Harry Potter and the Street of Hidden Shops
Years of watching Dudley and Uncle Vernon bully their way through the world gave Harry an odd feeling when he turned down the narrow side-street off Diagon Alley. The Dursleys always tried to make other people cower. In Knockturn Alley cowering meant attention, and attention meant trouble. Lurking, on the other hand, seemed acceptable.
“I’m looking for information on basilisks.” Harry stated at the second bookshop he had come to. The first had not gone well.
“Oh, yes?” the shopkeeper asked, his voice oily.
“Yes. Or parseltongue if you can’t help with the basilisks,” Harry kept his voice loud and brash, trying to sound like Uncle Vernon.
“Aren’t you a little young to be looking in this place?”
“I don’t see that that’s your business. Your business is selling books. Are you going to sell me a book?” Harry had rehearsed that line after the disaster in the first bookshop.
“Go to Flourish and Blots if you want a book, little boy.”
“I have. And to Claude Maximillian books, and to Transpire Reads, and to OverTomes. The lady there said to come to Knockturn Alley, and the man in Ouroboros books said to come here. Now can you help me or not?” Harry was trying to stay calm. The man’s oily rudeness was getting on his nerves.
The man didn’t reply, he just looked at Harry as though deciding on a piece of meat in a butcher’s. Harry let him look for about 30 seconds, then he turned and headed for the door.
“Alright,” the man called as Harry placed his hand on the doorknob, “might be I can ‘elp you.”
It was pretty poor help the man finally offered. Harry glossed over Venoms and their Origins, The Role of Snakes in Ritual, and Basilisks: Legends and History. “They’ve got that one in Flourish and Blots. It’s useless,” he told the man, who scowled at him. Serpent’s Tongues sounded promising but turned out to be another book of potion ingredients harvested from snakes. It had some interesting tips on what each part could do, and Harry set it to one side as a possible text. The last book was an ancient and heavy unnamed tome the man called a ‘grimoire’.
“Got this outta Gringotts when the line died, I did. Very rare. Could be what you want.” Harry had grown accustomed to the man’s little sales pitches with each book he offered. Harry looked at it. There was a family tree on the first few pages. At the top was a dotted line to the name Salazar Slytherin. The next page said, in the type of writing that was hard to read, Being the Family Record of the House of Gaunt, descended from the line of Slytherin, descended from the line of Peverell. Harry flipped to the middle of the book and was confronted by a blank page. He riffled back until he found text. There was a list of births, deaths and marriages, and a few notes about spells created by the early Gaunts. There was nothing helpful. The book ended with the birth of a daughter in 1907. Harry pushed it back.
“How is that what I need? There’s nothing in there.” The shopkeeper looked highly affronted.
Harry purchased Serpent’s Tongues to keep the man happy and asked, “anywhere else you can suggest?”
“Yeah,” the man said, clearly still hurt by Harry’s offhand rejection of the Book of Gaunt. “The private library of ‘Erpo the Foul. If you can find it.” Harry left. He stopped at one more bookshop, but aside from a volume on sea serpents the place had nothing to offer. Frustrated and footsore, Harry returned to the Leaky Cauldron.
The snake was asleep, Suku was sunning himself on the windowsill, and the toad was croaking to be fed when Harry got back upstairs. He fed the toad with very bad grace and flopped onto the bed. He felt quite resentful towards the creature. It had served its purpose, and now he was stuck with it. It was going to be hard enough keeping the basilisk and Suku, let alone also a toad. Besides, the school letter had specified or in the list of pets. Perhaps he could give it to someone else? Perhaps someone who’d let him borrow it if he needed to experiment again?
He felt quite resentful towards the little snake too. It was tiny! How was he supposed to feel about The King of Serpents, when it was so small? He also wasn’t sure it was male. He would need to check that. Everything he’d read said that it was quite hard to sex a snake. There had been a bit on tail shape, he remembered, but the hatchling was so small it was hard to tell whether its tail was thick or tapering. When it woke up maybe he could ask it. After all, it should know, shouldn’t it?
All in all, Suku was the most satisfactory of the animals in his life, and he rolled out of bed to stroke him where he sat on the windowsill. The owl made his soft scream at Harry, which Harry had learned meant either that the owl was happy, hungry, or angry. On this occasion he seemed happy with the attention, and contentedness radiated into Harry as he stood there petting Suku until he fell asleep.
***
On the 30th Harry took the toad back to the pet shop. The witch behind the counter was not happy.
“If you couldn’t care for it properly you shouldn’t have bought it,” she told him sternly.
Harry put on his most innocent expression. “I thought I could. But I can’t. So, I thought it would be better to bring it back here than to let it go.”
“Well, that’s true,” the witch said, grudgingly. “But you think about this next time!” Harry hoped he looked appropriately chastened.
***
On the 31st Harry spent a large part of the day in the wizarding equipment shops looking for the magical equivalent of a heat lamp, as the snake had complained of the cold outside of the terrarium. It made Harry wonder, for the first time in a month, about the boa constrictor he had inadvertently set loose on London. Where was he now?
