"ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴅɪᴀʀʏ ʜᴏʟᴅꜱ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀɪᴇꜱ ᴏꜰ ᴛᴇʀʀɪʙʟᴇ ᴛʜɪɴɢꜱ. ᴛʜɪɴɢꜱ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴡᴇʀᴇ ᴄᴏᴠᴇʀᴇᴅ ᴜᴘ. ᴛʜɪɴɢꜱ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ʜᴀᴘᴘᴇɴᴇᴅ ᴀᴛ ʜᴏɢᴡᴀʀᴛꜱ ꜱᴄʜᴏᴏʟ ᴏꜰ ᴡɪᴛᴄʜᴄʀᴀꜰᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴡɪᴢᴀʀᴅʀʏ."
Chapter Fourteen: Déjà Vu
It would have almost been idyllic, Harry thought. If only his left arm didn't keep phasing in and out of corporeality.
A few years ago, he would have willingly given that arm on some mornings to stay in bed for a full hour after waking up, or for a full stomach.
A few years ago, Uncle Vernon's hands, quickly becoming lifeless, around his throat, had meant nothing.
It wasn't until he had faced Quirrell in the Underground Chambers that Harry had realised how much he wanted to live.
The desire for survival clawed at his stomach day and night, hunger pangs more powerful than three days on nothing but half a can of cold baked beans could ever be. Desperation in the face of the inevitable.
Harry attempted to practice what Quirrell had taught him about controlling the shadows, but slippery as dolphins, they leapt from his grasp instead of obeying his will, leaving him nothing but exhausted.
The whispers that he pushed to the bottom of his mind grew more vicious by the minute.
He even tried to go back to that strange place between sleeping and waking again, to meet the wraith who contained the beast, but had no idea how he'd done it the first two times around.
So all there was to do... was wait. Wait to become the Obscurus.
(Wait to die).
There was nothing he could do about it.
And yet, he was restless.
At one point, he sat cross-legged in bed, armed with quill and parchment, to compose Harry Potter's Last Will and Testament. Hedwig would need looking after, Hermione disliked birds, Ruby had her hands full with Hephaestus, and Anthony was in no state to inherit anything, but Ron had need of an owl. Everything else, not that there was much else, probably, was Ruby's, actually.
Tears dripped onto the parchment, and he balled it up, gripping it with ghostly fingers, and flung it at the grey-gold spring sunlight-lit far wall, where it fell to the ground with a quiet thump.
Besides, Flamel was struggling.
Even Harry, despite his complete ignorance of the obscurities of alchemy, could tell.
"Isn't it close enough?" he'd asked, with a lifted eyebrow, at Flamel's latest foul-smelling, pitch-black concoction. If Potions was anything to go on, the more unpleasant something tasted or smelled, the stronger its effects, and so this batch of nigredo must have been fairly decent.
"Close enough will kill you," Flamel had said sharply as he discarded his latest creation, and at Harry's unimpressed expression, he added: "Gruesomely."
So, Dumbledore must be right.
"Could I try?" Harry had offered. I'm pretty miserable.
"You have not the skill."
"Oh."
To add insult to injury, his magic had gone from remarkably controlled to non-existent.
Harry wondered what had happened to Quirrell's cobalt measuring instrument.
Likely, he had destroyed it the first and only time he transformed. This time, Harry thought darkly, there will be ample warning. The ring even burned so hot against his fingers that Madam Pomfrey, terrified of what would happened if he removed it, charmed it to stay cool.
"What about the Elixir of Life?" he'd asked next, recalling the blood-red liquid that had brought Voldemort back to life.
At that suggestion, something dark crossed Flamel's face, and yet, Harry pressed him for an answer.
"I have fed the Elixir to an Obscurial before," he said curtly.
"And?"
Flamel's lips pressed into a hard line that reminded him of Professor McGonagall, and yet, his expression was even more stony.
"You will still die."
"Let me guess, even more gruesomely?"
"Yes."
Harry was silent for a while, contemplating this. He fiddled with the ouroboros ring, and his mind was drawn inexplicably to its original owner.
"Did you know Aretaphila Selwyn well?" he asked.
Flamel had, after all, been in the background of the painting.
