Black Candles and Horses

October came in wet, and brought a cold with it that got into the stone of the castle and stayed there.

Madam Pomfrey was run off her feet. Half the school seemed to be sneezing, and the staff weren't much better, and her Pepperup Potion went out of the hospital wing by the gallon. It worked at once, and it left whoever drank it smoking at the ears for several hours afterwards, so that the corridors between lessons looked like a railway station.

Ginny Weasley had been looking peaky for a week, and Percy had decided that it was his responsibility as a prefect, and as her brother, to do something about it.

'Drink it,' said Percy, at breakfast, standing over her with the bottle.

'I'm fine.'

'You're grey, Ginny. You've been grey since Tuesday. Mum would want...'

'Mum isn't here,' said Ginny, but she drank it, because it was quicker than arguing with Percy and she wanted to impress Harry by downing the whole thing in one gulp. She knew her brothers were impressed by that sort of thing amongst themselves. Two seconds later steam came pouring out from under her hair. With hair the colour of Ginny's, the effect was of a small girl whose head had caught fire.

'Better?' said Percy, satisfied.

'I'm going to kill you,' said Ginny, through the smoke, and went back to her toast.

Harry, watching from further down the table, found he was looking past her at the Slytherin table. Dracina Malfoy was sitting at the end of it, a little apart from Pansy Parkinson and the others, and she didn't look well either. She was pale even for her, with smudges under her silver eyes as though she hadn't been sleeping. She wasn't eating. She wasn't even shouting at Crabbe and Goyle. She had a small black book open beside her plate and she was writing in it with her head bent close, and every so often she'd stop, and wait, and read something, and her lips would move.

Then she looked up, quite suddenly, as if somebody had said her name, and found Harry looking at her, She shut the book so hard that Pansy jumped.

'What are you staring at, Potter?' she called, the length of two tables.

'Nothing,' said Harry. 'You look awful.'

'You look awful, idiot!' said Malfoy. It didn't have much behind it. She tucked the book away inside her robes, and after that she didn't look at him again, which was unusual enough that he noticed it.

'Leave her,' said Hermione, at his elbow. She'd seen the whole thing. 'She's probably got a cold. I hope it's a bad one.'

The rain came down for days. It came in drops the size of bullets and hammered on the windows until you stopped hearing it. The lake rose. The flowerbeds turned into little brown rivers. Hagrid's pumpkins went on swelling until they were the size of garden sheds, and squatted in his vegetable patch in the downpour like a row of orange boulders.

None of it made the slightest difference to Oliver Wood, who held training three times a week whatever the sky was doing. Which was how Harry came to be walking back up to Gryffindor Tower one stormy Saturday afternoon, a few days before Hallowe'en, wet to the skin and caked in mud to the knees.

It hadn't been a happy practice, quite apart from the weather. Fred and George had been down to the pitch the day before, to spy on the Slytherins.

'Seven green blurs,' Fred had reported, in the changing room, dripping. 'That's all you can see. Seven green blurs, going past like something the Muggle air force would have.'

This made Oliver perk up. He'd told Harry before his dad was in the RAF. He even showed Harry a big magazine full of muggle jet planes and explained at length their payloads and the damage they could do. As enthusiastically as he or Ron explained Quidditch results. Which was very enthusiastic indeed.

'Jump-jets,' said George. 'Dad's got a picture of one in the shed. They go straight up.'

'They don't go straight up,' said Wood, who was white about the mouth.

'Those brooms near enough do,' said Fred. 'And Malfoy's on one. She's not bad, either, Oliver. I'm not saying she's good. I'm saying she's not bad.'

Wood had looked at Harry then, and said nothing. That had been worse than if he'd said something. Some threat of violence or motivational speech. But Wood was silent.

So Harry squelched along the corridors with his mind on brooms, and was so far inside his own head that he almost walked into Nearly Headless Nick, who was drifting along the same corridor in the opposite direction, looking thoroughly put out. He was reading a letter. When he saw Harry, he folded it up irritably and tucked it away somewhere about his ghostly person.

'Good afternoon, young Potter,' said Nick. 'You look troubled.'

'Likewise,' said Harry. 'What's wrong?'

Nick huffed and shoved a ghostly bit of parchment into an unseen pocket. It was quite a thing to watch, a ghost huffing; there was no breath in it, and it came out all the same.

'Oh, it's nothing,' he said, in the voice of somebody to whom it is very much something. 'It's only that I've been turned down for the Headless Hunt. Again. Not that I wanted to join, you understand. Hacking about the countryside on horseback with my head under my arm, playing Head Juggling, Head Polo, Horseback Head Juggling. Why should I want to be part of that? It's the principle of the thing, Harry. Forty-five blows. Forty-five, with a blunt axe, on the twenty-third of... well. It doesn't matter when. And at the end of it there was still an inch of skin and sinew holding my neck on, and on account of that one inch, I'm not good enough for Sir Patrick Delaney-Podmore. One inch!'

