TRIWIZARD TOURNAMENT 1 страница

Harry Potter

AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE

also by j. k. rowling

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Year One at Hogwarts

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Year Two at Hogwarts

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Year Three at Hogwarts

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Year Four at Hogwarts

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Year Five at Hogwarts

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Year Six at Hogwarts

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Year Seven at Hogwarts

Harry P otter

and the goblet of fire

J. K. Rowling

ILLUSTRATIONS BY M ary GrandPrй

ARTHUR A. LEVINE BOOKS

AN IMPRINT OF SCHOLASTIC Press.

T o Peter Rowling,

In Memory of Mr. Ridley And to Susan Sladden, Who helped Harry Out of his cupboard

Publishers since 1920.

SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and the LANTERN LOGO

are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

HARRY POTTER and all related characters and elements are trademarks of Warner Bros.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write

to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 555 Broadway, New York, NY 10012. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

Library of Congress catalog card number: 00-131084

ISBN 0-439-13959-7

Sequel to: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Summary: Fourteen-year-old Harry Potter joins the Weasleys at the Quidditch World Cup, then enters his fourth year at Hogwarts Academy where he is mysteriously entered in an unusual contest that challenges his wizarding skills, friendships and character,

amid signs that an old enemy is growing stronger.

40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 Printed in the U. S. A. 55

First American edition, July 2000

Contents

ONE

The Riddle House · 1

TWO

The Scar · 16

THREE

The Invitation · 26

FOUR

Back to the Burrow · 39

FIVE

Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes · 51

SIX

The Portkey · 65

SEVEN

Bagman and Crouch · 75

EIGHT

The Quidditch World Cup · 95

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Contents

NINE

The Dark Mark · 117

TEN

Mayhem at the Ministry · 145

ELEVEN

Aboard the Hogwarts Express · 158

TWELVE

The Triwizard Tournament · 171

THIRTEEN

Mad-Eye Moody · 193

FOURTEEN

The Unforgivable Curses · 209

FIFTEEN

Beauxbatons and Durmstrang · 228

SIXTEEN

The Goblet of Fire · 248

SEVENTEEN

The Four Champions · 272

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Contents

EIGHTEEN

The Weighing of the Wands · 228

NINETEEN

The Hungarian Horntail · 313

TWENTY

The First Task · 337

TWENTY-ONE

The House-Elf Liberation Front · 363

TWENTY-TWO

The Unexpected Task · 385

TWENTY-Three

The Yule Ball · 403

TWENTY-FOUR

Rita Skeeter’s Scoop · 433

TWENTY-FIVE

The Egg and the Eye · 458

TWENTY-SIX

The Second Task · 479

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Contents

TWENTY-SEVEN

Padfoot Returns · 509

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Madness of Mr. Crouch · 535

TWENTY-NINE

The Dream · 564

THIRTY

The Pensieve · 581

THIRTY-ONE

The Third Task · 605

THIRTY-TWO

Flesh, Blood, and Bone · 636

THIRTY-THREE

The Death Eaters · 644

THIRTY-FOUR

Priori Incantatem · 659

THIRTY-FIVE

Veritaserum · 670

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Contents

THIRTY-SIX

The Parting of the Ways · 692

THIRTY-SEVEN

The Beginning · 716

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Harry Potter

And the GOBLET of FIRE

C H A P T E R O N E

THE RIDDLE HOUSE

he villagers of Little Hangleton still called it “the Riddle

House, ” even though it had been many years since the Rid-

dle family had lived there. It stood on a hill overlooking the village, some of its windows boarded, tiles missing from its roof, and ivy spreading unchecked over its face. Once a fine-looking manor, and easily the largest and grandest building for miles around, the Rid- dle House was now damp, derelict, and unoccupied.

The Little Hangletons all agreed that the old house was “creepy. ” Half a century ago, something strange and horrible had happened there, something that the older inhabitants of the village still liked to discuss when topics for gossip were scarce. The story had been picked over so many times, and had been embroidered in so many places, that nobody was quite sure what the truth was anymore. Every version of the tale, however, started in the same place: Fifty years before, at daybreak on a fine summer’s morning, when the

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CHAPTER ONE

Riddle House had still been well kept and impressive, a maid had entered the drawing room to find all three Riddles dead.

The maid had run screaming down the hill into the village and roused as many people as she could.

