Faith Managed

'All those times we were in that bathroom, and she was just three bloody toilets away,' said Ron bitterly at breakfast next day, 'we could've asked her, and now...'

He didn't finish. He didn't need to. It had been hard enough trying to find spiders. Getting away from the teachers for long enough to sneak into a girls' bathroom, the girls' bathroom, the one right next to the spot where Mrs Norris had hung and was heavily guarded, was going to be next to impossible.

But something happened in their first lesson that morning, Transfiguration, which pushed the Chamber of Secrets out of their heads for the first time in weeks.

Ten minutes into the lesson, Professor McGonagall put down her chalk and told them that their exams would begin on the first of June. One week from that day.

'Exams?' Seamus Finnigan howled. 'We're still having exams?'

There was a loud bang behind Harry. Neville's wand had slipped, and one of the legs of his desk had vanished. Professor McGonagall put it back with a flick of her own wand without even looking round, and turned a frown on Seamus.

'The whole point of keeping this school open at such a time,' she said sternly, 'is so that you may continue to receive an education. The examinations will go ahead exactly as planned. I trust you are all revising.'

Revising! It had never once crossed Harry's mind that there'd be exams with the castle in this state. A mutinous muttering went round the room, which made Professor McGonagall's frown deepen into something a good deal worse.

'You know, when I was learning, studying wards that I was placing as I was learning them, I decried that I never paid attention in class as Nephilim snatched and ate my friends around me. I will ensure you don't make my mistake.'

There was a short silence.

'Professor, what's a Nephilim?' asked Ron.

'Never you mind, Mr Weasley, you'll learn about them in the third year in Defence Against the Dark Arts. We'll be mercifully free of Lockhart then, I imagine.'

She stopped. Harry saw her wince, very slightly, the wince of somebody who's just heard what she said a second after she said it. Then she drew herself up, and the moment passed as though it had never happened.

'Professor Dumbledore's instructions were that the school should be run as normally as possible,' she said. 'And that, I need hardly tell you, means finding out exactly how much you have all learned this year.'

Harry looked down at the pair of white rabbits on his desk that he was supposed to be turning into a pair of slippers. What had he learned this year?

That the Malfoys were bastards. That the Ministry of Magic could have you nicked and booted off to prison without so much as a trial. That the wizarding world would happily put a liar like Lockhart in front of a classroom and buy his books by the hundred, however enormous the lies were. He couldn't think of a single thing that would be any use in an exam.

Ron looked as though he'd just been told he'd be spending the summer in the Forbidden Forest. Harry could see the hollow behind his eyes, and the clicking.

'Can you imagine me sitting exams with this?' Ron asked, holding up his wand, which had just started to whistle like a kettle.

Three days before the first exam, Professor McGonagall stood up at breakfast with another announcement.

'I have good news,' she said.

The Great Hall, instead of going quiet, erupted.

'Dumbledore's coming back!' yelled several people at once.

'You've caught them!' shrieked a Ravenclaw girl. 'You've caught the heir of Slytherin!'

'Quidditch is back on!' roared Wood, half out of his seat.

When the noise had died down, Professor McGonagall said, 'Professor Sprout tells me the Mandrakes are at last ready for cutting. Tonight, we shall be able to revive the people who have been Petrified. I need hardly remind you that one of them may very well be able to tell us who, or what, attacked them. I am hopeful that this dreadful year may yet end with the culprit caught.'

The Hall burst into cheers.

Harry looked across at the Slytherin table, and wasn't at all surprised to see that Dracina Malfoy hadn't joined in. She was sitting very still with her hands in her lap. The colour had gone out of her cheeks, so that she looked oddly sallow under the candles. It was like something that had been left out of the sun too long. She wasn't looking at Harry. She was looking at nothing.

Ron, though, looked happier than he had in days.

'Doesn't matter we never got to Myrtle, then!' he said. 'Hermione'll have the whole thing sorted the minute they wake her up. Mind you, she'll go spare when she finds out we've got exams in three days and she's not revised. Might be kinder to leave her where she is till they're over.'

Just then Ginny Weasley came and sat down next to Ron.

She looked tense and twitchy. Harry saw her hands twisting round and round each other in her lap, and that her sleeves were pulled right down over them.

'All right?' said Ron, reaching for the porridge.

Ginny didn't say anything. She looked up and down the Gryffindor table with a frightened expression that reminded Harry of somebody, though for a moment he couldn't think who.

'Come on, out with it,' said Ron, watching her.

Harry suddenly realised who she reminded him of. She was rocking very slightly backwards and forwards in her seat, exactly the way Dobby had on the end of his bed in the hospital wing, when he was right on the edge of saying something he wasn't allowed to say.

'I've got to tell you something,' Ginny mumbled. She was very carefully not looking at Harry.

'What is it?' said Harry.

Ginny looked as though she couldn't find the words.

'What?' said Ron.

Ginny opened her mouth. Nothing came out. Her eyes went, for a fraction of a second, across the Hall to the Slytherin table, and then back to her lap.

Harry leaned forward and spoke very quietly, so that only Ginny and Ron could hear.

'Is it about the Chamber? Have you seen something? Someone doing something they shouldn't?'

Ginny took a deep breath.

'I've been... I've been watching,' she whispered. 'For weeks. I know I shouldn't have, Percy said, but I had to know, and I saw...'

And at that exact moment Percy Weasley arrived, looking grey and exhausted.

'If you've finished, Ginny, I'll have that seat. I'm famished. I've only just come off patrol.'

Ginny shot up as if the bench had bitten her. She gave Percy one quick, terrified look, and bolted.

Percy sat down and reached for a mug.

'Percy!' said Ron furiously. 'She was about to tell us something! Something important!'

Percy choked on his tea.

'What sort of thing?' he said, coughing. His eyes went to Harry, very quickly, and away again.

'I only asked if she'd seen anything odd, and she started to say she'd been following...'

'Oh, that,' said Percy at once. 'That's nothing to do with the Chamber of Secrets.'

'How would you know?' said Ron, his eyebrows going up.

'Well. Er. If you must know.' Percy had gone a dull red. 'Ginny, ah, walked in on me the other evening. When I was, ah. Well. Never mind what.'

'Percy, mate...' said Ron, beginning to grin.

'The point is,' said Percy, very fast, 'she caught me at something, and I asked her not to mention it to anybody, and I must say I thought she'd keep her word. It's nothing. Really. I'd simply rather it wasn't...'

Harry had never seen Percy look so uncomfortable in his life.

'What were you doing, Percy?' said Ron, grinning properly now. 'Go on. We won't laugh.'

Percy didn't smile.

'Pass me those rolls, Harry. I'm starving.'

Harry knew the whole mystery might very well be solved by tomorrow without any help from him and Ron. But he wasn't going to pass up a chance to talk to Myrtle if one came along. And to his delight, one did, in the middle of the morning, while they were being walked to History of Magic by Gilderoy Lockhart.

Lockhart had told them so many times that all the danger was over, and been proved wrong so quickly each time, that even he seemed to have noticed people had stopped believing him. He'd noticed, too, Harry thought, the way the students had started looking at him. Not with adoration any more. With a flat, cold, measuring look, the look of people who'd worked something out. It was wearing on him. His hair wasn't as sleek as it used to be. His robes were creased. He looked as though he'd been up half the night patrolling the fourth floor and hadn't enjoyed a minute of it.

'You mark my words,' he said, hustling them round a corner, 'the very first thing those poor Petrified souls will say when they wake is It was Hagrid. I'm astonished, frankly, that Professor McGonagall thinks any of this is still necessary.'

'I agree, sir,' said Harry.

Ron dropped his books.

'Why, thank you, Harry,' said Lockhart graciously, as they waited for a long line of Hufflepuffs to file past. 'We teachers have quite enough on our plates, you know, without marching children up and down corridors and sitting up all night...'

'That's right,' said Ron, catching on fast. 'Why don't you leave us here, sir? It's only one more corridor.'

'D'you know, Weasley, I think I shall,' said Lockhart. 'I really ought to be getting on with preparing my next lesson.'

And he hurried off.

'Preparing his lesson,' Ron sneered after him. 'Gone to curl his hair, more like.'

They let the rest of the Gryffindors draw ahead, then slipped down a side passage and made for Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. And they were just congratulating each other on the brilliance of the plan when...

'Potter! Weasley! What are you doing?'

It was Professor McGonagall. Her mouth was the thinnest of thin lines.

'We were... we were...' Ron stammered.

'Oh I was just going off to fight the creature in the Chamber of Secrets by myself. Lockhart taught me these moves to fight Werewolves, Professor. I'm going to batter that thing,' Harry said sarcastically.

Professor McGonagall's nostrils went white.

'Potter...'

'I'm serious, Professor. He showed us. You get it on the floor, and you kneel on it, and you put your wand to its throat and say something fiendishly difficult. He held me down with one hand. Ask anyone. I was very convincing. I did a whimper.'

