The Observer Effect

      ‘Peeves has gone completely off the rails,’ Parkinson remarked at breakfast. ‘He’s always causing mayhem, of course, but now… They say someone’s seen him nicking portraits.’       She scowled, turning her perpetually sour face into a mask of all‑embracing displeasure with the universe.       Peeves was that very ‘lowly mischievous spirit’—the school poltergeist—to whom Tom had once compared himself (and had been thoroughly displeased with the comparison). Generations of students had suffered Peeves’ pranks, the stupid (chucking chalk) and the far from harmless (yanking a rug from under your feet was an injury waiting to happen). Strangely enough, Harry had been lucky: he’d yet to collide with either the tricks or their author—and by now he’d been at Hogwarts—imagine that!—almost a whole week.       ‘Nicking portraits?’ Pike said, astonished, and waggled his big‑eared head doubtfully. ‘Merlin—what for?’       ‘Who can tell? The undead have their own logic,’ Parkinson intoned, scooping out a soft‑boiled egg.       ‘Who saw him?’ Draco asked keenly as he ladled himself some porridge. Harry shuddered; on his own (admittedly very short) list of hated foods, porridge reigned supreme. Fortunately, the spread in the Great Hall was perfectly good without it, so he piled his plate with toast and set about making Marmite sandwiches.       ‘No idea.’ Pansy shrugged. ‘Monkley told me, and Derrick told her, and who told him—I’ve no clue; maybe he saw it himself. I doubt it, though. More likely one of the prefects—who else prowls at night? Probably caught Peeves on patrol.’       Harry knew who else prowled at night (including himself, though he certainly wasn’t the source of the gossip), but held his tongue and concentrated on his toast. It tasted divine—though Draco eyed him with a shudder and asked, rhetorically, ‘How can you eat that? It’s Thestral diarrhoea.’       Harry was quick to return the favour: ‘How can you eat that? It’s Flobberworm slime.’       Malfoy snorted.       ‘Flobberworm slime is green—nothing like it,’ he lectured. ‘Mind you, don’t say something like that in front of my godfather—he’s very tender about his subject.’       Harry gave a little shiver. He was frankly nervous about the double Potions coming up, though Draco did his best to soothe him.       ‘Don’t worry—Snape always covers us. He doesn’t take points, and, if it comes to detention, we’ll survive it—writing lines, or something. And in any case—you’ll see.’ At that, the mischievous ferret smiled mysteriously and wiggled his eyebrows.       The past school week—the breakfast was on Friday—had brought Harry two achievements. First, he’d mastered the route from the common room to the library on the third floor—right opposite the corridor one was not to visit on pain of a painful death. Second—and chiefly—he and Tom had established a secret headquarters; the place for it could not have been better. Harry, who had no lessons after lunch today, was already savouring the thought of spending the whole afternoon there. He missed Tom—he’d grown used, living at Black House, to having him constantly in view; now the lack of his near presence gnawed at him—he kept feeling as though something was missing, and kept wanting to glance round for it.       The Potions classroom, to which prefect Farley herded the Slytherin first‑years after breakfast, proved to be a large, square room, bitterly cold. Tables and braziers for cauldrons stood in the middle; along the walls were cupboards of ingredients—the most valuable hidden away in a locked storeroom, its door just behind the teacher’s desk by the blackboard. A big stone sink in the corner completed the less‑than‑cosy picture—though the sinister impression was partly offset by the madly interesting jars of preserved specimens here and there on the shelves. Harry even fancied that a lazily bobbing eye, in its dark liquor, winked at him.       What did nothing to improve the room was the nine Gryffindors, darting about in chaos, clattering cauldrons, and raising the kind of racket only Godric’s brood could contrive. Granger’s patter cut through it all with the persistence—and annoyance—of a toothache; the bushy‑haired swot was clearly determined to inform the whole world, willing or not, of the books on Potions she had read. Harry couldn’t for the life of him see why she needed to memorise the textbook—wasn’t the point of learning to marry theory and practice? Not that he hadn’t been charmed by One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, or at least leafed through Magical Drafts and Potions with interest, but he felt no unhealthy need to recite them to anyone who hadn’t scarpered fast enough.       