Judging by a Cover
Quidditch Stadium, May Eighth
The next day there was another attack. Another double attack. It happened just before the Quidditch match while the majority of the school was at the stadium waiting for the game to start. Everything halted when Professor McGonagall walked grimly up to the commentator's podium with a large, bright purple megaphone in her hand that contrasted her bleak expression. She commanded, by way of the megaphone, for all students to return to their dormitories immediately and called off the match. Harry Potter and Ron Weasley were exempted from this order and, for a moment, Jezibell wondered if they had been found responsible. She soon learned the real reason.
The victims of this petrifaction were Hermione Granger, found in a corridor near the library holding a hand-mirror and a Prefect from Ravenclaw. New security systems were put into play as soon as all the Gryffindors returned to the tower. There was now a six o'clock curfew to be in the common rooms and all transitions between classes were to be chaperoned by a teacher and including trips to the bathroom (If in Potions, you just had to hold it). That same night, the Minister of Magic himself made the journey to Hogwarts and escorted the Gamekeeper to Azkaban for half-a-century old suspicions. Far from making the students feel well protected, these drastic measures made it appear that Hogwarts was falling apart at the seams. The bitterest blow to its stitching came Sunday, when the school woke to find its Headmaster suspended.
The school board decided (i.e. Lucius Malfoy blackmails all) that because he failed to stop the attacks, Dumbledore was unfit to be Headmaster and thus was forced to take a leave of absence. This troll logic rattled the castle in a way even Slytherin's monster could not. Though the Headmaster of Hogwarts was rarely seen roaming the halls, the fact he was no longer at the school guiding the terrorized community through impossible times created a heavy gloom of hopelessness that hung like dank fog over the frightened students and miserable staff. Well, most of them…
If there is a bright side to a horrific monster prowling the castle, attacking students two at a time that even Chief Warlock Albus Dumbledore is unable to stop you can bet your joined-handed autograph Gilderoy Lockhart will find it. Somehow he got it into his delusional thicker-than-a-concussed-mountain-troll head that the danger of Chamber of Secrets had passed. He told the desolate second year in Defense Against the Dark Arts that Hagrid was surely the culprit and now that he was removed from the grounds Hogwarts was in the clear. Nobody believed this yarn for a second, especially not with their primary suspects in the same room.
"Says who?" barked Thomas, summing up the skeptic class's feelings.
"My dear young man," began Blockhead in a horrible patronizing voice that made Jezibell want dearly to wring his neck. She consoled herself in thinking to put dandelion seeds in his tea bag later - they'd do the job nicely and would be good karmic repayment for Valentine's day, "The Minister of Magic wouldn't have removed Hagrid if he hadn't been one hundred percent sure that he was guilty."
Want to bet? Many times people got thrown into Azkaban for doing almost nothing at all while others who were guilty wormed their way into escaping trial, scot-free. Welcome to the bureaucracy, leave your morals at the door.
"Oh yes he would!" said Weasley loudly, which made Jezibell turn sharply to look at him. He couldn't have known the all the circumstances of the arrest unless he had been there, it was classified ministry information. But something in his defiant voice and his openly honest Gryffindor expression of I'm-right-and-you-know-it convinced Jezibell that he knew exactly what went down. And that worried her. Which it shouldn't by all logic. Weasley had a father in the ministry, she had forgotten. He could easily have sent his son a letter explaining the trial or lack thereof Hagrid. Or maybe one of the other teachers had been present and told him and Potter about it because they knew the boys and the Gamekeeper were friendly. Still, it kept her up late that night, trying to get her head around an insignificant comment made by her foolish classmate. What was wrong with her?
A sudden vroom made her leap out of her midnight musings. She darted to the window were Emmy sat, now wide awake, and gazed out to the darkened grounds. It was impossible to see anything completely in the shadow-riddled night, but Jezibell could just make out a large, vaguely green shape moving heavily along the grass towards the abandon Gamekeeper's cabin. The sound that woke her seemed so foreign in the heart of the magical world that it took her second to put two and two together. It was a muggle vehicle - a car. Now she knew she was dreaming.
The door of the alleged 'car' opened and two figures stepped out. They were a little more than shadows solidified as they moved stealthily to Hagrid's Hut. Just before the door closed, the dim light from the open cabin door caught something shiny on one of the blurred figures. Something that, unless she was hallucinating which was a definite option appeared to be a pair of characteristically large rimmed and circular glasses.
Gryffindor Common Room, May Twenty-ninth
"If Harry Potter can sneak out of a security buffed castle and drive a car around the grounds at two in the morning, he can break into the second floor bathroom."
This was Emmy's theory and the snake-cat was sticking to it. Jezibell was still trying and failing to pacify her conscious with legs.
"I still am not convinced that wasn't a dream. A car at Hogwarts? It's muggle tech would fail just being within a mile of the building."
Unless… The Weasley car that crashed into the willow was never recovered. Most people didn't even know there was a car until the Howler struck the breakfast table. Potter and Weasley could have hid it someplace by the Forbidden Forest, or maybe in the Gamekeeper's hut. That had to be it. Potter was just taking his stolen technology for a joy ride and Jezibell caught him in the process of parking it.
Jezibell looked at the clock. Breakfast had to be over by now. She'd started skipping it two weeks ago when some diligent early risers started doing interesting things to her porridge spoons. This fasting was planned to last only a couple days until the perpetrators grew bored setting up unused booby traps, but they proved more persistent than anticipated. Emmy refused to go near the urchins while they were in such an awful mood, so Jezibell resigned her first meal of the day to an apple from lunch. One of the good things about the students having to be escorted everywhere was that lunch, at the very least, would remain reliable. She slung the book bag over her shoulder.
