The Man at the Door at Midnight
There was a outcrop of rock, just about visible from where she was, sitting in the rickety boat that Uncle Vernon had rented with far too much glee. She swallowed, even as Uncle Vernon rowed them closer and closer, eyes alighting on a ramshackle, wooden-clad house which looked about five seconds away from collapse even from a distance.
“Mum,” Dudley pleaded, evidently having seen the same things as her and come to the same conclusion as her for once: that ramshackle house was where they were going to be staying. “I don’t want to stay there! Can’t we go back?”
“Sweetums,” Petunia mumbled, all but draping herself around her son as if to try and offer some reassurance. “It’s only for a little while,” she placated, undoubtedly having spotted the incoming temper tantrum before it could erupt fully.
“No!” Dudley all but screamed, starting to thrash around, and Harriet’s eyes widened as the boat creaked and rocked beneath the childish tantrum. “I don’t want to go! There was a perfectly good hotel back there,” he declared, pointing back at the mainland. “And I want to stay there! They have TV there! ChuckleVision is on and I want to watch it!”
“Dudley!” The sharp tone of Uncle Vernon’s voice startled Harriet the most, part of her feeling as though her reality had been inverted as she watched her uncle snap at her cousin for the first time in, well, forever. Dudley Dursley was the child who could do no wrong in the Dursley Household. Yet that was no longer the case there it seemed. “We’re going to the house I rented, and we’re staying there… at least until those barmy—” he cut himself off, beady little eyes narrowing on her as she sat there innocuously in the rickety boat. “We’re not going back, and that’s final!”
“But I don’t want to go there!” Dudley complained still beating his meaty little fists against the boat albeit more weakly, as if sensing for the first time, that he wouldn’t be getting his own way.
Silently, Harriet hoped he got a splinter and stopped trying to sink the boat – in whatever half-concocted effort of his to make them all drown. A soft sigh escaped her, and she wondered then if Dudley even realised that the boat seemed as though it could easily break beneath his fists. He could barely swim, either, and Harriet wasn’t sure how her aunt and uncle would fare in the choppy sea waves.
The man at the harbour had claimed that there was a storm brewing, and had also urged them to stay on the mainland. Yet Uncle Vernon hadn’t listened to the fisherman, calling him an imbecile who couldn’t mind his own business once they were out of earshot and all aboard the rowing boat. Water sloshed as Uncle Vernon pulled them closer and closer to the small island which didn’t even have a patch of green grass upon it, unless one counted the moss.
They landed at a small wooden dock which looked like it needed to be replaced. The wood creaked ominously when Uncle Vernon stepped onto the planks and secured their boat with the frayed rope attached to the stern. “Come on, out,” Uncle Vernon ordered, and Harriet scrambled out of the boat, eager to have her feet back on solid land once more. She hurried off the rickety dock, eyeing up the dilapidated two-storey house which looked as though it were on its last legs. “I’d like to see them find their way here with those blasted letters!” he declared behind her, even as Petunia struggled to encourage Dudley out of the boat and into the wooden shack which was to be their home… for however long until Uncle Vernon took them back to Privet Drive.
Harriet hoped her uncle would change his mind soon, watching as one of the cladding boards fell to the rocky ground with a loud crack.
It was her birthday, part of her mused, watching as the numbers on her digital watch ticked closer to midnight, and the minute of her supposed birth. In the thick layer of dust on the floor, she drew a birthday cake – the only sort of birthday cake she had ever known; an imaginary one. The candles were thin lines, and as her watch beeped she blew the dust, scattering the visage of her birthday cake, even as she wished for some form of escape from the life she lived with the Dursleys.
Bang!
As if by magic, the door rattled ominously, sounds of movement upstairs telling her that her aunt and uncle had woken with the noise. Dudley startled awake on the sofa, blearily looking around and yelping in fright when another bang came at the door.
Harriet snuck behind the disused chimney, hiding herself behind the stone wall which jutted out where the fireplace was.
The door crashed to the ground with a considerable bang of weatherworn wood and stone meeting. Lightning flashed, casting a large shadow on the ground for the briefest of moments – one which took up the entirety of the doorframe, and Harriet swallowed apprehensively as she heard heavy footsteps intrude into the little shack.
“’ello?” a voice came, thick with an accent, and Harriet idly played about with the idea that maybe it wasn’t a crazed person come to murder them in the dead of night. There came a rattle, and Harriet peered around the stone wall to spy a gigantic man trying to push the door back onto its broken hinges. “Sorry ‘bout that,” the giant said, turning to face them then, frizzy brown hair framing his face and adding a couple of centimetres to his already giant height.
“I demand that you leave at once, sir,” Uncle Vernon spoke, spittle flying from his lips as he glared at the figure, an odd mix of anger and fear scrawled across his face as he stood there on the stairs, shotgun in hand. How and why her uncle had a shotgun, Harriet had no idea. The idea of Uncle Vernon actually shooting that gave her shivers. “You are breaking and entering!”
“Oh dry up Dursley, you great prune!”
Harriet blinked, staring at the distinct bend there was to the shotgun and swallowing as she stared at the giant of a man who could bend a shotgun with his bare hands. The man then turned, frown appearing on his face, just about visible behind the scraggly long beard as he glanced at Dudley.
“Where’s Harriet?” the still as of then unnamed man demanded, and Harriet felt her heart stutter in her chest. “Where’s James an’ Lily’s daughter?”
