The Horror Within a Fairy Tale

Harry couldn't take his eyes off it. The stiff grey shape of Mrs Norris hanging from the bracket, and the red letters over it, still wet, still catching the torchlight.

Then the crowd at the far end of the corridor heaved, and broke, and somebody came shoving through it.

'Out of the way! Out of my way, you filthy, nasty little... what's going on? What's all this? What are you all...'

It was Argus Filch. He'd elbowed his way to the front, wheezing, with his tartan scarf still round his neck, and he looked at the writing on the wall, and his eyes went down from the writing to the thing beneath it.

He made a sound Harry had never heard come out of a grown man. It started as a gasp and went up into something like a scream, and it was rage and grief and horror all at once.

'My cat! My cat! What's happened to Mrs Norris?'

And his popping eyes came down off the cat and landed on Harry.

'You!' he screeched. 'You! You've murdered my cat! You've killed her! I'll kill you! I'll...'

'I've done no such bloody thing!' said Harry. 'Calm down, Filch, I never touched her.'

But Filch was past calming. He was purple from his collar to his hairline, and he was spitting, and his knobbly hands were reaching for Harry's throat, and Harry had backed into Ron with Hermione still clinging to his arm and nowhere left to go.

'Argus!'

Dumbledore had arrived on the scene, with a number of other teachers at his heels. He went past Harry, Ron and Hermione in a single long stride, and laid one hand on Filch's shoulder, and Filch's hands dropped as though somebody had cut the strings.

'Argus. Be still. Let me see.'

Professor McGonagall was there, and Snape, and Lockhart, and Professor Flitwick bobbing about at the back trying to see over people's elbows. Dumbledore reached up and unhooked Mrs Norris from the torch bracket with great gentleness, as though she were something that might still break.

'Careful,' moaned Filch. 'Careful with her, careful...'

'Come with me, Argus,' said Dumbledore. 'You too, Mr Potter, Mr Weasley, Miss Granger.'

Lockhart stepped forward eagerly.

'My office is nearest, Headmaster. Just upstairs. Please feel free-'

'Thank you, Gilderoy,' said Dumbledore.

The crowd fell back in silence to let them through. Lockhart, looking thrilled and important, hurried after Dumbledore, and so did Professors McGonagall and Snape.

When they went into Lockhart's darkened office there was a scurry of movement all round the walls. Harry saw a number of the Lockharts in the photographs ducking out of sight with their hair in curlers. The real Lockhart lit the candles on his desk and stood back. Dumbledore laid Mrs Norris on the polished wood and bent to look at her.

Harry, Ron and Hermione exchanged tense looks and sank into chairs outside the circle of candlelight to watch.

Dumbledore's long, crooked nose was barely an inch from Mrs Norris's fur. He was peering at her through his half-moon spectacles and touching her very lightly here and there with his long fingers. Professor McGonagall was bent nearly as close, with her eyes narrowed to slits. Snape stood behind them, half in shadow, wearing a most peculiar expression. It was as though he were trying very hard not to smile.

And Lockhart was circling all of them like a moth, making suggestions.

'Definitely a curse,' he said. 'Probably the Transmogrifian Torture. I've seen it many times. So unlucky I wasn't there, I know the very counter-curse that would have...'

'Have you considered,' said Professor McGonagall, without lifting her eyes from the cat, 'a parasite of the vocal cords? I've seen something rather like this before. A strain that spreads by language. It spread through Russian soldiers in Afghanistan and conscripts in Africa.'

'Ah! Yes! Of course!' said Lockhart, lighting up. 'The language parasites! I remember them well! I was there myself, as it happens. In Africa. I was the one who identified it, actually, I had to wrestle the thing out of the fellow's throat with my bare hands...'

Professor McGonagall straightened up. She didn't say anything. She only smiled, very slightly, very darkly, she'd just had something confirmed that she'd suspected for some time.

Harry saw it. He didn't understand all of it. But he understood enough to see that Lockhart had just put his foot in his mouth. That Professor McGonagall had been standing exactly where Lockhart said he'd been, and that Lockhart had never been within a thousand miles of it.

She caught him looking. Over the top of her spectacles, across the candlelight, Professor McGonagall gave Harry a knowing look. And then, so quickly that he'd have thought he'd imagined it if he'd blinked, she winked.

Harry nodded at her. Somebody else had noticed.

Through all of this, Filch was making the most dreadful noise. He'd slumped into a chair by the desk with his face in his hands, and he was sobbing, great wet, hacking sobs.

'She's all I've got,' he kept saying. 'All I've got. Haven't got anything else. No magic, no nothing. Just her. And now I haven't even got her...'

Harry found, to his own surprise, that he was sorry for Filch. Loathsome as the man was, it was a hard thing to watch, and Lockhart talking cheerfully over the top of it about curses he'd broken didn't make it any easier. Not nearly as sorry, though, as he was for himself. If Dumbledore believed Filch, Harry would be expelled. He didn't see how he could be anything else.

Dumbledore was muttering strange words under his breath now and tapping Mrs Norris with his wand, but nothing happened. She went on looking as though she'd been recently stuffed.

'You know, this puts me very much in mind of a little affair in Transylvania,' said Lockhart. 'Ugly business. A cult. Dracula worshippers, all in red. They had a cat just like this on their altar. I foiled them, naturally.'

'Then you must know dear Julius,' said Professor McGonagall pleasantly. 'An old friend of mine. He was in Transylvania for some years. Always carried a whip.'