"So you're just going to walk away?" demanded Emmy, "You do get that if Potter's lost the Diary it's floating around the school somewhere."
"We don't know what happened to the Diary. Could be that Snape or Filch finally clued in and confiscated it."
"What about the monster? You could go to Dumbledore and show him the sink any time, free of charge, you know." Emmy licked the air and locked eyes with Jezibell intently. After a moment, she opened her mouth in a toothy cat-grin. "Oh. But it's not free of charge, is it? Not this late in the game. Going to Dumbledore now would be admitting you had the power to all year long."
"Well, that and it would also confirm to the staff that I am a parselmouth, which is really just rumors at this point. And Dumbledore would surely make a speech or something with at least a formal recognition for my discovery of the Chamber of Secrets. I don't want that kind of attention; I don't want any kind of attention."
"And it would imply you give toad's wart about the suffering of children."
"The victims are hardly suffering as stiffs in the Hosptial Wing, heck it seems like none too bad a deal. The only person suffering on account of the monster is I since the heir keeps framing me. But Potter gets taken down a notch too, and since I'm already at bottom rung that's not enough to make me care. I'm not a mudblood, and so there is no reason the heir of Slytherin business has ever been my concern. So what if Potter and his side-kick went for a midnight drive? It didn't have to do with anything. Not parseltongue, not the Chamber, not Myrtle's toilet, not me," Jezibell crossed to the Fat Lady, "Now, if you'd excuse me, I have to get back to reality."
Reality, as it turned out, was watching the clock tick Professor Binnses classroom. Professor Binns, like Blockhead, was undaunted by the idea of four students, a ghost and a cat lying in the hospital wing waiting for the mandrakes to mature. Jezibell originally thought this was because Binns was already dead, but after the attack on Nearly Headless Nick she guessed it was simply indifference to the situation. So he was like her. The history of the goblin riots washed over her and she boarded the endless train of thought regarding the Heir of Slytherin, not trying to make a plan, but to make sense of it all.
But there were too many unknowns, to many things that should add up but didn't. Was Harry Potter the heir of Slytherin? He was a parselmouth, and something weird happened when the Dark Lord gave him the scar on his head, that was for sure. Maybe there was some second-hand dark magic was given to him along with the lightning bolt. It would explain the parseltongue. But why would he ever go near Myrtle's bathroom, if his discovery of the chamber was as accidental as hers? And then to harm his best friend, that made no sense. Friendship with Hermione-muggleborn-prodigy-Granger was the best thing he had working for him for not being the heir of Slytherin. But then again, the paralyzed Granger seemed to be better at putting suspicions off him than an active one. Just today the Hufflepuffs that harassed them both over the year tried to make amends. But Jezibell didn't think he was that good of a liar after his pitiful performance when facing expulsion. Professor McGonagall came to class to tell Binns that he and Weasley were excused so they could go see Granger in the hospital wing. The Assistant Head's voice was throaty and Jezibell thought she saw a tear in McGonagall's eye. No amount of lies could fool the sharp eyed Transfiguration teacher. Harry Potter truly was desolate over his friend's attack. Unless Weasley did all the talking in that case, but this is something that somehow seemed unlikely. So Potter didn't do it, probably. Not knowingly, at least. Was it possible for the monster to be controlling its master? And, more importantly, what was he doing with the Diary?
Something clicked right then. A piece of the puzzle that Jezibell was wrestling with suddenly snapped in place. Jezibell stood up abruptly in her sudden revelation, but Professor McGonagall's voice suddenly boomed over the loud speaker so the movement didn't look suspicious.
"All students return to their house dormitories at once. All teachers return to the staff room. Immediately, please."
What had happened? Another attack? Had to be. Why else would McGonagall use the speaker? Unless the mandrakes were ready, but by her barely controlled urgency Jezibell didn't think so. The halls themselves seem to speak as they swarmed with panicked students sending the same message.
Attack. Attack. Another attack. Get to the common room. There's been an attack. Another Attack. Who is it? Are they dead? Get to the common room, another attack.
But for Jezibell, the common room was the last place she needed to go. She slipped through the crowd and stepped through one of the trick-walls she had discovered during winter break. She hadn't used it once even though it was an infallible escape route. It led directly to the corridor of the second floor bathroom.
The floor was wet as she walked down the deserted hallway, just as it had been the night of the Deathday party. She stopped at ten paces from the wall and read the second, fresher script written below the first in scarlet chicken blood.
Her Skeleton will lie in the Chamber Forever
The droplets from the wet blood ran down the wall and congealed on the damp floor in little splotches of dark red. Lying in one of the pools, resting haphazardly against each other in what was clearly a planted clue, where two things. A long lock of hair, so bright a shade of red it looked almost like an extension of the blood that shown with highlight, and a wand.
Jezibell stared at the hair and wand for a long time, even though it was perfectly clear what they meant. No other kids in the school, probably in the whole wizarding world, had hair like that. Weasley's little sister had been taken into the Chamber of Secrets by the monster itself. No footsteps came from the adjacent corridors and no voice from the loud-speaker asking students to return their commons rooms resounded, but Jezibell felt exposed standing in the middle of the hallway. She wasn't going back to the common room, to wait with the miserable Weasleys who would more than likely blame her for their sister's death, so she followed the leak of water to the bathroom nearby. Maybe if Myrtle was there she could finally get some real answers. The Diary, the voices, the chamber of secrets; it was all connected, she knew now. Emmy was right, it was her business. She pocketed the wand and made for the bathroom.
