Chapter 62 — What Harry Heard

We waited until Percy had brought us back before asking Harry to explain. He sat near the fire, looking between us while several students discovered reasons to go upstairs. Neville stayed with the homework he had already been struggling over. I was grateful for the ordinary scratch of his quill as we drew our chairs together and lowered our voices.

Harry repeated that he had told the snake not to hurt Justin. Hermione asked whether he had known he was speaking Parseltongue. He looked puzzled by the word, and Ron explained that a Parselmouth could talk to snakes. Harry said he knew he could do that. He had not realised it needed a special name.

That stopped Ron. I moved my chair nearer and asked whether Harry thought we had understood him. Of course, he replied; we had been standing beside him. I told him we had heard hissing, with nothing to explain his intention. He stared at me as though I had just claimed not to understand the conversation we were having now.

‘But I was telling it to leave Justin alone,’ he said. I assured him I believed him. From where I had stood, the snake was still moving towards Justin, and I could not wait to discover whether it would obey. Harry looked at the fire and said he thought it had understood him.

Perhaps it had, I replied. That would not have helped Justin understand Harry, or told me what either of them meant. Harry rubbed his face, then described speaking to another snake before Hogwarts. It had happened at the zoo, where a boa constrictor had seemed to answer him while the Dursleys looked elsewhere.

The glass had disappeared. Dudley had been frightened, and Harry had spent a great deal of time in trouble afterwards. I listened without interrupting, noticing that the missing glass seemed to have been the strange part for him. The conversation itself had made sense. He had assumed other wizards could do much the same thing.

Hermione said most could not. Ron added that Salazar Slytherin had been able to, and Harry looked up sharply. There was the connection people leaving the fire might already be making. Even without understanding the name of the language, they had heard something frightening beside a symbol they associated with the threat.

‘That doesn’t make Harry his heir,’ I said. Ron objected that he had not claimed it did. I told him other people would, and they needed more evidence than a talent Harry had not known was unusual. Hermione agreed that speaking a language told us little about what someone intended to do with it.

Harry asked whether he could be related to Slytherin. I admitted that I did not know his family tree. I did know he had approached Justin because he thought he could help, and being mistaken about what we could hear did not change that. He released a breath without looking sufficiently relieved for me to feel the conversation had solved much.

I thought of the hiss in the Hall. Then I remembered Harry outside Lockhart’s office with his hand against the wall, following words which had never reached the rest of us. I asked whether those might have belonged to a snake too. Hermione turned towards me, and Harry’s expression changed as he considered it.

‘Inside the wall?’ he asked. I reminded him that he had thought he was speaking ordinary words at the Club. Perhaps hearing them felt the same, whatever produced them. Ron began objecting to a snake travelling through the castle, then stopped before deciding how much weight that carried in a school with moving staircases.

Hermione took out her notebook and said we needed to tell McGonagall. We did the next morning when she came to speak with Harry about the Club. Snape had already given his account. She listened to ours and asked Harry whether he could describe any difference between hearing the snake and hearing the earlier voice.

He could not answer confidently. He had been thinking about where the voice came from, he explained, rather than whether he understood it differently from other people. McGonagall wrote that down without supplying certainty he did not have. The headmaster needed to hear the distinction, she said, and she repeated the instruction to report any recurrence with his position and the words.

We were not to search for the source ourselves. I asked about the students accusing Harry, and she said fear could make somebody misunderstand what they had seen without permitting threats against another student. Anything of that sort was to come to a prefect or to her. She looked directly at Harry before adding that an ability to speak Parseltongue was not a confession.

Before leaving, she answered my note about Myrtle. The girl had died at Hogwarts in June 1943, during the period the teachers were examining. McGonagall thanked me for separating the ghost’s words from my guesses. We were not to press Myrtle for an account she did not want to give; questions about the death were already being followed up.

Stolen from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I wrote the year beneath Olive Hornby’s name after she had gone. Nearly fifty years lay between that death and the attacks happening now. Myrtle had remained in the bathroom where we were brewing our potion, inside a castle whose hidden chamber people had repeatedly failed to find. The date gave us something firmer than a legend without explaining how those things fitted together.

The following days were difficult for Harry. His arrival stopped conversations. At lunch, someone moved a bag onto a space just before he reached the bench. Plenty of other students still passed plates or asked about homework, but the gaps were easier to notice. I could see why reassurance from three friends did not cancel every refusal to sit beside him.

