Petunia heard several whispers as she struggled to regain consciousness. It felt as if she were floating under water. It didn't take her long to consciously recall that she had recently tried to kill herself. Minutes later, after the foggy feeling wore off, she realized that she'd been brought to a hospital.
She felt the urge to move, but rethought the idea when she realized that her lower body was numb. She called out for a nurse or attendant to bring her some coffee for her pounding headache, and a talking medicine cabinet floated to her bedside.
Damn it! She was here in their world.
" Aunt Petunia," Harry said rushing to her side urgently. She saw that family of redheads enter behind Harry to support him.
" How did I get here?" she asked. She knew perfectly well how she got where she was, but she wanted to know how just much he knew about her and the reason that she was here.
" I called for help, but I forgot that they were repairing the lines from last night's storm, so I got to the Weasleys, and they brought you here. It was a strange thing, though, the way that they admitted you without asking any questions. Normally, muggles are a special case around here. In fact, I'd thought to ask Mr. Weasley if he could bring you to a muggle hospital, but I panicked, and let him bring you to the nearest place that he was familiar with. "
" Why didn't you get Mr. Prentice or Mrs. Figg? Didn't you ever stop to think that I could become the slightest bit unnerved by seeing medicine cabinets fly around while I'm trying to recover?" She knew that he meant her only the best, but she was having malicious fun until she caught sight of Dumbledore.
" It's good to see you, Mrs. Dursley," he said.
She could tell that this wasn't going to be good. She knew enough of him by now to be suspicious of his amiable tone. It usually indicated that he was plotting something. A sense of panic erupted through her like a mid day geyser, and she burst out,
" Look, whatever you're up to, it won't work! I don't yield to blackmailers, no matter how many secrets of mine they know." That was great! She'd just blown herself out of the water, but wait a minute. That was probably what he wanted all along, and she was stupid enough to play into the center of his greasy palm. 'Curse you, old man!' she thought.
" Contrary to what you may think, Mrs. Dursley, I want nothing more than for you to take a little time to recover," he said calmly.
There it was again, that tone. He wasn't going to get her again. No, sir! She was going to play it off just as or even more smoothly than he was doing presently. She watched him pace back and forth patiently as if he were trying to figure out what to say next. Gosh, that was unnerving! He was annoying her so that she couldn't even bother to pay attention to what he began to tell her.
" All right!" she shouted. "That's enough! Since you want the boy and everyone else under heaven to know the truth, then I'll be the one to tell it! I won't have you trying to twist facts around."
Everyone in the room looked around at her as if she 'd just taken leave of her senses. She didn' care. The only way to stop the old man was to beat him at his own game. Truth will out!
" Does any of you know what a recessive trait is?" she asked irritably.
She saw them all shake their heads. Okay, explaining this was going to be far more difficult than she thought.
" All right, then. Let's start at the beginning. Most of you are normal magic folk who share a dominant or latent trait that allows you to express magic externally. I, on the other hand, carry a recessive trait, which unfortunately, only allows me to express psychic force.
Now for the most part, I am clairvoyant. The unfortunate thing about being clairvoyant was that I had a father who took to gambling when he could no longer find work.
My personal tragedy came about because I was most imprudent in making a display of talent at age five. I first discovered it when mum was pregnant with Lily. Dad said that the baby was a boy, but I knew that it would be a girl. A week later, Lily was born.
I drew pictures of my baby sister, and pinned them on the refrigerator before they brought her home. My parents were impressed.
Now, my mother enjoyed my displays of talent for the sheer joy of the marvel, but my father sought these gifts out as a means for personal gain. He was at me night after night, second after second, pestering me for the names of winning horses or the winning lottery numbers. Quite frankly, it was frightening. At age ten, I tried with all of my might to put a stop to dad's behavior, but he got violent with me. You see, in his mind, he'd worked all of his life to give to the family, and it was time for me to give back to him.
Well, anyway to get to the real turning point of this fiasco, I'll tell you about my fifteenth birthday. Dad came home with a set of presents for me. Some were clothes, and others were perfume and make-up. He told me to get dressed and to put on the nice clothes. He also instructed me to put on the make-up as well.
He brought me down to a dock side casino in Glover's Wharf." She stopped talking and started to cry from embarrassment. Lord, what they must think of her for having gone to a seedy part of town like that.
" It's okay, dear," the red head woman said. She patted Petunia's heaving back and gave her a hug to stop her sniffling.
