Harry Potter 03 - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

thought you were …’
    His voice faded away, but Harry hardly noticed. He was thinking about what the Dementors had done to him … about the screaming voice. He looked up and saw Ron and Hermione looking at him so anxiously that he quickly cast around for something matter-of-fact to say.
    ‘Did someone get my Nimbus?’
    Ron and Hermione looked quickly at each other.
    ‘Er –’
    ‘What?’ said Harry, looking from one to the other.
    ‘Well … when you fell off, it got blown away,’ said Hermione hesitantly.
    ‘And?’
    ‘And it hit – it hit – oh, Harry – it hit the Whomping Willow.’
    Harry’s insides lurched. The Whomping Willow was a very violent tree which stood alone in the middle of the grounds.
    ‘And?’ he said, dreading the answer.
    ‘Well, you know the Whomping Willow,’ said Ron. ‘It – it doesn’t like being hit.’
    ‘Professor Flitwick brought it back just before you came round,’ said Hermione in a very small voice.
    Slowly, she reached down for a bag at her feet, turned it upside-down and tipped a dozen bits of splintered wood and twig onto the bed, the only remains of Harry’s faithful, finally beaten broomstick.

 
     
– CHAPTER TEN –
     
The Marauder’s Map
    Madam Pomfrey insisted on keeping Harry in the hospital wing for the rest of the weekend. He didn’t argue or complain, but he wouldn’t let her throw away the shattered remnants of his Nimbus Two Thousand. He knew he was being stupid, knew that the Nimbus was beyond repair, but Harry couldn’t help it; he felt as though he’d lost one of his best friends.
    He had a stream of visitors, all intent on cheering him up. Hagrid sent him a bunch of earwiggy flowers that looked like yellow cabbages and Ginny Weasley, blushing furiously, turned up with a ‘get well’ card she had made herself, which sang shrilly unless Harry kept it shut under his bowl of fruit. The Gryffindor team visited again on Sunday morning, this time accompanied by Wood, who told Harry, in a hollow, dead sort of voice, that he didn’t blame him in the slightest. Ron and Hermione only left Harry’s bedside at night. But nothing anyone said or did could make Harry feel any better, because they only knew half of what was troubling him.
    He hadn’t told anyone about the Grim, not even Ron and Hermione, because he knew Ron would panic and Hermione would scoff. The fact remained, however, that it had now appeared twice, and both appearances had been followed by near-fatal accidents; the first time, he had nearly been run over by the Knight Bus; the second, fallen fifty feet from his broomstick. Was the Grim going to haunt him until he actually died? Was he going to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for the beast?
    And then there were the Dementors. Harry felt sick and humiliated every time he thought of them. Everyone said the Dementors were horrible, but no one else collapsed every time they went near one … no one else heard echoes in their head of their dying parents.
    For Harry knew who that screaming voice belonged to now. He had heard her words, heard them over and over again during the night hours in the hospital wing while he lay awake, staring at the strips of moonlight on the ceiling. When the Dementors approached him, he heard the last moments of his mother’s life, her attempts to protect him, Harry, from Lord Voldemort, and Voldemort’s laughter before he murdered her … Harry dozed fitfully, sinking into dreams full of clammy, rotted hands and petrified pleading, jerking awake only to dwell again on the sound of his mother’s voice.
    *
    It was a relief to return on Monday to the noise and bustle of the main school, where he was forced to think about other things, even if he had to endure Draco Malfoy’s taunting. Malfoy was almost beside himself with glee at Gryffindor’s defeat. He had finally taken off his bandages, and celebrated having the full use of both arms again by doing spirited imitations of Harry falling off his broom. Malfoy spent much of their next Potions class doing Dementor imitations across the dungeon; Ron finally cracked, flinging a large, slippery crocodile heart at Malfoy, which hit him in the face and caused Snape to take fifty points from Gryffindor.
    ‘If Snape’s taking Defence Against the Dark Arts again, I’m going off sick,’ said Ron, as they headed towards Lupin’s classroom after lunch. ‘Check who’s in there, Hermione.’
    Hermione peered around the classroom