Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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CHAPTER TWO 
 
 
The Scar
Harry lay flat on his back, breathing hard as though he had been running. He had awoken from a 
vivid dream with his hands pressed over his face. The old scar on his forehead, which was 
shaped like a bolt of lightning, was burning beneath his fingers as though someone had just 
pressed a white-hot wire to his skin.
He sat up, one hand still on his scar, the other hand reaching out in the darkness for his glasses, 
which were on the bedside table. He put them on and his bedroom came into clearer focus, lit by 
a faint, misty orange light that was filtering through the curtains from the street lamp outside the 
window. 
Harry ran his fingers over the scar again. It was still painful. He turned on the lamp beside him, 
scrambled out of bed, crossed the room, opened his wardrobe, and peered into the mirror on the 
inside of the door. A skinny boy of fourteen looked back at him, his bright green eyes puzzled 
under his untidy black hair. He examined the lightning-bolt scar of his reflection more closely. It 
looked normal, but it was still stinging.
Harry tried to recall what he had been dreaming about before he had awoken. It had seemed so 
real… There had been two people he knew and one he didn’t… He concentrated hard, frowning, 
trying to remember… The dim picture of a darkened room came to him… There had been a 
snake on a hearth rug… a small man called Peter, nicknamed Wormtail… and a cold, high 
voice… the voice of Lord Voldemort. Harry felt as though an ice cube had slipped down into his 
stomach at the very thought…
He closed his eyes tightly and tried to remember what Voldemort had looked like, but it was 
impossible… All Harry knew was that at the moment when Voldemort’s chair had swung 
around, and he, Harry, had seen what was sitting in it, he had felt a spasm of horror, which had 
awoken him… or had that been the pain in his scar? 
And who had the old man been? For there had definitely been an old man; Harry had watched 
him fall to the ground. It was all becoming confused. Harry put his face into his hands, blocking 
out his bedroom, trying to hold on to the picture of that dimly lit room, but it was like trying to 
keep water in his cupped hands; the details were now trickling away as fast as he tried to hold on 
to them… Voldemort and Wormtail had been talking about someone they had killed, though 
Harry could not remember the name… and they had been plotting to kill someone else… him! 
Harry took his face out of his hands, opened his eyes, and stared around his bedroom as though 
expecting to see something unusual there. As it happened, there was an extraordinary number of 
unusual things in this room. A large wooden trunk stood open at the foot of his bed, revealing a 
cauldron, broomstick, black robes, and assorted spellbooks. Rolls of parchment littered that part 
of his desk that was not taken up by the large, empty cage in which his snowy owl, Hedwig, 
usually perched. On the floor beside his bed a book lay open; Harry had been reading it before he 

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fell asleep last night. The pictures in this book were all moving. Men in bright orange robes were 
zooming in and out of sight on broomsticks, throwing a red ball to one another. 
Harry walked over to the book, picked it up, and watched on of the wizards score a spectacular 
goal by putting the ball through a fifty-foot-high hoop. Then he snapped the book shut. Even 
Quidditch — in Harry’s opinion, the best sport in the world — couldn’t distract him at the 
moment. He placed Flying with the Cannons on his bedside table, crossed to the window, and 
drew back the curtains to survey the street below. 
Privet Drive looked exactly as a respectable suburban street would be expected to look in the 
early hours of Saturday morning. All the curtains were closed. As far as Harry could see through 
the darkness, there wasn’t a living creature in sight, not even a cat. 
And yet… and yet… Harry went restlessly back to the bed and sat down on it, running a finger 
over his scar again. It wasn’t the pain that bothered him; Harry was no stranger to pain and 
injury. He had lost all the bones from his right arm once and had them painfully regrown in a 
night. The same arm had been pierced by a venomous foot-long fang not long afterward. Only 
last year Harry had fallen fifty feet from an airborn broomstick. He was used to bizarre accidents 
and injuries; they were unavoidable if you attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and 
Wizardry and had a knack for attracting a lot of trouble.
No, the thing that was bothering Harry was the last time his scar had hurt him, it had been 
because Voldemort had been close by… But Voldemort couldn’t be here, now… The idea of 
Voldemort lurking in Privet Drive was absurd, impossible…
Harry listened closely to the silence around him. Was he half expecting to hear the creak of a 
stair or the swish of a cloak? And then he jumped slightly as he heard his cousin Dudley give a 
tremendous grunting snore from the next room. 
Harry shook himself mentally; he was being stupid. There was no one in the house with him 
except Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley, and they were plainly still asleep, their dreams 
untroubled and painless. 
Asleep was the way Harry liked the Dursleys best; it wasn’t as though they were ever any help to 
him awake. Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley were Harry’s only living relatives. They 
were Muggles who hated and despised magic in any form, which meant that Harry was about as 
welcome in their house as dry rot. They had explained away Harry’s long absences at Hogwarts 
over the last three years by telling everyone that he went to St. Brutus’s Secure Center for 
Incurably Criminal Boys. They knew perfectly well that, as an underage wizard, Harry wasn’t 
allowed to use magic outside Hogwarts, but they were still apt to blame him for anything that 
went wrong about the house. Harry had never been able to confide in them or tell them anything 
about his life in the wizarding world. The very idea of going to them when they awoke, and 
telling them about his scar hurting him, and about his worries about Voldemort, was laughable.

