Chapter Two

Vernon Myles Dursley was no stranger to prisons. Ever since his fateful sophomore year in college, he had been tried, and usually found guilty of all sorts of misdemeanors, and had found himself sentenced to varying amounts of time in prison.

The son of Miles Dursley, a successful businessman and Mary Myla-Dursley, no one who had known the well-tempered, Bach-loving child that he had been would ever have guessed that he could have grown up to be the man that most of society considered a dangerous person, but he had, and it had started in college.

He had fallen for a young lady by the name of Helena, who was a tall, exotic sort of woman, with dark brown hair down to the small of her back, olive skin, and dark, intense eyes, and a killer smile. His love had not been mutual, however, and though he always told his friends he was going out with her, he discovered that a handsome young Russian had been the object of her affections. He had confronted her, claiming, for everyone present to hear, that she had been his girlfriend, had slept with him and had cheated on him. None of it had been true, of course, but it had unnerved the poor girl. That night, he paid her and her boyfriend a visit, held Nikolai at gunpoint and threatened his life, and proceeded to rape Helena mercilessly. Not satisfied, after he had finished with her, he made for Nikolai too, but Nikolai had run for campus security, and had managed to alert them before Vernon decided that Nikolai wasn't deserving of a rape, and unloaded the gun on the poor young man's head at point blank range. Terror and grief gripped the campus the following days, and Vernon was sentenced to two years in jail. His mother and father used their considerable wealth to post bail and bring his sentence down to a year and a quarter.

Vernon had ended up being released two days short of completing his sentence when his father passed away, and it wasn't long before he had faithfully completed his parole and was back living with his mother and back on the streets. His second arrest came when he was found guilty of drug possession, and was sentenced to 500 hours of community service. Not long after, however, he was found dealing drugs to rock celebrity junkies, and sentenced to a year in prison, with an additional charge of robbing from his own mother. Mary Myla, who had dropped the name Dursley after her husband's death again posted bail for her son, but since their main source of income was dry, and Mary Myla was unaware of her son using her money to buy the drugs, she was on the brink of bankruptcy.

His third, and most recent, arrest was a bit of a doubleheader. After completing his sentence, he went back to community life and had proven to be a good actor, taking a job at a Tesco supermarket not far from where he lived, and presenting himself as a respectable community member, even though those who watched the television regularly knew who he was. Nevertheless, he had ended up making friends with a fellow worker who was an attractive, but not exactly sexy young woman who lived with her husband and seven year old daughter. When she and her husband said that they were going on a vacation, he used his newfound ability as an actor to persuade her that he was very good with children and would look after their little girl, swearing that he would not hurt her. He had managed in the beginning at least, to uphold that promise, but on the last day of his tenure as a babysitter, had ended up kidnapping the child while she napped, and took her out into the woods where he first flashed her, then raped her, multiple times, before strangling her. When her parents got back, he was able to smoothly convince them that he was just as upset as they were by the girl's disappearance, and supported them in tracking down the perpetrator of the misdeed. After he had killed the girl, though, he had not done a good job of hiding the body, and her father, who the next day had gone for a walk in the same area Vernon had been, stumbled across the body of his lost daughter. People who debated how bad Vernon was constantly asked if even a man who appeared to have a heart of stone, would have trembled and been remorseful had he been able to see the girl's father weep as he did, cradling and kissing his daughter's corpse, regardless of the fact that her body was starting to show signs of having been dead for nearly 24 hours. The police were able to get sperm samples from the cadaver and match the semen found on the body to that of Vernon, but it wasn't until nearly a week later, when a hunter happened to stumble on Vernon mercilessly raping a twelve year old girl that they were able to catch him. He was sentenced to life in prison, and as he was led away, sneered at the fathers of the two girls, sobbing on each others' shoulders, and fought the impulse to growl at the mothers of the girls, whose grief was beyond tears, and who looked almost soulless. The woman who had worked with him at the Tesco sent him a glare of deepest loathing.

