Read Online Harry Potter 06 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by authors_sort - Free Book Online Page B

been bewitched to do a Dark wizard’s bidding. Inferi have not been seen for a long time, however, not since Voldemort was last powerful … he killed enough people to make an army of them, of course. This is the place, Harry, just here …’
    They were nearing a small, neat stone house set in its own garden. Harry was too busy digesting the horrible idea of Inferi to have much attention left for anything else, but as they reached the front gate Dumbledore stopped dead and Harry walked into him.
    ‘Oh dear. Oh dear, dear, dear.’
    Harry followed his gaze up the carefully tended front path and felt his heart sink. The front door was hanging off its hinges.
    Dumbledore glanced up and down the street. It seemed quite deserted.
    ‘Wand out and follow me, Harry,’ he said quietly.
    He opened the gate and walked swiftly and silently up the garden path, Harry at his heels, then pushed the front door very slowly, his wand raised and at the ready.
    ‘Lumos.’
    Dumbledore’s wand-tip ignited, casting its light up a narrow hallway. To the left, another door stood open. Holding his illuminated wand aloft, Dumbledore walked into the sitting room with Harry right behind him.
    A scene of total devastation met their eyes. A grandfather clock lay splintered at their feet, its face cracked, its pendulum lying a little further away like a dropped sword. A piano was on its side, its keys strewn across the floor. The wreckage of a fallen chandelier glittered nearby. Cushions lay deflated, feathers oozing from slashes in their sides; fragments of glass and china lay like powder over everything. Dumbledore raised his wand even higher, so that its light was thrown upon the walls, where something darkly red and glutinous was spattered over the wallpaper. Harry’s small intake of breath made Dumbledore look round.
    ‘Not pretty, is it,’ he said heavily. ‘Yes, something horrible has happened here.’
    Dumbledore moved carefully into the middle of the room, scrutinising the wreckage at his feet. Harry followed, gazing around, half-scared of what he might see hidden behind the wreck of the piano or the overturned sofa, but there was no sign of a body.
    ‘Maybe there was a fight and – and they dragged him off, Professor?’ Harry suggested, trying not to imagine how badly wounded a man would have to be to leave those stains spattered halfway up the walls.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ said Dumbledore quietly, peering behind an overstuffed armchair lying on its side.
    ‘You mean he’s –?’
    ‘Still here somewhere? Yes.’
    And without warning, Dumbledore swooped, plunging the tip of his wand into the seat of the overstuffed armchair, which yelled, ‘Ouch!’
    ‘Good evening, Horace,’ said Dumbledore, straightening up again.
    Harry’s jaw dropped. Where a split second before there had been an armchair, there now crouched an enormously fat, bald old man who was massaging his lower belly and squinting up at Dumbledore with an aggrieved and watery eye.
    ‘There was no need to stick the wand in that hard,’ he said gruffly, clambering to his feet. ‘It hurt.’
    The wand-light sparkled on his shiny pate, his prominent eyes, his enormous, silver walrus-like moustache, and the highly polished buttons on the maroon velvet jacket he was wearing over a pair of lilac silk pyjamas. The top of his head barely reached Dumbledore’s chin.
    ‘What gave it away?’ he grunted as he staggered to his feet, still rubbing his lower belly. He seemed remarkably unabashed for a man who had just been discovered pretending to be an armchair.
    ‘My dear Horace,’ said Dumbledore, looking amused, ‘if the Death Eaters really had come to call, the Dark Mark would have been set over the house.’
    The wizard clapped a pudgy hand to his vast forehead.
    ‘The Dark Mark,’ he muttered. ‘Knew there was something … ah well. Wouldn’t have had time, anyway. I’d only just put the finishing touches to my upholstery when you entered the room.’
    He