“Lying there with their eyes wide open! Cold as ice! Still in their dinner things! ”

The police were summoned, and the whole of Little Hangleton had seethed with shocked curiosity and ill-disguised excitement. Nobody wasted their breath pretending to feel very sad about the Riddles, for they had been most unpopular. Elderly Mr. and Mrs. Riddle had been rich, snobbish, and rude, and their grown-up son, Tom, had been, if anything, worse. All the villagers cared about was the identity of their murderer — for plainly, three apparently healthy people did not all drop dead of natural causes on the same night.

The Hanged Man, the village pub, did a roaring trade that night; the whole village seemed to have turned out to discuss the murders. They were rewarded for leaving their firesides when the Riddles’ cook arrived dramatically in their midst and announced to the suddenly silent pub that a man called Frank Bryce had just been arrested.

“Frank! ” cried several people. “Never! ”

Frank Bryce was the Riddles’ gardener. He lived alone in a run- down cottage on the grounds of the Riddle House. Frank had come back from the war with a very stiff leg and a great dislike of crowds and loud noises, and had been working for the Riddles ever since.

There was a rush to buy the cook drinks and hear more details. “Always thought he was odd, ” she told the eagerly listening vil-

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THE RIDDLE HOUSE

lagers, after her fourth sherry. “Unfriendly, like. I’m sure if I’ve of- fered him a cuppa once, I’ve offered it a hundred times. Never wanted to mix, he didn’t. ”

“Ah, now, ” said a woman at the bar, “he had a hard war, Frank. He likes the quiet life. That’s no reason to —”

“Who else had a key to the back door, then? ” barked the cook. “There’s been a spare key hanging in the gardener’s cottage far back as I can remember! Nobody forced the door last night! No broken windows! All Frank had to do was creep up to the big house while we was all sleeping. . . . ”

The villagers exchanged dark looks.

“I always thought he had a nasty look about him, right enough, ” grunted a man at the bar.

“War turned him funny, if you ask me, ” said the landlord. “Told you I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of Frank, didn’t I, Dot? ” said an excited woman in the corner.

“Horrible temper, ” said Dot, nodding fervently. “I remember, when he was a kid. . . ”

By the following morning, hardly anyone in Little Hangleton doubted that Frank Bryce had killed the Riddles.

But over in the neighboring town of Great Hangleton, in the dark and dingy police station, Frank was stubbornly repeating, again and again, that he was innocent, and that the only person he had seen near the house on the day of the Riddles’ deaths had been a teenage boy, a stranger, dark-haired and pale. Nobody else in the village had seen any such boy, and the police were quite sure that Frank had invented him.

Then, just when things were looking very serious for Frank, the report on the Riddles’ bodies came back and changed everything.

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CHAPTER ONE

The police had never read an odder report. A team of doctors had examined the bodies and had concluded that none of the Rid- dles had been poisoned, stabbed, shot, strangled, suffocated, or (as far as they could tell) harmed at all. In fact (the report continued, in a tone of unmistakable bewilderment), the Riddles all appeared to be in perfect health — apart from the fact that they were all dead. The doctors did note (as though determined to find some- thing wrong with the bodies) that each of the Riddles had a look of terror upon his or her face — but as the frustrated police said,

whoever heard of three people being frightened to death?

As there was no proof that the Riddles had been murdered at all, the police were forced to let Frank go. The Riddles were buried in the Little Hangleton churchyard, and their graves remained objects of curiosity for a while. To everyone’s surprise, and amid a cloud of suspicion, Frank Bryce returned to his cottage on the grounds of the Riddle House.

“’S far as I’m concerned, he killed them, and I don’t care what the police say, ” said Dot in the Hanged Man. “And if he had any decency, he’d leave here, knowing as how we knows he did it. ”

But Frank did not leave. He stayed to tend the garden for the next family who lived in the Riddle House, and then the next — for neither family stayed long. Perhaps it was partly because of Frank that the new owners said there was a nasty feeling about the place, which, in the absence of inhabitants, started to fall into disrepair.

The wealthy man who owned the Riddle House these days neither lived there nor put it to any use; they said in the village that he kept it for “tax reasons, ” though nobody was very clear what these might

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THE RIDDLE HOUSE

be. The wealthy owner continued to pay Frank to do the garden- ing, however. Frank was nearing his seventy-seventh birthday now, very deaf, his bad leg stiffer than ever, but could be seen pottering around the flower beds in fine weather, even though the weeds were starting to creep up on him, try as he might to suppress them.

