Uncle Vernon spent the morning after the dementors up a stepladder outside Harry's bedroom door.
He had done this before. Three summers ago there had been bolts on that door and a cat flap at the bottom of it, and when the fittings came off again the holes had been filled and painted, because Aunt Petunia did not permit visible holes. Now the filler was being drilled back out. Vernon was not a natural carpenter, and Harry, sitting on his bed on the wrong side of the work, followed it all by ear: the drill getting away from him twice, a screw rolling somewhere unreachable, and one word, at about half past ten, that Aunt Petunia at the foot of the stairs pretended very hard not to have heard.
By eleven it was done. Two bolts, a padlock, and the cat flap, back in business after three years of honourable retirement.
"Meals through the flap," said Vernon's voice, from very close to the wood. He sounded winded but satisfied, a man who had solved a problem with brass fittings. "Bathroom morning and evening. Your aunt says you stay, so you stay. This is how you stay."
Harry looked at the door and found he had nothing to say to it. There was no version of the argument he hadn't already had through it, in one summer or another.
The window, at least, Vernon had left alone. His carpentry had limits, and they were at the top of a ladder.
Dudley had not looked at Harry since the alley. He passed the bedroom door with a wide berth, on the far side of the landing, and at mealtimes the house was quieter than Harry had ever known it: no television, no radio, none of Dudley's thundering up and down. Petunia brought the tray up herself. On the first evening she crouched to push it through the flap, and paused, and said, through the door, "Eat it while it's hot," in a voice so nearly ordinary that Harry sat looking at the flap for some time after her footsteps had gone.
Nothing came from anyone else. That was the part he turned over in the dark. Mrs. Figg had gone shuffling off on Wednesday night to report, he'll be beside himself, she'd said. And then nothing. They knew two dementors had come to Little Whinging for him, and the sum total of the wizarding world's response had been four letters in one night telling him what not to do. No owl since, no note, not a line.
He fed his bacon rind to Hedwig, who was sulking on top of the wardrobe, letterless.
"I know," he told her. "I'm not writing one either."
* * *
The doorbell went at four o'clock on Friday.
Harry reached his window in time to see the top of a familiar brown head on the front step, and he heaved the window up and leaned out, but he needn't have bothered on Vernon's account. Vernon could be heard through floors.
"he is not seeing visitors-"
"Then I'll wait until he is." Lily's voice, polite as a shop assistant. "I don't mind. I brought a book."
"You'll wait off my property, is what you'll do-"
"You can't just lock him in, you know. Even for you people, that's..." A tiny pause, in which several better words went unsaid. "That's illegal."
"PETUNIA! If this girl comes back, we're calling the police!"
The door slammed. Harry watched Lily walk down the path, perfectly composed, and stop at the gate, and turn round, and find his window at the first try. She waved. It was not a subdued sort of wave.
Then she pointed at him, pointed at the ground, held up one finger (wait) and disappeared round the hedge.
The first stone arrived four minutes later with a ball of paper round it, thrown from behind the wall on a very flat trajectory. Harry unwrapped it on the sill.
SAW THE LOCKS BEING BOUGHT. Mr. Fenton at the hardware shop tells my aunt everything, it's better than the wireless. Are you all right? Actually all right, not politely all right. Throw this back.
He found a quill, wrote Locked in but fine. Don't ring the bell again, he means it about the police underneath, balled it round the stone, and dropped it over the sill. There was a pause, some rustling in the hedge, and the stone came back up.
Police would be a new one for the collection. Right, tomorrow night. When the last light's been off an hour, I'll do an owl call so you know I'm there. I've been practising. Get everything to your door quietly before that. Question: can the fire undo a padlock without the Ministry knowing? If yes, do that. If no, I'm bringing my aunt's hacksaw, and you'll have to explain the hacksaw.
Harry read it twice. Somewhere in the last two days, without his quite noticing the moment, the question had stopped being whether he was going and become how. He wrote back:
Don't know if the fire counts as magic to them. I can't put a foot wrong before the hearing.
The stone was back so fast she must have had the answer ready.
It doesn't count. Think about it. You did fire in my garden for ten whole minutes and nobody wrote to you. The Patronus, they billed you inside twenty-two minutes. The fire's invisible to them. And before you invent a noble reason to stay in your room: my aunt knows everything. Her exact words were "Sunday breakfast is already planned for three, so Saturday suits." So you're not being rescued, you're being invited to breakfast. See you tomorrow night. Eat something.
Harry sat on the bed for a long while with the note in his hand.
Planned for three.
