Chapter 18: Secrets

"So that's why," Bridget whispered as she drew away from the book. She looked to Matthew. "They never told me."

"Told you what?" Shoshanna demanded.

"How did you know what that thing was and why did it open for you?" Ceelee added to the demands.

Matt and Bridget had the sudden realization they were not alone. The others stared at them, Shoshanna angrily, but Izzy and Holly appeared almost in wonder. "Should we tell them?" Matt asked.

Bridget nodded her head. "But you do it."

"Tell us, Matt. What's this big secret?" Shoshanna, said, clearly agitated. But then Matt could not blame her, she had seen her own family in the sampo as he had his, that they could be killed with the simple twitch of a wand from this room was a terrifying thought. Even had they faced Voldemort they would have at least had a chance to fight, to know what was to happen, even if they might lose.

He took a deep breath before plunging ahead. "Bridget... well... Bridget's a selkie."

"What?!" Shoshanna and Izzy said together.

Holly's eyes had lit up and she leaned closer. "You're really a selkie?" she asked.

"I am." she nodded.

"And, well, she's... she's a Gaunt. Descended from the line of Cadmus Peverell."

Shoshanna drew back, her hand in her robe. Matt could tell she was fingering her wand. "You're a Gaunt!" she cried. The last one was supposed to have died with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named." That she would not use Voldemort's true name revealed her fear. "How is that even possible? We know the entire Gaunt line."

"It was from my mother's side. My great-great-great-grandmother was a squib, so they abandoned her to an orphanage."

"You're a Gaunt," Shoshanna repeated. She rounded on Matt. "And you knew! You knew she was a Gaunt and still you took her with us to find the Chamber of Secrets? What in Merlin's name were you thinking?! An heir of Slytherin?!"

"She may not be," Matt said.

"Who cares! How could you be so reckless? Who knows what might have happened? You could have gotten us killed!"

"Tom Riddle was the heir of Slytherin," Ceelee said defensively.

"How do we know that?! How do we know there weren't two or three or however many?!"

"Well, if she were the heir of Slytherin, wouldn't she be able to speak parseltongue?" Holly said as stroked her little white mouse, not even looking at Shoshanna. Matt was shocked. He had not heard so many words from Holly in ages.

"Who says she can't?"

"We all saw her at the sink. The same as the rest of us. If she could speak parseltongue it would have let us through."

Shoshanna seemed to falter. "Well... she could have been faking that she couldn't."

"But why? She would have never had a better time to fake it. Even had it opened it could have been any of us who did it."

"Only parseltongues can open the chamber of secrets."

"Ronald Weasley seemed to manage without being an heir of Slytherin or a parseltongue. Therefore, any of us could have been the one to do it and it would have been the ideal moment, when she might be able to escape suspicion. So why not then?"

Shoshanna attempted a reply, then faltered, and finally gave up. Now Matt could see why Holly had been selected for Ravenclaw. That was a grand display of the famous Ravenclaw logic if ever he had seen one. "Well why didn't you tell us then?" Shoshanna asked. "Aren't we your friends? Couldn't you trust us?"

"Tell you that I'm a part-human? I didn't know how you'd react."

"Obviously not well," Izzy snarked.

"My sister does make a good point," Matt ventured.

"But that was to her being a Gaunt," Shoshanna said defensively, "not to her being a selkie. I mean, I have a million questions."

"That's not much better," Matt said.

"But it's just curiosity!" she protested.

"Would you want to be asked a million questions about being Jewish as though you were some kind of freak?" Ceelee said. "I mean you are, but you know, about something that isn't your fault."

"Well... no." Shoshanna hung her head. "I suppose you're right."

"I would not even have told Matt if he hadn't caught me at the lake one night... changing..."

"You saw her? Do selkies change by transfiguration or is it really a sealskin?" Shoshanna asked eagerly. Matt shot her a look. "I wasn't asking her, I was asking you."

"Shoshanna..." Matt scolded.

"Oh alright. So, that means you weren't taking special ruin translation classes?"

Of course, when the shock wore off that would be what concerned Shoshanna the most, Matt thought.

"No." Bridget said, staring at her shoes.

Shoshanna breathed a sigh of relief. "Good. I was beginning to doubt myself. But still, you should have trusted us."

"I'm trusting you now."

"I suppose that will have to do."

BWWAAAATTTT A large horn sounded. "You guys are boring," Izzy said from atop a shelf she had climbed upon to reached the top of the snorkac horn. "Who cares what she is? We're in the laboratory of Ignotus Peverell and all you want to do is blah blah blah friendship and trust. What a bunch of Hufflepuffs. Just cover the thing and let's see what other stuff he's got. Holly, come over here and give me a hand." Holly did as she was told, receiving into her hands a number of strange objects including a small crystalline ball that held wisps of white smoke contained within a decorative wrought iron holder. The ball slipped from its seat but Holly managed to catch it, causing her to drop a few long black quills. Shoshanna easily levitated the stone lid back onto the sampo. Izzy climbed higher to where Matt could no longer see her without backing up Then a few books dropped to the floor.

Shoshanna ran over to rescue them. "Izzy! Be more careful!" she yelled up to the curly headed blond who was shimmying across the top of a tall bookshelf. "Holly! Catch!" she called. Holly quickly dumped the contents of her arms to catch what appeared to be a misshapen skull the size of a baby's head.

"What is that?" Shoshanna asked in disgust.

"Looks like a house elf skull," Ceelee said.

"You would know," Shoshanna muttered.

Ceelee swiped the skull from Holly. "Yeah, we have a whole bunch of them in the common room, we use them as drinking mugs." She mimed drinking from it.