Myrtle wasn't home. Maybe she went down the Hogwarts plumbing to moan and sulk herself to oblivion. Jezibell waited for her to return, sitting in one of the empty stalls, watching the once benevolent engraved sink across from her and listening to the steady plink plink plink of the leaking toilet that was causing a small flood. She wished she had a clock or a window so she would be able to see time passing and know how long she had been camping out in the dismal gray lavatory. She didn't mind the monotony of her hiding place though. In a strange way, the bleak surroundings made her thinking clearer.
Weasley's sister was certainly dead by now. It was a few hours since her abduction and the monster was unlikely to restrain itself to petrifying when it was alone. The Diary was the answer; the key all along. Harry Potter was using the Diary (or being used by it) to open the chamber of secrets with parseltongue. Dobby's visit in November hadn't been his first. The Diary had been delivered to Jezibell within days of her being made Gryffindor, the reasoning being if she couldn't be a Slytherin she might be of use sacrificing herself to the greater cause of purging the school of muggleborns. It was expected she would be caught in the end, but since she was a Gryffindor anyways, that didn't matter. Harry Potter found it as Emmy suggested; picking it up because it said Diary on the cover. The Diary must have been conditioned before hand for Jezibell's specific use however, so the monster wouldn't attack her and the Diary still tried to make contact with her through dreams. Potter came here for months learning how to control the monster with the Diary's knowledge. Under the influence of it, his powers and fibbing abilities would have increased enough to fool even Dumbledore when he interrogated them. In a way, Jezibell felt very lucky. If her father had been just a few minutes late, or hadn't made the impression of his study well enough, she would have stolen he diary back when she had the chance and it would be her down in the bowels of the castle now, terrorizing for ancient meaningless prejudice.
Weasley and Granger probably weren't in on most of the gory details, but they would follow their fearless leader to the ends of the earth. It couldn't have been difficult for Potter to convince them to help with limited information. Granger was clever though. She could have started to figure out what Potter was doing, so he petrified her so she wouldn't stop him or turn Weasley against him too. Today he left class, under the pretense of visiting his friend in hospital wing, to make the attack on Weasley's sister, a perhaps as a manner of threat to Weasley, who dense as he is might have put it together by now. The girl had a well known crush on the Boy Who Lived, she was the obvious sender of the Valentine's Day card of Doom, and Jezibell could picture him luring her out from adult supervision for a friendly chat. She wouldn't be the first eleven year old tricked into trust. Maybe Weasley was down there as well.
It all made a sense, and Jezibell probably should have done the responsible thing and gone to straight to the headmaster instead of sitting vigil in this abandoned lavatory. But she couldn't. Because now it was personal. The Diary seemed behind every bane in her life; her dark preschool years, which led her parents shipping her off to Durmstrang, which led to the expulsion, which led to Hogwarts. It was intended for her, this heir of Slytherin mess was to be her destiny had Potter not gotten in the way. It had always been her business and now she couldn't not face it. Alone. Emmy said she was a Gryffindor at heart, and this is what Gryffindors do. Stupid things because of righteous anger. So she waited for Myrtle.
The ghost girl resurfaced several hours later (It could have minutes or days for all Jezibell knew; no clock) and she seemed to have gotten a nice traumatic cry done in her absence. Good, maybe she would be easier to deal with since her evening meltdown was taken care of. Her slouched form floated out of the overfilled toilet and it took her a second to realize she had company.
"Oh, it's you again." Myrtle sulked, "Are you here to make fun me some more? I'm used to it now, you know only weeks ago someone sent me a valentine. I was so happy, it looked like they were actually being nice to me, but it was all stinky and had a nasty poem inside. Roses are red, violets are blue. You're human waste and smell like a loo."
She crossed her transparent arms with insolence and her lower lip stuck out in a pout.
"I didn't sit in this moldy stall half the day to hear your psychiatric report," Jezibell sniped. Acting nice to Myrtle never worked, so she decided to be blunt and hopefully side step Myrtle's self-pitying rants. "I just needed to ask you if you had seen anyone else, besides me, in this bathroom this year. A boy, my age, but shorter and with glasses; a girl with frizzy brown hair and another boy only a tall redhead. Ring a dead bell?"
"You are sooo inconsiderate!" Myrtle whined "I mean this is my home, pitiful septic tank that it is. You can't just waltz in here and demand information! I may be dead, but I still have feelings!" She was winding herself up into a wail, but Myrtles words touched a long dormant nerve.
"No kidding, you have feelings. So does most of the planet. I have feelings too, but here's a handy tip. Nobody cares. About you, about me, about anybody but their goddam selves. Nobody has ever cared, nobody is ever caring and nobody ever will! I will never care. And I know you won't either; I'm not asking you to. I'm asking for you to information now so I can give my bogeyman a name before I go kill him. So, tell me Myrtle, if you can recall a subject other than your eternally irrelevant depression, have you seen Harry Potter in this bathroom?"
Myrtle observed her through foggy spectacles, her face unusually emotionless. When she spoke it was in a flat but clear voice.
