Free Harry Potter 02 - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by authors_sort

we’ll be able to follow the Hogwarts Express.’
    And they marched off through the crowd of curious Muggles, out of the station and back into the side road where the old Ford Anglia was parked.
    Ron unlocked the cavernous boot with a series of taps from his wand. They heaved their trunks back in, put Hedwig on the back seat and got into the front.
    ‘Check 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.
    ‘OK,’ 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.
    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 pummelled 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. ‘OK, we’ll just have to check on it every half an 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 aeroplanes,’ 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 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 further and further north, each dip beneath the clouds showing them a different view. London was soon far behind them, replaced by neat green fields which gave way in turn to wide, purplish moors, villages with tiny toy churches and a great city alive with cars like multi-coloured ants.
    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 jumpers, 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 further, can it?’ croaked Ron, hours later still, as the sun started