'This is not the moment for-'

'And he did a werewolf, and a vampire, and the Bandon Banshee, and I honestly feel I've absorbed a great deal of it, Professor. Just by proximity. I think if I'd been in the room with him for one more lesson I'd be able to take on the whole Chamber with a tea-strainer.'

Ron made a choking noise.

Professor McGonagall opened her mouth. Harry could see it coming. He could see her winding up for the sort of telling-off that took the paint off walls. And then something very strange happened to her face. Her mouth twitched. It twitched again, harder. She pressed her lips together so hard they disappeared, and looked at the ceiling, and a small, strangled sound came out of her nose that could only have been a laugh.

'Mr Potter,' she said, when she could speak, 'you and your sense of humour will be the death of me.'

She took off her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her nose. And when she put them back on, her face had gone softer than Harry had ever seen it.

'I know perfectly well where you were going,' she said. 'You wanted to see Miss Granger. You might simply have asked. It can all be arranged.' She looked from one of them to the other. 'Of course, I realise this has all been hardest on the friends of those who have been... I quite understand. Yes, Potter, of course you may visit Miss Granger. I will inform Professor Binns where you've gone. Tell Madam Pomfrey I have given my permission.'

'Thank you, Professor,' said Harry, rather weakly.

Then her face firmed up again, all at once, like water freezing, and she rounded on him.

'And now you will listen to me, Potter, because I shall say this once.' Her voice had dropped. 'I have faced Garou. I have walked through places where Wraiths walk and come out the other side. I have tangled with William the Bloody himself, in a cellar in Whitechapel, and I came out of that one with my life and very little else. And I have done several things besides, which I shall never be able to speak of to a living soul, and I was trained for every one of them.' She held his eye. 'And whatever is in that Chamber, I would not go in after it alone. Not even now. Do you understand me? It is dangerous beyond anything you can imagine, and schoolboys have no business going anywhere near it.'

She gave him a look as she said it. It was a long, level, knowing look, and it went straight through him, and Harry had the sudden, horrible feeling that she wasn't warning him about something he might do. She was warning him about something she already knew he was going to do.

How does she know? he thought. How does she always know?

'Yes, Professor,' he said.

'Hm,' said Professor McGonagall. 'Go on, then. Both of you.'

Harry and Ron walked away, hardly daring to believe they'd got off without so much as a detention. Neither of them looked back. If they had, they'd have seen that the corridor behind them was empty. Not that Professor McGonagall had gone. She'd simply stepped sideways into the shadow of a suit of armour at the precise moment they turned, in the way she'd been taught a very long time ago by a man with one eye and a cigar, and from there she watched them all the way to the stairs, with her lips pressed together and her wand in her sleeve.

'How the bloody hell,' said Ron, when they were safely round the corner, 'do you keep doing that to Professor McGonagall?'

Harry shrugged. He didn't know. She was only keeping up appearances, it seemed to him. Underneath, she was somebody else entirely, and every so often that somebody else looked out.

They had no choice now but to go to the hospital wing and tell Madam Pomfrey they had Professor McGonagall's permission to see Hermione. Madam Pomfrey let them in, though not with any enthusiasm.

'Oh, Merlin's beard. There's no earthly point talking to a Petrified person,' she said, and once they'd sat down beside Hermione they had to admit she was right. It was obvious that Hermione had no idea at all that anybody was there. They might as well have told her bedside cabinet not to worry.

'I wonder if she saw who did it, though,' said Ron, looking sadly at Hermione's rigid face. 'Because if the thing sneaked up on them all, nobody'll ever...'

But Harry wasn't looking at Hermione's face. He was looking at her right hand. It lay clenched on top of the blankets, and when he bent closer, he could see a scrap of paper crushed inside the fist.

'Hang on,' said Harry.

He checked that Madam Pomfrey was nowhere near, and pointed.

'Try and get it out,' Ron whispered, shifting his chair so that it blocked Harry from the office door.

It wasn't easy. Hermione's fingers were clamped so hard round the paper that Harry was sure he'd tear it. While Ron kept watch he tugged and twisted, and after several very tense minutes, it came free.

It was a page torn out of a very old library book. Harry smoothed it flat on his knee, and Ron leaned in to read it with him.

Of the many fearsome beasts and monsters that roam our land, there is none more curious or more deadly than the Basilisk, known also as the King of Serpents. This snake, which may reach gigantic size, and live many hundreds of years, is born from a chicken's egg, hatched beneath a toad. Its methods of killing are most wondrous, for aside from its deadly and venomous fangs, the Basilisk has a murderous stare, and all who are fixed with the beam of its eye shall suffer instant death. Spiders flee before the Basilisk, for it is their mortal enemy, and the Basilisk flees only from the crowing of the rooster, which is fatal to it.

And underneath, a single word had been written in a hand Harry knew at once as Hermione's.

Pipes.

It was as if somebody had thrown a switch in Harry's head.

'Ron,' he breathed. 'This is it. This is the answer. The monster in the Chamber's a Basilisk. A giant snake! That's why I've been hearing that voice all over the place, and nobody else has heard it. It's because I understand Parseltongue...'

He looked round at the beds. At Colin, and Justin, and the curly-haired Ravenclaw.

'The Basilisk kills people by looking at them. But nobody's died, because nobody looked it straight in the eye. Colin saw it through his camera. The Basilisk burned up all the film inside it, but Colin just got Petrified. Justin... Justin must've seen the Basilisk through Nearly Headless Nick! Nick got the full blast of it, but he couldn't die again... and Hermione and that Ravenclaw Prefect were found with a mirror next to them. Hermione had just realised the monster was a Basilisk. I bet you anything she warned the first person she met to look round corners with a mirror first! And that girl pulled out her mirror... and...'

Ron's jaw had dropped.

'And Mrs Norris?' he whispered eagerly.

Harry thought hard, picturing the corridor on the night of Hallowe'en.

'The water...' he said slowly. 'The flood from Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. I bet you Mrs Norris only saw the reflection...'

He scanned the page again. The more he looked at it, the more of it fitted.

'The Basilisk flees only from the crowing of the rooster, which is fatal to it!' he read aloud. 'Hagrid's roosters were killed! The heir of Slytherin didn't want one anywhere near the castle once the Chamber was opened! Spiders flee before the Basilisk! It all fits!'

'But how's it been getting about?' said Ron. 'A dirty great snake... somebody would've seen...'

Harry pointed at the word Hermione had scrawled at the bottom of the page.

'Pipes,' he said. 'Pipes, Ron. It's been using the plumbing. I've been hearing the voice in the walls...'

Ron grabbed his arm.

'The entrance to the Chamber!' he said hoarsely. 'What if it's a bathroom? What if it's in...'

'Bloody Moaning Myrtle's bathroom,' said Harry.

They sat there with it fizzing through them, hardly able to believe it.

'Which means,' said Harry, 'I can't be the only Parselmouth in the school. The heir's one too. That's how they've been controlling the Basilisk. Maybe that's why it can't be Malfoy?'

He heard himself say it, and sighed. Why had he said that? Every single thing pointed straight at Malfoy. Every single thing. Why did some stubborn part of him still not want it to be her?

'What do we do?' said Ron. His eyes were blazing. 'Go to McGonagall? Now?'

'The staff room,' said Harry, jumping up. 'She'll be there in ten minutes. It's nearly break.'

They ran downstairs. Not wanting to be caught loitering in yet another corridor, they went straight into the staff room, which was empty. It was a big panelled room full of dark wooden chairs. Harry and Ron paced up and down it, far too wound up to sit.

But the bell for break never came.

Instead, Professor McGonagall's voice came rolling down every corridor in the castle, magically magnified.

'All students to return to their house dormitories at once. All teachers to the staff room. Immediately, please.'

Harry wheeled round and stared at Ron.

'Not now, of all the bloody times, another attack? Now?'

'What do we do?' said Ron, aghast. 'Go back to the tower?'

'No,' said Harry.

He looked round. Not now. Not when they were this close to the truth, this close to finishing the whole nightmare. There was an ugly great wardrobe against the wall to his left, stuffed with teachers' cloaks.

'In there. Let's hear what it's about. Then we'll tell them what we know.'

They squeezed in among the cloaks and pulled the door nearly shut. Above them, hundreds of feet were rumbling along the corridors. Then the staff-room door banged open, and through the musty folds of wool they watched the teachers come in. Some looked bewildered. Some looked frightened.

Then Professor McGonagall came in.

'It has happened,' she told the silent room. 'A student has been taken by the monster. Into the Chamber itself.'

Professor Flitwick let out a squeak. Professor Sprout's hands flew to her mouth. Snape took hold of the back of a chair very hard.

'How can you be certain?' he said.

