Harry Potter and the Psychic Serpent by Barb

Chapter One

Manual Labor


Harry had planned to sleep late on the first day of the summer holiday. He felt as though he needed to sleep for a year after what he'd been through during his fourth year of wizarding training. Already possibly the most famous wizard in the world, apart from the dark wizard who had killed his parents, he was now probably even more famous, having won the Triwizard Tournament just a fortnight earlier. But his fame was only in the wizarding world; in the non-magical, Muggle world, he was just an annoyance to his aunt and uncle and cousin. He just wanted to sleep late and try to forget everything that had happened to him during the previous ten months.

But instead he awoke at seven-thirty in the morning to the shouts of workmen, the squeal and grinding of a backhoe, and the shrill voice of his aunt shouting instructions to the workers who had been hired to relandscape the garden at number four, Privet Drive, where Harry felt about as welcome as an arsonist in a paper factory. It was impossible to continue to sleep with all the racket, so Harry resigned himself to it and threw back the sheet, sitting on the edge of the bed and fumbling on his bedside table for his glasses. The room came into focus now, littered with wizarding paraphernalia that was spilling out of his trunk, which he had not properly unpacked yet. He rose to walk to the wardrobe and stood looking at his reflection in the mirror on the inside of the door.

He had grown several inches during the previous year, and the bottoms of his pyjama trousers hovered around his shins. He'd been so busy just trying to stay alive through the Triwizard Tournament that he hadn't even noticed that he now had a full-blown Adam's apple. He tried to sing a little of his school's song, to see how his voice sounded. Traditionally, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, everyone sang the school song to a different tune. He was partial to Loch Lomond and started singing, "I'll take the high road and you'll take the low road...." but it came out sounding rather like a cross between a garden gnome being sat on by a dragon and a rabid cat being kicked about. He cleared his throat and tried again, managing this time to produce a recognizable tune in a reedy tenor, causing him to be optimistic, but halfway through the first verse, his voice cracked and made a noise that was so startling that his snowy owl Hedwig squawked in her cage and flapped her wings agitatedly.

There was a sudden silence in the garden; one of the workmen yelled, "What the bloody hell was that?"

Harry had hoped that the worker was referring to Hedwig, and not to him, but a second worker now replied, "Cor, Dick, I think it was someone singing."

Harry grimaced into the mirror; he decided to drop the voice experiments for now and lifted up his hair, examining the lightening-shaped scar on his forehead. He let the hair flop back onto his face. He needed a haircut. When he was younger, he'd always fought against haircuts (his aunt and uncle were endlessly frustrated by his hair), but now he was thinking he needed something that made him look a bit less like a scared little kid (as though it were standing on end because he was afraid) and a lot more like a wizard that a powerful Dark Lord had to take seriously.

He also noticed that there was a dark, downy haze starting to appear on his chin and upper lip and along his jawline. Facial hair! At last! Maybe he would be shaving before the summer was over; he wondered whether there were special charmed razors that wouldn't ever cut a person's skin while shaving. There had to be something; he'd never noticed a single wizard walking about with little tufts of loo paper stuck to the shaving cuts on his face, like his Uncle Vernon did every morning. Sometimes they fell off his face at the breakfast table and dropped into his coffee or his food; Harry never said anything when this happened, trying not to grin broadly as he watched his detested uncle eat a spoonful of eggs prominently adorned with a wad of bloody paper, which his uncle did not notice when his face was buried in the morning newspaper. At times like this he would invariably say to Harry's Aunt Petunia, "Petunia! What have you put in the eggs this morning! They're smashing!" And his aunt would look self-satisfied and smug, launching into a discourse about a famous chef she'd seen demonstrating recipes on a chat show. Harry would have to drop his fork and put his head under the table to avoid them seeing the gleeful look on his face, and once he'd almost choked on his orange juice, trying not to laugh.