Greengrass, as planned, had bagged a spot beside Zabini and was now casting a militant look, as if ready to fight for the privilege. No one was silly enough to argue. Malfoy, smug, chose a desk in the front row; Harry shrugged and joined him—though it meant landing in the line of fire of the never‑silent Mudblood. Crabbe and Goyle settled behind; Nott sat in the next row with Tracey Davis—a girl with fair plaits, dark eyes, and a reserve so deep that Goyle, who only opened his mouth in class, seemed by comparison a real chatterbox and the life and soul of the party.       Millicent Bulstrode, as ever slow off the mark, was left without a partner and had to share with an equally sluggish Gryffindor whose name Harry didn’t know—and wasn’t keen to learn. The pair eyed each other warily—the inter‑House antipathy, handed down for centuries, seemed a sort of self‑fulfilling prophecy: no one expected or got anything but nastiness. The poor girl would have to watch the cauldron like a hawk now—idiotic stunts like slipping in the wrong ingredient were a red‑and‑gold speciality.       Professor Snape swept in, in the full bleak splendour of his persona—gliding gait, billowing black robes, greasy hair, and those soul‑sucking black eyes in which the iris and pupil had no border you could make out. He’ll be in my head any second, Harry warned himself, and dragged his gaze to the tip of Snape’s nose—an eminently noticeable object. Snape surveyed the assembled children with all the fondness of a housewife discovering a nest of cockroaches under the sink, snapped, ‘Silence!’—though mouths had snapped shut at the sight of him anyway—and bent over the register.       ‘We shall begin with the register,’ he announced ominously. ‘Brown.’       ‘Here!’       ‘Bulstrode.’       ‘Here, sir.’       When he came to ‘Potter’—Harry’s surname, annoyingly, was near the very end alphabetically, with only Zabini after him—Snape smiled unpleasantly.       ‘Ah, yes. Potter,’ he said, as if uttering something indecent. ‘Our new celebrity.’       His year‑mates, the wretches, tittered into their fists—even Draco; only Harry didn’t laugh. He understood the point of the circus: with his notoriety, if the Head of House also kissed his arse in public, the House might not stand it. He had no desire to ‘accidentally’ fall off his broom. They’d already organised a cordon sanitaire—if not a formal boycott, they were giving him a wide berth, like a pile of hippogriff dung—Merlin forbid you should step in it. Many—Harry could see—especially among the older years, itched to give him a beating in some quiet corner, but the knowledge that Harry was under special watch by the staff cooled hot heads. Only Draco stood apart, ostentatiously refusing to join in and instead hovering at Harry’s side—with his two henchmen, of course.       ‘Prats,’ he’d said, reprovingly, in passing. ‘I told them straight away there was sense in keeping in with you. If they like missing their chances, that’s on them.’       Having had his sport of humiliating Harry, Snape launched his introductory speech.       ‘You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion‑making.’ He ran his eyes over the cowed room and steepled his fingers, satisfied. ‘Since there is little foolish wand‑waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic.’       He all but whispered, forcing them to catch every word: a cheap trick, but effective—only McGonagall, perhaps, could match this silence in her classes.       ‘I do not expect you to truly understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its mutating fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind and ensnaring the senses… I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death—’       He broke off; Harry, bewitched without any potion at all, blinked—and Snape finished, suddenly matter‑of‑fact and weary, dispersing the spell he’d woven: ‘—if you weren’t a bunch of dunderheads like the lot I generally have to teach.’       Well, that’s a shame, Harry thought. He’d been eager to brew glory—or at least brew something—but the cunning professor chose to begin the very first lesson with a round of questions—an approach that, on reflection, seemed absurd. As it soon turned out, it only seemed so.       ‘Mr Zabini!’ Snape said abruptly. ‘What would you get if you mixed powdered root of asphodel with an infusion of wormwood?’       ‘Nothing worth having, sir,’ Blaise replied smartly. ‘But if you add sopophorous bean juice and valerian root to the pair, you get the Draught of Living Death—and that’s a very powerful sleeping potion.’       ‘Five points to Slytherin for your splendid answer, Mr Zabini,’ Snape approved, and switched to his next victim. ‘Mr Malfoy! What is the difference between wolfsbane and monkshood?’       