"Harry and his two friends have been coming here nearly every day since Nicholas's Deathday party. They were planning something, I don't know what exactly. The red haired boy told me to keep quiet to teachers and prefects if they asked which they didn't. They stopped coming after Christmas for a bit. Then Harry and the red haired boy came once several weeks ago. I haven't been out of the u-bend much since then, so they could have come some more while I wasn't here."
And that was all Jezibell had needed to know. She turned Myrtle's dead eyes still on her, to face the sink directly across from her cubicle. The choice she had been avoiding since the beginning of the year had to be made now. The last time she opened the Chamber, she used one of her choicest swear words to do so. Now she offered it a little more respect.
"Get out of my way" she hissed. The Chamber of Secrets obeyed her command and Jezibell walked into the wide, yawning mouth of a tunnel. It swallowed her whole. Jezibell slid down the damp, dark tube. She couldn't see much in the limited light, but sometimes she felt passing holes in the pipe that appeared to lead off to other sections of the plumbing. She wondered vaguely if this was how the monster traveled around the castle, by way of pipes. It would make sense for how the voice came from inside the walls. She landed, a little clumsily, in a circular area of smooth stone with more tunnels leading off in various directions. Jezibell lit her wand for sight and began to make her way to the most likely of passages. It was the largest and directly across from the exit pipe, but that's not why Jezibell chose it. It seemed to emanate a faint dark aura exactly how the Chamber first appeared to her. Her instincts repelled it, like a cat's repel water, so it was where she was to go.
The floor was not as well swept deeper in the Chamber as it was just outside the tunnel. Jezibell's feet went crunch, crunch against the ancient skeletons of small unfortunate animals. There were fresher ones too, that squished rather than crunched, but she tried not to think about those.
A few hundred yards in and she had her first scare. An immense, heavy shape was coming into view in the feeble wand light. It was long and appeared to loop around the anti-chamber of sorts. Jezibell could barely breathe. Was this it? Had she found the monster already? It ignored her last time, but it would probably be a bit more concerned with her once she started hexing it.
She edged around the shape, trying to find the head. It was made of a thick, plated hide with scales, as a dragon's and probably just as hard. The color was a dark, poisonous green with a simple pattern of black diamonds along the back. The shape of it ended in a lump and she crept towards it, staying out of sight in case the head turned suddenly. Jezibell approached it with terrified caution, wincing as the dead rats crackled in sharp sound. She was a few feet from it now and the creature still hadn't moved a muscle. Jezibell knew that snakes could make themselves perfectly immobile when they wanted to, so she hesitated to turn the wandlight on it. The blurry shape that was presumed to be the head was at an odd, twisted angle. The body itself uneven as it lay like a loose coil of water-hose. Jezibell put her hand lightly on the tough skin. It crumpled, like paper under her touch leaving a small hole in the empty shell.
She almost laughed in hysterical relief. It wasn't the monster at all, just its shedded skin, and the brief test of courage granted her new information. Slytherin's monster was a snake. A giant petrifying poisonous century old serpent at the Heir's every command, but still, in essence, just a snake. She also knew its name from one of the dustier volumes in her father's private library: the Basilisk, king of serpents. It was a beast that lived for centuries and could kill at glance. The only puzzling thing was why the victims were only petrified; she supposed it was a magical handy cap of this particular basilisk. This knowledge filled her with strange surge of confidence. She had imagined some twisted, warped creature of fantasy that glided through walls as a phantom and could turn you to stone with its touch. The King of Serpents made much more sense. Basilisks, rare and unmanageable as they were, did crop up now and then over the centuries. The last one had been unleashed by Herpo the Foul and hadn't lasted anywhere near as long as this one. It was controllable with parseltongue and it could be defeated.
Several contorted turns and smaller anti-chambers later, Jezibell came to expanse of solid rock blocking her path. A pair of entwined serpents was carved vertically on the stone. The emeralds set into their eyes flickered animatedly in the wand-light, but unlike the snake in Myrtle's bathroom, they were anything but peaceful.
"Open up."
The snakes slid their interlocking bodies apart and as they did so the wall cracked smoothly open to form a wide archway. Jezibell held her wand high and stepped inside.
What she saw was a long open stretch of wet stone tiles that lead to a gigantic statue of (based on what Jezibell knew from her history books) Salazar Slytherin himself. The walkway was lined with large statues of opened mouthed serpents and Slytherin's likeness was so tall the crown of its head touched the cavern's ceiling. Jezibell had found the Chamber of Secrets without a doubt. She ran forward, not taking care to be wary of the basilisk, because at the colossus's feet lay a small red-haired figure.
Weasley's sister was unconscious, not petrified. Her frail body's crumpled posture was too loose to be frozen and her eyes were closed on her morbidly pale face. Jezibell quickly felt for a pulse on the inside of the girl's delicate wrist. It was there. She wasn't dead, but the beats were irregular and light. Jezibell supposed the first year had fainted from shock. Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and the basilisk were nowhere in sight, but Jezibell had the strange feeling that someone's eyes were on the back of her neck the while she was tending to the girl. This was probably just the effect of Uncle 'Zar bearing down behind her.
A loud noise that sounded horribly like a cave-in rang from one of the anti-chambers. There was a shout of panic that was lost in the rumbling, then it stopped, another shout and then silence. Jezibell rose unsteadily from Weasley's sister's side to stare at the archway out. Her wand hand shook somewhat in front of her, but she was prepared to defend against whoever was coming. Hurrying footsteps pattered from the darkness and Harry Potter burst into cavernous room, brandishing his own wand as if expecting an attack.
