The dead lead that was presented by their polyjuice potion misadventure wasn't the end of the saga however. Once Hermione had lost her whiskers, fur and her eyes were back to their normal brown, another clue presented itself. Only Harry seemed to believe it was indeed a clue, however.
A diary, apparently belonging to a prefect from fifty years prior, Tom Riddle.
"It's empty", Ron said for what felt like the fifth time. "Just chuck it"
"I want to know why someone did chuck it. Doesn't make sense to me", Harry replied, still staring at the many blank pages.
"It is a bit odd that a fifty year old diary is floating around, but there are much more bizarre and old things that pop up around here", said Hermione. She was excited at first about this find, but after a week had passed, she too was in agreement with Ron and John. She attempted to use a revealer on it, but to no avail.
"Riddle got a diary for Christmas and never bothered to write in it. It's obvious", said Ron, tiredly as he tried to attempt a gruelling marathon of an essay for Snape. Harry was sat opposite him, absent-mindedly flicking through the empty pages.
"Yeah, just chuck it", said John. He too was struggling with Snape's essay, only half-paying attention.
"I wish I know why somebody did try to chuck it though", said Harry, with furrowed eyebrows.
"Because it's a piece of junk? I dunno, I think we've got bigger fish to fry Harry", John replied.
"Fish? What?", Ron asked.
"Muggle saying", said Hermione, absent-mindedly as she read through what seemed like her fifth monstrous, oversized book that month, this one in particular about creatures that the British Ministry of Magic deemed too dangerous for most wizards to approach.
"It's been a really long time since someone's been attacked though. I wonder why", John mused.
"There could be any number of reasons. It's likely that the heir of Slytherin is intelligent enough to pace themselves. The more attacks they commit in a short space of time, the more alert everyone would be, and the greater the chance would be of them being caught. We aren't out of this yet", Hermione said at once. For obvious reasons, this whole affair seemed to occupy her every waking thought.
"Damn I wish you didn't make so much sense", John said, a grimace spreading across his face.
"Sorry", Hermione muttered.
"Don't apologise for being right. It sucks, but you're right", John said, still looking grim.
John wasn't the only person who had noticed that there hadn't been an attack in a while. Professor Lockhart however, took a very different view on the whole matter to John or Hermione.
"I think the whole affair is now behind us, Minerva. The perpetrator must have been aware that it was only a matter of time before I really came down hard on them", they overheard him telling McGonagall at breakfast. McGonagall didn't look impressed, but Lockhart was as ever, oblivious to the opinions of everyone around him.
Hardly three days later, the whole school found out what Lockhart was talking about; a Valentine's day celebration which involved dwarves singing Valentine's day songs for recipients, lurid decorations everywhere and most girls acting rather giggly, Hermione included.
John had received more than one singing valentine, both of which happened in the middle of a potions lesson.
"I can't stop them professor", said John, shrugging as a dwarf sang about John's sarcasm and ability to make the anonymous girl laugh. Needless to say, he lost five points from Gryffindor for the interruption.
Having seen what these valentines were like, Harry panicked when a dwarf stopped him on the way to Transfiguration, attempting to give him his singing valentine.
It didn't go in his favour; the dwarf tackled Harry and began to serenade him, comparing his hair to a blackboard and his eyes to a pickled toad.
The tackle caused Harry's bag to fall, which in turn meant that the contents, from Riddle's diary to Harry's ink spilled out onto the ground as everyone laughed. While Harry was hoping to vanish into thin air, Malfoy took the chance to pick up Riddle's diary.
Ginny, who was present in the hallway looked in shock between Harry and Malfoy as he held the diary.
"I wonder what Potter's written in here...", said Malfoy, a grin spreading across his face.
"Give it back Malfoy", Harry snarled.
"Malfoy, that is not your property; give it back at once", came Percy's authoritative 'prefect voice'.
"Once I've had a look", Malfoy replied, opening the diary up. He didn't get a chance to see anything however. Harry had pulled his wand out, pointed it at Malfoy and yelled "Expelliarmus!"
The book jerked out of Malfoy's hands and flew through the air for Ron to catch, smirking as he did so. Harry felt that the five points Percy took from Gryffindor were thoroughly worth it.
Something strange caught Harry's eye later however. His parchment, textbooks and the bag itself had ink stains covering them, but the diary appeared completely spotless.
Harry tested the diary later that evening, only to have him sucked into the diary itself, into Tom Riddle's memory from fifty years prior.
