Harry Potter 02 - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

room was growing dark. Exhausted, stomach rumbling, mind spinning over the same unanswerable questions, Harry fell into an uneasy sleep.
    He dreamed that he was on show in a zoo, with a card reading ‘Underage Wizard’ attached to his cage. People goggled through the bars at him as he lay, starving and weak, on a bed of straw. He saw Dobby’s face in the crowd and shouted out, asking for help, but Dobby called, ‘Harry Potter is safe there, sir!’ and vanished. Then the Dursleys appeared and Dudley rattled the bars of the cage, laughing at him.
    ‘Stop it,’ Harry muttered, as the rattling pounded in his sore head. ‘Leave me alone … cut it out … I’m trying to sleep …’
    He opened his eyes. Moonlight was shining through the bars on the window. And someone was goggling through the bars at him: a freckle-faced, red-haired, long-nosed someone.
    Ron Weasley was outside Harry’s window.

 
— CHAPTER THREE —
     
The Burrow
    ‘Ron!’ breathed Harry, creeping to the window and pushing it up so they could talk through the bars. ‘Ron, how did you – what the –?’
    Harry’s mouth fell open as the full impact of what he was seeing hit him. Ron was leaning out of the back window of an old turquoise car, which was parked in mid-air. Grinning at Harry from the front seats were Fred and George, Ron’s elder twin brothers.
    ‘All right, Harry?’
    ‘What’s been going on?’ said Ron. ‘Why haven’t you been answering my letters? I’ve asked you to stay about twelve times, and then Dad came home and said you’d got an official warning for using magic in front of Muggles …’
    ‘It wasn’t me – and how did he know?’
    ‘He works for the Ministry,’ said Ron. ‘You know we’re not supposed to do spells outside school –’
    ‘Bit rich coming from you,’ said Harry, staring at the floating car.
    ‘Oh, this doesn’t count,’ said Ron. ‘We’re only borrowing this, it’s Dad’s, we didn’t enchant it. But doing magic in front of those Muggles you live with …’
    ‘I told you, I didn’t – but it’ll take too long to explain now. Look, can you explain to them at Hogwarts that the Dursleys have locked me up and won’t let me come back, and obviously I can’t magic myself out, because the Ministry’ll think that’s the second spell I’ve done in three days, so –’
    ‘Stop gibbering,’ said Ron, ‘we’ve come to take you home with us.’
    ‘But you can’t magic me out either –’
    ‘We don’t need to,’ said Ron, jerking his head towards the front seats and grinning. ‘You forget who I’ve got with me.’
    ‘Tie that round the bars,’ said Fred, throwing the end of a rope to Harry.
    ‘If the Dursleys wake up, I’m dead,’ said Harry, as he tied the rope tightly around a bar and Fred revved up the car.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ said Fred, ‘and stand back.’
    Harry moved back into the shadows next to Hedwig, who seemed to have realised how important this was and kept still and silent. The car revved louder and louder and suddenly, with a crunching noise, the bars were pulled clean out of the window as Fred drove straight up in the air – Harry ran back to the window to see the bars dangling a few feet above the ground. Panting, Ron hoisted them up into the car. Harry listened anxiously, but there was no sound from the Dursleys’ bedroom.
    When the bars were safely in the back seat with Ron, Fred reversed as close as possible to Harry’s window.
    ‘Get in,’ Ron said.
    ‘But all my Hogwarts stuff … my wand … my broomstick …’
    ‘Where is it?’
    ‘Locked in the cupboard under the stairs, and I can’t get out of this room –’
    ‘No problem,’ said George from the front passenger seat. ‘Out of the way, Harry.’
    Fred and George climbed carefully through the window into Harry’s room. You had to hand it to them, thought Harry, as George took an ordinary hairpin from his pocket and started to pick the lock.
    ‘A lot of wizards think it’s a waste of time, knowing this sort of Muggle trick,’ said Fred, ‘but we feel they’re skills worth learning, even if they are a bit slow.’
    There was a small click and the door swung open.
    ‘So – we’ll get your trunk – you grab anything you need from your room and hand it out to Ron,’ whispered George.
    ‘Watch out for the bottom stair, it creaks,’ Harry whispered back, as the twins disappeared onto the dark landing.
    Harry dashed around his room, collecting his things together