Harry Potter and the Valley of Souls

Chapter 1, Unanswered Owls

Even the owls that delivered the post in the wizarding world knew a trip to number 4, Privet Drive would be a short affair. They, like the wizards who sent them on their missions, knew the boy who lived in the house wasn't answering his letters.

All summer long, Harry Potter had stayed holed up in the smallest bedroom on the top floor of his aunt and uncle's house. Like the summers before, he was cut off from writing to his friends at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but this summer, it was a voluntary seclusion. Uncle Vernon had finally allowed the boy to send and receive mail by Owl Post, but the correspondence remained the one sided affair it had been since Vernon had first allowed Harry to receive letters from his fellow Hogwarts students between his second and third years at school. Harry would simply watch, unresponsively, as magnificent birds of every shape and size floated through his bedroom window with the morning sun, dropping their messages onto a growing pile of parcels and parchment. Harry's only response was to cover the pile with dirty socks.

Occasionally, an owl caught his eye as it zoomed in over the bed where he lay. He knew some of them by sight, like Pig, the tiny barn owl that belonged to his best friend Ron Weasley or one of the barn owls that lived in the owlrey at Hogwarts, the one he knew Hagrid favored. These owls gave Harry a wistful glance as they entered, as though willing the boy to open their post. Tellingly, though, they were always the ones to make the fastest retreats. Harry would not shut the window to the owls, knowing that they'd only come to him through one of the other windows in the house. Though the Dursleys were allowing the post to come and go freely this summer, their distrust of all-things-magical had not abated and Harry feared that Uncle Vernon's hatred of magic was stronger than his fear of the Order.

And so, they came through his window, a steady stream of aviary messengers. To the casual correspondent, it would appear that Harry Potter was so besieged by fan mail lauding him for the courage to tell the truth about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's return, that he was not able to answer all of his letters. Only, a few, like Ron who had taken to folding his parchment inside out in an effort to reach out to his friend, suspected Harry wasn't even reading the post at all.

Harry's own owl, Hedwig, watched the morning's proceedings with interest, hooting a soft greeting to some of the more familiar owls, moving over so they could share a bit of water before flying out of the window. She shifted slightly as Harry scooped up Ron's letter. It was the first time in a month that he'd taken any of these letters into his hands. Harry caught only a few words, like "ignore" and "come home" before picking up a sock with his other hand and stuffing the letter inside. Hedwig's disapproving hoot caused the boy to look up and for a moment an apologetic expression flashed on his face before he returned to the blank stare he'd perfected over the summer.

"I'm not ready to read them yet, Hedwig," Harry explained as he kept his gaze on something beyond her wing. "I'm not ready to face them."

Hedwig blinked in response and with another hoot, she flew out of the window, leaving him alone. Harry watched as her snowy-white form sailed off into the horizon. With no errands to run, Hedwig was spending a great deal of time away from Harry's home in Little Whinging. She returned each evening with the rain, standing guard while Harry woke each night in a cold sweat, the memory of his godfather's death repeating itself nightly in his sub-conscious. During the day, after the boy had received his messages, she would fly off, presumably going to visit Harry's school friends. Harry had not banned these visits from her because he knew Hedwig's appearances at the Burrow, Ron's home, or to his other best friend, Hermione Granger, were silent reassurance to them that Harry was physically well, even if his emotions were teetering on the edge of sanity.

As Hedwig sailed from view, Harry dressed and left his room, escaping the parchments all over the floor. Three times a day, he joined his aunt and uncle downstairs for meals. He sat in his cousin Dudley's chair as the other boy was always away from the house. Unlike his parents who tolerated Harry's participation in mealtimes, Dudley Dursley could not eat whenever Harry appeared at the table. He told his mother that Harry destroyed his appetite, though Dudley's increasing size pointed to the contrary. Harry supposed Dudley's friends, themselves a pack of whales, kept him fed or his mother prepared plates of food for her son to eat after Harry retreated to his bedroom.

The meals were always quick for Harry. This summer, he ate whatever the family was eating- chops, hams, puddings- but he had no appetite. He would push his food around his plate, nibbling down a few bites while listening to Aunt Petunia "tut, tut" about something in the gossip column and Uncle Vernon give his daily oration on whatever struck his fancy. Within minutes of sitting down, though, the boy was on his way back upstairs again to brood. He would not have come down at all if his family, wondering what it was the boy was doing upstairs all alone all day, had not insisted on his presence.

