After she finished speaking, Aunt Petunia started toward the door behind Harry. Harry pressed his lips together slightly, his body swaying stiffly as he turned aside to let his hurried aunt pass. He stood dazedly in the kitchen for a while, wandering aimlessly back and forth, pulling open empty cupboards and shutting them again, hardly knowing what he was doing. Only after dawdling for a while did he slowly head for the living room.
Harry noticed the cupboard under the stairs where he had lived for ten years. Its little door now hung open weakly, and inside, piles of shoes and umbrellas lay scattered all over the floor, plainly having been ruthlessly abandoned after their owners had made their choices. Two spiders, their long legs moving leisurely, crawled out from within.
Compared with the room upstairs where he had not actually spent that much time, this cupboard stirred far more nostalgia in Harry. Without realizing it, he walked over and peered inside, then his gaze was caught by two rusty toy soldiers on the cement shelf in the cupboard.
The two wrought-iron toy soldiers sat beside two empty glass jars, one standing upright, the other toppled over on top of them. The standing soldier had one hand raised high with a longsword, while the other was tucked behind his back; the fallen soldier's waist was covered in red rust—for a very long time, these two toy soldiers had been Harry's only toys besides grass and stones.
Harry bent down and crawled into the cupboard. He took the two wrought-iron toy soldiers in his hand, and suddenly there came a deafening crash from upstairs. Harry jerked upright, and the top of his head hit the low doorframe with a bang. Rubbing his head, he crawled out of the cupboard and pulled