Harry Potter 02 - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

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.
    ‘I mean that this diary holds memories of terrible things. Things which were covered up. Things which 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 who’d 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 the girl 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.
    ‘It’s happening again now. There have been three attacks and no one seems to know who’s behind them. Who was it last time?’
    ‘I can show you, if you like,’ came Riddle’s reply. ‘You don’t have to take my word for it. I can take you inside my memory of the night when I caught him.’
    Harry hesitated, his quill suspended over the diary. What did Riddle mean? How could he be taken inside somebody else’s memory? He glanced nervously at the door to the dormitory, which was growing dark. When he looked back at the diary, he saw fresh words forming.
    ‘Let me show you.’
    Harry paused for a fraction of a second and then wrote two letters.
    ‘OK.’
    The pages of the diary began to blow as though caught in a high wind, stopping halfway through the month of June. Mouth hanging open, Harry saw that the little square for June the thirteenth seemed to have turned into a minuscule television screen. His hands trembling slightly, he raised the book to press his eye against the little window, and before he knew what was happening, he was tilting forwards; the window was widening, he felt his body leave his bed and he was pitched headfirst through the opening in the page, into a whirl of colour and shadow.
    He felt his feet hit solid ground, and stood, shaking, as the blurred shapes around him came suddenly into focus.
    He knew immediately where he was. This circular room with the sleeping portraits was Dumbledore’s office – but it wasn’t Dumbledore who was sitting behind the desk. A wizened, frail-looking wizard, bald except for a few wisps of white hair, was reading a letter by candlelight. Harry had never seen this man before.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said shakily, ‘I didn’t mean to butt in …’
    But the wizard didn’t look up. He continued to read, frowning slightly. Harry drew nearer to his desk and stammered, ‘Er – I’ll just go, shall I?’
    Still the wizard ignored him. He didn’t seem even to have heard him. Thinking that the wizard might be deaf, Harry raised his voice.
    ‘Sorry I disturbed you, I’ll go now,’ he half-shouted.
    The wizard folded up the letter with a sigh, stood up, walked past Harry without glancing at him and went to draw the curtains at his window.
    The sky outside the window was ruby red; it seemed to be sunset. The wizard went back to the desk, sat down and twiddled his thumbs, watching the door.
    Harry looked around the office. No Fawkes the phoenix; no whirring silver contraptions. This was Hogwarts as Riddle had known it, meaning that this unknown wizard was Headmaster, not Dumbledore, and he, Harry, was little more than a phantom, completely invisible to the people of fifty years ago.
    There was a knock on the office door.
    ‘Enter,’ said the old