Total Spider Death

Summer was coming, and Harry and Ron still hadn't found a way into the Forbidden Forest.

It wasn't for want of trying. But the teachers had become watchful in a way Harry had never seen before. They walked the students to every lesson and back again, counting heads at every door, then they walked them up to the common room and counted them in. There didn't seem to be a single crack anywhere in the day for two boys to slip through, Invisibility Cloak or no Invisibility Cloak. There were prefects and teachers patrolling the corridor outside the portrait hole all night now, in pairs, and Harry was quite sure that even if nobody could see him and Ron, somebody would notice the Fat Lady swinging open all by herself and nobody climbing out.

And with no Hagrid to be seen from the castle windows, striding about the grounds with Fang at his heels, the view didn't look right either. It looked wrong in the same way that the inside of the castle looked wrong. Everything that had been solid had gone thin.

Harry and Ron had tried to visit Hermione. But there were no visitors allowed in the hospital wing at all now.

'No. I'm sorry. No exceptions,' Madam Pomfrey told them severely, through a two-inch gap in the door, with her foot wedged firmly behind it. 'We can't take the risk. There's every chance whoever did this will come back to finish the job, and I'll not have anyone in here who doesn't need to be.'

'But she's our-'

'I know who she is, Mr Weasley. Go back to your tower.'

The door shut.

With Dumbledore gone, a fear had spread through the castle that Harry had never known there before. It was a different fear from the one after Mrs Norris, or even after Colin. That had been a nervous, jumpy, whispering sort of fear. This was quieter and heavier, and it was everywhere. The sun was warm on the castle walls outside, but it seemed to stop dead at the windows and never come in. There was hardly a face anywhere in the school that wasn't tight and pale. Any laughter that happened in the corridors came out high and strange and was quickly smothered, as if the person laughing had remembered where they were.

Harry saw a first-year Ravenclaw burst into tears in the middle of the Charms corridor one morning because somebody had dropped a book behind her. He saw a group of Hufflepuffs who had taken to walking with their backs against the wall, all the way down a corridor, so that nothing could come at them from behind. He saw Dean Thomas, who was afraid of nothing, sitting on the end of his bed one night with a lit wand, not sleeping, just watching the dormitory door.

'What are you doing?' Harry asked him.

'Nothing,' said Dean. He didn't put the wand out. 'I'm Muggle-born, aren't I. Both of them. Mum and Dad.' He didn't look round. 'Go to sleep, Harry.'

Harry kept saying Dumbledore's last words over to himself, like a charm. I shall not truly have gone. Help has always come, and always will come, to those who ask for it. But what good were the words? Who exactly were they supposed to ask? Everybody in the whole school was as frightened and as lost as they were. There wasn't anyone to ask. There was just a lot of pale people walking in lines.

Hagrid's hint about the spiders was a lot easier to understand. The trouble was that there didn't seem to be a single spider left anywhere in the castle to follow. Harry looked everywhere he went. He looked in corners, and under window-ledges, and up in the rafters of the Great Hall, and behind the tapestries. Ron helped, in the sense that he came with Harry and stood a little way back with his arms folded while Harry looked. They were hampered, of course, by not being allowed to go anywhere on their own; they had to go about the castle in a herd with the rest of Gryffindor, and most of the herd seemed quite glad of it. Harry found it maddening.

'If they'd just let us out for ten minutes,' he said to Ron, through his teeth, as Professor Flitwick walked them in a long crocodile from Charms to lunch. 'Ten minutes. That's all we need. Ten minutes and a torch and nobody counting us.'

'We're being guarded, Harry,' said Ron. 'That's what the counting's for. In case that creature eats one of us on the way to dinner.'

'Nothing's going to eat us on the way to dinner. The thing's been quiet for weeks. We're wasting time, and every day we waste is a day nearer them shutting the...'

He stopped. He couldn't say it.

Ron looked at him sideways and didn't say anything. After a moment he bumped his shoulder against Harry's, hard, the way he did.

One person, though, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the atmosphere of terror and suspicion.

Dracina Malfoy went about the school as though she'd just been made Head Girl. She walked down the middle of corridors so that people had to get out of her way. She tossed her shining hair. She laughed loudly in the Great Hall when nobody else was laughing at all. Harry told himself, every single time he saw her, that he was never going to speak to her again, and he kept to it. He was sure she was the one controlling the creature. He was sure of it. She'd had the diary back for weeks now, she must have, nothing else explained the way she was.

Except that she didn't look anything like she'd looked the last time she had it.

Harry couldn't stop himself noticing that. Last time, with the diary tucked inside her robes, she'd gone grey, thin and strange, talking to empty chairs, with ink up to her knuckles and shadows under her eyes. Now she was pink-cheeked, bright-eyed and gleaming with health, and it didn't make sense, and the not making sense gnawed at him.

She was just as nasty as ever, though. Nastier.

'Morning, Scarhead,' she called across the Entrance Hall, in the second week after Dumbledore left, with Crabbe and Goyle flanking her like a pair of wardrobes. 'Sleep well? I expect you're used to it by now, aren't you? Being locked in. Being counted. Being told when you can go to the toilet.' She tilted her head. 'Must feel just like home.'

Several people laughed. Harry's face went hot.

'At least we've got homes to go to, if they shut the place,' she went on, as the Gryffindor crocodile shuffled past her towards the dungeons. 'Imagine being the sort of person who'd rather be locked in a castle with a monster than go back to his own family. Imagine what that says about the family.' Her voice dropped. 'Imagine what they are, Potter, if you'd rather be here. Don't you ever think about that? Don't you ever think they ought to be made to-'

'Shut up, Malfoy!' said Harry, and walked on without looking at her.