"Expelliarmus," said Jezibell, relieving him of his weapon before he could use it against her. The wand flew high over Jezibell's head into the darkness behind them. Potter paused, stunned at the immediate assault to take in the scene of the Chamber, before his eyes fell on Jezibell standing over Weasley's sister.
"You are the Heir of Slytherin!" He cried, "I knew it!"
Jezibell stood shocked. His triumphant words were exactly what she was planning to say.
"Where's the basilisk?" He demanded, undaunted by the fact his only weapon was gone, "What have you done to Ginny?"
"I haven't done anything besides check her pulse," Jezibell regained her composure. This couldn't be a clever ruse, Potter looked too terrified and determined to be faking it and he clearly just got here. So, if he wasn't the Heir of Slytherin, then who - ?
"That's a lie!" Potter yelled, even though he was only a yards away from her now, "You're the other parselmouth at Hogwarts; it has to be you who's been doing it! Durmstrang taught you how to use parseltongue with the Dark Arts to control snakes, but you took it too far and got expelled. Now you discovered the basilisk and Chamber of Secrets and thought you'd try the same thing here!"
He spat the theory at her as he walked haltingly to where she stood, working with anger to mask his fear. He was afraid of her. Of course he was. He had barged into the chamber to find her standing over an apparently lifeless girl and drew the obvious conclusion before having his wand dispelled from him, proving the mistaken identity. Jezibell slipped her wand back in its pocket to show that she wasn't about to curse him. Not yet.
"Ginny found out though. Somehow she knew what you were doing and she tried to tell us. But you told her to keep her mouth shut and when she almost told us the truth at breakfast, you took her down here so the snake could have her. I bet you're the one who stole the Diary too and -"
"Stop!" Jezibell shouted. "Stop-stop-stop" echoed around the cavern, effectively making Potter shut up, "I am not the Heir of Slytherin, not any more than you are. Ginny is still alive, but she won't be for much longer. You need to get her to the hospital wing. I don't know where the basilisk is, but we are practically in its bedroom. So if you can stop persecuting me, we can get out of here before it comes to finish her and us off."
"I'm afraid," said a voice from behind them, "That you won't be able to do that."
Jezibell spun around on the slick floor. Standing in the shadow of the great statue was a dark haired boy of about sixteen or so. He was dressed in the Hogwarts uniform and Jezibell could see a Slytherin's prefect badge proudly displayed on his chest. His face was pale and sallow, but not in an unattractive way and his brown eyes roved her and Potter casually, as though he were completely at ease here in the bowels of Hogwarts School. He twiddled Potter's dispelled wand in his long fingers idly. Jezibell wondered how she overlooked his standing there when she first came in.
"Tom!" said Potter in recognition, "Tom Riddle? What are you doing down here?"
Jezibell refocused her confounded gaze onto Potter. He was speaking to this strange personage as if they were old friends and he was surprised to see him in the particular setting. Tom Riddle... it rang a bell. But then, she didn't pretend to know all the school prefects by name.
"That," said Riddle, answering Potter's question, "Will become clear in due course."
"Potter," asked Jezibell, trying to a grip on what in the name of Nimue was going on, "Why are you friends with a Slytherin Prefect?"
"I'm not...sure. It's hard to explain. I- Tom?" He addressed Riddle now, looking nearly as confused as Jezibell felt. "Are you a-a ghost?"
It seemed a strange question at first, but then Jezibell looked closer at Tom Riddle. His form appeared solid enough, but it shimmered, blurring at the edges when he moved. There was something very unnatural about his being here.
"A memory, preserved in a diary for fifty years." He gestured, nonchalantly to the small red-bound book on the floor beside him and Jezibell felt her stomach churn with acid at the sight.
"Avada Kedavra!" She cursed at it. Nothing happened. Riddle had not the humanity for his eyes to twinkle with condescending amusement, but the plinking of water down the cracks in the silence was a sufficient substitute.
"What was that supposed to do?" Potter asked her accusingly. Jezibell stared at him; not wanting to state the obvious in case he was baiting her with the insane irony that the Boy Who Lived didn't know what the killing curse was.
"I'm afraid your guest is getting ahead of herself," said Riddle, like he didn't just have an attempt on his life.
"I didn't bring her here," Potter said defensively, "This is the Chamber of Secrets and she's the new heir of Slytherin. Or, I was fairly certain she is."
Riddle raised his eyebrows, "Miss Jezibell Malfoy has enviable ancestry and is a self-taught parselmouth which is admirable, but as she has already assured you she is no more and heir of Slytherin than yourself. And, as once again the girl in question so perfectly demonstrated, she has not the will to produce even a puff of Dark Magic. Completely powerless and relatively unremarkable in present company, it is a testament to your unshakable bias that she led you along as long as she did. Let me reassure that she is no threat. But even so, I don't want any more interruptions."
He dispelled Weasley's sister's wand from Jezibell casually and caught it midair. That easy gesture of mastery made her wanted to curse the book to a thousand wicked bits right then with Elladora's wand, which she had kept in her pocket. But her failed casting of the killing curse had made her uneasy that anything would work on that book. The boy himself was out of the question as she was eighty five percent sure that this prefect was being fully possessed by the memory that lived in the Diary. That would make him too powerful to duel.
"Ok, great," Harry blew aside Riddle's monologue, "But Tom, I don't think you heard me. We're in the Chamber of Secrets. There's a basilisk, I don't where it is, but it could be along any moment. You've got to help me –"
"We're not getting help from him, he's it." Jezibell interrupted and addressed Riddle, "You're the heir of Slytherin. Or the memory that got inside you is. That Diary, Riddle, did you pick it up because you thought it was funny? Because it said Diary on the front?"