'Oh, yes,' said Lockhart. 'I'm very familiar with old Julius Carrow. He aided me in foiling the dark scheme of those wicked men.'

Professor McGonagall sighed. It was a small sigh, almost inaudible. She looked across at Harry again, and Harry knew perfectly well what the look meant. Whoever Julius was, he wasn't a Carrow. Lockhart had just told another one.

Lockhart didn't notice. He'd got into his stride.

'There were three hundred of them, all told, and their leader was a Methuselah. Fourth generation, if you can credit it. Clan Tzi-mi-see.' He said it slowly, as if spelling it out for a slow class. 'A shapeshifter. A horror. Bone and flesh like wax in his hands. He came at me in the shape of a great wolf made out of men, and I said to myself, Gilderoy, it's now or never, and I stepped forward with my wand held so'

'He's saying it wrong,' Professor McGonagall murmured. She'd drifted, somehow, to the end of the desk nearest Harry's chair, and she spoke without moving her lips very much, to the air above his head. 'It's Tzimisce. Three syllables, not four. And that is not how one kills one of the fourth generation. Not with a wand held so. Not with a wand at all, if one has any sense.'

Harry looked up at her. She was looking at Mrs Norris with an expression of perfect professional interest, as though she hadn't said a word.

He made a note in the back of his head, that he was going to ask Professor McGonagall about all this one day. About Julius. About the sand and the soldiers. About how one did kill a vampire of the fourth generation, if it came to it. He had a feeling she could teach him things that weren't on any timetable.

'... and with a single word,' Lockhart was saying, 'I -'

'Thank you, Gilderoy,' said Dumbledore, quite gently and quite firmly, straightening up. 'That was a most fascinating story. But I'm afraid the important matter here is a simpler one. She's not dead, Argus.'

Lockhart stopped dead in the middle of counting the number of murders he'd prevented. Filch lowered his hands.

'Not dead?' he choked, peering at Mrs Norris through his fingers. 'But why's she all... all stiff and frozen?'

'She has been Petrified,' said Dumbledore.

'Ah! I thought so!' said Lockhart.

'Of course you did,' said Harry.

He knew from long experience that Lockhart hadn't thought anything of the kind.

'Your faith in me is most gratifying, Harry,' said Lockhart, beaming at him.

Harry sighed. He was beginning to think that it was physically impossible to insult Gilderoy Lockhart. The man either thought Harry was joking, or took him at his word, and either way he went away pleased.

'How she has been Petrified, I cannot say,' said Dumbledore, and he said it in a voice that made the candles seem to flicker.

'Ask him!' shrieked Filch, turning his blotched, tear-stained face on Harry.

'Come off it, Filch. I had two other people with me who could confirm I was nowhere near that cat until we found her all done up.'

'Harry...' said Dumbledore, firmly. Then he turned to Filch.

'No second-year could have done this,' Dumbledore told him, more firmly still. 'It would take Dark Magic of the most advanced-'

'He did it! He did it!' Filch spat, his pouchy face going purple. 'You saw what he wrote on the wall! He found... in my office... he knows I'm a... I'm a...' Filch's face worked horribly. 'He knows I'm a Squib!' he finished.

'I never touched Mrs Norris!' Harry said loudly. Any pity he'd felt for Filch had gone out of the window. He was uncomfortably aware of everybody in the room looking at him, including every one of the Lockharts on the walls. 'And I don't even know what a Squib is.'

Then he remembered Ron in Hagrid's hut, between slugs. Dad reckons it's what you get when the same five families keep marrying each other. And it came out of Harry before he could stop it.

'Oh. Are your mum and dad siblings or something? That would explain a lot.'

'Ruddy child, come here!' Filch screamed, and went for him.

Professor McGonagall looked thoroughly scandalised. Something at the corner of her mouth twitched, and she had to put a hand up to it.

'That is quite enough!'

Dumbledore didn't often raise his voice. When he did, the room went still to its corners. Filch stopped with his hands out. The Lockharts on the walls stopped too.

'Argus, I will not have you accusing students of murder or Dark Magic most foul without proof.' Dumbledore drew a breath. 'And Harry. You will not disrespect a member of staff, or the circumstances of their birth. Twenty points from Gryffindor.'

Harry's face fell.

'Sorry, Professor.'

'Apologise to Filch, not to me, Harry.'

Harry turned. Filch was standing by the desk with his chest heaving and his eyes red, and he looked so wretched that Harry found the words came easier than he'd expected.

'Sorry, Mr Filch. That was a rotten thing to say.'

Filch grunted. It wasn't acceptance. But he sat back down, and the room seemed to let out its breath.

'If I might speak, Headmaster,' said Snape, from the shadows.

Harry's heart sank further. He was certain that nothing Snape had to say was going to do him any good.

'Potter and his friends may simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time,' said Snape, with a faint curl of the lip that said he doubted it very much. 'But we do have a set of suspicious circumstances here. Why were they in the upstairs corridor at all? Why weren't they at the Hallowe'en feast?'

Harry, Ron and Hermione all started at once, about the Deathday Party.

'There were hundreds of ghosts, they'll tell you we were there...'

'Nearly Headless Nick invited us...'

'We had to listen to the musical saws, Professor.'

'But why not join the feast afterwards?' said Snape, and his black eyes glittered in the candlelight. 'Why go up to that corridor?'

Ron and Hermione looked at Harry.

