Chapter 13- Of Seeing and Unbelieving

"If only these old walls could talk, how boring they would be." Robert Benchley.

"You killed this Potter?" Snape said faintly. He looked stunned. As did the students and teachers.

Harry felt uncomfortable.

"Back everyone. Stay well back," McGonagall said sharply, though no one had taken a step forward. "Dragonhide gloves back on, just in case," quickly donning hers.

Harry put his gloves back on.

Gallagher walked over to the middle of the chamber and bent down to pick something up,

"What's this doing here?"

It was the fang that pierced Harry's arm, the one he had used to destroy Riddle's diary. There was still a dark puddle of ink where Gallagher had picked the fang up from. Harry explained what it was doing there and how Fawkes had healed him. Gallagher looked a little sick and gladly let Snape, who was ready with another jar, take it from him. His explanation only rewarded him with incredulous looks.

"So what are going to do first?" Lupin asked.

"The fangs," Snape said. "Let us extract the remaining fangs first." He pulled out a shrunken trunk from the bag he had been carrying and left it open after he'd taken the tools he'd needed. The other teachers followed suit.

"All right. We'll start there," said Moody.

"Anybody know any spells?" Gallagher asked.

They looked at each other.

"No idea," Tonks said.

"I don't usually hang around basilisks, so no," said Lupin.

"There's a spell that's used by dragon handlers to extract dragon's teeth," Snape offered helpfully.

"What is it?" Moody asked.

"I do not know. I just know that one exists." Snape said with dignity.

"We'll have to do this the old fashioned. Let's just rip them out."

"What? Just yank them out?" Gallagher asked incredulously.

"Yes. Lupin, Killian, Hagrid. You do the pulling. Snape, have the jars ready. Make sure your gloves on properly. We don't have a phoenix handy in case you get nicked by a fang so be careful." Moody instructed.

McGonagall shepherded the students, who had somehow slowly crept forwards, back away from the serpent. The teachers stood with their wands as if expecting something. Killian, Lupin and Hagrid walked over to mouth of the serpent, which had gone lax in death.

Hagrid grabbed the basilisk's lower jaw and prised it open a little more. Snape, Moody, Flitwick and Shacklebolt walked closer to examine the rest of the serpent.

"Dead nearly four years, but not a spot of decay. Very well preserved. We should be able to harvest all of it. Scales, blood, venom. Everything. Everything will be useful," Snape said reverently.

"All right. We're ready to yank these teeth out. Severus, do you want to bring those jars over?" Killian asked.

Snape ran over to the trio, jar in hand. He peered into the mouth. Killian gently moved him out of the way so that she could reach in, and yanked out a fang.

Hagrid helped extract the fangs, though he winced with every yank.

When the basilisk's jaw was finally empty, they stood back to see their handiwork, as if inspecting a piece of art.

Snape handled the fangs humbly, as if he was going to fall to his knees and start worshipping them. Reluctantly, at Killian's prompting, he put his jar of basilisk fangs away.

"What's next?" Tonks asked.

"How big is the beast?" Lupin asked.

"Really long," said Moody, looking down the pool of water the serpent's tail. "It winds down, I can't see properly. The thrashing caused the tail to get trapped somewhere. Killian, you go down and get the tail untrapped. Gallagher, grab a measuring tape from my trunk. I want an exact figure. Snape, you go with Killian."

Snape nodded and joined Killian at the base of the pool. The pool must hast have had steps because they both disappeared slowly rather than suddenly. Tonks hit them both with a bubblehead charm.

Whilst Snape and Killian were down there, Moody and Lupin moved the trunks out of the way, and had everyone line against the wall, casting cleaning charms again.

Harry stopped mid-spell when he saw empty jars flying out of Snape's trunk flying into the pool.

"Severus must have found something worth collecting," McGonagall said as she too had seen the jars fly.

It was 20 minutes before Killian and Snape came back, jars now full with green slime and other bits of something Harry reckoned only Snape would find useful.

