Harry Potter 02 - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

had clearly been manning his usual lookout post: they were once again on the spot where Mrs Norris had been attacked. They saw at a glance what Filch had been shouting about. A great flood of water stretched over half the corridor, and it looked as though it was still seeping from under the door of Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom. Now Filch had stopped shouting, they could hear Myrtle’s wails echoing off the bathroom walls.
    ‘ Now what’s up with her?’ said Ron.
    ‘Let’s go and see,’ said Harry, and holding their robes over their ankles they stepped through the great wash of water to the door bearing its ‘Out of Order’ sign, ignored it as always, and entered.
    Moaning Myrtle was crying, if possible, louder and harder than ever before. She seemed to be hiding down her usual toilet. It was dark in the bathroom, because the candles had been extinguished in the great rush of water that had left both walls and floor soaking wet.
    ‘What’s up, Myrtle?’ said Harry.
    ‘Who’s that?’ glugged Myrtle miserably. ‘Come to throw something else at me?’
    Harry waded across to her cubicle and said, ‘Why would I throw something at you?’
    ‘Don’t ask me,’ Myrtle shouted, emerging with a wave of yet more water, which splashed onto the already sopping floor. ‘Here I am, minding my own business, and someone thinks it’s funny to throw a book at me …’
    ‘But it can’t hurt you if someone throws something at you,’ said Harry, reasonably. ‘I mean, it’d just go right through you, wouldn’t it?’
    He had said the wrong thing. Myrtle puffed herself up and shrieked, ‘Let’s all throw books at Myrtle, because she can’t feel it! Ten points if you can get it through her stomach! Fifty points if it goes through her head! Well, ha ha ha! What a lovely game, I don’t think!’
    ‘Who threw it at you, anyway?’ asked Harry.
    ‘ I don’t know … I was just sitting in the U-bend, thinking about death, and it fell right through the top of my head,’ said Myrtle, glaring at them. ‘It’s over there, it got washed out.’
    Harry and Ron looked under the sink, where Myrtle was pointing. A small, thin book lay there. It had a shabby black cover and was as wet as everything else in the bathroom. Harry stepped forward to pick it up, but Ron suddenly flung out an arm to hold him back.
    ‘What?’ said Harry.
    ‘Are you mad?’ said Ron. ‘It could be dangerous.’
    ‘Dangerous?’ said Harry, laughing. ‘Come off it, how could it be dangerous?’
    ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Ron, who was looking apprehensively at the book. ‘Some of the books the Ministry’s confiscated – Dad’s told me – there was one that burned your eyes out. And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives. And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading ! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed. And –’
    ‘All right, I’ve got the point,’ said Harry.
    The little book lay on the floor, nondescript and soggy.
    ‘Well, we won’t find out unless we look at it,’ he said, and he ducked round Ron and picked it off the floor.
    Harry saw at once that it was a diary, and the faded year on the cover told him it was fifty years old. He opened it eagerly. On the first page he could just make out the name ‘T. M. Riddle’ in smudged ink.
    ‘Hang on,’ said Ron, who had approached cautiously and was looking over Harry’s shoulder. ‘I know that name … T. M. Riddle got an award for special services to the school fifty years ago.’
    ‘How on earth d’you know that?’ said Harry in amazement.
    ‘Because Filch made me polish his shield about fifty times in detention,’ said Ron resentfully. ‘That was the one I burped slugs all over. If you’d wiped slime off a name for an hour, you’d remember it, too.’
    Harry peeled the wet pages apart. They were completely blank. There wasn’t the faintest trace of writing on any of them, not even ‘Auntie Mabel’s birthday’, or ‘dentist, half past three’.
    ‘He never wrote in it,’ said Harry, disappointed.
    ‘I wonder why someone wanted to flush it away?’ said Ron curiously.
    Harry turned to the back cover of the book and saw the printed name of a newsagent’s in Vauxhall Road, London.
    ‘He must’ve been Muggle-born,’ said Harry thoughtfully, ‘to have bought a diary from Vauxhall Road …’
    ‘Well, it’s not much use to