"I WANT A CHOCOLATE ONE!" clarified Dudley loudly. Vernon was standing in queue for ice creams. Harry had not been offered one. He didn't really mind, since he wasn't hungry anyway, but he did wish that he was allowed to walk around unsupervised by his aunt, instead of sitting on a bench and watching her finish off a lettuce-filled burger.
Once Dudley had realized that there was nothing he could do to get rid of Harry, he had perked up a bit. They had so far visited the zoo's petting area, aquarium, and reptile house. Their next stop after food was the African animals display. Harry was half hoping that Dudley would fall into a cage and be swallowed whole by some kind of snake. When he thought about it, though, he wasn't entirely sure if any swallowing types of snake even were from Africa, and if they were, he couldn't imagine that one would want to eat such an excess of empty calories with bad attitudes and spoiled-brat cellulite – just about the only things Dudley consisted of.
Harry was awoken from his happy fantasy by Petunia's voice.
"Come on!" she said to him sharply, as if speaking to a dog.
The African animals turned out to be pretty interesting. Harry passed by lions, zebras, tigers, and nearly every other animal found in the stereotypical idea of Africa. As Dudley complained that he was tired and needed a rest, Harry wandered to an enclosure, about half of which was an artificial pond. He stopped to fix his untied shoelace. When he stood up again, he found that an all-too-happy-to-help-him animal information employee was, to put it plainly, right in his face.
"Hi!" said the employee. His name tag proclaimed him to be called Duncan, and when he spoke again, it was with an American accent. "If you have any questions about these hippopotamuses, I'm your guy!"
Harry backed away quickly. He awkwardly faked a smile.
"Yeah, thanks...not right now." He quickly escaped to another viewing point of the hippopotamus enclosure, from which he saw two fairly content-looking hippopotamuses, one chewing slowly, the other standing in the water.
Duncan wasn't finished with Harry yet. With an acne-ridden, yet dimpled smile, he nearly screamed at Harry, "Did you know - the hippopotamus is the third largest land animal in the world! They are in fact related to cetaceans, and not, as you may incorrectly derive from their appearances, terrestrial ungulates!" His teeth were very straight, white, and exceptionally long, and he was making sure he showed off every single one of them.
A woman pushed past Harry and apologized over her shoulder. The sun burned down on them. The hippopotamuses chewed and stood. Duncan's smile remained fixed. A fly buzzed between them. Harry felt an intense urge to escape Duncan, curl up, and cry.
"Uh...yeah. That's really interesting," he said, severely disturbed now. He blurted out the first thing that came to mind. "Do they ever eat people?"
Duncan hesitated for a short, unwavering moment. "No," he said, still beaming. "However, we have placed Wilma in a little, ahaha, 'hippo time out,' which means that she got a little feisty with some of the other hippos! Of course," he added in a terrifyingly reassuring tone, "I can assure you and all members of your party that we take extensive steps to make sure that kind of behavior never gets beyond the handlers to reach our valued visitors!"
Harry grinned weakly, inwardly pleading Dudley to stop resting. There was something about Duncan that was basically wrong, something in Harry's soul that told him to run away and forget, forget all of this, forget Duncan and his accursed hippos! But he could not run, he could not hide. He could not escape that smile.
"Where's Wilma now?" he asked, almost ready to faint.
"Over there," said Duncan, pointing, and Harry was glad to escape. Moments later he found himself alone, next to a small patch of ground, partly water, separated from him by strong glass. Behind the glass, a hippo was chewing some grass. Oddly enough, she looked up at him when he came near.
"Hellooo," said Harry vaguely, giving her a little wave. To his shock, a voice replied, "Hey. You come to take me outa this dump?"
It took Harry a minute to figure out that the voice he heard was, in fact, coming from Wilma. A talking hippo? Harry had certainly never heard of such a creature, but he was pretty good at believing odd things – they seemed to follow Harry. (Also he believed in hobbits, angels, pet rocks, the Lion King, and elves.) When he turned five, he had received two shillings from the Dursleys, and immediately Dudley had wanted it from him. Managing to seize the coins, Dudley was unpleasantly surprised when they burst into flame and disappeared. Harry was quite pleased by this indecent because Dudley received minor burns, and Harry had no use for the money anyway. Similar strange things had occurred throughout his life, whenever he felt particularly angry, or sad, or even cheerful, like Harry's first day of summer vacation when he was seven. Petunia, who at the time had a cold, had sneezed out a bedraggled bouquet of daisies which never should have fit up her skeletal nose. Harry couldn't explain the phenomena, and if the Dursleys could, they certainly had no intention of letting him know.