Three times a day, Petunia and Vernon could ensure that their nephew was not plotting to blow up the house or kill them all in their sleep, but getting Harry out of his room had been a challenge. Aunt Petunia had gone as far as changing the door to Harry's bedroom, removing the cat flap that had been installed between his first and second year at Hogwarts, and resolutely refusing to feed the boy anything unless he came to the table to get it. At first, Harry responded by staying upstairs, presumably not eating at all. On the fourth day of his school holidays, the third day since he'd been seen eating anything at all, Aunt Petunia looked out from the parlor window and saw a man staring intently at the house, his eyes locked on Harry's bedroom window. When the man turned to stare at her, Petunia raced for her husband, who marched upstairs to the boy's room, pounding on the door and demanding he remove himself at once and come to eat. If Vernon was expecting an argument that day, he was surely disappointed. After just a few bangs and one earth shattering "HARRY POTTER," the door swung open quietly and Harry Potter, paler and bonier than ever before, walked past his uncle without a word, heading for the breakfast table. The boy came to every meal now, never once needing to be called, but Aunt Petunia would look out the parlor window each morning as if searching for the man who would never appear again.

Like many mornings before, Harry walked down the stairs, pausing on the step directly over the cupboard he once used as a room. He allowed himself a moment of brief reflection as he thought about how far he'd come in the past five years. On his eleventh birthday, he had been simply a miserable orphan, unloved and neglected, a ward of his Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia Dursley and a boxing bag for Dudley. At that time, there was no apparent means of escape from this miserable existence, but that was before Hogwarts and all that came with it.

"No," Harry told himself. "I can't think about Hogwarts now. Hogwarts leads to Dumbledore, Dumbledore leads to the Order, the Order leads to Voldemort and Voldemort leads to Si--"

Harry clutched his chest, wincing through the pain and cursing under his breath. The daytime pain was almost unbearable. Just as intense as the nightly vomits and sweats, but perhaps because his body knew he would face questions from his relatives, the anguish in the day was far more personally felt, rather than an outward physical demonstration. In the night, he could cry, scream and vomit loudly, during the day the grief manifested itself in a piercing stab against his heart.

"What're you doing up there, boy?"

Uncle Vernon's interrogation snapped Harry out of his trance. The image of Sirius that had been forming in his head suddenly vanished and the pain surrounding his heart lifted. For once, Harry was grateful to hear his uncle's gruff tones.

"Nothing, er, sir."

Vernon eyed him suspiciously, but decided against further questioning. Though he hadn't warmed to Harry since the boy returned for the summer, Vernon's open hostility had been tempered this year. Fearing the Order's promise to check in on Harry to make sure he wasn't being mistreated, he gave Harry a wider berth than usual, practically ignoring him most of the time.

"Anything to keep those weirdoes away from this house," Vernon would tell his wife. Every so often, though, he'd give the boy a sideways glance, as if expecting him to burst into flames or, Vernon shuddered, worse.

Harry was quiet, too quiet, since his return from school. The breakfast incident at the beginning of the summer made Vernon very uneasy. Over the years, Vernon had become accustomed to fighting with his wife's sister's son. To him, it was the natural order of things. He certainly never expected the hasty submission Harry had exhibited that day. Coming to breakfast without a fight wasn't the only time over the summer that Harry had failed to resist the Dursley's orders. When they gave Harry a command now, he complied immediately and silently, often merely with the slightest nod of a head, rather than the "yes, Aunt Petunias" or "yes, Uncle Vernons" that had peppered his speech as a child. Vernon had expected Harry to threaten to contact the freaks who had accompanied him through King's Cross Station if they gave him a task they knew from experience he didn't like, but Harry hadn't mentioned the incident or those people at all. In fact, he never spoke a word to anyone unless he was addressed first.

Though she dared not admit it to her husband, Aunt Petunia, especially, could tell something was wrong. Petunia felt a wash of terror come over her as she raised her eyes to the ceiling, looking up to where the boy, now little more than a living skeleton, was wasting away. Whatever she had thought of the boy in the past, she knew not the wrath that would befall her if she allowed Lily and Potter's son to continue to destroy himself. The man outside the parlor window had been the only one to show himself to her, but somehow, Petunia Dursley knew Harry was being watched. She only hoped they had the boy's best interest at heart, but the attack on the boy and her own beloved son last summer had proven that there were others with far more malevolent intentions. No one had come forward yet, but Petunia wasn't about to risk a confrontation with a member of the magical world, not for Harry Potter.

