Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5)

by J.K. Rowling

‘Petrificus Totalus!’ shouted Harry, as the second Death Eater raised his wand. His arms and legs snapped together and he fell forwards, face down on to the rug at Harry’s feet, stiff as a board and unable to move.

‘He’s dot alone!’ shouted a voice from above them. ‘He’s still god be!’ Harry’s heart sank: Neville was scrambling down the stone benches towards them, Hermione’s wand held fast in his trembling hand.

Then, high above them, two more doors burst open and five more people sprinted into the room: Sirius, Lupin, Moody, Tonks and Kingsley.

The Death Eater keeled over backwards and his mask slipped off: it was Macnair, Buckbeak’s would-be killer, one of his eyes now swollen and bloodshot.

‘Dubbledore!’ said Neville, his sweaty face suddenly transported, staring over Harry’s shoulder. ‘What?’ ‘DUBBLEDORE!’ Harry turned to look where Neville was staring. Directly above them, framed in the doorway from the Brain Room, stood Albus Dumbledore, his wand aloft, his face white and furious. Harry felt a kind of electric charge surge through every particle of his body – they were saved. Dumbledore had already sped past Neville and Harry, who had no more thoughts of leaving, when the Death Eaters nearest realised Dumbledore was there and yelled to the others. One of the Death Eaters ran for it, scrabbling like a monkey up the stone steps opposite. Dumbledore’s spell pulled him back as easily and effortlessly as though he had hooked him with an invisible line –

Harry looked behind him, his heart pounding. Dumbledore was standing in front of the golden gates.

‘It was foolish to come here tonight, Tom,’ said Dumbledore calmly. ‘The Aurors are on their way

‘We both know that there are other ways of destroying a man, Tom,’ Dumbledore said calmly, continuing to walk towards Voldemort as though he had not a fear in the world, as though nothing had happened to interrupt his stroll up the hall. ‘Merely taking your life would not satisfy me, I admit –’ ‘There is nothing worse than death, Dumbledore!’ snarled Voldemort. ‘You are quite wrong,’ said Dumbledore, still closing in upon Voldemort and speaking as lightly as though they were discussing the matter over drinks. Harry felt scared to see him walking along, undefended, shieldless; he wanted to cry out a warning, but his headless guard kept shunting him backwards towards the wall, blocking his every attempt to get out from behind it. ‘Indeed, your failure to understand that there are things much worse than death has always been your greatest weakness –’ Another jet of green light flew from behind the silver shield. This time it was the one-armed centaur, galloping in front of Dumbledore, that took the blast and shattered into a hundred pieces, but before the fragments had even hit the floor, Dumbledore had drawn back his wand and waved it as though brandishing a whip. A long thin flame flew from the tip; it wrapped itself around Voldemort, shield and all. For a moment, it seemed Dumbledore had won, but then the fiery rope became a serpent, which relinquished its hold on Voldemort at once and turned, hissing furiously, to face Dumbledore. Voldemort vanished; the snake reared from...

Then Harry’s scar burst open and he knew he was dead: it was pain beyond imagining, pain past endurance – He was gone from the hall, he was locked in the coils of a creature with red eyes, so tightly bound that Harry did not know where his body ended and the creature’s began: they were fused together, bound by pain, and there was no escape – And when the creature spoke, it used Harry’s mouth, so that in his agony he felt his jaw move … ‘Kill me now, Dumbledore …’ Blinded and dying, every part of him screaming for release, Harry felt the creature use him again … ‘If death is nothing, Dumbledore, kill the boy …’ Let the pain stop, thought Harry … let him kill us … end it, Dumbledore … death is nothing compared to this … And I’ll see Sirius again …

‘Now see here, Dumbledore!’ said Fudge, as Dumbledore picked up the head and walked back to Harry carrying it. ‘You haven’t got authorisation for that Portkey! You can’t do things like that right in front of the Minister for Magic, you – you –’ His voice faltered as Dumbledore surveyed him magisterially over his half-moon spectacles. ‘You will give the order to remove Dolores Umbridge from Hogwarts,’ said Dumbledore. ‘You will tell your Aurors to stop searching for my Care of Magical Creatures teacher so that he can return to work. I will give you …’ Dumbledore pulled a watch with twelve hands from his pocket and glanced at it ‘… half an hour of my time tonight, in which I think we shall be more than able to cover the important points of what has happened here. After that, I shall need to return to my school. If you need more help from me you are, of course, more than welcome to contact me at Hogwarts. Letters addressed to the Headmaster will find me.’ Fudge goggled worse than ever; his mouth was open and his round face grew pinker under his rumpled grey hair. ‘I – you –’ Dumbledore turned his back on him. ‘Take this Portkey, Harry.’ He held out the golden head of the statue and Harry placed his hand on it, past caring what he did next or where he went. ‘I shall see you in half an hour,’ said Dumbledore quietly. ‘One … two … three …’ Harry felt the familiar sensation of a hook being jerked behind his navel. The polished wooden floor was gone from beneath his feet; the Atri...

