Out of the Books

Chapter 2 - Where are the wizards?

Liz was glad that it was a Saturday and she did not have to work, so she could start searching for her son right away today. So soon after breakfast she was ready to leave Jacks apartment.

"I don't have any plans today," Jack told her. "I can give you a lift home if you want?"

Liz, who did not have an idea yet where she would start looking, shook her head. "No thanks, I need to do some things on my way, that could take a while."

Jack shrugged and was surprised that he was a bit disappointed by this answer. "Well, if you are sure."

Then he scribbled some numbers on the rim of a newspaper and gave it to her. "But if you need any help or anything just call me, okay?"

Liz smiled at him when she took the paper. "You are sweet Jack." Then her smile grew a little playful. "You know, I might need some help dining tomorrow night."

He grinned broadly at her now. "Of course, I will not let you down."

"Thank you again for letting me stay for the night. I don't know where I would have ended up, if you hadn't taken care of me." She smiled at him again, then gave him a quick peck on the cheek and left his flat.

On the way from Jack's house to the tube station, Liz thought about how she could find Harry.

Liz already suspected that she was not a witch anymore, but she had not tried to do magic yet. So before she went downstairs to the tube station, she hid in a small alleyway to try whether her "death" had affected her magical abilities. Of course, she did not have her wand anymore, but she had always been rather good at wandless magic.

The alleyway where she stood now was pretty messy. Rude messages were sprayed with graffiti on the building walls and trash was scattered on the sidewalks. But the trash came in handy for her purpose now. She would try to levitate an empty beer bottle.

Liz screwed up her face in concentration and stared at the bottle, while she aimed her hand at it. "Wingardium Leviosa!" she said determinedly, but softly so that she wouldn't be heard by any muggles nearby.

The bottle did not move. She concentrated harder and tried again. "Wingardium Leviosa!" The same result.

She went closer to the piece of rubbish and put her hand right next to it, without really touching it. Then she willed the bottle to move with every single of her brain cells. "Wingardium Leviosa!" she cried, her voice really powerful this time.

But obviously, the bottle was not impressed at all as it still lay at the same place as before.

Liz sighed in frustration and looked up. An elderly woman stood in the alley and stared at her strangely. Liz flushed a little and stood up, then she hurried out of the alleyway to the tube.

"Great," she said to herself, "I'm a muggle now. That really doesn't make it easier to find Harry."

But then her face lit up again. If she could not use magic to find her son, then she would need to contact someone who could.

Liz smiled to herself and decided to go to Diagon Alley. From there she could send an owl to Albus Dumbledore, who would surely help her.

After having made this decision, Liz went down to the station with a bounce in her step, which made her stand out against the passers-by, who hurried along with hunched shoulders and grim expressions on this cold and wet November day.

Liz did not have to wait long for her train, but she had to change trains twice and then had to walk the last bit to the Leaky Cauldron. So it took her almost an hour to reach the street where the wizarding pub was situated.

Soon she had found the bookshop and the jeweller between which the entrance of the Leaky Cauldron lay, invisible for muggle eyes.

Invisible for muggle eyes - that must be the reason why I can't see it. I'm a muggle now.

So Liz decided just to wait in front of it until someone went in or came out. It could not take too long, she reckoned. It was Saturday and close to noon, after all. She looked into the windows of the shops around the area, but always kept an eye on the invisible gap between the bookshop and the jewellery store. But when, after more than half an hour, there was still no witch or wizard in sight, she started to get impatient - and she was not the only one. The jeweller looked very suspiciously at her through his window. Liz made a great show of looking at her wrist watch and sighing, as though waiting for someone who was not on time.

After another twenty minutes, Liz started to doubt she was in the right place. But she knew that the Leaky Cauldron was here. She had used this entrance numerous times. She scowled at the gap now. Her feet were freezing and she was beginning to get hungry - and the thought of a nice warm butterbeer, which was only a few meters away but impossible for her to reach, did not exactly help matters.

Then she noticed someone staring at her. She turned around and saw that the jeweller had come out of his shop. He walked towards her.

"Listen ma'am, I don't really like people loitering in front of my shop for hours on end," he told her. "It makes me quite nervous, you know."

He sounded very suspicious and Liz had no doubt that he would call the police, if she gave him the slightest further reason to do so.

