Dan wasn't usually this determined, if anything took more than 3 tries it wasn't worth doing, but not this time, he needed to talk to Phil. Everyday for a week he would go round to his house, knock on the door, peer through the windows, just trying to talk to him. The rare times the door would open, it would be Phil's mum, she would say that Phil wasn't in and that Dan should get of her premises immediately. Dan wasn't good at handling people so he would just do as he was told, but he would just return a few hours later.
On the 8th day he realised he must have done something very wrong. He knocked on the door and no one answered, this was to be expected, but as he sat in the driveway looking at the house he noticed something, it looked older, much older, like no one had lived in it for years. The windows were hastily boarded up and weeds grew up the stairs leading to the doorway. The back garden was the same. Overgrown and empty, no swing set, no action figures littering the lawn, just a carpet of dark, overgrown grass. The door hung loosely on it's hinges, broken enough for Dan to just pull it off. The house was just as he had suspected. There was no furniture, the walls where bare of pictures and the carpet and been stripped from the floor. Black mold crept up the side of one wall ending just before a set of light switches. He tried them all, only one bulb in the corner came to life, flickering for a second before leaving the room to drown in shadow once again. Dan hated what he was seeing, that house had always been a constant, when everything he could do seemed unbelievable, that house, Phil, had always been a reassurance that he wasn't alone, now he was just a freak standing in a ghost house.
He had nothing to do anymore. Hardly anyone new the house, it was right on the edge of town, and no one knew where they went. The thing that scared Dan the most was how little people seemed to care, the Lesters had kept themselves to themselves and that meant they were not to be worried about. Try as he might, Dan couldn't get people to pay attention, so he resolved to just sit on the doorstep incase someone came asking for them and he could find out who they were.
He was in luck, a man arrived not long after the disappearance. "'ello?" he said in a gruff voice, making Dan jump then back away in fear. The man was a giant, maybe not literally but he wasn't far from it, he even had a beard that went all the way down to his waist, as well as covering his mouth and nose. "Don't be scared" his voice was kind once you got over the initial shock of it "are you Dan Howell?". Words failed Dan at that moment and all he could do was nod "yeah, Dumbledore said you might be 'ere, i'm supposed to give you this", he handed Dan an envelope with curly green writing on it. He opened it cautiously, as though it was going to go off at any second, once he pulled it out he read it quickly, not believing any of it but wishing it were true. Once he finished he looked up, "why would you make this?" he said, trying not to sound too upset.
"You don't believe it?"
"Of course not"
"So you've never made anything happen? Never done anything that you couldn't believe when you were angry, or scared? Never seen anything?"
Dan swallowed, thinking back to that day, at this house, all those years ago, it did make sense. "So if this is really...what does it mean?"
"Dan - yer a wizard"