Harry Potter 04 - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

much they were helping him, when he ought to be working out how to do the task alone?
    ‘We’ll meet you back in the common room,’ Hermione told Harry, as she got up to go with Ron – both of them looked very anxious. ‘Bring as many of these books as you can, OK?’
    ‘Right,’ said Harry uneasily.
    By eight o’clock, Madam Pince had extinguished all the lamps and came to chivvy Harry out of the library. Staggering under the weight of as many books as he could carry, Harry returned to the Gryffindor common room, pulled a table into a corner and continued to search. There was nothing in Madcap Magic for Wacky Warlocks … nothing in A Guide to Medieval Sorcery … not one mention of underwater exploits in An Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Charms , or in Dreadful Denizens of the Deep , or Powers You Never Knew You Had and What to Do With Them Now You’ve Wised Up .
    Crookshanks crawled into Harry’s lap and curled up, purring deeply. The common room emptied slowly around Harry. People kept wishing him luck for the next morning in cheery, confident voices like Hagrid’s, all of them apparently convinced that he was about to pull off another stunning performance like the one he had managed in the first task. Harry couldn’t answer them, he just nodded, feeling as though there was a golf-ball stuck in his throat. By ten to midnight, he was alone in the room with Crookshanks. He had searched all the remaining books, and Ron and Hermione had not come back.
    It’s over, he told himself. You can’t do it. You’ll just have to go down to the lake in the morning and tell the judges …
    He imagined himself explaining that he couldn’t do the task. He pictured Bagman’s look of round-eyed surprise, Karkaroff’s satisfied, yellow-toothed smile. He could almost hear Fleur Delacour saying, ‘I knew it … ’e is too young, ’e is only a little boy.’ He saw Malfoy flashing his POTTER STINKS badge at the front of the crowd, saw Hagrid’s crestfallen, disbelieving face …
    Forgetting that Crookshanks was on his lap, Harry stood up very suddenly; Crookshanks hissed angrily as he landed on the floor, gave Harry a disgusted look and stalked away with his bottle-brush tail in the air, but Harry was already hurrying up the spiral staircase to his dormitory … he would grab the Invisibility Cloak and go back to the library, he’d stay there all night if he had to …
    ‘Lumos,’ Harry whispered fifteen minutes later, as he opened the library door.
    Wand tip alight, he crept along the bookshelves, pulling down more books – books of hexes and charms, books on merpeople and water monsters, books on famous witches and wizards, on magical inventions, on anything at all that might include one passing reference to underwater survival. He carried them over to a table, then set to work, searching them by the narrow beam of his wand, occasionally checking his watch …
    One in the morning … two in the morning … the only way he could keep going was to tell himself, over and over again, Next book … in the next one … the next one …
    *
    The mermaid in the painting in the Prefects’ bathroom was laughing. Harry was bobbing like a cork in bubbly water next to her rock, while she held his Firebolt over his head.
    ‘Come and get it!’ she giggled maliciously. ‘Come on, jump!’
    ‘I can’t,’ Harry panted, snatching at the Firebolt, and struggling not to sink. ‘Give it to me!’
    But she just poked him painfully in the side with the end of the broom, laughing at him.
    ‘That hurts – get off – ouch –’
    ‘Harry Potter must wake up, sir!’
    ‘Stop poking me –’
    ‘Dobby must poke Harry Potter, sir, he must wake up!’
    Harry opened his eyes. He was still in the library; the Invisibility Cloak had slipped off his head as he’d slept, and the side of his face was stuck to the pages of Where There’s a Wand, There’s a Way . He sat up, straightening his glasses, blinking in the bright daylight.
    ‘Harry Potter needs to hurry!’ squeaked Dobby. ‘The second task starts in ten minutes, and Harry Potter –’
    ‘Ten minutes?’ Harry croaked. ‘Ten – ten minutes ?’
    He looked down at his watch. Dobby was right. It was twenty past nine. A large, dead weight seemed to fall through Harry’s chest into his stomach.
    ‘Hurry, Harry Potter!’ squeaked Dobby, plucking at Harry’s sleeve. ‘You is supposed to be down by the lake with the other champions, sir!’
    ‘It’s too late,