'Because... because...' said Harry, and his heart was thumping very fast. Something told him that it would sound extremely unlikely if he told them he'd been led there by a voice with no body that nobody else could hear. 'Because we were tired and wanted to go to bed,' he said.

'Without any supper?' said Snape, and a triumphant smile flickered across his sallow face. 'I didn't think ghosts provided food fit for living people at their parties.'

'We weren't hungry,' said Ron loudly, and his stomach gave a tremendous rumble.

Ron found the floor very interesting after that.

Snape's nasty smile widened.

'I suggest, Headmaster, that Potter is not being entirely truthful,' he said. 'It might be a good idea if he were deprived of certain privileges until he is ready to tell us the whole story. I personally feel he should be taken off the Gryffindor Quidditch team until he is ready to be honest.'

'Really, Severus,' said Professor McGonagall sharply. 'I see no reason to stop the boy playing Quidditch. This cat wasn't hit over the head with a broomstick. There's no evidence at all that Potter has done anything wrong.'

Dumbledore was giving Harry a long, searching look. Under those bright blue eyes Harry felt as though he were being X-rayed.

'Innocent until proven guilty, Severus,' Dumbledore said firmly.

Snape looked furious. So did Filch.

'My cat has been Petrified!' he shrieked, his eyes bulging. 'I want to see some punishment!'

'We will be able to cure her, Argus,' said Dumbledore patiently. 'Professor Sprout recently managed to procure some Mandrakes. As soon as they've grown to their full size, I'll have a potion made that will revive Mrs Norris.'

'I'll make it,' Lockhart broke in. 'I must have done it a hundred times. I could whip up a Mandrake Restorative Draught in my sleep!'

'Excuse me,' said Snape icily, 'but I believe I am the Potions master at this school.'

There was a very awkward pause.

'You may go,' Dumbledore said to Harry, Ron and Hermione.

They went, as fast as they could without actually running.

On the staircase above Lockhart's office, in the shadow of a pillar where the torchlight didn't reach, somebody was standing very still.

Harry nearly walked into her. He stopped, with Ron and Hermione piling up behind him, and found himself looking at Dracina Malfoy.

She wasn't with Crabbe and Goyle. Or with anybody else. She'd been waiting, by the look of it, for some time, in the cold, with her arms wrapped round herself, and when she saw Harry she straightened up quickly, as though she'd been caught.

'They didn't expel you, then,' she said.

'No thanks to you,' said Harry.

She ignored that. Her eyes went over him, very fast, the way you'd look over somebody who'd come in out of a storm, checking for damage.

'Are you hurt?'

Harry stared at her.

'What?'

'Nothing.' The colour went up into her face. 'I didn't say anything. I don't care. I was only...' She lifted her chin. 'You stood in front of her. In the corridor. With everybody watching. You put yourself between her and me as though I were some... some dragon, and you were...'

She stopped. Whatever word came next, she bit it off.

'Were what?' said Harry, completely lost.

'Nothing, Potter. You were nothing. You were an idiot. A proper knight would know which lady he was meant to be standing in front of.'

And she turned and went off down the stairs, very fast, with one hand pressed flat against the front of her robes, over something square and small that Harry could just see the shape of through the cloth.

'What,' said Ron, 'was that?'

'No idea,' said Harry.

He turned round. Hermione was looking down the stairwell after Malfoy, and there was nothing on her face at all. It was completely smooth, and completely still, like a lake with something very large underneath it.

'Hermione?'

'She's mad,' said Hermione pleasantly. 'Come on, Harry.'

When they were a floor further up, they ducked into an empty classroom and shut the door quietly behind them. Harry squinted at his friends' faces in the dark.

'You reckon I should've told the professors about the voice I heard?' Harry asked.

'No, mate,' said Ron, in the friendly, careful voice you use when you're talking a mate down off a wall. 'I'll be honest, mate, I thought you went a bit funny in the head. Admitting you're hearing voices no one else can hear isn't... well, it's not seen well. Even by wizards.'

Something in the way Ron said it made Harry ask, 'You do believe me, don't you?'

'Yeah, yeah. Course I do,' said Ron quickly, and put a hand on Harry's shoulder. And he did. He hadn't, quite, on the stairs, with Harry running about listening to nothing. But that had been before the cat. 'But to other people, it'd look a bit strange, mate.'

'I know it's weird,' said Harry. 'The whole thing's weird. What was that writing on the wall about? The Chamber has been opened. What's that supposed to mean?'

'You know, it rings a sort of bell,' said Ron slowly. 'I think someone told me a story about a secret chamber at Hogwarts once... might've been Bill...'

'Well, I found out Filch is a Squib,' said Harry.

'Oh, really? I thought that was obvious,' said Ron.

A clock chimed somewhere in the castle.

'Midnight,' said Harry. 'We'd better get to bed before Snape comes along and tries to frame us for something else.'

For days afterwards the school could talk of nothing but the attack on Mrs Norris.

Filch made sure nobody forgot it. He paced up and down the spot where she'd been found, as though he expected the attacker to come back for another look. Harry saw him scrubbing at the message on the wall with a bottle of Mrs Skower's All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover, and it did no good whatever; the letters went on gleaming as brightly as the night they'd been written. When Filch wasn't guarding the scene of the crime, he was skulking about the corridors red-eyed, lunging out of alcoves at passing students and trying to put them in detention for things like 'breathing loudly' and 'looking happy'.

Ginny Weasley seemed very upset about Mrs Norris. According to Ron, she was a great lover of cats.

