"Anyone who looks the basilisk in the eye dies. But no one here has died—because none of them looked it directly in the eye!"
Speaking of which, Harry looked eagerly at the page in his hand again. The more he looked, the clearer his mind became.
"The crowing of the rooster is fatal to it!" he read aloud. "Hagrid's roosters were all killed! Once the Chamber is opened, the Heir of Slytherin wouldn't want any roosters near the castle!"
"But how can a basilisk get around the place?" said Ron. "A giant snake... someone would've seen it!"
Harry pointed to the two words scrawled at the bottom of the page.
"Pipes," he said. "Ron, it's been using the plumbing. I've been hearing that voice from inside the walls..."
Ron grabbed Harry's arm.
"The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets!" he said hoarsely. "What if it's in a bathroom? What if it's in—"
"Moaning Myrtle's bathroom!" said Harry.
"This means," said Harry, "I'm not the only Parselmouth in the school. The Heir of Slytherin is one too. That's how they've been controlling the basilisk."
"Oh, yes..." Ron was excited for a moment, but then his expression turned to one of anger and helplessness.
"Yes, but even if we know this, what can we do... I think we should go find Professor McGonagall."
"Right, let's go to the staff room," said Harry, jumping to his feet. "She'll be there in ten minutes. It's nearly time for break."
"No matter who the heir is, it's never wrong to act first!" Harry said firmly.
With that, the two of them hurried downstairs.
They didn't want Professor McGonagall to find them wandering in another corridor, so they went directly into the empty staff room.
It was a large, wood-paneled room full of dark wood chairs. Harry and Ron paced inside, too excited to sit down.
But the bell for break never rang.
Instead, Professor McGonagall's voice, magically magnified, echoed through the corridors.
"All students are to return to their house dormitories at once. All teachers are to return to the staff room! Immediately!"
Harry spun around, staring at Ron.
"Has something else happened? At a time like this?"
"Marcel! It must be him!" said Ron. "I'm going to find him!"
"Don't jump to conclusions, Ron," said Harry, his eyes searching the room.
To his left was an ugly wardrobe, filled with teachers' robes.
"Hide in here. Let's listen to what's going on, and then we can tell them what we've found."
They hid in the wardrobe, listening to the sound of hundreds of people walking on the floor above. Then, the staff room door was thrown open. Through the musty layers of robes, Harry and Ron watched the teachers walk into the room, some looking confused, others terrified.
Then, Professor McGonagall arrived.
"It's happened," she said to the silent teachers in the room. "A student has been taken by the monster. Taken into the Chamber itself."
Professor Flitwick let out a squeak. Professor Sprout clapped her hands to her mouth.
And Snape gripped the back of a chair tightly and asked, "How can you be sure?"
"The Heir of Slytherin," said Professor McGonagall, who was very pale, "left another message. Right underneath the last one. It says: 'Her skeleton will lie in the Chamber forever'."
Professor Flitwick burst into tears.
"Who is it?" said Madam Hooch, sinking weakly into a chair.
"Which student?"
"Ginny Weasley," said Professor McGonagall.
Harry felt Ron collapse silently onto the bottom of the wardrobe beside him.
"We'll have to send all the students home tomorrow," said Professor McGonagall. "This is the end of Hogwarts. Dumbledore always said..."
The staff room door was thrown open again.
Ron, sitting on the floor of the wardrobe, even thought it was Marcel, but it was Lockhart, still with a smile on his face.
"So sorry—dozed off—"
He didn't seem to notice that the other teachers were staring at him with what could only be described as hatred.
Snape stepped forward.
"The very man," he said. "The very man. A girl has been snatched by the monster, Lockhart. Taken into the Chamber of Secrets—your moment has come at last."
He had expected Lockhart to be panicked by this, but to his surprise, Lockhart still maintained his bright and calm expression.
"Yes, of course... I'll just go to my office and prepare," Lockhart said with a smile, and left the staff room under the strange gazes of the other professors.
…
When Lockhart hurried back to the third floor and pushed open the door to his office, the smile on his face immediately collapsed.