'Sorry, mate. That's rotten,' said Harry, and meant it.

'Thank you. It is rotten. And it's bad enough to be refused,' Nick went on, warming to it, 'without the whole castle knowing. Do you know who stopped me on the stairs this morning to offer her condolences? That Malfoy girl. The Slytherin one. Sweet as anything, and laughing the whole time behind those eyes. She'd had it from the Bloody Baron, who must have had it from somebody else, I can't think who. They're dreadful gossips, ghosts.'

'Yeah,' said Harry dryly, 'ghosts are known for gossiping.'

He meant it as a joke, more or less, about the sheer absurdity of the thing. A year and a bit ago he hadn't believed in ghosts at all, and now here he was being told that they couldn't keep a secret. But Nick turned to him with an expression of the deepest gratitude, as though Harry had laid a hand on his arm.

'Finally,' said Nick. 'Finally somebody understands. You've no idea, Potter. It's a nightmare, being a ghost. You'd think five hundred years would give a fellow some perspective, but no. All that gnashing and wailing and moaning. All of them, all the time, on and on about how they died. The circumstances. The indignity. The Grey Lady won't speak to anyone, the Baron won't stop speaking about his chains, and as for the Friar...' He shook his head, carefully, so that it stayed on. 'But I'm being very rude. What's bothering you, young man? Is there anything I can do?'

Harry thought about it.

'Don't suppose you know a bloke who can find me seven Nimbus Two Thousand and Ones that fell off the back of a lorry?' he said. 'A wizard lorry.' He stopped. 'Do wizards even have lorries?'

Nick opened his mouth, with the look of a ghost giving the question his full and serious consideration. And then something brushed past Harry's ankle, and he looked down into a pair of yellow eyes like lamps.

Mrs Norris. Filch's skeletal grey cat, who served him as a sort of deputy, and who seemed to have a nose for Harry the way some dogs have a nose for truffles.

'You had better make a brave retreat, Harry,' Nick said quickly. 'He's in a foul temper. He's got a cold, and some third-years splattered frog brains all over the ceiling of dungeon five, it was a nasty mess and he's been cleaning it all morning. If he sees you dripping all over the place...'

'Right,' said Harry, and backed away from the accusing stare of Mrs Norris.

He wasn't quick enough. There was some connection between him and that cat that he'd never got to the bottom of, some kind of invisible string, and it was tied to Filch at the other end. Out of a tapestry to Harry's right burst Argus Filch, wheezing, with a tartan scarf wrapped round his head and his nose an unhealthy purple, looking wildly about for a rule-breaker.

'Filth!' he cried, and his eyes bulged, and his jowls shook, and he pointed a quivering finger at the muddy puddle that had dripped out of Harry's Quidditch robes. 'Mess and muck everywhere! Nasty little children, tramping their corruption up and down, and who cleans it? Who's on his knees at midnight scrubbing it out of the flags? I've had enough of it, I tell you! Follow me, Potter!'

So Harry gave Nick a gloomy little wave, and followed Filch back downstairs, doubling the number of muddy footprints on the floor as he went.

He'd never been in Filch's office before. Most students went to a good deal of trouble to keep it that way. It was dingy, had no window, and a single oil lamp hung from the low ceiling over a desk, and there was a smell of fried fish about the place that seemed to have soaked into the walls. Wooden filing cabinets lined the room. From the labels on them, Harry could see that they held the particulars of every pupil Filch had ever punished. Fred and George had a drawer to themselves. On the wall behind the desk hung a collection of chains and manacles, very lovingly polished. Everybody knew that Filch was forever begging Dumbledore to let him hang students up by their ankles, and looking at the shine on those chains, Harry believed it.

Filch snatched a quill out of a pot and began rooting about for parchment.

'Dung,' he muttered furiously, 'great sizzling dragon bogies... frog brains... rat innards... I've had enough of it... make an example... where's the form... yes...'

He found a long roll of parchment in his drawer and spread it out and dipped the quill.

'Name... Harry Potter. Crime...'

'Enduring you for far too long, Filch,' said Harry.

Filch growled at him.

'I have to do so much cleaning. It's only a bit of mud to you, boy, but to me it's an extra hour scrubbing!' Filch shouted, and a drip shivered on the end of his bulbous nose. 'Crime... befouling the castle... suggested sentence...'

He dabbed at his nose and squinted at Harry, and Harry waited with his breath held to be sentenced.

