Chapter One
The night was growing cooler, a crisp breeze rolling in from the west. A pale moonlight sifted in through the departing clouds. But all else was dark on Privet Drive, the silence was almost complete, except for the whispers on the wind.
Privet Drive was a very respectable neighborhood where the residents lived dull, monotonous lives. Nothing out of the ordinary ever occurred on Privet Drive, except for the appearance of a very peculiar man, nine years ago. But none of the neighbors ever witnessed what happened that night.
They never saw the tall, thin man leave a small bundle of blankets on the scrubbed doorstep of Number 4. Inside that bundle of cotton blankets was a one year old boy and his name was Harry Potter. Clutching in his small hand was a letter, addressed to the Dursley's, the owners of Number 4. The letter explained that Harry's parents had been murdered and that in order for Harry to survive he would have to be placed in his blood relative's care.
But Harry never read the letter, his relatives never told him about his past. And eight years on, Harry now occupied the small cupboard under the stairs. Harry was told by his Aunt and Uncle that his parents had died in a car crash, and that they had accepted Harry out of the goodness of their hearts.
So Harry had lived with the Dursley's for nine years, sleeping in a small cupboard and working for his Aunt Petunia in the day. Harry also attended school, but he didn't like going. It wasn't that he didn't like learning, Harry loved learning and reading, it was because of his aunt and uncle's son, Dudley Dursley, that Harry hated going to school.
Dudley looked a lot like Uncle Vernon. He had a large pink face, not much neck, small, watery blue eyes, and thick blond hair that lay smoothly on his thick, fat head. Aunt Petunia often said that Dudley looked like a baby angel - Harry often said that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig. Dudley was a renowned bully, and he loved to pick on Harry especially at school.
Dudley had a gang, who were all in Harry's class at school. Piers, Dennis, Malcolm and Gordon were all big and stupid. But as Dudley was the biggest and stupidest of the lot, he was the leader. Dudley and the gang spent their day terrorizing other students, they often beat up Harry, but Harry had learned that he couldn't fight back, because if Dudley returned home with a bruise or a small cut, Harry would be in serious trouble.
The Dursley's were astonishingly stupid when it came to their son. Dudley was spoiled, day and night. In their eyes, there was no finer boy. Mr. Vernon Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunning, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a rather large moustache. Mrs. Petunia Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in handy as she spent a lot of her time craning over the garden fence, spying on the neighbors.
The Dursley's lived perfectly normal lives until Harry arrived, and their greatest fear was that he would disrupt their small fabricated world they had built around themselves. So they tried to keep Harry out of the family as much as possible. They never bought him anything, preferring to give him Dudley's old clothes, and they kept him in the cupboard under the stairs, so they wouldn't have to see him often, except when he did the only thing he was good for, clean the house.
Nobody would have known that Harry lived with the Dursley's, if they hadn't been told. There were no pictures on the mantelpiece of Harry as there was of the rest of the family. Harry really didn't have any possessions of his own. He had no photographs of his parents and he didn't have any memory of them either. He couldn't remember their voices or their faces. His aunt and uncle refused to tell him anything of his parents; he didn't even know their names.
At this moment in time, Harry was now lying on the comfortable couch in the Dursley's spotless living room; he often snuck out of his cupboard to sleep here because it was more comfortable. Shadows from the trees outside the windows were thrown across the room. But Harry didn't recognize this; he was looking up at the bright stars that were now showing from beneath the departing clouds.
At the age of ten Harry was small and skinny for his age. He looked even smaller and skinnier than he really was because all he had to wear were old clothes of Dudley's, and Dudley was about four times bigger than he was. Harry had a thin face, knobbly knees, black hair, and bright green eyes. He wore round glasses held together with a lot of Scotch tape because of all the times Dudley had punched him on the nose. The only thing Harry liked about his own appearance was a very thin scar on his forehead that was shaped like a bolt of lightning. His aunt and uncle had told him that this was a result of the car-crash which had claimed the lives of the Potters.
Harry was thinking of the day's events. A lot of strange things had been happening lately, Harry put it down to the fact it was Halloween. For instance, a tiny man in a violet top hat had bowed to him today while out shopping with Aunt Petunia and Dudley. After asking Harry furiously if he knew the man, Aunt Petunia had rushed them out of the shop without buying anything. A wild-looking old woman dressed all in green had waved merrily at him once on a bus. A bald man in a very long purple coat had actually shaken his hand in the street the other day and then walked away without a word. The weirdest thing about all these people was the way they seemed to vanish the second Harry tried to get a closer look.