"What?" Potter exclaimed. "Tom tried to stop the person who opened it fifty years ago! He got it wrong, Hagrid's innocent, but Tom wasn't the Heir..."
"Fifty years ago, how does that...?" She trailed off uncertainly as it dawned she was missing something very important about Riddle.
"It seems that in your separate endeavors, your two parties went sadly misinformed to the goings on at Hogwarts this year." said Riddle, a light smile of amusement played on his thin lips. "But maybe I can clear things up. This whole story starts, as Jezibell has kindly identified, with my Diary. This is the first bit of confusion to clear up because, Jezibell, it is in fact mine. It was always mine long before you, your father or Ginny Weasley. I did not chance upon it; I made it with the memories of my youth stored away inside."
"You told me that," said Potter, "But what about Ginny. How did she get like this?"
"That is quite a long story –"
"Should I pull up a chair?" asked Jezibell, who currently had not the patience for more of Riddle's monologues. Riddle regarding her coldly and despite herself she shut up. Right, no more interruptions. He resumed.
"I suppose the real reason Ginny Weasley's like this is because she opened her heart and spilled all her secrets to an invisible stranger. Using my journal as her own, she has been writing to me all year in this book, telling me all her pitiful wishes and woes. How her brother's tease her; how she came to school with her second hand robes and books and of course," Riddle looked directly at Harry for this, "how the great Harry Potter would never like her..."
Potter's pickled-toad eyes winced at the last bit.
"It was very boring, as you know," he continued, "To listen to the trivial prattles of those lesser than you, but I was patient. I began to write back. And as Ginny Weasley poured her heart, her soul into my diary, I began to pour a little of my own self back into her..."
"You possessed her," Jezibell reiterated.
"Yes," said Riddle, in mild approval, "Ginny Weasley opened the Chamber of Secrets and set the Serpent of Slytherin on the mudbloods and the squib's cat. Ginny, who strangled the Gamekeeper's roosters and spread the threatening messages on the walls with their blood."
"No." Disbelief colored Potter's voice.
"Yes," said Riddle, "She didn't actually know what she doing at first of course. I am very good with possessing. But after, oh, a few months, it was very amusing to listen to her new diary entries. 'Dear Tom,'" Riddle began to quote in a panicked falsetto, "'I think I'm losing my memory; there are rooster feathers on my robes and I don't know how they got there. Dear Tom, I can't remember what I was doing the night of Halloween, but a cat was attacked and I've got paint down my front. Dear Tom, Percy keeps telling me I look pale, I think he suspects me –'"
"Enough!"
Jezibell yelled to cut him off from this tangent. Not for her sake, it was actually very interesting to hear the plight of Ginny Weasley put into perspective, but the look of pure torture on Potter's face made her speak up. Riddle was playing with his food and Jezibell wanted out of the game.
"I was also kept up to date on the latest gossip through Ginny." Riddle now refocused his attention to Jezibell, trying his luck at tormenting her. "I heard of the Great Harry Potter and his every day antics with his friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. I also read of a curious new development in the school of Hogwarts. A new student, who had been expelled by foreigners for dark magic unknown and spoke in the serpent's tongue to her cat. Who came from the purest pedigree of Slytherin blood and yet was placed in exactly the wrong House for her talents. Whom everybody took as the scapegoat for Slytherin's heir," Riddle's eyes glimmered in their haze knowingly and she couldn't help it.
"What talents - you don't know anything about me." She asked, keeping her voice neutral.
"On the contrary, I know everything about you. I know how you and your brother used to play in the small nook in the plaster, behind the stairwell, before he got his first broom. I know how you performed your first magic, healing the wing of a small bird Draco had hit while flying, and then receiving your mismatched familiar as a reward. I heard it when you first began to speak in parseltongue."
All these things were uncannily true, to be sure, but Jezibell took a strange comfort in them. Riddle hadn't mentioned Durmstrang except in passing. If he was really out to cause as much pain as possible, that's where he would go to find it. Her morale was safe.
"Once you became literate in the language of serpents, I tried to help you discover my Diary. I hoped that when you came to Hogwarts, I might be able to operate through you and finish Salazar Slytherin's noble work. I sent dreams to you at night and little nudges of false intuition during the day. I thought natural curiosity would win when you were eight, you almost made it to the office where I was being kept. But then your father caught you and forced you from the study. He made sure you were too traumatized to return and he placed much greater enchantments on my case so I couldn't communicate with dreams anymore..." Riddle grimaced ruefully, "But I managed to find a suitable host in the end."
"To return to our tragic story, it took some time, but eventually stupid little Ginny began to lose faith in her Diary. She tried to dispose of it, throwing it down a toilet. And that was where you come in, Harry," He pointed to him, as though trying to help connect the dots, "You found it and I couldn't have been more delighted. Of all the people who could have come across it, with the possible exception of Jezibell, you were the one I was most anxious to meet."
"Why did you want to meet me?" asked Harry. His previous familiarity to Riddle seemed to have evaporated to be replaced by anger and contempt. It was now his turn to have his past dissected by Riddle.
"Ginny filled me in on all of your fascinating history, and I knew I had to find out more. To meet with you and talk to you, if I could. I decided to show my famous capture of the oaf, Hagrid, to gain your trust."
"Hagrid's my friend," Harry snarled, "You framed him! And I had thought you made a mistake!"