"Aretaphila, the King-Killer... She was a fascinating woman." Flamel's facial expression and inflection remained entirely neutral.
"But who was she?"
"A rich, bored noblewoman who lived for chaos."
"Why don't you want to talk about her?" pressed Harry, despite Flamel's glowering. "And more importantly, why didn't you tell Dumbledore that you know her ring is my ring? I've seen the painting of you at Cor- I can't remember his name, at Gaunt's banquet."
"Many people attended Corvinus Gaunt's banquets," said Flamel, in the same measured tone.
"But you know who she was."
"Aretaphilia was infamous."
Harry, remembering Ron's recognition of the name, half-believed him.
"But the ring."
"But enough. I did not find it terribly important to take note of every piece of jewellery the woman wore. I have no idea if it even belonged to her in the first place."
This was going nowhere. Harry crossed his arms and sat back against the pillows.
Later on, Ruby had drifted in, with a messy stack of notes and a half-frantic expression.
"Harry," she said, pointing to a small drawing, "doesn't that look like your ring?"
Directly, it didn't. But with a bit of imagination, Harry supposed it did. A opened circle with a forked end surrounded a dot, and if you squinted, it could be a snake with an open mouth, ready to swallow its tail.
He coughed, then shrugged off her worried look, shifting his incorporeal arm out of her line of sight. "What is it?"
"The constellation Draco," said Ruby curtly, re-sorting her pile.
"We're not set to learn notation for Astronomy until next year," said Harry, and then he remembered that he might not be around for that, and bit his tongue.
"Well, I thought I'd do a bit of reading ahead."
That might have sounded convincing out of Hermione's mouth, but coming from Ruby, it was nothing but suspicious.
"Spill. I know you've been sneaking around all term. What is it?"
She shook her head stubbornly, and Harry sighed. Ruby was as impossible as Flamel when it came to getting answers.
"So this Draco," Harry tried instead, shuddering at the thought of Malfoy, "what about it?"
He recognised it, at least, from Astronomy. Sandwiched between Ursa Minor and Ursa Major, wriggling its way around Polaris towards Vega. Harry even remembered the names of the dragon's eyes: Rastaban and Eltanin.
Ruby frowned, but answered nonetheless. "Draco never sets." And quietly, she added: "Just like the snake in the ouroboros never dies. It just made me think, Harry... where do charmed objects like your ring get their energy from to power the spell? Even Invisibility Cloaks wear off."
"The more exact the invocation, the more efficient the spell," he parroted back.
"Yes, Flitwick told us all that. Spells can last millions and millions of years. But the thing is, I asked Flamel how long he thought the spell on your ring would last, after he tested it, and he looked me right in the eye, and said forever."
"Maybe he was being flippant," said Harry, annoyed. The master alchemist was certainly flippant with him.
"I don't think he was being flippant," said Ruby, her voice ascending into the high and slightly whiny register that she often used when irritated and self-righteous. "Look, I was talking to Ron yesterday, and apparently wizards and witches don't read the same fairytales as us ― Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and all that ― anyway, he mentioned this one, The Three Brothers, where Death makes the three Hallows."
She paused for dramatic effect. Harry indulged her.
"The first one is a wand that will beat anyone, the third one is a cloak that will hide you from Death, and... the second is an object that will bring the dead back to life."
"And?"
"And Hermione and Ron helped me out with this bit, we all came up with it together; her and Ron will be down in a minute, but I thought I'd explain to you first and see what you think."
They both turned as the door was flung open; both Hermione and Ron hurried into the room, the former clasping a stack of books to her chest and staggering under the weight.
Hermione, clearly over-excitedly, scrambled to get organised. Whatever she had found out, Harry's interest was piqued. It had been a long time since he had seen any of the three act somewhat normal.
"So," Hermione continued where Ruby had left off, "Ron found me a copy of the book, because it sounded interesting. There was a drawing in there, of the Resurrection Stone, and it looked strangely familiar, and so―" Here, she fumbled about for the next book "―I ordered this from Flourish and Blotts, for extra reading about Corvinus Gaunt. I just couldn't get it out my head, about all this Heir of Slytherin stuff ― yes, the basilisk's dead, but the Heir's not you, so, who is it? Anyway, look." She turned the book towards Harry. "In all these paintings of the Gaunt family starting from the fourteenth century, they're wearing this ring, with the exact same stone on it."