Izzy's head popped out from the shelf ledge, "Really?"

"No, not really." She tossed the skull over her shoulder, Matt winced as he heard an unpleasant crack. "Hey Squibling, there anything good up there?"

"Squibling?" Matt asked perplexed.

"Squib sibling," she shrugged.

Izzy popped out again with a dirty look. She threw a bottle squarely at Ceelee's head.

Ceelee caught it. "Nice. Polyjuice potion. I wonder who you'd turn into if you drank this?" She uncorked the bottle and gave it a sniff. Her skin turned vaguely green and her expression fell. She quickly corked the bottle and put it on a table that was half buried in rusted out cauldrons with holes in their bottoms. She stuck out her tongue. "Ugh, like anyone would want to drink that to find out."

Izzy had crawled across a gap between shelves and around a corner. "Hey Matt, I found something for you!" she yelled.

Matt looked up just in time to catch an ancient looking wand. "Ha ha, very funny."

"What is it, Matt?" Bridget asked.

"It's a wand." Matt then took on an accent not unlike Mr. Ollivander as he examined the wand. "Hmmm...Holly... yielding... manticore mane hair core..."

"Manticore mane hair!" Holly laughed.

"Come on Matt, be serious. That's English Oak," Shoshanna scolded.

"You expect me to know that?"

"Yes. You were allowed in for extraordinary magical knowledge. You earned nine OWLS."

"And none of them were in Wand Lore, if you recall."

"I'd think you'd at least learn the woods."

"Well... This is English Oak," he held the wand out triumphantly. Shoshanna groaned. Holly cracked up.

"Can I see it?" Holly asked, suddenly regaining her composure.

"You can have it," he passed the wand to Holly. "I mean it is your namesake afterall."

Shoshanna hissed, "It's English Oak. And you can't just give it to her."

"Why not? It's not like anyone here is going to use it."

"It could be dangerous. You don't know who it belongs to."

"Sure I do. It belongs to Holly."

"Don't be such a stick in the mud, Shosh," Izzy said, climbing down the final few shelves, her pockets so full of potion bottles they were bulging out like multi-colored glass balloons. At least a dozen quills stuck out in all which ways, as well as the skull of something that looked like a miniature dragon.

"You might not want to drink those potions," Matt suggested. "They look like they may have gone a bit off."

"That's okay, they're for that git, Boranos, anyway," she said, hopping from the shelves, face wreathed in a smile. "Look what I caught." She held up a bottle inwhich dangled a black bodied spider with sizable pincers. "I'm going to give her to Hagrid. He always says how we should never hurt spiders from the Forbidden Forest, so he must really love them."

"I'm not sure Hagrid needs anymore pets," Bridget said tactfully.

"I'm sure he doesn't," Shoshanna said back.

"Nonsense. He'll love her." She brought the bottle up to her eyes so they crossed as she looked at the small spider. "Right, Nancy? Hagrid's gonna take good care of you."

"That's for sure," Ceelee said. "In a month she'll look like a ball with legs for how much he'll be feeding her."

Matt checked his watch. "We should go, it's getting pretty late."

"Yeah," Shoshanna said, gathering up an armful of books. "We wouldn't want Filch to catch us."

"I thought you said not to take anything, it could be dangerous," Ceelee said in a tone mocking Shoshanna's voice.

"Oh what?" Ceelee raised her brows toward Shoshanna's full arms. "You mean these?" Shoshanna looked at the books in her arms. "They're just books, it's not like a wand or something. Or that knife you took when you thought we weren't looking."

Ceelee smirked, taking a small blade from her pocket and observing it. "You can never have too muck silver. Besides, books can contain far worse evils than a wand." She let out a low hiss.

Shoshanna paled and quickly put the books down. "You know, I really have enough books to read already. Are you happy now?"

"Yes." Ceelee stuck up her chin and walked out. Matt noticed she had not returned the knife.

"Izzy, leave the potions," Matt said. "I don't think Slughorn has enough beazors for all of those."

"Aw but Mattie," Izzy whined as she emptied her pockets onto the table before turning to leave.

"All of them."

"Oh but Hector's such a git, just one?"

"No."

"Fine." She produced a final vial of pinkish liquid with a strange foggy grey shape inside that looked strangely like a heart broken in two from her sock.

As they left the room door reappeared behind them. Given how long they had been in the ballroom it seemed strange that in only a few minutes they were able to cross the floor to the shore. Bridget said the words on the paper and, as they had thought it might, the floor receded back into it's disc shape. They talked happily of their discovery until they got to the hidden room.

"I can't wait to tell Pitchit what he missed," Izzy declared.

"You know," Bridget ventured. "Perhaps we shouldn't tell him?"

"What do you mean? He's going to be dying that he missed this!"

"I mean, perhaps we should just keep this our secret for now. If people found out about it the teachers might not let us go there anymore. They might close it all down."

"Yeah, have you ever known Pitchit to keep a secret? I mean, even I know his first kiss was with Moaning Myrtle," Ceelee said, casting a spell to check that no one was in the other room.

Izzy and Holly looked like they could barely contain their laughter at the memory.

"Bridget's right," Matt said. "We should keep this between ourselves. At least until we learn more about it."

"But we'll visit it again?" Izzy asked.

"Sure. We've got a whole week before the term starts," Matt said. And at the moment he had meant it. They all greed they would go back in the next few days, but, in the end, the week passed by without the quintet finding a time when they were all able to meet and eventually the days ran out and the Hogwart's Express returned with the students from break.