The next day, Harry told her everything.
"I heard that voice again," he said. "It kept going 'rip, tear, kill' and going on about how it had been so hungry for so long. Then it went 'I smell blood', and we were chasing it when we came upon Mrs. Norris. We were too shocked to get away before everyone else showed up."
Hermione looked at Neville and Ron.
"Did either of you hear this voice?" she asked.
They both shook their heads.
"I didn't hear anything," Ron said. "Just Harry, yelling about hearing someone."
"Just because we didn't hear it doesn't mean that Harry didn't hear it," Neville told Ron.
"Exactly," Hermione said, nodding satisfactorily. Her eyes fixed on Harry. "That means there's something special about you, allowing you to hear this odd voice."
"Special about me?" Harry looked uneasy. "I survived the killing curse, Hermione. That's it. I'm nothing special otherwise."
"Current circumstances beg to differ," Hermione said, folding her arms. "Whatever attacked Mrs. Norris, you clearly heard it when no one else did."
"Filch was furious," Neville said, shuddering. "He looked like he was going to have a full-on breakdown. He only calmed down a little when Dumbledore said that she was Petrified, not dead…"
"Filch blamed Harry," Ron snickered. "Said Harry did it because he knew Filch was a Squib."
Hermione blinked.
"A Squib?" she repeated. "I suppose that makes sense. I wondered why he never used magic."
"I didn't even know what it was," Harry said. "I felt like a fool."
"Snape kept pushing for us to be punished," Neville said. "He could tell we weren't telling the teachers everything — we didn't want to say Harry had been hearing voices — and he was trying to get Harry kicked off the Quidditch team."
"Lockhart was trying to show off and annoyed Snape, too," Ron said, sniggering. "If Lockhart kicks it in the next week, we'll know Snape poisoned him."
Hermione wasn't sure she'd care if he did.
Rumors of the attack flew around the school wildly for the next few days. Filch kept prowling around near the scene of the crime, as if he thought the attacker would come back. And the words on the wall continued to gleam, despite Filch's best efforts to clean off the blood. No one knew what was going on, but rumors of the Chamber of Secrets were whispered in the corridors from ear to ear, the legend gradually spreading throughout the school.
Hermione was careful not to go anywhere alone, sticking close to her fellow Slytherins when she went through the halls. There were rumors in Slytherin that this had all happened before, that the Chamber of Secrets had been opened before some fifty years ago, and that the last time, a Muggle-born had died. And though Hermione was normally one to dismiss rumors, Slytherin rumors had an uncanny habit of being unusually accurate, their sources never fully disclosed.
Several of the older, snobbier Slytherins were whispering loudly and snickering now when they saw her, but Hermione tried to pay them no mind. Even if Salazar Slytherin had put a monster in the castle to get rid of the unworthy, there was no way that she would ever be considered 'unworthy'.
She would make sure of it.
Some of the rumors grew ridiculous. Whispers of Harry being the Heir of Slytherin spread throughout the school, as he'd been found at the scene of the crime, and the rumors seemed to upset Harry a lot.
"Justin Finch-Fletchley ran away from me at lunchtime," he said. "Colin's heard the rumors too and fled from me as well."
"Creevey was carried off in the crowd," Ron objected. "It was change of classes, and he's a titchy little thing."
"Still…" Harry looked depressed.
"Do you think there's really a Chamber of Secrets?" Neville asked Hermione.
Hermione shrugged. "There might be. The Slytherins seem to think so."
"They would," Ron dismissed. "Of course they'd want to believe that their founder made some giant secret dungeon that held terrifying monsters."
"It's a bit more than that," Hermione said tersely. "Rumor in the Slytherin common room is that this happened before fifty years ago, and that at least one Muggle-born died."
"I've never heard that," Neville said, eyes wide.
"That because it probably didn't happen," Ron said. "The Slytherins just like to feel superior and scare people."
"If that had happened, unless they found the monster and chamber, they might have covered it up," Hermione said. "There's not much evidence for a chamber either way, is there?"
"We could look." Harry's eyes were hard. "We could look around near the scene of the crime."
Hermione watched the Gryffindor boys all exchange glances, determination and adventure in their eyes. She sighed, standing and dusting off her robes.
"I recognize that look," she said wryly. "We might learn something, I suppose. Why not?"
"It's not like Filch is going to figure out anything," Ron pointed out, to which Hermione had to agree.
The corridor where the attack had happened looked very much the same, with the exception of the missing cat. The wall still read "The Chamber of Secrets has been Opened," and except for a chair against the wall, Hermione could detect no difference.
"Look at these!" Harry said. "Scorch marks!"
Hermione frowned.
"Scorch marks?" she said. "Wasn't there water on the floor that night?"
"Maybe a fire spell went out of control and they needed to put the fire out?" Harry suggested.
"Come look at this!" said Neville. "This is funny…"
Hermione and Harry got up and crossed to the window next to the message on the wall, where nearly two dozen spiders were scuttling, fighting to get through a small crack. There was a long, dangly silvery thread, hanging like a rope they'd all climbed in a hurry.
"Have you ever seen spiders act like that?" Neville said wonderingly.
"No," said Harry. "Have you, Ron? ...Ron?"
Hermione glanced at Ron, who seemed on the verge of an anxiety attack.
"What's up?" said Harry.
Hermione winced.
