Prologue
The Boy and the Trolley
Autumn seemed to arrive early that year. The morning of the first of September was crisp and golden as an apple, and the elderly woman sitting on the bench by platform nine pulled her shawl snugger around her shoulders as she gazed morosely at the morning commuters hurrying about the great sooty station. She had been meant to meet her son at half past ten, but now it was nearly eleven o'clock and she was beginning to worry they wouldn't make their train. She thought with a sigh of what her son would say when he finally arrived. No doubt that he had been waylaid by traffic and would have called to tell her he'd be late, but she still stubbornly refused to carry a cell phone and perhaps now she'd let him buy one for her.
The woman checked the watch on her wrist and scanned the platform again. Thick white steam from the trains roiled across the platform, making the figures swarming about the station indistinct. She watched them for a second and then something moving in the mist caught her attention. She couldn't make out what it was at first. It clattered and squawked as it moved down the platform toward her, its bulky and oddly-shaped body propelled by an unknown force, but as it came closer, the woman saw it was two trolleys, piled high with trunks and, unbelievably, cages of birds. Owls, it looked like.
The trolleys were being pushed by two adults: a man in glasses and a woman with shockingly red hair. They were trailed by three children, the youngest clinging tearfully to her father's arm as the elder two boys walked together, apparently arguing. Suddenly the tallest boy rushed forward, easily outpacing his parents, his younger brother (for that's what they were, the woman realized; the resemblance was unmistakable) following in his wake.
On her bench, the elderly woman watched the family weave through the commuters, oblivious to the stares they were receiving. As they passed her, she caught a snatch of the two boys' argument above the clamor of the station.
"I won't! I won't be in Slytherin!" the younger boy said heatedly.
"You might, though," said the elder, teasingly.
"James, give it a rest!" said the mother.
"I only said he might be," said James, grinning over his shoulder at his brother. "There's nothing wrong with that. He might be in Slyth—"
But he caught his mother's eye and fell silent.
The family approached the barrier beside the woman's bench. She studied them covertly from the corner of her eye, not wanting to be rude, but extremely curious (what was this slither-whatsit the boy had mentioned?). The owls on the trolleys glowered back at her, hooting dolefully.
Suddenly, the elder boy—James—had grabbed hold of the trolley his mother had been pushing and broke into a run. The woman watched horrorstruck as he hurtled at the concrete barrier, certain he was going to crash…
But then—the woman didn't see how, because her view was abruptly obscured by steam and commuters—both boy and trolley were gone. Craning her neck left and right, the woman tried to spot where he went, thinking he had veered around the barrier at the last moment, but he was no where to be seen.
The parents seemed wholly unconcerned at their son's disappearance.
"We wrote to James three times a week last year," the mother was telling the younger boy.
"And you don't want to believe everything he tells you about Hogwarts," the father put in. "He likes a laugh, your brother."
Together, the family pushed the remaining trolley toward the barrier. Again, the woman watched fearfully as they picked up speed, but like the boy, no crash came. The family simply vanished within a jumble of billowing steam and people.
The woman leaned back against the bench, only then realizing she had scooted to the edge of her seat in anxiety. Who had those people been? she wondered. They had looked ordinary enough, but there had been something decidedly odd about the entire family. Maybe it was the way they had shut owls up in metal cages, like one would pack up a pet cat or dog, but she didn't think so, somehow. If she hadn't heard their accent, she might have guessed they were foreigners. Americans, speaking in slang about a slither-thing and some disease called "hogwarts."
Trying to put the encounter out of her head, the woman checked her watch again. It was now six minutes to eleven. The train at platform nine whistled a warning blow and the last of the travelers hurried to the doors, ushered through by blue uniformed conductors. The train would be leaving in another minute.
The woman got to her feet with a groan. Seems she was going to miss the train after all. She was reaching down to retrieve her luggage from its place beside the bench when she saw it: a pair of yellow-green eyes staring fixedly out from the darkness underneath a bench directly across from her on platform ten. She froze, half bent over. The eyes, narrowed in acute dislike, glowered menacingly at the barrier separating the two platforms. If she had been closer, the woman was certain she would have heard growling.
"Mum! Hey, mum!"
The woman looked up and saw a young man in a gray suit racing toward her, a traveling case swinging from one hand.
"Mum, what are you doing?" he asked as he reached her. "The train's about to leave. We gotta get going."
"Did you see that?" the woman said, pointing to the bench opposite her. The eyes had vanished.
"See what?" he demanded impatiently. "Look, we gotta go. They're shutting the doors."
He scooped up the woman's luggage in his free hand and rushed away toward the whistling train. After a second's wondering pause, the woman hurried after him.