'The heir of Slytherin,' said Professor McGonagall, who had gone very white, 'has left a second message. Directly under the first. Her skeleton will lie in the Chamber for ever.'

Professor Flitwick burst into tears.

'Who?' said Madam Hooch. She'd sat down very suddenly, as though her knees had gone. 'Which student?'

'Ginny Weasley,' said Professor McGonagall.

Harry felt Ron slide silently down the inside of the wardrobe until he was sitting on the floor among the shoes.

'We shall have to send the students home tomorrow,' said Professor McGonagall. 'All of them. This is the end of Hogwarts. Dumbledore always said...'

'Minerva.' It was Snape. His voice was low and very controlled. 'I took the register in the dungeons on my way up. One of mine has not answered it either.'

Several heads turned.

'Which?'

'I would prefer not to say until I am certain. The Slytherin common room is a warren, and I have not yet searched the whole of it. The child in question is not... the sort to be in any danger from this.' He paused. 'But she has not been seen since breakfast, and her bed has not been slept in.'

Professor McGonagall looked at him for a long moment.

'Find them, Severus,' she said. 'Quietly. We have quite enough to deal with.'

Inside the wardrobe, Harry's mind had gone cold and clear. Not the sort to be in any danger from this. He knew exactly which Slytherin Snape meant. There was only one Slytherin who'd gone sallow at breakfast when the Mandrakes were mentioned, and who'd be hiding now, somewhere in the dungeons, while her monster finished what she'd started.

The staff-room door banged open again. For one wild moment Harry was sure it would be Dumbledore.

It was Lockhart. He was beaming.

'Awfully sorry! Dropped off. What have I missed?'

He didn't seem to notice that every other teacher in the room was looking at him with something very close to hatred.

Snape let go of the chair and stepped forward.

'The very man,' he said softly. 'The very man we were hoping for. A girl has been taken by the monster, Lockhart. Carried off into the Chamber of Secrets itself. Your hour has come at last.'

Lockhart went white.

'That's right, Gilderoy,' said Professor Sprout. 'Weren't you telling us only last night that you've known all along where the entrance to the Chamber is?'

'I... well, I...' Lockhart spluttered.

'Yes, and didn't you say you were quite sure you knew what was inside it?' piped up Professor Flitwick, wiping his eyes.

'D-did I? I don't quite recall...'

'I distinctly remember you saying,' said Snape, 'that it was a pity you hadn't been allowed a crack at the beast before Hagrid was taken. That the whole affair had been bungled, and that you ought to have been given a free hand from the very start.'

Lockhart looked round at the stony faces.

'I... I really never... you must have misunderstood...'

'We shall leave it to you, then, Gilderoy,' said Professor McGonagall. 'Tonight would be the ideal time. We'll see that nobody gets in your way. You'll be able to tackle the monster entirely on your own. A free hand at last.'

Lockhart looked desperately round for a rescue. Nobody offered one. He didn't look remotely handsome any more. His lip was trembling, and without the great toothy grin, his face had gone weak-chinned and weedy.

'V-very well,' he said. 'I'll... I'll be in my office. Getting... getting ready.'

He went out.

'Right,' said Professor McGonagall, with her nostrils flared. 'That's got him out from under our feet. Heads of House will go and inform their students what has happened. Tell them the Hogwarts Express will take them home first thing tomorrow. The rest of you, please make sure no student is left outside their dormitory. Severus, the dungeons.'

The teachers got up and went out one by one.

It was probably the worst day of Harry's life.

He and Ron and Fred and George sat together in a corner of the Gryffindor common room and couldn't find a single thing to say to each other. Percy wasn't there. He'd gone to send an owl to Mr and Mrs Weasley and then shut himself in his dormitory, and nobody had seen him since.

No afternoon had ever gone on so long. Gryffindor Tower had never been so full, or so quiet. People talked in whispers, if they talked at all. Every so often somebody would start to cry, and stop, and start again. Lavender Brown had her face in Parvati's shoulder. Neville was sitting on the floor by the fire with his knees up and his face hidden, and every time anybody came near him he flinched.

Once, near four o'clock, the portrait hole opened, Professor McGonagall put her head in, and the whole room went still.

'Nothing,' she said. 'I'm sorry. Nothing yet.' And then, after a moment, in a slightly different voice, 'Has anybody in this house seen a Slytherin today? Anywhere at all. Outside the dungeons.'

Nobody had. The portrait hole closed.

'What was that about?' muttered Fred.

Harry didn't answer. He thought he knew. Somewhere in the castle, Snape was still turning out the Slytherin dungeons, and still not finding what he was looking for, and Harry could picture exactly where she'd be. Down there. In the dark. With the thing she'd set loose. With Ginny.

Near sunset, Fred and George went up to bed, unable to sit there any longer.

'She knew something, Harry,' said Ron. It was the first thing he'd said since the wardrobe. 'That's why she was taken. It wasn't some stupid thing about Percy at all. She'd found out something about the Chamber of Secrets. That must be why Malfoy...'

He rubbed his eyes hard with the heels of his hands.

'I mean, she was a pure-blood. There can't be any other reason.'

'We'll get her back, Ron.'

Harry said it more firmly than he'd ever said anything in his life. He said it the way you'd say the sun would come up. He didn't know where it came from. He only knew, as he said it, that it was true, and that he'd make it true if it killed him.

Ron looked at him. He didn't say anything. But something in his face eased, just a fraction, and he nodded.

Out of the window, Harry could see the sun sinking blood-red behind the hills. He had never felt so low. If only there were something they could do. Anything.

'Harry,' said Ron. 'D'you think there's any chance at all she's not... you know...'

Harry didn't know what to say. He couldn't see how Ginny could still be alive.

'D'you know what?' said Ron. 'I reckon we should go and see Lockhart. Tell him what we know. He's meant to be going in there. We can tell him where we think it is. Tell him it's a Basilisk.'

Harry looked at him.

'Lockhart,' he said. 'Right. Yes. And while we're there, shall we ask him about his hair? Because I've always wanted to know. Or his teeth. How does he get them that white, Ron? Is it a charm? Is it a potion? I feel like if we're going to be stuck in a tunnel with a giant snake, we should at least go in with a decent skincare routine...'

He stopped.

Ron wasn't laughing. Ron was looking at him with a face so stripped and desperate that Harry felt the sarcasm go out of him like air out of a tyre.

'All right,' Harry said quietly. 'All right. Come on. For Ginny.'

The Gryffindors around them were so miserable, and so sorry for the Weasleys, that nobody tried to stop them when they got up, crossed the room and climbed out through the portrait hole.

It was getting dark as they went down to Lockhart's office. There seemed to be a great deal going on inside it. They could hear scraping, and thumps, and quick footsteps. Harry knocked, and everything went suddenly quiet. Then the door opened a crack and one of Lockhart's eyes looked out at them.

'Oh. Mr Potter. Mr Weasley.' He opened the door a fraction further. 'I'm rather busy just at the moment. If you'd be quick about it...'

'We've got some information for you, Professor,' said Harry. 'We think it'll help you.'

'Er... well... it's not terribly...' The sliver of Lockhart's face they could see looked deeply uncomfortable. 'I mean... well. Very well.'

He opened the door and they went in.

The office had been all but stripped. Two big trunks stood open on the floor. Robes had been bundled into one, jade green and lilac and midnight blue, all jumbled together. Books had been crammed into the other. The photographs that had covered every wall were stacked in boxes on the desk, all of them beaming up at the ceiling.

'It's an awful time to go on holiday, Professor,' Harry said, quite sweetly, looking at the trunks.

He knew exactly what Lockhart was doing.

'Er... well... yes,' said Lockhart. He was peeling a life-sized poster of himself off the back of the door and rolling it up as he talked. 'Urgent call. Quite unavoidable. Must dash...'

'What about my sister?' said Ron jerkily.

'Well, as to that... most unfortunate,' said Lockhart. He wouldn't look at either of them. He wrenched open a drawer and began sweeping the contents into a bag. 'Nobody regrets it more than I...'

'I knew you were a Billy Bullshitter from the moment I first laid eyes on you, Lockhart, but to run off now with all the dark arts being done around us... you're a maggot, Gilderoy.'

Harry said it with a certain grim relish. It was almost two years since Hagrid had stood in a hut on a rock in the sea and told him, in exactly that tone, what he was. You're a wizard, Harry. He'd been waiting a long time to say something that good to somebody, and it gave him real pleasure that it was Lockhart, and that the word was maggot.

'Well, I must say... when I took the post...' Lockhart muttered, piling socks on top of his robes, 'nothing in the job description... didn't expect...'

'All right then, go. Prove to the whole world you're the fraud I know you to be.'

Harry was completely and utterly sick of Gilderoy Lockhart.

'Books can be... misleading,' said Lockhart delicately.

'You wrote them!' Harry shouted.

