The Girl in the Cupboard Under the Stairs
Aunt Petunia’s ire was saved for three things, Harriet had long since learnt: losing the Annual Little Whinging Garden Contest that she regularly participated in, herself, and, most mystifyingly of all, horses.
Though, Harriet Potter mused, her aunt always blamed her if she lost the Garden Contest, so perhaps there were only two things which stirred Aunt Petunia’s ire. Still, it was mostly her freakishness and anything out of the ordinary which made her aunt start yelling. She didn’t quite understand how that translated to the horses she always called freakish things.
Freak was a term mostly applied to her, and all the odd things which seemed to happen to her – like the time she had been running from Dudley and had somehow jumped all the way up to the rooftop. The wind, she had tried to explain to the teachers who weren’t having any of it. Apparently wind didn’t work like that. Idly she wondered what did work like that as she sat in her cupboard, humming quietly under her breath.
Magic, after all, was another banned word in the house – and her uncle was ever so determined to remind her of that much whenever anything strange happened and she mentioned that cursed word in the presence of her only family.
Strange things didn’t tend to happen to horses, she thought to herself, slumping back on her mattress. A soft sigh escaped her, even as she watched Bob, the spider, fiddle about with its web in the darkest corner of the cupboard she called her room.
She had become very well acquainted with the darkness of her cupboard, thanks to the matter of the snake at the zoo. It was safe to say that her aunt and uncle hadn’t been best pleased with her – and so she had been shut away in her cupboard, with the occasional bit of lunch and dinner so long as her aunt and uncle didn’t conveniently forget about her existence.
A sharp rap pierced through the silence which had lulled her into a false sense of security. “Up,” Aunt Petunia demanded, the sound of the latch being opened ringing in her ears as her aunt unlocked the door to her cupboard. “Get up. Now.”
“Coming, Aunt Petunia,” she mumbled, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes even as she rolled out of bed and mentally readied herself to face the newest day. Year Six was over and done with, the summer holidays in full swing – and it was that very September that she would be going to a different school than Dudley for once.
Yet Stonewall High was apparently a hotbed of trouble. Her Aunt liked to say that would make her fit right in, and Harriet wasn’t looking forwards to starting secondary school as much as she might have otherwise.
“Mind the bacon, Girl,” her aunt ordered as she hurried into the kitchen – all beige and orange tiles with the walls painted a pastel pink. “You’d best not let it burn.”
“Yes, Aunt Petunia,” she said, as she always did every morning, even as slowly the house started to wake up as the sunlight filtered through the lacy curtains.
In the stairwell, she heard Dudley thumping down the stairs, undoubtedly eager to make it rain dust in her room. Silently, she hoped the floorboards would one day give out on him and his increasing weight – that would certainly teach him a lesson. Her shoulders sunk at that, stomach starting to rumble as she caught the scents of the food cooking. The same food which would go to her uncle, aunt, and her cousin, leaving her plate with nothing more than a few slices of dry toast with the thinnest scrapings of butter. There might even be a bit of jam if she were lucky.
True to her musings, her aunt came in, taking away all that food on three plates. “Go and get the post,” she ordered. “You know your uncle likes to read the morning paper with his breakfast.”
Harriet smiled, a small, slightly strained thing – because god-forbid she not smile kindly at her family like good girls were wont to do. Not that Harriet was ever considered anything of a good girl there. “Of course, Aunt Petunia,” she said, stomach rumbling as she hurried into the hallway. A frown crossed her lips, eyes narrowing on the way the flap of the letterbox seemed slanted – the edge of a newspaper just about visible from the way someone had attempted to cram it in.
She reached for the door handle then, feeling somewhat cautious as she pulled the door open and spied a few letters left on the doorstep sitting atop the welcome mat in a sad little puddle.
A faint tinkling sound rang out, and, as if tugged forwards by a string, Harriet stumbled out, carefully stepping over the pile of letters. Confused, she glanced up and down the street, freezing as she spotted their neighbour, Mrs Harris, glaring at her suspiciously. She stepped back towards the safety of her house, a small yelp escaping her as she tripped over something.
That something turned out to be a box; a purple box with the words Harriet Potter, 4 Privet Drive, the Cupboard Under the Stairs emblazoned on it in what looked like emerald ink.
“What’s taking you so long, girl?” her uncle’s voice bellowed from the dining room. “Checking for letter bombs?” he asked, chortling then at his terrible joke.
Startled, Harriet lifted the box from the floor, gathered up the letters, and grabbed the newspaper which was hanging sadly out on the wrong side of the front door. Ignoring her uncle for a moment, placing the letters and newspaper off to one side, she pressed the button on that purple box, blinking in surprise when the box opened of its own volition, revealing a slip of card with the name Harriet Potter written on it once more.