'She's been crying in the girls' dormitory,' Ron told Harry, at breakfast, in an undertone. 'Lavender said. Every night.'

He went down the table to sit with her.

'But you hadn't really got to know Mrs Norris,' Ron told her, bracingly. 'Honestly, Gin, we're much better off without her. She used to sit on the stairs and wait for you to put a foot wrong.'

Ginny's lip trembled. She was as white as the tablecloth and there were shadows under her eyes, and she didn't seem able to look at anything for long.

'Stuff like this doesn't often happen at Hogwarts,' Ron assured her. 'They'll catch the nutter who did it and have him out of here in no time. I just hope he's got time to Petrify Filch before he's expelled. I'm only joking...' he added hastily, as Ginny went whiter still.

'It's not funny,' Ginny whispered. 'It's not funny, Ron. That girl. The Slytherin one. She pointed at Hermione and said she'd be next. I was right behind her. I saw her face.'

'Malfoy?' said Harry, who'd come down the table after Ron.

Ginny looked up at him, and went pink, and then went white again, all in the space of a second.

'She looked at me,' Ginny said, very quietly. 'After. When she was going. She looked right at me, and she was smiling. Like she knew something about me. Like she'd... written my name down somewhere.'

Ron put his arm round her.

'She's all mouth, Gin,' he said. 'Honestly. She does that to everyone.'

But Harry, watching Ginny's face, wasn't sure that she believed him, and he wasn't sure he believed it himself.

The attack had had an effect on Hermione too. It was quite usual for Hermione to spend a great deal of time reading, but now she was doing almost nothing else. Harry and Ron couldn't get much out of her when they asked what she was up to, and it wasn't until the following Wednesday that they found out.

Harry had been kept back in Potions.

It had been a horrible lesson from the start. Dracina Malfoy had begun on Hermione before Snape had finished taking the register.

'What a shame your cauldron's so ordinary, Granger,' she said, loudly, as they set up. 'I suppose it's all your parents could afford. What is it they do again? Teeth? How useful.'

Hermione was very good at Potions. But she wasn't quite as good as Malfoy, Harry would never have admitted this aloud. Malfoy knew it. She spent the whole double lesson making sure everybody else knew it too. When Hermione's Swelling Solution came out half a shade too pale, Malfoy laughed. When Harry passed Hermione his knife, Malfoy said, 'Oh, how gallant, Potter!' in a voice that dripped. When Neville spilled his beetle eyes, Malfoy said, 'Longbottom, you're a disgrace to your blood, at least Granger hasn't got any to disgrace,' and Pansy Parkinson shrieked.

And every time she said something, she looked at Harry to see if he'd heard it.

By the end of the lesson Harry had had enough.

'Will you shut up, Malfoy?' he shouted, across the dungeon. 'Just for once? Just leave her alone! What's she ever done to you?'

The dungeon went silent. Snape, at the front, turned slowly round.

Malfoy went quiet. She didn't answer. She looked at Harry for a long moment, with her ladle held in the air and the colour gone right out of her face, and then she put the ladle down, and took a small black book out of her robes, and opened it on the desk, and began to write.

Harry, two desks behind, could see the page. She wrote fast, in her neat, spiky hand, three or four lines. He couldn't read them. He was too far away. But he saw her read them, and he saw her face change, and the change wasn't a nice one.

'Stop looking at me, Potter,' she said, without lifting her head. 'Stop looking at me. You haven't got the right. You've given it away.'

'What are you on about?'

'Ten points from Gryffindor for shouting in my lesson,' said Snape silkily. 'And you'll stay behind, Potter, and scrape the tubeworms off the desks.'

So Harry stayed behind and scraped, by the time he'd finished, and been inspected, and had a hurried lunch on his own, he'd forgotten about the book. He went up to meet Ron in the library, and on the way he saw Justin Finch-Fletchley, the Hufflepuff from Herbology, coming towards him along the corridor with two of his friends.

Harry had just opened his mouth to say hello when Justin saw him, went pale, turned round on the spot, and walked very fast in the opposite direction.

'Justin?'

Justin didn't look back. His friends did. One of them, Hannah Abbott, the girl with the plaits, looked back at Harry over her shoulder with frightened eyes, and Harry heard her say, as they turned the corner, '... told you, he was right there under the writing, and my gran says...'

The rest was lost.

Harry found Ron at the back of the library, measuring his History of Magic homework. Professor Binns had asked for a three-foot composition on 'The Medieval Assembly of European Wizards'.

Hermione was there too, at the next table, writing out Harry's essay for him. She still insisted on doing it, very firmly, whatever Ron said about it.

'Hermione, he's got to learn it himself,' Ron had said, more than once.

'He's got enough to do,' Hermione had said, every time, and gone on writing.

She looked up as Harry sat down, and her face lit, and she began to explain it to him, because she said he ought at least to know what was in it.

'The thing you have to understand, Harry, is that there wasn't one wizarding world in the early Middle Ages. Not really. Not even in Britain. There were the southern sorcerers, round London and the old Roman towns, who did magic the Greek and Roman way, with Latin and Greek incantations and a great deal of geometry. And then there were the druids in the Midlands and Wales and the North, Brythonic and Cymric and Cornish, who did it with songs and with stone and with the seasons, and the two lots couldn't stand each other. And that's before you even get to the Viking families in the North-East, who didn't leave when the Saxons took Jorvik, they just stopped saying they were Norse, and the Picts up in Scotland with their own kind of magic altogether, all knots and tattoos and things. Every one of those communities thought they were the real wizards and everybody else was a fraud. They fought about it for centuries. Hogwarts was the first place they were all made to sit down in the same room, in nine hundred and ninety, and even then it took another two hundred years before they'd marry each other. And wand magic, the way we do it now, didn't really settle down into what we'd recognise until the seventeen hundreds.'

