books were drenched in scarlet ink. The diary, however, was as
clean as it had been before the ink bottle had smashed all over it. He
tried to point this out to Ron, but Ron was having trouble with his
204
wand again; large purple bubbles were blossoming out of the end,
and he wasn't much interested in anything else.
Harry went to bed before anyone else in his dormitory that night. This
was partly because he didn't think he could stand Fred and George
singing, "His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad" one more time,
and partly because he wanted to examine Riddle's diary again, and
knew that Ron thought he was wasting his time.
Harry sat on his four-poster and flicked through the blank pages, not
one of which had a trace of scarlet ink on it. Then he pulled a new
bottle out of his bedside cabinet, dipped his quill into it, and dropped a
blot onto the first page of the diary.
The ink shone brightly on the paper for a second and then, as though it
was being sucked into the page, vanished. Excited, Harry loaded up
his quill a second time and wrote, "My name is Harry Potter."
The words shone momentarily on the page and they, too, sank without
trace. Then, at last, something happened.
Oozing back out of the page, in his very own ink, came words Harry
had never written.
"Hello, Harry Potter. My name is Tom Riddle. How did you come by my
diary?"
These words, too, faded away, but not before Harry had started to
scribble back.
"Someone tried to flush it down a toilet."
He waited eagerly for Riddle's reply.
"Lucky that I recorded my memories in some more lasting way than ink.
But I always knew that there would be those who would not want this
diary read. "
"What do you mean?" Harry scrawled, blotting the page in his
excitement.
*240*
205
`I mean that this diary holds memories of terrible things. Things that were
covered up. Things that happened at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and
Wizardry. "
"That's where I am now," Harry wrote quickly. "I'm at Hogwarts, and
horrible stuff's been happening. Do you know anything about the
Chamber of Secrets?"
His heart was hammering. Riddle's reply came quickly, his writing
becoming untidier, as though he was hurrying to tell all he knew.
"Of course I know about the Chamber of Secrets. In my day, they told us it
was a legend, that it did not exist. But this was a lie. In my fifth year, the
Chamber was opened and the monster attacked several students, finally
killing one. I caught the person whod opened the Chamber and he was
expelled. But the Headmaster, Professor Dippet, ashamed that such a thing
had happened at Hogwarts, forbade me to tell the truth. A story was given
out that thegirl had died in a freak accident. They gave me a nice, shiny,
engraved trophy for my trouble and warned me to keep my mouth shut. But I
knew it could happen again. The monster lived on, and the one who had the
power to release it was not imprisoned. "
Harry nearly upset his ink bottle in his hurry to write back.