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And yet it was because of Voldemort that Harry had come to live with the Dursleys in the first 
place. If it hadn’t been for Voldemort, Harry would not have had the lightning scar on his 
forehead. If it hadn’t been for Voldemort, Harry would still have had parents…
Harry had been a year old the night that Voldemort — the most powerful Dark wizard for a 
century, a wizard who had been gaining power steadily for eleven years — arrived at his house 
and killed his father and mother. Voldemort had then turned his wand on Harry; he had 
performed the curse that had disposed of many full-grown witches and wizards in his steady rise 
to power — and, incredibly, it had not worked. Instead of killing the small boy, the curse had 
rebounded upon Voldemort. Harry had survived with nothing but a lightning-shaped cut on his 
forehead, and Voldemort had been reduced to something barely alive. His powers gone, his life 
almost extinguished, Voldemort had fled; the terror in which the secret community of witches 
and wizards had lived for so long had lifted, Voldemort’s followers had disbanded, and Harry 
Potter had become famous.
It had been enough of a shock for Harry to discover, on his eleventh birthday, that he was a 
wizard; it had been even more disconcerting to find out that everyone in the hidden wizarding 
world knew his name. Harry had arrived at Hogwarts to find that heads turned and whispers 
followed him wherever he went. But he was used to it now: At the end of this summer, he would 
be starting his fourth year at Hogwarts, and Harry was already counting the days until he would 
be back at the castle again. 
But there was still a fortnight to go before he went back to school. He looked hopelessly around 
his room again, and his eye paused on the birthday cards his two best friends had sent him at the 
end of July. What would they say if Harry wrote to them and told them about his scar hurting? 
At once, Hermione Granger’s voice seemed to fill his head, shrill and panicky. 
“Your scar hurt? Harry, that’s really serious… Write to Professor Dumbledore! And I’ll go and 
check Common Magical Ailments and Afflictions… Maybe there’s something in there about 
curse scars…” 
Yes, that would be Hermione’s advice: Go straight to the headmaster of Hogwarts, and in the 
meantime, consult a book. Harry stared out of the window at the inky blue-black sky. He 
doubted very much whether a book could help him now. As far as he knew, he was the only 
living person to have survived a curse like Voldemort’s; it was highly unlikely, therefore, that he 
would find his symptoms listed in Common Magical Ailments and Afflictions. As for informing 
the headmaster, Harry had no idea where Dumbledore went during the summer holidays. He 
amused himself for a moment, picturing Dumbledore, with his long silver beard, full length 
wizard’s robes, and pointed hat, stretched out on a beach somewhere, rubbing suntan lotion onto 
his long crooked nose. Wherever Dumbledore was, though, Harry was sure that Hedwig would 
be able to find him; Harry’s owl had never yet failed to deliver a letter to anyone, even without 
an address. But what would he write?