He peered at it; a clumsy, ugly and ancient-looking gold ring with a misshapen black stone, upon which a symbol was engraved.
"But look!" said Hermione. "Corvinus Gaunt, when he becomes head of the family, wearing the ring, and Corvinus Gaunt, shortly before he dies, not wearing the ring. Neither his son, nor anyone who comes after him, wear the ring. Isn't that strange?"
All three looked at him expectantly.
"No," said Harry. "Maybe he lost it."
"Or maybe it ended up in someone else's hands, literally. Maybe Aretaphilia Selwyn took it. Maybe, it became some kind of inside joke. Maybe, the ring that contained the Resurrection Stone was transformed into a literal symbol of resurrection, so that it could hide in plain sight, unable to be used for its original purpose, but maybe, used differently. Maybe the reason Flamel couldn't identify the exact spell that powers the ring's movement and suppression of the Obscurus is because it's an inherent property of the material. Maybe it's not a spell at all."
Now, they had to be collectively pulling his leg. "It's too far-fetched. Why would you even bother?"
Ron spluttered. "There are some crazy people who'd like to bring back the dead! Like You-Know-Who! He'd have an army of―of Inferi, or zombies, or something. Necromancy and stuff. I dunno."
Harry sighed. "Great theory, mate. But there's one problem. Why would Quirrell, or Voldemort, however you like, hand me this thing if he wanted it?"
"There is―" Hermione bit her lip.
"Go on."
"There is," she said, very slowly, "always the possibility Voldemort didn't know."
It was Harry's turn to splutter. "Come on, we're kids, Hermione! If we could figure that out, so could Voldemort! He's a lot of things, Hermione, but definitely not stupid! I found that out last year!"
Unless, thought Harry with a shudder, he's keeping me alive so he can kill me himself. Maybe Hermione's right, after all.
"Maybe not," said Hermione. "Lots of Muggle kids believe in magic, and lots of Muggle adults don't. But who's right?"
"That's not exactly fair," Ruby pointed out.
Hermione sighed. "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
Whatever the expected response was, she did not receive it. Instead, Harry, Ron, and Ruby stared at her blankly.
Hermione shook her head at them disdainfully.
"Haven't any of you read Sherlock Holmes? Honestly!"
"But we haven't eliminated the impossible yet," said Ron. "All we've done is play guessing games. Besides, the Peverells weren't even real. It's a story to scare kids."
Hermione glowered at the ring. For the first time ever, Harry thought she looked well and truly stumped.
"I don't know the spell to Un-Transfigure it. But I'll bet anything Dumbledore does. Or― Or―" She looked extremely embarrassed. "Or Lockhart."
Ron threw his hands up. "Hermione!"
"No Lockhart," Harry agreed. "Absolutely not."
"He's not that bad," said Hermione staunchly. "He talks all about Untransfiguration in Gadding in Ghouls. You two are just jealous and haven't bothered to read the course material all term."
"I wonder why," Harry muttered under his breath, and Hermione shot him a dirty look.
"Jealous of what?" asked Ron, making a gagging noise. "His hair or his peacock-feather quill? Or his adoring fans?"
"Leave him alone!"
"Yeah, I will. Hope he falls headfirst down a bloody well while I'm leaving him alone though; don't know if I can stand him another year. He's been unbearable since he killed the basilisk ― Harry, he was trying to lecture Professor McGonagall on Transfiguration yesterday ― McGonagall!"
Harry merely smiled, listening to their bickering escalate as usual.
His left arm felt more corporeal than it had in a long while.
Why she had come back here was beyond her.
But all the same, here she was: watching the leaky tap dripping, in Moaning Myrtle's permanently out-of-order toilet.
Harry, she remembered, often used it as a quiet place to brew illicit potion experiments ― this was where he'd made the Calming Draught Anthony fed Mrs. Norris last year. The scent of cigarette smoke lingered, as if it was caked under the paint on the stall doors.
Tee denied having ever opened the tap. But Ruby had seen it with her own eyes that night. It was no dream.