Harry winced. It was a great deal to take in. But he had to admit that he'd understood more of it in two minutes from Hermione than in two months from Professor Binns, who had the gift of making a war sound like a bus timetable.

'I don't believe it, I'm still eight inches short...' said Ron furiously, letting go of his parchment, which sprang back into a roll, 'and Hermione's done four feet seven inches, and her writing's tiny.'

Hermione gave a small, self-satisfied little tilt of the head.

Harry told Ron about Justin Finch-Fletchley running away from him.

'Dunno why you care. I thought he was a bit of an idiot,' said Ron, scribbling away and making his letters as large as he could. 'All that rubbish about Lockhart being so great -'

Hermione got up and vanished between the shelves for a few minutes, and when she came back she looked irritable, and at last seemed ready to talk.

'All the copies of Hogwarts: A History have been taken out,' she said, sitting down next to Harry, closer than she needed to. 'And there's a two-week waiting list. I wish I hadn't left my copy at home, but I couldn't fit it in my trunk with all the Lockhart books.'

'Why do you want it?' said Harry.

'The same reason everyone else wants it,' said Hermione. 'To read up on the legend of the Chamber of Secrets.'

'What's that?' said Harry quickly.

'That's just it. I can't remember,' said Hermione, biting her lip. 'And I can't find the story anywhere else...'

'Hermione, let me read your composition,' said Ron desperately, checking his watch.

'No, I won't,' said Hermione, suddenly severe. 'You've had ten days to finish it.' She turned to Harry, and the severity went out of her face. 'You can, though, Harry. I've almost finished your essay. I won't let you fail.'

'I only need another two inches, go on...' said Ron.

The bell rang. Ron and Hermione led the way to History of Magic, bickering.

On the way out, Harry passed the long table under the window where the younger students sat, and saw Dracina Malfoy there, alone, with a heap of books in front of her. It was a strange heap. There were two fat volumes of wizarding genealogy, with the Malfoy crest on the spine of one, and on top of them, open, a big, old, battered picture book of the sort that small children are given at Christmas. The page it was open at showed a painted knight in silver armour kneeling in front of a girl with long pale hair, in a tower, and the knight was holding out his sword to her, hilt first.

Malfoy saw him looking. She slammed the book shut so hard that Madam Pince shot out from behind her desk, and swept it under the genealogies, and glared at him with her face burning.

'What, Potter?'

'Nothing,' said Harry, mystified, and went on to History of Magic.

History of Magic was the dullest lesson on the timetable, and today was no exception. Professor Binns drifted in through the blackboard, opened his notes, and began to read from them in a voice like a distant vacuum cleaner left running in an empty house, and inside a quarter of an hour the whole class had gone glassy. Every so often somebody would come to long enough to copy down a name or a date, and then sink again.

He'd been going for half an hour when something happened that had never happened before.

Hermione put her hand up.

Professor Binns, who was in the middle of a remarkably dull account of the International Warlock Convention of 1289, looked up and seemed to see a raised hand for the first time in a century and a half.

'Miss... er...?'

'Granger, Professor. I was wondering if you could tell us anything about the Chamber of Secrets,' said Hermione, clearly.

Dean Thomas, who'd been gazing out of the window with his mouth open, jerked as though he'd been stung. Lavender Brown's head came up off her arms. Neville's elbow slid off the edge of his desk.

Professor Binns blinked.

'My subject is History of Magic,' he said, in his dry, wheezing voice. 'I deal in facts, Miss Granger. Not in myths and legends.' He cleared his throat with a small noise like a twig snapping. 'In the September of that year, a sub-committee of Sardinian sorcerers...'

He faltered. Hermione's hand was up again, and her face was the face of someone who has been refused something she very much wants and has no intention of taking no for an answer. If Professor Binns hadn't already been dead, Harry thought, he'd have had reason to be nervous.

'Miss Grange?'

'Please, sir. Don't legends always have some basis in fact?'

Professor Binns looked at her in such astonishment that Harry was sure no student had ever interrupted him before, in life or out of it.

'Well,' he said slowly, 'yes. One could argue that, I suppose.' He peered at Hermione as though he'd never properly looked at a student before. 'However, the legend you refer to is so very sensational. So very... lurid...'

But the whole class was hanging on his words now. Every face in the room was turned to him. Harry could see that it had thrown him completely. He'd never had an audience before. He didn't know what to do with one.

'Oh, very well,' he said at last. 'Let me see. The Chamber of Secrets. You will all know, I take it, that this school was founded something over a thousand years ago. The exact year is a matter of some dispute...'

'Nine hundred and ninety, Professor,' said Hermione.

'Yes, yes, quite so. By four of the most gifted witches and wizards of that age. The houses bear their names. Godric Gryffindor. Helga Hufflepuff. Rowena Ravenclaw. Salazar Slytherin. They raised these walls together, in a wild place, a long way from the eyes of the common people, for it was a time when magic was feared, and those who practised it were hunted.'

He paused, and gazed about the room, blearily, as though looking for the thread.