He packed after dark, an inch of noise at a time. It was not a long job; it was mostly done in one trunk, and the trunk was mostly done in an hour, and what was left over (the loose floorboard's small hoard, the photograph album) went in last, on top. His wand went where it had lived all week: in his waistband. He did not try to write to anyone. They had told him what not to do, four times over, and never once why, and if the Order wanted to know where he was, they could find out how they preferred to: by watching.
He was aware, in a small clear corner of himself, that this was not entirely fair. He went on packing anyway.
* * *
Saturday night, the last light in the house went out at twenty to twelve: Vernon's bedside lamp, printing its faint line under Harry's door and then taking it away. Harry lay on top of his covers, dressed, and let the house settle around him, tick by tick, pipe by pipe, until the only sound left was Dudley's snore coming through the wall in long, peaceful strokes. An hour is a very long time when you are listening to it.
At about a quarter to one, from the front garden, came a sound. It was possibly meant to be an owl. It was closer to the sound a referee's whistle makes when it has been dropped in a pond, and it went on for slightly too long, and Hedwig, from the top of the wardrobe, took it as a personal insult.
"Don't," Harry whispered. "She's been practising."
He opened the window and let Hedwig out first. She went in complete silence, a white smudge over the dark gardens, aimed at Church Road with the address and an apology already delivered and coldly received. Then he knelt at the door, put his fingertips to the wood beside the keyhole, and stopped fighting.
The fire came at once, glad about it. A thread of gold no thicker than a bootlace slipped out of his fingers and under the door, and he closed his eyes and followed the feel of it up the far side of the wood, cold brass, colder steel, finding the metal the way a tongue finds a chipped tooth. The padlock's hasp went soft, and gave, with a sound like a knuckle cracking. The two bolt tongues took longer; steel drinks more heat, and the thread had to sit against each one and press. He heard the first bolt sag out of its keeper. Then the second.
By the time the door swung open onto the dark landing, Vernon's morning of carpentry hung in ruins from three neat silver drips, and Harry was shivering.
It was a small cost, as the costs went. Nothing like the garden; his teeth clicked once and his hands had gone stupid and cold, and that was the price, paid in full. But stupid cold hands are not what you want for carrying a school trunk down thirteen stairs past a sleeping wardrobe of an uncle, and the next ten minutes were the longest of the summer. He went one stair at a time, in the pauses between Dudley's snores, skipping the fourth stair and the ninth, which creaked, and had time on each step to reflect that burglars earned every penny.
The front door of Number Four had never once creaked in fourteen years. Petunia would not have permitted it. It chose that night to begin.
The groan went up the stairwell like a foghorn. Harry stopped breathing. Above him, bedsprings shifted, and Vernon's voice, thick with sleep, said, "There's somebody at the door, Petunia."
Harry stopped being quiet and started being fast.
He hauled the trunk over the step and down the path, and Lily rose out of the dark by the gate, where Mrs. Prentice's wheelbarrow stood waiting with its handles already turned to the road. They swung the trunk in together; the empty cage went on top with a clatter that could have been heard in Kent; and the landing light came on behind them.
"It's the boy!" The bedroom window banged up. "PETUNIA, HE'S GETTING AWAY-"
"Go," said Lily.
Harry took the wheelbarrow handles before she could. Fair was fair; he'd ridden in it once.
They went down Privet Drive at a dead run, the cage rattling like a one-man band, and behind them the front door of Number Four burst open and produced Uncle Vernon in a purple dressing gown and one slipper, moving at a speed that did him tremendous credit.
"COME BACK HERE! You... after everything this family has... UNGRATEFUL... POLICE! PO-LICE!"
The security light at Number Two came on like a searchlight and lit him from the side. A cat left the scene at ankle height. Ahead, the wheelbarrow found the slope and picked up its own opinions about speed, and Lily ran alongside laughing in gulps and telling Harry, not helpfully, to steer.
Vernon was gaining, in the way of a boulder gaining. Then, in the space of five yards, he lost. A bedroom light snapped on across the street. Then another, next door to it. A curtain twitched, and behind that curtain was a face, and Vernon Dursley, mid-bellow, stopped dead, as though the entire street had rung a bell only he could hear. When Harry glanced back from the corner, his uncle was walking, strolling, back up the pavement, dressing gown re-belted, wishing the lit windows a stiff good evening, one slipper slapping, the world's least convincing man out for the world's least convincing midnight stroll.
And above him, at the frosted landing window of Number Four, a thin silhouette stood quite still, watching the corner where Harry stood. It didn't open the window. It didn't bang on the glass. As Harry watched, the landing light went out, which felt, in some way he had no time to examine, less like being given up on than like being let go.
