"J. K. Rowling - The Prisoner of Azbakan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowling J. K)

under his bed; put the flashlight, A History of Magic, his essay, quill,
and ink inside it; got out of bed; and hid the lot under a loose
floorboard under his bed. Then he stood up, stretched, and checked the
time on the luminous alarm clock on his bedside table.

It was one o'clock in the morning. Harry's stomach gave a funny jolt. He
had been thirteen years old, without realizing it, for a whole hour.

Yet another unusual thing about Harry was how little he looked forward
to his birthdays. He had never received a birthday card in his life. The
Dursleys had completely ignored his last two birthdays, and he had no
reason to suppose they would remember this one.

Harry walked across the dark room, past Hedwig's large, empty cage, to
the open window. He leaned on the sill, the cool night air pleasant on
his face after a long time under the blankets. Hedwig had been absent
for two nights now. Harry wasn't worried about her: she'd been gone this
long before. But he hoped she'd be back soon -- she was the only living
creature in this house who didn't flinch at the sight of him.

Harry, though still rather small and skinny for his age, had grown a few
inches over the last year. His jet-black hair, however, was just as it
always had been -- stubbornly untidy, whatever he did to it. The eyes
behind his glasses were bright green, and on his forehead, clearly
visible through his hair, was a thin scar, shaped like a bolt of
lightning.

Of all the unusual things about Harry, this scar was the most
extraordinary of all. It was not, as the Dursleys had pretended for ten
years, a souvenir of the car crash that had killed Harry's parents,
because Lily and James Potter had not died in a car crash. They had been
murdered, murdered by the most feared Dark wizard for a hundred years,
Lord Voldemort. Harry had escaped from the same attack with nothing more
than a scar on his forehead, where Voldemort's curse, instead of killing
him, had rebounded upon its originator. Barely alive, Voldemort had
fled....

But Harry had come face-to-face with him at Hogwarts. Remembering their
last meeting as he stood at the dark window, Harry had to admit he was
lucky even to have reached his thirteenth birthday.

He scanned the starry sky for a sign of Hedwig, perhaps soaring

back to him with a dead mouse dangling from her beak, expecting praise.
Gazing absently over the rooftops, it was a few seconds before Harry
realized what he was seeing.

Silhouetted against the golden moon, and growing larger every moment,
was a large, strangely lopsided creature, and it was flapping in Harry's