Chapter Two - Of Snakes and Dudders

Harry Plot-Holes would like everyone to believe that he had, for the best part of his short and largely insignificant life, been grossly mistreated by his aunt, uncle and cousin Dudder. He would like everyone to believe that he has spent the last eleven years locked up in a cupboard under the stairs with only the spiders for company. He would like everyone to believe that no one ever remembers his birthday and that nobody, but nobody, has had a childhood quite as unfulfilled, miserable or insignificant as he.

These are, in fact, lies. Fabrications. Utter porkies. Pleas for attention from a lonely little boy with a bad hair cut, bad glasses that wouldn't look out of place in a 'should have gone to specsavers' advert and an oddly shaped scar on his forehead - but you already know about that, right?

Harry Plot-Holes was NOT mistreated, he did NOT sleep in the cupboard under the stairs, but that is not to say that his family did NOT dislike him. They DID dislike him - they disliked him a LOT. They disliked him about as much as one dislikes the messy little presents next doors' dog leaves on the front lawn, or that spider that is the biggest arachnid EVER that insists on waiting for you in the bath. Take the doggy do, add it to the spider, multiply it by a tub full of wriggling maggots and you may get some idea of just how much they disliked him.

However, they didn't dare mistreat him, and this was because of something they had feared for a very long time, something to do with our hapless hero, something they saw as potentially dangerous. Secretly they feared that, someday soon, they would get a knock on the door from an organisation that they did NOT want their neighbours to see them associated with. And that organisation ... that organisation that they were so desperately afraid of ... was ...

Social Services.

The truth was that Harry had, almost from the moment he could walk and talk, owned a slip of paper with the number for Childline printed on it in very large numerals - and he had wasted no time in learning that flashing this said piece of paper in front of his terrified guardian's eyes was usually enough to get him whatever he wanted.

Harry had the biggest bedroom. He had numerous expensive games and toys that he had blackmailed his aunt and uncle (via said slip of paper) into buying for him.

Oh, and for the record, Dudder Dursley is a WIMP. A coward. A spotty, overweight kid whose parents are too busy stuffing food down his gullet to see just how pathetically miserable he is or how much he would prefer to curl up in some inconspicuous corner with a book than attend the boxing lessons they force him to go to once a week.

This, of course, makes him an easy target for Harry Plot-Holes who now, courtesy of some rather graphic descriptions of foster home life on his part, now enjoyed unlimited access to all of Dudders' games and toys, too.

The Dursleys had tried everything imaginable to thwart Harry's threats to shop them to the authorities. They had tried locking him in the cupboard, but he had screamed the house down and three days without a toilet break had had some rather undesirable results. They had tried denying him access to phones, but hadn't counted on him aquiring a mobile from one of his rather dodgy friends at school. They had tried pretending to be nice to him, but it didn't wash with our suspicious hero ... so now they employed a tried and tested method employed by thousands of people everywhere...

They simply ignored him and hoped that he would go away.

Their prayers, as we all know, were about to be answered - but in a most unusual and unexpected way.

To tell this story we must start with a typical day in the Dursley household - well, not a typical day, it just so happened to be Dudder's birthday and the Dursleys, not being known for thought or originality, had organised the same thing that they had organised every year - a trip to the zoo.

They had done one thing to make their son's special day better than usual, though - they had devised a cunning plan, a cunning plan that would insure that the trouble-making Harry would not be around to get up to his usual hobby of Dudder-baiting and, well, troublemaking. There happened to be an elderly lady living on the Dursley's street, an old lady named Mrs. Brigg - an old lady named Mrs. Brig who, thanks to a carefully placed foot on Uncle Vernix's part, had tripped while walking home from the shops and broken her leg, leaving the guiltless uncle to apologise profusely and offer to send his nephew around to help her around the house. This, conveniently, happened to happen on the day before Dudder's birthday.

Harry had tried everything to get his aunt and uncle to take him to the zoo. He'd screamed, he'd been sick on purpose, he'd thrown Dudder's pet turtle through the greenhouse roof, he'd let Dudder's parrot out of its cage, broken his toy rifle, put his foot through the tv, blamed it all on Dudders, etc, etc. But to no avail. There was simply no getting around the fact that Mrs.Brigg was expecting him.

So Harry tried something desperate ... he got his mobile phone out, he dialed a number, he glared defiantly at his aunt and uncle, put the phone to his ear ...

And had Mrs. Brigg put into a nursing home.

There was nothing for it - the Dursley's couldn't risk leaving Harry alone in the house (last time he had thrown a HUGE party and completely trashed the place, not to mention somehow managing to demolish next door's chimney), they simply had to admit defeat and take him with them, much to Dudder's despair.

