Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (17 page)

‘Having a last meal, Potter? When are you getting the train back to the Muggles?’

‘You’re a lot braver now you’re back on the ground and you’ve got your little friends with you,’ said Harry coolly. There was of course nothing at all little about Crabbe and Goyle, but as the High Table was full of teachers, neither of them could do more than crack their knuckles and scowl.

‘I’d take you on any time on my own,’ said Malfoy. ‘Tonight, if you want. Wizard’s duel. Wands only – no contact. What’s the matter? Never heard of a wizard’s duel before, I suppose?’

‘Of course he has,’ said Ron, wheeling round. ‘I’m his second, who’s yours?’

Malfoy looked at Crabbe and Goyle, sizing them up.

‘Crabbe,’ he said. ‘Midnight all right? We’ll meet you in the trophy room, that’s always unlocked.’

When Malfoy had gone, Ron and Harry looked at each other.

‘What
is
a wizard’s duel?’ said Harry. ‘And what do you mean, you’re my second?’

‘Well, a second’s there to take over if you die,’ said Ron casually, getting started at last on his cold pie. Catching the look on Harry’s face, he added quickly, ‘but people only die in proper duels, you know, with real wizards. The most you and Malfoy’ll be able to do is send sparks at each other. Neither of you knows enough magic to do any real damage. I bet he expected you to refuse, anyway.’

‘And what if I wave my wand and nothing happens?’

‘Throw it away and punch him on the nose,’ Ron suggested.

‘Excuse me.’

They both looked up. It was Hermione Granger.

‘Can’t a person eat in peace in this place?’ said Ron.

Hermione ignored him and spoke to Harry.

‘I couldn’t help overhearing what you and Malfoy were saying –’

‘Bet you could,’ Ron muttered.

‘– and you
mustn’t
go wandering around the school at night, think of the points you’ll lose Gryffindor if you’re caught, and you’re bound to be. It’s really very selfish of you.’

‘And it’s really none of your business,’ said Harry.

‘Goodbye,’ said Ron.

*

All the same, it wasn’t what you’d call the perfect end to the day, Harry thought, as he lay awake much later listening to Dean and Seamus falling asleep (Neville wasn’t back from the hospital wing). Ron had spent all evening giving him advice such as ‘If he tries to curse you, you’d better dodge it, because I can’t remember how to block them’. There was a very good chance they were going to get caught by Filch or Mrs Norris, and Harry felt he was pushing his luck, breaking another school rule today. On the other hand, Malfoy’s sneering face kept looming up out of the darkness – this was his big chance to beat Malfoy, face to face. He couldn’t miss it.

‘Half past eleven,’ Ron muttered at last. ‘We’d better go.’

They pulled on their dressing-gowns, picked up their wands and crept across the tower room, down the spiral staircase and into the Gryffindor common room. A few embers were still glowing in the fireplace, turning all the armchairs into hunched black shadows. They had almost reached the portrait hole when a voice spoke from the chair nearest them: ‘I can’t believe you’re going to do this, Harry.’

A lamp flickered on. It was Hermione Granger, wearing a pink dressing-gown and a frown.

‘You!’
said Ron furiously. ‘Go back to bed!’

‘I almost told your brother,’ Hermione snapped. ‘Percy – he’s a Prefect, he’d put a stop to this.’

Harry couldn’t believe anyone could be so interfering.

‘Come on,’ he said to Ron. He pushed open the portrait of the Fat Lady and climbed through the hole.

Hermione wasn’t going to give up that easily. She followed Ron through the portrait hole, hissing at them like an angry goose.

‘Don’t you
care
about Gryffindor, do you
only
care about yourselves, I don’t want Slytherin to win the House Cup and you’ll lose all the points I got from Professor McGonagall for knowing about Switching Spells.’

‘Go away.’

‘All right, but I warned you, you just remember what I said when you’re on the train home tomorrow, you’re so –’

But what they were, they didn’t find out. Hermione had turned to the portrait of the Fat Lady to get back inside and found herself facing an empty painting. The Fat Lady had gone on a night-time visit and Hermione was locked out of Gryffindor Tower.

‘Now what am I going to do?’ she asked shrilly.

‘That’s your problem,’ said Ron. ‘We’ve got to go, we’re going to be late.’

They hadn’t even reached the end of the corridor when Hermione caught up with them.

‘I’m coming with you,’ she said.

‘You are
not
.’

‘D’you think I’m going to stand out here and wait for Filch to catch me? If he finds all three of us I’ll tell him the truth, that I was trying to stop you and you can back me up.’

