The Clubhouse of Secrets

In the dark green gloom deep within the earth, Ron said, "The Chamber of Secrets? What's that? It sort of rings a bell."

"I read about it in Hogwarts, A History," said Hermione. "It's supposed to be a secret place Salazar Slytherin built, in the foundations of the school, but no one's ever found it and most people think it's a myth."

Luna's voice was a dirge. "The Chamber dark and deadly, a noisome monster residing within, awaiting, awaiting when the time would come to purge the school of those Slytherin thought unworthy; muggle-borns, half-bloods, squibs, those with non-human ancestry, and all the rest that he looked down upon."

Surrounded by carvings and pillars vast and gothic, Hermione, Ron, Luna and Neville huddled closer together against the threat of traps and monsters eldritch and deadly.

"Scourgify," said Harry Potter, cleaning an oval of stone about six feet wide. "Righty then, I think we'll set up over there, maybe?" He pointed to a pillar with an especially angry looking snake carving. "Clean it up, transfigure an area rug, armchairs, beanbags, a sofa. Hermione, how long do you think you can get bluebell flames of yours to to last? We'll fill a firepit with them."

Ron said slowly, as if speaking to a small child, "You want to use Salazar Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets as a clubhouse?"

Harry said, "Sure. Why not? It's obviously very private. You enter by using a slide, which is loads of fun. It's very roomy, and the carvings and reliefs, well, honestly, I'm not sure they're in the best taste, but better garish art than no art at all. The lighting's not great, but we can improve it. I'm not saying that sprucing the place up will be easy, but there's five of us and we've all got wands." Granted, Luna was only a first-year, but he expected she'd catch on quick.

Luna said, "We'll have to clean the Chamber first. And we're all dirty from sliding down the pipe."

Hermione said, "No, first we have to find a way out of here. We don't have food or water, and we can't go back up that pipe. There's no telling how long it'll take us to get out of here." She paused, and Harry saw that a bit of the filth that the pipe had gotten on her robes was oozing down her sleeve onto her hand. She said, "Okay, maybe we clean ourselves up first, then we find a way out."

Harry cast cleaning charms on himself and Luna while the others took care of themselves (Hermione helping Nevald a bit) and, still dirty but no longer filthy, they walked through the Chamber, shoes squelching on a thin layer of mud. Harry's foot crunched on something that wasn't mud at all. The rib cage of a small mammal, the start of a veritable carpet of bones.

Ron said, "Eeek," Neville swallowed, Luna bent in for a closer look, and Hermione cast a spell Harry didn't know.

"About fifty years old," Hermione said. She cast the spell on another little animals skeleton. "About fifty years old. Another, another, another. "All the bones are about fifty years old."

"That's good," said Harry. "I was worried there might be something dangerous down here. Probably, there's an exit to outside somewhere, and fifty years ago an animal used this place as its burrow."

"The skeletons aren't broken," said Luna.

"What?"

"The skeletons are still whole, mostly, and the bones haven't been cracked open so that the marrow could be licked out. It's as if they were swallowed whole. Look, that's a deer skeleton, and it was swallowed whole too."

"So it was a big animal," Harry said, but he couldn't help feeling at least a little nervous. He couldn't transfigure something that big. "Hermione, keep checking to be sure all the bones are old."

Ron said, "We need to get out of here."

"Stop being such a wet underwear. Let's explore first."

"I'm not a wet underwear. What does that even mean?"

"If you don't know what it is, you can't say that you're not one."

Luna said, "Harry, this is a dark and mysterious chamber, lost to time and history. To explore it without preparation would be hubris of the first order. To brave this dark, we must research it, study spells and equip ourselves."

Hermione, Neville and Ron stared at her. Harry beamed. "See Hermione, I told you she was perfect. Alright Lady Luna, I accede to your wisdom. We'll look for a way out, which is a type of exploring, and we'll come back later when we're ready." He continued confidently across the Chamber floor, head on a swivel, as the others followed.

Ron said, "How did we even get here? Why did the wall open?"

Harry said, "I told it to."

"You hissed at it."

"The candle holder was a snake, so I told it to open in hissy-snake-language."

"Hissy-snake... Harry, you can talk to snakes?"

"Can't you? In the Bible, the snake talks, so I thought maybe all wizards and witches could talk to snakes."

Ron said, "No Harry, not all wizards can. Very few wizards can. Wizards who can talk to snakes are parselmouths, and it's bad."

Neville said, "It's dark, Harry. You-Know-Who was a parselmouth."

Harry said, "So Adam and Eve were Parselmouths?"

"Who?" said Ron.

"Maybe..." said Hermione, considering the idea.

Luna said, "Speaking parseltongue is wonderful gift. You can ask the snakes all sort of questions about underground, and if you speak parseltongue aloud, any umgubular slashkilters around will run away because they'll think you're a big snake who might eat them."

Hermione gave Luna a suspicious look and said, "Salazar Slytherin was a parselmouth."

"Who?" said Harry.

"Salazar Slytherin is one of the four founders of Hogwarts. Slytherin House is named after him."

"That's nice," Harry said absently, continuing on.

Hermione said, "This is his Chamber of Secrets. That must be why parseltongue opens it." As they'd moved on a ways, she checked a few more bones. "All these bones are fifty years old too."

"Oh, look, big statue!" said Harry, pointing.

It was a statue high as the Chamber itself, standing against the back wall. The giant face high above was ancient and monkeyish, with a long, thin beard that fell almost of the bottom of the wizard's sweeping stone robes, where two enormous grey feet stood on the smooth Chamber floor.

Hermione said, "That must be a statue of Salazar Slytherin himself."

Ron said, "Not much of a looker, was he? No wonder there aren't any painting of him.