He didn't see her face as he passed, which was a pity, because it might have told him something. It had gone very still. Her lips were pressed together. And she watched him all the way to the dungeon steps, with Crabbe and Goyle shifting uncertainly beside her, with the look of somebody who had thrown a rope to a drowning man and seen him swim the other way.

Harry didn't look back. He was too busy being angry.

That was the thing about Malfoy. She found out where you were sore and she pressed on it. She'd done it on the Quidditch pitch, and in the hospital wing, and now she was doing it in the Entrance Hall in front of half the school: taking the Dursleys, taking the cupboard and the bars and the cat flap and everything he'd never told anybody and she somehow knew, and using it like a stick to beat him with. For a laugh. For an audience. He'd thought, lying awake after the diary was stolen, that maybe Tom was right, that maybe there was something underneath. He'd thought about the violets and the Valentine and the Bludger. And then she'd gone and done this, and he'd felt like a fool for ever having thought it.

He was angry at her for that. He was angry at her for Hermione, lying up there like a statue. But under it all, worse than all of it, he was angry about the thing he couldn't say out loud. If they shut the school, he was going back. For good.

'They won't,' said Ron.

They were sitting in the common room that evening, in the corner by the window, with the last of the light going red on the lake. Harry hadn't said anything. He hadn't needed to. Ron had been watching his face.

'I didn't say anything.'

'You didn't have to. You've got your Dursleys face on.' Ron put down the chess piece he'd been fiddling with. He looked at Harry properly, and when he spoke it was slower and more careful than Ron usually was, as though he'd been working out how to say it. 'Listen. I've been thinking about this. If they shut Hogwarts, right, the Ministry'll have about fifty other things to sort out before they get round to one second-year and where he's living. And by the time they do, you'll have been at the Burrow a month, and Mum'll have fed you up, and Dad'll have had a word with someone, and it'll be done. They're not going to come and drag you out of our kitchen. Nobody drags anybody out of Mum's kitchen.' He paused. 'And if they try, we've got a ghoul. He keeps going on about being some high level servant of a Prince. But I reckon he's talking nonsense.'

Harry laughed. It came out a bit cracked.

'You keep saying that.'

'Because it keeps being true.' Ron picked the chess piece back up. 'You're ours now, mate. That's just how it is. Deal with it.'

Two things happened in the week after that, and Harry didn't know what to make of either of them.

The first was in the corridor outside the library. The Gryffindor crocodile was going one way, with Professor Flitwick at the front, and a knot of Slytherins was going the other, with Snape behind them, and the two lines had to squeeze past each other at the narrow part by the stone bench. Malfoy was near the back of hers. As she came level with Neville, who was near the back of theirs, she slowed down.

'Longbottom,' she said, quite pleasantly. 'There you are. I never did say thank you properly, did I? You've been such a help.'

Neville dropped every one of his books.

He went white, and then red, and then white again, and he scrambled about on the floor picking them up with hands that didn't seem to work, and he wouldn't look at anybody. Malfoy walked on, smiling. She didn't look back.

'What was that?' said Ron, frowning after her. 'A help with what?'

'Nothing,' said Neville, very fast, from the floor. 'Nothing. She's just... she does that. She's just being horrible. You know what she's like.'

Harry did know what she was like. He'd watched her do exactly that to Neville for two years: single him out, say something sweet in a voice like syrup, and leave him in bits. It was the sort of thing she did. He helped Neville pick up his Herbology book, and told him to ignore her, and thought no more about it.

The second thing happened that same evening, just before six.

Harry and Ron were already in the common room when the portrait hole opened and Percy came through it with Ginny. He had her by the elbow. Ginny was crying.

'...and I shall be writing to Mother tonight, Ginevra, I mean it this time. On your own. On the second floor. After I have told you, and Professor McGonagall has told you, and has told the entire school...'

'I wasn't on my own! I was... I was following...'

'Following what?'

Ginny's mouth shut. She looked across the room, and saw Harry looking at her, and went the colour of a tomato.

'Nobody,' she said. 'Nothing. I wanted to see... I just wanted to see. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Percy. I won't do it again.' Ginny then pulled her elbow free and fled up the girls' staircase, and Percy stood at the bottom of it with his mouth open and his Prefect badge glinting, looking for once in his life as though he had absolutely no idea what to do.

'The second floor,' Ron said slowly, when Percy had stalked off to find some parchment. 'That's where the bathroom is, isn't it? Myrtle's. That's where the writing was.'

'Yeah,' said Harry.

They looked at each other.

'Or she was just saying that,' said Harry. He didn't like the way his own voice sounded. 'To get out of trouble. People do.'

Ron didn't answer. He was looking at the girls' staircase with his forehead creased up, the way it had been for weeks, and his hand had drifted up to his ear.

Harry didn't realise what Malfoy was so pleased about until the Potions lesson nearly a month after Dumbledore and Hagrid had gone.

He was sitting directly behind her. Snape had moved the Gryffindors forward, and so Harry had Malfoy's pale, gleaming head about three feet from his cauldron for the whole of the double lesson, and could hear every word she said. She was holding court. Pansy Parkinson was on one side of her and Daphne Greengrass on the other, and Crabbe and Goyle stood behind her stool with their arms folded, like the two enormous bodyguards Harry had once seen in a picture in Uncle Vernon's study, standing behind a vast bald man in a white suit whom Uncle Vernon had called a very successful American businessman in a tone of deep respect.