But as Filch lowered the quill, there was an almighty BANG on the ceiling of the office, so loud that the oil lamp swung on its chain.

'PEEVES!' Filch roared, and flung the quill down in a passion. 'Little gobshite, I'll have you this time! I'll have you!'

'Ew,' said Harry. Not wanting to see Filch 'have' poor Peeves no matter how annoying Peeves could be. Whatever Lockhart had was spreading apparently. Uncle Vernon spoke of this.

And without a backward glance at Harry he ran, flat-footed, out of the office, with Mrs Norris streaking along at his heels.

Harry didn't much like Peeves. But he felt something very like gratitude towards him at that moment. Whatever Peeves had done up there, and it had sounded as though he'd dropped something the size of a wardrobe, it might take Filch's mind off Harry.

He supposed he'd better wait. He sank into a moth-eaten chair beside the desk. There was only one thing on the desk besides his half-written form, and that was a large, glossy purple envelope with silver writing on it. Harry looked at the door. Nothing. He picked up the envelope. Sod Filch. Thought Harry. His curiosity taking over.

KWIKSPELL

A Correspondence Course in Beginners' Magic

Harry flicked it open and drew out a sheaf of parchment. More silver curlicues on the front page:

Do your charms fizzle where others' sparkle? Do you mumble your incantations in company for fear of getting them wrong? Do the young people at family gatherings exchange looks when you pick up your wand? You are not alone! Kwikspell is the all-new, never-fail, rapid-result, simple-to-learn method that has transformed the lives of hundreds of witches and wizards just like you!

Mrs P. Hoskins of Wolverhampton writes: "For years I couldn't so much as warm a teapot without setting light to the cosy. Since Kwikspell, my Scouring Charms are the talk of the street!"

Mr L. Ashby of Kendal writes: "My brother-in-law always laughed at my wandwork. He has not laughed since Lesson Four, chiefly because he is presently a hatstand. Thank you, Kwikspell!"

Harry turned the pages, fascinated. Why on earth would Filch want a correspondence course in beginners' magic? Did that mean he wasn't a proper wizard? He'd got as far as Lesson One: Holding Your Wand (Some Useful Tips) when he heard shuffling footsteps outside, and he stuffed the parchment back in the envelope and threw it on the desk as the door opened.

Filch looked triumphant.

'That vanishing cabinet was extremely valuable!' he was saying to Mrs Norris, with relish. 'We'll have Peeves out this time, my sweet.'

His eyes fell on Harry. Then they went to the Kwikspell envelope, which, Harry saw a moment too late, was lying two feet from where it had been.

Filch's pasty face went the colour of brick. Harry braced himself. Filch hobbled to the desk, snatched up the envelope, and flung it into a drawer.

'Have you... did you read...?' he spluttered.

'No,' Harry lied quickly.

Filch's knobbly hands were wringing each other.

'If I thought you'd read my private... not that it's mine... for a friend... be that as it may... however...'

Harry stared at him. He'd never seen Filch look so mad. His eyes were bulging, a tic was going in one pouchy cheek, and the tartan scarf did nothing to help.

'Very well... go... and don't breathe a word... not that... however, if you didn't read... go now, I've got to write up Peeves's report... go...'

Harry went. He couldn't believe his luck. He sped out of the office and up the passage and up the stairs, and he was fairly sure that to get out of Filch's office without a punishment must be a school record of some kind.

'Harry! Harry! Did it work?'

Nearly Headless Nick came gliding out of a classroom. Behind him Harry could see the wreckage of a large black-and-gold cabinet that looked as though it had been dropped from a considerable height.

'I persuaded Peeves to crash it right over Filch's office,' said Nick eagerly. 'Thought it might distract him...'

'Was that you?' said Harry. 'You're a legend, mate. Yeah, it worked, I didn't even get detention. Thanks, Nick!'

They set off up the corridor together. Nick, Harry noticed, still had Sir Patrick's letter in his hand.

'I wish there was something I could do for you,' Harry said. 'About the Headless Hunt.'

Nick stopped dead, and Harry walked straight through him, which he regretted at once; it was like stepping through a cold shower with his clothes on.

'But there is something you could do for me,' said Nick excitedly. 'Harry, would I be asking too much... but no, you wouldn't want...'

'What is it?' said Harry.

'Well, this Hallowe'en will be my five hundredth deathday,' said Nearly Headless Nick, drawing himself up with great dignity.

'Oh,' said Harry, unsure whether to look sorry or pleased. 'Right. Sorry about that, or... uh I'm happy for you, I guess.'

'I'm giving a party. Down in one of the roomier dungeons. Friends are coming from all over the country. It would be such an honour if you'd attend. Mr Weasley and Miss Granger would be most welcome too, of course. But I dare say you'd rather go to the school feast?'

