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// Chapter 3:  The Letters from Nowhere 
// Story: The Accidental Invasion 
// by computerneek 
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Earlier That Year…





“This is boring,” Dudley announced, and prowled away from the glass.
Harry sighed, watching him go, and looked at the snake behind the glass.  According to the sign he’d read while Dudley had been trying to make it move, it was a Boa Constrictor.  “I wonder if he would still think it was boring if the roles were reversed,” he mused aloud.
Very suddenly, the snake’s beady eyes opened, and it raised its head off the floor of its enclosure, looking at him.  Then…  it spoke.  It was badly distorted through the glass, but he was just able to make out the words.  “You can talk?”  It sounded surprised.
Harry blinked.  The snake could talk?  Was that something all snakes could do?  In any case, it would be rude not to answer.  “Well yeah,” he answered, after a second’s pause.  “Dudley would have my head if I couldn’t.”
The snake laughed.  It was a very strange thing to watch.  “That prat?  He wouldn’t know a jovial greeting from an angry snarl.”  It glared at Dudley, who was staring into a different enclosure with a much smaller snake that was hissing furiously at him.  The one in the next enclosure was goofing off for Piers.
“He wouldn’t?” Harry asked, looking back at the snake.
The snake smiled.  “No, he wouldn’t.  After all, young Speaker, I can understand English…  even if I can’t speak it.”
“Dudley!  Mr. Dursley!  Come and look at this snake!  You won’t believe what it’s doing!”
The sudden yell made both Harry and the Boa Constrictor jump.
For as large and as heavy as Dudley was, he could move alarmingly quickly on occasion.  It took him mere seconds to cross the gap between the enclosures and elbow Harry aside.  “Out of the way, you!”
For perhaps a fraction of a second, Harry saw Piers and Dudley, faces flat against the glass while the snake yawned theatrically at them.
Then the next second, both of them were leaping away from the enclosure with matching shrieks of terror.  The snake, on the other hand, merely looked surprised.
Harry sat up, and gasped.  The glass front of the enclosure had disappeared.
The snake leaned out to rest against the railing that Dudley and Piers had been leaning against moments before, causing the two boys to scramble to their feet and flee, and looked around the room.  “Where did the glass go?” it asked, no longer distorted.
“No idea,” Harry answered.
It shrugged- though exactly how, Harry couldn’t have explained.  It didn’t exactly have shoulders.  “Maybe you vanished it?” it mused.  “Accidentally, of course.”
“Vanished?” Harry repeated, confused.
It looked at him and began slithering out onto the floor, causing everyone else in the reptile house to scream and run for the exits.  “You do know about accidental magic, right…?”  It flicked its tongue.  “Ahh, I see.  Not quite Hogwarts age.  And living with muggles, I bet?”
Harry stared dumbly at the snake.  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said honestly.





“Harry was talking to it, weren’t you, Harry?”
It was Piers, once they had gotten back into the car.
Harry, knowing he was already in for his longest punishment yet, decided to have a bit of fun while he still could.  “Well no,” he answered.  “I wasn’t.  It was talking to me.”





Back in Modern Times...





“Oy!” Harry cried, as Vernon took his letter right out of his hands.  “That’s mine!”
“Who’d be writing to you?” Vernon asked.
“I’d like to know that too,” Harry retorted.
“P-P-Petunia?”
Harry blinked, and stared at his uncle.  Why was he demonstrating the strongest fear reaction Harry had ever seen out of him, just from the content of a letter?  “What, is it from that snake?” Harry asked.
They ignored him.  Petunia peered at the letter.  “V-Vernon!”
“H-H-Harry,” Harry said flatly.
“I want to read that letter,” Dudley demanded.
“Out!” Vernon barked at both him and Dudley.





“It was addressed to you by mistake,” Vernon informed Harry.  He had come to visit him in his cupboard.  “I have burned it.”
“Well I hope it was intended for you then,” Harry informed him.  “That’d be a crime if it wasn’t.”
Vernon ignored him, and took a deep breath.  “Er- About this cupboard.  Your aunt and I have been thinking…  that you’re really getting a bit big for it.”
Harry raised an eyebrow.  He’d had to curl up on his little cot for the last three years because he was too tall to lay down flat- even on the floor- in this cupboard.
Vernon wasn’t done.  “We think it might be nice if you moved into Dudley’s second bedroom.”
His other eyebrow raised as well.  Might be nice?  Since when was anything to do with Harry ‘nice’?  Then he frowned, and lowered both eyebrows.  “This is because of that letter, isn’t it?”
Vernon bristled, but Harry saw a flash of fear in his eyes.  “Don’t ask questions!  Now get your stuff upstairs, now.”