'I always thought Father might be the one who got rid of Dumbledore,' Malfoy was saying, and she wasn't bothering to keep her voice down. 'I told you he thinks Dumbledore's the worst Headmaster the school's ever had. Maybe we'll get a decent Headmaster now. Someone who won't want the Chamber of Secrets closed. McGonagall won't last long, she's only filling in...'

Harry's hand tightened on his stirring rod. Father might be the one. There it was again. Lucius Malfoy, and the parchment with twelve signatures, and the smile in Hagrid's hut. Whatever this was, it was his. All of it. Harry was sure of it now.

Snape, who had been drifting past the end of the bench, stopped dead.

It was a strange thing to watch. At the name McGonagall, Snape's shoulders went up very slightly, the way a cat's do when a door opens somewhere in the house. He looked round. He actually looked round, quickly, at the dungeon door, as though saying her name might bring her through it.

'Miss Malfoy,' he said, very quietly.

Malfoy looked up, surprised. Snape never scolded a Slytherin. Snape had never, in Harry's memory, so much as raised an eyebrow at one.

'You will speak of Professor McGonagall with respect,' said Snape. His voice was low and even and quite cold. 'In this room and in every other. Unless you would care to find out for yourself precisely why I do.' He let that sit for a moment. 'I would not recommend it.'

There was a short, shocked silence along the Slytherin bench. Malfoy's mouth had come open. Then it closed again, and she said, 'Yes, sir,' in a very small voice, and looked down at her cauldron.

Snape swept on past Harry without a word about Hermione's empty stool and her cold, clean cauldron. Harry watched the back of his head and hated him with a steady, quiet, thorough hatred.

Malfoy recovered quickly. She always did.

'Sir,' she said loudly, as Snape came back down the aisle. 'Sir, why don't you apply for the Headmaster's job?'

'Now, now, Miss Malfoy,' said Snape. But he couldn't quite keep the thin smile off his lips. 'Professor Dumbledore has only been suspended by the governors. I dare say he'll be back with us soon enough.'

'Yeah, right,' said Malfoy, smirking. 'I expect you'd have Father's vote, sir, if you wanted to apply for the job. I'll tell Father you're the best teacher here, sir...'

Snape's smirk widened a fraction. He glided off round the dungeon, and was lucky not to see Seamus Finnigan, two benches back, pretending to be sick into his cauldron.

'I'm quite surprised the Mudbloods haven't all packed their bags by now,' Malfoy went on, turning back to Pansy and Daphne. 'Bet you five Galleons the next one dies. Pity it wasn't Granger-'

Harry was halfway off his stool before he knew he'd moved.

Ron's hand clamped round his arm like a vice and hauled him back down. Harry fought it. He didn't even know what he'd been going to do. Shout in her face. Shove her off her stool. Something. Something worse, maybe. Ron held on, and kept holding, with a grip that didn't let go, and Harry sat there shaking with Malfoy's shining hair three feet from him and the word Granger ringing in his ears.

Ron was looking at the back of Malfoy's head with an odd expression. He'd let go of Harry's arm, slowly, when he was sure Harry wasn't going to go for her, and now his hand had drifted up to his ear, and was rubbing it, where a small crescent of pale scar still showed if you knew where to look. Harry knew where to look. He'd seen the tooth marks the night of the Hufflepuff match last year, when Ron had come back from wherever McGonagall had taken him with four lines down his cheek and a bald patch over one temple.

Ron hadn't forgotten any of that. But Ron, Harry had slowly come to understand, didn't hate Malfoy the way Harry did. He'd been bitten and scratched and screamed at by her, and somewhere in all that screaming he'd heard something that Harry never had, and ever since, he'd watched her with the look of somebody working out a very long maths question. Sometimes he even looked sorry for her, which Harry couldn't understand at all. Ron knew, better than Harry did, what she was doing. For whatever twisted-up reason, Dracina Malfoy couldn't say a single thing to Harry without saying it on top of somebody else, without climbing up on Weasleys or Grangers or Creeveys to get the height to be heard. And Ron knew, too, what the Dursleys had done to Harry, and that Harry would never, ever stand for being handled like that, however much she was obsessed with him.

So Ron held his arm. He didn't say anything. And then the bell rang.

It was lucky it did, because Malfoy's last remark, tossed over her shoulder to Pansy as she reached for her bag, was about Ginny.

'...and have you seen the little Weasley girl lately? Honestly. She looks like something that crawled out of the lake. All hunched up over that diary of hers, whispering into it, like it's going to whisper back. Mad. The whole family's...'

Ron came off his stool as though it had been fired from a cannon.

In the scramble of bags and books and scraping stools, nobody saw him go for her. Harry and Dean got him by an arm each, and it took both of them.

'Let me at her,' Ron growled, as Harry and Dean hung onto his arms. 'I don't care, I don't need my wand, I'm going to kill her with my bare hands, I don't care what happened at Quidditch, that's my LITTLE SISTER she's talking about, Harry! I'll twat her so hard bloody Lucius will feel it.'

'Hurry up, I have to take you to Herbology,' Snape barked over the heads of the class, and off they all went in a crocodile, with Harry, Ron and Dean at the back of it, and Ron still trying to get his arms free.