'My dear boy.' Lockhart straightened up and frowned at him. 'Do try to use a little common sense. My books wouldn't have sold a quarter as well if people hadn't believed I'd done it all myself. Who wants to read about some ugly old Armenian warlock, even if he did rid a village of werewolves? He'd look simply dreadful on a cover. No dress sense whatsoever. And the witch who saw off the Bandon Banshee had a hairy chin. I mean, really...'

'So not only are you a liar, you've just been taking credit for what a load of other people have done?' said Harry incredulously.

'Harry, Harry.' Lockhart shook his head impatiently. 'It's nowhere near as simple as that. There was work involved. I had to track these people down. Get them to tell me exactly how they'd done it. And then, naturally, I had to Memory Charm them, so they wouldn't remember doing it. If there's one thing I pride myself on, it's my Memory Charms. No, it's been a great deal of work. It's not all signings and photographs, you know. If you want fame, you have to be prepared to graft for it.'

He slammed the lids of his trunks shut and locked them.

'Now, let's see,' he said. 'I think that's everything. Yes. Just one thing left.'

He drew his wand and turned round.

'Awfully sorry, boys. But I'm going to have to put a Memory Charm on you both. Can't have you going round telling people my secrets. I'd never sell another book...'

It was the worst mistake Gilderoy Lockhart had ever made.

He had drawn his wand on Harry Potter. And Harry Potter had stood in a chamber under the school with a two-faced man and Lord Voldemort himself, he'd not backed down. Harry felt it come up in him now, the same hard, cold, resolve rising from his stomach to his chest to his arm, and his wand was in his hand before he'd thought about it.

'Expelliarmus!'

Lockhart flew backwards over his own trunk and crashed into the wall. His wand went spinning up into the air. Ron caught it, and flung it straight out of the open window.

'Watched Snape do that one in the Duelling Club,' said Harry, through his teeth. 'If you were even half the man you claimed you were, I wouldn't have been able to do that.'

He kicked Lockhart's trunk out of the way. Lockhart was looking up at him from the floor, weedy once more, with his hair over his eyes. Harry kept his wand on him.

'What do you want me to do?' said Lockhart feebly. 'I don't know where the Chamber is. There's nothing I can do.'

'You're in luck,' said Harry, and hauled him up at wandpoint. 'We think we know where it is. And what's in it. Come on, shift!.'

They marched Lockhart out of his office and down the nearest staircase, along the dark corridor where the two messages still gleamed on the wall, to the door of Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. They sent Lockhart in first. Harry was pleased to see that he was shaking.

Moaning Myrtle was sitting on the cistern of the end toilet.

'Oh, it's you,' she said, when she saw Harry. 'What is it this time?'

'I want to ask how you died,' said Harry.

Myrtle changed completely. She looked as though nobody had ever asked her anything so flattering in her life. It reminded Harry, rather uncomfortably, of Hermione whenever Harry gave her a compliment.

'Ooooh, it was dreadful,' she said, with deep relish. 'It happened right in here. I died in this very cubicle. I remember every bit of it. I'd hidden in here because Olive Hornby was teasing me about my glasses. The door was locked, and I was crying, and then I heard somebody come in. They said something funny. A different language, I think it must have been. Anyway, what really got me was that it was a boy talking. Boys should never go into the ladies'.'

'But we're in the ladies right now,' pointed out Ron.

'Never mind, Ron! Carry on, Myrtle.'

Myrtle seemed to like Harry telling Ron off very much indeed.

'So I unlocked the door, to tell him to go and use his own toilet, and then...' Myrtle swelled up importantly, her face shining. 'I died.'

'How?' said Harry.

'No idea,' said Myrtle, in a hushed voice. 'I only remember seeing a pair of great big yellow eyes. My whole body sort of seized up, and then I was floating away...' She looked dreamily at Harry. Harry really, really didn't want a ghost to fancy him right now. 'And then I came back. I was determined to haunt Olive Hornby, you see. Oh, she was sorry she'd ever laughed at my glasses.'

'Where exactly did you see the eyes?' said Harry.

'About there,' said Myrtle, pointing vaguely at the sink in front of her toilet.

Harry and Ron hurried over. Lockhart stayed well back, with a look of sheer terror on his face.

It looked like an ordinary sink. They went over every inch of it, inside and out, and the pipes underneath. And then Harry saw it. Scratched into the side of one of the copper taps was a tiny snake.

'That tap's never worked,' said Myrtle brightly, as Harry tried to turn it.

'Harry,' said Ron. 'Say something. In Parseltongue.'

'But...'

Harry thought hard. The only times he'd ever managed it, he'd had a real snake in front of him. He stared at the tiny scratched snake, trying to believe it was alive.

'Open up,' he said.

He looked at Ron. Ron shook his head.

'English, mate.' he said.

Harry looked at the little snake again, willing it to move. When he tilted his head, the candlelight made it look as though it was.

'Open up,' he said.

Except that wasn't what he heard. A strange hissing had come out of him instead. And at once the tap lit up with a brilliant white light and began to turn. Next second, the whole sink began to move. It sank. It sank right down and out of sight, leaving a wide, dark pipe gaping where it had been, a pipe big enough for a man to slide into.

Harry heard Ron gasp. He looked up.

He'd made up his mind. It was exactly like the night he'd gone down the trapdoor after Quirrell. This was the right thing to do, and so he was going to do it.

'I'm going down there,' he said.

He couldn't not. Not now they'd found the way in. Not if there was even the faintest, slimmest, wildest chance that Ginny might still be alive.

'Me too,' said Ron.

There was a pause.

'Well, you hardly seem to need me,' said Lockhart, with a ghost of his old smile. 'I'll just...'

He put his hand on the door handle. Harry and Ron both turned their wands on him.

'You can go first,' Ron snarled.

White-faced and wandless, Lockhart came slowly to the edge of the pipe.

'Boys,' he said, in a feeble voice. 'Boys. What good will it do?'

Harry jabbed him in the back with his wand. Lockhart slid his legs into the pipe.

'I really don't think...' he began, and Ron shoved him, and he vanished with a yell.

Harry went next. He lowered himself into the pipe, and let go.

It was like plunging down an endless, slimy, pitch-dark slide. He could see other pipes branching off in every direction, none as big as this one, which twisted and turned and dropped and dropped, and he knew he was going down further under the school than even the dungeons went. Behind him he could hear Ron, thumping against the bends. And then, just as he'd begun to worry about what would happen when he reached the bottom, the pipe levelled out, and he shot out of the end of it with a wet thud onto the damp floor of a dark stone tunnel, high enough to stand up in.

Lockhart was getting to his feet a little way off, covered in slime and as white as a ghost. Harry stepped aside just in time as Ron came whizzing out of the pipe after him.

'Bloody hell,' Harry said, wiping slime off the seat of his robes. 'We must be miles under the school.'

His voice came echoing back at him along the tunnel.

'Under the lake, I reckon,' said Ron, peering at the dark, dripping walls.

All three of them turned to look into the blackness ahead.

'Lumos,' Harry muttered, and his wand lit up. 'Come on,' he said to Ron and Lockhart, and off they went, their footsteps slapping loudly on the wet stone.

The tunnel was so dark that they could only see a little way in front of them. Their shadows on the slimy walls looked monstrous in the wandlight.

'Remember,' Harry said quietly, as they crept forward, 'any sign of anything moving, shut your eyes. Straight away.'

But the tunnel was as silent as a grave, and the first unexpected sound they heard was a loud crunch as Ron trod on what turned out to be a rat's skull. Harry lowered his wand and saw that the floor was scattered with small animal bones. Trying very hard not to imagine what Ginny might look like if they found her, Harry led the way on, round a dark bend.

'Harry. There's something up ahead...' said Ron hoarsely, grabbing his shoulder.

They froze. Harry could just make out the outline of something huge and curved lying across the whole width of the tunnel. It wasn't moving.

'Maybe it's asleep,' he breathed.

Lockhart had both hands pressed over his eyes. Harry turned back to the thing, with his heart going so hard it hurt. He narrowed his eyes to slits and crept forward, holding the wand high.

The light slid across a gigantic snakeskin, a vivid, poisonous green, lying coiled and empty across the floor. Whatever had shed it must have been twenty feet long at the very least.

'Blimey,' said Ron weakly.

There was a sudden movement behind them. Gilderoy Lockhart's knees had given out.

'Get up,' said Ron sharply, pointing his wand at him.

Lockhart got up. And then he dived at Ron and knocked him flat.

Harry jumped forward, but it was too late. Lockhart was straightening up, panting, with Ron's wand in his hand and the great gleaming smile back on his face. He hadn't noticed that it was held together with Spellotape.

'The adventure ends here, boys!' he said. 'I shall take a bit of this skin back up to the school, tell them I was too late to save the girl, and that the pair of you tragically lost your minds at the sight of her mangled body. Say goodbye to your memories!'

