, speaking fast, fighting to control his temper. ‘Dudley thought he’d be smart with me, I pulled out my wand but didn’t use it. Then two Dementors turned up –’

‘But what ARE Dementoids?’ asked Uncle Vernon furiously. ‘What do they DO?’

‘I told you – they suck all the happiness out of you,’ said Harry, ‘and if they get the chance, they kiss you –’

‘Kiss you?’ said Uncle Vernon, his eyes popping slightly. ‘
Kiss
you?’

‘It’s what they call it when they suck the soul out of your mouth.’

Aunt Petunia uttered a soft scream.

‘His
soul
? They didn’t take – he’s still got his –’

She seized Dudley by the shoulders and shook him, as though testing to see whether she could hear his soul rattling around inside him.

‘Of course they didn’t get his soul, you’d know if they had,’ said Harry, exasperated.

‘Fought ’em off, did you, son?’ said Uncle Vernon loudly, with the appearance of a man struggling to bring the conversation back on to a plane he understood. ‘Gave ’em the old one-two, did you?’

‘You can’t give a Dementor
the old one-two
,’ said Harry through clenched teeth.

‘Why’s he all right, then?’ blustered Uncle Vernon. ‘Why isn’t he all empty, then?’

‘Because I used the Patronus –’

WHOOSH. With a clattering, a whirring of wings and a soft fall of dust, a fourth owl came shooting out of the kitchen fireplace.

‘FOR GOD’S SAKE!’ roared Uncle Vernon, pulling great clumps of hair out of his moustache, something he hadn’t been driven to do in a long time. ‘I WILL NOT HAVE OWLS HERE, I WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS, I TELL YOU!’

But Harry was already pulling a roll of parchment from the owl’s leg. He was so convinced that this letter had to be from Dumbledore, explaining everything – the Dementors, Mrs Figg, what the Ministry was up to, how he, Dumbledore, intended to sort everything out – that for the first time in his life he was disappointed to see Sirius’s handwriting. Ignoring Uncle Vernon’s ongoing rant about owls, and narrowing his eyes against a second cloud of dust as the most recent owl took off back up the chimney, Harry read Sirius’s message.

Arthur has just told us what’s happened. Don’t leave the house again, whatever you do.

Harry found this such an inadequate response to everything that had happened tonight that he turned the piece of parchment over, looking for the rest of the letter, but there was nothing else.

And now his temper was rising again. Wasn’t
anybody
going to say ‘well done’ for fighting off two Dementors single-handed? Both Mr Weasley and Sirius were acting as though he’d misbehaved, and were saving their tellings-off until they could ascertain how much damage had been done.

‘… a peck, I mean, pack of owls shooting in and out of my house. I won’t have it, boy, I won’t –’

‘I can’t stop the owls coming,’ Harry snapped, crushing Sirius’s letter in his fist.

‘I want the truth about what happened tonight!’ barked Uncle Vernon. ‘If it was Demenders who hurt Dudley, how come you’ve been expelled? You did you-know-what, you’ve admitted it!’

Harry took a deep, steadying breath. His head was beginning to ache again. He wanted more than anything to get out of the kitchen, and away from the Dursleys.

‘I did the Patronus Charm to get rid of the Dementors,’ he said, forcing himself to remain calm. ‘It’s the only thing that works against them.’

‘But what were Dementoids
doing
in Little Whinging?’ said Uncle Vernon in an outraged tone.

‘Couldn’t tell you,’ said Harry wearily. ‘No idea.’

His head was pounding in the glare of the strip-lighting now. His anger was ebbing away. He felt drained, exhausted. The Dursleys were all staring at him.

‘It’s you,’ said Uncle Vernon forcefully. ‘It’s got something to do with you, boy, I know it. Why else would they turn up here? Why else would they be down that alleyway? You’ve got to be the only – the only –’ Evidently, he couldn’t bring himself to say the word ‘wizard’. ‘The only
you-know-what
for miles.’

‘I don’t know why they were here.’

But at Uncle Vernon’s words, Harry’s exhausted brain had ground back into action. Why
had
the Dementors come to Little Whinging? How
could
it be coincidence that they had arrived in the alleyway where Harry was? Had they been sent? Had the Ministry of Magic lost control of the Dementors? Had they deserted Azkaban and joined Voldemort, as Dumbledore had predicted they would?

‘These Demembers guard some weirdo prison?’ asked Uncle Vernon, lumbering along in the wake of Harry’s train of thought.

‘Yes,’ said Harry.

If only his head would stop hurting, if only he could just leave the kitchen and get to his dark bedroom and
think …

‘Oho! They were coming to arrest you!’ said Uncle Vernon, with the triumphant air of a man reaching an unassailable conclusion. ‘That’s it, isn’t it, boy? You’re on the run from the law!’

‘Of course I’m not,’ said Harry, shaking his head as though to scare off a fly, his mind racing now.

‘Then why –?’

‘He must have sent them,’ said Harry quietly, more to himself than to Uncle Vernon.

‘What’s that? Who must have sent them?’

‘Lord Voldemort,’ said Harry.

He registered dimly how strange it was that the Dursleys, who flinched, winced and squawked if they heard words like ‘wizard’, ‘magic’ or ‘wand’, could hear the name of the most evil wizard of all time without the slightest tremor.

‘Lord
–
hang on,’ said Uncle Vernon, his face screwed up, a look of dawning comprehension coming into his piggy eyes. ‘I’ve heard that name … that was the one who –’

‘Murdered my parents, yes,’ Harry said.

‘But he’s gone,’ said Uncle Vernon impatiently, without the slightest sign that the murder of Harry’s parents might be a painful topic. ‘That giant bloke said so. He’s gone.’

‘He’s back,’ said Harry heavily.