It was only safe to let him go once Snape had seen them out of the castle doors and they were crossing the vegetable patch towards the greenhouses. Harry got Ron talking about Quidditch as fast as he could.

'...and if we'd played Hufflepuff, we'd have flattened them, Wood had us so sharp. Doesn't matter now, does it? Cup's off. Everything's off. It's like being in a prison with Dean's people.'

'What do you mean, my people, Ron?' said Dean.

Ron looked at Dean.

'Football players,' he said.

Dean gave him a long, flat look, and then shook his head and walked on ahead. Ron glanced at Harry with a sly sort of face. He knew what he said. And what he meant by Dean's people. Ron confirmed it with that look. Ron had grown up in a house where the plates washed themselves and the garden was full of gnomes, and he knew less about the Muggle world than Harry knew about dragons. Half the time he didn't know what things to say to Dean, and he said other ones instead. Harry knew how Dean's people could be, maybe Ron just wasn't used to them. There weren't many at Hogwarts and they all seemed to be Muggleborn. It was an odd thing for someone like Harry, so used to the 'benefits' of multiculturalism.

Herbology was a very quiet lesson. There were two empty places in the class now, Justin's and Hermione's. Professor Sprout set them all to work pruning the Abyssinian Shrivelfigs, and hardly anybody spoke.

Harry went to tip an armful of withered stalks onto the compost heap and came face to face with Ernie Macmillan.

Ernie took a deep breath. Then he said, very formally, as though he'd rehearsed it:

'I just wanted to say, Harry, that I'm sorry I ever suspected you. I know you'd never have attacked Hermione Granger, and I'm sorry for all the things I said. We're all in the same boat now, and, well...'

He stuck out a plump hand. Harry shook it.

'It's all right,' said Harry. He found, slightly to his own surprise, that he meant it. It was such a relief to have one person look at him and not see a monster that he'd have shaken hands with Filch. 'Forget it. Everyone was saying it.'

Ernie looked relieved too. He and his friend Hannah Abbott came and worked at the same Shrivelfig as Harry and Ron.

'That Dracina Malfoy girl,' said Ernie, snapping off dead twigs, 'she seems very pleased about all this, doesn't she? D'you know, I think she might be Slytherin's heir.'

'That's clever of you,' said Ron, who didn't seem to have forgiven Ernie nearly as fast as Harry had.

'Do you think it's Malfoy, Harry?' Ernie asked.

Harry opened his mouth to say yes. It should have been easy. He'd said it to himself a hundred times.

'Maybe,' said Harry.

He said it so oddly, so flatly, that Ernie and Hannah both stared at him.

He didn't know why he'd said it. He didn't know why yes hadn't come out. He was thinking of pink cheeks and bright eyes, and of a girl who'd been grey and shaking the last time she'd held the diary. He was thinking of Ginny on the morning of the match, white as a sheet with ink on her hands, trying to tell him something. I saw somebody. Last night. And Percy had interrupted, and she'd run.

A second later he saw something on the ground that made him hit Ron over the back of the hand with his pruning shears.

'Ow! What're you...'

Harry was pointing at the earth a few feet away. Several large spiders were hurrying across it, in a line, purposefully, like people late for a train.

'Oh,' said Ron. He tried to look pleased. He failed completely. 'Yeah. Brilliant. Only we can't exactly follow them now, can we...'

Ernie and Hannah were watching curiously. Harry watched the spiders go. They went straight across the vegetable patch, under the fence, and away over the lawn, and he lost them in the grass.

'They're heading for the Forest,' he said quietly. 'Look. Straight for it.'

Ron looked even more unhappy than before.

At the end of the lesson Professor Sprout walked them all up to Defence Against the Dark Arts. Harry and Ron hung back at the end of the line so they could talk without being heard.

'We'll have to use the Cloak again,' Harry said. 'Tonight, or tomorrow. And we'll take Fang. He goes into the Forest with Hagrid all the time, he'll know the paths. He might be some use.'

'Right,' said Ron. He was turning his wand over and over in his fingers. 'Right. Yeah. Er. Harry. There aren't... I mean, you don't think there are... werewolves? In there? Mum always said to steer well clear of them. She said they go funny round wizards.'

They'd reached Lockhart's classroom and were sliding into their usual seats at the back. Harry thought of Professor McGonagall in the window alcove, with the dark grounds behind her. If it has black fur, and it's dancing, run faster. He very much hoped there was nothing like that in the Forest. He'd quite enough to be frightened of without it.

He decided not to answer the question.

'There's good things in there too,' he said instead. 'The centaurs are all right. And the unicorns.'

Ron had never set foot in the Forbidden Forest. Harry had been in once, and had rather hoped never to go again.

Lockhart bounded into the room, and the whole class stared at him. Every other teacher in the castle was looking grimmer than Harry had ever seen them. Lockhart, on the other hand, was positively bouncing.

'Now, now, now!' he cried, beaming round at them. 'What's all this? Why the long faces?'

People exchanged looks. Nobody answered.

'Surely you've all realised,' said Lockhart, slowly, as though they were a bit slow themselves, 'that the danger has passed? The culprit has been removed!'

'Who says?' said Dean Thomas loudly.

'My dear young man.' Lockhart smiled at him kindly, as one might smile at a very small child who had asked why the sky was blue. 'The Minister for Magic would hardly have taken Hagrid away if he hadn't been quite, quite certain of his guilt.'

'Yeah, he would,' said Ron, even louder than Dean.

'I flatter myself, Mr Weasley,' said Lockhart, in a self-satisfied voice, 'that I know rather more about the circumstances of Hagrid's arrest than you do.'