When Petunia finished, she said," he ordered me to write down a progressive list of numbers for him to roll when he approached the craps table. During the first hour, we made over seven thousand dollars. Now you know that when a person has luck that is too good, people become suspicious. That is why the owner had one of the waitresses keep an eye on dad and me. She escorted me to a table to sit down and have a drink. I knew that I wasn't old enough to imbibe alcohol, but the sheer thrill of feeling grown-up was simply exhilarating. In fact it was so exhilarating that I was too green and naïve to realize that she was loosening my tongue. So a bit later, I could barely stand up. I handed her numeric plays to bring to dad. Unbeknownst to me, he began losing and going into the hole. By the time my inebriation wore off, dad and I were sitting in the back room of the casino with the owner, a man by the name of Gus Fagin.
He informed us that dad was forty thousand in the hole. He wanted to know how we planned to pay it back. Dad suggested the house, but Gus didn't want it. Instead, he proposed that I work for him during my time away from Hogwarts. He wanted me to screen all his clients to tell him which ones were planning to cheat. He planned on paying me minimum wage."
" But how were you supposed to pay him back at that rate?" Fred asked.
" That was the catch. He never intended for me to be able to pay him back. He wanted me to be stuck there. I took shifts waiting tables to meet the debt better, and I can't tell you just how flirtatious the male customers could be. But anyway, a night came when I was so busy waiting tables that I forgot to screen a couple who had won over seventy thousand dollars. Gus brought them back, and then called for me to join him. He asked me how it was possible for them to win all that money, when he'd recently rigged the machines.
I confessed that I hadn't been screening the people, as I should, so he slapped me. That, however, was only the crust outside the bread.
The real problem came when he decided how he should deal with Donna and James, the young couple. He decided to play a sadistic mind game with me. He tied a blindfold around my eyes and had his lackeys pour liquor down my throat until I was finally drunk. That way he could be sure of my honesty. He told me to grope their palms and to tell him what would happen to them.
I answered that fishermen would find them after they'd been found stuffed in crates and drowned. Gus fulfilled this premonition, and although my memory was fuzzy, I knew that I had had something to do with their deaths when they'd later been discovered."
"Dear, Lord! Just what kind of monster was your father to let you be exposed to all this?" Aruthur Weasley asked.
" The kind that I arranged to have killed," she said. She watched the shock return to everyone's faces when she said this.
" You-Know-Who was rising at the time, and I wanted desperately to shake Gus. So I began going to Knockturn Alley to learn how to use my other gifts. I'd met a few future Death Eaters down there, and made alliances by doing favors for them like predicting where they should invest their money during the recession. In turn, they offered to assist me with my problem. I asked them to deal with Gus and dad. They went to the casino, and they wated until it was empty to cast a killing curse on Gus. He died of apoplexy, and they blew the casino up. Two weeks later, they went to the house to do dad, but I wasn't aware that mum would come home from my grandparents' farm so early. I didn't mean for her to die," she said covering her eyes as she burst into tears.
Harry's bottom lip dropped, and he asked," did mum know what you did?'
" Yes. She went to Professor Dumbledore and the others to get help. He insisted that I change my face, and he had a friend remove my name from the magical registry. Lily accompanied me back to the other side, and helped me find a job. I met Vernon, and you can guess the rest."
" Why did you feel that you had to go to such extremes to deal with your problems?" Harry asked.
" Harry, you must understand. Petunia didn't have the supportive connections that you do, and as I've told you before Petunia, your mother didn't die in the blast that killed your father. She died while trying to go inside the house to rescue him."
" But even still, that was just as good as having had her killed," Harry said.
" No, not necessarily. She was stubborn when it came to helping those that she loved. People tried to hold her back, but she insisted that her place be beside your grandfather during his time of need."
" You belong in Azkaban. You're just as evil as those Death Eaters you contracted with. I say we give her some veritaserum and make her tell us who the rest of the Death Eater party are!" Harry shouted. He always believed that she was awful, but he never knew just how awful she was until now. You would have thought that she'd be kinder to him given the fact that his mum and Dumbledore had protected her sorry arse from seeing the inside of Azkaban prison.
His mind switched back to Sirius. Why did Fate play so many twisted games? She and Sirius were both his guardians, and he, the innocent party, got sent to prison, while, she, a stinking murderess, got to escape and walk freely among decent people. He hated her more now than he ever had in his life. One way or another, he would make sure that she payed, whether it be by the hand of Moody or Tonks bringing her in, or his own hand. He promised himself as much.
