They marched Lockhart out of his office and down the nearest stairs, along the dark corridor where the messages shone on the wall, to the door of Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. Daphne pushed Lockhart in first. Lyla was pleased to see that he was shaking. Moaning Myrtle was sitting on the tank of the end toilet.

"Oh, it's you," she said when she saw them. "What do you want this time?"

"To ask you how you died," said Lyla without any preamble.

Myrtle's whole aspect changed at once. She looked as though she had never been asked such a flattering question.

"Ooooh, it was dreadful," she said with relish. "It happened right here. I died in this very stall. I remember it so well. I'd hidden 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 speaking. So I unlocked the door, to tell him to go and use his own toilet, and then —" Myrtle swelled importantly, her face shining. "I died."

"How did you die?" asked Arabella.

"No idea," said Myrtle in hushed tones. "I just 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 Lyla. "And then I came back again. 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 Ron.

"Somewhere over there," said Myrtle, pointing vaguely toward the sink in front of her

Lockhart was standing well back, a look of utter terror on his face.

Where Myrtle had pointed looked like an ordinary sink. They examined every inch of it, inside and out, including the pipes below. And then Lyla saw it: Scratched on the side of one of the copper taps was a tiny snake.

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

"Guys," said Daphne. "Say something. Something in Parseltongue."

"But—" Lyla thought hard. The only times she'd ever managed to speak Parseltongue were when she'd been faced with a real snake. She stared hard at the tiny engraving, trying to imagine it was real.

"Open up," she said.

She looked at Daphne, who shook his head.

"English," she said.

Arabella leaned forward and tilted her head in curiosity. She moved her head the, and Lyla could understand her sister's thought process

"Open," Arabella said.

Except that the words weren't what she heard; a strange hissing had escaped her sister's mouth, and at once the tap glowed with a brilliant white light and began to spin. Next second, the sink began to move; the sink, in fact, sank, right out of sight, leaving a large pipe exposed, a pipe wide enough for a man to slide into.

"Wicked," breathed Ron.

"I'm going down there," said Arabella decidedly.

And Lyla understood. They couldn't not go, not now they had found the entrance to the Chamber, not if there was even the faintest, slimmest, wildest chance that Astoria might be alive.

"Me too," said Ron.

"Of course," said Daphne.

There was a pause.

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

He put his hand on the doorknob, but all four students pointed their wands at him.

"You can go first," Ron snarled.

White-faced and wandless, Lockhart approached the opening.

"Um, I hate to ask," he said, his voice feeble, "but what good will it do?"

Daphne jabbed him in the back with her wand, and Lockhart slid his legs into the pipe.

"I really don't think —" he started to say, but Ron gave him a push, and he slid out of sight. Arabella followed quickly, and Ron after that. It was now just Lyla, and she gazed around the bathroom with a heavy sigh. She then lowered herself slowly into the pipe, and let go.

It was like rushing down an endless, slimy, dark slide. She could see more pipes branching off in all directions, but none as large as the one she slid down now, which twisted and turned, sloping steeply downward, and she knew that she was falling deeper below the school than even the dungeons. Ahead of her, she could hear Ron, thudding slightly at the curves. And then, just as she had begun to worry about what would happen when she hit the ground, the pipe leveled out, and she shot out of the end with a wet thud, landing on the damp floor of a dark stone tunnel large enough to stand in. Lockhart was getting to his feet a little ways away, covered in slime and white as a ghost.

"We must be miles under the school," said Lyla as she scrambled to her feet

"Under the lake, probably," said Daphne, squinting around at the dark, slimy walls.

All of them turned to stare into the darkness ahead.

"Lumos!" Lyla muttered to her wand and it lit again. "Let's go," she said, and off they went, their footsteps slapping loudly on the wet floor.

The tunnel was so dark that they could only see a little distance ahead. Their shadows on the wet walls looked monstrous in the wand light.

"Remember," Lyla said quietly as they walked cautiously forward, "any sign of movement, close your eyes right away..."

But the tunnel was as quiet as the grave, and the first unexpected sound they heard was a loud crunch as Arabella stepped on what turned out to be a rat's skull. Lyla lowered her wand to look at the floor and saw that it was littered with small animal bones. Trying very hard not to imagine what Astoria might look like if they found her, Lyla led the way forward, around a dark bend in the tunnel.

"Lyla — there's something up there —" said Arabella hoarsely, grabbing her sister's shoulder.

They froze, watching. Lyla could just see the outline of something huge and curved, lying right across the tunnel. It wasn't moving.

"Maybe it's asleep," suggested Daphne in a hushed voice. Lockhart's hands were pressed over his eyes. Lyla turned back to look at the thing, her heart beating so fast it hurt.

"Let me," said Arabella, and very slowly, her eyes as narrow as she could make them, the dark-haired sister edged forward, her wand held high.

