July 30, 1991
England, Little Whinging
"Hold it, Dudley!" I shouted to my brother. He yanked the cord, and the trap slammed shut. The bird we'd caught let out an awful screech, rocking the cardboard box we'd adapted into a trap.
A large barn owl—yet another owl that had deliberately dropped a letter onto our lawn—had been tempted by a piece of meat and got caught.
"How are we supposed to get it out now?" my brother asked, pressing down on the box with both hands. "And somehow send the letter too..."
"Yeah... and it's supposed to be a postal owl..." I nodded toward the thick envelope bearing our address in the same green ink.
Sensei had told me about a Duplication Spell. It worked on things that were nonliving, inedible, and didn't carry magic. By now almost four hundred letters had accumulated. After the first one, another arrived the next day, then another. The day after that there were about ten, all at once. Afterward they started being thrown down the chimney and onto the lawn. Good thing the neighbors didn't pay any attention to the owls constantly flying to our house. Either Sensei or Harry had mentioned that Hogwarts had its own owlery. At this point, probably every school owl had visited our address. Anyone could identify the 'Chosen One' just from this abnormal level of bird activity.
If someone had wanted to drive Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia into a nervous tic and make them hate wizards, they had a fair chance of succeeding.
Except I'd persuaded my relatives not to worry and intercepted the letters immediately, practically before they landed. Only once, when they started coming out of the fireplace, had I barely managed in time, and even then I'd secretly used magic to catch them. Whoever had arranged all this was seriously beginning to piss me off. At least the owls flew away immediately and didn't leave droppings everywhere, otherwise the bill I'd present to the unknown paper-waster would have multiplied several times over. For now, I simply collected all my correspondence lovingly into bags while nurturing bloodthirsty intentions that hadn't yet taken definite form.
I treated and opened a couple more letters, but every single one turned out to be completely identical to the first, right down to the tiniest ink blot in the corner. That was why I'd thought of the Duplication Spell.
"Another letter?" Aunt Petunia stepped onto the porch. "And what is that you've got there?" she added in a much sterner tone.
"We caught an owl," Dudley informed her. "We're going to send a letter with it so they stop sending more letters."
At that exact moment, the owl inside the box screeched horribly and punched one foot through the cardboard. My brother jumped back in fright, our trap tipped over, and a thoroughly ruffled barn owl sprang free, snapped its beak threateningly, and launched itself into the air.
"Aunt Petunia, I just remembered—you sent a letter to Mr. Snape by owl post three years ago. How did you do it?" The obvious solution suddenly occurred to me.
"He had sent his own owl. But there are also unassigned owls you can attract with a special whistle. I think I still have one somewhere from when Lily was at school. My sister and I wrote to each other sometimes, but her owl always flew away afterward. If an owl hasn't specifically been told to wait for a reply, you can't force or persuade it to take a letter. There are some rules around that."
Right. I could even guess what sort of rules. Someone might slip a curse onto your owl.
"The letter says he has to send an owl before the thirty-first, and today is already the thirtieth," Dudley said, looking at his mother. "By the time we find another owl—and they sleep in the morning and daytime—and then it actually flies there... what happens? Harry doesn't get to go to his school?"
"Technically, an escort is supposed to come," Aunt Petunia frowned. "Don't count on me. I don't know where to go or what to do. Father always went with Lily. If you send the letter, those..." She pressed her lips together, deciding not to say what she thought. "...strange people might assume Harry already knows everything. Though we could send a letter to Mr. Snape..."
"No, we can't contact him." I sighed. It felt unpleasant lying to my family. "He wanted to leave on a journey as soon as the holidays started, so it would be useless."
Which meant we'd have to wait for... the groundskeeper.
I hoped the hairy giant wouldn't try to harm my family, forcing me to expose myself and everything I could do ahead of time.
* * *
All Tuesday I couldn't settle down, and eventually I decided that the family's peace and safety mattered more than maintaining a supposedly perfect cover. Harry had often mentioned that Headmaster Beard-Bells insisted there was some kind of 'blood protection' hiding him from various unpleasant villains in the Dursleys' house—a house Harry hadn't wanted to return to. Fine. We'd arrange that protection ourselves. Blood wouldn't even be a problem.
"Aunt Petunia, I wanted to tell you something," I said, catching Petunia-san in the kitchen while she was baking a cake for my birthday, and I paused to admire her.