Harry often felt like the loneliest person in the world. He knew the Dursley's hated him, punishing him for some very absurd reasons or very stupid reasons. The thing was some strange things often happened to Harry .Once, Aunt Petunia, tired of Harry coming back from the barbers looking as though he hadn't been at all, had taken a pair of kitchen scissors and cut his hair so short he was almost bald except for his bangs, which she left "to hide that horrible scar." Dudley had laughed himself silly at Harry, who spent a sleepless night imagining school the next day, where he was already laughed at for his baggy clothes and taped glasses. Next morning, however, he had gotten up to find his hair exactly as it had been before Aunt Petunia had sheared it off. He had been given a week in his cupboard for this, even though he had tried to explain that he couldn't explain how it had grown back so quickly.
Another time, Aunt Petunia had been trying to force him into a revolting old sweater of Dudley's (brown with orange puff balls). The harder she tried to pull it over his head, the smaller it seemed to become, until finally it might have fitted a hand puppet, but certainly wouldn't fit Harry. Aunt Petunia had decided it must have shrunk in the wash but Uncle Vernon must have disagreed because when Harry saw him next, he looked furious and completely demented. He hit Harry a few times while complaining about his unnaturalness, which thoroughly confused Harry.
Another time after that, he'd gotten into terrible trouble for being found on the roof of the school kitchens. Dudley's gang had been chasing him as usual when, as much to Harry's surprise as anyone else's, there he was sitting on the chimney. The Dursley's had received a very angry letter from Harry's headmistress telling them Harry had been climbing school buildings. But all he'd tried to do (as he shouted at Uncle Vernon through the locked door of his cupboard) was jump behind the big trash cans outside the kitchen doors. Harry supposed that the wind must have caught him in mid-jump.
At school, Harry had no one. Everybody knew that Dudley's gang hated that odd Harry Potter in his baggy old clothes and broken glasses, and nobody liked to disagree with Dudley's gang.
Harry felt as if he had no one in this world. That he was alone. He felt helpless to do anything. He couldn't go anywhere because he had nowhere to go. He was either at the Dursley's house or at school. Sometimes he visited the local library. He liked it there because it was so quiet. Silence ruled the library. Harry loved all kinds of books, from fiction to non-fiction. When he read he wasn't living in his miserable life, he was on some great adventure, and he liked it, being able to escape his life. He also liked to read books on Judo, which is a refinement of the ancient martial art of Jujutsu. He particularly liked Judo because skill, technique and timing, rather than the use of brute strength, are the essential ingredients for success. He often practiced the movements required for the spectacular throwing, grappling and choking techniques. But he wasn't great considering he didn't have a teacher or anyone to practice with. He had tried a choking attack out on Dennis which had knocked him out for a few minutes. Harry was lucky because Dennis didn't want anyone to know that little Potter had knocked him out cold, so he didn't tell a soul.
The librarian was an old withered man named Mr. Kravitov. He told Harry that he was from Russia but when he was eleven years old; his parents had immigrated to Britain to escape the war. He was a kind man and he often offered Harry books, saying that he was amazed at Harry's reading abilities, but Harry knew that if the Dursleys ever noticed the books, they would be forbidden immediately. Apart from the library Harry only went to Mrs. Figg's house.
Every time the Dursley's went out, Harry was left behind with Mrs. Figg, a mad old lady who lived two streets away. Harry hated it there. The whole house smelled of cabbage and Mrs. Figg made him look at photographs of all the cats she'd ever owned. Mrs. Figg was the owner of almost every cat in Little Whinging and Harry knew them all very well. But there was one tabby cat in particular that often followed Harry around during the summer and he was sure that it didn't belong to Mrs. Figg. It was a peculiar cat because it acted uncannily like a human. It also had strange spectacle markings around its eyes. The cat also had a knack for knowledge about human behavior, because Harry would swear on his life that the cat hated Dudley. It sometimes gave him very stern looks.
Harry tried remembering the last time he had seen the cat. It had been during the summer, Harry was leaving the library, but he had ran into Dudley and his gang, or more like Dudley had ran into him and shoved him down the stone steps of the library exit. Harry had tumbled down the steps and painfully smacked his head against the hard ground and fell unconscious. When he had awoken Mr. Kravitov was bending over him with a glass of water and asking him was he alright, Mr. Kravitov had then explained that the cat had come into the library and meowed until he had followed the cat outside to see what had it in such a state, finding Harry unconscious at the foot of the steps.
Harry let out an angry sigh as he remembered his encounter with Dudders. He was sick of being Dudley's victim, sick of being Aunt Petunia's slave and Uncle Vernon's excuse to rant. He was just plain sick of the Dursley's. He couldn't believe that Aunt Petunia was his mother's sister, but then again he never knew his mother so he didn't know what she was like.
When he had been younger, Harry had dreamed and dreamed of some unknown relation coming to take him away, but it had never happened; the Dursleys were his only family.
With that, Harry rolled over onto his side and snuggled into his warm blanket in order to attempt to fall to sleep. For some strange reason, Harry never slept well on Halloween. He always had nightmares, a blinding flash of green light and a burning pain on his forehead. Harry often wondered whether this had anything to do with the car-crash that had taken his parents away from him.
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