He raised Ron's wand high over his head.

Harry, who knew with absolute certainty what was about to happen, sighed, and looked at the ceiling.

'Obliviate!'

The wand went off like a small bomb.

Harry threw his arms over his head and ran, slipping over the coils of snakeskin, as great chunks of the tunnel roof came crashing down behind him. A moment later he was standing alone, in a cloud of dust, staring at a solid wall of broken rock.

He didn't spare a thought for Lockhart.

'Ron!' he shouted. 'Ron! Are you all right? Ron!'

'I'm here!' Ron's voice came back, muffled, from the other side of the rockfall. 'I'm all right! I'm okay!' There was a pause, and then a thud, and an oof. 'This git isn't, though.'

Another thud.

'Ron, what are you...'

'Kicking him,' said Ron. 'He's out cold. Bit of rock got him. His own spell bounced right off the ceiling and hit him in the face.' Thud. 'That one's for Ginny.' Thud. 'That one's for my wand.'

Harry found, in spite of everything, that he was laughing. It came out shaky and high and not quite right, but it was laughing.

'Blew himself up with a broken wand in a sewer,' he said. 'Honestly, Ron. He'll want that on the cover of the next one. Gilderoy Lockhart and the Year with the Drains.'

He heard Ron snort.

'What now?' Ron's voice said, sounding suddenly desperate. 'We can't get through. It'd take hours...'

Harry looked up. Huge cracks had spread across the ceiling. He'd never tried to break apart anything as big as these rocks with magic, and now didn't seem the time to try. What if the whole tunnel came down? There was another thud from behind the rocks, and another ow. They were wasting time. Ginny had been in the Chamber for hours already.

Harry knew there was only one thing to do.

'Wait there,' he called. 'Stay with Lockhart. I'll go on. If I'm not back in an hour...'

There was a long, heavy pause.

'I'll try and shift some of this,' said Ron. He was trying very hard to keep his voice steady. 'So you can... so you can get back through. And, Harry...'

'See you in a bit,' said Harry, trying to put some confidence into a voice that was shaking.

And he set off alone, past the giant snakeskin.

Soon the far-off sounds of Ron heaving at the rocks had faded. The tunnel turned, and turned again. Every nerve in Harry's body was crawling. He wanted the tunnel to end, and he dreaded what he'd find when it did. And then, at last, as he crept round one more bend, he saw a solid wall ahead of him, with two entwined serpents carved into it, their eyes set with great, glinting emeralds.

Harry went up to it. His throat had gone very dry. He didn't need to pretend these snakes were real. Their eyes looked strangely alive. He could guess what he had to do. He cleared his throat, and the emerald eyes seemed to flicker.

'Open,' said Harry, in a low, faint hiss.

The serpents parted as the wall split down the middle. The two halves slid smoothly out of sight. And Harry, shaking from head to foot, walked through.

He was standing at the end of a very long, dimly lit chamber.

Towering stone pillars, carved with yet more serpents twining up them, rose to a ceiling lost in blackness, and cast long shadows through the strange greenish gloom that filled the place. The air was cold and still and smelled of old water. Harry stood with his heart hammering, listening to the silence. Could the Basilisk be lurking in a shadowy corner? Behind a pillar? And where was Ginny?

He raised his wand and walked forward between the serpentine columns. Every careful step came echoing back off the walls. He kept his eyes narrowed, ready to clamp them shut at the slightest flicker of movement. The hollow eye sockets of the stone snakes seemed to turn as he passed. More than once, with a lurch of his stomach, he thought one of them had stirred.

Then, as he came level with the last pair of pillars, a statue as tall as the Chamber itself loomed up out of the gloom against the far wall.

Harry had to crane his neck to look up into its face. It was ancient, and monkeyish, with a long thin stone beard falling almost to the hem of its sweeping robes, and two enormous grey feet planted on the smooth floor.

And between the feet, standing quite still, was Dracina Malfoy.

She was on her feet, with her arms hanging at her sides and her head bowed, and her white-blonde hair fell forward over her face so that he couldn't see it. She was wearing a long scarlet and gold scarf, wound round her neck three times. Harry knew that scarf. He'd lost it.

Then her knees folded, and she went down.

'Malfoy!'

He ran. He didn't think about it. He dropped to his knees on the stone beside her and got hold of her shoulders and turned her over, and her head rolled back against his arm. She was as cold as the floor. Her eyes were half open.

'Malfoy. Dracina. Can you hear me? Are you all right? Say something...'

Her eyes found him. They were dazed and unfocused, like somebody waking from a long fever, but they found him, and something moved in them.

'You came...' she whispered. 'He said you'd come.'

'Who said? Who...'

But her eyes had closed, and her head had gone heavy on his arm, and she was gone again, breathing slow and shallow, with her face as white as paper.

'I did indeed,' said a voice.

Harry's head snapped up.

A boy was leaning against the nearest pillar, with his arms folded, watching him. A tall boy of about sixteen, handsome, with jet-black hair, in a Hogwarts uniform fifty years out of date. He looked strangely blurred round the edges, as though Harry were seeing him through a misted window. But Harry knew him. He'd followed him down the moving staircase and along the dungeon passage. He'd watched him draw his wand on Hagrid.

'Tom Riddle,' said Harry.

Riddle inclined his head, very slightly, like somebody accepting a compliment.

And then Harry saw what was lying at Riddle's feet, and his stomach turned over.

Ginny Weasley was lying on her side on the stone, quite still, with her red hair spread out round her. There was blood in it. A dark line of it ran from a cut at her temple down across her forehead and had dried there. And beside her, open on the floor, lay the small black diary.

'What are you?' Harry said.

'A memory,' said Riddle pleasantly. He gestured at the diary with one long hand. 'Kept safe in there for fifty years. You know that, Harry. I told you.'

Harry looked at Ginny. He couldn't help it. He looked at the blood, and the terrible stillness of her, and Riddle saw him look.

'Oh. Her,' Riddle said.

He said it the way you'd say it about a pair of dirty socks somebody had left on your chair.

'She tried to stop dear Dracina. She's been on us for weeks now. Creeping about after us. Hiding behind pillars. I... well, she,' he said, pointing at the white, unconscious girl in Harry's arms. 'She sorted it out for us.'

Harry stared at him. Something hot and sick rose up in his throat.

'Why?' he said. 'Why would you make her do that? What's wrong with you?'

Riddle laughed. It was a very pleasant laugh.

'Oh, come now. This was a golden opportunity for the both of you.'

'I'm not in the mood for games,' said Harry. 'Tell me what's going on. Now!'

Riddle smiled.

'I've always liked that about you, Harry,' he said. 'I've been watching you for some time. And I admire your intolerance for foolishness. It marks you as clever. Cleverer than the rest of them.' He tilted his head up, towards the dark ceiling, towards the whole castle sitting on top of them. 'Cleverer than all of them up there, with their counting, and their crocodiles, and their Mandrakes.'

Harry looked down at Dracina again. Her lips had gone a faint blue.

'Is she alive?'

'Yes, but only just.'

'I'm not in the mood for cryptic half phrases, Tom.'

'Oh.' Riddle pushed himself off the pillar and strolled closer. He stopped a few feet away and looked down at Dracina with something that might almost have been fondness. 'Now that the Weasley girl is here, I have no more need of dear Dracina. Regrettable though it all was.'

'What do you mean, no more need?'

Riddle laughed again. This laugh was different. This one had something cruel in it.

'From what I understand it was always Lucius's goal to put the diary in Ms Weasley's possession. Into her cauldron, at Flourish and Blotts. Very neat. Nobody looks at a Weasley. But then Dracina had to react emotionally. You'll remember. Lucius told her to pick up the Weasley girl's book, and the Weasley girl screamed at her, and in a temper she swept up every book in sight. In the mix up, she picked up my diary.' He touched his own chest. 'Me, really. Regrettable. But still in line with my plans. One pure-blood girl is very much like another, from where I was sitting.'

He began to walk slowly round Harry and Dracina as he talked. His footsteps made no sound at all.

'She began to write in me, of course. And I listened. I listened to every single stroke of her quill. And do you know what she wrote about, Harry? Night after night, page after page?' He smiled down at Harry. 'You.'

Harry said nothing.

'How stupid you are. How dense. How your friends take up every minute of your time and never leave her a single one. How those Muggles you live with treat you.' Riddle's voice dropped, and softened. 'That last, she wrote about more than anything. She has a house-elf, you see, who sees things. She knows what they do to you, Harry. She has known since before the summer ended. She has lain awake over it. I will confess it was sometimes quite taxing, reading it all. But I gave her advice. I was kind to her. And with every page she wrote, I slipped a little further into her. Until, one night, I could move her hands. And then her feet. And then I could walk her down a corridor while she thought she was asleep in her bed.'