He hung on Harry's answer with an expression of such hope that it was painful to look at.

'No,' said Harry quickly. 'I'll come. I owe you one. It wouldn't be right to refuse.'

'My dear boy! Harry Potter, at my Deathday Party!' Nick hesitated, and his face lit up even more. 'And do you think you could possibly mention to Sir Patrick how very frightening and impressive you find me?'

'Yeah, mate. O-of course,' said Harry.

Nearly Headless Nick beamed at him.

Up in Gryffindor Tower Harry peeled off his robes, which had begun to dry stiff, and got into a dry jumper with a gratitude he couldn't have put into words, and went down to the common room and told Ron and Hermione what he'd agreed to.

'A Deathday party?' said Ron. 'Instead of the feast?'

'I owe him. He dropped a cabinet on Filch for me.'

'Harry, that's wonderful,' said Hermione, and she'd sat up straight. 'Hardly anybody living ever gets invited to one of those. Do you know how many ghosts there'll be? From all over the country? We could ask them anything. Their history, their culture, the way they lived, the way the world was when they were alive. It's a golden opportunity. Most historians would give their eye teeth. We ought to take full advantage.'

'Take advantage of what?' said Ron. 'A load of moany old ghosts going on about how they died? What are they going to teach us? How to get your head nearly chopped off?'

'Ronald,' said Hermione, in the voice of a patient teacher with a slow pupil, 'none of us should throw away knowledge just because it doesn't come with pudding. Some of those ghosts were alive before Hogwarts was even built.'

Ron shrugged and went back to his chess problem. Hermione's face fell, as it always did when somebody didn't share her excitement, and she looked down at her book.

'You're welcome to come,' Harry said. 'You can tell me who they all are. You probably know about all of them already, seeing how clever you are.'

Hermione came back to life like a lamp being lit. She shifted along the sofa until she was right up against Harry's side, closer than there was really any need for, so close that he could feel her elbow in his ribs, and she didn't seem to notice how close she was, and if she did she didn't seem to mind.

Ron looked up from the chessboard, saw Harry's face, and came to the rescue.

'Go on, then, Hermione,' he said. 'Who are they all? Who's the Wailing Widow? I've heard of her.'

It was the right question. Hermione turned to him and opened her mouth, and what came out was a torrent.

'Oh, the Wailing Widow's from Kent, she drowned herself in a well in thirteen ninety-two after her husband went off to the Crusades and didn't come back, only it turned out he did come back, a week later, so she's been wailing about that ever since. And there's a knight from Wales who had a crossbow bolt go straight through his visor at the Battle of Crécy, and a lady from Yorkshire who was bricked up inside a chimney by her own steward, they found her in eighteen hundred and twelve when they swept it, and there's a monk from Glastonbury who was hung, drawn and quartered by Henry the Eighth's men, so he comes in four pieces and the pieces don't always agree on where to go, and...'

She went on. The deaths got worse and worse, and her eyes got brighter and brighter with each one. Harry sat back against the cushions with Hermione's elbow out of his ribs at last and gave Ron a look of pure gratitude over the top of her head.

Rain was still lashing the windows, which had gone black, but the common room was bright and warm and cheerful. Firelight glowed on the squashy armchairs where people sat reading or talking or doing homework or, in the case of Fred and George, finding out what happened when you fed a Filibuster firework to a Salamander. Fred had liberated the bright orange, fire-dwelling lizard from a Care of Magical Creatures class, and it was now sitting on a table, smouldering gently, with a ring of interested people round it.

Harry was on the point of telling Ron and Hermione about Filch and the Kwikspell course when the Salamander went off. It shot into the air spitting sparks and bangs and whirled round the room like a Catherine wheel, showering tangerine stars from its mouth, with Percy bellowing himself hoarse at the twins underneath it, until at last it dived into the fire with a series of explosions and stayed there. And between Percy and the stars and the explosions, Filch and his purple envelope went clean out of Harry's head.

By the time Hallowe'en came, Harry was cursing himself for ever having promised.

The rest of the school was looking forward to the feast. The Great Hall had been hung with the usual live bats, Hagrid's monstrous pumpkins had been carved into lanterns big enough for three men to sit in, and there was a rumour going round that Dumbledore had booked a troupe of dancing skeletons for after the pudding.

'A promise is a promise,' Hermione reminded Harry, bossily, at breakfast. 'You said you'd go to the Deathday Party.'

She said you. She meant we. And she meant, as became clear over the course of the day, that she wasn't going to give him the smallest opportunity to wriggle out of it. She was at his elbow on the way to Charms. She was at his elbow on the way out of it. She was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when he came down from the dormitory to fetch a book he'd forgotten, and he hadn't told anybody he was going up.