‘You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.’ ‘I – DON’T!’ Harry screamed, so loudly that he felt his throat might tear, and for a second he wanted to rush at Dumbledore and break him, too; shatter that calm old face, shake him, hurt him, make him feel some tiny part of the horror inside himself. ‘Oh, yes, you do,’ said Dumbledore, still more calmly. ‘You have now lost your mother, your father, and the closest thing to a parent you have ever known. Of course you care.’ ‘YOU DON’T KNOW HOW I FEEL!’ Harry roared. ‘YOU – STANDING THERE – YOU –

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young … and I seem to have forgotten, lately

‘Kreacher seized his opportunity shortly before Christmas,’ said Dumbledore, ‘when Sirius, apparently, shouted at him to “get out”. He took Sirius at his word, and interpreted this as an order to leave the house. He went to the only Black family member for whom he had any respect left … Black’s cousin Narcissa, sister of Bellatrix and wife of Lucius Malfoy.’

‘He did not wish to tell me,’ said Dumbledore. ‘But I am a sufficiently accomplished Legilimens myself to know when I am being lied to and I – persuaded him – to tell me the full story, before I left for the Department of Mysteries.

Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike …

‘The prophecy’s smashed,’ Harry said blankly. ‘I was pulling Neville up those benches in the – the room where the archway was, and I ripped his robes and it fell …’ ‘The thing that smashed was merely the record of the prophecy kept by the Department of Mysteries. But the prophecy was made to somebody, and that person has the means of recalling it perfectly.’ ‘Who heard it?’ asked Harry, though he thought he knew the answer already. ‘I did,’ said Dumbledore. ‘On a cold, wet night sixteen years ago, in a room above the bar at the Hog’s Head inn. I had gone there to see an applicant for the post of Divination teacher, though it was against my inclination to allow the subject of Divination to continue at all. The applicant, however, was the great-great-granddaughter of a very famous, very gifted Seer and I thought it common politeness to meet her. I was disappointed. It seemed to me that she had not a trace of the gift herself. I told her, courteously I hope, that I did not think she would be suitable for the post. I turned to leave.’ Dumbledore got to his feet and walked past Harry to the black cabinet that stood beside Fawkes’s perch. He bent down, slid back a catch and took from inside it the shallow stone basin, carved with runes around the edges, in which Harry had seen his father tormenting Snape. Dumbledore walked back to the desk, placed the Pensieve upon it, and raised his wand to his own temple. From it, he withdrew silvery, gossamer-fine strands of thought clinging ...

Harry felt as though something was closing in on him. His breathing seemed difficult again. ‘It means – me?’ Dumbledore took a deep breath. ‘The odd thing, Harry,’ he said softly, ‘is that it may not have meant you at all. Sybill’s prophecy could have applied to two wizard boys, both born at the end of July that year, both of whom had parents in the Order of the Phoenix, both sets of parents having narrowly escaped Voldemort three times. One, of course, was you. The other was Neville Longbottom.

‘But you said – Neville was born at the end of July, too – and his mum and dad –’ ‘You are forgetting the next part of the prophecy, the final identifying feature of the boy who could vanquish Voldemort … Voldemort himself would mark him as his equal. And so he did, Harry. He chose you, not Neville. He gave you the scar that has proved both blessing and curse.’ ‘But he might have chosen wrong!’ said Harry. ‘He might have marked the wrong person!’ ‘He chose the boy he thought most likely to be a danger to him,’ said Dumbledore. ‘And notice this, Harry: he chose, not the pureblood (which, according to his creed, is the only kind of wizard worth being or knowing) but the half-blood, like himself. He saw himself in you before he had ever seen you, and in marking you with that scar, he did not kill you, as he intended, but gave you powers, and a future, which have fitted you to escape him not once, but four times so far – something that neither your parents, nor Neville’s parents, ever achieved.’