He tried to start a conversation.
"So...did you like Africa?" he asked. Wilma's large face grimaced.
"I miss it. Nowadays, you're a hippo, you want Africa, this place is the best you're gonna get. I used to roam around with my team. We'd hunt down wrongdoers like a dog tracks down a dead rodent. Ha! Those were the days..."
"So...you're the hippo police?" Harry guessed. Wilma snorted. Harry checked behind him to make sure that no one had noticed the boy and the hippo having a conversation.
"Hell no!" said Wilma. "I'm a freedom fighter. Down in Africa, things are bad. Dark, I mean. There's talk of power behind the throne. Me and my team, we were close, so close – and then those damn humans came and took me!"
Harry wondered if the bad grammar was intentional – Wilma spoke with an African accent, but used words like some kind of thug. Maybe it was a freedom fighter thing.
"Hey, you feel like getting me outa here?" Wilma said suddenly.
"I...I wouldn't know how," Harry admitted. He wished he could set Wilma free. He knew firsthand that captivity was a sad life. Wilma chuckled.
"You just did it, little guy! Look at me – I'm bustin' outa here!"
To his shock Harry realized that the glass in front of him had vanished. Just in time, he leaped to the floor as Wilma came flying out of her prison, into a crowd of panicking people. Harry hadn't even known that hippos could jump. It was just one of those things he had never really thought about.
And then it all happened so fast – he saw Dudley, sitting on the bench. He saw him stand up, and walk out into the crowd, where the panic had not quite reached yet. He saw the hippo, barreling down the walkway, her face ecstatic. He saw, for just a tiny moment, a look of utter and complete terror on Dudley's face before the two collided in a heap of cousin and hippo. Petunia screamed, and Harry began push through the crowd towards the Dursleys. A large, meaty hand grabbed his shoulder...
Legs. That was all Harry could see and think about. Not normal legs. Not the kind of legs with feet and toes at the end. No, the kind of leg Harry was occupied by came in eights. They were small, sometimes furry, and they were attached to spiders. They crawled across the ceiling in slow, deliberate movements, as if to tell him that they remembered every one of their numbers that he had vacuumed, and now that he was on their ground, they would make him pay.
And Harry had to endure them for as long as it took for Dudley to return from the hospital. Two broken ribs, a smashed foot, and a broken leg...Harry guessed he would be grounded at least two more days. Vernon and Petunia had been speechless with horror when they had seen their beloved son, mauled by a hippo. The ambulance had arrived quickly, and it had all seemed like a blur to Harry. Vernon had grounded him, he knew that. Forever. Later, 'forever' had come to mean 'until Dudley gets back'.
Actually, Harry had once again managed to pick the lock on the cupboard door. But with Vernon patrolling the house, he wouldn't be able to leave without being noticed.
He sighed, and tried his hardest to concentrate on anything but the spiders. Outside the cupboard, he heard the mail being dropped through the mail slot. He heard Vernon coming down the hall to retrieve it. The light coming through the vent in the cupboard door was momentarily blocked out. There was a scuffling as Vernon picked up the envelopes. A pause. Then Vernon hurried back down the hall. The sounds of a phone dialing reached Harry's ears. Then Vernon's hushed voice.
"It's another one, Petunia! Came in the mail a moment ago!" (A pause) "Oh is he? Yes. Yes I know. What if they don't stop?" (Another pause) "If...if they won't stop, we'll have to leave until they do. Yes. I'll call back."
Vernon hung up and stomped into the living room as Harry eased open the door. He saw the mail where Vernon had thrown it on the counter. He sneaked down the hallway and into the kitchen. On the top of the pile was an envelope of heavy yellowed paper, addressed in handwritten green ink. Harry picked it up, and almost dropped it when he saw the address:
Mr. H. Potter
The Cupboard under the Stairs
4 Private Drive
Little Winging
Surrey
BANG! A door slammed shut and Vernon, his face bright red and furious, seized the letter from Harry.
"YOU – WILL – NOT – READ – THIS – LETTER!" he roared, and dragged a protesting Harry back down the hall and into the cupboard, where he locked the door.
"Don't you ever speak of this again," Vernon hissed through the vent. "You hear me, boy? Mention this letter – to ANYONE – and you'll be sorry!"
