send your answer by return of this owl. Hoping to see you this Friday,
I am, yours most sincerely
Albus Dumbledore
Though he already knew it by heart, Harry had been stealing glances at this missive every few minutes since seven o’clock that evening, when he had first taken up his position beside his bedroom window, which had a reasonable view of both ends of Privet Drive. He knew it was pointless to keep rereading Dumbledore’s words; Harry had sent back his ‘yes’ with the delivering owl, as requested, and all he could do now was wait: either Dumbledore was going to come, or he was not.
But Harry had not packed. It just seemed too good to be true that he was going to be rescued from the Dursleys after a mere fortnight of their company. He could not shrug off the feeling that something was going to go wrong – his reply to Dumbledore’s letter might have gone astray; Dumbledore could be prevented from collecting him; the letter might turn out not to be from Dumbledore at all, but a trick or joke or trap. Harry had not been able to face packing and then being let down and having to unpack again. The only gesture he had made to the possibility of a journey was to shut his snowy owl, Hedwig, safely in her cage.
The minute hand on the alarm clock reached the number twelve, and at that precise moment, the street lamp outside the window went out.
Harry awoke as though the sudden darkness was an alarm. Hastily straightening his glasses and unsticking his cheek from the glass, he pressed his nose against the window instead and squinted down at the pavement. A tall figure in a long, billowing cloak was walking up the garden path.
Harry jumped up as though he had received an electric shock, knocked over his chair, and started snatching anything and everything within reach from the floor and throwing it into the trunk. Even as he lobbed a set of robes, two spellbooks and a packet of crisps across the room, the doorbell rang.
Downstairs in the living room his Uncle Vernon shouted, ‘Who the blazes is calling at this time of night?’
Harry froze with a brass telescope in one hand and a pair of trainers in the other. He had completely forgotten to warn the Dursleys that Dumbledore might be coming. Feeling both panicky and close to laughter, he clambered over the trunk and wrenched open his bedroom door in time to hear a deep voice say, ‘Good evening. You must be Mr Dursley. I daresay Harry has told you I would be coming for him?’
Harry ran down the stairs two at a time, coming to an abrupt halt several steps from the bottom, as long experience had taught him to remain out of arm’s reach of his uncle whenever possible. There in the doorway stood a tall, thin man with waist-length silver hair and beard. Half-moon spectacles were perched on his crooked nose and he was wearing a long black travelling cloak and a pointed hat. Vernon Dursley, whose moustache was quite as bushy as Dumbledore’s, though black, and who was wearing a puce dressing-gown, was staring at the visitor as though he could not believe his tiny eyes.
‘Judging by your look of stunned disbelief, Harry did not warn you that I was coming,’ said Dumbledore pleasantly. ‘However, let us assume that you have invited me warmly into your house. It is unwise to linger overlong on doorsteps in these troubled times.’
He stepped smartly over the threshold and closed the front door behind him.
‘It is a long time since my last visit,’ said Dumbledore, peering down his crooked nose at Uncle Vernon. ‘I must say, your agapanthuses are flourishing.’
Vernon Dursley said nothing at all. Harry did not doubt that speech would return to him, and soon – the vein pulsing in his uncle’s temple was reaching danger point – but something about Dumbledore seemed to have robbed him temporarily of breath. It might have been the blatant wizardishness of his appearance, but it might, too, have been that even Uncle Vernon could sense that here was a man whom it would be very difficult to bully.
‘Ah, good evening, Harry,’ said Dumbledore, looking up at him through his half-moon glasses with a most satisfied expression. ‘Excellent, excellent.’
These words seemed to rouse Uncle Vernon. It was clear that as far as he was concerned, any man who could look at Harry and say ‘excellent’ was a man with whom he could never see eye to eye.
‘I don’t mean to be rude —’ he began, in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable.
‘– yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often,’ Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely. ‘Best to say nothing at all, my dear man. Ah, and this must be Petunia.’
The kitchen door had opened, and there stood Harry’s aunt, wearing rubber gloves and a housecoat over her nightdress, clearly halfway through her usual pre-bedtime wipe-down of all the kitchen surfaces. Her rather horsy face registered nothing but shock.
‘Albus Dumbledore,’ said Dumbledore, when Uncle Vernon failed to effect an introduction. ‘We have corresponded, of course.’ Harry thought this an odd way of reminding Aunt Petunia that he had once sent her an exploding letter, but Aunt Petunia did not challenge the term. ‘And this must be your son Dudley?’
Dudley had that moment peered round the living-room door. His large, blond head rising out of the stripy collar of his pyjamas looked oddly disembodied, his mouth gaping in astonishment and fear. Dumbledore waited a moment or two, apparently to see whether any of the Dursleys were going to say anything, but as the silence stretched on he smiled.
‘Shall we assume that you have invited me into your sitting room?’
Dudley scrambled out of the way as Dumbledore passed him. Harry, still clutching the telescope and trainers, jumped the last few stairs and followed Dumbledore, who had settled himself in the armchair nearest the fire and was taking in the surroundings with an expression of benign interest. He looked quite extraordinarily out of place.
‘Aren’t – aren’t we leaving, sir?’ Harry asked anxiously.
‘Yes, indeed we are, but there are a few matters we need to discuss first,’ said Dumbledore. ‘And I would prefer not to do so in the open. We shall trespass upon your aunt and uncle’s hospitality only a little longer.’
‘You will, will you?’
Vernon Dursley had entered the room, Petunia at his shoulder and Dudley skulking behind them both.
‘Yes,’ said Dumbledore simply, ‘I shall.’
He drew his wand so rapidly that Harry barely saw it; with a casual flick, the sofa zoomed forwards and knocked the knees out from under all three of the Dursleys so that they collapsed upon it in a heap. Another flick of the wand and the sofa zoomed back to its original position.
‘We may as well be comfortable,’ said Dumbledore pleasantly.
As he replaced his wand in his pocket, Harry saw that his hand was blackened and shrivelled; it looked as though his flesh had been burned away.
‘Sir – what happened to your —?’
‘Later, Harry,’ said Dumbledore. ‘Please sit down.’
Harry took the remaining armchair, choosing not to look at the Dursleys, who seemed stunned into silence.
‘I would assume that you were going to offer me refreshment,’ Dumbledore said to Uncle Vernon, ‘but the evidence so far suggests that that would be optimistic to the point of foolishness.’
A third twitch of the wand