"Oh, hush Ron, he was a great wizard."

"He looks part Skinny-Troll," Luna said.

Neville said, "Let's just get out of here."

Harry sighed, feeling put-upon and underappreciated (he had just discovered this awesome clubhouse, after all) and let them on. The came to a set of vast doors covered in carvings of snakes. Whoever had designed the Chamber had been obsessed with snakes, apparently. What was it Hermione had said? Salad Bar Slytherin?

He focused on the carvings of snakes, pretending they were real, and told them to open. Open the doors did. They walked through, and found a wall and another giant pipe, open-ended, its extent spiraling up into the distance.

"We could take the broom up the pipe," Ron said. "Two people a trip, we'd be done in three trips."

Hermione said, "Four trips, Ron."

"No, three. Two people, two people and one person. That's three trips."

"No. If you and I rode up together, you'd drop me off and come back down, so you'd only move one person per trip until the final trip. One, one, one and two. Four trips."

Ron wobbled back and forth between disputing basic math and claiming that the broom could carry three at a time, and Harry tuned their arguing out. The secret entrance had been opened by hissy-snake-language. It only made sense that the secret exit would be the same.

"Serpentsortia," said Harry casting the spell, and a small green snake with red eyes appeared on the ground before him. "Snake conjuring," he said to the others. He hissed briefly at the snake, telling it he'd eat it if it didn't play dead, and picked it up. He told the others, "It's hard to speak hissy-snake-language without a snake to look at."

Hermione said, "Parseltongue, Harry. It's called Parseltongue."

"I don't see how you can tell me what it's called when you don't even speak it. In hissy-snake-language, hissy-snake-language is called hissy-snake-language. I'm just translating."

Luna. "What are hats called in hissy-snake-language?"

He frowned at the snake he held, hissed at it, showed it his bowler hat, and it hissed back.

"Thingies," Harry reported to Luna. "Not surprising. In hissy-snake-language, most things are called thingies." He raised the snake up before himself, and began screaming in hissy-snake-language.

The sound was dreadful, foreboding, a thousands nails on chalkboard with a background of a madman's laughter, promising a lonely doom to all who heard it. A shiver ran down Hermione's spine, Neville trembled, Ron covered his ears, and Luna cupped her hands to her ears so she could hear better.

The stones next to the pipe glowed greenly, brighter and brighter, and when the stones dimmed, none of them could say whether an illusion had been broken or whether stones of the wall had pushed forward, but where before there had been only a sheer wall, there was a staircase, switchbacking endlessly up, lost in the gloom.

Ron said, "How did you know that was here?"

Harry said, "I figured there had to be some way out, and it was probably near the entrance. To be honest, I was hoping for a lift."

Hermione said, "They didn't have lifts back when the Chamber of Secrets was made."

Harry looked confused. "Why not? It might not be the safest lift in the world, but we could make one. A board, some rope, a pulley, and third and fourth-year charms, and I could make the board and the rope easily enough. Come on. Let's-"

"We're taking the stairs," Hermione said.

Harry said, "Ron, hand me my broom."

"Why?"

"Because it's my broom and I'm the one who's actually going to check and make sure there's an exit at the top."

Harry pocketed the snake, secured his wand, took the broom, slung his leg over it, and shot into the air, the lights he'd made accompanying him as the others disappeared into the gloom below. He followed the endlessly switchbacking staircase, which followed the messily spiraling, occasionally intersecting pipe.

Harry flew low over the stairs, practically skimming them. The Chamber of Secrets probably didn't have the same safety charms the grounds of Hogwarts did, which meant if he fell off his broom from height, he wouldn't just break a limb, he'd actually die.

At the start, the stairs and pipe had been crawling up the Chamber wall. Now, the Chamber had been left behind, and pipe and stairs continued up a comparatively small slot in the earth, the width and breadth of many a house, yet flying up it was claustrophobic.

The pipe and stairs ended at the same place. He alighted on the top of the stairs and didn't see a snake figurine. He took the snack from his pocket, and, in hissy-snake-language, said "Open."

The snake, still quite compliant after his threat of eating it, opened its fangless mouth as a large portion of the wall lowered, revealing a dim room beyond.

Harry stepped into a battered loo. The floor was wet, the sinks were chipped, and the mirrors were scratched.

There weren't any urinals, which made it a girls' loo.

He was in a girl's loo.

He ran back onto the stairs leading into the Chamber of Secrets, still staring into the loo.

Water splashed from the toilet of an open stall, and a ghost shot out of it. The ghost was a girl of indeterminate age, with thick glasses and bad acne.

She said, "How did you open that?"

Harry said, "You made the water splash. What's water like to a ghost? Is it different from walls?"

"You pop out of the wall and you all you want to do is ask me horrible questions about what being a ghost is like? The wall opened just like that when I died, I think."

Harry didn't hear the last part. The moment he'd realized she wasn't answering his question, he'd stopped paying attention. His guess was that to a ghost, water, being amorphous and so, more ghost-like, was actually more solid than stone.

"This loo is in Hogwarts, right?"

"Of course it's in Hogwarts," said the ghost.

"Right then," said Harry, slinging one leg over the broom. "I'm just going to kip down and grab the others."

:::

It's very tempting to zoom out of Harry's perspective and into Hermione's. She has a measured view of things. But doing that too much takes the zany zip and verve from the story. I had to re-write this chapter because of that, and I'm still not sure about it.

Also, this chapter is... sort of missing a dramatic arc? I had something planned for the end of it, but I forget to do first the stuff that has to happen first, so that will have to wait until later, but as a result the whole thing feels like a u-turn.

I may be publishing a couple one shots over the next week or so?