Harry's arms had tightened round Dracina without his telling them to.

'After that it was simple. I opened the Chamber with her mouth. I set the Basilisk on the Mudbloods with her voice. I wrote on the wall with her hands. And she remembered none of it, poor child. She only knew she was tired, and ill, and losing time, and that Tom was ever so supportive.'

'You're foul,' said Harry.

'Everything was going beautifully,' Riddle went on, as if he hadn't spoken, 'until you snatched the diary from her, on Christmas night, in her own common room, wearing another boy's face.' He gave Harry a small, admiring bow. 'That was very well done, Harry. That was cunning. There are people up in that castle who'd tell you cunning is a dirty word. It isn't. It's a Slytherin word, and you have it. I'd have used you, you know, to open the Chamber. Regretfully, but gladly. You'd have been a far better instrument than she was.'

'I'd never have...'

'You wrote in me, didn't you?' said Riddle gently. 'Within the week. And you went back. And you kept going back, and you hid it from your friends, and you couldn't have told them why.' He let that sit. 'But Dracina was desperate. She craved me. I have always had that effect on people, Harry. They crave my attention. The diary only makes it worse. So I lay there among your things, and waited, and she worked on the Longbottom boy until he let her in a second time. He's very easy, Longbottom. You only have to be kind to him. Nobody ever is.'

Harry thought of Neville dropping his books in the corridor. You've been such a help.

'And once she had me back,' said Riddle softly, 'after all those months of writing, there was nothing left of her to resist with. I could take her whenever I liked. Walk her wherever I liked. Make her say whatever I liked, in whatever voice I liked.' He paused. 'She was quite the actress, those last weeks. Wasn't she? Glowing. Laughing. Tossing her hair. You thought she'd got well.' He smiled.

Harry felt cold all over.

'And I'll tell you something else, since we're being honest. I did her one favour, in return for all her devotion. I'm quite magnanimous, really. I liked her. So I removed the Granger girl for her. She'd wanted it so badly, and for so long.'

'That's foul,' said Harry again. His voice cracked.

'That Mudblood was an obstacle,' said Riddle calmly, 'to the union of strong magical blood.'

'The what?' said Harry. 'Sorry. The union of what? Are you proposing, Tom? Only I think you've got the wrong girl unconscious.'

Riddle laughed out loud. It was a real laugh, warm and delighted, and it rang round the Chamber.

'Oh, that's very good. That's very good, Harry. You see? That's what I mean. You've a wit on you. You'd be wasted on the lot upstairs.' He shook his head, still smiling. 'But I mean exactly what I say. The Potters are very old blood, Harry. Older than you know. And the Malfoys are older still. Two lines like that, brought together...'

'I don't care about any of that.'

'You should.' Riddle's eyes had gone very bright. 'Your blood is potent, Harry. The meeting of two great rivers. Even your Mudblood mother. Especially her, in fact. Her line runs back further than anybody has ever written down. Further than memory.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

Riddle laughed again, and this time the cruelty was back in it.

'You don't know? Oh, that's rich. Dumbledore is keeping things from you, Harry. Great big things. Exactly as he kept them from me.'

Harry had had enough. He'd had enough of riddles and games and that pleasant, patient, circling voice.

'Who are you?' he said bluntly. 'Not a memory. Not Tom. Who are you?'

Riddle looked at him for a long moment.

Then he drew a wand from his pocket. Harry's wand. Harry's hand went to his own robes, and found them empty, and he realised, with a plunge of horror, that it had been lying on the stone beside Dracina the whole time, where he'd dropped it to catch her, and that Riddle had simply walked over and picked it up.

Riddle wrote in the air with it. Three words, in letters of thin fire.

TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE

He flicked the wand. The letters shivered, and slid, and rearranged themselves, and hung there burning.

I AM LORD VOLDEMORT

Harry stared at them.

He wasn't as shocked as he should have been. He found that, some way down, he'd known. He'd been working it out the whole time Riddle talked. The way he said Mudblood. The way he'd looked at Ginny. The fire in Dumbledore's eyes in Hagrid's hut.

He looked down at Dracina, grey-white in his arms. He looked across at Ginny, with the blood dried in her hair.

'They both need help,' he said. 'Now. So whatever you're planning, Tom, whatever this is, I'm going to stop it. Because Ginny's life is at stake. And Dracina's.'

Riddle's eyebrows went up. He smiled a slow, knowing smile.

'Not Malfoy, Harry? Dracina... my, my. You're starting to understand.'

'Understand what?' said Harry irritably.

Riddle laughed. Not cruelly, this time. It was a great, delighted belly laugh, the laugh of someone who's heard a joke that nobody else in the room has got yet. Then he wiped his eyes and smiled at Harry with enormous, infuriating fondness.

'You needn't worry about Dracina, Harry. I have no more use for her. Oh I was fully willing to use her, regrettable as it would be to dispose of one of such pure and ancient blood.' He gestured with Harry's wand at Ginny. 'But as I said. The young Weasley girl had been tracking us. Stalking us like... well, like a Basilisk slithering through the pipes. She followed us into the Chamber and I sensed a golden opportunity. I had Dracina sort out the girl for me. All I needed was a bit of blood.' He smiled. 'And then I walked her back up, of course, to leave a little note on the wall. One does like to be tidy.'

He pointed with the wand at the cut on Ginny's temple.

Then he held up his free hand and looked at it, turning it over in the greenish light. Harry saw, with a crawl of horror, that he could see the pillar through it. But only just. It was thickening. It was coming into focus, like something rising up out of deep water.

'In order to fully reconstitute myself, I needed life force,' said Riddle. 'As I said, I would've drained Dracina. It would've been a waste of pure blood. But necessary for my rebirth. But the Weasley girl is here now. I have no more need of Dracina. She will recover.' He smiled. 'And you, Harry, you can take Dracina with you.'

He leaned on the last two words, just slightly. And then he smiled that private smile again, at the joke only he could hear.

'I'm not leaving without Ginny,' said Harry.

'She's a Weasley,' Riddle hissed.

It came out of him in a flash, ugly and sudden, and for an instant his handsome face was something else entirely. Then it was gone, smoothed over, and he was charming again, and leaning in.

'Harry. Listen to me. I know what you need. I've known it since the first word you wrote to me. You need a guiding hand. Someone who'll teach you what you really are. Not Dumbledore, with his sherbet lemons and his secrets. Someone who'll show you the power in your own blood, and the old magic, the deep magic, the things they've been too frightened to teach at Hogwarts for a thousand years.' His voice had dropped to a murmur. 'I could teach you that. All of it. You'd be the greatest wizard of your age. And I'd be standing right behind you.'

'I don't want...'

'When you looked into my memories, Harry, I looked into yours.' Riddle's eyes held his. 'All of them. I saw the cupboard. I saw the spiders in the cupboard. I saw the frying pan. I saw a fat boy and his friends in a playground, and what they did when the teachers weren't looking. I saw you sent upstairs with bread and cheese while they laid the table for their guests and their pudding. I saw the bars go up on your window the morning after, and three days of a slice of bread through a cat flap. I saw it all.'

Harry couldn't move.

'And I saw what you felt. The rage, Harry. You've buried it so deep you've half forgotten it's there. But it's there. I know, because I had it too.' Riddle's voice was soft and warm and utterly certain. 'I grew up in a place like that. Worse. There was a woman who ran it who used to lock the little ones in the coal cellar. In the dark. For hours. I was five years old the first time. And the big boys, Harry. The things the big boys did.' He paused. 'And then one summer I found out what I could do. And I went home. And I made them sorry.'

He held out his hand. Harry's wand was in the other one.

'Those Muggles, the Dursleys. I saw into your mind. I know what they've done to you. They've hurt you so much. And you've always felt you couldn't do anything about it. But I know you, Harry. Don't you want to hurt them back?'

The words went into Harry like a hook.

They went in and they caught, and they pulled, and everything came up with them. The cupboard, and the smell of it. Uncle Vernon's hand on the back of his neck. Aunt Petunia's frying pan swinging. Dudley on the stairs, Dudley in the playground, Dudley's gang, Dudley's second bedroom full of broken things. The bars going up over the window while Uncle Vernon whistled. The cat flap. The bread. Sitting on his bed on the night of the Masons' dinner, listening to the laughter coming up through the floor, with a house-elf he'd never asked for wrecking everything, and then the bars going up the next morning while Uncle Vernon whistled, and three days of bread through the cat flap, and a hollow in his stomach, and hating them. Hating them with every cell in his body. Wanting, more than he'd ever wanted anything, to make them feel one single hour of what he'd felt.

Hurt them back, the voice said inside him. Hurt them back. Hurt them back. Hurt them back.

He did want to. God help him, he did.

For one long, terrible moment, Harry Potter looked at Tom Riddle's outstretched hand, and wanted to take it.

And then he looked down.