Riddle just laughed. It was an unnerving thing, cold as frostbite and weirdly high pitched. Like his voice hadn't cracked yet, though should have by the look of him.
"For the lady who doesn't know the tale," He nodded at Jezibell, "It was a precautionary move on my part, to use Hagrid as my scapegoat, fifty years ago. Even I was surprised at how well it worked out, it would have been clear to anyone who had done their homework that Hagrid had no Slytherin relations and didn't have the brains besides. Or the power. Then again I have always been able to charm my way out of sticky situations. Think of how it looked to old Armando Dippet, headmaster at the time. On the one hand, you have big bumbling Hagrid, in trouble every week and raising monster spawn under his bed, sneaking off to the dark forest to wrestle with trolls... On the other, you have Tom Riddle. Poor, but brilliant. Parentless, yet so brave. School prefect, a model student...Only Dumbledore, transfiguration teacher not headmaster then, ever had the slightest suspicions in my disfavor. He persuaded Dippet to keep Hagrid at Hogwarts as a Gamekeeper. Yes, he may have guessed. If only guessed..."
"I bet he saw right through you." growled Harry. Jezibell wondered if she should try magicking the Diary - but no, it wouldn't work. All the protection spells her father had placed on it, any useful hex would probably end up backfiring onto her and Harry.
"He kept an annoyingly close watch on me after that," Riddle continued. "I knew it wouldn't be safe to reopen the Chamber while I was at school, so I left behind a Diary. The key to the Chamber of Secrets, preserving my sixteen year old self so one day I might lead another my footsteps and purge the school of those unworthy."
"Well, it looks like you failed," said Harry bluntly, "No one has died this time, and fifty years ago you only managed to kill one person. The mandrake potion is nearly done and soon all the people you got petrified will be back to normal."
"Haven't I told you," said Riddle, his tone less calm and more dangerous now, "Ever since Ginny informed me of your past, my new target had been you."
Harry and Jezibell glanced at each other, sharing shocked surprise and morbid curiosity.
"The both of you, actually," clarified Riddle now turning to Jezibell, "Just Harry at first, but then I started to hear you making plans with your hybrid in parseltongue. I knew you knew were the Chamber was and how to activate it. You could have exposed me at any time, I appreciate that you didn't, but there were other complications your presence caused. Whenever I tried to set the Basilisk on Harry, you always turned up and forced it into retreat. I very nearly had you both in December. It was a dark corridor, Harry was just coming around the bend and I had already silenced both the mudblood and the ghost. And then there you were, against the wall, right between where Harry was approaching and the Basilisk. It was your stellar heritage that saved you. The basilisk is well trained not to touch purebloods, and in its moment of indecision you almost saw it for what it was."
"Well, when Harry picked up the Diary from the bathroom, I thought that if I could get him to trust me as Ginny had I may have been able to lure him to the Chamber of Secrets. Unfortunately those plans never came into effect -"
"Because Ginny stole it back. That's who the Weasley in your dormitory was," She spoke to Harry, "I had thought you took it to Quidditch practice."
"Ginny ransacked my bedroom?" Harry was taken aback, "But how did you know about that?"
"Riddle sent Ginny a dream SOS because you stopped talking to him. I know because I got it too. He's dead lucky she got to the Diary first; I would have sent that thing to the bottom of the lake." Jezibell explained bitterly.
"You went into my dormitory?" Harry inferred looking more than a little violated.
"And then Riddle started possessing Ginny again," Jezibell ignored him, "He attacked Granger so you would be determined to find the Chamber of Secrets even without his help -"
"But when Ginny almost betrayed him at breakfast, Riddle decided it was too risky to keep using her -"
"So he made her write her own death sentence and then led her down here so you and I would come looking-"
"You see," said Riddle, his tone almost congratulatory, "It is all connected. You two, Ginny Weasley and I. If you had only joined forces earlier in the year, instead of directing suspicions at each other, you may have had a chance at stopping me. But it is too late for that now." He smiled wide and lipless as an adder might at a mouse. Mice. "In any case it is my turn to ask the questions."
"What would you want to know about us?" said Harry angrily, "You seem to know all about Jezibell from 'living' in her house and Ginny told you my past already."
"Yes," agreed Riddle, "But she couldn't tell me everything. For instance, she couldn't tell me how it is that you, a skinny boy with no extraordinary magical power, managed to defeat the greatest Dark Wizard of all time? How could you not once, but twice escape with nothing but a small scar, while Lord Voldemort's powers were destroyed?"
Riddle wore an almost hungry expression now, and his dark brown eyes caught the light in the strangest way. They almost seemed to gleam red.
"What does it matter to you," asserted Harry, "Voldemort was decades after your time -"
"Wait," Jezibell cut him off. Harry's words had made her realize what they were missing. "You've been talking to us as who you were fifty years ago. Who are you now?"
"Yes!" Riddle was in triumph, "Finally you have found the right question."
He raised Harry's wand, and Jezibell thought he was going to curse them, but instead he turned around and wrote three flaming words in the air.
Tom Marvolo Riddle
He flourished the wand and then stepped aside so Jezibell and Harry could watch as the letters began to swirl and rearrange themselves.
I am Lord Voldemort
Anagrams, really?
"You see," hissed Riddle, "It was a name I was already using at Hogwarts, to intimidate friends only, of course. I wasn't about to keep my filthy Muggle Father's name forever. I, whose vein run with the blood of Salazar Slytherin himself, through my mother's side. I fashioned myself a new name, a name I knew one day wizards everywhere would fear to speak when I became the greatest sorcerer in the history of the world!"