So that was how Vernon, now an inmate at Peterhead Prison, no longer known as Vernon, but as Prisoner 994750 at Peterhead, and 'Jackass' everywhere else, had come to be regarded as one of the most dangerous men in Britain. He shared a cell with a man who looked like a Rastafarian wannabe, and spoke in what was his own mad dialect. 987776 had been busted 17 times on various drug-related charges, and had most recently sodomized a ten year old boy—his nephew no less! But Vernon liked the man. He also came up with ridiculously complex handshakes that he would alter at least two times a day, as a means to say hello.

"Respect!" 987776 called out, waking Vernon up.

"Peace!" Vernon replied, sleepily.

"Dun habdh tuh ghad wukk," 987776 said ("we have to go to work")

"Mm," Vernon replied, noncommittally.

"An hahv a visit'er." ("And you have a visitor")

"Mm." He said again. But Vernon was curious. Who would visit him? His mother had come on occasion, and had again posted bail, pushing herself far over bankruptcy, but his sentence was only reduced by a single day.

"994750!" A guard called out crisply, "you have a visitor. Follow me." Vernon did so, and entered the meeting room. A screen stood in between them, but Vernon knew exactly who it was.

"I see you've hit your fair share of bad times too," Russell Owen Granger said, eyeing Vernon with cold amusement.

"And what in the world could make your day bad?" Vernon said none too warmly, "you were the successful dentist, remember, and I had to be called every swear in the book by…well, just about everybody!"

"How about discovering that the thing you thought to be your daughter is, in fact, the reincarnation of pure evil?!" Russell replied, his eyes flashing.

"Ooo, bad little girl, eh?" Vernon said delightedly, "can I put her in her place?"

"Not so fast, mate," Russell said laughing, "but yes, I will let you help me keep the girl in her place. But what I want to talk to you about is much more serious." He glanced around, to see that none of the guards were listening in. "Listen carefully, Vern, you and I have been close for a while now, and I think that with all that's been happening here, and discovering that there are people out there as evil as the girl…"

"How do you know?" Vernon cut him off curiously.

"Our neighbors are also like her." Russell said disgustedly. "Now, to continue. Obviously, they're a dangerous sort, and I'll be if our government is doing anything about it, not to mention every other thing that goes wrong around here. I want to instigate some change around here, but we need a new leader. Someone who knows right from wrong, and can deal with what is wrong."

"Who would that be? I was under the impression that each new politician was as corrupt as the old one."

"Isn't obvious? I'm talking about you, fool."

"Me?"

"Since when has history proven that fear didn't work as a means to motivate a peoples to follow our orders? We'll have Britain eating out of our hands, and we can get rid of the evil beings to whom she belongs. You, my friend, are the best fearmonger I've ever known; you'd be perfect."

"Okay, so what do we do then?"

"I use my contacts in the justice system to get you out of here, then we find a place to base our operations. My wife thinks we should do it from our house, but she doesn't understand the delicacies of our operation. We need a place few people would rightfully go. I was thinking of the house your mother got when she paid your last bail."

"And your reason for that is…?"

"Vern, she's two pennies away from living in a homeless shelter. No sane person who isn't as poor as she is would ever go there, so we would have every advantage to plot our schemes undetected."

"Was Mum willing to accommodate us?"

"I've already spoken to her about it, and she said she was delighted. Decent people are so easy to manipulate. I'm glad you weren't one of them, Vern." Vernon replied with three words:

"Let's do it."

Three weeks later, Russell Granger bribed the best lawyers he could find, and Vernon Dursley's release was signed, on the promise that he would serve 2,500 or more hours of supervised community service. Vernon agreed, though he did not understand why Russell Granger appeared delighted at the terms upon which Vernon's release was set upon. Nevertheless, he was happy to bed down that night in a different bed, and felt happy that at long last, he would be doing something to right the wrongs he'd had to live through.