The bus ride from St. Brutus’s back to Surrey took hours, but it seemed short compared to the twenty minutes Harry spent in the car with his Uncle Vernon, who was in a nasty mood.
“Don’t see why they have to send you home for the holidays,” he muttered, glaring at Harry as he zipped through the traffic. “I wish they’d just keep the whole lot of you, and throw away the key!”
Harry pretended not to hear him. If he remembered anything about dealing with his uncle, it was that silence was generally the best policy. Uncle Vernon continued grumbling all the way home, but Harry didn’t care. True, he would have to deal with his annoying and sometimes brutish relatives, but at least he wouldn’t be dealing with any attempts on his life. Plus, Aunt Petunia’s cooking would be a welcome change; she might make everyone participate in Dudley’s diet the way she had during the summer, but at least she would never serve rancid food - not even to Harry.
Walking through the front door, Harry was greeted by a welcoming punch in the jaw from Dudley. He just shook himself and smiled at his cousin. “You know, Dud,” he said, “after being hit across the face with a baseball bat, your punches don’t seem all that bad.”
Dudley grimaced and threw another punch just to prove that his punches were too “that bad,” but Harry ducked it easily and dashed into his cupboard under the stairs, where he stretched out on his little bed and waited for suppertime to be announced.
The holiday wasn’t as bad as Harry had feared it might be. Dudley still liked trying to beat up on him, but Harry was fairly good at escaping. A couple of times, he almost used magic in self-defense, but he always managed to stop himself. If the Dursleys found out he was a witch, he would likely be out on the street before nightfall, and then where would he go?
When Christmas Day arrived, Harry was not surprised when Dudley received a mountain of presents, while he was given nothing but a badly-wrapped, broken marionette that was missing all of its strings. Sadly enough, it was the best present he could ever recall having received from the Dursleys.
The food at Christmas dinner, however, was excellent: turkey, ham, roast potatoes, and anything else that Uncle Vernon and Dudley might find appetizing. It appeared that the diet had been put on hold for the holiday feast, and for that, everyone was grateful. Although he was not allowed first choice of the food, Harry was still able to secure a satisfyingly large and tasty meal before retiring to his cupboard.
As he lay on his bed, daydreaming about being able to practice magic openly, his eyes fell on the marionette that the Dursleys had given him. He smiled as he whispered, “What do you think, Pinocchio? Can we make you dance like a real boy?”
For about an hour, Harry practiced casting a separate levitation charm from each of the fingers of his right hand: one for each of the marionette’s limbs, and one for its head. By the time he was finished, he was able to make it move quite easily, just by moving his fingers. After another half hour of making the marionette run, walk, jump, and dance at the foot of his bed, Harry was so tired that he could barely keep his eyes open. Without bothering to change into his pajamas, he lay back on his bed and fell fast asleep. Perhaps it was the fact that his stomach was truly full and content for the first time in months, or perhaps it was merely a coincidence, but his subconscious mind chose that night to give him a chance to prove to himself, once and for all, whether or not his dreams were made up of real memories.
It was late at night, and Harry was leaving the kitchen after having an unauthorized snack. As he approached the stairs in the darkness, he muttered to himself, “I could use a ‘Lumos’ spell about now.” He quietly ascended the staircase and entered Dudley’s second bedroom, where he knelt on the floor and began prying at a loose floorboard. The board came up, revealing a small hidden space. Harry pulled a folded paper from his pocket and placed it inside the hole before replacing the floorboard. Once it was securely back in place, he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.
In an instant, Harry was fully awake. It was pitch black inside his cupboard, preventing him seeing his watch, but from the lack of light coming under the door, and the silence that filled the house, he decided that it must be late enough that the Dursleys were asleep. Silently, he felt his way to the door and turned the handle. As he opened the cupboard door, a small amount of starlight coming in through a window illuminated his steps. Glancing around and seeing no one, he headed for the stairs. Unfortunately, the second step gave a loud groan as he put his weight on it. Harry froze. A light clicked on upstairs, and he made a mad dash for his cupboard, but it was too late.
“Boy!” hissed Uncle Vernon, stopping Harry in his tracks. “What are you doing sneaking around at this hour?”
“I wasn’t-” Harry began.
“Quiet! I don’t want to hear it. You get back in that cupboard this instant!”
After shooting his uncle a dirty look, Harry turned and ducked back into his cupboard, all the while grumbling under his breath. He sat down on the edge of his bed, waiting for Uncle Vernon to return to bed, but after a moment, there was a jangling of keys outside.
“Let’s see you come sneaking around now,” said Uncle Vernon as he locked the door to Harry’s cupboard. Harry didn’t respond and, after a moment’s pause, he heard heavy footsteps ascending the stairs.
As he sat in the darkness, Harry went over the dream in his mind. He had been leaving the kitchen and, as he walked toward the dark stairs, he had muttered something about a ‘Lumos’ spell. Could that have something to do with light? Extending his right index finger, he whispered, “Lumos.” A narrow beam of white light shot from the tip of his finger, illuminating the inside of the small cupboard. Harry lowered his hand to extinguish the light, but nothing happened; the light remained. He gave his hand a shake and, almost without realizing it, whispered, “Nox.” The light went out.
“I’ll have to remember those two,” Harry told himself with a small grin. He would never be without light again.
Five minutes passed, then ten, and still he sat on the edge of his bed. After fifteen minutes, he decided it was safe to venture out again. Stepping toward the door, he muttered the unlocking charm and slipped out into the starlit hall. After ensuring that there was no one watching him, he whispered, “Lumos,” and directed the narrow beam of light at the darkened stairs. This time, he was careful to skip the noisy step, and he reached the landing without difficulty. After one more furtive look around, he pushed open the door to Dudley’s second bedroom and stepped inside.
