Chapter 71 — The Way Back

I watched the Ford’s remaining light until the trees hid it. My fingers would not quite open, even after I had put both feet on the ground and accepted that I was no longer holding a steering wheel.

Inside the hut, Harry set the surviving lamp on the table. Ron carried water to Fang and stood with his back to us while the dog drank. I was working a splinter out of my palm when he spoke.

‘You said we’d turn back.’ He waited until I looked up. ‘I said it more than once.’

‘We should have.’ I put the splinter down beside the lamp, although I had nowhere sensible to put a splinter and would have been better off looking at him. ‘I know you told us.’

Ron turned round. ‘Being scared of them didn’t make me wrong.’ The words were steady now, which made them harder to hide behind anything that had happened in the hollow.

‘No, it didn’t. I’m sorry.’ I made myself leave the explanation there. We had learned something, but Ron had nearly been eaten while I learnt that his warning deserved an answer.

Harry lowered himself onto a chair with his sleeve torn open from elbow to cuff. He said Hagrid must have thought Aragog would help us.

‘He did help,’ Ron said, setting the water jug down. ‘Then he tried to feed us to his children. Apparently you can do both in one conversation.’

I picked up the note I had left beside the door and added Aragog’s account. A girl found in a bathroom, a different creature born in the castle, spiders afraid to name it: those were things worth reporting. His denial mattered too, but I described it as what he had said, not proof that he could never have harmed anybody.

Harry collected his cloak while I added a warning about the burning oil. My used preparations had spent their charges; the broken lantern had left ordinary fuel behind on the ground. Getting away from the fire did not mean we had put it out.

McGonagall met us just inside the castle. One look at our clothes and my knuckles was enough to send us into a small classroom, where we explained the Forest before she had to ask twice.

She read the note in silence and laid it flat on the desk. ‘You had information worth bringing to me. Instead, you went into the Forest and nearly left it there with your bodies.’

Ron looked at his shoes. I kept my eyes on McGonagall and agreed, because there was no version of the journey which became sensible by beginning the account after the spiders attacked.

She arranged for the new information to reach Dumbledore and for the old report of the girl’s death to be checked against the bathroom. She also sent word about the fire, then took us to Madam Pomfrey. My hand was cleaned and bandaged, Harry’s scratches were treated and we were examined thoroughly enough that I stopped trying to estimate when we might get to bed.

Ginny was asleep in the separate room when we passed. Sprout sat beside the open doorway with a book, and Mrs Weasley rose from a chair near the bed as soon as she saw Ron.

He began explaining the mud. She caught him against her before he reached the part about the car, and for a moment he stopped trying to speak.

‘Your father’s with Professor Flitwick,’ she told him when she let go. ‘We’ll be here. Both of us.’

Her gaze moved to Harry’s torn sleeve and my bandage. I expected questions, but she put a hand on Harry’s shoulder and asked whether Pomfrey had seen us. Once she knew we had been treated, she made us promise to go to bed.

Ron stayed long enough to see his sister’s face. Then McGonagall brought us back to the tower, and I lay awake watching the ceiling until every shift of shadow looked like something moving on too many legs.

In the morning we waited with a supervised group outside the library while Pince received McGonagall’s instructions. Harry and Ron went inside with the others to search for creatures that spiders feared. I asked to visit Hermione and was taken to the ward with the group delivering clean linen.

Luna was already beside the bed, with flowers laid across her knees. She explained that Flitwick had brought Ravenclaws to see Penelope, and Pomfrey had allowed her to wait with Hermione until they left.

She moved her chair to make room for me. Her eyes went to my bandaged hand, and I told her about the spider hollow quietly enough not to disturb the other visitors. When I reached Aragog’s account of the girl in the bathroom, she glanced at Hermione.

‘Myrtle was crying there,’ Luna said. ‘Olive Hornby had been making fun of her glasses.’

I turned towards her. ‘You mean before she died? Did Myrtle tell you that herself?’

‘At the beginning of term. Somebody dared me to use her bathroom.’ Luna began gathering the stems into an even bunch. ‘It wasn’t a very good dare. She seemed pleased that I wanted to ask a question.’

I remembered Myrtle plunging beneath the water while I waited for her to give us something useful. She had told us what she had done to Olive after becoming a ghost, then refused our questions about what came before. I had not managed to get her to describe the room in which she died.

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‘The same bathroom she uses now, on the second floor?’ I asked. Luna nodded and told me Myrtle thought it used to be much nicer.

McGonagall already had the date. Aragog had supplied a kind of room, and Luna had just connected Myrtle to that particular room for a reason which had nothing to do with monsters. I thanked her, explaining which part of the old account it helped us check.

She got up to arrange the flowers on the cabinet. I was looking at Hermione’s face when Luna paused on the other side of the bed.

‘There’s something under her finger.’ She pointed without touching the hand, and I stood to see what she meant.

From my chair, I had been looking at the back of Hermione’s hand. At Luna’s angle, a narrow edge of paper showed against the palm, almost hidden beneath a stiffened finger. I called Pomfrey before either of us tried to reach it.

‘Don’t attempt to open her fingers,’ Pomfrey said immediately. When I told her we had not touched them, she steadied the hand without altering its position and examined the loose fold.