"I don't buy it. No way in hell was it Hagrid", John said, firmly.
"But you know what Hagrid's like. He'd have thought it was a shame that the monster was stuck inside all those years, maybe he wanted to let it out", Hermione replied miserably.
"This Riddle sounds like a bit of a snitch though. Who asked him to grass on Hagrid?", Ron asked.
"But the monster had killed someone. And the attacks had to have stopped after Hagrid was expelled, otherwise he'd have been reinstated", Hermione explained.
"It's true, but it's definitely not Hagrid. Think about it, Hagrid, the heir of Slytherin? Who in their right mind would buy that?", John asked.
"But how many monsters do you think this place can hold?", asked Harry miserably.
"Well there's Fluffy. So definitely more than one", John said. Harry had to admit that John's optimism about Hagrid being innocent was helpful to say the least. The motivation wouldn't be difficult to work out if Hagrid was guilty.
The situation with the Chamber of Secrets however, ended up being driven from Harry's mind as the second Quidditch match against Hufflepuff, for which the Gryffindor team was training harder than ever, with confidence to spare. At least, it was all that Harry was thinking about. Until McGonagall announced the match's cancellation and came to collect Harry, John and Ron.
"I warn you, this may come as something of a shock", she said as she led them to the hospital wing.
There was another pair of beds with occupants in them. One of them had Penelope Clearwater, a Ravenclaw prefect in it. However, it was the other newly occupied bed that the three boys found themselves staring in shock at.
"Hermione", Ron groaned, half shocked and half depressed at the sight of her.
If Ron was shocked at the sigh of Hermione, petrified in a hospital wing bed, it was nothing compared to the look on his face when he, Ron and John ventured into the forbidden forest on Hagrid's "follow the spiders" tip.
Spiders the size of bears had abducted the three boys and Fang, bringing them deeper and deeper into the forest; so deep in fact, that even if they meant them no harm, there was no hope for them to find their way back to the castle.
And it looked like these spiders meant harm.
There were so many of them that fighting their way out was simply not an option either.
Harry saw that Ron had all but been paralysed with fear and knowing that he didn't like normal spiders to begin with, this would've been a personalised hellscape for him.
When the spiders dropped them on the floor however, the hellscape somehow got worse. If the spiders that carried them were big, they were nothing compared to the one that crawled out from behind a dense group of trees. It looked to be the weight of an adult male elephant. Spiders shouldn't shake the ground when they took a single step.
This spider had eight milky white eyes. It was blind.
"Who is it?", the biggest spider... said?
It could speak?
"Humans!", came a voice from behind Harry. It must have been the one that carried him.
"Hagrid?", asked what Harry now guessed was the lead spider.
"No! Too small to be him!" came Harry's carrier spider.
"Kill them! I was sleeping!", came the voice of the largest spider.
"We're his friends! Hagrid's friends!" John yelled, just as his spider began to descend upon him.
The spiders stopped moving.
"Hagrid has never sent another human into our midst! Why would he?", asked the lead spider. Aragog, Harry recalled. Hagrid had called him Aragog.
"He's in trouble! He's been sent to prison! They're saying that he opened the Chamber of Secrets! Like before!", Harry explained quickly. He looked sideways, hoping Ron was in a position to back him up, but he was still white, still as a statue, with his mouth open as if screaming, but not making a sound.
"That's a lie! Hagrid never opened the Chamber of Secrets! Not now, not fifty years ago!", Aragog all but growled.
"So you aren't the monster. You never killed people then", said John. He didn't sound relieved; Aragog had already ordered the other spiders to kill them. They were lucky to still be alive.
"No. Out of respect for Hagrid, who shows care for all living things. The monster was born in the castle. I came to Hagrid from a distant land. His kindness allowed me to grow and he even found me a wife, Mosag. And you see how our family has grown", said Aragog.
The image of two monstrous spiders, laying hundreds of eggs and building nests less than five miles from where they went to school disturbed Harry deeply.
"So the monster is... what, exactly?", John pressed.
"WE DO NOT SPEAK IT'S NAME! It is a creature that we spiders fear above all others!", Aragog bellowed, clicking his pincers angrily.
John grimaced. Harry could almost hear his disappointment. They'd gone into the forest for nothing.
Their wild goose chase into the forest (and subsequent chase from the forest) meant that the trail had gone cold.