I had to say, after the course of potions I regularly brought her from Sensei, she looked amazing. She smiled more often too, and in general seemed much happier. Martha Polkiss constantly tried to pry out 'her secret', but Aunt Petunia naturally never cracked. Because of his 'such beautiful wife', Uncle Vernon apparently became afraid of competition once men started looking at Petunia-san in the supermarket and whenever we went anywhere. So he decided to 'take care of himself' too and began exercising with Dudley and me. He lost his belly and slimmed down impressively. He and Dudley were both naturally broad and rather stocky, but now Uncle Vernon no longer resembled the walrus we'd seen at London Zoo. He looked more like a mustached strongman lifting weights in a circus program.
"Yes? Did you want something, Harry? Sorry, but Dudley has already licked the entire mixing bowl clean..."
"Oh, that's fine." I waved it off. "I'm worried that wizards may show up here and... I don't want to put our family in danger. Mr. Snape taught me a few things," I said, shifting the blame for my knowledge onto Sensei. "I can close the perimeter around our property so nobody with magic can get through the gate without permission. Or into the house, especially."
"What do you have to do?" Aunt Petunia asked sternly.
"I need to place five drawings: one at each corner of the property and one on the roof, so nobody can come in from above. They need to be protected because they're drawn on paper. The roof one can just be fixed under the ceiling in the bathroom. Around the perimeter, maybe put them inside some kind of little metal plates or boxes... The drawings are small." I showed her the approximate size.
"Vernon! Dudley!" Aunt Petunia shouted. When they arrived, she immediately started issuing orders. "Dudley, help Harry. There are chairs—you'll hold them so your cousin doesn't fall. Vernon, we need four small iron boxes. Look for something suitable in the garage. They'll have to be buried around the garden. Maybe one of your drill-bit tins will work."
Uncle Vernon glanced at me, but nodded and headed for the garage, while my brother and I ran upstairs, where I explained everything about the protective barrier.
I'd never had a chance to test it. I'd only finished these extremely complicated seals at the beginning of the year, after more than a year of work adapting them. But it was probably the best solution, and I'd feel much calmer after leaving if I knew the family was protected.
* * *
"Do you feel anything?" I asked after activating the barrier and adding Aunt Petunia and my brother to the access blocks. That had been the main difficulty, because neither of them had full chakra, while fuinjutsu had originally been designed specifically around chakra. That was why I'd spent more than a year modifying this seal.
"Maybe..." Dudley said uncertainly. He stepped through the gate and back again, trying to feel the difference. "It feels calmer in here somehow."
"I'm already happy that suspicious people won't be able to wander onto the property," Uncle Vernon said thoughtfully, twirling one end of his mustache. "What about owls and letters?"
"They should just drop them onto the doorstep from above. If there's no magic involved, the barrier should let them through," I answered, though I wasn't entirely certain myself.
"And if there is magic and it comes from above?" my brother asked with interest.
"I don't know." I shrugged. "Maybe it'll slide down the force field, or maybe the force field will absorb its magic first and only then let it pass. We'd have to test it..."
The family was satisfied with my answer, and Aunt Petunia called everyone to dinner.
* * *
I couldn't sleep. In Harry's story, the giant groundskeeper had arrived exactly at midnight, at the moment my birthday officially began. My sense of time sharpened even more, and I counted the seconds mentally. On the very first second of July thirty-first, a solid boom sounded outside, waking everyone.
My brother apparently hadn't been asleep either. He flew down the stairs like a bullet and looked into my cupboard.
"Harry! Did you hear that?!" Dudley asked eagerly. Yep, definitely not asleep—he was wearing his shorts and T-shirt instead of pajamas. I'd gone to bed fully dressed too.
"Yeah, I heard it all right." Just as I said it, another drawn-out BOOM sounded outside.
"Boys, don't even think about going beyond the gate," Aunt Petunia called after us as she came downstairs, her voice catching us near the front door.
"If that wakes all the neighbors..." Uncle Vernon looked displeased. He had a shotgun slung over his shoulder and a long-handled police flashlight in his hands.
We went outside. And three tails through my liver, our 'guest' really was enormous! Four times as wide as Uncle Vernon had been before losing weight and twice as tall as me—and I was currently taller than I'd been at thirteen in my old world: I'd grown to one hundred and forty-nine centimeters. I had no idea just how badly Harry had been treated, or what exactly had been put on that letter and birthday cake the giant had handed to a frightened child, that Harry had happily and easily followed this hairy mountain of a man somewhere after seeing him for the first time in his life. Either that, or you had to be completely reckless and possess absolutely no instinct for self-preservation.