The basilisk, unhelpfully, had no concept of the word ‘gender’ and had no idea whether it was a boy or a girl. Harry supposed that, if basilisks had to be made by chickens and toads and wizards, then perhaps they didn’t have genders at all.
He had settled on the name Nagara for the little creature. He had come across mention in his reading of the Nagaraja in India and had shortened it for the little snake. He had asked Tom and Dave about names that meant ‘little’ and had considered both Nagette and Nagina but they were both too feminine for the apparently neuter snake. So, the thing was stuck as Nagara until it told Harry otherwise.
That evening Harry packed his trunk. Reverentially he stored his books and stationery, wrapped his ink bottles in the pair of Dudley’s socks he’d been wearing when he arrived, and folded his clothes in carefully. He polished his new school shoes, and them aside for the morning. Dave had volunteered, through Tom (Harry was more comfortable around the hunchback, but still couldn’t understand him when he spoke), to take Harry to the train station the following day, so Harry could get into his school robes in the morning. They hung in the wardrobe now, and he felt a strange mix of pride and fear when he looked at them. Suku stuck himself to Harry's shoulder while he packed. Harry had thought it was to make sure he didn’t leave the owl behind, but when he started preening Harry's hair, Harry wondered whether Suku was trying to reassure Harry as much as himself.
***
Despite leaving the heat lamp on for Nagara, Harry woke on September the 1st to find the snake curled up between his chest and knees. He grumbled about this as he got up, took a last sponge bath in the tiny sink and packed his toiletries carefully into his trunk. He fed the animals: Suku had been hunting and ate only a grasshopper, which seemed to be a special treat, and then flew off to Hogwarts; Nagara had three grasshoppers, which was a large meal for the little snake, then crawled up Harry’s arm to sit under his robes on his shoulder. It complained about the robes as it went. “Scratchy. Heavy. Dislike.” Harry ignored the grumblings and packed Suku’s water dish, Nagara’s heat lamp, and the supply of dead insects he had purchased for them both on top of his clothes.
Dave had prepared an enormous meal for Harry’s final breakfast, including bacon and egg and sausage. Harry was sure he wouldn’t be able to eat half of it, but a month of Dave’s cooking had given him an appetite, and there wasn’t much left to pack into his bag for lunch. Tom gave Harry a jovial pat when he took the breakfast dishes into the kitchen to be washed. “You come back next summer if you need to. You’re always welcome.” Harry smiled at the man. Dave let out a string of vowels. Harry was getting better at telling where one word ended and another began, but still couldn’t detect meaning. Tom translated, “Dave says you don’t need to leave for another hour. If there’s anything you need in town, it’s best to go now. But you can leave your trunk under the bar, I’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks,” Harry told the two men. He recognised the dismissal: they were busy and didn’t want him hanging around. He wandered back into the Alley, looking at the shops he had come to know over the last month. He thought back to that first bewildering, wonderful day when Hagrid had brought him here. He’d never expected to be able to come back. For now, Harry basked in the strange feeling of home he got from the place. Having got used to the street crowded with Hogwarts students Harry felt that the place was oddly empty. There were adults, some with very young children, but most unaccompanied. Harry wondered about the young children. Was there a Wizard primary school? Did they go to their local muggle schools? Would there be another wizard from Greater Whinging primary at Hogwarts?
He got back to the Leaky Cauldron at half past ten. It was still early, but Harry was nervous and didn’t want to risk being late. Dave grinned when he came in and indicated with gestures that Harry should help him make chips before they left.
Harry had come to enjoy watching Dave in the kitchen. The man made things whenever he had the time, and then vanished them, only to wave his wand and bring them out later. He washed up with a swish of his wand and set knives working on their own. But some of the more fiddly things were beyond him, it seemed. Peeling anything oddly shaped, cutting the Xs in Brussel’s sprouts, cutting florets, and using the chip maker. Harry quite liked this contraption. You put in a potato, pulled the lever down and out came chips, ready for the fryer and all neatly cut. Then you moved the lever back up, and you did it again.
At ten minutes to 11 Dave indicated to Harry to fetch his trunk, and the two departed for the station through the fireplace. When Harry had first seen a wizard stepping from emerald flames he had jumped up in shock, spilling his lemonade all over the table, but now he was used to the sight. This was the first time he’d ever done it himself though, and he decided it was not a nice experience. Nagara hissed angrily form his shoulder as it was bumped around in the chimney. Harry’s dislike was quite done away, though, as he gazed up at the scarlet steam engine, every carriage bearing the name Hogwarts Express on a silver plaque. Nagara poked its head out the neck of Harry’s robes to look as Harry’s jaw dropped.
There were still students milling around on the platform with their parents, and lots of adults standing close to the train windows, talking to children already on board. Dave helped Harry carry in his trunk into a still empty compartment and gave him a fond half-hug. He uttered a string of vowels in which Harry thought he caught the word ‘you’, gave him a final squeeze, and got off the train. Harry looked out the window to wave goodbye, but, at that moment, the whistle blew, the remaining students rushed aboard, and Dave was lost in the press of people.