It was a drizzly January afternoon, with the soft kind of rain that blurs everything together in a superficial, amateurish representation of what the world should be. The rain dripped gently off the sloping roofs of Privet Drive with a quiet rippling sound. The atmosphere within Number 4 was slightly unsettled, like something was missing, the gleaming surfaces of the kitchen strangely at odds with the dismal weather outside the window.
Harry walked down the stairs, treading lightly. He was slight for a boy of nine, in overlarge jeans and a sweatshirt, with bright green eyes behind messily Sellotaped round glasses. Hidden slightly behind his shock of black hair was a thin, red scar shaped like a lightning bolt. Although you wouldn't know it from looking at him, and although Harry didn't know it himself, the scar was a relic of the dark past that Harry had unknowingly left behind him eight years before.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, and heard his cousin Dudley's yelling from above as he mutilated aliens on his computer. Somehow in the grey prickliness of the day, the shouting seemed out of place, as though the walls were frowning down at Harry for disturbing their eerie silence.
Harry walked past the living room door, where his uncle sat reading the newspaper. He hurried past before he could be seen, thinking it unlikely that this dismal weather would have done anything to improve Vernon Dursley's mood – then again, Harry thought, when had anything involving Harry ever improved his uncle's mood?
Harry walked towards the kitchen. As he reached it, he stopped, watching his aunt warily. Petunia Dursley was standing in front of the window, her bony neck and pointed nose framed in the window against the pale, grey sky, one long-fingered hand resting on the gleaming, carefully disinfected kitchen surface. Her other hand was gripping a small photograph; it was black and white, and showed two young girls smiling at the camera happily. Their eyes did not seem as glassy and empty as those in ordinary photographs, and for a moment it looked – Harry later convinced himself it must have been a trick of the light – as though the girls in the photograph were moving.
Hearing her nephew's movement, Aunt Petunia turned, and her eyes, which looked as misty and distant as the fog beyond the window, widened at the sight of him. Her knuckles turned white as she clutched the photograph more tightly.
'What are you doing, lurking around? Get back upstairs.' Her voice seemed to lack its usual sharpness, and sounded oddly constricted, as though the words were catching in her throat and struggling to slip between her thin, pursed lips.
Confused, Harry frowned at his aunt and asked, 'Who is that – in the photograph? Is that you?'
Aunt Petunia scrunched the photograph into a tiny ball in her hand and looked away from him.
'Don't ask questions,' she said, softly.
Harry started to walk away from her. After a few steps, he turned back to look into the shadowy kitchen. Petunia was staring out of the window again. It had started to snow.
That night, Harry dreamed of a kind-faced, red-haired woman with bright green eyes that seemed strangely familiar. She was laughing and talking gently to him, but her smile suddenly faltered as she started at something that Harry could not see. She started to scream as he started to cry. The dream changed then, and he could see a flying motorbike, a huge man with a tangled beard and black eyes like beetles, a cat turning into a woman with a stern face, and a tall, strange, bearded man offering her a sherbet lemon…
Harry slept silently on, and when he woke in the morning he didn't remember the strange, magical, distant dream.