The Hog’s Head inn, which Sybill chose for its cheapness, has long attracted, shall we say, a more interesting clientele than the Three Broomsticks. As you and your friends found out to your cost, and I to mine that night, it is a place where it is never safe to assume you are not being overheard. Of course, I had not dreamed, when I set out to meet Sybill Trelawney, that I would hear anything worth overhearing. My – our – one stroke of good fortune was that the eavesdropper was detected only a short way into the prophecy and thrown from the building.’ ‘So he only heard –?’ ‘He heard only the beginning, the part foretelling the birth of a boy in July to parents who had thrice defied Voldemort. Consequently, he could not warn his master that to attack you would be to risk transferring power to you, and marking you as his equal. So Voldemort never knew that there might be danger in attacking you, that it might be wise to wait, to learn more. He did not know that you would have power the Dark Lord knows not –

‘Albus Dumbledore, newly reinstated Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, reinstated member of the International Confederation of Wizards and reinstated Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, has so far been unavailable for comment. He has insisted over the past year that You-Know-Who is not dead, as was widely hoped and believed, but is recruiting followers once more for a fresh attempt to seize power. Meanwhile, the “Boy Who Lived” – ‘There you are, Harry, I knew they’d drag you into it somehow,’ said Hermione, looking over the top of the paper at him. They were in the hospital wing. Harry was sitting on the end of Ron’s bed and they were both listening to Hermione read the front page of the Sunday Prophet. Ginny, whose ankle had been mended in a trice by Madam Pomfrey, was curled up at the foot of Hermione’s bed; Neville, whose nose had likewise been returned to its normal size and shape, was in a chair between the two beds; and Luna, who had dropped in to visit, clutching the latest edition of The Quibbler, was reading the magazine upside-down and apparently not taking in a word Hermione was saying.

He knew one thing, though: unhappy as he felt at the moment, he would greatly miss Hogwarts in a few days’ time when he was back at number four, Privet Drive. Even though he now understood exactly why he had to return there every summer, he did not feel any better about it. Indeed, he had never dreaded his return more.

Harry pulled some crumpled robes out of the very bottom of his trunk to make way for folded ones and, as he did so, noticed a badly wrapped package lying in a corner of it. He could not think what it was doing there. He bent down, pulled it out from underneath his trainers and examined it. He realised what it was within seconds. Sirius had given it to him just inside the front door of number twelve Grimmauld Place. ‘Use it if you need me, all right?’ Harry sank down on to his bed and unwrapped the package. Out fell a small, square mirror. It looked old; it was certainly dirty. Harry held it up to his face and saw his own reflection looking back at him. He turned the mirror over. There on the reverse side was a scribbled note from Sirius. This is a two-way mirror, I’ve got the other one of the pair. If you need to speak to me, just say my name into it; you’ll appear in my mirror and I’ll be able to talk in yours. James and I used to use them when we were in separate detentions.

Nearly Headless Nick hesitated, then said, ‘Not everyone can come back as a ghost.’ ‘What d’you mean?’ said Harry quickly. ‘Only … only wizards.’ ‘Oh,’ said Harry, and he almost laughed with relief. ‘Well, that’s OK then, the person I’m asking about is a wizard. So he can come back, right?’ Nick turned away from the window and looked mournfully at Harry. ‘He won’t come back.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Sirius Black,’ said Nick. ‘But you did!’ said Harry angrily. ‘You came back – you’re dead and you didn’t disappear –’ ‘Wizards can leave an imprint of themselves upon the earth, to walk palely where their living selves once trod,’ said Nick miserably. ‘But very few wizards choose that path.’ ‘Why not?’ said Harry. ‘Anyway – it doesn’t matter – Sirius won’t care if it’s unusual, he’ll come back, I know he will!’ And so strong was his belief, Harry actually turned his head to check the door, sure, for a split second, that he was going to see Sirius, pearly-white and transparent but beaming, walking through it towards him. ‘He will not come back,’ repeated Nick. ‘He will have … gone on.’ ‘What d’you mean, “gone on”?’ said Harry quickly. ‘Gone on where? Listen – what happens when you die, anyway? Where do you go? Why doesn’t everyone come back? Why isn’t this place full of ghosts? Why –?’ ‘I cannot answer,’ said Nick. ‘You’re dead, aren’t you?’ said Harry exasperatedly. ‘Who can answer better than you?’ ‘I was afraid of death,’ said Nick softly. ‘I chose to remain behind. I sometimes wonder whethe...

‘I expect what you’re not aware of would fill several books, Dursley,’ growled Moody.

‘Are you threatening me, sir?’ he said, so loudly that passers-by actually turned to stare. ‘Yes, I am,’ said Mad-Eye, who seemed rather pleased that Uncle Vernon had grasped this fact so quickly. ‘And do I look like the kind of man who can be intimidated?’ barked Uncle Vernon. ‘Well …’ said Moody, pushing back his bowler hat to reveal his sinisterly revolving magical eye. Uncle Vernon leapt backwards in horror and collided painfully with a luggage trolley. ‘Yes, I’d have to say you do, Dursley.’