Chapter 5 Dudley
Chapter 5 Dudley
Dudley couldn’t move. Someone had hit him with a spell that paralysed him before levitating him face down through several cold corridors and winding steps. It was a strange feeling being weightless, to just drift, anchor-less and helpless. Dudley was half convinced he was already dead.
He could tell without looking that the room he was placed in was large, larger than the ground floor of Privet Drive, something in the way Lucius’s footsteps echoed behind him. Dudley was left levitating stationary in the air for a few seconds, before he heard a door creak shut behind him.
‘Stilla’ Lucius said from the other side of the door, instantly Dudley crashed to the floor. He couldn’t protect his face as he fell and the stone shattered into him. Pain lanced through his face hot and white, radiating through his body leaving him breathless. His nose was definitely broken. Blood gushed in a wave out of his nose, he could feel it cascade off his chin. Dudley tried so desperately to move, to touch his face to assess the damage or apply pressure. He imagined his arms moving, rehearsing the movement trying to get them to co-operate but they were just hung limply at his sides, dead and useless. They weren’t his anymore.
Dudley waited for the remaining spell to be broken like the first. He waited, anticipating and praying for the moment he’d be able to move again, to be in control of something. He’d never felt more useless or exposed. Anyone could do anything to him and he would be entirely helpless. A frog on the dissection table. He longed to feel his body respond to his brain again. But it didn’t happen, a door shut, further down the corridor. Lucius had gone.
It could have been hours, it could have been days Dudley had no idea. He had not moved a single millimetre. He had wet himself not long after he had been abandoned, he had no muscle control to hold on with. It had just slipped out. The blood on his face had congealed in some places and got tight an itchy in others. It was now a glue sticking his bruised face to the stone. He drifted in and out of consciousness a few times, he was beginning enjoy the oblivion of unconsciousness. Dudley wished for the peace of unconsciousness, he was jealous of that version of himself that was able to stop feeling. Stop replaying images of his father hitting dusty flagstones and his mothers limp body splayed out on clean tiles.
‘I’m going to Apparate inside okay?’ a confident voice from somewhere behind him.