'For a time, the four worked in concert. They went out into the country and sought out children who showed the signs, they then brought them here to be taught. But in time they quarrelled. The quarrel was chiefly between Slytherin and the other three. Slytherin desired that the school be more particular in whom it took. He held that magic ought to be taught only to those born of magical families. He mistrusted children whose parents were not of our kind. He believed them unreliable. A danger.'

Which was a load of rubbish, as far as Harry could see. Wizards were so busy keeping their blood pure that they were turning away their own and turning out Squibs like Filch. There were far, far more dangerous Muggles coming into Britain than any Muggle-born witch. Even Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia would have agreed with him on that one.

'In the end,' Professor Binns went on, 'there was a bitter falling-out between Slytherin and Gryffindor on this very question, and Slytherin left the school.'

He paused again, and pursed his lips, so that he looked like a very old tortoise that had swallowed something sour.

'That much the sources will bear,' he said. 'Reliable sources. But the plain facts have been, over the years, overgrown by a great deal of fanciful nonsense, which goes by the name of the Chamber of Secrets. The tale is that Slytherin built a hidden room within this castle of which the others knew nothing. That before he left, he sealed it, so that none might open it until his own true heir came to the school. And that this heir, and the heir alone, would be able to break the seal, release the horror that waited inside, and with it cleanse the school of all those unworthy to learn magic.'

There was a silence when he'd finished. It wasn't the usual sleepy silence of Professor Binns's lessons. It was an uneasy one, and every eye in the room was still on him, waiting for more.

Professor Binns looked faintly put out.

'The whole thing is perfect nonsense, of course,' he said. 'Naturally the school has been searched for such a chamber, many times over, by the most learned witches and wizards. It does not exist. It is a story to frighten the credulous.'

Hermione's hand was in the air again.

'Sir. What exactly do you mean by "the horror" inside the Chamber?'

'It is generally held to be some sort of monster,' said Professor Binns, in his thin, dry voice, 'which the heir of Slytherin alone can command.'

The class exchanged nervous looks.

'I tell you, there is no such thing,' said Professor Binns, shuffling his notes. 'No Chamber. And no monster.'

'But, sir,' said Seamus Finnigan, 'if the Chamber can only be opened by Slytherin's true heir, nobody else would be able to find it anyway. Would they?'

'Nonsense, O'Halloran,' said Professor Binns, with some irritation. 'If a long line of Hogwarts headmasters and headmistresses have not found the thing - '

'But, Professor,' piped up Parvati Patil, 'you'd probably have to use Dark Magic to open it.'

'A wizard who does not use Dark Magic is not therefore incapable of it, Miss Pettigrew,' snapped Professor Binns. 'I repeat, if the likes of Dumbledore -'

'But maybe you've got to be related to Slytherin, so Dumbledore couldn't -.' began Dean Thomas, and Professor Binns had had enough.

'That will do!' he said sharply. 'It is a myth! It does not exist! There is not one scrap of evidence that Slytherin ever built so much as a secret broom cupboard! I regret having told you so foolish a tale! We will return, if you please, to history. To solid, believable, verifiable fact!'

And within five minutes the class had sunk back into its usual stupor.

Why couldn't they learn about vampires? Harry thought, propping his chin on his hand. That Angelus bloke Hermione kept going on about, gruesome as he was, sounded a great deal more interesting than a load of old warlocks arguing about Sardinia.

'I always knew Salazar Slytherin was a twisted old loony,' Ron said to Harry and Hermione, as they fought their way through the packed corridors at the end of the lesson to drop off their bags before dinner. 'But I never knew he started all this pure-blood stuff. I wouldn't be in his house if you paid me. Honestly, if the Sorting Hat had tried to put me in Slytherin I'd've got the train straight back home...'

'All this pure-blood nonsense is dragging us down, Ron. But what do we even do to sort it out?' asked Harry.

'I don't know, mate.'

Hermione nodded fervently. But Harry didn't say any more. His stomach had just dropped, unpleasantly.

He'd never told Ron and Hermione that the Sorting Hat had seriously thought about putting him in Slytherin. He could remember it as clearly as if it had happened that morning. The small voice in his ear, a year ago, under the brim. You could be great, you know. It's all here, in your head. Slytherin would set you well on the road to it. And Harry, who'd already heard what Slytherin turned out, had thought, not Slytherin, not Slytherin, with everything in him, and the Hat had said, Well, if you're quite sure... better be GRYFFINDOR.

As they were swept along in the crush, Colin Creevey went past them. He could be a nuisance, Colin. But he was so keen about everything that Harry always made time for him.

'Hiya, Harry!'

'Alright, Colin?'

But Colin was so small that he couldn't hold his own against the tide that was carrying him towards the Great Hall. They heard him squeak, 'See you, Harry!' and he was gone.

'What's a boy in his class saying about you?' Hermione wondered.

'Oh, I'm a dark wizard and Salazar Slytherin's heir, I reckon,' said Harry. He sighed, and shook his head, and thought of Justin Finch-Fletchley turning on his heel in the corridor at lunchtime. Eton boy, indeed.

'People here'll believe anything,' said Ron in disgust.

'Too bloody right,' Harry nodded, and was grateful.

The crowd thinned, and they got up the next staircase without trouble.

'D'you really think there's a Chamber of Secrets?' Ron asked Hermione.

'I don't know,' she said, frowning. 'Dumbledore couldn't cure Mrs Norris, and that makes me think that whatever attacked her might not be... well. Human.'

