He suddenly remembered why he had fallen over and turned around quickly to stare at the alleyway between the garage and fence. One of the knees in his jeans was torn, and the hand he had thrown out to break his fall was bleeding. 'I didn't do it on purpose,' said Harry, annoyed.
'What were you doin' down there?' said Stan, dropping his professional manner. Close up, he saw that Stan Shunpike was only a few years older than he was, eighteen or nineteen at most, with large, protruding ears and quite a few pimples. Harry snatched up his wand again and scrambled to his feet. He had just caught sight of Harry, who was still sitting on the ground. My name is Stan Shunpike, and I will be your conductor this eve-' just stick out your wand hand, step on board, and we can take you anywhere you want to go. 'Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Then a conductor in a purple uniform leapt out of the bus and began to speak loudly to the night. Gold lettering over the windshield spelled The Knight Bus.įor a split second, Harry wondered if he had been knocked silly by his fall. They belonged, as Harry saw when he raised his head, to a triple-decker, violently purple bus, which had appeared out of thin air. A second later, a gigantic pair of wheels and headlights screeched to a halt exactly where Harry had just been lying. With a yell, he rolled back onto the pavement, just in time. There was a deafening BANG, and Harry threw up his hands to shield his eyes against a sudden blinding light. His wand flew out of his hand as he flung out an arm to break his fall, and he landed, hard, in the gutter. He held it high over his head, and the pebble-dashed walls of number two suddenly sparkled the garage door gleamed, and between them Harry saw, quite distinctly, the hulking outline of something very big, with wide, gleaming eyes. 'Lumos,' Harry muttered, and a light appeared at the end of his wand, almost dazzling him. If only it would move, then he'd know whether it was just a stray cat or - something else. He had sensed rather than heard it: someone or something was standing in the narrow gap between the garage and the fence behind him. He bent over his trunk again, but almost immediately stood up once more, his hand clenched on his wand. Harry opened his trunk again and pushed the contents aside, looking for the Invisibility Cloak - but before he had found it, he straightened up suddenly, looking around him once more.Ī funny prickling on the back of his neck had made Harry feel he was being watched, but the street appeared to be deserted, and no lights shone from any of the large square houses.
It was a horrible prospect, but he couldn't sit on this wall forever, or he'd find himself trying to explain to Muggle police why he was out in the dead of night with a trunk full of spell books and a broomstick. He had the Invisibility Cloak he had inherited from his father - what if he bewitched the trunk to make it feather-light, tied it to his broomstick, covered himself in the cloak, and flew to London? Then he could get the rest of his money out of his vault and. now thumping painfully fast), a bit more magic couldn't hurt.
If he was already expelled (his heart was. He looked down at his wand, which he was still clutching in his hand. He'd never be able to drag his trunk all the way to London. There was a little wizard gold in the money bag at the bottom of his trunk, but the rest of the fortune his parents had left him was stored in a vault at Gringotts Wizarding Bank in London. Harry was sure that, criminal or not, Ron and Hermione would want to help him now, but they were both abroad, and with Hedwig gone, he had no means of contacting them. What, was going to happen to him? Would he be arrested, or would he simply be outlawed from the wizarding world? He thought of Ron and Hermione, and his heart sank even lower. Harry shivered and looked up and down Magnolia Crescent. He had broken the Decree for the Restriction of Underage Wizardry so badly, he was surprised Ministry of Magic representatives weren't swooping down on him where he sat. And the worst of it was, he had just done serious magic, which meant that he was almost certainly expelled from Hogwarts. He was stranded, quite alone, in the dark Muggle world, with absolutely nowhere to go. Whichever way he looked at it, he had never been in a worse fix. He sat quite still, anger still surging through him, listening to the frantic thumping of his heart.īut after ten minutes alone in the dark street, a new emotion overtook him: panic. Harry was several streets away before he collapsed onto a low wall in Magnolia Crescent, panting from the effort of dragging his trunk.