Ron opened his mouth to say that he very much doubted it, and stopped halfway, because Harry had kicked him hard under the desk.

'We weren't there,' Harry muttered. 'Remember?'

But Lockhart's revolting cheerfulness, his little hints that he'd always known Hagrid was a bad lot, his utter certainty that it was all over now, made Harry so angry that he wanted to pick up Gadding with Ghouls and throw it straight into Lockhart's gleaming face. He didn't. He scrawled a note instead, and pushed it across the desk to Ron.

Tonight. Let's do it tonight.

Ron read it. He swallowed. Then he looked sideways, at the empty seat where Hermione should have been, with her quill out and her hand already half up. The sight of it seemed to stiffen something in him. He nodded.

The Gryffindor common room was always packed these days, because from six o'clock on the Gryffindors had nowhere else to be. And they had a great deal to say to each other, so the room often didn't empty until well past midnight.

That night it was worse than usual. Harry had gone straight up after dinner to get the Invisibility Cloak out of his trunk, and he spent the whole evening sitting on it in an armchair by the fire, waiting for the room to clear, and it wouldn't.

Lee Jordan had got a crowd round him again. He was standing on a table.

'...and I'm telling you, if McGonagall won't do it, we should do it ourselves. Go down there. All of us. Tonight. Fifty Gryffindors against a few dozen Slytherins, I like those odds...'

'Oh, brilliant, Lee,' said Angelina Johnson. 'And then what? Duel them in the dungeons? Half of us can't do a Shield Charm.'

'Then we learn...'

'There isn't time to learn!' It was Lavender Brown, and her voice cracked right up the middle. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up, and Parvati had an arm round her. 'There isn't time, don't you understand? They're going to close it. My mum wrote. She says the Ministry's already drawing up the letters. She says they'll send us home on the Express next week if there's one more, just one more, and I'll have to go to the Muggle school in our village and I don't know how to do anything, I don't know what a... a fraction is, I don't...'

She put her face in her knees. Parvati pulled her in closer.

'They can't shut it,' said Neville, in a small voice, from the corner. 'They can't. Where would we all go?'

Nobody answered him.

Over by the window, Fred and George were being very quiet, which was so unlike them that it was worse than the shouting. They were sitting with Ginny between them. Ginny was in Hermione's usual chair. She had a book open on her lap that she wasn't reading, and she was pale and pinched and very still, and every so often one of the twins would say something low and make her nod, and she'd go back to staring at the fire.

Harry watched her. He couldn't help it.

She looked dreadful. She looked worse every day. There was ink on her fingers again. She kept rubbing at it with her thumb, the way you'd rub at a stain you'd given up on. Once, when Fred got up to fetch something, Harry saw her hand go inside her robes, quickly, as though checking that something was still there, and come out again. Then she saw him looking and went scarlet and pulled her sleeves down over her hands.

I saw somebody, she'd said, on the morning of the match. Last night.

And she hadn't said who.

Fred and George challenged him and Ron to Exploding Snap, to pass the time, and Ginny sat watching them, very subdued, in Hermione's chair. Harry and Ron lost on purpose, over and over, as fast as they could, trying to get the games finished. But even so it was long past midnight before Fred and George yawned, and stretched, and took Ginny up to bed between them.

Harry and Ron waited in the dark, listening, until they heard two dormitory doors close somewhere above them. Then they grabbed the Cloak, threw it over themselves, and climbed out through the portrait hole, praying that no prefect would be passing at the exact moment the Fat Lady swung open on nothing.

It was another slow, careful journey through the castle, ducking round corners, flattening themselves into alcoves while Professor Sinistra went past, and then Flitwick, and then two Ravenclaw prefects having a whispered argument. At last they reached the Entrance Hall, drew back the bolt on the great oak doors, squeezed between them without letting them creak, and were out in the moonlit grounds.

''Course,' said Ron abruptly, as they crossed the black grass, 'we might get to the Forest and find there's nothing there to follow. Those spiders might not have been going there at all. I know it looked like they were sort of going that way, generally, but...'

His voice trailed off hopefully.

They came to Hagrid's hut. It looked sad and sorry, with all its windows dark. There was an empty bowl on the step, and another on the table inside, so somebody, Professor Sprout probably, had been coming down to feed him. When Harry pushed the door open, Fang went nearly mad with joy all the same, bounding and barking and flinging himself at them. Terrified he'd wake the whole castle with those great booming barks, they fed him treacle fudge from the tin on the mantelpiece as fast as they could, which stuck his teeth together and shut him up.

Harry left the Invisibility Cloak folded on Hagrid's table. There'd be no need for it in the Forest. Nothing in there could see them anyway.

'Come on, Fang,' said Harry, slapping his leg. 'Walkies.'

Fang bounded out of the hut after them, raced to the edge of the trees, and lifted his leg against a big sycamore.

Harry took out his wand.

'Lumos,' he murmured, and a small light bloomed at the end of it, just enough to show them the path.

'Good idea,' said Ron. 'I'd do mine too, but, you know. It'd probably go off. Or turn into a frog.'

Harry touched his shoulder and pointed down. Two spiders were hurrying away from the wandlight, across the grass and into the shadow under the trees.

'Right,' Ron sighed, with the air of a man who'd been expecting the worst and had now got it. 'Right. Fine. I'm ready. Let's go.'

So, with Fang trotting round them, snuffling at roots and leaves, they went into the Forest.