The interior of the room was an absolute mess. Broken toys, games, and other things that belonged to Dudley littered the floor, the shelves, the old desk, and even the bed. The room stood in stark contrast with the rest of the house, which Aunt Petunia always kept unnaturally immaculate. Harry imagined that the reason for this was the fact that this was the only room in the house, aside from his cupboard, that Aunt Petunia never visited. In both cases, she kept the door closed and pretended there was nothing behind it.
As quickly as he dared, Harry closed the door and began pushing Dudley’s junk off of the loose floorboard under the bed. The noise made by an old skateboard scraping against the wooden floor as he pushed it aside made him cringe - it seemed ridiculously loud, and he found himself wishing he knew a spell that would prevent noise traveling through walls. After a moment’s pause during which he heard nothing more than Dudley’s loud snores coming from the next room, Harry pulled up on the loose board he had seen in his dream. It came out.
So far, so good, he thought. The dream had at least been accurate up to this point. Almost quivering with excitement at what he might find, Harry aimed his light into the open hole and swore under his breath. It was empty. If there ever had been anything hidden here, it was gone now.
As he rolled slightly to his left to make replacing the board easier, his light glanced off of a pale yellow slip of paper that had been hidden in the shadows. Harry held his breath, hoping against hope that it was something important - something that would trigger his memory. Slowly and carefully, he removed the small paper which, as it turned out, wasn’t paper at all; it was parchment. He felt like he was moving in slow motion as he unfolded it and directed his beam of light onto its surface. His hands were nearly trembling with excitement as he read the note:
Dear Harry,
I hope your summer is going okay. I know you don’t want to talk about what happened at the end of last term, and I can’t say I blame you. I’ll try my best to make sure nobody bothers you about it. There’s loads going on here - we’ve been really busy - but I’m not supposed to write about anything specific. Mum says they’re worried about the post being intercepted. Anyway, please let us know you’re okay so Mum will stop asking me every five seconds if I’ve heard from you. Just send a short reply with Hedwig. Please, Mum’s driving me batty.
We’ll come and get you as soon as we can. Don’t let the Muggles get you down.
Your friend,
Ron
Harry stared at the note, dumbfounded. It wasn’t anything earth-shattering, but there was definitely something strange about this short letter. For one thing, it had been hidden under the floor of Dudley’s second bedroom, even though it clearly belonged to Harry. What was so secret about it that he had gone to such lengths to hide it? Nobody ever searched his cupboard; why couldn’t he have hidden it there? Then there was the matter of what the note actually said. Who in the world would be “intercepting” his post? Uncle Vernon, perhaps? Or could it be the police? After all, he reminded himself, he was an incurably criminal boy.
Even as these thoughts ran through Harry’s head, he began to wonder about the mysterious event at the end of term. This letter couldn’t be referring to the fight that had taken his memory the previous year - if it was, then he would have remembered hiding it. It must be talking about something else that happened earlier - possibly by a year or more. And then there was the question of the strange name, Hedwig, and the word Muggles. Who was this Hedwig person? What in the world was a Muggle? He wondered if it was some kind of code that he had used with his partners in crime. True, Ron had referred to his mum in the letter, but Mum could just be somebody’s nickname or codename.
Above all of these jumbled thoughts, however, one thing stood out in Harry’s mind. The letter ended with the words, Your friend. Up until now, he had believed that Tyler was the first friend he had ever had. Now, though, he began to see the possibility that he had had more friends before his memory had disappeared. On top of that, the name Ron sparked some sort of recognition in his mind. The only problem was that he had no idea how to contact Ron, or Hedwig, or anyone else he might have known before. There was no address or telephone number on the note, and Ron was too common a name to even think of searching for him. Hedwig, on the other hand, was not a common name at all, but Harry was fairly certain that it was just a codename of some sort. After all, what kind of person names their child Hedwig?
A particularly loud snort coming from Dudley’s room jerked Harry from his musings, and he suddenly remembered that he was lying halfway under the bed in Dudley’s second bedroom. After slipping the letter carefully into his pocket, Harry quietly replaced the floorboard and moved a few of his cousin’s broken possessions on top of it. Then, still using the light coming from his fingertip as a guide, he stole down the stairs and into his cupboard, where he locked the door, extinguished the light, and collapsed onto his bed, hoping his dreams would give him a clue about how to find Ron.
Harry was sitting in a large library with a huge stack of books on the table in front of him. In the seat to his right, he recognized the bushy-haired girl he had dreamed about before. She was bent low over a list of some sort, and her mass of brown hair fell forward far enough to prevent him getting a proper look at her face. For a moment, he wondered if this could be the same girl whose beautiful face he had dreamed of so many times. The idea seemed to make sense, and he reached out his hand to brush her hair back and give himself a view of her face. Just as his fingertips reached the girl’s hair, however, she spoke, and he jerked his hand away.
“I made this list of spells that might be useful for the final task,” she said. “You already know some of them, but I think you ought to practice them anyway. I really need to get to class, though, so if you have any questions, you’ll have to ask me later.” She slid the list over in front of Harry, and slung her bag over her shoulder as she walked away, calling “Bye!” back at him. He never did get a good look at her face.
Harry looked down at the parchment in front of him. It read:
- Petrificus Totalus
- Incendio
- Diffindo
- Protego
- Impedimenta
- Four-Point Spell (“Point Me”)
- Reducto
- Stupefy (counter: Rennervate)
Don’t forget: if you get hit with something, ‘Finite Incantatem’ will remove most jinxes and hexes.