It took Ron nearly five minutes and a particularly violent bout of vomiting before he'd recovered from what they'd seen.
"Shit Ron, are you alright?", asked John, clapping Ron's back, forcing out yet more vomit.
"Follow the spiders...", Ron wheezed, wearily, once he'd thoroughly emptied his stomach. He'd gone pale.
"I'll never forgive Hagrid. We could've been killed!",
"At least we know that Hagrid never opened the chamber. He was innocent", said Harry.
Ron scoffed. Raising Aragog wasn't his idea of innocent.
The three boys visited the petrified Hermione once again the next morning. Though while Ron and John had pained expressions upon the sight of Hermione's frozen face, Harry was more interested in her left hand. Hermione was holding something very tightly in her fist.
Harry caught Ron's eye and nodded towards Hermione's hand. Ron frowned, trying to figure out what he could be holding. John too, upon noticing what Ron and Harry were looking at. While John worked at opening up Hermione's fist, which was closed with a surprising amount of strength, Harry and Ron kept a lookout. Thankfully, John's strength prevailed quickly, before Madame Pomfrey arrived.
The three boys left, and upon reaching their dorm room, knowing that Seamus, Dean, Alex, Liu, Neville and Sam wouldn't be there in the afternoon.
"Of all the many fearsome beasts that roam our world, there are none so deadly as the basilisk. Death meets all that meet the murderous gaze of the king of serpents. With venom capable of killing within minutes and enough size and strength to rival a dragon, wizards are warned to steer clear of any areas with so much as a rumour of basilisk activity. Created by hatching a chicken's egg under a toad and growing to nearly fifty feet in length, all spiders flee before it, though the crowing of the rooster is fatal to it", read John. As soon as he stopped, pieces of the puzzle seemed to click into place.
"She solved everything", whispered Ron, in awe.
"Except one thing", said Harry. "How does a fifty foot snake get around a castle with more than a thousand people without being noticed?", he asked.
John turned the page around to show it to Harry. Hermione had written one word in massive black letters.
PIPES.
"It's using the bloody plumbing?", Ron asked incredulously.
"Murderous gaze... But no-one's dead. Why?", asked John, frowning back down at the page.
"Because no one looked it in the eye", said Harry, who was looking at his loose reflection in a window. "Not directly at least! Hermione and that Ravenclaw girl had that mirror! Hermione read that book and I bet she warned the first person she could find that the monster's a basilisk! The girl used her mirror to look around a corner and both her and Hermione were petrified!", he explained.
"Colin had his camera", said Ron, counting the victims on his fingers as they went.
"Justin saw it through Nearly Headless Nick! But Nick's a ghost, so he got the full blast, but he can't die again!", John explained excitedly as Ron counted two more off his fingers.
"Mrs. Norris... Mrs. Norris... how the hell is she alive?", asked Ron, frowning.
"The water", Harry said quietly. "There was water on the floor the night she got attacked! She only got the basilisk's reflection!", Harry said excitedly.
John blew out a torrent of air, looking down at his feet.
"What?", asked Ron.
"It's a fucking miracle that no-one's died yet. Everyone just got lucky. Every single one of them.", said John, who was in absolute awe, though his voice was shaking. He was right. There were so many close calls. There could have been funerals for multiple students.
Including Hermione.
"Last thing we need to figure out is where the chamber's entrance is then! We've almost got this!", said Ron excitedly.
Harry's heart skipped a beat. Somehow, he already knew.
"In Riddle's diary, the memory I saw said that the girl died in a bathroom. What if that girl never left that bathroom?", He asked, his voice shaking with the excitement of his revelation.
"Moa... Moaning Myrtle. Holy shit. Holy shit!", John whispered.
The three boys ran straight towards the staff room, only to find it empty. Not ten seconds after their arrival did the reason reveal itself. McGonagall's magically enhanced voice echoed throughout the school.
"All students will return to their dormitories immediately. All staff members will convene in the staff room once the students have returned to their dormitories", she said.
The three boys immediately hid in a wardrobe, knowing that they couldn't make it to the common room in time. The teachers didn't take long to arrive. McGonagall and Snape, Dumbledore's right and left hands looked ashen-faced.
"The heir of Slytherin left another message", said McGonagall. She looked shell-shocked.
"Her skeleton will lie in the Chamber forever", Snape recited in a monotone voice. It was strange. Seeing Snape so affected by a student's face.