Petunia Dursley was angry, but for once, it was not at the boy upstairs. Though Vernon had tried to tell her that his behavior was merely an attempt to act out on the anger he felt at being holed up here for an entire summer, Petunia knew the difference between a child's misbehavior and a serious cry for help. Blowing up Vernon's Aunt Marge and dropping a pudding on Mrs. Mason when he was twelve, that was acting out. This was different.

As she cleared Harry's nearly untouched plate, she thought about her sister Lily. It had been hard for Petunia to ignore the images of her younger sister that had crept into her brain over the weeks while she watched her nephew fade away before her eyes, as though the boy's concentrated deterioration allowed for the spectral images of his mother to take their place in Petunia's mind. The boy certainly didn't look like his mother, though he had the green eyes Petunia had been so jealous of as a child. Looking at the boy, Petunia felt the disgust that had lived inside her for fifteen years lifting and fading away. The anger that had been present ever since Lily and that husband of hers, Potter, had gone and gotten themselves blown up, leaving the Dursleys to raise their orphan son was abating and a new, unfamiliar, feeling of understanding was taking its place. The memories of Lily were not necessarily pleasant for the older sister who had longed to be the special one in her parent's eyes. But, Petunia realized, comparing Lily's summers at home with her son's reaction to being at number 4, Privet Drive was filled with eye-opening revelation. Harry's mother would return home each summer beaming and eager to talk about all of the things she'd learned at Hogwarts, showing off, Petunia supposed, to their relatives and friends. Silence, certainly, had never come home with Lily.

Something had happened to Lily's son at that school, something that would cause the boy to stop eating and lose all sense of the resilient personality Petunia and her husband had tried to break from Harry from the moment he arrived on their doorstep in a basket with the milk bottles. What Petunia and Vernon Dursley had not been able to accomplish in fifteen years, those magicians had been able to do in merely one school term. Remembering the frustration she'd felt that morning watching her nephew play with the ham and eggs before him, Petunia wondered if she shouldn't remove Harry from Hogwarts altogether. It wasn't too late to send him to Stonewall High as she and Vernon had intended all along. Vernon would fuss, Petunia knew, not wanting to spend one more minute than was necessary with the boy under his roof, but if Petunia allowed this destruction to continue... She shuddered at the thought.

"I will speak to Vernon about this tonight," she said to no one. "Vernon will see it's the only way."

A thunderous crash broke Petunia away from her thoughts and she stared out the window as a large owl fell from above, landing in the bushes outside the kitchen sink. Petunia opened the window and picked up the owl. In its talons, it held a letter, folded inside out. Petunia couldn't help herself as she extracted the letter from the owl and laid the bird, dazed from its collision with the house, down on the table. Her curiosity getting the better of her, Petunia tore open the parchment and sat down to read the note.

Dear Harry,

Ron suspects you haven't read any of his letters all summer and I am beginning to believe the same thing. I am not going to try to understand your grief. I can't. I can only tell you that you are beginning to scare us all with your silence. We miss you and need you. Mundungus Fletcher has been watching your house and tells us you haven't been outside at all. For a while, he wondered if you were even eating, though he assures us you've been seen at the table at every meal. Though I know you are safe, I am giving you until tomorrow to reply to this letter. If I haven't heard from you, Mum and Dad have given me permission to come to you. You can't ignore us forever, Harry.

Hermione

"So, he's ignoring his friends as well," Petunia thought. "I must put a stop to this."

Petunia left the owl on the table and walked upstairs to Harry's room. In nearly fifteen years, she had never set foot into any place where her nephew slept, not even when he was away at school. She didn't stop to think about the gravity of what she was about to do as she entered without knocking, slipping on a piece of paper on the floor. She gasped in horror as her eyes took in a den covered in paper and bird droppings. Harry lay in bed, his eyes screwed shut, ignoring the intrusion and the growing number of owls that gathered around the now closed window. Disgust and anger overtaking the worry that had led her to this place, Petunia crossed over to the bed, grabbed her nephew and shook him.

"Open your eyes, boy," she demanded. "We need to talk."