He was bearing down on Harry like a great bulldog, all his teeth bared.” Well, I’ve got news for you, boy . … I’m locking you up …. You’re never going back to that school … never … and if you try and magic yourself out. they’ll expel you!”
And laughing like a maniac, he dragged Harry back upstairs.
Uncle Vernon was as bad as his word. The following morning, he paid a man to fit bars on Harry’s window. He himself fitted a cat- flap in the bedroom door, so that small amounts of food could be pushed inside three times a day. They let Harry out to use the bathroom morning and evening. Otherwise, he was locked in his room around the clock.
Three days later, the Dursleys were showing no sign of relenting, and Harry couldn’t see any way out of his situation. He lay on his bed watching the sun sinking behind the bars on the window and wondered miserably what was going to happen to him.
What was the good of magicking himself out of his room if Hogwarts would expel him for doing it? Yet life at Privet Drive had reached an all-time low. Now that the Dursleys knew they weren’t going to wake up as fruit bats, he had lost his only weapon. Dobby might have saved Harry from horrible happenings at Hogwarts, but the way things were going, he’d probably starve to death anyway.
The cat-flap rattled and Aunt Petunias hand appeared, pushing a bowl of canned soup into the room. Harry, whose insides were aching with hunger, jumped off his bed and seized it. The soup was stone-cold, but he drank half of it in one gulp. Then he crossed the room to Hedwig’s cage and tipped the soggy vegetables at the bottom of the bowl into her empty food tray. She ruffled her feathers and gave him a look of deep disgust.
“It’s no good turning your beak up at it. that’s all we’ve got,” said Harry grimly.
He put the empty bowl back on the floor next to the cat-flap and lay back down on the bed, somehow even hungrier than he had been before the soup.
Supposing he was still alive in another four weeks, what would happen if he didn’t turn up at Hogwarts? Would someone be sent to see why he hadn’t come back? Would they be able to make the Dursleys let him go?
The 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.l” 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 midair Grinning at Harry from the front seats were Fred and George, Ron’s elder twin brothers.
“All right, Harry?” asked George.
“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.”