“There’s another one!  Mr. H Potter, the smallest bedroom, number four, Privet Drive-!”
Harry looked up, eyebrows raised, as Vernon let out a strangled cry and ran to battle Dudley for the mail.
Harry, however, didn’t move.  Whoever had sent it had definitely not addressed it to him by mistake…  and they seemed to know both that he hadn’t gotten it, and that he had been moved, and so were trying again.
He frowned at his bacon.  How many attempts would they make before they gave up?  Would they give up?  How hard would it be to snag one before Vernon detected it, if they didn’t?
His scowl grew.  The saying went, ‘the third time's the charm’.  They probably wouldn’t stop at two attempts, but three.  He’d have to try to make sure the third was successful.





Harry stopped when he reached the main floor, near the door.  The faint light drifting in through the windows from the dark night was suggesting to him that there was something on the floor by the door- and now that he had stopped moving, he thought he could hear something as well.  He crouched down low, crept a little closer, and peered at it.
It took him almost a full minute, but he finally determined that it was his uncle, in a sleeping bag.  He withdrew silently, wondering what on earth could be so dangerous that Vernon would go to this kind of length to keep him from reading it.  He didn’t think Vernon would have been this religious about it even if it told him he was a wizard or something; if it wasn’t true, it wasn’t true, and that was it.
But whatever it was, Harry was fast becoming certain that whatever was in that letter was very true.
He headed for the kitchen to make breakfast.





Harry gently prodded his uncle awake, a plate of food in his hand.  “Good morning,” he began.  “Breakfast is ready.  Do you want it here or in the kitchen?”
Before Vernon had the chance to answer, though, the mail slot clicked, and the morning mail landed right in Vernon’s lap.  Harry counted three envelopes addressed to him in that emerald green ink, but did not make a grab for any of them before Vernon ripped them to shreds.
Three of them?  That suggested that the sender wasn’t going to give up at three tries…  and would be sending progressively larger numbers until there were so many of them that one could go missing without anybody noticing.  He did have to wonder exactly what lengths Vernon would go to to keep him from stealing one.  Unlike the cupboard, his new bedroom was lit well enough for him to read behind a closed door, though cluttered with broken garbage.  Broken garbage that would be very convenient for hiding a stolen letter.
Vernon didn’t go to work that day- instead, he nailed up the mail slot.  “If they can’t deliver them, they’ll just give up.”
Harry scowled.  Sure, the postman would give up- but would the mystery sender, who clearly wasn’t the postman, be stopped by a sealed mail slot?





It was evident to Harry that they would not be stopped by the inability to push letters in through the mail slot.  A full dozen letters, all addressed in green ink, had made their way into the house.  They had been pushed under the door, slotted through the sides- and a couple even forced through the small window in the downstairs bathroom.  Harry, unfortunately, hadn’t been downstairs to see them in time, and so had been unable to rescue one.
Vernon stayed home again, this time to board up both doors, so no one could get out…  though didn’t touch the window.  While he worked, Harry watched the TV Vernon had left on, on a news channel.
It was a very interesting story.  Apparently, a very large number of funny-haired children, right about his age, had just appeared in the middle of London, not too far away, and were walking around the block to a dingy pub called the “Leaky Cauldron” that appeared on all the cameras and looked perfectly normal to Harry- except that the reporters kept assuring the broadcast that they couldn’t see the place with their naked eyes.





On Saturday, Harry might have made off with a letter had Petunia not been in the kitchen when he made lunch.  The very confused milkman had handed two dozen eggs to Petunia through the living room window- which had been a very good thing, because they’d been almost out.
Only, when Harry started cracking eggs, he found not egg whites and yolks but letters rolled up inside the eggshells.  Every single one of the two dozen eggs hosted a letter and, as Harry watched Petunia shred them all in the food processor, he had to ask how they had gotten inside the eggs, but he was ignored.
“Who on earth wants to talk to you this badly?” Dudley asked Harry, while Petunia poured the letter chips into a bowl for transfer to the fireplace.
“That’s a good question,” Harry answered.  “Maybe it’s that snake?”
Fortunately, neither Petunia nor Vernon seemed to notice that comment.