"Oh—heavens!" he said, closing the office door and looking towards the desk. "Are you really going to make me go to the Chamber of Secrets to deal with that terrifying basilisk... I mean, since you already know my secret..."
"In fact, I don't want to either."
In an armchair by the desk, an expressionless boy was leaning back. His left sleeve was rolled up, and on his forearm was a large scrape, which was now bleeding slightly.
This boy was using tweezers to hold a cotton ball, dabbing a light green liquid on his own wound.
"You saw it too. The basilisk is not easy to deal with. It still managed to escape in the end."
"But Professor Lockhart, you don't have to worry too much. Although the basilisk can slow its growth by hibernating, it doesn't stop growing after all," the boy said. "It's already too old, and now it's seriously injured, with one eye blind. It won't be much of a danger."
"...Isn't this a ready-made story for a novel?"
Lockhart nodded with difficulty, but then muttered, "But it still has one eye..."
At this moment, the boy put down the tweezers on the table, took out a roll of bandages, and began to wrap it around his own arm. He spoke as he wrapped.
"I'll go with you. I need experimental material, and you need novel material. Isn't it perfect?" he said. "You don't have to do anything. You don't even have to cast a single spell to achieve your goal. Is there anything better than this?"
"Alright, alright! Even if you didn't say so much, I'd still have to do it..." Lockhart said, shaking his head. "I can't believe you're only in your second year."
"As long as you're focused enough," the boy said, pulling down his sleeve and then looking up at Lockhart. "Your Memory Charm is definitely master-level, isn't it?"
"But you still blocked it."
The boy walked to the door and opened it.
"Because I focus on magic, while you focus on opportunistic tricks."
With that, he walked out quickly.
Lockhart looked at the slowly closing office door and muttered, "Marcel Maclean... Maclean, is that an old pure-blood wizarding family? Why haven't I heard of it?"
…
At this time, the heads of each house had gone to inform the students of what had happened. They had to tell them that the Hogwarts Express would take them home first thing tomorrow morning.
And the other teachers had to make sure that no student was left outside the dormitories.
The teachers stood up and left one by one.
This was probably the hardest day of Harry's life. He, Ron, Fred, and George sat in a corner of the Gryffindor common room, unable to say a word. Percy wasn't there. He had sent an owl to Mrs. Weasley and then shut himself in his dormitory.
Never had an afternoon passed so slowly. Gryffindor Tower had never felt so crowded and yet so quiet.
As the sun began to set, Fred and George could no longer sit still and went back to their dormitory to sleep.
"Ginny must have known something, Harry," said Ron. It was the first time he had spoken since they had hidden in the staff room wardrobe. "That's why she was taken... It has nothing to do with the stupid thing Percy did. She must have found out something about the Chamber of Secrets... Maybe she ran into Marcel! It must be. That's why she—"
Ron rubbed his eyes desperately, his face gradually filling with anger again. "I mean, she's a pure-blood. It wasn't her turn! There can't be any other reason!"
Harry could see the sun, as red as blood, slowly sinking below the horizon.
He had never felt so miserable in his life. If only they could do something. Anything.
"Harry," said Ron, "d'you think—d'you think she's—you know—"
Harry looked at Ron, who was at one moment angry, and the next moment lost and dejected. He didn't know what to say.
Although Harry had always felt that one shouldn't easily suspect their friends without evidence, Marcel's various behaviors this term were really too suspicious, which made him feel a sense of suffocation as well.
"I think we should go find Lockhart and tell him what we know," Ron said suddenly. "Isn't he preparing to enter the Chamber of Secrets? We can tell him where we think the Chamber is, and tell him that it's a basilisk inside!"
Harry couldn't think of any other way, but he wanted to do something, so he nodded in agreement with Ron's proposal.
The Gryffindor students around them were all very sad and felt sorry for the Weasley brothers, so when Harry and Ron got up, crossed the room, and slipped out of the portrait hole, no one tried to stop them.
As they went down to Lockhart's office, they found that the corridors had become somewhat dim.
Night had already fallen...
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