The next day, another letter arrived for Harry addressed in the same green ink.
Just as he had the first day, he put it in his cupboard on the way past, and as soon as he got some free time he was lying on his back with his tail halfway up the wall as he compared them.
Much to his surprise – and disappointment – the second letter explained no more than the first. In fact, the second letter explained exactly as much as the first had, being identical in every way.
Harry shrugged, put it with the first, and went about his day.
On the third day, the post arrived when Aunt Petunia was closer to the door. She picked up the letters, gasped, and hurried to show them to Uncle Vernon.
The two adults exchanged worried looks out of all proportion to how important simple junk mail was, in Harry's opinion – then tried to hide them away from him when he craned his neck to look.
"Stop it!" Aunt Petunia ordered. "Vernon, make him stop it!"
"I just want to see if it's another one of those letters," Harry explained politely, as Uncle Vernon completely failed to push Harry away. "I've read two already, they're exactly the same and they seem quite silly."
"You've read one?" Uncle Vernon demanded. "How did you get your hands on one of those… those… freakish letters?"
"I got the post," Harry pointed out, quite reasonably as far as he was concerned. "It's a pity, really, it's the first time there's been a letter addressed to me and it's all total nonsense. Something about a school that's taking donations of owls and wants me to bring pewter along or something, but they didn't give an address or a phone number."
He held out his paw. "If you want I'll put them down in my cupboard? That way they'll be out of the way, at least."
Harry had to demonstrate that he did indeed have two opened letters – and point out the things about them which just seemed ridiculous – but ultimately his case was made, and Aunt Petunia somewhat reluctantly surrendered the three letters that had arrived that day to his care.
That made a total of five, though about half of them were still in their envelopes, and Harry sighed a little as he looked at his new collection.
They were nice, and they were certainly his, but he did wish they made a bit more sense.
On the fourth day, there were ten letters on the doormat.
They all ended up in Harry's cupboard again, but Harry also spent half an hour helping Uncle Vernon hold up planks while his uncle hammered nails into the door. The planks blocked the letterbox off, which seemed a little bit extreme to the ten-year-old drake, but he had to admit that it was just getting annoying by now.
Surely it had to cost more to send all these letters than anyone could get back? And what did they think he was doing with the letters, exactly?
Harry's tail lashed back and forth as he contemplated exactly what the mysterious letter-sender could be thinking. Maybe they thought the letters were being used for firewood?
Then he nearly tripped his cousin up as Dudley ran up the stairs, and got sent to his cupboard again. Harry passed the time by opening another three envelopes and trying to see if he could do origami with them.
Despite Harry's vague mixture of anticipation and worry about the subject, no letters made their way through the letterbox on the fifth day.
The whole household had been up early enough for it, on tenterhooks to see if the plank plan would work, but by the time Harry began breakfast – an hour later than normal – they had all decided that Uncle Vernon's unorthodox plan had worked.
Humming a tune he'd overheard on the television through his cupboard door, Harry cracked the first egg into the frying pan.
A rolled-up letter came out, instead of a white and a yolk, and fell into the pan with a faint sizzle. Frowning, Harry fetched it out – not fearing the hot oil, because dragons didn't seem to have much truck with being uncomfortable because of being hot – and put it to the side before cracking the second egg.
A letter tumbled out of that one as well, and Harry looked properly at it this time. Sure enough, it was addressed in emerald green ink.
"Aunt Petunia?" he called.
"What is it?" his aunt asked, walking into the kitchen. "I told you, two eggs each for Dudders and Vernon, and..."
She paused, staring at the empty eggshells, the lack of eggs in the frying pan, and the rolled-up letters.
Harry took the opportunity to crack a third egg, from the box of twelve, and a letter came out of that one as well.
"Oh," Aunt Petunia said.
As she watched, Harry cracked egg after egg – going through the entire dozen – and got nothing but rolled-up letters.
"Should I do extra bacon and toast instead?" he asked.
"Yes, of course you should," she told him. "Vernon! Vernon, they did something!"
Harry listened with half an ear to the conversation, most of the rest of his attention on salvaging the already late breakfast. To save time, he ate while he was making it – both the eggshells, and the letters, which tasted really quite good.
He'd actually intended to only have one, but it tasted a lot better than paper usually did, and Harry ate eight of them before catching himself so he would have a few to add to his as-yet-tiny hoard.
Maybe that was why they were able to keep students from nibbling on things like cauldrons or pets? If paper there tasted this much better than normal paper, then it would be the way he'd make sure.
On day six, a few days before Harry's birthday, nothing happened on the letter front all morning.
There still weren't any eggs – Aunt Petunia had refused to get any more – and so breakfast was large slices of toast with bacon and sausages instead. After that Dudley had vanished upstairs to play on his specially imported games console from Japan, and Harry spent most of the morning tidying the living room.
Aunt Petunia had told him to do it without the vacuum cleaner to avoid disturbing Dudley, which was fair enough, and he was nearly finished scrubbing the carpets when a letter flew down the chimney.
And then another.
Harry stepped back a little warily, taking care not to knock over the soap bucket, and a flood of hundreds of letters came cascading out the fireplace – propelled with great force, some of them floating in the air and others crashing into the sofas or armchairs and falling to the ground.
When the deluge finally stopped, Harry rolled his eyes and snorted something he'd heard one of the kids at school call him. Then he began picking up the letters, twenty at a time, and moving them into his cupboard.
He'd feel a lot better about these letters if they didn't keep making life harder for him.