Fred and George tried making a performance of clearing a path. Harry asked them to stop doing it so loudly, and they stopped. They had wanted the accusation to look foolish. Harry was still the person required to walk through the space their joke created, and I was glad they listened when he told them that it was not helping.

We continued our research. Hermione found accounts of dangerous serpents, with descriptions involving venom, size and, in some cases, a killing look. The last interested me until I considered Colin and Mrs. Norris being alive. I kept it among the possibilities with a question mark rather than forcing the two results to agree because I wanted a name for the monster.

I tried the map too. With all four of us watching, I woke it and opened the floor where we had found the cat. People moved along familiar passages. Nothing identified a hidden chamber or a travelling monster. It had never promised to show every creature in Hogwarts, so I put it back in my pouch without treating an absent label as proof that Harry had heard nothing.

One evening Harry stayed in the dormitory after dinner. Ron came with me to fetch him while Hermione finished the notes before joining the next group upstairs. We met Hagrid in the entrance hall, carrying a dead cockerel in one hand. I stopped, caught by the limp shape against his coat, and asked what had happened.

‘Third one this month,’ he said. He had thought it might be a fox at first and wanted to ask Dumbledore about protecting the coop. I asked whether the others had been like that. He confirmed they had been found dead, then changed the bird to his other hand and asked how Harry was doing.

Ron said he was not enjoying being talked about. Hagrid’s expression darkened. He insisted Harry had not done it and began mentioning what happened fifty years ago, then stopped. I looked more closely at him and asked whether he knew about that. He repeated that he knew Harry was innocent, giving me an answer to a different question.

I told him McGonagall had explained when Myrtle died. His fingers tightened round the cockerel’s legs, and he glanced towards the stairs. The teachers were looking into things, he said, and he needed to see the headmaster. We were to go back together. He left before I found a way to ask more without simply repeating the question he had avoided.

Ron watched him go and called the exchange odd. I agreed and recorded the dead birds before putting my notebook away. Hagrid was taking the matter to Dumbledore, he had said. I wanted to retain that and the number he gave us, rather than remember some more satisfying explanation later as though he had supplied it.

On the second floor, water shone outside the bathroom. I remembered the fire beneath the cauldron and quickened my pace, with Ron following. Inside, it was still burning. Hermione had raised the stand and put a charm against splashes round its base, leaving the water short of the place where a flooded floor could ruin weeks of work.

I checked the heat against the last entry rather than relying on the sight of a flame. The surface appeared as it had on our previous visit. I wrote down what I found so Hermione could assess it herself, then looked towards Myrtle by the window. She was crying and asked whether I intended to throw things at her too.

I said no and asked what had happened. Somebody had thrown a book while she was thinking, she explained, as though the choice of moment had been as offensive as the object. A small black volume lay in the water near a cubicle. I picked it up by the edge and wiped its cover on the dry part of my sleeve before opening it.

The pages were blank. Inside the cover, however, a name remained legible despite the water: Tom Marvolo Riddle. I read it and turned another page, finding nothing which explained why the book had ended up there. When I asked whether Myrtle had seen who threw it, she said people did not stop to introduce themselves before being horrible.

‘The name may tell us whose it is,’ I said, closing it. ‘It doesn’t tell us who threw it.’ She watched me for a moment, then suggested that I could stay and talk. Ron was visible through the open door. I indicated the cauldron and explained that we still needed to finish checking it before returning upstairs.

Myrtle said we always had somewhere else to go. I thought of Nick visiting tables and inviting us to the ghost gathering earlier in the autumn. I had gone out of curiosity despite Hermione’s warning about the food. The crowded room, music and smell of dishes left to rot had been enough to satisfy that curiosity, but at least Nick had chosen the company.

I offered to ask whether he would visit her. Myrtle was unimpressed, pointing out that she had asked me to stay. I promised another time when I could, unsure whether that sounded like anything beyond the answer she expected. She looked at me again, then smiled unexpectedly and called me handsome when I was serious.

I had no useful reply. Ron found something outside the doorway interesting enough to study very closely, and I kept the book against my sleeve while Myrtle dived into a cubicle. More water splashed onto the floor. Whatever had improved her mood had done little for the condition of our workshop.

I checked the cauldron once more and turned the taps off. The black book went beneath my arm, clear of the preparations in my pouch. Ron waited at the door while I recorded the visit, and we left together. We still had not reached Harry, though the journey had acquired several things I would have to tell him when we did.