The streetlights were out, so all we could see was a creepy silhouette lit by the nearly full moon. Uncle Vernon switched on the electric torch and shone it into the groundskeeper's... face, apparently. The beam revealed a shaggy, bearded face with black eyes, bushy eyebrows, and a broad nose. The giant smelled like some kind of wet dog, which wasn't especially pleasant.
"What do you want, sir, and why the hell are you trying to break into our property?" Uncle Vernon asked dryly.
"Dursley?! Let me in, I'm here for Harry!" the giant growled aggressively.
"You show up at night, try to break into our home, and then say you're here to take our nephew?" Uncle Vernon performed amazement beautifully. "Are you insane?! Though why am I even asking?.. You people think Muggles are dirt beneath your feet and couldn't care less about inconveniencing anyone."
"Why, you!" The groundskeeper swung the ridiculous pink umbrella he held and pointed its tip at Uncle Vernon. I tensed and regretted not listening to Dudley, who had suggested burying a couple of explosive tags around the house for self-defense.
Harry had said that this unstable groundskeeper had something like a fragment of a wand hidden inside that umbrella and could cast magic with it. He'd also said the giant had once tried to turn Dudley into a pig but failed, giving the boy only a pig's tail that later had to be removed surgically. Yeah, Uncle Vernon was right. The groundskeeper hadn't spared a single thought for the fact that Muggles wouldn't be able to get rid of something like that on their own.
So I concentrated and sent an air strike under the umbrella, twisting it and snapping the tip. I'd spent almost two years practicing that move on thick branches, figuring that in extreme cases I could at least use levitation to knock wands out of the hands of overly arrogant wizards. It didn't work every time and required serious concentration for a full twenty seconds, which I hadn't managed to shorten at all. Luckily, the groundskeeper held his umbrella firmly and the target wasn't moving. The umbrella cracked, sparked, and caught fire. The groundskeeper swore loudly, dropped his half-wand to the ground, and stomped the flames out.
Without his umbrella, the giant calmed down immediately.
"I'm here for Harry," he grumbled. "It's his birthday today. I've got a letter for him. Dumbledore said. And he didn't send an owl. Harry and me, we're friends."
"My nephew has an entire sack of those letters," Uncle Vernon replied. "And birthdays are celebrated in the morning, not at one o'clock at night. We don't have an owl because we're Muggles. Are all of you complete idiots over there? Go away."
"But the owl..." the groundskeeper gurgled.
"Harry, do you agree to study at this damned school of witchcraft and wizardry?" Uncle Vernon asked in a perfectly polite social tone.
"Harry? So he's here?" The giant began looking around wildly and once again hit my magical force field with another drawn-out BOOM. Apparently Uncle Vernon's flashlight had blinded him, or maybe he simply couldn't see through the barrier.
"Of course I'm here," I replied irritably. "I'm amazed the police and every neighbor on the street aren't here already. Are all wizards as huge as you? Couldn't they have sent somebody less conspicuous?"
"I'm not a wizard, exactly. I'm the... groundskeeper at Hogwarts," the giant admitted. "Dumbledore asked me to come."
"Oh, you mean the Headmaster of Hogwarts, Order of Merlin First Class, great wizard, Supreme Mugwump, and President of the International Confederation of Wizards?" I listed all of Beard-Bells' titles exactly as they appeared in the letter. "You're telling me that in his entire confederation of wizards, he couldn't find... a wizard? I'm starting to seriously question whether I want to attend a school with a Headmaster who sends giant groundskeepers to ordinary Muggles in violation of the Statute of Secrecy."
"You know your parents were wizards?" the groundskeeper asked in astonishment.
"Of course I know. My aunt is my mother's own sister. Why on earth would she hide that from me?" I seemed to have seriously confused the giant with that question.
"Children should be in bed," Uncle Vernon interrupted us. "At this rate the police really will arrive, and the neighbors will come running. Harry is right. For any questions, you should have sent someone... more reasonable. Come back tomorrow at ten in the morning. And preferably, don't come yourself."
"But..." the groundskeeper gurgled timidly.
"No 'buts'," Uncle Vernon cut him off. Aunt Petunia turned Dudley and me toward the house and told us to go to bed. Nobody made any more noise. I was pleased that the barrier worked, and I fell asleep with a light heart.