Weeds were not the only things Frank had to contend with ei- ther. Boys from the village made a habit of throwing stones through the windows of the Riddle House. They rode their bicycles over the lawns Frank worked so hard to keep smooth. Once or twice, they broke into the old house for a dare. They knew that old Frank’s devotion to the house and grounds amounted almost to an obsession, and it amused them to see him limping across the gar- den, brandishing his stick and yelling croakily at them. Frank, for his part, believed the boys tormented him because they, like their parents and grandparents, thought him a murderer. So when Frank awoke one night in August and saw something very odd up at the old house, he merely assumed that the boys had gone one step fur- ther in their attempts to punish him.

It was Frank’s bad leg that woke him; it was paining him worse than ever in his old age. He got up and limped downstairs into the kitchen with the idea of refilling his hot-water bottle to ease the stiffness in his knee. Standing at the sink, filling the kettle, he looked up at the Riddle House and saw lights glimmering in its up- per windows. Frank knew at once what was going on. The boys had broken into the house again, and judging by the flickering quality of the light, they had started a fire.

Frank had no telephone, and in any case, he had deeply mis- trusted the police ever since they had taken him in for questioning about the Riddles’ deaths. He put down the kettle at once, hurried

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CHAPTER ONE

back upstairs as fast as his bad leg would allow, and was soon back in his kitchen, fully dressed and removing a rusty old key from its hook by the door. He picked up his walking stick, which was propped against the wall, and set off into the night.

The front door of the Riddle House bore no sign of being forced, nor did any of the windows. Frank limped around to the back of the house until he reached a door almost completely hid- den by ivy, took out the old key, put it into the lock, and opened the door noiselessly.

He let himself into the cavernous kitchen. Frank had not en- tered it for many years; nevertheless, although it was very dark, he remembered where the door into the hall was, and he groped his way toward it, his nostrils full of the smell of decay, ears pricked for any sound of footsteps or voices from overhead. He reached the hall, which was a little lighter owing to the large mullioned win- dows on either side of the front door, and started to climb the stairs, blessing the dust that lay thick upon the stone, because it muffled the sound of his feet and stick.

On the landing, Frank turned right, and saw at once where the intruders were: At the very end of the passage a door stood ajar, and a flickering light shone through the gap, casting a long sliver of gold across the black floor. Frank edged closer and closer, grasping his walking stick firmly. Several feet from the entrance, he was able to see a narrow slice of the room beyond.

The fire, he now saw, had been lit in the grate. This surprised him. Then he stopped moving and listened intently, for a man’s voice spoke within the room; it sounded timid and fearful.

“There is a little more in the bottle, My Lord, if you are still hungry. ”

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THE RIDDLE HOUSE

“Later, ” said a second voice. This too belonged to a man — but it was strangely high-pitched, and cold as a sudden blast of icy wind. Something about that voice made the sparse hairs on the back of Frank’s neck stand up. “Move me closer to the fire, Wormtail. ”

Frank turned his right ear toward the door, the better to hear. There came the clink of a bottle being put down upon some hard surface, and then the dull scraping noise of a heavy chair being dragged across the floor. Frank caught a glimpse of a small man, his back to the door, pushing the chair into place. He was wearing a long black cloak, and there was a bald patch at the back of his head. Then he went out of sight again.

“Where is Nagini? ” said the cold voice.

“I — I don’t know, My Lord, ” said the first voice nervously. “She set out to explore the house, I think. . . . ”

“You will milk her before we retire, Wormtail, ” said the second voice. “I will need feeding in the night. The journey has tired me greatly. ”

Brow furrowed, Frank inclined his good ear still closer to the door, listening very hard. There was a pause, and then the man called Wormtail spoke again.

“My Lord, may I ask how long we are going to stay here? ” “A week, ” said the cold voice. “Perhaps longer. The place is mod- erately comfortable, and the plan cannot proceed yet. It would be foolish to act before the Quidditch World Cup is over. ”

Frank inserted a gnarled finger into his ear and rotated it. Ow- ing, no doubt, to a buildup of earwax, he had heard the word “Quidditch, ” which was not a word at all.

“The — the Quidditch World Cup, My Lord? ” said Wormtail.

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CHAPTER ONE

(Frank dug his finger still more vigorously into his ear. ) “Forgive me, but — I do not understand — why should we wait until the World Cup is over? ”