But why? But how?
Carefully, she reached forward, and flipped the snake-headed tap on, then jumped back at the horrible gurgling sound emanating from it.
Frustrated, Ruby kicked the sink.
"Be quiet!" cried Moaning Myrtle, voice muffled by the stall door as she glided out of her favourite sulking spot and into the main area. "Can't you see I'm trying to mope in peace? My life was miserable, and now horrible girls like you come around my toilet, making my death miserable, too!"
Ruby froze, her hand on the shuddering tap. She switched it off, and turned to Myrtle.
"Myrtle," she said, hesitantly, but unable to deny her curiosity, "did you die in here?"
It was such an odd thing to ask, in hindsight. But Myrtle seemed pleased, even gleeful; a little silver seemed to colour her cheeks, and for the first time, she looked something approaching pretty. A beatific smile appeared on her usually-miserable face.
"Ooooh, it was dreadful. It happened right in here," she said softly. "I died in this very stall. I remember it so well. I'd hidden because Olive Hornby was teasing me about my glasses. I was so mortified, I wished I could just — just cry myself to death. The door was locked, and I was crying, and then I heard somebody come in. They said something funny. A different language, I think it must have been. Anyway, what really got me was that it was a boy speaking. So I unlocked the door, to tell him to go and use his own toilet, and then —" Myrtle paused for dramatic effect, and floated closer to Ruby, intoning, "I died."
"How?"
Myrtle looked at her as if her question was entirely unreasonable and Ruby herself was entirely tiresome.
"Well, I died. Of course I don't know."
"But you died in that stall."
"Well, yes, I suppose."
Ruby glanced over Myrtle's ghostly form. The Bloody Baron was splattered in blood, Nearly Headless Nick was.. well... nearly headless, and even the Grey Lady had a faint scar on her neck. As for Myrtle... she had no fatal wound.
"So you died."
"Obviously. Are you daft?"
"But not from a spell."
Myrtle seemed confused. "Well — no — I suppose not—"
"But you weren't poisoned either. So did you — did you wish yourself to death? Can you do that?"
The ghost did not answer.
"Do you remember what the boy said?" Ruby had a sneaking suspicion. "You know, the funny thing in a different language."
Was it — maybe — could it have been Tee? But why? What was he doing? And how did he remember to do it, anyway, out of everything?
It says here that there was a prefect called T. Riddle in the 1940s. Theodore had found out that he had been here, at Hogwarts, fifty years ago.
What were you doing here, in a girls' toilet? Were you looking for this place? Did you see something you shouldn't have?
"Of course I do," said Myrtle, offended. "It was only the last thing I heard before I died."
She rolled her ghostly shoulders back, cleared her throat, and uttered a low, sharp hiss that made the hairs on the back of Ruby's neck stand on end.
Just like with the diary, the snake's mouth grew larger and larger until it swallowed the tap, then the whole sink, then even the floor underneath it.
What have you done, Tee?
"Will you go down and have a look?" asked Ruby, trying to summon her courage and face her terror of heights. Her heart was already beating so quickly that she could feel her pulse everywhere. "You can't die twice," she added.
"Die twice," said Myrtle with a haughty sniff. "No one cares about my feelings. I tried to kill myself, yesterday, you know. I was just about to jump out the window, and then I realised that I'm — I'm— I'm already— already—"
"Dead," Ruby finished helpfully, and Myrtle burst into a torrent of tears, diving in all the toilet bowls and sending massive amounts of water sloshing out.
Well, I didn't think she would mind; after all, she just told me about how she died and she didn't seem bothered.
It happened very, very quickly.
First, Ruby noticed that the marble floor had grown slick from the water. Next, she took a tentative step towards the doorway, tripped over the hem of her robes, wobbled back, and tipped, headfirst, into the abyss.
"MYRTLE!" she screeched, her stomach seeming to plummet even faster than the rest of her body, but the ghost heeded her not.
Terror-struck, Ruby squeezed her eyes shut — then met the cold, hard embrace of a stone floor.
For what seemed like a good hour, she lay there, wondering, one, how on earth she had managed not to break her neck, and two, if she was going to feel like a single giant bruise tomorrow.