Harry barely had time to think the question would have suited Herbology better when Draco was already answering—no less confidently than Blaise, ‘None at all, sir. They’re the same plant, also known as devil’s helmet, moondew, or aconitum.’       ‘Correct. Another five points to Slytherin.’ Snape allowed the left corner of his mouth the tiniest curl and went on, ‘Mr Potter!’       Harry gave a start and suppressed the reflex to spring to his feet—at Hogwarts one answered from one’s seat, and he was still getting used to it; leaping up would have blown his Muggle schooling at once—the only magical school where one stood to answer was the semi‑militarised Durmstrang.       His imagination promptly filled with vivid scenes of him being faced with something like the questions already asked and disgracing himself royally—in full view of the sniggering Gryffs, including the Mudblood swot whose hand was up and up with such desperation you’d think, if she didn’t answer now, the pressure of knowledge would burst her. But when the question came, to Harry’s relief it wasn’t so dreadful.       ‘If I tasked you with bringing me a bezoar, where would you look for it?’       ‘At the apothecary’s, sir!’ Harry blurted after a second of feverish thought.       ‘Witty,’ Snape grated, his face settling into an expression of weary distaste. ‘Do try again.’       Harry began to worry in earnest. He wasn’t at all sure what Snape wanted of him, and Draco’s elbow in his ribs wasn’t helping.       ‘But, sir!’ he rattled, loathing himself for sounding like Granger, and unable to slow down. ‘The nearest place to look would be the storeroom behind you; however—since you’re asking me to bring you a bezoar, logically it isn’t there. And the only herd of goats in the vicinity is in Hogsmeade, and I very much doubt Mr Aberforth will let me gut the lot of them looking for a bezoar—and none of them may have one anyway!’       Malfoy seemed barely to keep from laughing—his shoulders trembled; there was suspicious snorting from behind as well.       ‘So the apothecary’s is the only way to carry out your order, sir,’ Harry finished—and looked at Snape hopefully. Over the course of his speech the man had plainly shifted from disappointment to amusement—but when he spoke again, his voice was colder than the Arctic wastes.       ‘Fair enough. Incidentally, you forgot the Hospital Wing’s cupboard. Do you know, Potter, what a bezoar is used for?’       ‘It’s a universal antidote, sir!’ Harry rattled off. ‘Used on its own and in the Standard Antidote!’       Snape’s smile put one in mind of a replete snake.       ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Three points to Slytherin. Mr Crabbe!’       Harry let out a breath. Had he imagined it—or…? Snape hadn’t been trying to sink him; quite the reverse—he hadn’t let up until he’d shaken out of Harry what he deemed an acceptable answer. So that’s what lay behind Malfoy’s ‘you’ll see’?       ‘What goes into the Boil‑Cure Potion?’       Vince, praise Salazar, had the wit to dive into the textbook—the sound of frantic page‑turning came from behind, particularly loud in the hush.       ‘Miss Granger, I can see your hand perfectly well—do stop wriggling. You may go to the lavatory at break; until then you will have to hold it. Well then, Mr Crabbe?’       ‘Horned slugs… dried nettles, porcupine quills, and snakes’ fangs, sir,’ Vince read out.       ‘Precisely. One point to Slytherin. That is the potion you will brew now. Eyes on the board!’ Snape flicked his wand, and a stick of chalk sprang to life, skittering over the slate to set out the recipe.       ‘And for your disregard of classroom discipline, Miss Granger, I’m taking one point from Gryffindor.’       Harry realised his mouth was hanging open. No—he hadn’t imagined it. Professor Snape was playing an utterly, outrageously unfair game. Not that Harry objected; it simply wasn’t what he’d expected. Especially after McGonagall’s impersonal strictness, Flitwick’s merry forbearance, Quirrell’s absent‑mindedness, and Sprout’s good humour. Professor Sinistra—brilliant, beautiful, and cold as the stars she spoke of—and the ghost Binns, who scarcely noticed to whom he was lecturing, were even less the types to cultivate favourites. Snape’s approach was radically different.       Harry had the chance to be convinced of it before the lesson was out. Snape had only just invited all to admire how exemplary Malfoy’s slicing of horned slugs was—when, from the far end of the room, there came the sound of milk boiling over, and clouds of acrid greenish smoke billowed up.       