'How did you know I'd be here?' said Harry.

'You forgot your Standard Book of Spells,' said Hermione. 'You always forget it on Thursdays.'

He hadn't known that himself.

At lunch she sat so close to him on the bench that he had to eat his shepherd's pie with his left elbow tucked into his side, and she talked to him the whole way through it about the Grey Lady, and every so often she touched his arm to make a point.

'Hermione,' said Ron, at last, through a mouthful of potato, 'give him a bit of room, will you? He's got to use that arm.'

Hermione moved half an inch.

'Bit more,' said Ron.

She moved another half-inch, and gave Ron a look, and Ron gave her one back, and Harry ate his pie and had the odd feeling, not for the first time that term, that a conversation was going on over his head in a language he didn't speak.

At seven o'clock Harry, Ron and Hermione walked straight past the doors of the Great Hall, which were standing open on a blaze of gold plates and candlelight and the smell of roasting, and turned their steps instead towards the dungeons.

'I can smell the roast potatoes,' Ron said, in a hollow voice, as the smell followed them across the Entrance Hall. 'I can smell them, Harry.'

'Keep walking.'

They'd reached the top of the dungeon stairs when Harry glanced back, for no reason at all, and saw a flicker of white-blonde hair on the marble staircase. Somebody was going up. Away from the feast, alone, at a quick, light run, with one hand pressed flat to the front of her robes as though she were holding something against her. Then the stairs turned and she was gone.

'What?' said Ron.

'Nothing,' said Harry. 'Thought I saw Malfoy.'

'Good. Hope she's going to be sick somewhere.'

Harry thought no more about it. He'd have plenty of reason, later, to wish he had.

The passage down to Nick's party had been lined with candles too, but there was nothing cheerful about them. They were long, thin, jet-black tapers, and they burned a bright, cold blue, and the light they gave off made all three of the living faces in the passage look like the faces of the drowned. It got colder with every step. Harry pulled his robes tight, and as he did he heard a sound like a thousand fingernails being drawn down an enormous blackboard.

'Is that supposed to be music?' Ron whispered.

'They're ghosts, mate,' Harry replied.

That was all the explanation Ron needed.

They turned a corner and found Nearly Headless Nick at a doorway hung with black velvet.

'My dear friends,' he said mournfully. 'Welcome, welcome... so pleased you could come...'

He swept off his plumed hat and bowed them in.

It was an extraordinary sight. The dungeon was full of hundreds of pearly, see-through people, most of them drifting round a crowded floor and waltzing to the frightful, quavering sound of thirty musical saws played by an orchestra on a platform draped in black. Overhead a chandelier blazed midnight blue with a thousand more black candles. Their breath went up in clouds in front of them. It was like walking into a cold store.

'Shall we have a look round?' Harry suggested, mostly to get some feeling back into his feet.

'Careful not to walk through anyone,' said Ron nervously, and they set off round the edge of the floor.

They passed a huddle of gloomy nuns, and a ragged man wrapped in chains, and the Fat Friar, the cheerful ghost of Hufflepuff, deep in conversation with a knight who had an arrow sticking out of his forehead. The Bloody Baron, gaunt and staring and silver with blood, had a wide space all round him that nobody seemed eager to step into, and Harry didn't blame them.

Hermione was bouncing on her toes. She'd got a quill and a small notebook out of her pocket, and before Harry could stop her she'd stepped up to a tall, mournful monk who, now that Harry looked, was not quite assembled, and was holding his left arm on with his right.

'Excuse me,' said Hermione. 'I'm so sorry to bother you. Are you Brother Aldric? From Glastonbury? I've read about you. Is it true that you hid the abbey's books from the King's commissioners in a cave on the Tor, and that they never found them?'

The monk looked down at her. It was clear that nobody had asked him about anything but his quartering for about four hundred and fifty years.

'Young lady,' he said, in a voice like a cellar door, 'it is entirely true. Would you care to know where?'

'Oh, would I,' said Hermione, and her quill went to the page, and Harry and Ron left her to it and went on alone, for about thirty seconds, which was how long it took her to write down the answer and come running after them.

'He told me!' she said, glowing. 'Harry, he told me! I'm going to write to-'

Then her face changed, and she stopped dead.

'Oh no. Turn back, turn back, I don't want to talk to Moaning Myrtle...'

'Who?' said Harry, as they reversed hastily.

'She haunts the girls' toilet on the first floor,' said Hermione.

'She haunts a toilet?'

'Yes. It's been out of order all year, because she keeps having tantrums and flooding it. I never went in there anyway if I could help it. It's awful trying to go to the loo when she's wailing at you over the top of the cubicle...'

