Free Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling Page B

cavernous trunk with a series of taps from his wand. They heaved their luggage back in, put Hedwig on the back seat, and got into the front.
          “Check that no one’s watching,” said Ron, starting the ignition with another tap of his wand. Harry stuck his head out of the window: Traffic was rumbling along the main road ahead, but their street was empty.
          “Okay,” he said.
          Ron pressed a tiny silver button on the dashboard. The car around them vanished — and so did they. Harry could feel the seat vibrating beneath him, hear the engine, feel his hands on his knees and his glasses on his nose, but for all he could see, he had become a pair of eyeballs, floating a few feet above the ground in a dingy street full of parked cars.
          “Let’s go,” said Ron’s voice from his right.
          And the ground and the dirty buildings on either side fell away, dropping out of sight as the car rose; in seconds, the whole of London lay, smoky and glittering, below them.
     
          Then there was a popping noise and the car, Harry, and Ron reappeared.
          “Uh-oh,” said Ron, jabbing at the Invisibility Booster. “It’s faulty —”
          Both of them pummeled it. The car vanished. Then it flickered back again.
          “Hold on!” Ron yelled, and he slammed his foot on the accelerator; they shot straight into the low, woolly clouds and everything turned dull and foggy.
          “Now what?” said Harry, blinking at the solid mass of cloud pressing in on them from all sides.
          “We need to see the train to know what direction to go in,” said Ron.
          “Dip back down again — quickly —”
          They dropped back beneath the clouds and twisted around in their seats, squinting at the ground.
          “I can see it!” Harry yelled. “Right ahead — there!”
          The Hogwarts Express was streaking along below them like a scarlet snake.
          “Due north,” said Ron, checking the compass on the dashboard. “Okay, we’ll just have to check on it every half hour or so — hold on —”
          And they shot up through the clouds. A minute later, they burst out into a blaze of sunlight.
          It was a different world. The wheels of the car skimmed the sea of fluffy cloud, the sky a bright, endless blue under the blinding white sun.
          “All we’ve got to worry about now are airplanes,” said Ron.
          They looked at each other and started to laugh; for a long time, they couldn’t stop.
          It was as though they had been plunged into a fabulous dream. This, thought Harry, was surely the only way to travel — past swirls and turrets of snowy cloud, in a car full of hot, bright sunlight, with a fat pack of toffees in the glove compartment, and the prospect of seeing Fred’s and George’s jealous faces when they landed smoothly and spectacularly on the sweeping lawn in front of Hogwarts castle.
          They made regular checks on the train as they flew farther and farther north, each dip beneath the clouds showing them a different view. London was soon far behind them, replaced by neat green fields that gave way in turn to wide, purplish moors, a great city alive with cars like multicolored ants, villages with tiny toy churches.
          Several uneventful hours later, however, Harry had to admit that some of the fun was wearing off. The toffees had made them extremely thirsty and they had nothing to drink. He and Ron had pulled off their sweaters, but Harry’s T-shirt was sticking to the back of his seat and his glasses kept sliding down to the end of his sweaty nose. He had stopped noticing the fantastic cloud shapes now and was thinking longingly of the train miles below, where you could buy ice-cold pumpkin juice from a trolley pushed by a plump witch. Why hadn’t they been able to get onto platform nine and three-quarters?
          “Can’t be much