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.
“You mustn’t blame yourself for the way the boy’s turned out, Vernon,” she 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—
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.
“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 suspiciously, so he 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 gotten an official warning that had stated quite clearly that if the Ministry got wind of any more magic in Privet Drive, Harry would face expulsion from Hogwarts.
He heard the Dursleys leaving the table and hurried upstairs out of the way.
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.
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 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.
“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.
“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 shovellike 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.”
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—”
“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—”
But 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 just 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 toward 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.
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. He wriggled out, seized Hedwig’s empty cage, 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.
“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.”
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.
3. THE KNIGHT BUS
Harry was several streets away before he collapsed onto a low wall in Magnolia Crescent, panting from the effort of dragging his trunk. He sat quite still, anger still surging through him, listening to the frantic thumping of his heart.
But after ten minutes alone in the dark street, a new emotion overtook him: panic. Whichever way he looked at it, he had never been in a worse fix. He was stranded, quite alone, in the dark Muggle world, with absolutely nowhere to go. And the worst of it was, he had just done serious magic, which meant that he was almost certainly expelled from Hogwarts. He had broken the Decree for the Restriction of Underage Wizardry so badly, he was surprised Ministry of Magic representatives weren’t swooping down on him where he sat.
Harry shivered and looked up and down Magnolia Crescent.
What was going to happen to him? Would he be arrested, or would he simply be outlawed from the wizarding world? He thought of Ron and Hermione, and his heart sank even lower. Harry was sure that, criminal or not, Ron and Hermione would want to help him now, but they were both abroad, and with Hedwig gone, he had no means of contacting them.
He didn’t have any Muggle money, either. There was a little wizard gold in the money bag at the bottom of his trunk, but the rest of the fortune his parents had left him was stored in a vault at Gringotts Wizarding Bank in London. He’d never be able to drag his trunk all the way to London. Unless . . .
He looked down at his wand, which he was still clutching in his hand. If he was already expelled (his heart was now thumping painfully fast), a bit more magic couldn’t hurt. He had the Invisibility Cloak he had inherited from his father—what if he bewitched the trunk to make it feather light, tied it to his broomstick, covered himself in the cloak, and flew to London? Then he could get the rest of his money out of his vault and . . . begin his life as an outcast. It was a horrible prospect, but he couldn’t sit on this wall forever, or he’d find himself trying to explain to Muggle police why he was out in the dead of night with a trunkful of spellbooks and a broomstick.
Harry opened his trunk again and pushed the contents aside, looking for the Invisibility Cloak—but before he had found it, he straightened up suddenly, looking around him once more.
A funny prickling on the back of his neck had made Harry feel he was being watched, but the street appeared to be deserted, and no lights shone from any of the large square houses.
He bent over his trunk again, but almost immediately stood up once more, his hand clenched on his wand. He had sensed rather than heard it: someone or something was standing in the narrow gap between the garage and the fence behind him. Harry squinted at the black alleyway. If only it would move, then he’d know whether it was just a stray cat or—something else.
“Lumos,” Harry muttered, and a light appeared at the end of his wand, almost dazzling him. He held it high over his head, and the pebble dashed walls of number two suddenly sparkled; the garage door gleamed, and between them Harry saw, quite distinctly, the hulking outline of something very big, with wide, gleaming eyes.
Harry stepped backward. His legs hit his trunk and he tripped. His wand flew out of his hand as he flung out an arm to break his fall, and he landed, hard, in the gutter—
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 windshield 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—”
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 purpose,” 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 around 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.
“’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 a 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.
“Nothing,” 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 fifteen you get ’ot chocolate, and for fifteen you get an ’ot water bottle an’ a toofbrush in the color of your choice.”
Harry rummaged once more in his trunk, extracted his money bag, and shoved some gold into Stan’s hand. 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. Candles were burning in brackets beside each bed, illuminating the wood paneled walls. 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.
“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 bangs 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 backward 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 mastered the use of a steering wheel. The Knight Bus kept mounting the pavement, but it didn’t hit anything; lines of lampposts, mailboxes, and trash cans jumped out of its way as it approached and back into position once it had passed.
Stan came back downstairs, followed by a faintly green witch wrapped in a traveling cloak.
“’Ere you go, Madam Marsh,” said Stan happily as Ern stamped on the brake and the beds slid a foot or so toward the front of the bus. Madam Marsh clamped a handkerchief to her mouth and tottered down the steps. Stan threw her bag out after her 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 traveling 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.
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.
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