'Look, food!' said Ron.

On the far side of the dungeon was a long table covered in black velvet, and they made for it with some eagerness, and stopped dead a yard short of it in horror.

The smell was unspeakable. On handsome silver platters lay great rotten fish. Cakes burned to charcoal were heaped on salvers. There was a haggis crawling with maggots, and a slab of cheese gone green and furry, and in pride of place an enormous grey cake shaped like a tombstone, with tarry icing that spelled out:

Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington

died 31st October, 1492

'Lovely,' said Harry. 'Just what I wanted when the Hallowe'en feast is going on.'

He looked at Hermione, and if looks could have killed she'd have been joining the party as a guest of honour. Hermione had the grace to go red.

As he watched, a portly ghost came up to the table, crouched, and walked slowly through it with his mouth held open wide, so that one of the stinking salmon passed straight through his face.

'You'll get there eventually, mate,' said Harry encouragingly.

'Almost,' said the ghost sadly, and drifted off.

'I expect they let it go off so it'll have more flavour,' said Hermione knowledgeably, holding her nose and leaning in for a closer look at the haggis. 'For them, I mean. They can just about taste it if it's strong enough...'

'Can we move? I feel sick,' said Ron.

They'd barely turned round when a little man shot out from under the table and stopped in mid-air in front of them.

'All right, Peeves?' said Harry warily.

Peeves was the very opposite of every ghost in the room. There was nothing pale or see-through about him. He was wearing a bright orange party hat and a bow-tie that spun round on its own, and he had a wide, wicked grin on his wide, wicked face.

'Nibbles?' he said sweetly, and held out a bowl of peanuts wearing a fine fur of fungus.

'No thanks,' said Hermione.

'Heard you,' said Peeves, and his eyes danced. 'Heard you talking about poor Myrtle. Ever so rude, you was, about poor Myrtle.'

He drew in a great breath and bellowed, 'OI! MYRTLE!'

'Oh, no, Peeves, don't tell her what I said, she'll be really upset,' Hermione whispered, frantic. 'I didn't mean it, I don't mind her at all... er, hello, Myrtle.'

A squat ghost of a girl had come gliding up to them. She had the glummest face Harry had ever seen, half hidden behind lank hair and a pair of thick, pearly glasses.

'What?' she said, sulkily.

'How are you, Myrtle?' said Hermione, in a voice so bright it hurt. 'It's nice to see you out of the toilet.'

Myrtle sniffed.

'Miss Granger was just talking about you,' said Peeves slyly, into Myrtle's ear.

'Just saying... saying how nice you look tonight,' said Hermione, glaring at Peeves.

Myrtle looked at Hermione with deep suspicion.

'You're making fun of me,' she said, and silver tears were already welling in her small, see-through eyes.

'No! Honestly! Didn't I just say how nice Myrtle's looking?' said Hermione, and drove her elbows into Harry's and Ron's ribs at once.

'Oh, yeah...'

'She did...'

'Don't lie to me,' Myrtle gasped, and the tears were pouring down her face now, while Peeves sniggered happily over her shoulder. 'D'you think I don't know what they call me behind my back? Fat Myrtle! Ugly Myrtle! Miserable, moaning, moping Myrtle!'

'You've left out "spotty",' Peeves hissed in her ear.

Moaning Myrtle burst into heartbroken sobs and fled the dungeon, and Peeves went after her, pelting her with mouldy peanuts and yelling, 'Spotty! Spotty!'

'Oh, dear,' said Hermione sadly.

Harry watched the place where Myrtle had gone. He felt rather bad about it, and he couldn't have said exactly why, except that he knew what it was to be called names down a corridor and have nobody stop it.

'She sounded like me,' he said, half to himself. 'Before Hogwarts.'

Hermione looked at him. Ron looked at the floor.

Nearly Headless Nick came drifting towards them through the crowd.

'Enjoying yourselves?'

'Oh, yes,' they lied.

'Not a bad turnout,' said Nick, with pride. 'The Wailing Widow came all the way up from Kent... It's nearly time for my speech, I'd better go and warn the orchestra...'

But the orchestra stopped at that very moment, and so did everybody else in the dungeon, and turned, in excitement, as a hunting horn rang out.

'Oh, here we go,' said Nick, bitterly.

A dozen ghost horses burst out of the dungeon wall, and on every one of them sat a rider with no head on his shoulders. The crowd went wild. Harry started to clap too, and stopped at once when he saw Nick's face.

The horses galloped into the middle of the floor and pulled up, rearing and plunging. At the front was a large ghost with his bearded head under his arm, blowing the horn, and he jumped down, held his head up high over the crowd so it could see (everyone laughed), and strode over to Nick, cramming his head back down on his neck as he came.