After she had moped enough, Ruby got to her feet, both her bones and her wand miraculously un-broken.
"Lumos," she whispered, and the tip of her wand sputtered to life, casting bluish wandlight onto a dank and dark corridor, framed on either side by stone walls with intricate carvings. It seemed to open up into a sort of atrium in the distance, but she couldn't see very well.
Lavender would kill her for not bringing her down here, too.
Whatever here was. Besides, this place gave her the creeps. She felt as if she were being watched.
I'll go as far as the bit where it opens up, then I'm going right back up, Ruby told herself as she inched her way through the corridor.
Oh, how she'd like to give everything down here a good dousing of Dettol. Then it might not reek of bacteria and filth. She didn't even want to look down for fear of what she was putting her feet in.
Eventually, Ruby had managed to shuffle her way to the end of the corridor; it did open, both out and up into a grand sort of atrium (though still filthy), lit only by the little light that descended into the depths of the Black Lake, flanked on each side by wooden pillars, entwined with carved wood in the shape of a coiled snake.
The centerpiece of it all, however, an enormous statue of a wizard, as tall as the atrium was.
Briefly, Ruby seemed to recognise him, but she could not put a name to his face.
What was this place.
Surely... surely not the Chamber of Secrets?
There was nothing to fear, though. The basilisk was dead.
Yes, thought Ruby, fair enough, but if Slytherin was anything like Slytherins now, the entire place is booby-trapped. I must touch nothing.
The year before they'd left Privet Drive, she and Harry had been to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at the cinema, since Dudley wanted to see it, weird Mrs. Figgs had the flu, and Uncle Vernon was due to supervise the neighbourhood boys' outing that week.
The main take-away was not to touch things in underground tombs.
Slowly, she turned on her heel, surveying the atrium once more. Where her shoes had left imprints in the filth covering the floor, Ruby could see flawless white stone poking through; Parian marble. Anthony had described a statue of Rowena Ravenclaw in his common room made out of the same material.
The diary buzzed in her pocket; gripping her wand between her teeth to free her hands, she retrieved it.
What... where are you?
Something feels familiar about this.
Like I've been drawn here, and now I'm here.
I think I'm in the Chamber of Secrets, Tee.
But what happened down here?
And what do you have to do with it all? It's so confusing.
He did not answer immediately.
I think this is where you should bring me back. Where my separation from the real world is thinnest.
And even thinner on Walpurgis Night.
Yes... bring me here.
It was sensible enough, Ruby supposed. Private... quiet...
But what if he's dangerous, she thought. What if he tries to hurt me once he escaped? I felt him... he's very powerful, much more powerful than he has any reason to be.
And did Tee... mightn't he have killed Moaning Myrtle, too?
How I can't fathom. And it's not as if I know it was him. It's simply an odd coincidence.
Besides, Slytherin's bound to have hundreds, if not thousands of descendants. Only one of them is the Heir. What are the chances?
But only the Heir can open the Chamber of Secrets. Only the Heir could have that kind of power. It fits.
But Myrtle opened it, too. She can't be the Heir. If all you have to do is speak a single word in Parseltongue, anyone could do that, even me! Maybe that part of the legend is false.
Maybe she would return here, but she had lingered long enough. With one last look at the towering statue, Ruby turned around and trudged back to the damp corridor.
"Myrtle?" she called. Ruby couldn't imagine how she was going to get up again; even if she did crawl in the muck, it was nearly a vertical drop. The opening above looked the size of a coin from down here.
"Here!" came a voice that was definitely not Myrtle's. "Catch this!"
For a second, her heart gave a wild leap as the rope descended into the Chamber. It had been knotted at even intervals, giving her somewhat of a ledge as she climbed up.
Don't look down, Ruby reminded herself, and she inched up the rope, her forehead breaking out in a cold sweat and her arms trembling from the effort.
Light began to flood towards her, and she blinked in pain, blinded momentarily just as a pair of hands pulled her fully out of the Chamber, and she emerged, trembling. Daring to hope.
"Anthony?" she asked, blinking at the blur of light hair and black robes.
"Sorry," said the other person. "It's just me, Neville."
