"J. K. Rowling - The Goblet of Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowling J. K)

to hold on to them...Voldemort and Wormtail had been talking about someone they had killed, though
Harry could not remember the name...and they had been plotting to kill someone else...him!
Harry took his face out of his hands, opened his eyes, and stared around his bedroom as
though expecting to see something unusual there. As it happened, there was an extraordinary
number of unusual things in this room. A large wooden trunk stood open at the foot of his bed,
revealing a cauldron, broomstick, black robes, and assorted spellbooks. Rolls of parchment
littered that part of his desk that was not taken up by the large, empty cage in which his snowy
owl, Hedwig, usually perched. On the floor beside his bed a book lay open; Harry had been reading
it before he fell asleep last night. The pictures in this book were all moving. Men in bright
orange robes were zooming in and out of sight on broomsticks, throwing a red ball to one another.
Harry walked over to the book, picked it up, and watched on of the wizards score a
spectacular goal by putting the ball through a fifty-foot-high hoop. Then he snapped the book
shut. Even Quidditch -- in Harry's opinion, the best sport in the world -- couldn't distract him
at the moment. He placed Flying with the Cannons on his bedside table, crossed to the window, and
drew back the curtains to survey the street below.
Privet Drive looked exactly as a respectable suburban street would be expected to look
inthe early hours of Saturday morning. All the curtains were closed. As far as Harry could see
through the darkness, there wasn't a living creature in sight, not even a cat.
And yet...and yet...Harry went restlessly back to the bed and sat down on it, running a
finger over his scar again. It wasn't the pain that bothered him; Harry was no stranger to pain
and injury. He had lost all the bones from his right arm once and had them painfully regrown in a
night. The same arm had been pierced by a venemous foot-long fang not long afterward. Only last
year Harry had fallen fifty feet from an airborn broomstick. He was used to bizarre accidents and
injuries; they were unavoidable if you attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and had
a knack for attracting a lot of trouble.
No, the thing that was bothering Harry was the last time his scar had hurt him, it had
been because Voldemort had been close by...But Voldemort couldn't be here, now...The idea of
Voldemort lurking in Privet Drive was absurd, impossible...
Harry listened closely to the silence around him. Was he half expecting to hear the creak
of a stair or the swish of a cloak? And then he jumped slightly as he heard his cousin Dudley
give a tremendous grunting snore from the next room.
Harry shook himself mentally; he was being stupid. There was no one in the house with him


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except Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley, and they were plainly still asleep, their dreams
untroubled and painless.
Asleep was the way Harry liked the Dursleys best; it wasn't as though they were ever any
help to him awake. Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley were Harry's only living relatives.
They were Muggles who hated and despised magic in any form, which meant that Harry was about as
welcome in their house as dry rot. They had explained away Harry's long absences at Hogwarts over
the last three years by telling everyone that he went to St. Brutus's Secure Center for Incurably
Criminal Boys. They knew perfectly well that, as an underage wizard, Harry wasn't allowed to use
magic outside Hogwarts, but they were still apt to blame him for anything that went wrong about
the house. Harry had never been able to confide in them or tell them anything about his life in
the wizarding world. The very idea of going to them when they awoke, and telling them about his
scar hurting him, and about his worries about Voldemort, was laughable.
And yet it was because of Voldemort that Harry had come to live with the Dursleys in the