Kapitel 13: Chapter - 13 : Stormy Night on the Rock
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We stopped for the night at a gloomy hotel. Dudley, Harry, and I had to share a room. Dudley snored loudly in his sagging twin bed, but I curled up in the sheets and joined Harry on the windowsill, staring out at the cars passing by.
"Do you think the letters will keep coming?" I whispered, leaning my forehead on the cool window.
"They haven't stopped yet," Harry replied. I touched the envelope, which was hidden up my sleeve. It was like some kind of silent prayer: please keep coming. If the letters kept coming, then eventually we'd get a hold of one. Eventually, we'd find out who wanted to talk to us so desperately.
The next morning's breakfast was toast and cold tomatoes. As we were eating, the owner came up and asked, "I'm looking for H and L Potter? I've got 'bout a hundred of these at the front desk." He held up one of the letters. I opened my mouth desperately, but Uncle Vernon was already on his feet, hustling the man away and loudly announcing, "I'll take them!"
Our impromptu road trip didn't get any better. Uncle Vernon stopped the car several times, got out, looked around, shook his head, and took off again. They did this in a forest, the middle of a field, the top of a parking garage, and an abandoned parking lot. Finally he stopped by the coast and locked us into the car, vanishing into a store.
"Daddy's gone mad, hasn't he?" Dudley mumbled. Aunt Petunia hissed at him to hush the front seat. "I want to stay somewhere with a hotel!" he whined. "It's Monday, the Great Humberto's on tonight!"
I blinked. Dudley always knew the date because of the truly staggering number of TV shows that he watched religiously. And if it really was Monday, then that meant…
My hand reached out, settling on top of Harry's.
"We're almost eleven," Harry whispered, following my train of thought.
"Tomorrow," I agreed.
Our birthdays were never fun. We didn't get to go to the zoo like Dudley did, we didn't get huge chocolate cakes, and we didn't have any friends to invite over. Last year on our birthday, Harry had gotten a travel package of tissues and I received a pair of Aunt Petunia's old stockings full of holes.
This year we definitely wouldn't get anything, even something that bad. But still, at least we'd gotten to go somewhere, I mused. It may not have been fun sitting in the awkward silence of the Dursley's car as Uncle Vernon drove frantically and muttered, "Shake 'em off…" but I had Harry and there was some pretty countryside to see every now and then, so all in all, it wasn't the worst birthday we'd ever had.
Uncle Vernon returned then, and this time he was smiling widely and holding a long, thin package and a grocery bag. I couldn't decide if the smile was a good sign or a bad one.
"Found a place for us to stay tonight!" he announced, thrusting a finger proudly towards a rock way out to sea with a broken-down old shack on it. "And this fellow," he gestured to the toothless old man who had followed him to the car, "has agreed to let us use his boat."
The sea spray dampened our clothes as we rowed out to the rock, making the wind that whipped around us seem even colder. Harry and I were made to take point, so we took most of the spray. We huddled together desperately for warmth, but it didn't help much. By the time we arrived at the rock, we were shuddering with cold.
The shack itself wasn't anything special, and it definitely didn't have a television. In fact, it didn't even have electricity. There were only two rooms and a fireplace to provide warmth. The cracks in the walls rendered a fire pretty much useless though. The whole place reeked of seaweed and old fish.
The grocery bag held a bag of chips each and four bananas. We ate quietly, turning over our chip bags when we'd finished to Uncle Vernon, who tried to use them to start a fire. They just smoked and curled.
"Shame there's a storm forecast! We could use some of those letters now, eh?" he announced jovially. Clearly, he was relying on the bad weather to keep the post from getting through to us.
I narrowed my eyes at him angrily and raised my banana peel. Harry caught my wrist hastily and yanked the peel away from me.
"I wasn't gonna actually throw it," I mumbled, glaring at my uncle.
"Can never tell with you," Harry countered.
We bedded down that night in some moldy blankets that Aunt Petunia found in the second room. It was a bedroom, which she and Uncle Vernon claimed. Dudley took the couch, burrowed under thick blankets. Of course Harry and I were left with a thin, ragged sheet and a patch of floor for our beds. We curled up together in a corner that was mostly free of holes to try and preserve as much warmth as possible.
That night the storm came. Between the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls and rattling the windows, the thunder that rolled in around ten, and Dudley's snoring that could have woken the dead, there was no way we were getting any sleep.
"This sucks," I muttered, draping one leg over Harry's side and scooting closer, trying to fight off the shivers that had started up again. "Think if I grabbed one of Dudley's blankets he'd notice?"
"Uncle Vernon would in the morning," Harry pointed out. I huffed, then did it again when my breath warmed up my fingers.
"Right," I grumbled. I sent a glance over my shoulder towards Dudley. "But if we freeze to death it won't matter," I pointed out, emerging from the sheets. I shuddered as the parts of me that I'd managed to keep warm immediately froze in the cold air. I crept closer to Dudley, hand outstretched towards his top blanket.
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