Amelia Potter and the Chamber of Secrets PART 1

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bathroom morning and evening. Otherwise, he was locked in his room around the clock.

*
Three days later, the Dursleys were showing no sign of relenting and Harry couldn't see any way out of his situation. He lay on his bed watching the sun sinking behind the bars on the window and

wondered miserably what was going to happen to him.
What was the good of magicking himself out of his room if Hogwarts would expel him for doing it? Yet life at Privet Drive had reached an all-time low. Now the Dursleys knew they weren't going to wake up as fruitbats, he had lost his only weapon. Dobby might have saved Harry from horrible happenings at Hogwarts, but the way things were going, he'd probably starve to death any-

way.
The cat-flap rattled and Aunt Petunia's hand appeared, pushing

a bowl of tinned soup into the room. Harry, whose insides were aching with hunger, jumped off his bed and seized it. The soup was stone cold, but he drank half of it in one gulp. Then he crossed the room to Hedwig's cage and tipped the soggy vegetables at the bottom of the bowl into her empty food tray. She ruffled her feathers and gave him a look of deep disgust.

'It's no good turning your beak up at it, that's all we've got,' said Harry grimly.

He put the empty bowl back on the floor next to the cat-flap and lay back down on the bed, somehow even hungrier than he had been before the soup.

Supposing he was still alive in another four weeks, what would happen if he didn't turn up at Hogwarts? Would someone be sent to see why he hadn't come back? Would they be able to make the Dursleys let him go?

The room was growing dark. Exhausted, stomach rumbling, mind spinning over the same unanswerable questions, Harry fell into an uneasy sleep.

He dreamed that he was on show in a zoo, with a card reading 'Underage Wizard' attached to his cage. People goggled through the bars at him as he lay, starving and weak, on a bed of straw. He saw Dobby's face in the crowd and shouted out, asking for help, but Dobby called, 'Harry Potter is safe there, sir!' and vanished. Then the Dursleys appeared and Dudley rattled the bars of the cage, laughing at him.