Harry swore. He pressed a hand to the back of his head and could already feel a bump from the place where his head had collided with the cupboard door jam.
He wasn't nearly as tall as Ron or Dean, but he still had to bow his head in order to enter the room. Was it a room? Harry had always thought of it as one, but everything seems very big when you are very small.
The whole room, or whatever it was, made Harry claustrophobic, which was slightly ridiculous. The passages to the Shrieking Shack and Honeydukes had been the size of a children's play slide, and he'd managed fine there. But the cupboard was different somehow. It wasn't a passage to anywhere special or magical, it was just a dead end.
Harry was perversely pleased that his aunt Petunia had never ventured into his cupboard to clean it out and fill it with the sort of organized clutter that probably filled Number Seven's cupboard under the stairs. Harry's tiny little island of disorder was hiding in Petunia's prison of cleanliness. There was a spider hanging from the ceiling, the harmless kind with spindly legs. Harry let it be. This sort of a spider, even enlarged, wouldn't stand have stood a chance against the sort of spiders that made their home at Hogwarts. He thought of spiders smacking against the windscreen of the Ford Anglia as it tore out of the forest of its own volition. And of the false Moody's dancing spider.
There was a shelf placed at a very convenient height for a small boy, though this height was not so convenient for a man of seventeen. It held all of Harry's worldly possessions, most of which had been Dudley's first. Harry could spend days rearranging his motley collection of toys, by colour, by date acquired, and by a thousand other things. A week before Harry had received his very first letter, he had arranged them in a manner that, while carefully thought out, was utterly mystifying now.
A puzzle with half its pieces and no box sat in the far right corner of the shelf. Harry used to stack the pieces very carefully one on top of another. Usually Dudley could ruin it with one trip down the stairs, but Harry would simply start again. The tower had long since fallen and the pieces lay scattered in the corner of the shelf. Some of them had fallen to the dusty floor. Next to the cardboard pieces was a teddy bear, name and origin long forgotten. Harry hadn't ever used the tatty bear for comfort. It had been a playmate and something to be displayed on the shelf. One of the glassy eyes had gone missing before it had come into Harry's possession and there was a small tear in the side. Harry was forever pushing the stuffing back inside with his grubby fingers.
There were a few old army men carefully lined up two-by-two. Dudley had had hundreds of these men, and the entire house had endured several days of loudly-staged battles, all of which took place in the middle of the parlor floor, in front of the television, before Aunt Petunia took Dudley out to buy him several new video games. The men had been relegated to a bucket in the corner of Dudley's second bedroom, and Aunt Petunia had generously permitted Harry to select exactly ten to take back to his cupboard. Harry remembered painstakingly choosing one man of each type, and making sure that each colour was represented in equal measure. Harry had played with them and imagined himself the leader. He thought of the heat in his cheeks when one of those mismatched teenagers with snow-flecked hair had suggested the name "Potter's Army."
The camp bed was pressed against the back wall of the cupboard, and no one had changed the sheets. He toyed with the heavy blanket between his fingers—it reminded Harry of the velvety bed hangings at school—and adjusted the pillow, which had always made him sneeze. His four-poster, despite being the setting of sleepless nights and terrible visions and one almost-murder, had always felt very safe and cloud-like. Harry could remember sinking into the four-poster next to Ron's for the first time, half-convinced he had dreamed the whole of Hogwarts.
Harry knew every inch of this place, even though there wasn't much to know or explore. It was his little ten-year-old world, and would always be so. He knew the sound the cat flap made when it swung closed and the sound of the army men as they scraped across the shelf and the half-hearted ring of the alarm clock.
Harry shut the door, and went upstairs to finish packing.