Harriet blinked. It took a moment for her to realise that he knew her parents’ names – when her uncle and aunt were the only ones who’d seemed to know, and had barely ever referred to her parents by their actual names. Impulsivity took hold of her then. “You knew my parents?” she asked, creeping out from the shadowy nook she’d taken shelter in.
“Course I did,” he said, a smile curving at his lips then. “Rubeus Hagrid at your service, Keeper of Keys at Hogwarts Castle, and First Stablehand and Groundskeeper at Unicorn Academy. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t yer?”
Harriet blinked again, one word – or more like a couple – there not making sense. “Unicorn Academy?” she echoed, glancing at her aunt and uncle, frowning as she spotted her aunt’s complexion turning into something resembling curdled milk.
Hagrid’s smile faded a bit. “Well of course,” he said. “Didn’t yer ever wonder where your mum and dad learnt it all?” he asked, and Harriet opened her mouth, another question on the tip of her tongue.
“Stop,” her uncle bellowed, still safely positioned on the stairs as far away from Hagrid as he could be. “Stop, I forbid it! We swore when we took her in we’d put a stop to all of this nonsense!”
“Learnt what?” she asked, a thirst rising up within her then for answers. Answers she suddenly felt as though she had been deprived of for her whole life. A curiosity which had been quashed since the day her aunt had snapped at her for getting better results than Dudley rose up, unable to be deterred by her uncle’s snappish tone.
“Your parents were Unicorn Riders,” Hagrid said, and all Harriet could do was blink because that was a phrase she had never heard before.
“Unicorn Riders?” she echoed, trying to picture a unicorn then – a horse with a horn, or so she thought, considering her aunt had—Her eyes snapped to her aunt then, something like realisation settling in her chest as she thought she might have discovered the reason why her aunt hated horses. “You knew?” she asked, wondering why she felt a sliver of betrayal at that. Why had she expected the Dursleys to be truthful to her? “You knew all this time… and you never said anything…”
“Of course we knew. How could you not be?” her aunt spat. “My perfect sister being who she was. My mother and father were so proud the day she got her letter. ‘We have a unicorn rider… or a witch, at the very least, in the family. Isn't it wonderful?’ I was the only one to see her for what she was... a freak! And then she met that Potter. And then she had you, and I knew you would be the same. Just as strange, just as... abnormal. And then, if you please, she went and got herself blown up, and we got landed with you.”
“Blown up?” Harriet demanded. “You told me they died in a car crash!”
“A car crash?” Hagrid bellowed, the strength of his voice startling her alongside the note of rage it held. “A car crash killed Lily and James Potter?”
“We had to tell her something,” Petunia said waspishly.
“It’s an outrage… a scandal!” Hagrid declared.
“She won’t be going,” Uncle Vernon stated, and something in Harriet felt her heart squeeze at that. At the thought of going to Stonewall High in those rags that her aunt had been dyeing in the kitchen before their road trip across the country. She would be a laughing stock in those, she knew. She’d already had plenty of experience in being the laughing stock of St Grogory’s Primary School. She hardly wanted it to continue all through secondary school, and Unicorn Academy was seemingly her way out of that.
“And I suppose a great muggle like yourself is going ter stop her,” Hagrid mocked, and she stared at the absolute stranger of a giant man – someone, by all rights, she probably ought to have been terrified of given the rhetoric of stranger danger. Yet that strange man had known her parents, known the school they had gone to. “This girl has had her name down to attend since she was born,” he said matter-of-factly. His hand delved into one of the many pockets there was on his enormous coat, fumbling around for a few moments before he pulled out a familiar-looking envelope. “Here.” He held it out, offering it to her, and Harriet took it.
She pried open the wax seal on the back, pulling out the slips of paper within.
“Dear Miss Potter,” she read aloud. “We are pleased to inform you of your conditional acceptance to Unicorn Academy – though should these conditions not be met, you will be automatically enrolled into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry which is also located within the Hogwarts Isles. Term will begin on the 2nd of August for Unicorn Academy First Years only, and then on the 1st of September for all subsequent years. Please confirm your acceptance by owl or post—”
“Oh, I almost forgot!” Hagrid said suddenly, startling her from her reading. His hands delved into his pockets then, and Harriet could only blink as he pulled a tiny, live owl out. A piece of paper and a feathery rod appeared from other pockets, that feather being dipped into a dark pot, and then Hagrid was writing something on that scrap of paper. “Need ter let the Professor know I found yer. Need to take the four of yer to Diagon Alley for supplies before I take yer all ter the island…” he muttered. “Cuttin’ it a bit close, but we’ll make it.”
“I can go then? Even if I’m only just confirming my place now?” she asked, heart beating nervously in her chest as she wondered just what was waiting for her at that strange school.
“Well yer were chosen by the Fate Fairies for Unicorn Academy, an’ they’ve never chosen wrong before… Don’t think there’s been a student who hasn’t shown up for their place for decades,” Hagrid informed her, gesturing to the door, ignoring the Dursleys as they began their spluttering.
Harriet blinked, glancing back at her uncle, aunt, and cousin in order before she followed that stranger out – and blinking at the sight of the yacht moored at the flimsy dock alongside the rickety wooden row boat, and the three other children in varying stages of sleep within said yacht.
So that was what he’d meant by four, she realised, even as she hurried towards the new future away from Stonewall High and the Dursleys.