'Nick!' he roared. 'How are you? Still hanging on by a thread, eh?'

He gave a great booming laugh and clapped Nick on the shoulder, which nearly undid all Nick's careful work.

'Welcome, Patrick,' said Nick stiffly.

'Live 'uns!' said Sir Patrick, catching sight of Harry, Ron and Hermione, and he gave an enormous pretend jump of astonishment, and his head fell off again, and the crowd howled.

'Very amusing,' said Nick darkly.

'Don't mind Nick!' shouted Sir Patrick's head, from the floor. 'Still sulking because we won't have him in the Hunt! But I ask you, look at the fellow...'

'Oi. You're not invited. Get out!' Harry shouted.

He hadn't known he was going to do it. It came out of him the way the speech in Hagrid's hut had, it rang round the dungeon, and two hundred ghosts turned and looked at the living boy in the middle of the floor.

Sir Patrick's head, from the flagstones, gave Harry a look of the most aristocratic contempt.

'We go where we please, boy!' it said, with a sneer that made Harry wonder, for a second, whether it was some relation of Malfoy's.

'Nick's a great ghost,' Harry said, loud and clear, so that Sir Patrick couldn't miss a word of it. 'And he'd plaster the walls with all of you lot if you didn't keep running away from him on your horses.'

There was a short, astonished silence. Somewhere at the back of the room, one of the gloomy nuns gave a single scandalised giggle. And Nick, beside him, looked at Harry with an expression that Harry would remember for a long time, the expression of somebody who has waited five hundred years for anyone at all to take his side.

'If I could have everyone's attention,' said Nick, loudly, and with a great deal more steadiness in his voice than there had been a moment before, 'it's time for my speech!'

He strode to the platform and climbed up into an icy blue spotlight.

'My late lamented lords, ladies and gentlemen, it is my great sorrow...'

Nobody heard much more. Sir Patrick and the rest of the Headless Hunt had just begun a game of Head Hockey, and the crowd was turning to watch. Nick tried gallantly to get his audience back, and gave up when Sir Patrick's head went sailing past his nose to loud cheers.

Harry was very cold by now, and very hungry.

'I can't stand much more of this,' Ron muttered, his teeth chattering, as the saws started up again and the ghosts went back to their waltz.

'Let's go,' Harry agreed.

They backed towards the door, nodding and smiling at anybody who looked their way, and a minute later they were hurrying back up the passage of black candles.

'Pudding might not be finished yet,' said Ron hopefully, leading the way towards the steps to the Entrance Hall.

And then Harry heard it.

'... rip... tear... kill...'

It was the same voice. The same cold, murderous voice he'd heard in Lockhart's office. For half a second he thought it was a stray thought of his own about Dobby. Then he stumbled to a halt and caught at the stone wall, and listened with everything he had, peering up and down the dim passage.

'Harry, what're you...?'

'Hang on, hang on, it's the voice!'

'... so hungry... for so long...'

'Listen!' said Harry urgently, and Ron and Hermione froze where they stood and watched him.

'... kill... time to kill...'

The voice was getting fainter. Harry was sure of it. It was moving away from them. It was moving up. A mixture of terror and excitement took hold of him as he stared at the black ceiling. How could it be going up? Was it a phantom of some kind, that went through stone as though it weren't there?

'This way,' he shouted, and he ran.

Up the steps, into the Entrance Hall. It was no good trying to hear anything there; the noise of the feast was roaring out of the Great Hall. Harry tore up the marble staircase to the first floor, with Ron and Hermione clattering after him.

'Harry, what are we...'

'SHH!'

He strained his ears. And, far off, from the floor above, and fading, he heard it.

'... I smell blood... I SMELL BLOOD!'

Harry's stomach turned over.

'It's going to kill someone,' he said. 'Whatever it is. It's going to kill someone, now.'

He saw Hermione's face. She'd gone quite white, and she was looking at him with real fear, it was fear of the thing he couldn't see, because she believed him. He saw Ron's face. Ron was looking at him the way you'd look at a mate who'd just told you the walls were talking, and you'd known him long enough to be sure he didn't make things up, and so the only other answer was that he'd finally gone round the bend.

There wasn't time to explain. Harry went up the next flight three steps at a time.

The second floor was deserted. Everybody in the castle was at the feast, and the corridors had been left to the torches, and the torches had burned low.

Harry stopped at the top of the stairs and listened. Nothing. Then, a very long way off, a sound that might have been a voice and might have been the wind in a chimney.

They went left.

The corridor was long and the torches were far apart, so that they walked from light into dark and into light again, and in each stretch of dark Harry found he was holding his breath. Their footsteps came back to them off the walls, a little late, as though somebody were walking just behind them. Ron looked round twice. There was nobody there.