By the glow of Harry's wand they followed the thin, steady trickle of spiders along the path. They didn't talk. They listened. There were twigs snapping, and leaves rustling, and once something a long way off that might have been an owl. Harry could hear Ron breathing beside him, fast and shallow, and every time a spider ran across the path in front of them Ron's breath hitched.

'You're doing all right,' Harry said quietly, after a while. 'You know that? You hate these things. I know you do. And you're still here.'

Ron didn't answer for a moment.

'Course I'm still here,' he said at last, rather gruffly. 'Where else would I be?' Then, after a few more steps, in a different voice, 'You're a good mate, Harry. You know that? Most people wouldn't have noticed.'

They walked on. After about twenty minutes the trees had grown so thick that the stars overhead had vanished, and Harry's wand shone alone in a great sea of dark. And then they saw their guides leaving the path.

Harry stopped, holding the wand up, trying to see where the spiders were going. But everything beyond his little circle of light was black. He'd never been this deep in before. He could remember, very clearly, how fast everything had gone wrong last year the moment anybody left the path. But Hagrid was miles away, sitting in a cell in Azkaban, and Hagrid had said follow the spiders.

Something wet touched Harry's hand and he jumped backwards onto Ron's foot. It was only Fang's nose.

'What d'you reckon?' Harry said. He could just see Ron's eyes, catching the light from the wand.

'We've come this far,' said Ron.

So they followed the darting little shadows off the path and into the trees.

They couldn't go fast now. There were roots and stumps everywhere, barely visible in the blackness, and brambles that caught at their robes. Harry could feel Fang's hot breath on the back of his hand. More than once they had to stop so that Harry could crouch and find the spiders again in the wandlight. They walked for what felt like half an hour at least. After a while, Harry noticed that the ground was sloping downwards, though the trees were as thick as ever.

Then Fang let out a great, echoing WOOF, and both of them jumped out of their skins.

'What?' said Ron loudly, grabbing Harry's elbow and staring round into the dark. 'What?'

'Something's moving,' Harry breathed. 'Over there. Listen. Something big.'

They listened. Some way off to their right, something big was pushing through the trees, snapping branches as it came.

'Oh no,' said Ron. 'Oh no, oh no, oh...'

'It's going to be all right, Ron. But we have to be quiet,' said Harry frantically. 'It'll hear you.'

'Hear me?' said Ron, in a voice gone high and thin. 'It's already heard Fang!'

The dark seemed to press on their eyes as they stood waiting. There was a strange, low, rumbling noise. Then silence.

'What's it doing?' Harry whispered.

'Getting ready to jump us,' said Ron, and swore steadily under his breath for some time.

They waited, shivering, not daring to move.

'D'you think it's gone?' Harry whispered.

'Dunno...'

And then, off to their right, there was a sudden blaze of light, so bright in all that dark that they both threw their arms over their eyes. Fang yelped and bolted, got himself tangled in a bramble, and yelped louder.

'Harry!' Ron's voice broke with relief. 'Harry, it's the car!'

'The what?'

'Come on!'

Harry blundered after him towards the light, stumbling over roots, and a moment later they came out into a clearing.

Mr Weasley's car stood in the middle of it, empty, in a ring of thick trees under a roof of branches, with its headlamps blazing. As Ron walked towards it with his mouth open, it rolled slowly forwards to meet him, exactly like a big turquoise dog that had found its owner.

'It's been in here the whole time!' said Ron delightedly, walking right round it. 'Look at it! Look at the state of it! The Forest's turned it feral...'

The car's wings were scratched and plastered with mud. Where the door on Ron's side had been there was nothing but a gap with a bit of bramble caught in it. It had obviously been trundling about the Forest on its own for months, quite happily. Fang didn't like it at all. He pressed himself against Harry's legs, trembling.

Harry's breathing slowed down. He stuffed his wand back into his robes.

'Thanks, Dad,' said Ron, to the car, patting its bonnet. 'Brilliant car. Best car there's ever been.' He leaned against it. 'And we thought it was going to eat us! I wondered where it had got to!'

Harry squinted round the floodlit clearing for spiders. But they'd all scuttled away from the glare of the headlamps.

'We've lost them,' he said. 'Come on. Let's find them again.'

Ron didn't say anything. He didn't move. His eyes were fixed on something about ten feet above the ground, just behind Harry's head, and his face had gone the colour of candle wax.

Harry didn't even have time to turn.

There was a loud click, and something long and hairy seized him round the middle and swung him up off the ground so that he hung face down in the air. Struggling, terrified, he heard more clicking, and saw Ron's feet leave the ground too, and heard Fang howling. And then he was being rushed away into the dark between the trees.

Hanging upside down, Harry saw that whatever had him was going along on six immensely long, hairy legs, with the front two holding him tight beneath a pair of gleaming black pincers. Behind him he could hear a second creature, which must have Ron. They were going down, down, into the very heart of the Forest. Harry could hear Fang somewhere behind, fighting a third one, whining. He couldn't have shouted if he'd wanted to. His voice seemed to have stayed behind in the clearing with the car.

He never knew how long he hung there. He only knew that at some point the dark thinned enough for him to see the leaf-littered ground beneath him, and that the ground was moving. It was alive with spiders. Twisting his neck round, he saw that they'd come to the lip of a vast hollow, cleared of trees, so that the stars shone straight down into it and lit up the worst thing Harry had ever seen in his life.