She smiled appeasingly at him. "I'm sorry. I've been waiting for my friend, but obviously he didn't show up. I think I have waited long enough for him now, though."

The shopkeeper nodded, but did not really look convinced. When Liz walked away from him, she could still feel his stare between her shoulder blades. But finally, she turned around a corner and sighed.

What's wrong with wizard folks? she thought irritably. Why can't they go into the Leaky Cauldron for lunch today, when I need them to?

In this moment her stomach growled very loudly.

Now lunch, that's an idea, she thought. As she could not eat at the wizarding pub, she settled for some fish and chips and a coke in a shabby cafe.

While she was eating, she pondered about what she could do next. Then she remembered that Cathy Linings, one of her fellow Gryffindors in her year, was learning to be a healer at St. Mungo's. Surely she would let her use her fireplace to contact Dumbledore.

Liz finished her lunch and went back to the tube station to go to the wizarding hospital. Soon she stood in front of the large and empty department store which, unknown to (most) muggles, housed hundreds of ill and wounded wizards and witches. She went to the large shop window which she knew was the entrance - and stopped, surprised.

The window was boarded up. Liz frowned, then she went closer and peaked through the boards. She could not see anything, just darkness. She pushed her hands against the boards to see if they were a portal like the wall between platforms nine and ten at King's Cross, but the boards were very solid and did not admit her hand.

She backed up and looked at the five-storey building. It was the right building, but why couldn't she get in?

She went along the whole front, peering through every window and touching it the same way she had touched the boards to no avail. Then she went around the building to look for a door, but it was boarded up as well. Liz was getting very frustrated now.

Impatiently, she knocked at the door and against the windows, hoping that someone might come out. And if it only were ministry wizards to obliviate her, she could at least tell them that she knew about the wizarding world and that she needed the help of the Hogwarts headmaster.

She sighed. Nobody had reacted to her knocking. It almost seems as if this building is empty after all.

Then she had an idea. She looked around nervously to see whether she was alone, then she took a stone to smash one of the old, dusty windows. If the building was inhabited by wizards, it would be no problem for them to repair it, and if it was not, nobody would probably care about a broken window in an almost broken-down house.

She winced at the noise of breaking glass and took another nervous look around. Then she stepped into what once was the department, which sold men's clothes. She could see some dummies standing around in the twilight, but the otherwise empty room was definitely not the busy foyer of a hospital.

Liz was utterly disappointed and even more confused. What had happened to St. Mungo's? How could it be gone from one day to the other?

She took a deep breath and left the old, dead shell of a house.

Well, lets try one more location, she decided and tried not to sound too hopeless to herself.

Once more she went down to the tube station and this time, she seemed to fit in way better into the grey mass of people with hunched shoulders and grim expressions. After some stations, she emerged from the tube again, then walked some blocks and finally stood in front of a totally ordinary red phone booth.

She frowned when she saw that it was not out of order.

That's dangerous, she thought. Every unsuspecting muggle could go in here and end up in the Ministry of Magic.

Then another thought sneaked into her mind. What if it doesn't lead into the Ministry? She scowled and tried to push this thought away forcefully.

Liz entered the phone booth determinedly. She took the receiver and dialled the code number to be admitted to the ministry. But instead of the voice which inquired her name and business, she only heard three annoying beeping noises and an automatic female voice, which told her that the number she had dialled did not exist.

Liz took a deep breath and forced herself to stay calm, then tried to dial the code number again - with the same result.

Angry and disappointed, she slammed the receiver down and leaned against the wall of the phone booth, needing all of her energy to keep her eyes dry from angry and desperate tears.

How hard could it be for a muggle who knew about the wizarding world to find a single bloody wizard in the middle of London!

Feeling totally depressed and abandoned by the world, Liz decided to go home.

Her legs felt like lead when she finally reached her home and trudged up the stairs to her apartment. The flat felt dark and empty and the first thing she did was to switch on the TV, only to avoid this feeling of loneliness.

Then she let herself fall in a cosy armchair leaned her head back and closed her eyes in exhaustion and frustration. How was she supposed to find her son without being able to perform magic and without help?

Liz sat up and tried to view all the facts about the last 24 hours logically. Had it only been 24 hours? she thought, amazed.

She and James were killed by Voldemort, but somehow, both had ended up here in London as muggles, who already had a totally different personal history. While she could remember her old life, James could not.