"Arachnophobia?" she asked. "There's plenty of people like that. Go look on the other side of the corridor, Ron. We'll handle this."
Ron nodded gratefully and hurried away while she watched the spiders. Harry watched Ron, a funny look on his face.
"I never knew Ron was afraid of spiders," he said. Hermione shrugged.
"I suspect it hasn't come up before now," she said. "I'm sure you can ask him about it later."
She pulled away from the spiders to look around.
"The only noticeable difference is the lack of Mrs. Norris," she said.
"And the water," Harry said, remembering. "It was all in this hall. It came to about here." He stopped at a door bearing an "Out of Order" sign.
"You can't go in there," Ron objected. "That's a girls' toilet."
"No one will be using it if it's out of order," Hermione said. "Just go in."
With that, Harry put his hand on the knob and opened the door.
The bathroom was one of the gloomiest she'd ever seen. The floor was damp and reflected the dull light given off by a few stubs of candles. The mirror was speckled with water and dirt and cracked in several places, and the sinks looked chipped and rusted. The stall doors were flaking and old, decaying on their hinges. Hermione was reminded why she never used this toilet and always held it until she was back in the Slytherin dungeons — this toilet was always marked as Out of Order, and for good reason, it seemed.
"Oh!" Neville said abruptly. "Ah, hello, Myrtle."
Hermione looked up to see the floating ghost of a girl not much older than herself — a fourth or fifth year, she would have guessed. She was dressed in what looked like an old-fashioned uniform, and she had dark, lank hair and thick pearly spectacles.
"This is a girls' bathroom," Myrtle said, eyeing them suspiciously. "You're not girls."
"Ah— no, we're not," Neville said. "We just— we thought we'd come and visit you? After Peeves was so mean to you when we met you at the Deathday party…"
Hermione stared at the ghost, tuning out Neville and Harry working to assuage the ghost with their good intentions. Myrtle looked young, only maybe a few years older than Hermione, and as the implications sank in, Hermione slowly grew more and more horrified.
"Myrtle," she said finally, interrupting Neville's assurance that her glasses looked fine on her. "Were you a student here when you died?"
Myrtle gave Hermione a dark look.
"Oh, that's funny," she said nastily. "Poor Myrtle died normally, but no one liked her, so she came back to haunt a toilet instead–"
"I'm being serious," Hermione said sharply. "I'm a student at this school. If you died while at this school, forgive me if I'm a bit concerned about it."
"Hermione?" Neville said, cautious.
"If you had an accidental death, I understand that unfortunate things occur, but most people who return as ghosts died violently," Hermione went on. "If you were killed while in school, it is an outrage, and I want to know everything about it immediately to determine if I, myself, am still safe in a school that loses their students in such a way. So, I ask again," she said, drawing breath, "were you a student here when you died?"
Myrtle stopped to look at Hermione closely.
"Yes," she said finally. "I died here."
"Here?" Hermione asked, astonished. "In this bathroom?"
"Yes," said Myrtle. She sniffed. "I wouldn't have chosen to haunt a toilet, you know."
"How did you die?" Harry asked. "Were you—were you attacked?"
Hermione elbowed him sharply, but Myrtle looked flattered.
"I was. It was dreadful," she told him with relish. "It happened right here. I remember it so well. I was hiding because Olive Hornby was teasing me about my glasses. The door was locked and I was crying, and then I heard someone come in. They said something funny — a different language, I think, some made-up language. Anyway, what really got to 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."
"What?" Harry said. "How?"
"No idea," Myrtle said. "I just remember seeing a pair of great, big, yellow eyes, and my whole body sort of seized up, and then I was floating away…" She refocused on Harry. "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…"
Seeing great, big, yellow eyes that caused you to die wasn't something that rang a bell for Hermione, but it definitely didn't sound like a tragic accident. It was possibly a case of tragic negligence, but still…
"When did you die?" Hermione asked.
"Right after exams," Myrtle told her. "1943." She sniffed. "I never ever got to see my marks—!"
It was at this point Hermione observed the faded colors on Myrtle's uniform tie, the blue and bronze recognizable even when partially transparent.
"That's awful," Hermione told her genuinely. "I'm so sorry."
"Nobody even missed me," Myrtle announced, tearing up. "It took them hours to find my body. I should know — I was sitting here waiting for them to find me."
"Because a toilet's the first place you look for someone missing," Ron muttered.
Neville elbowed him sharply. "Ron!" he admonished, but Myrtle let out a wail.
"Oh, you think it's funny, do you?" she cried. "Poor Moaning Myrtle, lost in a toilet, who no one missed enough to even look!"
She gave a tragic sob, rose up in the air, turned over, and dove head first into a toilet, splashing water all over the place. Harry, Ron, and Neville all flinched, while Hermione wisely hid behind Ron, the tallest of the boys.
"So… she was a student here?" Neville ventured.
"She was killed exactly fifty years ago," Harry said slowly, "by a monster. You don't think— do we know if she's Muggle-born?"
"Not only was she a student here, but she was attacked and killed on campus," Hermione said vehemently. "Something like that had to have made the news back then."
Ron groaned. "Does that mean we're going to the library?"
Hermione gave him a look. "Well, if you'd rather entertain Moaning Myrtle all day…"
Hermione never thought she'd seen Ron move quite that quickly to get to the library ever before.