Harry Potter 06 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Dumbledore’s letter might have gone astray; Dumbledore could be prevented from collecting him; the letter might turn out not to be from Dumbledore at all, but a trick or joke or trap. Harry had not been able to face packing and then being let down and having to unpack again. The only gesture he had made to the possibility of a journey was to shut his snowy owl, Hedwig, safely in her cage.
    The minute hand on the alarm clock reached the number twelve, and at that precise moment, the streetlamp outside the window went out.
    Harry awoke as though the sudden darkness was an alarm. Hastily straightening his glasses and unsticking his cheek from the glass, he pressed his nose against the window instead and squinted down at the pavement. A tall figure in a long, billowing cloak was walking up the garden path.
    Harry jumped up as though he had received an electric shock, knocked over his chair, and started snatching anything and everything within reach from the floor and throwing it into the trunk. Even as he lobbed a set of robes, two spell-books and a packet of crisps across the room, the doorbell rang.
    Downstairs in the living room his Uncle Vernon shouted, ‘Who the blazes is calling at this time of night?’
    Harry froze with a brass telescope in one hand and a pair of trainers in the other. He had completely forgotten to warn the Dursleys that Dumbledore might be coming. Feeling both panicky and close to laughter, he clambered over the trunk and wrenched open his bedroom door in time to hear a deep voice say, ‘Good evening. You must be Mr Dursley. I daresay Harry has told you I would be coming for him?’
    Harry ran down the stairs two at a time, coming to an abrupt halt several steps from the bottom, as long experience had taught him to remain out of arm’s reach of his uncle whenever possible. There in the doorway stood a tall, thin man with waist-length silver hair and beard. Half-moon spectacles were perched on his crooked nose and he was wearing a long black travelling cloak and a pointed hat. Vernon Dursley, whose moustache was quite as bushy as Dumbledore’s, though black, and who was wearing a puce dressing-gown, was staring at the visitor as though he could not believe his tiny eyes.
    ‘Judging by your look of stunned disbelief, Harry did not warn you that I was coming,’ said Dumbledore pleasantly. ‘However, let us assume that you have invited me warmly into your house. It is unwise to linger overlong on doorsteps in these troubled times.’
    He stepped smartly over the threshold and closed the front door behind him.
    ‘It is a long time since my last visit,’ said Dumbledore, peering down his crooked nose at Uncle Vernon. ‘I must say, your agapanthuses are flourishing.’
    Vernon Dursley said nothing at all. Harry did not doubt that speech would return to him, and soon – the vein pulsing in his uncle’s temple was reaching danger point – but something about Dumbledore seemed to have robbed him temporarily of breath. It might have been the blatant wizardishness of his appearance, but it might, too, have been that even Uncle Vernon could sense that here was a man whom it would be very difficult to bully.
    ‘Ah, good evening, Harry,’ said Dumbledore, looking up at him through his half-moon glasses with a most satisfied expression. ‘Excellent, excellent.’
    These words seemed to rouse Uncle Vernon. It was clear that as far as he was concerned, any man who could look at Harry and say ‘excellent’ was a man with whom he could never see eye to eye.
    ‘I don’t mean to be rude –’ he began, in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable.
    ‘– yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often,’ Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely. ‘Best to say nothing at all, my dear man. Ah, and this must be Petunia.’
    The kitchen door had opened, and there stood Harry’s aunt, wearing rubber gloves and a housecoat over her nightdress, clearly halfway through her usual pre-bedtime wipe-down of all the kitchen surfaces. Her rather horsy face registered nothing but shock.
    ‘Albus Dumbledore,’ said Dumbledore, when Uncle Vernon failed to effect an introduction. ‘We have corresponded, of course.’ Harry thought this an odd way of reminding Aunt Petunia that he had once sent her an exploding letter, but Aunt Petunia did not challenge the term. ‘And this must be your son Dudley?’
    Dudley had that moment peered round the living-room door. His large, blond head rising