"The monster has taken a student. Into the chamber itself. It is as we feared. This is the end of Hogwarts", said McGonagall, sounding like she was holding back tears.
The teachers had varying reactions, all conveying their shock, rage and fear. Snape gripped the back of the chair he stood next to hard enough to make his knuckles go white. Flitwick let out a whimper and Sprout was silently crying.
"Who was the student?", asked Madame Pomfrey.
"Ginny Weasley", McGonagall croaked. Immediately, John and Harry looked at Ron, who stood between them. He wasn't standing for long. He sunk to his knees in the wardrobe, shaking like a leaf.
"So sorry! Dozed off, what've I missed?", came a voice that made John almost sprint out of the wardrobe and punch the owner of said voice.
Lockhart.
"Just the man we were hoping to see!", said Snape, with false excitement that made Harry's skin crawl.
"Why? What's happened?", asked Lockhart. He was already looking worried.
"Your moment has come at last. The monster has taken a student into the chamber. Weren't you telling us yesterday that you've known for weeks where the Chamber's entrance was located?", asked Snape.
"That's right!" squeaked Flitwick excitedly. "And didn't you say that the affair had been bungled? That you should have had free reign from the outset?"
"I... don't recall-", Lockhart said.
"Consider this your moment of free reign, Gilderoy. Your skills are of course, legendary", said McGonagall.
"V-very well. I'll be in my office... getting ready", he stuttered.
The rest of Gryffindor house were utterly silent. Percy said to Fred, George, Ron, John and Harry that he'd write to Mrs. Weasley, while they sat there, in stunned silence.
"We should go to Lockhart", Ron croaked. "He's going to try to get into the chamber. We can tell him that we know where it is", he said.
Neither Harry or John knew what else to do, so they nodded and the three of them walked away. The other Gryffindors felt so horrible for the Weasleys that nobody stopped them.
Their walk to Lockhart's office was utterly silent. Ron had a look on his face that was somewhere in between determination and rage. Harry and John meanwhile found themselves following, trying to think of something to say to Ron and failing miserably.
When they opened the door to his office though, they found it almost stripped bare, with Lockhart hurriedly shutting one of five large trunks.
The professor and the three boys stared at each other for a few seconds in utter silence.
"Going somewhere professor?", asked John lightly.
"Yes, urgent call! Unavoidable, I must go-", started Lockhart.
"What about my sister?", asked Ron, looking completely incredulous.
"Well as for that - most unfortunate - no one regrets more than I-", Lockhart started.
"You're the defence against the dark arts teacher! You can't go now when a bunch of dark stuff is going on!", Harry seethed.
"Well I have to say that when I took the job, the description mentioned nothing like this!", Lockhart replied, desperately.
"You're running away. After all that stuff you did in your books", said John, trying to maintain as much calmness as he could.
"Books can be misleading", said Lockhart, cryptically.
"You're the one who wrote them!", yelled Harry.
"Use your common sense! They wouldn't have sold half as well if people didn't think I'd done all those things! No one wants to read about a witch with a hair lip getting rid of a troll! She'd look terrible on the front cover! And don't get me started on the Armenian fellow who defeated the werewolf! No dress sense at all!", Lockhart explained.
"You've been taking credit for other wizards and witches' work... You're pathetic!", Harry said with a shaking voice.
"It's not that simple! I had to track these people down! I had to find out how they beat those monsters! I had to wipe their memories! If there's something I pride myself on, it's my memory charms! It's not all book signings and endorsements! If you want fame, you need to be prepared for a long, hard slog!", said Lockhart.
John had gone pale. He looked horrified.
"You... you basically killed them"
"They're still alive! They're healthy!", Lockhart retorted desperately. "Yes... I think that's everything. One thing left to do I suppose", he said, turning around.
"Awfully sorry boys, but I'll have to wipe your memories too. I can't have you blabbing or I won't ever sell another book!", he said now pointing his wand at them, though he was too late.
"Expelliarmus!", said Harry. Lockhart's wand sailed through the air, landing in John's hands. Suddenly, Lockhart didn't look so handsome. He looked weak-chinned, childish and confused.
"B-boys. What good will any of this do? I don't know where the Chamber of Secrets is!", he said.
"It's your lucky day. We think we know exactly where it is", said John. It hadn't hit Harry until then, but Ron was already as tall as Lockhart and John wasn't far behind. They each placed a hand on Lockhart's back and pushed, forcing him to come with them as they started what could very well be a suicide mission.