"I could just run away and find a place to stay on my own, but what if they find me; they'll just send me back here. So what I need to do is figure out a way so that they'll never be able to send me back or even better find me."
He briefly contemplated blowing the house up and faking his own death. "Shouldn't be that hard to do" he thought. "Wait till everyone's out of the house, sever the gas line, leave a candle burning somewhere and when the house fills with gas - BOOM. No more house, everyone thinks I'm dead, Voldemort stops coming from me, and I can finally live life on my own terms."
He spent a few blissful minutes imagining the faces of the Dursleys when they came back to their home to find it nothing but a smoking hole in the ground. "Serve them right, treating me the way they do. Would do them good to rough it for a while. He he he."
Unfortunately he soon found several flaws with the plan. "What if Petunia or Dudley came back home early? I don't know how long it'll take for the house to blow up after all, could take hours for the gas to build up. Even if it blows up correctly, they could find out I've taken money from my vault, then they'll probably get suspicious. Probably toss me in Azkaban as well. I'll have to come up with a better plan. Pity, I really - really wanted to blow up this damn house."
The faintest outline of a plan glimmering in his mind he called out to Dobby. "Dobby if I give you my key - can you make a withdrawal from Gringotts for me?"
"Of course Master Harry, Dobby be fetching things from Gringotts all the time for bad former master."
"Excellent, so could you just hop over to Gringotts, get some money - say a hundred galleons, then go over to Flourish and Bott's. Tell them to give you any book that covers American and European wizard towns, settlements or places like Diagon Alley. They probably have something in the travel section. Make sure you don't let on that you're buying it for me okay."
"Of course Harry Potter Sir, Dobby be doing that right away," said Dobby as he vanished with a cracking sound.
...
The next morning Harry was poring over the guidebooks that Dobby had heard from him. Just then he heard a loud, echoing crack which broke the sleepy silence just like a gunshot. Harry had become very familiar with that sound. It was exactly the same sound that Dobby made when he was apparating. He would have assumed it was Dobby, but Dobby was even now pottering around Harry's room putting stuff away and cleaning up. This meant that it had to be another wizard who was apparating close by. Harry wondered who it could be, when he felt a chill run down his spine. It could not be any of the people he knew, since they would surely have informed him before coming over and he hadn't received any letters in days. That left him with only one conclusion -
The Death Eaters had come for him.
...
Harry stared out of his window. His heart was hammering in his chest. Moments ago he had heard the distinctive crack of somebody apparating. However he could not see anybody on the street at all. This did not mean that nobody was there however. He himself had an invisibility cloak so it was obvious that whoever was out there could also be invisible. There was an invisible Death Eater somewhere out there, watching him, waiting for him to step out of the house, waiting for an opportunity to kill him. He had heard only one crack, did that mean there was only one Death Eater? Could multiple Death Eaters have apparated together? He had no idea. He wished he had a way to see through invisibility cloaks. Why hadn't he ever asked Dumbledore how it could be done. He knew Moody's eye could see through cloaks. Damn it, he should have looked up methods on detecting invisibility cloaks. Okay, he thought, there's at least one invisible Death Eater out there. He could be an assassin waiting for me to step out of the wards that Dumbledore told me were around Privet Drive. Or ... he might just be a scout checking out the protections before coming back with a full Death Eater assault team. First things first, he thought, I need to be ready to move quickly. He rushed to his trunk and dug out his own invisibility cloak. He looked at his trunk, filled with school uniforms and books. He would have to leave it all behind. Pity... or maybe not. He turned to Dobby.
"Dobby, do you know how to make a bag bigger on the inside? I saw this trunk last year that had a whole room inside it. Could you make a normal bag do something like that?"
"House elves be doing that all the time Master Harry Potter Sir. We often need to do it for shopping," said Dobby.
"Excellent, so we can just take one of Dudley's backpacks and... no that wouldn't work... I'd get a warning from the Ministry for underage magic... Since Voldemort owns the bloody ministry, that will just give them an excuse..." he trailed off.
"No Harry Potter sir, No. Dobby can do magic here without setting off the Ministry's underage trackers. Last time Dobby made it look like Harry Potter was doing the magic. Bad Dobby, Bad Dobby," said Dobby, looking like he was about to start ironing his ears any second.
"Great," said Harry, as he decided to ignore Dobby's distress for now. He raced to Dudley's room. Luckily his whale of a cousin was not there. He rooted around frantically in Dudley's closet before he found what he was looking for - a backpack. It looked like Dudley had hardly used it. He grabbed it and raced back to his room.
"Dobby... Dobby... Stop twisting your ears and listen to me. This is important."