They came to a junction. Harry stood in the middle of it and turned his head one way, and then the other, like a dog trying to catch a scent.

'Harry,' Ron whispered. 'Mate. There's nothing...'

'Shh.'

Somewhere ahead of them, water was dripping. A slow, patient drip, with a long gap between each fall, like a clock that had run down.

They went towards it.

The passage narrowed. The windows here were tall and black and the rain was running down them in sheets, and every so often lightning lit the whole length of the corridor white and then dropped it back into the dark, and in the second after each flash Harry's eyes were full of shapes that weren't there. A suit of armour. A tapestry. A shadow that might have been a doorway, or a figure standing very still in a doorway, and when the next flash came it was a doorway after all.

The drip got louder. The floor under their feet was wet. Harry looked down and saw that they were walking through a shallow sheet of water, spreading out across the flagstones from somewhere ahead, and in the torchlight it was black.

He couldn't hear the voice any more. That was worse than hearing it. Wherever it had been going, it had got there.

'Harry,' said Hermione, very quietly. Her hand had found his sleeve. 'Harry, I don't like this.'

'Harry, what was that all about?' said Ron, behind them, wiping the sweat off his face with his sleeve, though the corridor was freezing. 'I couldn't hear anything...'

But Hermione gave a sudden gasp, and pointed down the corridor.

'Look!'

Something was shining on the wall ahead.

They went towards it slowly, squinting into the dark. Between two of the tall windows, in letters a foot high, something had been daubed across the stone, and it glimmered red in the light of the torches.

THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED.

ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE.

There was a great puddle of water on the floor beneath it, and the puddle was where the dripping was coming from.

And then, all three of them together, they saw what was hanging above the puddle.

It was Mrs Norris.

She was hanging by her tail from the bracket of a torch, and she was stiff as a board, as stiff as a thing that has been dead for hours, and her eyes were wide open and staring at nothing.

Hermione screamed. She turned and threw herself at Harry and got both arms round him and buried her face in his chest, and Harry, who had no idea what to do with his own arms, stood there with them half lifted and stared over the top of her head at the dangling cat. Hermione didn't let go. If anything, she held on harder, and pressed closer, and burrowed into him as though she meant to stay there.

For a few seconds none of them moved.

Then Ron said, 'Let's get out of here.'

'Shouldn't we try and help...' Harry began, awkwardly, over Hermione's hair.

'Trust me,' said Ron. 'We don't want to be found here.'

It was too late.

A rumble, like thunder a long way off, told them the feast had ended. From both ends of the corridor came the sound of hundreds of feet on the stairs, and the loud, happy chatter of people who'd eaten a great deal, and the next moment students were spilling into the passage from both directions at once.

The chatter stopped. The bustle stopped. The noise died away, row by row, from the front backwards, as the people at the front saw the cat. Harry, Ron and Hermione stood alone in the middle of the corridor, in the water, under the writing, as the silence spread out through the mass of students pressing forward to see.

Then somebody shouted into it.

'Enemies of the heir, beware! You'll be next, Mudblood!'

It was Dracina Malfoy.

She'd pushed her way to the front of the crowd. She looked dishevelled, as though she'd been running, and her hair had come loose, and she was pale, paler even than she'd been at breakfast that week, almost grey. She was pointing straight at Hermione. And her silver eyes were alive with something. Harry knew the twinkle. This wasn't the twinkle. It was something that looked like it from a distance, and up close looked like something else entirely, she was grinning at Hermione's fear as though Hermione's fear were the best thing she'd seen all year.

The whole corridor was looking at the cat. The cat was so horrible, and the writing so frightening, that not one person there noticed that the finger Malfoy was pointing with had a red stain on it, down the side, to the second knuckle. Not even Harry.

Harry was too angry to notice anything.

'Leave her alone!' he shouted. Hermione was still clinging to him and he got an arm round her, and pulled her behind him, and faced Malfoy across the water. 'You leave her alone, Malfoy! What's the matter with you? There's a dead cat on the wall and that's what you've got to say? Get away from her! Go on! Get out of here!'

Malfoy's grin went. Something flickered across her face, very fast, at the sight of Harry's arm round Hermione, and was gone. She folded her arms. She looked at him, and at Hermione behind him, and at his arm.

Then she turned on her heel and pushed back into the crowd.

As she went, she said something under her breath. Harry didn't catch it. He caught a word, at the end, and only that one, because it was the only word she'd bothered to say clearly.

Mine.

Whatever could she mean? Harry stood in the water with Hermione shaking behind him and watched the back of Malfoy's head go away through the crowd, and wondered what on earth it was, in all of this, that Dracina Malfoy thought was hers.