The light slid over a gigantic snake skin, of a vivid, poisonous green, lying curled and empty across the tunnel floor. The creature that had shed it must have been twenty feet long at least.

"Blimey," said Daphne weakly.

Then there was a sudden movement behind them. Gilderoy Lockhart's knees had given way.

"Get up," said Ron sharply, pointing his wand at Lockhart.

Lockhart got to his feet — then he dove at Ron, knocking the boy to the ground.

Lyla jumped forward, but too late— Lockhart was straightening up, panting, Ron's wand in his hand and a gleaming smile back on his face.

"The adventure ends here!" he said victoriously. "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 you all tragically lost your minds at the sight of her mangled body— say goodbye to your memories!"

He raised Ron's Spellotaped wand high over his head and yelled, "Obliviate!"

The wand exploded with the force of a small bomb. Arabella flung her arms over her head and ran, slipping over the coils of snake skin, out of the way of great chunks of tunnel ceiling that were thundering to the floor. Next moment, she was standing alone, gazing at a solid wall of broken rock.

"Ron!" she shouted. "Daphne! Lyla!"

"We're here!" came Daphne's muffled voice from behind the rockfall.

"We're okay—" came Ron's voice next. "This git's not— he got blasted by the wand —"

There was a dull thud and a loud "ow!" It sounded as though Ron had just kicked Lockhart in the shins.

"What now?" Lyla's panicked voice asked, sounding desperate. "We can't get through — it'll take ages–'

Arabella looked up at the tunnel ceiling. Huge cracks had appeared in it. She had never tried to break apart anything as large as these rocks by magic, and now didn't seem a good moment to try — what if the whole tunnel caved in?

There was another thud and another "ow!" from behind the rocks. They were wasting time. Astoria had already been in the Chamber of Secrets for hours... Arabella knew there was only one thing to do.

"Wait there," she called. "Wait with the others. I'll go on... If I'm not back in an hour..."

There was a very pregnant pause.

"I'll try and shift some of this rock," said Lyla, who seemed to be trying to keep her voice steady. "So you can — can get back through. And, Ara—"

"See you in a bit," said Arabella, trying to inject some confidence into her shaking voice.

And she set off alone past the giant snake skin.

Soon the distant noise of her friends straining to shift the rocks was gone. The tunnel turned and turned again. Every nerve in Arabella's body was tingling unpleasantly. She wanted the tunnel to end, yet dreaded what she'd find when it did. And then, at last, as she crept around yet another bend, she saw a solid wall ahead on which two entwined serpents were carved, their eyes set with great, glinting emeralds.

Arabella approached her throat very dry. There was no need to pretend these stone snakes were real; their eyes looked strangely alive. She could guess what she had to do next. She cleared her throat and gazed at the emerald eyes that seemed to flicker.

"Open," said Arabella, in a low, faint hiss.

The serpents parted as the wall cracked open, the halves slid smoothly out of sight, and Arabella, shaking from head to foot, walked inside.

She was standing at the end of a very long, dimly lit chamber. Towering stone pillars entwined with more carved serpents rose to support a ceiling lost in darkness, casting long, black shadows through the odd, greenish gloom that filled the place. Her heart beating very fast, Arabela stood listening to the chilling silence. Could the basilisk be lurking in a shadowy corner, behind a pillar? And where was Astoria?

She pulled out her wand and moved forward between the serpentine columns. Every careful footstep echoed loudly off the shadowy walls. She kept her eyes narrowed, ready to clamp them shut at the smallest sign of movement. The hollow eye sockets of the stone snakes seemed to be following her. More than once, with a jolt of the stomach, she thoughts he saw one stir.

Then, as she drew level with the last pair of pillars, a statue high as the Chamber itself loomed into view, standing against the back wall.

Arabella had to crane her neck to look up into the giant face above: It was ancient and monkeyish, with a long, thin beard that fell almost to the bottom of the wizard's sweeping stone robes, where two enormous gray feet stood on the smooth Chamber floor. And between the feet, facedown, lay a small, black-robed figure with a mess of dark wavy hair.

"Astoria!" Arabella muttered, sprinting to her and dropping to his knees. "Astoria — please don't be dead — please don't be—"

She flung her wand aside, grabbed the girl's shoulders, and turned her over. Her face was white as marble and cold as ice. Yet her eyes were closed, so she wasn't Petrified. But then she must be…

"Astoria, please wake up," Arabella muttered desperately, shaking her. Astoria's head only lolled hopelessly from side to side.

"She won't wake," said a soft voice.

Arabella jumped and spun around on his knees. A tall, handsome, black-haired boy was leaning against the nearest pillar, watching. He was strangely blurred around the edges, as though Harry were looking at him through a misted window. But there was no mistaking him.

"Tom— Tom Riddle?"

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