"You're not." Harry spoke quietly, but there was a lot of highly concentrated hatred in those two words.
"What?" snapped Riddle, sounding like a two year old being denied ice cream.
"Not the greatest sorcerer of all time!" Harry's volume was rising, "Sorry to disappoint you and all that, but the greatest wizard is Albus Dumbledore. Everyone says so. Even when you were strong you didn't dare try and take Hogwarts. Dumbledore saw right through you when you were at school and he still frightens you now. Wherever you're hiding these days."
"Dumbledore's been driven from this castle by the mere memory of me." sneered Riddle.
"He's not gone as you think!"
Jezibell truly admired his faith and determined loyalty in the face of imminent doom, but she didn't see how Harry's blind trust in Dumbledore could possibly help them here. Then she heard the music.
It was coming from the far end of the cavern, at first a melodic whisper. It grew steadily louder and the melody became clearer, a high warbling cry of hope. A faintly glowing shape was soaring towards them in the darkness, the eerie tune harmonizing with the echoes vibrating around the domed room into a fierce wave of sound. The phoenix flew with the gentle grace of firelight and it looped around the group once before dropping a shapeless mass of cloth in Harry's hands and it landed, surprisingly light, on Jezibell's shoulder. It stopped singing and the song reverberated once more through the room and died.
Riddle looked incredulously at the visitor, "That's a phoenix..."
"No, that's a fox," Jezibell found sarcasm a very good way to keep her head on.
"Fawkes," whispered Harry who was stoking the magnificent bird on Jezibell's right shoulder, recognizing the bird Dumbledore introduced them to when he interrogated them in his office. But that one was a newly born chick… Maybe desperate hope gives phoenixes a growth spurt.
"And that," Riddle eyed the brown material in Harry's hands, "Is the old school Sorting Hat."
Jezibell looked to Harry for an explanation, like he had the answer for everything. Did you-? She mouthed and he shrugged, just as in awe with their unexpected rescuer. A phoenix and a hat. Well, it was better than nothing.
Riddle through back his head and started to laugh. It echoed wildly around the chamber as the phoenix song had, but the two sounds couldn't be more different. While the phoenix song filled you with warmth and hope, Riddle's hilarity seemed to strip it.
"This is what Dumbledore sends his defenders?"(Is it, now? If Dumbledore can get his bird down here, why doesn't he come to the rescue?) "A song bird and an old hat! Do you feel brave? Do you feel safe?"
No, Jezibell did not feel remotely sheltered or assured. Neither of Dumbledore's parting gifts would be able to do anything against an armed Riddle once he summoned the basilisk. Phoenix or no, they would be sitting ducks under its petrifying gaze. She expected Harry to be thinking similar thoughts of despair, but he had an oddly confident look to him. Looking at his set jaw and dark eyebrows narrowed in determination to try in spite of impossible odds, it almost made Jezibell believe they could pull through. Ha-ha. Almost.
"To business then, Harry" said Riddle brusquely, "Twice, your past, my future we have met. Twice I failed to kill you. How did you survive? Tell me everything!"
Harry stood lock-jaw, clearly not in the mood for expending the secrets of his survival to his archnemisis. Jezibell watched as Riddle's out-line, which had been wavering and fading, was growing clearer and strong. He was feeding off Weasley's sister's soul the longer they stood. The time he spent monologing was just him wasting their time before he had enough substance to attack. Riddle wasn't going to budge until he got his precious information and if they died in here over it, it wouldn't matter anyway. Jezibell made eye contact with Harry, trying to convey a just-get-it-over-with message.
"Fine," he began curtly, "No one knows why you couldn't kill me, I don't even understand it myself. But I know what saved me. It was my mother, my common muggleborn mother. She died to save me; she stopped you from killing me."
This bit was new to Jezibell. She had never heard of a person being protected from the killing curse just by - in a nutshell - motherly love. It sounded like a ludicrous fancy, the something out of a fairy story. But Harry Potter gave no other reason for being alive today. He wasn't done either.
"Do you want to know who you really are now, Riddle? Who you were last year, 1992, not fifty years ago? Because I've seen you - the real you. You're a wreck. You're barely alive. You're weak, you're hiding, and you're ugly and foul -"
"Enough!" commanded Riddle, his face handsome features were contorted in scowl, "Yes, your mother died to save you. It's a powerful counter curse, I understand now...there is nothing special about you. I did wonder, you see about you, about us. There are many strange likenesses between. Both orphans, both raised by muggles, and we three are likely the only parselmouths to come out of Hogwarts since Salazar Slytherin himself. It seems almost destiny our paths should converge here where the legacy began.
"I'd call it bad timing," Jezibell said and the phoenix rolled its sharp toes on her shoulder. It was a bit painful, but comforting in its way.
Riddle's pale shimmering face puckered with the intensity of his distaste, "But I suppose none of that matters when I kill you now.
He smiled, but it was so twisted that it wasn't any better than the ugly sneer, "This is school, after all, and I believe it's time I taught you both a little history lesson. Let's match the powers of Lord Voldemort, Heir of Slytherin and his basilisk against the Famous Harry Potter and his rebellious friend aided by the best weapons Dumbledore can give them."
Leaving Jezibell and Harry behind him, Riddle turned to the great stone likeness and called out in parseltongue.
"Speak to me Salazar Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts four!"