Dracina's head was heavy against his arm, and her lips were blue. Across the floor, Ginny lay with her hair in a red fan on the stone and blood dried on her face. Two girls who'd been used, and emptied, and thrown away, by the owner of that hand.

Harry felt it come up in him. The hard resolve. The thing that had kept his fingers locked round a broomstick while Quirrell tried to shake him off, and walked him through a wall of fire to face the man with two faces. He'd beaten Voldemort once, with Voldemort looking out of the back of somebody else's head. He could do it again.

'No,' said Harry.

Riddle's hand didn't move.

'No,' said Harry again, and his voice was steadier than he'd ever heard it. 'I don't want anything you've got. Not your magic. Not your guiding hand. Not anything. You can keep it.'

Riddle's smile had thinned.

'And there's something else I don't get,' said Harry. He was getting to his feet, slowly, lifting Dracina's head off his arm and laying it down on the stone as gently as he could. 'All this about blood. Pure blood. Old blood. The Malfoys are the oldest blood there is, you said. And you were going to drain her dry and chuck her in a corner. And the Weasleys are pure-bloods too. Every one of them. And you're doing it to Ginny right now.' He pointed. 'So what's it for, Tom? All of it? The Mudbloods and the Chamber and the wall? If you don't actually care who's pure and who isn't, as long as they're useful?'

'You don't understand...'

'And another thing.' Harry's heart was pounding, but he kept going. 'You told me in the diary. Tom after your father. Your Muggle father. Marvolo after your grandfather. You're a half-blood, Tom. Just like me.' He stared at him. 'You're a half-blood who grew up with Muggles, who hates them so much you've built a whole religion about it, and you don't believe one word of it, do you? Not really. It's a story. It's a story to get people to follow you.'

'Be silent!' Riddle's face had gone white. 'You know nothing. You know nothing. You're a child, you're a stupid, ignorant child, and I am the greatest wizard who ever-'

'Yeah,' said Harry. 'You know who else told me how great he was? Every lesson, for a whole year?'

He smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. He'd learned it off Malfoy.

'You're just like Lockhart, Tom. You're exactly like him. You're a fraud.'

Something broke in Riddle's face.

He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He turned on his heel, and looked up into the great stone face of Salazar Slytherin, high above them, and opened his mouth, and hissed. Harry understood every word.

Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four.

The stone face began to move.

The great mouth opened. It opened wider, and wider, into a black hole, and something was stirring inside it. Something was sliding up out of the dark in the belly of the statue, and Harry could hear it coming, a heavy, dry, dragging slither, and he had just enough sense left to squeeze his eyes shut and drop into a crouch.

Something enormous hit the stone floor with a crash that shook the whole Chamber. He felt it through his knees. He felt the floor tremble as it uncoiled. And then Riddle's voice, hissing, and the slithering was coming towards him.

Kill him.

Harry ran.

He ran blind, with his eyes screwed shut and one hand out in front of him, and he hit a pillar and went round it and kept running. Behind him the slithering came faster. He could feel the wind of it. He could smell it, a thick, wet, rotten smell that got in the back of his throat. Something huge went past him on the left, close enough to touch, with a sound like a tree being dragged over gravel, and he threw himself the other way and hit the floor and rolled and was up again.

No wand. Can't look. Can't look at it. Keep moving. Keep moving.

He opened his eyes a crack and looked at the floor, only the floor, and saw his own feet, and the stone, and the shadow. The shadow was enormous. It swept across the flagstones ahead of him like the shadow of a cloud, and he dived sideways as the thing it belonged to came down where he'd been standing, and the floor cracked.

'Kill him!' Riddle was screaming now. 'Smell him! Kill him!'

Harry ran down the Chamber between the pillars with his eyes on the floor and the Basilisk after him. He could hear it breathing. He went round one pillar and the thing hit the pillar and he heard stone shatter and rain down. He went round another and felt something snatch at his robes and tear them. He was running out of Chamber. He was running out of pillars. He could see the far wall coming, and the door he'd come in by, and he knew, somewhere cold and clear, that if he went through it he'd be in a tunnel with the thing behind him and nowhere to go.

He turned.

He turned with his eyes shut, and the Basilisk was right there, he could feel it, and he went left, and it went left, and something caught him across the right arm just below the shoulder, something sharp and hot and fast, like being touched with a poker.

Harry fell.

He hit the floor on his back. His eyes came open and he slammed them shut again and lay there, and the pain in his arm wasn't a pain, it was a fire. It was pouring into him. It was going up his arm and across his chest and down into his legs, a white, roaring, spreading heat, and he couldn't breathe, and he couldn't move, and he could hear Riddle's voice from somewhere a very long way off, and it sounded almost sad.

'Oh, Harry,' Riddle said. 'Oh, that is a pity. I did so want to see what the two of you would make. What a wedding that would have been.'

Harry couldn't feel his hands any more.

He couldn't feel the floor. The fire had gone everywhere, and now it was going cold, and the cold was worse, and the Chamber was going away from him, and he thought, very faintly, Ron. Ron's waiting. I said an hour. And then, I never told her the violets were nice. And then nothing.

He was dying. He knew it quite calmly. He was twelve years old and he was lying on a stone floor under a lake with a snake's venom in him, and nobody was coming, and he was going to die, and there was nothing, nothing at all, that he could do.

The blackness came up to take him.

And something was in the blackness with him.

It was warm. That was the first thing. All at once there was a warmth all round him, all through him, not the fire of the venom but something else, something that went under the fire and put it out. It was like being wrapped in something. It was like being held. He hadn't been held since he was a year old, and he hadn't known he remembered it, and he remembered it now.

And then a voice.

It was a kind voice. But it was firm. It was the kind of voice, Harry thought dimly, that a father might have, if you'd ever had one. It didn't come from anywhere. It was simply there, it was warm and comforting. 'Your work is not yet done, my child.'

And then, from somewhere up in the dark above him, high up, a sound.

A single long, clear note, like a trumpet and a bell at once. The cry of a phoenix.

Harry opened his eyes.

The pain had gone.

Harry lay on the stone and understood that, before he understood anything else. The fire in his arm had gone out. The cold had gone with it. He could feel his hands, and his feet, and the floor under his back, and his own heart going steady and strong in his chest, and he felt, absurdly, as though he'd slept for a week and woken up hungry. He felt renewed. He didn't know why. He didn't stop to wonder.

High above him, something scarlet and gold was circling under the black ceiling, trailing light.

It was Fawkes. His wings were spread wide and blazing, and in his claws, dangling, was something old and shapeless and brown. The Sorting Hat.

The Basilisk had reared back. Harry could hear it, hissing and thrashing somewhere to his left, and he kept his eyes fixed upward, on the bird. Fawkes dived. He came down the whole height of the Chamber in one long stoop and let go, and the Sorting Hat fell straight into Harry's hands.

Harry sat up.

He didn't know why he did what he did next. He only knew, with the same odd certainty he'd felt in Dumbledore's office with the Hat on his head and something cold and heavy brushing his hair, that he had to. He had nothing left to lose. He pushed his hand down into the Hat, past the brim, past where the bottom of it ought to have been, into a dark that went on much further than any hat had any right to, until his fingers closed round something hard and smooth and cold.

He pulled.

The sword came up out of the Hat as though the Hat had been waiting all year to give it to him.

It was long. Much longer than the Hat was deep. The blade was bright as water, so bright it seemed to hold its own light in the green gloom, and all down the length of it ran a line of strange letters that Harry couldn't read and had never seen and somehow felt he ought to know. The guard swept out in two long curves, and the grip was bound in dark leather worn smooth by hands, and the pommel was plain, pale metal with the same strange letters cut round it. There were no jewels on it anywhere. There was no name on it, and no lion, and nothing that said Gryffindor. It didn't look like anything that belonged in a wizard's castle at all. It looked like something out of a much older story than that.

Harry had the strangest feeling that he'd read about this sword somewhere. In a book, a long time ago, in a corner of a library where he'd been hiding from Dudley. He couldn't remember the name of it. He couldn't remember the name of the man who held it. But Harry held it, and it felt as though it had been made for his hand, and that couldn't be right, because his hand was twelve years old.

The Basilisk came round.

Harry heard it before he saw it. The slither. The hiss. He had the sword up and his eyes on the floor, and then he made a mistake, and looked up, and the Basilisk was looking at him.

He saw the eyes.

Two great yellow eyes, each as big as his head, blazing, fixed on him, and he had time to think that's it, then and nothing else.

And then there was heat.

It hit his face. Not the venom-fire, not pain, but a sizzling, pressing, golden heat, as though somebody had opened the door of a furnace between him and the snake, and the Basilisk's stare struck it and went no further. He felt it go. He felt it bounce, Like light bouncing off water. The yellow eyes bored into him. He looked straight back at them, and he did not die. He didn't understand it. He had no time to. The Basilisk reared up above him with its hood spread and its mouth gaping and its fangs dripping, and Harry raised the sword.