She worked the corner free. The paper slid out, revealing two folds and a dark crease where Hermione’s thumb had pressed against it. Pomfrey opened it over the cabinet, next to Luna’s unfinished arrangement of flowers.

It was part of a printed page. A drawing of an immense snake occupied the upper portion; beneath it, Hermione had underlined a sentence hard enough to almost tear the paper.

I read the name, then the line about the eyes. Basilisk: the word at last belonged to something more definite than a fragment I could not recover from my memory.

Luna touched my sleeve and said my name. I turned and hugged her before I had thought about doing it; she stood still for a moment, then put an arm carefully round my back.

‘You found it,’ I said. The relief made the words come out much more fiercely than I meant them to.

‘Hermione found it. I only saw the corner.’ Luna looked past my shoulder towards the bed, and I loosened my grip.

‘Both count.’ I let go, suddenly aware of Pomfrey watching over the page. Luna’s cheeks had gone pink, which did nothing useful for my ability to speak.

‘When this is over, would you like to go for a walk with me?’ I asked. ‘Somewhere without anybody’s teeth involved.’

‘I should like the walk,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to bring my own teeth.’

I laughed and felt it in my scraped hand where I had clenched it. For a moment, it was enough to have said something ordinary and received an answer I wanted. Then Pomfrey put the page into my good hand and told me to read it aloud.

Hermione had found a creature which could grow to an enormous size and live for centuries. Its venom was lethal, and its eyes killed those who met them directly. I read the line about the eyes again, more slowly this time.

The page also said that spiders fled from a basilisk, and that a cock’s crow could kill one. Only a Parselmouth could hope to control it; nothing in the passage promised that speaking the language was enough to make the creature obedient. I reached the torn edge with my thumb carefully clear of Hermione’s underlining.

Pomfrey took the page back. ‘Professor McGonagall must see this at once,’ she said, already looking towards a teacher visiting Penelope.

I asked to go with whoever carried it, because Harry needed to hear it too. Instead, she sent the teacher to fetch McGonagall and allowed me to make a copy at the end of the ward. I wrote the wording as accurately as I could, leaving my explanation of the petrification separate from what the book actually said.

Luna stayed with the flowers until Flitwick collected her group. Before leaving, she looked back at Hermione’s hand and said she hoped our friend would wake soon enough to tell us we had missed a footnote.

‘So do I,’ I said. After she went, I checked my copy again, taking particular care over the sentence about the cockerel. Hagrid had lost three of them. That no longer looked like a curious detail at the edge of the investigation.

McGonagall came herself. She read the original while I explained what Luna had heard from Myrtle, including which part came from a direct conversation and which connection I was making to Aragog’s account.

‘Professor Flitwick inspected that bathroom this morning,’ she told me. ‘He found no entrance. The ghost wasn’t there to question, and we have asked the others to find her.’

I described the taps that did not work and where I had picked up the diary among the water. McGonagall made a note, asked Pomfrey about the patients and left with Hermione’s page folded inside my report from the Forest.

I carried my copy to Harry and Ron with the teacher returning to the library. Harry began reading on his feet, then sat down hard when he reached the description of the eyes.

‘I never saw it,’ he said, touching the edge of the drawing I had copied. ‘At the zoo I could see the snake talking. Here, I only heard words.’

‘Inside the walls,’ I said. He nodded, and Ron looked from the page to the solid stone beside our table.

‘How does something that size get through a wall?’ Ron asked. I thought about the voice moving through parts of the school where teachers had searched without finding anything. Then I thought about the flooded bathroom.

‘It doesn’t go through the stone. There are pipes and old drains.’ I drew a rough channel beside my notes. ‘The water has to get from one place to another somehow.’

Ron questioned whether there could be enough room. I could not give him a measurement for drains I had never seen, but a route through the spaces within the castle fitted Harry’s account better than an enormous snake repeatedly disappearing from open corridors.

Harry went back to the passage about Parseltongue. ‘I heard it because it was speaking. The rest of you didn’t know there were words.’

‘We might have heard hissing if we were close enough. Or something we took for water.’ I closed the notebook before another question could keep us at the table. The idea needed checking, and this time waiting to be escorted would not be an excuse to take a different journey.

Ron had already pushed his chair back. We asked Pince to send us with the next teacher leaving the library and waited through the few minutes it took, with the copy lying between us.

McGonagall listened without interruption in her office. She asked Harry where the voice had been clearest, marked two places on a plan and said she would have the accessible drain entrances checked.

‘The page changes what we are looking for,’ she said. ‘It does not make mirrors safe. If your explanation is correct, petrification leaves somebody helpless in front of the same animal.’

I thought of Hermione’s hand and told her I understood. Ron asked about Ginny, and McGonagall said Sprout was with her while his parents spoke to Pomfrey about the weeks before the holidays. She would tell them where we were, but the ward was being reorganised to protect its patients and we could not visit again just then.

Back in the library, I tried to read more about snakes. My eyes kept returning to the copied sentence about the cock’s crow, a weakness that required neither a wand nor a direct view of the basilisk. Beneath the rest of my notes, I wrote a reminder to check whether Hagrid still had surviving birds and have them brought indoors, somewhere protected.