Spiders. Not little spiders, like the ones swarming over the leaves. Spiders the size of carthorses. Eight-eyed, eight-legged, hairy and black and huge. The one carrying Harry picked its way down the steep side of the hollow towards a great, misty, domed web in the very middle of it, and the others came crowding in from all sides, clicking their pincers excitedly at the sight of what it had brought.

The spider let go, and Harry dropped onto all fours in the leaves. Ron and Fang thudded down beside him. Fang wasn't howling any more. He'd gone silent and was cowering flat to the ground. Ron looked exactly how Harry felt. His mouth was stretched wide in a scream that made no sound, and his eyes were starting out of his head.

Harry realised, slowly, that the spider that had dropped him was talking. It was hard to tell, because it clicked its pincers with every word.

'Aragog!' it was calling. 'Aragog!'

'Bless you,' Harry said.

He thought the thing was sneezing. Or choking. He didn't know. He'd gone past fear into some strange calm place on the far side of it, where the only thing left to do was be rude.

'Sorry. Do giant spiders sneeze?' Harry asked.

'HARRY!' Ron screamed at him. It was the first sound he'd made. He was shaking so hard that Harry could hear his teeth.

And out of the middle of the misty web, very slowly, came a spider the size of a small elephant.

There was grey in the black of its body and legs. Every one of the eight eyes on its ugly, pincered head was milky white. It was blind.

'What is it?' it said, clicking its pincers rapidly.

'Men,' clicked the spider that had carried Harry.

'Is it Hagrid?' said Aragog, moving closer, with its eight milky eyes wandering.

'Strangers,' clicked the spider that had brought Ron.

'Kill them,' clicked Aragog fretfully. 'I was asleep...'

'Hang on, hang on, we're friends of Hagrid's,' Harry shouted.

His heart seemed to have climbed up out of his chest and was pounding in his throat.

Click, click, click went the pincers of the spiders all round the hollow.

Aragog paused.

'Hagrid has never sent men into our hollow before,' it said slowly.

'Hagrid's in trouble,' said Harry, breathing very fast. 'That's why we've come.'

'In trouble?' said the old spider, and Harry thought he could hear something like worry underneath the clicking. 'But why would he send you?'

Harry thought about standing up, and decided against it. He didn't think his legs would hold him. So he spoke from the ground, as calmly as he could manage.

'They think, up at the school, those bloody idiot wizards, that Hagrid's been setting a... a... something on students. They've taken him to Azkaban.'

Aragog clicked its pincers furiously, and all round the hollow the sound was taken up by the crowd of its children. It was like applause. Except that applause didn't usually make Harry feel sick with terror.

'But that was years ago,' said Aragog fretfully. 'Years and years ago. I remember it well. That's why they made him leave the school. They believed that I was the monster that dwells in what they call the Chamber of Secrets. They thought that Hagrid had opened the Chamber and set me free.'

'And you... you didn't come from the Chamber of Secrets?' said Harry. There was cold sweat on his forehead.

'I!' said Aragog, clicking angrily. 'I was not born in the castle. I come from a distant land. A traveller gave me to Hagrid when I was an egg. Hagrid was only a boy, but he cared for me, hidden in a cupboard in the castle, feeding me on scraps from the table. Hagrid is my good friend, and a good man. When I was discovered, and blamed for the death of a girl, he protected me. I have lived here in the Forest ever since, where Hagrid still visits me. He even found me a wife, Mosag, and you see how our family has grown, all through Hagrid's goodness...'

Harry gathered up what was left of his courage.

'So, uh, you never, um, never attacked anyone?'

'Never,' croaked the old spider.

'Oh good, you're a nice giant spider then?' asked Harry innocently.

'It would have been my instinct, but from respect of Hagrid, I never harmed a human. The body of the girl who was killed was discovered in a bathroom. I never saw any part of the castle but the cupboard in which I grew up. Our kind like the dark and the quiet...'

'Ah... But I reckon you do know what did kill that girl?' said Harry. 'Because whatever it is, it's back and attacking people again...'

His words were drowned in a sudden storm of clicking, and the dry rustle of many long legs shifting angrily. Huge black shapes moved all round him in the dark.

'The thing that lives in the castle,' said Aragog, 'is an ancient creature we spiders fear above all others. Well do I remember how I pleaded with Hagrid to let me go, when I sensed the beast moving about the school.'

'What is it?' said Harry urgently.

More clicking. More rustling. The spiders were closing in.

'We do not speak of it!' said Aragog fiercely. 'We do not name it! I have never even told Hagrid the name of that dread creature, though he asked me, many times.'

Harry felt, very strongly, that this was not a subject to push. Not with the hollow full of giant spiders pushing closer on every side.

Aragog seemed to have had enough of talking. It was backing slowly into its domed web. But its children went on inching forward towards Harry and Ron.

'Right then. Sorry to be a bother. We'll just go, then,' Harry called desperately after Aragog, hearing leaves rustle behind him.

'Go?' said Aragog slowly. 'I think not...'

'But... but...'

'My sons and daughters do not harm Hagrid, on my command. But I cannot deny them fresh meat, when it wanders so willingly into our midst. Goodbye, friend of Hagrid.'

'Oh you bloody cu-'

Harry was spun round. He found himself facing a wall of ravenous giant spiders, smaller than Aragog and no less dreadful for it, and very, very hungry, clicking, with their dozens of eyes gleaming in their ugly black heads...

