He banged the lids of his trunks shut and locked them.
“Let’s see,” he said. “I think that’s everything. Yes. Only one thing left.”
He pulled out his wand and turned to them.
“Awfully sorry, boys, but I’ll have to put a Memory Charm on you now. Can’t have you blabbing my secrets all over the place. I’d never sell another book —”
Harry reached his wand just in time. Lockhart had barely raised his, when Harry bellowed, “Expelliarmus!”
Lockhart was blasted backward, falling over his trunk; his wand flew high into the air; Ron caught it, and flung it out of the open window.
“Shouldn’t have let Professor Snape teach us that one,” said Harry furiously, kicking Lockhart’s trunk aside. Lockhart was looking up at him, feeble once more. Harry was still pointing his wand at him.
“What d’you want me to do?” said Lockhart weakly. “I don’t know where the Chamber of Secrets is. There’s nothing I can do.”
“You’re in luck,” said Harry, forcing Lockhart to his feet at wandpoint. “We think we know where it is. And what’s inside it. Let’s go.”
They marched Lockhart out of his office and down the nearest stairs, along the dark corridor where the messages shone on the wall, to the door of Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom.
They sent Lockhart in first. Harry was pleased to see that he was shaking.
Moaning Myrtle was sitting on the tank of the end toilet.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said when she saw Harry. “What do you want this time?”
“To ask you how you died,” said Harry.
Myrtle’s whole aspect changed at once. She looked as though she had never been asked such a flattering question.
“Ooooh, it was dreadful,” she said with relish. “It happened right in here. I died in this very stall. I remember it so well. I’d hidden because Olive Hornby was teasing me about my glasses. 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 swelled importantly, her face shining. “I died.”
“How?” said Harry.
“No idea,” said Myrtle in hushed tones. “I just remember seeing a pair of great, big, yellow eyes. My whole body sort of seized up, and then I was floating away. . . .” She looked dreamily at 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.”
“Where exactly did you see the eyes?” said Harry.
“Somewhere there,” said Myrtle, pointing vaguely toward the sink in front of her toilet.
Harry and Ron hurried over to it. Lockhart was standing well back, a look of utter terror on his face.
It looked like an ordinary sink. They examined every inch of it, inside and out, including the pipes below. And then Harry saw it: Scratched on the side of one of the copper taps was a tiny snake.
“That tap’s never worked,” said Myrtle brightly as he tried to turn it.
“Harry,” said Ron. “Say something. Something in Parseltongue.”
“But —” Harry thought hard. The only times he’d ever managed to speak Parseltongue were when he’d been faced with a real snake. He stared hard at the tiny engraving, trying to imagine it was real.
“Open up,” he said.
He looked at Ron, who shook his head.
“English,” he said.
Harry looked back at the snake, willing himself to believe it was alive. If he moved his head, the candlelight made it look as though it were moving.
“Open up,” he said.
Except that the words weren’t what he heard; a strange hissing had escaped him, and at once the tap glowed with a brilliant white light and began to spin. Next second, the sink began to move; the sink, in fact, sank, right out of sight, leaving a large pipe exposed, a pipe wide enough for a man to slide into.
Harry heard Ron gasp and looked up again. He had made up his mind what he was going to do.
“I’m going down there,” he said.
He couldn’t not go, not now they had found the entrance to the Chamber, not if there was even the faintest, slimmest, wildest chance that Ginny might be alive.
“Me too,” said Ron.
There was a pause.
“Well, you hardly seem to need me,” said Lockhart, with a shadow of his old smile. “I’ll just —”
He put his hand on the door knob, but Ron and Harry both pointed their wands at him.
“You can go first,” Ron snarled.
White-faced and wandless, Lockhart approached the opening.
“Boys,” he said, his voice feeble. “Boys, what good will it do?”
Harry jabbed him in the back with his wand. Lockhart slid his legs into the pipe.
“I really don’t think —” he started to say, but Ron gave him a push, and he slid out of sight. Harry followed quickly. He lowered himself slowly into the pipe, then let go.
It was like rushing down an endless, slimy, dark slide. He could see more pipes branching off in all directions, but none as large as theirs, which twisted and turned, sloping steeply downward, and he knew that he was falling deeper below the school than even the dungeons. Behind him he could hear Ron, thudding slightly at the curves.
And then, just as he had begun to worry about what would happen when he hit the ground, the pipe leveled out, and he shot out of the end with a wet thud, landing on the damp floor of a dark stone tunnel large enough to stand in. Lockhart was getting to his feet a little ways away, covered in slime and white as a ghost. Harry stood aside as Ron came whizzing out of the pipe, too.
“We must be miles under the school,” said Harry, his voice echoing in the black tunnel.
“Under the lake, probably,” said Ron, squinting around at the dark, slimy walls.
All three of them turned to stare into the darkness ahead.