Neville. That made much more sense, and she endeavoured to hide the disappointment on her face as to not hurt Neville's feelings.
"Don't be sorry," said Ruby. "I'd still be stuck down there if you didn't come. Myrtle was a load of help."
Moaning Myrtle threw Ruby a scathing glare, still moping, but this time, by the window.
"I didn't mean to be nosy, promise," said Neville. "I was looking for you and Percy said he'd seen you going this way. And I know people come here to cry and stuff, so I wanted to make sure you were alright."
"She ought to be crying," interrupted Myrtle in a sing-songy voice. "She's a horrid, horrid, horrid girl."
"I wouldn't have been down there in the first place if you weren't splashing around and making the floor slippery!"
"Down there? Do you mean that sewer you were trapped in?" asked Neville.
"S-Sewer?"
Of course, it made sense. No one would look at a hole under a sink and instantly think it lead to the Chamber of Secrets; so Ruby laughed it off.
"Oh, yeah, the sewer. It's horrible down there."
"We should ask someone to cover it," Neville suggested. "Wouldn't want someone else falling down there, it's a miracle you didn't break your neck."
Ruby panicked.
"Oh, no― I mean Filch'll probably get round to it sometime. It's Myrtle's fault anyway. You said you were looking for me?"
Neville beamed. "The Flutterby bushes have grown! I wanted you to come see them!"
Her mouth opened and closed. She had forgotten all about the seeds planted in the too-sunny corner of the greenhouse that also happened to make up a large percentage of her final score in Herbology.
"Alright," she said. "Let's go see them, then."
She followed Neville outside, making sure the diary and her wand were safe and out of the way as they continued downstairs towards the Herbology greenhouses.
The Hogwarts grounds smelled sweet, like fresh earth and springtime ― when was the last time she'd been outside?
Neville, unlike her, was wearing galoshes over his shoes to keep them dry. Rationalising that her feet were already wet, anyway, Ruby stopped to peel off her soaking and grimy shoes and socks.
"They got wet in the sewer," she explained when Neville gave her a funny look, but he seemed to believe her.
They entered Greenhouse Three, both taking care to give the Mandrakes and the toothsome Venomous Tentacula in the corner a wide berth.
"See?" asked Neville, shifting a few pots over.
Ruby knelt down to have a closer look. Sure enough, a mass of trembling, heart-shaped green leaves had sprung up from the ground.
"It looks like a mass of butterflies," Neville explained proudly. "Hence the name Flutterby bush."
"They grew," she said, still stunned.
"Of course," said Neville, picking up a watering can. "All they needed was a little bit of hope."
Ruby said nothing, instead patting the dirt in around the Flutterby bushes.
All of a sudden, a feeling of intense and existential dread came over her.
Harry.
She let go of the trowel, muttered an excuse to Neville, and dashed off into the Entrance Hall, heedless of the dirt she was trailing through the hallways.
"You're ill!" Ron's voice emanated from the open doorway of the Hospital Wing. "You don't have to put a brave face on, why don't you tell us anything? Harry, we're your friends!"
The air suddenly felt very, very cold. Very sober, and somewhat in the daze of shock, Ruby barely noticed the frigid floor of the Hospital Wing against her bare, dirt-smeared feet until she reached the bed.
In a disjointed fashion, she saw Hermione put a hand to her mouth.
"He was perfectly fine," Hermione said, in a choked sort of voice. "He was perfectly fine this morning. Didn't you speak to him, Ron?"
"I'm fine," someone else said.
Harry was propped up against the pillows; his left arm had turned completely black, and his fingers were diaphanous, more shadow than flesh, yet jagged and sharpened to cruel points.
Most frighteningly of all, the veins on his neck showed through his skin; his blood was pitch-black.
Ruby did not need Madam Pomfrey to tell her something was different.
"I'm fine," Harry repeated staunchly, his corporeal arm braced against his chest. "This happens all the time. See. Mum's necklace isn't spinning. I'm not going to die."
He was right. Ruby grasped the false Time-Turner, and was horrified.
It was silent not because Harry was not in mortal peril, because he clearly was, but because even Lily Evans did not know a way to save him from this fate.
Fear clawed at her stomach, eager to feed.