“Girl!” her uncle bellowed, and Harriet heard it for the warning it was as she grabbed a hold of that card, and took the other letters and her uncle’s newspaper to the dining room. It was only once her hands were free of everything else that she managed to open the card addressed to her.
We are pleased to inform you that you have been invited to attend Nuncior Academy on the Hogwarts Isles, the leading school for promising equestrian riders—
Harriet blinked as Dudley snatched the missive out of her hands. “Dad! Mum! Look! Harriet’s got a letter!”
“Give it back, that’s mine!” she hissed at her cousin, making a grab for the letter before her aunt snatched it out of her cousin’s hands.
“You’re going to Stonewall High,” her aunt said, ripping that letter up with trembling fingers. “There will be no uni—horse riders in this household. They’re freakish and unnatural things!”
“How are horses freakish and unnatural?” Harriet demanded, feeling as if something had been stolen from her. Because it has, her lizard hind brain graciously informed her. “You see people riding them all the time!”
“Don’t talk back to me, Girl!” her aunt snapped, and Harriet only flinched at the way her aunt raised her hand. Her finger pointed back to the hallway – where the door to her tiny little cupboard room was. “Cupboard, now!”
Harriet opened her mouth, lips closing with a soft pop as she swiftly realised it wouldn’t be in her best interests to continue to try and argue. Her letter had already been ripped up into shreds. She was going to Stonewall High, it seemed, part of her feeling wretchedly bitter about that very fact. What was wrong with equestrian academies and horses? Harriet could only ponder on her aunt’s distaste for such things as her feet started moving. She slunk into her cupboard then, shoulders sinking as her aunt slammed the door behind her, casting her in shade, closing the bolt with a definite thunk.
Harriet blinked, staring at the puddle of letters beneath the letterbox addressed to her without that purple box which her aunt had long since thrown away. “What?” she mumbled, wondering exactly what was going on with her life even as her uncle’s clammy hand closed around her shoulder. Those meaty digits yanked her back, throwing her inside the living room before he shut the living room door on her with a vicious snarl on his face.
“Who’s sending you letters?” Dudley demanded, trapped in that same room with her while her uncle dealt with those emerald-inked letters seemingly determined to reach her.
“That Nuncior Academy place,” she answered, the name of the school which actually wanted her all but engraved into her memory. She didn’t think anywhere had really wanted her that much before. Her aunt had liked to say they had only sent her to primary school because that was the law.
“Why would they want you?” he asked, his glance at her showing her exactly what he thought of her – not that it was any surprise to her. He had invented Harriet Hunting for a reason, after all, and had taken great pleasure in whacking her with sticks and smearing mud in her hair before she had learnt how to evade Dudley and his cronies until they grew bored.
“Perhaps because I have the intelligence required of their students?” she offered, glancing down her nose at him then, a smug feeling setting in as Dudley stared at her in confusion.
It probably said something for her cousin’s own intelligence that it took him a good minute to realise that she had insulted him.
Her uncle was in a chipper mood that morning, and Harriet felt herself set on edge around him, even as she tentatively placed the biscuits he had demanded on the table beside him. “Do you know what day it is today?” he asked, turning to her with a smile which made him look just a bit too manic.
Though given he had spent the last several days either burning letters, shredding letters, and then sealing up the letterbox with a drill and a short plank of wood… Harriet wondered whether she would be justified in calling him a maniac. “It’s Sunday, Uncle Vernon,” she answered cautiously, feeling as though one wrong move would be like prodding the angry bear with a stick.
“Do you know what I love most about Sundays?” he questioned, the grin on his face telling of madness and sheer glee – which somehow Sunday had caused. At her blankest look imaginable he shared with her then what had set him off that morning. “There’s no post on Sunday! Not a single blasted letter! Not one—”
A soft shift of air was the only warning Harriet got before an envelope flew down the chimney and fluttered out of the fireplace, dust and charcoal marring the otherwise perfect cream colour of the letter’s casing. It landed on the carpet with a neat little smack, and Harriet sensed her uncle’s impending implosion even as the chimney rattled with the sounds of more letters.
“Oh dear,” distantly she heard herself say, before a single letter became ten, ten became a hundred, and then she was all but swimming in a sea of letters addressed to herself. It was as though it were raining letters, part of her idly mused.
Meaty fingers curled around the collar of the old blouse she wore, dragging her out of the room and depositing her in the hallway.
“Enough, that’s enough!” her uncle hissed, swelling up with rage like an inflatable raft. “We need to go where they can’t find us,” he muttered, ranting and raging under his breath as he herded her and Dudley out towards the car and sent Petunia to pack things they would need.
“Dad’s gone mad, hasn’t he?” Dudley mumbled, looking somewhere between excited and terrified even as Aunt Petunia came back with two backpacks and a small carry-case. The boot of the car seemed to dip down as she placed the luggage in the back, and then they were off, away from Privet Drive and the mystery of those strange, numerous letters addressed to herself.