‘You’ve got some nerve –’ said Ron loudly.

‘Shut up, both of you!’ said Harry sharply. ‘I heard something.’

It was a sort of snuffling.

‘Mrs Norris?’ breathed Ron, squinting through the dark.

It wasn’t Mrs Norris. It was Neville. He was curled up on the floor, fast asleep, but jerked suddenly awake as they crept nearer.

‘Thank goodness you found me! I’ve been out here for hours. I couldn’t remember the new password to get in to bed.’

‘Keep your voice down, Neville. The password’s “Pig snout” but it won’t help you now, the Fat Lady’s gone off somewhere.’

‘How’s your arm?’ said Harry.

‘Fine,’ said Neville, showing them. ‘Madam Pomfrey mended it in about a minute.’

‘Good – well, look, Neville, we’ve got to be somewhere, we’ll see you later –’

‘Don’t leave me!’ said Neville, scrambling to his feet. ‘I don’t want to stay here alone, the Bloody Baron’s been past twice already.’

Ron looked at his watch and then glared furiously at Hermione and Neville.

‘If either of you get us caught, I’ll never rest until I’ve learnt that Curse of the Bogies Quirrell told us about and used it on you.’

Hermione opened her mouth, perhaps to tell Ron exactly how to use the Curse of the Bogies, but Harry hissed at her to be quiet and beckoned them all forward.

They flitted along corridors striped with bars of moonlight from the high windows. At every turn Harry expected to run into Filch or Mrs Norris, but they were lucky. They sped up a staircase to the third floor and tiptoed towards the trophy room.

Malfoy and Crabbe weren’t there yet. The crystal trophy cases glimmered where the moonlight caught them. Cups, shields, plates and statues winked silver and gold in the darkness. They edged along the walls, keeping their eyes on the doors at either end of the room. Harry took out his wand in case Malfoy leapt in and started at once. The minutes crept by.

‘He’s late, maybe he’s chickened out,’ Ron whispered.

Then a noise in the next room made them jump. Harry had only just raised his wand when they heard someone speak – and it wasn’t Malfoy.

‘Sniff around, my sweet, they might be lurking in a corner.’

It was Filch speaking to Mrs Norris. Horror-struck, Harry waved madly at the other three to follow him as quickly as possible; they scurried silently towards the door away from Filch’s voice. Neville’s robes had barely whipped round the corner when they heard Filch enter the trophy room.

‘They’re in here somewhere,’ they heard him mutter, ‘probably hiding.’

‘This way!’ Harry mouthed to the others and, petrified, they began to creep down a long gallery full of suits of armour. They could hear Filch getting nearer. Neville suddenly let out a frightened squeak and broke into a run – he tripped, grabbed Ron around the waist and the pair of them toppled right into a suit of armour.

The clanging and crashing were enough to wake the whole castle.

‘RUN!’ Harry yelled and the four of them sprinted down the gallery, not looking back to see whether Filch was following – they swung around the doorpost and galloped down one corridor then another, Harry in the lead without any idea where they were or where they were going. They ripped through a tapestry and found themselves in a hidden passageway, hurtled along it and came out near their Charms classroom, which they knew was miles from the trophy room.

‘I think we’ve lost him,’ Harry panted, leaning against the cold wall and wiping his forehead. Neville was bent double, wheezing and spluttering.

‘I –
told
– you,’ Hermione gasped, clutching at the stitch in her chest. ‘I – told – you.’

‘We’ve got to get back to Gryffindor Tower,’ said Ron, ‘quickly as possible.’

‘Malfoy tricked you,’ Hermione said to Harry. ‘You realise that, don’t you? He was never going to meet you – Filch knew someone was going to be in the trophy room, Malfoy must have tipped him off.’

Harry thought she was probably right, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.

‘Let’s go.’

It wasn’t going to be that simple. They hadn’t gone more than a dozen paces when a doorknob rattled and something came shooting out of a classroom in front of them.

It was Peeves. He caught sight of them and gave a squeal of delight.

‘Shut up, Peeves – please – you’ll get us thrown out.’

Peeves cackled.

‘Wandering around at midnight, ickle firsties? Tut, tut, tut. Naughty, naughty, you’ll get caughty.’

‘Not if you don’t give us away, Peeves, please.’

‘Should tell Filch, I should,’ said Peeves in a saintly voice, but his eyes glittered wickedly. ‘It’s for your own good, you know.’

