Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Rowling Joanne Kathleen - Страница 45
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“Oh, don’t start that again!” sighed Hermione. “I thought we’d settled this.”
“It’s one thing hanging around the entrances under the Cloak, but this is different, Hermione,” Ron jabbed a finger at a copy of the Daily Prophet dated ten days previously. “You’re on the list of Muggle-borns who didn’t present themselves for interrogation!”
“And you’re supposed to be dying of spattergroit at the Burrow! If anyone shouldn’t go, it’s Harry, he’s got a ten-thousand-Galleon price on his head—”
“Fine, I’ll stay here,” said Harry. “Let me know if you ever defeat Voldemort, won’t you?”
As Ron and Hermione laughed, pain shot through the scar on Harry’s forehead. His hand jumped to it. He saw Hermione’s eyes narrow, and he tried to pass off the movement by brushing his hair out of his eyes.
“Well, if all three of us go we’ll have to Disapparate separately,” Ron was saying. “We can’t all fit under the Cloak anymore.”
Harry’s scar was becoming more and more painful. He stood up. At once, Kreacher hurried forward.
“Master has not finished his soup, would master prefer the savory stew, or else the treacle tart to which Master is so partial?”
“Thanks, Kreacher, but I’ll be back in a minute—er—bathroom.”
Aware that Hermione was watching him suspiciously, Harry hurried up the stairs to the hall and then to the first landing, where he dashed into the bathroom and bolted the door again. Grunting with pain, he slumped over the black basin with its taps in the form of open-mouthed serpents and closed his eyes…
He was gliding along a twilit street. The buildings on either side of him had high, timbered gables; they looked like gingerbread houses. He approached one of them, then saw the whiteness of his own long-fingered hand against the door. He knocked. He felt a mounting excitement…
The door opened: A laughing woman stood there. Her face fell as she looked into Harry’s face: humor gone, terror replacing it…
“Gregorovitch?” said a high, cold voice.
She shook her head: She was trying to close the door. A white hand held it steady, prevented her shutting him out…
“I want Gregorovitch.”
“Er wohnt hier nicht mehr!” she cried, shaking her head. “He no live here! He no live here! I know him not!”
Abandoning the attempt to close the door, she began to back away down the dark hall, and Harry followed, gliding toward her, and his long-fingered hand had drawn his wand.
“Where is he?”
“Das wei? ich nicht! He move! I know not, I know not!”
He raised his hand. She screamed. Two young children came running into the hall. She tried to shield them with her arms. There was a flash of green light—
“Harry! HARRY!”
He opened his eyes; he had sunk to the floor. Hermione was pounding on the door again.
“Harry, open up!”
He had shouted out, he knew it. He got up and unbolted the door; Hermione toppled inside at once, regained her balance, and looked around suspiciously. Ron was right behind her, looking unnerved as he pointed his wand into the corners of the chilly bathroom.
“What were you doing?” asked Hermione sternly.
“What d’you think I was doing?” asked Harry with feeble bravado.
“You were yelling your head off!” said Ron.
“Oh yeah… I must’ve dozed off or—”
“Harry, please don’t insult our intelligence,” said Hermione, taking deep breaths. “We know your scar hurt downstairs, and you’re white as a sheet.”
Harry sat down on the edge of the bath.
“Fine. I’ve just seen Voldemort murdering a woman. By now he’s probably killed her whole family. And he didn’t need to. It was Cedric all over again, they were just there…”
“Harry, you aren’t supposed to let this happen anymore!” Hermione cried, her voice echoing through the bathroom. “Dumbledore wanted you to use Occlumency! He thought the connection was dangerous—Voldemort can use it, Harry! What good is it to watch him kill and torture, how can it help?”
“Because it means I know what he’s doing,” said Harry.
“So you’re not even going to try to shut him out?”
“Hermione, I can’t. You know I’m lousy at Occlumency. I never got the hang of it.”
“You never really tried!” she said hotly. “I don’t get it, Harry—do you like having this special connection or relationship or what—whatever—”
She faltered under the look he gave her as he stood up.
“Like it?” he said quietly. “Would you like it?”
“I—no—I’m sorry, Harry. I just didn’t mean—”
“I hate it, I hate the fact that he can get inside me, that I have to watch him when he’s most dangerous. But I’m going to use it.”
“Dumbledore—”
“Forget Dumbledore. This is my choice, nobody else’s. I want to know why he’s after Gregorovitch.”
“Who?”
“He’s a foreign wandmaker,” said Harry. “He made Krum’s wand and Krum reckons he’s brilliant.”
“But according to you,” said Ron, “Voldemort’s got Ollivander locked up somewhere. If he’s already got a wandmaker, what does he need another one for?”
“Maybe he agrees with Krum, maybe he thinks Gregorovitch is better… or else he thinks Gregorovitch will be able to explain what my wand did when he was chasing me, because Ollivander didn’t know.”
Harry glanced into the cracked, dusty mirror and saw Ron and Hermione exchanging skeptical looks behind his back.
“Harry, you keep talking about what your wand did,” said Hermione, “but you made it happen! Why are you so determined not to take responsibility for your own power?”
“Because I know it wasn’t me! And so does Voldemort, Hermione! We both know what really happened!”
They glared at each other; Harry knew that he had not convinced Hermione and that she was marshaling counterarguments, against both his theory on his wand and the fact that he was permitting himself to see into Voldemort’s mind. To his relief, Ron intervened.
“Drop it,” he advised her. “It’s up to him. And if we’re going to the Ministry tomorrow, don’t you reckon we should go over the plan?”
Reluctantly, as the other two could tell, Hermione let the matter rest, though Harry was quite sure she would attack again at the first opportunity. In the meantime, they returned to the basement kitchen, where Kreacher served them all stew and treacle tart.
They did not get to bed until late that night, after spending hours going over and over their plan until they could recite it, word perfect, to each other. Harry, who was now sleeping in Sirius’s room, lay in bed with his wandlight trained on the old photograph of his father, Sirius, Lupin, and Pettigrew, and muttered the plan to himself for another ten minutes. As he extinguished his wand, however, he was thinking not of Polyjuice Potion, Puking Pastilles, or the navy blue robes of Magical Maintenance; he though of Gregorovitch the wandmaker, and how long he could hope to remain hidden while Voldemort sought him so determinedly.
Dawn seemed to follow midnight with indecent haste.
“You look terrible,” was Ron’s greeting as he entered the room to wake Harry.
“Not for long,” said Harry, yawning.
They found Hermione downstairs in the kitchen. She was being served coffee and hot rolls by Kreacher and wearing the slightly manic expression that Harry associated with exam review.
“Robes,” she said under her breath, acknowledging their presence with a nervous nod and continuing to poke around in her beaded bag, “Polyjuice Potion… Invisibiliity Cloak… Decoy Detonators… You should each take a couple just in case… Puking Pastilles, Nosebleed Nougat, Extendable Ears…”
They gulped down their breakfast, then set off upstairs, Kreacher bowing them out and promising to have a steak-and-kidney pie ready for them when they returned.
“Bless him,” said Ron fondly, “and when you think I used to fantasize about cutting off his head and sticking it on the wall…”
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