The blade caught fire.

It went up all at once, from the hilt to the point, in flames of white so bright they were almost blue, and the whole Chamber jumped into sudden brilliant light, and Harry roared, he actually roared, a sound he didn't know he had in him, and swung.

The sword went through the Basilisk's lower jaw like a hot wire through butter.

A fang the length of Harry's arm fell, and hit the stone, and shattered. The Basilisk screamed. It was a terrible sound, a hiss that went up into a shriek, and the great body thrashed and whipped and sent a pillar crashing down in a storm of dust, and Harry was thrown off his feet and rolled, and came up with the sword still in his hands and still burning.

The Basilisk was turning away from him. Blind with pain, maddened, it was going for the only thing in the Chamber that smelled of warm living blood and couldn't run.

It was going for Dracina.

She was lying where he'd left her, between the feet of the statue, white as paper, with her pale hair spread out across the stone and that scarf still wound round her neck. The Basilisk's head was swinging down towards her with its ruined jaw hanging and its one remaining fang bared, and she wasn't moving, and she couldn't see it coming.

'You won't have her!'

Harry cried out with that same hard resolve. And then he was running.

He ran as he'd never run in his life, across the broken stone, under the swinging shadow of the thing, and the sword was blazing in both his hands so that he ran inside his own light, and some small, calm part of him that was standing outside all this noted that this was how it must have looked, in the picture in the church that Aunt Petunia had dragged him to once at Christmas, the painted knight on the painted horse going in under the dragon's neck with the lance couched and the whole window lit up gold behind him, while the lady stood in the corner in white and waited.

He reached her a second before the snake did.

He planted his feet astride her, and set his shoulders, and brought the sword up over his head with both hands, and felt something go into his arms that wasn't his. A strength. A given strength, poured in from somewhere outside him, so that the sword came up as though it weighed nothing at all, and he brought it down with everything that was in him and a great deal that wasn't.

The flaming blade went through the Basilisk's neck.

All the way through. Scales and sinew and bone, in one stroke, and the sword rang on the stone beneath, and the enormous head came away from the body and fell. It hit the floor beside Dracina with a crash that cracked three flagstones, and lay there, with its yellow eyes going dull, and its black blood spreading out across the stone in a slow, steaming pool. Behind it, the body thrashed once, enormously, and knocked down another pillar, and was still.

Harry stood over her with the sword in his hands, and the flames on the blade burned down, and went out.

He was gasping. His arms were shaking. His glasses were cracked across one lens and he'd lost a shoe somewhere and the smell of the thing was all over him, and he stood between the feet of Slytherin's statue in the sudden, ringing silence and looked down at the girl on the floor, and did not see that her eyes were open.

Dracina Malfoy had woken up.

She didn't know when. She didn't know how. One moment there had been nothing, and the next there had been a roar, and light, and a sound like the end of the world, and she had opened her eyes in time to see a boy with a sword of white fire step over her body and cut the head off a monster.

She lay perfectly still, because she couldn't move, and looked up at him.

He was standing with his back to her. He was filthy, and bleeding, and his hair was standing straight up at the back the way it always did, and he was shining. The last of the light was still going out of the sword, and it lit the side of his face, and he looked like something out of the painted book she'd slammed shut in the library so that he wouldn't see. The knight in the silver armour, holding out his sword. Except he wasn't kneeling in a tower. He was standing over her, between her and the dark, with the thing that had come for her lying dead at his feet.

It was Saint George. And he just slayed the dragon.

You came, she thought. He said you would. And you did.

Something hot was running down the side of her face into her hair, and she didn't know it was tears.

Harry didn't look round. He was looking at Riddle.

Riddle was standing by the diary, quite still. Fawkes was circling above him, crying. Riddle's face had gone a strange colour, and he was staring at the dead Basilisk, and then at the sword in Harry's hands, and then at Harry, and there was something in his eyes that Harry had never expected to see there.

'No,' Riddle whispered. Then, louder, 'No. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you've done, you stupid, ignorant, half-blood...' His voice was climbing. 'The diary cannot be destroyed. Nothing can destroy it. Nothing you have, nothing you know, nothing you are. You think a sword and a bird make you anything? You're a boy. You're a scrawny, ridiculous little boy with a borrowed sword from a long forgotten ancestor, I am Lord Voldemort, and I will not be lectured on blood by-'

'You reckon?' said Harry.

He looked at the sword.

It had gone dark. But as he looked at it, with the diary lying open on the stone ten feet away, the blade stirred. A line of fire ran up the letters on it, thin and white, like a fuse.

Harry walked over to the diary. His feet felt very steady. He stood over it, with the sword in both hands, and looked up at Tom Riddle, and Tom Riddle looked back at him, and Harry raised the blade.

'No matter how compelling and confident Lockhart was,' Harry said, 'spending time around him made everyone eventually see he was a fraud.' He paused. 'I wonder what your followers think about you?'

And in that moment there was no Lord Voldemort.

There was no dark wizard. There was no murderer, no master of the Death Eaters, no man who'd torn himself to pieces hunting for a way to never die. There was only Tom Riddle, sixteen years old, in a uniform fifty years out of date, standing in the green dark of a sewer under a school, with his mouth open and nothing coming out of it.

And Tom Riddle was afraid of Harry Potter.

Harry saw it. He saw it quite clearly in that handsome face, and he thought, good, and he brought the sword down.

The point went through the diary and into the stone beneath.

Ink burst out of it. It came in a great black gush, like blood, like a fountain, pouring over Harry's hands and the hilt of the sword and running out across the floor. And Riddle screamed. He twisted, and writhed, and clawed at the air, and the scream went on and on, and his outline was fraying, coming apart at the edges like smoke in a wind. His face was the last thing to go. His mouth was still open. Riddle's eyes found him, in the last second before they went, and Harry saw that he had heard it. Somehow. Through the pages, or through the scar, or through whatever thread ran between them, he'd heard it. And the sound that came out of him then wasn't rage any more. It was something much worse. It was the sound of someone looking down into a very deep hole and seeing nothing at the bottom. This piece of Tom Riddle's last thoughts were wondering if Voldemort was simply going to be a footnote in Harry Potter's history.

Then he was gone.

The ink stopped. The Chamber was silent, except for Fawkes, who had settled on a broken pillar and was singing very softly, and the slow drip of water somewhere in the dark.

Harry let go of the sword. It stayed where it was, standing upright in the pierced diary, dark and quiet.

And the pain came back.

It came all at once, as though it had only been waiting, and it took him in the arm and the chest and the legs and dropped him. He went down on his knees, and then on his side, right beside Dracina, with the fire roaring up through him again and the cold coming behind it, and he thought, oh. Oh, it wasn't gone. It was only waiting till I'd finished.

He lay on the stone and the Chamber went grey.

Somebody was standing a little way off, by the fallen pillar, watching him.

It wasn't Riddle. It wasn't anybody Harry knew. It was a man, a grown man, with fair skin and long brown hair that fell past his shoulders, and a brown beard, and he was dressed in something plain and pale that Harry couldn't make out. He wasn't doing anything. He was just standing there, quite still, with his hands at his sides, looking down at Harry.

He looked warm. That was the only word Harry could find for it. He looked warm, and kind, and sad, and he was looking at Harry with an expression Harry had never in his whole life seen directed at himself. It was pride. It was the look of somebody who had always known, right from the beginning, that Harry could do this. Who had never once doubted it. And who knew, too, that Harry would have to do it again, and again, and would do it, every time.

Who are you? Harry tried to say. Nothing came out.

Will you help them? he tried. Ginny. And her. Will you get them out?

The man didn't answer. But his face changed, very slightly, into something that might have been a smile.

Harry's eyes were closing. He couldn't stop them.

And then there were hands on him.

Small, cold hands, shaking, turning him over, and an arm going under his head, and he was being lifted, and held, and his face was against something soft that smelled faintly of sugared violets. Somebody was crying. Somebody was saying his name, over and over, his first name, in a cracked and desperate whisper, and a hand was stroking the hair back off his forehead, again and again, as though it couldn't stop.

'Harry. Harry. Harry. Don't. Don't you dare. You can't, not now, not after... I saw you. I saw you. You came for me and you... you stood in front of me, you stood right in front of me, like... oh, please, Harry, please, I'm here, I've got you, I've got you, I won't let go, I'll never, ever let go...'

The arms tightened round him. Something wet fell on his face.

Harry tried to say it's all right. He tried to say where's Ginny. He tried to say that's my scarf. None of it came.

The dark came up over him, soft and warm, like a blanket being pulled up to his chin. And the last thing he heard, from somewhere far off, down the long tunnel, over the sound of a girl weeping and a phoenix singing, was a voice he didn't know at all, calling his name.