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“We tried to comfort her,” said Fred, moving around the bed to look at Harry’s portrait. “Told her Percy’s nothing more than a humongous pile of rat droppings —”

“— didn’t work,” said George, helping himself to a Chocolate Frog. “So Lupin took over. Best let him cheer her up before we go down for breakfast, I reckon.”

“What’s that supposed to be anyway?” asked Fred, squinting at Dobby’s painting. “Looks like a gibbon with two black eyes.”

“It’s Harry!” said George, pointing at the back of the picture. “Says so on the back!”

“Good likeness,” said Fred, grinning. Harry threw his new homework diary at him; it hit the wall opposite and fell to the floor where it said happily, “If you’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s then you may do whatever you please!”

They got up and dressed; they could hear various inhabitants of the house calling “Merry Christmas” to each other. On their way downstairs they met Hermione. “Thanks for the book, Harry!” she said happily. “I’ve been wanting that New Theory of Numerology for ages! And that perfume is really unusual, Ron.”

“No problem,” said Ron. “Who’s that for anyway?” he added, nodding at the neatly wrapped present she was carrying.

“Kreacher,” said Hermione brightly.

“It had better not be clothes!” said Ron warningly. “You know what Sirius said, Kreacher knows too much, we can’t set him free!”

“It isn’t clothes,” said Hermione, “although if I had my way I’d certainly give him something to wear other than that filthy old rag. No, it’s a patchwork quilt, I thought it would brighten up his bedroom.”

“What bedroom?” said Harry, dropping his voice to a whisper as they were passing the portrait of Sirius’s mother.

“Well, Sirius says it’s not so much a bedroom, more a kind of — den,” said Hermione. “Apparently he sleeps under the boiler in that cupboard off the kitchen.”

Mrs. Weasley was the only person in the basement when they arrived there. She was standing at the stove and sounded as though she had a bad head cold when she wished them Merry Christmas, and they all averted their eyes.

“So, this is Kreacher’s bedroom?” said Ron, strolling over to a dingy door in the corner opposite the pantry which Harry had never seen open.

“Yes,” said Hermione, now sounding a little nervous. “Er … I think we’d better knock …”

Ron rapped the door with his knuckles but there was no reply.

“He must be sneaking around upstairs,” he said, and without further ado pulled open the door. “Urgh.”

Harry peered inside. Most of the cupboard was taken up with a very large and old-fashioned boiler, but in the foot’s space underneath the pipes Kreacher had made himself something that looked like a nest. A jumble of assorted rags and smelly old blankets were piled on the floor and the small dent in the middle of it showed where Kreacher curled up to sleep every night. Here and there among the material were stale bread crusts and moldy old bits of cheese. In a far corner glinted small objects and coins that Harry guessed Kreacher had saved, magpielike, from Sirius’s purge of the house, and he had also managed to retrieve the silver-framed family photographs that Sirius had thrown away over the summer. Their glass might be shattered, but still the little black-and-white people inside them peered haughtily up at him, including — he felt a little jolt in his stomach — the dark, heavy-lidded woman whose trial he had witnessed in Dumbledore’s Pensieve: Bellatrix Lestrange. By the looks of it, hers was Kreacher’s favorite photograph; he had placed it to the fore of all the others and had mended the glass clumsily with Spellotape.

“I think I’ll just leave his present here,” said Hermione, laying the package neatly in the middle of the depression in the rags and blankets and closing the door quietly. “He’ll find it later, that’ll be fine. …”

“Come to think of it,” said Sirius, emerging from the pantry carrying a large turkey as they closed the cupboard door, “has anyone actually seen Kreacher lately?”

“I haven’t seen him since the night