He went for his wand. Even as he did it he knew it was no good. There were far too many. But as he tried to get to his feet, ready at least to go down fighting, a long, loud note blared through the hollow, and a blaze of light came flooding down the slope.

Mr Weasley's car was thundering down into the hollow, headlamps blazing, horn screaming, knocking spiders flying. Several were thrown onto their backs, their endless legs waving in the air. It screeched to a halt in front of Harry and Ron, and its one remaining door flew open.

'Get Fang!' Harry yelled, diving into the front seat.

Ron grabbed the boarhound round the middle and flung him, yelping, over the seat into the back, scrambled in after Harry, and the door slammed. Ron didn't so much as touch the accelerator. The car didn't need him. The engine roared, and they were off, hitting more spiders as they went. They tore up the slope and out of the hollow and went crashing away through the Forest, with branches whipping at the windows, the car threading its way cleverly through the widest gaps along a path it clearly knew.

Harry yelled. He yelled out of the window at the spiders. He told them several things about their mothers, and their legs, and what they could do with their pincers, that would have done lasting damage to the self-esteem of any giant spider that heard them. Then he fell back in the seat, gasping, and looked sideways at Ron.

Ron's mouth was still open in the silent scream. But his eyes weren't popping any more.

Harry reached over and put his hand on Ron's shoulder. The way Ron had done for him, so many times.

'Are you OK?'

Ron stared straight ahead through the windscreen. He couldn't speak.

They smashed on through the undergrowth, with Fang howling in the back, and Harry saw the wing mirror snap clean off as they scraped past a huge oak. After ten loud, lurching minutes the trees began to thin out, and Harry could see bits of sky again between them. Then the car stopped so suddenly that they were nearly thrown into the windscreen.

They were at the edge of the Forest. Fang hurled himself at the window in his desperation to get out, and when Harry opened the door he shot off between the trees towards Hagrid's hut with his tail clamped between his legs.

Harry got out too. After a minute or so Ron seemed to get the feeling back into his arms and legs, and followed him, still stiff-necked and staring. Harry gave the car a grateful pat on the bonnet. It reversed slowly back into the trees and was gone.

Harry went into the hut to fetch the Invisibility Cloak. Fang was shaking under a blanket in his basket. When Harry came out again, he found Ron being violently sick in the pumpkin patch.

'Follow the spiders,' said Ron weakly, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. 'I'll never forgive Hagrid for that. Never. We're lucky to be alive.'

'I expect he thought Aragog wouldn't hurt friends of his,' said Harry.

'That's exactly Hagrid's trouble!' said Ron, and thumped the wall of the hut with his fist. 'He always thinks monsters aren't as bad as everyone says, and look where it's got him! Azkaban!' He was shivering so hard he could barely stand. 'What was the point of sending us in there? What have we actually found out? I'd like to know.'

'That Hagrid never opened the Chamber of Secrets,' said Harry. He threw the Cloak over Ron and prodded him in the arm to get him walking. 'He was innocent.'

Ron snorted loudly. Hatching Aragog in a cupboard clearly wasn't his idea of innocent.

As the castle loomed up ahead of them, Harry tugged the Cloak straight to make sure their feet were covered, and eased the creaking front doors open. They crept back across the Entrance Hall and up the marble staircase, holding their breath as they passed the corridors where the sentries were walking. At last they reached the safety of the Gryffindor common room, where the fire had burned itself down to a glow. They pulled off the Cloak and climbed the winding stairs to their dormitory.

Ron fell onto his bed without bothering to undress.

Harry didn't feel sleepy at all. He sat on the edge of his four-poster thinking hard about everything Aragog had said.

The thing in the castle, he thought, was like some sort of monster Voldemort. Even the other monsters wouldn't say its name. But he and Ron were no nearer to knowing what it was, or how it Petrified people. Even Hagrid had never known what was in the Chamber of Secrets.

Harry swung his legs up onto the bed and leaned back against his pillows, watching the moon through the tower window.

He couldn't see what else they could do.

The feeling came up in him slowly, from the stomach, the way it always did. It was panic, and it was anger, and he couldn't have said where one stopped and the other started. They'd hit a wall. Every way they turned, there was a wall. Riddle had caught the wrong person. The real heir of Slytherin had walked away, fifty years ago, and nobody knew if it was the same person now or somebody new. The diary was gone. Hermione was stone. Hagrid was in Azkaban. Dumbledore was gone. There was nobody else to ask. And the days were running out, one after another, like sand through his fingers, and at the end of them was a train, and a station, and a car, and Uncle Vernon's face.

No. Harry's jaw set hard. No. Not without a fight.

But he didn't know who to fight. That was the worst of it. He had all this fury in him and nowhere to put it.

He lay down, still turning over what Aragog had said. The hollow. The cupboard. The body of the girl who was killed was discovered in a bathroom. He was drifting, nearly asleep, when what seemed like the very last hope they had came to him all at once, and he sat bolt upright in bed. If anyone had looked at the moon at that moment, they would've noticed it shone just a bit brighter for a moment. But Harry didn't notice at all. Despite the fact it was meant for him. God is funny about that sort of thing.

'Ron,' he hissed into the dark. 'Ron!'

Ron woke with a yelp exactly like Fang's, stared wildly round, and saw Harry.

'Ron, that girl who died. Aragog said she was found in a bathroom,' said Harry, ignoring Neville's snuffling snores from the corner. 'What if she never left the bathroom? What if she's still there?'

Ron rubbed his eyes, frowning in the moonlight. And then he got it.

'You don't think... not Moaning Myrtle?