Killian carried on straightening the serpent whilst everyone else had been ordered to back up as far as possible, which meant they were literally up against the wall. Harry thought Killian made the basilisk look like it was still alive, as if it is was still slowly slithering itself into a straight line. The serpent took up fair length of the chamber. Once Killian straightened up the basilisk as much as possible, Moody and Gallagher measured the snake from head to hail whilst everyone waited with baited breath.

"45 feet and 5 inches," Moody announced.

Snape spoke up.

"But that snakeskin outside, even broken down as it was, was barely over 20 feet."

"So?"

"So that means there must be more snake skins somewhere. The serpent would not have only shed its snake just the one time in the thousand years it's been here."

"Good point," Moody said. "We'll have to look for the entrances for the hidden passage ways." He said looked around with his magical eye. "I can see plenty of other passages. We'll eventually find a way to them all."

"Eventually we can. But for now it's well past lunch time, the students must be hungry and we still have the basilisk corpse to transport," Lupin pointed out.

"I'm sure we'll figure a way to get it out. But where are we going to store it?" Gallagher asked.

"An excellent question. We were still undecided on that last night weren't we?" Dumbledore said as he walked in with the students and teachers left behind taking care of the snake skin and the cave in, also some of the Ministry officials he'd said would be popping in. Harry recognised that they were all part of the Order.

"Oh my," said one of the Ministry workers. "It's quite big isn't it?"

They spent 15 minutes debating where they would take the basilisk to. In the end they decided the serpent king would be taken whole to the one of the bigger dungeons and stored in there, where they would eventually start harvesting it.

"Your workers have been happily toiling away in outer chamber. Nicolas and Perenelle have stored away the skin in those brilliant trunks of theirs. And they have also cleared the path for you. You may take the basilisk up there without any restrictions," Dumbledore announced.

He left soon after, taking the Ministry officials with him.

"Now that we know where it' going, how are we going to get it there?" Lupin asked.

"Isn't Killian going to levitate it up?" Gallagher asked.

"I could barely get it to move straight. Basilisk hide is quite resistant to magic in any form," Killian told them.

"I don't want it to be sliced into pieces until we get it to the dungeons," Snape stated.

"The snake itself is resistant to magic. But what if you wrapped it up in something, like a blanker or rope or something and tried to levitate that instead?" Tonks suggested.

"That might work," Killian said after she thought about it. "But we need to completely wrap it so the underbelly is covered. It'll make it easier to drag."

So Harry watched them get to work. Killian managed to levitate it up a little enough so that the others could wrap it completely, and Harry could see how much effort that was for her from the sweat beading her forehead. She moved the whole serpent into the air, only managing to get lift it by an inch. The other professors wrapped it in thick ropes they'd conjured, which they then tightened around the serpent in three different places. They left the one at the head of the snake long, so when Killian climbed to the top and took it in hand it looked like she was going to ride the serpent out like a horse.

Job done the teachers moved out of the way. Harry watched in awe as they watched the serpent rise as if it was still alive. It was amazing as it was unnerving to see the basilisk be slithered out by Killian. With intense concentration Killian slowly led out the basilisk; Hagrid, Snape and the Flamels following behind.

They didn't stay long in the Chambers after that. Moody used his magical eye to see if he could find another way an entrance to the tunnels he saw through the walls. The rest of them were divided into house groups and set to cleaning different parts of the chambers, using cleaning spells. They found a few more random plants growing in certain damp parts of the chamber which Lupin then collected samples of.

It was about an hour later when Moody and McGonagall decided that they were finished for the day and they should head back up to let the students shower and have dinner, seeing as they in fact worked right the way through lunch.

For the most part they hadn't actually accomplished much in the Chamber of Secrets, apart from move the corpse of the king of the serpents, and have almost a full day practicing their cleaning charms. The most they got from the chamber was a tour, to those who had heard the legends and wanted to see what the fuss was about.