As she said it, they turned a corner and found themselves at the end of the very corridor where it had happened. They stopped, and looked.

It was just as it had been that night, except that there was no stiff cat hanging from the torch bracket, and there was an empty chair standing against the wall under the message.

THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED.

'Oh, not again, for God's sake,' Harry moaned.

'That's where Filch has been keeping guard,' Ron muttered.

They looked at each other. The corridor was empty.

'Can't hurt to have a poke round,' said Harry, and he dropped his bag and got down on his hands and knees and crawled along the flagstones, looking for clues.

'Scorch marks!' he said. 'Here... and here...'

'Come and look at this!' said Hermione. 'This is funny...'

Harry got up and went over to the window next to the message. Hermione was pointing at the topmost pane, where twenty or so spiders were scuttling and shoving, apparently fighting each other to get out through a small crack in the glass. A long silvery thread hung down from it like a rope, as though they'd all climbed it in a mad hurry to be gone.

'Have you ever seen spiders act like that?' said Hermione, wonderingly.

'No,' said Harry. 'Have you, Ron? Ron?'

He looked over his shoulder. Ron was standing well back, and looked as though he were fighting the urge to run.

'You all right, mate?' asked Harry.

'I. Don't. Like. Spiders,' Ron hissed, as though Harry were pointing a gun at him.

'I never knew that,' said Hermione, looking at Ron in surprise. 'You've used spiders in potions loads of times...'

'I don't mind them dead,' said Ron, who was looking carefully at everything in the corridor except the window. 'I just don't like the way they move...'

Hermione giggled.

'It's not funny,' said Ron fiercely. 'If you must know, when I was three, Fred turned my... my teddy bear into a dirty great spider, because I broke his toy broomstick. You wouldn't like them either if you'd been holding your bear and all of a sudden it had too many legs and...'

He stopped, and shuddered.

Hermione was plainly still trying not to laugh. Harry gave her a look that told her to pack it in, and then went and gave Ron's shoulder a squeeze, the way Ron had done for him, more times than he could count, all summer.

Feeling that they'd better get off the subject, Harry said, 'Remember all that water on the floor? Where did that come from? Someone's mopped it up.'

'It was about here,' said Ron, recovering himself enough to walk a few paces past Filch's chair and point. 'Level with this door.'

He reached for the brass handle, and snatched his hand back as though it had burned him.

'What's the matter?' said Harry.

'Can't go in there,' said Ron gruffly. 'That's a girls' toilet. Mum was always very clear about that.'

'Oh, Ron, there won't be anyone in there,' said Hermione, getting up and coming over. 'That's Moaning Myrtle's place. Come on, let's have a look.'

And ignoring the large OUT OF ORDER sign, she opened the door.

It was the most dismal, depressing bathroom Harry had ever set foot in. Under a big, cracked, speckled mirror stood a row of chipped stone basins. The floor was damp, and gave back the dull light of a few candle-stubs burning low in their holders, and the wooden cubicle doors were scratched and flaking, and one of them was hanging off its hinges.

Hermione put a finger to her lips and went down to the end cubicle.

'Hello, Myrtle. How are you?'

Harry and Ron went to look. Moaning Myrtle was sitting on top of the cistern, picking at a spot on her chin.

'This is a girls' bathroom,' she said, looking at Ron and Harry with deep suspicion. 'They aren't girls.'

'No,' Hermione agreed. 'I only wanted to show them how... er... nice it is in here.'

She waved vaguely at the filthy mirror and the wet floor.

'Ask her if she saw anything,' Harry mouthed at Hermione.

'What are you whispering?' said Myrtle, staring at him.

'Nothing,' said Harry quickly. 'We wanted to ask -'

'I wish people would stop talking behind my back!' said Myrtle, in a voice thick with tears. 'I do have feelings, you know. Even if I am dead.'

'Myrtle, nobody wants to upset you,' said Hermione. 'Harry only...'

'Nobody wants to upset me! That's a good one!' Myrtle howled. 'My life was nothing but misery in this place, and now people come and spoil my death!'

'We wanted to ask you if you'd seen anything odd lately,' said Hermione quickly. 'Because a cat was attacked right outside your door on Hallowe'en.'

'Did you see anybody near here that night?' said Harry.

'I wasn't paying attention,' said Myrtle, with great drama. 'Peeves upset me so much I came in here and tried to kill myself. And then, of course, I remembered that I'm... that I'm...'

'Already dead,' said Ron helpfully.

Myrtle gave a tragic sob, rose into the air, turned over, and dived head first into the toilet, splashing water all over the three of them, and vanished. From the direction of her muffled sobs, she'd come to rest somewhere round the U-bend.

Harry and Ron stood with their mouths open. Hermione shrugged wearily.

'Honestly, that was almost cheerful, for Myrtle. Come on, let's go.'

Harry had barely shut the door on Myrtle's gurgling when a loud voice made all three of them jump.

'RON!'

Percy Weasley had stopped dead at the top of the stairs, prefect's badge gleaming, with an expression of total shock on his face.

'That's a girls' bathroom!' he gasped. 'Mum was always very clear that we weren't to go into the ladies' room. It's for girls, and we're not girls, Ron! What were you -?'

'Just having a look round, mate,' Ron shrugged. 'Clues, you know...'

Percy swelled up in a way that reminded Harry very strongly of Mrs Weasley.