So that's how Harry came to be at the zoo, smirking and waving that cherished Childline slip around to get the biggest and most expensive icecream the shop had to sell, a giant stuffed elephant, sweets, a vip pass into the monkey house, etc, etc, etc. But it was when the entered the snake house (a very BAD idea on the part of uncle Vernix, given Harry's delinquent personality) that things started to go very, VERY wrong.

It just so happened that there was a new employee in the snake house - a very YOUNG employee who happened to have very little knowledge of how to look after snakes and who had been rather irresponsibly left to fend for himself with some of the larger specimens on display. Luckily, the snakes were rather disinclined to bother with attacking someone who was both skinny and spotty and hardly worth the effort of getting up to hunt, and so had left him alone whilst he nervously cleaned out their cages. Unluckily (for Dudder) the hapless snake carer had forgotten to lock the sliding door to the boa constrictor's cage.

Now, Harry Plot-Holes was hardly the sort of boy who would ignore an oportunity such as this. Smirking evily, he slipped up to the cage, when the keeper wasn't looking, and quietly slipped the door open. Fortunately he was, like the keeper, extremely skinny, so the snake was just as disinclined to attack him.

"Hey, Dudder!" Harry roared, "Come here!"

Dudder waddled up apprehensively.

"That keeper's sure done a great job," said our sneaky hero, "the glass is so clean that you can't see it's there, don't you agree?"

Dudder nodded nervously.

"You know," said Harry, a wicked glint in his eye, "I bet that if you lean on the glass, the snake will come up and say hello."

"I dunno..." Dudder knew well enough by now that Harry was not to be trusted.

"Now, Dudder," said Harry in a hurt voice, "I know I bully you sometimes, but surely you don't believe that I, Harry, your loving cousin, would be so mean as to do something nasty on your birthday. I'm simply trying to be nice. Believe me, it won't happen again for a whole year, so I'd make the most of it if I were you."

Poor Dudder, who was always eager to please and was naiive enough to believe that his cousin might just be telling him the truth (for once), put his hands out to lean against the glass that wasn't there ... and fell through.

Now Dudder, unlike Harry and the keeper, had quite a bit of flesh on his body and, unfortunately for him, it was often suggested that he rather resembled a pig. Even more unfortunately, the boa constrictor just so happened to have very poor eyesight (as most snakes do) and a rather strong taste for pork. Dudder reacted rather quickly when he saw the supersized serpent slithering towards him and turned to get back out of the cage - only to see horrible Harry grinning at him from the other side of a very solid, very real pane of glass.

Next second, the snake had grabbed him.

"DUDDER!" Roared Uncle Vernix.

"DUDDER!" Roared Aunt Petulant.

"BINKI!" Roared the zoo keeper, who was rather fond of the hungry snake and very careful over his diet.

"Binki?" Queried everyone in the snake house (except Dudder, who was, by now, being suffocated).

"But the glass!" spluttered the spotty keeper, "where'd the glass go?"

"Vanished," said Harry innocently, "completely vanished, just like that, honestly, you'd think it was magic!"

You will, perhaps, be relieved to hear that Dudders was eventually rescued from the snake - but only because the creature seized its chance at escape when the cage was, once again, opened (it really rather hated the zoo and did not return its spotty admirer's affections), slithered out into the carpark and crushed Uncle Vernix's car into the size of a dustbin. The zoo got sued by almost everyone in the snake house (and a fair few who got scared when they saw the snake slithering out in the open, too) and hadto close down. The Dursley's recieved two thousand pounds in compensation(which Harry nicked) for the injuries and trauma Dudder suffered, the snake, allegedly, was spotted some days later boarding a boat destined for Brazil and Mrs. Brigg won the lottery, was able to move out of her nursing home and into a mansion, where she was reunited with her precious catsand filed a law suit against Uncle Vernon for GBH ... and won.

Harry Plot-Holes, of course, refused to give back the money he had stolen - meaning that the Dursley's were not only extremely tramatised, but also extremely out of pocket. Even more unfortunately, Harry opted to spend his illgotten wealth on a snake - meaning that poor Dudder locked himself in his room for weeks and refused to come out - meaning that he lost an extraordinary amount of weight, meaning that he won an award from the local paper and received two thousand pounds (which Harry nicked).

So all's well that ends well ... I think...

A/N: Whew! Another chapter ... Goddess, I hope I'm not embarassing myself too much :D

Thank you for your reviews, I hope you enjoyed this chapter - I enjoyed writing it. If you didn't enjoy it, feel free to go and read something else :P just don't flame me, and please don't curse me :D

Blessed Be,

Andaren xxx