As they passed the last lamp post on Privet Drive, the warmth under his ribs lifted its head, and did not put it down again.
They stopped behind the chemist's on Church Road, finally, because Lily could no longer steer for laughing and Harry's arms had given their notice. They hung over the wheelbarrow in the alley's dark, wheezing.
"His face in the security light..."
"One slipper," said Harry. "Where was the other slipper?"
"He kept it on, that's the... he ran a hundred yards in one slipper and never lost it..." She pushed her hair out of her face and got most of her breath back, and some quieter part of her arrived in her eyes a beat behind the laughter. "All right?"
Harry looked at the trunk. Everything he owned in the world was in a borrowed wheelbarrow behind a chemist's at one in the morning, and the house he had left had bolts on a bedroom door, and ahead, one street over, a kitchen light was on.
"Yeah," he said, surprised to find it was the truth. "Weirdly."
"Good," said Lily. "Because you're pushing. I did the owl."
* * *
Margaret Hale opened her front door before the second knock, in a tartan dressing gown, with the expression of a woman who had been a ward sister for thirty years and had already seen everything once.
She looked at Harry. She looked at the trunk, and the empty cage, and her niece, who was doing her best impression of someone who got in at one in the morning all the time. She looked at Harry again.
"Maybe turned into yes, then."
"Yes," said Harry.
"Right." She held the door wider. "In. Barrow round the side. It goes home in the morning, deposit or no deposit."
The box room was small and smelled of clean sheets and slightly of apples, and Hedwig was already asleep on top of the wardrobe, head under wing, having let herself in at the window and declined to wait up. Margaret put the landing light on, pointed out which door was the bathroom and which was the airing cupboard ("you'll only make that mistake once") and paused at the top of the stairs.
"Questions are at breakfast," she said. "Sleep."
Harry lay down in the dark of a strange small room, in a house where the only lock was on the front door, and listened to the water in the pipes and Lily's voice below, low, telling her aunt about a slipper. He meant to hear the end of it.
He was asleep in minutes.
* * *
He woke to bacon. Breakfast was laid for three, which Harry now knew was not an accident and could therefore hardly look at. There was a pot of tea in a knitted cosy, and fried bread, and the Prophet folded at Margaret's elbow with the crossword already begun, in pen. She let him get through his first rasher before the questions, and there were, in the end, exactly two.
"Are you hurt anywhere? Don't be brave, I'll know."
"No."
"Does anyone dangerous know where you are?"
Harry put his fork down and gave it the honesty the kitchen seemed to run on. "I don't know. Maybe."
Margaret nodded slowly, the nod of an examiner marking a pass. "Then we'll start locking the back door again. We'd got slack about it." She pushed the fried bread across. "That's the inquest done. House rules: three meals, you're not a guest after today so you'll dry while she washes, and no magic business at my table; whatever it is, it keeps till after the washing-up."
"There's a hearing," Harry said. "At the Ministry. On the twelfth. For the... for what happened in the alley. I might need-"
"Then on the eleventh we'll iron something," said Margaret Hale, and filled in seven across.
That, apparently, was the entire crisis, dealt with between the teapot and the marmalade. Harry ate his breakfast in a kind of wonder. Lily, mouth full, told her aunt about the security light at Number Two, doing both slippers in different voices, and Margaret said "mm" in the places the story asked for it and never once treated any of it as unusual.
After the washing-up, Harry and Lily wheeled the barrow back.
It was a warm, closed, Sunday-morning sort of ten o'clock, sprinklers going, the smell of cut grass, and nobody about except a man polishing an already polished car. Mrs. Prentice received the wheelbarrow at her gate, walked all the way round it, and located, with the flair of a customs officer, a scratch along the tray.
"Deposit's forfeit. That's a scratch."
"It came with that scratch," said Lily, electrified. "That scratch is historic. I have witnesses..."
Harry left them to it. He had seen the deposit; it was ten pence.
"Ten pence," Lily was still saying as they started back, "is a matter of principle..."
They walked towards Church Road with the morning warming up around them and the argument about the scratch going on cheerfully without any need of Harry's help. It was at the corner of Wisteria Walk that he saw Mrs. Figg. She was standing at her gate in her carpet slippers, two cats threading round her ankles, and she was looking directly at him, and she made no pretence at all of doing anything else. Harry looked back at her. Neither of them waved. After a moment she nodded, once, the smallest possible movement of the chin. Then she stooped, gathered up one of the cats, and went inside.
The other cat stayed on the wall by her gate, and watched them all the way up the road.