‘Get out of the way,’ snapped Ron, taking a swipe at Peeves – this was a big mistake.

‘STUDENTS OUT OF BED!’ Peeves bellowed. ‘STUDENTS OUT OF BED DOWN THE CHARMS CORRIDOR!’

Ducking under Peeves they ran for their lives, right to the end of the corridor, where they slammed into a door – and it was locked.

‘This is it!’ Ron moaned, as they pushed helplessly at the door. ‘We’re done for! This is the end!’

They could hear footsteps, Filch running as fast as he could towards Peeves’s shouts.

‘Oh, move over,’ Hermione snarled. She grabbed Harry’s wand, tapped the lock and whispered,
‘Alohomora!
’

The lock clicked and the door swung open – they piled through it, shut it quickly and pressed their ears against it, listening.

‘Which way did they go, Peeves?’ Filch was saying. ‘Quick tell me.’

‘Say “please”.’

‘Don’t mess me about, Peeves, now
where did they go?
’

‘Shan’t say nothing if you don’t say please,’ said Peeves in his annoying sing-song voice.

‘All right –
please.
’

‘NOTHING! Ha haaa! Told you I wouldn’t say nothing if you didn’t say please! Ha ha! Haaaaaa!’ And they heard the sound of Peeves whooshing away and Filch cursing in rage.

‘He thinks this door is locked,’ Harry whispered. ‘I think we’ll be OK – get
off,
Neville!’ For Neville had been tugging on the sleeve of Harry’s dressing-gown for the last minute.
‘What?
’

Harry turned around – and saw, quite clearly, what. For a moment, he was sure he’d walked into a nightmare – this was too much, on top of everything that had happened so far.

They weren’t in a room, as he had supposed. They were in a corridor. The forbidden corridor on the third floor. And now they knew why it was forbidden.

They were looking straight into the eyes of a monstrous dog, a dog which filled the whole space between ceiling and floor. It had three heads. Three pairs of rolling, mad eyes; three noses, twitching and quivering in their direction; three drooling mouths, saliva hanging in slippery ropes from yellowish fangs.

It was standing quite still, all six eyes staring at them, and Harry knew that the only reason they weren’t already dead was that their sudden appearance had taken it by surprise, but it was quickly getting over that, there was no mistaking what those thunderous growls meant.

Harry groped for the doorknob – between Filch and death, he’d take Filch.

They fell backwards – Harry slammed the door shut, and they ran, they almost flew, back down the corridor. Filch must have hurried off to look for them somewhere else because they didn’t see him anywhere, but they hardly cared – all they wanted to do was put as much space as possible between them and that monster. They didn’t stop running until they reached the portrait of the Fat Lady on the seventh floor.

‘Where on earth have you all been?’ she asked, looking at their dressing-gowns hanging off their shoulders and their flushed, sweaty faces.

‘Never mind that – pig snout, pig snout,’ panted Harry, and the portrait swung forward. They scrambled into the common room and collapsed, trembling into armchairs.

It was a while before any of them said anything. Neville, indeed, looked as if he’d never speak again.

‘What do they think they’re doing, keeping a thing like that locked up in a school?’ said Ron finally. ‘If any dog needs exercise, that one does.’

Hermione had got both her breath and her bad temper back again.

‘You don’t use your eyes, any of you, do you?’ she snapped. ‘Didn’t you see what it was standing on?’

‘The floor?’ Harry suggested. ‘I wasn’t looking at its feet, I was too busy with its heads.’

‘No,
not
the floor. It was standing on a trapdoor. It’s obviously guarding something.’

She stood up, glaring at them.

‘I hope you’re pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed – or worse, expelled. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed.’

Ron stared after her, his mouth open.

‘No, we don’t mind,’ he said. ‘You’d think we dragged her along, wouldn’t you?’

But Hermione had given Harry something else to think about as he climbed back into bed. The dog was guarding something … What had Hagrid said? Gringotts was the safest place in the world for something you wanted to hide – except perhaps Hogwarts.

It looked as though Harry had found out where the grubby little package from vault seven hundred and thirteen was.

Malfoy couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw that Harry and Ron were still at Hogwarts next day, looking tired but perfectly cheerful. Indeed, by next morning Harry and Ron thought that meeting the three-headed dog had been an excellent adventure and they were quite keen to have another one. In the meantime, Harry filled Ron in about the package that seemed to have been moved from Gringotts to Hogwarts, and they spent a lot of time wondering what could possibly need such heavy protection.