If Harry was also killed, he probably ended up as a muggle as well. And as James and she both had turned up at the same place, chances were that Harry had also turned up close by. But what would a toddler do in a disco?

No, either he suddenly lived with one of the families around that part of the city or he only was there during the night for some reason.

Liz did not like either thought, but now she had a point where she could start researching.

Tomorrow she would ring all the families who lived close to the pub where the Halloween party had taken place and then she could still ask in hospitals and orphanages about a 15monthold boy with unruly black hair who had mysteriously turned up.

Feeling somewhat calmed with her new plan, Liz only ate something small for dinner and went to bed early and fell asleep almost immediately.

She was flying. The dark landscape was speeding by below her. In the distance, she could see a large accumulation of tiny lights on the ground. Must be a big city, she thought. But she flew past that. Slowly, the lights grew scarcer and she felt that she lost height. And then suddenly, she felt solid ground under her feet. She looked around. Obviously, she was standing in a neat garden of a small house in a suburb of the city she had seen earlier. Something felt very familiar about this place. She had been here before.

Suddenly she whirled around. Something had landed behind her. It was a - motorcycle? A huge man climbed off it, holding a small bundle in his hands, and smiled sadly at a corner some metres to the left of Liz. He didn't seem to notice her at all. Liz followed the look of the large man and now saw two figures - a very old man and a stern-looking woman - whom she hadn't noticed before.

She realized that she knew all of the persons. The large man walked towards the two others, who were obviously waiting for him, and handed them the bundle. The old man gazed lovingly at it and said something, which Liz couldn't understand. In fact, she couldn't understand anything any of the persons said. She couldn't hear any sound at all. It was as though she was watching a silent film. She walked closer to them to see what was in the bundle. It was a small boy with black hair and a wound on his forehead, which was shaped like a lightning bolt. He was sleeping peacefully.

The old man now put the bundle on the doorstep of the house, in front of which they were standing and pulled a letter out of his robes. He put the letter into one of the folds of the bundle and Liz could read whom it was addressed to:

Mr and Mrs Dursley

Privet Drive 4

Little Whinging, Surrey

Liz woke up with a jolt. She had found him!

She knew it had not been a dream. Hagrid had found Harry and Dumbledore and McGonagall had left him in the care of Petunia Dursley and her family. The only thing she had to do now was to drive to Little Whinging and pick him up!

Liz felt how tears of gratitude and relief rolled down her cheeks. Tomorrow, she would see her son again, she thought happily before she fell asleep again.

Liz woke up very early the next morning. She dressed quickly and forced down some toasts with marmelade and a cup of coffee. Then she grabbed her car keys and practically sprinted down the stairs of the house.

After a drive of not quite two hours, she turned into Privet Drive in Little Whinging. She had not been here in almost four years, but the suburb did not seem to have changed one bit.

Liz was a bit nervous about meeting her sister, but on the other hand, she thought that Petunia might be glad that she did not have to put up with Harry after all, as she was not really fond of magic.

Liz parked the car in front of number four and climbed out. She went up the driveway to the entrance door and had almost rung the bell when her gaze fell on the name plate next to it. It did not say Dursley. Liz frowned and hesitated. But then she rang the bell anyway. A formidable lady in her sixties opened the door and looked at Liz suspiciously.

"I don't buy anything," she informed her.

"Er, good morning ma'am. I don't want to sell anything. I'm just looking for a Petunia Dursley who is supposed to live here," she smiled at the lady uncertainly.

"There is no Petunia Dursley living here. I have lived here all my live and know all the people in the neighbourhood. But I don't know a Petunia Dursley," she said and was already closing the door.

"And what about Evans? Petunia Evans?" Liz hurried to ask her. "Don't know her either," the old lady said and this time, she closed the door.

Liz shook her head and went back to her car, at a loss at what to do now. She had been so certain that Harry was living with her sister now. And the dream had showed her that her sister still lived here. Well, maybe it was just that - a dream.

And then suddenly, Liz snapped her head up and her eyes went wide in shock and in understanding.

She knew now why she had not met any other wizards and witches in London yesterday and why Petunia Dursley did not seem to exist.

She had not just slipped into another body after she had "died", she had slipped into another world - a world where there were no wizards and no Petunia Dursley!