'Get... away... from... there...' he said, and strode towards them flapping his arms as though he were herding chickens. 'Don't you care what this looks like? Coming back here while everyone's at dinner...'

'Why shouldn't we be here?' said Ron hotly, stopping short and glaring at him. 'Listen, we never laid a finger on that cat!'

'That's what I told Ginny,' said Percy fiercely. 'But she still seems to think you're going to be expelled. I've never seen her so upset, crying her eyes out. You might think of her. All the first-years are thoroughly over-excited by this business -'

'You don't care about Ginny,' said Ron, and his ears were going red. 'You're just worried I'm going to mess up your chances of being Head Boy.'

'Five points from Gryffindor!' said Percy tersely, fingering his badge. 'And I hope it teaches you a lesson! No more detective work, or I'll write to Mum!'

And he strode off, with the back of his neck as red as Ron's ears.

Ron cursed him under his breath all the way to the tower, in terms that would have cost Gryffindor considerably more than five points if Percy had heard them.

Harry, Ron and Hermione chose seats as far as possible from Percy in the common room that night. Ron was still in a foul temper, and kept blotting his Charms homework. When he reached absent-mindedly for his wand to remove the smudges, it set the parchment on fire. Fuming almost as much as his homework, Ron slammed The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2 shut.

To Harry's surprise, Hermione did the same.

'Who can it be, though?' she said quietly, as though they'd been in the middle of a conversation about it. 'Who'd want all the Squibs and Muggle-borns out of Hogwarts?'

'Let's think,' said Ron, in mock puzzlement. 'Who do we know who thinks Muggle-borns are scum?'

He looked at Hermione. Hermione looked back at him, unconvinced.

'If you're talking about Malfoy -'

'Of course I am!' said Ron. 'You heard her. "You'll be next, Mudblood!" She was pointing right at you, Hermione. It's all because she's...'

Ron stopped. He rubbed his ear, where Malfoy had bitten it.

'She's what, Ronald?' Hermione asked.

Her voice had gone dark. Harry couldn't understand why. Even if it was about Malfoy.

Ron glanced at Harry, with something that looked very like sympathy, and Harry couldn't understand that either.

'Come on, you've only got to look at how she looked then to know it's her. Remember the state of her. It's...'

'Malfoy, the heir of Slytherin?' said Hermione sceptically.

'Malfoy hates me,' said Harry. He said it as a plain matter of fact, and he didn't notice Ron look away. 'Look at her family. All dark wizards. They've all probably been in Slytherin. She fits the bill. I bet she's Slytherin's heir. It'd be just like her. That's why she got that ruddy house-elf to stop me going to Hogwarts.'

'They could've had the key to the Chamber of Secrets for centuries!' said Ron. 'Handing it down, parent to child.'

'Well,' said Hermione, cautiously, 'I suppose it's possible...'

'But how do we prove it?' said Harry darkly.

'There might be a way,' said Hermione slowly. She dropped her voice even lower, with a glance across the room at Percy. 'Of course, it would be difficult. And dangerous. Very dangerous. We'd be breaking about fifty school rules, I expect. But the chance to finally humble that dreadful girl. To show...'

She looked at Harry.

'Uh... everyone. Yes, everyone! Show him... I mean them. Show them how dreadful that girl is.'

'If, in a month or so, you feel like explaining, you will let us know, won't you?' said Ron irritably.

'All right,' said Hermione coldly. 'What we'd need to do is get inside the Slytherin common room and ask Malfoy a few questions without her realising it's us.'

'But that's impossible,' Harry said, as Ron laughed.

'No, it's not,' said Hermione. 'All we'd need would be some Polyjuice Potion.'

'What's that?' said Ron and Harry together.

'Snape mentioned it in class a few weeks ago...'

'Oh, right. I must've missed it in between all the times Malfoy kept shouting about how much better she was at Potions than me,' Harry said dryly.

'You actually listened to that greasy git?' asked Ron.

'It transforms you into somebody else,' said Hermione, ignoring both of them. 'Think about it! We could change into three of the Slytherins. Nobody would know it was us. Malfoy would probably tell us anything. She's probably boasting about it in the Slytherin common room right now, plotting how to hurt Harry. If only we could hear that foul girl.'

'This Polyjuice stuff sounds a bit dodgy to me,' said Ron, frowning. 'What if we were stuck looking like three of the Slytherins for ever?'

'It wears off after a while,' said Hermione, waving her hand impatiently.

Harry found that her tone was all wrong. It was too insistent, and too eager, and there was something underneath the eagerness that he didn't like, something dark and very fixed, as though she'd been thinking about this for a lot longer than one evening. It frightened him a bit, if he was honest.

'But getting hold of the recipe will be very difficult,' Hermione went on. 'Snape said it was in a book called Moste Potente Potions, and it's bound to be in the Restricted Section of the library.'

There was only one way to get a book out of the Restricted Section. You had to have a note of permission, signed by a teacher.

'Oh, I didn't realise it'd be that easy,' said Harry sarcastically.

'Hard to see why we'd want the book, really,' said Ron, 'if we weren't going to try and make one of the potions.'

'I think,' said Hermione, 'that if we made it sound as though we were only interested in the theory, we might stand a chance...'

'Oh, come on, no teacher's going to fall for that,' said Ron. 'They'd have to be really thick...'

Harry sighed, and looked into the fire, and thought of a man in forget-me-not blue telling a tall tale of three hundred cultists and a fourth-generation Tzi-mi-see.

He had a feeling he knew exactly which teacher it would be.