It turned out the toad boy—brave budding alchemist Longbottom—had somehow melted his cauldron, slopped the potion over himself and everything round about, and now stood blubbering, covered in swelling red boils—the curious reverse effect of an incorrectly brewed potion, unmentioned in the set book.       ‘Idiot!’ Snape declared—and reproached him: ‘You added the porcupine quills before taking the potion off the fire? You should have done it after. Hospital Wing—smartly.’       But Snape’s bloodlust was not yet wholly appeased—and, casting about, he found himself a dessert.       ‘And you, Granger—why did you not point out such a gross mistake to Longbottom? Thought you’d look cleverer beside him? Another point you have lost for Gryffindor—well done!’       It was gloriously unpedagogical—but as Harry packed quill, parchment, and textbook into his bag, he couldn’t suppress a grin. It seemed Potions had just officially become his favourite subject.       ‘Is it always like that?’ he asked Draco when Farley had counted heads and was herding them off like a hen with chicks to their next lesson.       ‘Heavens, usually it’s even better,’ Draco said, smiling dreamily. ‘Today was just a warm‑up. But you’d best not skive,’ he warned. ‘My godfather wants everyone to try to the best of their ability.’       ‘Uh‑huh,’ Crabbe squeaked. Goyle, as usual, held his tongue—but did so with an air of entire agreement.       They were almost at their destination when their peaceful procession was stopped by an unfamiliar girl with a prefect’s badge on her robe—trimmed in blue‑and‑bronze for Rowena’s House.       ‘Gemma!’ she panted. ‘Peeves has gone mad! Run for your Head of House—I’ll fetch mine! Please—quickly! He’s in the courtyard.’ And the prefect tore off.       Farley hesitated a second, then ordered, ‘Everyone stick together—no wandering. Straight on now, two corridors, then a staircase, up one floor, and you’re there. Malfoy—you’re in charge.’       And she departed the other way—not running, but at a brisk clip—leaving the first‑years alone.       Draco rubbed his hands, predatory.       ‘Come on—let’s have a look!’ he cried.       ‘We’ll be late,’ Millicent ventured—but found no support. Harry only asked, ‘We won’t get lost, will we?’       ‘Nonsense—what d’you think the portraits are for? They’ll point us.’ Malfoy waved it away and trotted off down the nearest corridor to the right, whence the Ravenclaw prefect had emerged.       They found the way into the courtyard without trouble. A decent crowd had already gathered—and it was easy to see why.       A square quadrangle was crossed corner‑to‑corner by paved paths that met at the feet of a statue of a man in a chiton and sandals, holding a scroll and an astrolabe, his majestic head with its mop of curls gazing upwards into the cloudy September sky. The statue depicted Hipparchus; it was enchanted to come alive at night—when the stone mathematician watched the moon, peering at the rocky disc of his instrument and jotting notes with a stone quill on a stone scroll. It felt symbolic that Hipparchus was paying no heed to what was happening at his feet.       On the border between one of the paths and the lawn—not yet touched by autumn yellow—a bonfire blazed. From it came a sort of squealing—in which Harry, to his astonishment, recognised human voices, warped by agony. But it wasn’t people burning.       In the tongues of flame, magical portraits writhed and crumbled to ashes.       There was no shadow of a doubt as to who’d treated them so. Harry had at last the chance to set eyes on Peeves—and it was not a pleasant sight.       A scrawny little man with a wide, froggy mouth, small, far‑set eyes, and ears that stuck out wore the livery of a medieval jester. He did, in truth, resemble Tom in a way—insulting as the comparison felt. He had none of a ghost’s transparency or incorporeality; yet his feet, not touching the grass, left no doubt as to the supernatural nature of the creature. Were he on solid ground, you’d have said he was capering in a frenzy; as it was, it looked like a set of spasms. His jester’s cap wagged from side to side.       In a nasal, piercing voice—the sort professional beggars have—Peeves screeched, ‘Burn! Burn! Stop me—I shan’t stop! Take that! I hate you! Let it all burn! Die!’—and other such incoherent, hate‑filled babble.       He lifted a dark rectangle—a painting—over his head and pitched it into the heart of the fire; sparks flew. Another couple of framed canvases lay beside it—but no one tried to wrest them from the deranged spirit; all stood, as if hypnotised, watching him consign his last victims to the flames.       Having finished his auto‑da‑fé, Peeves went berserk with renewed fury. With wild laughter and howls he shot up over the blaze, swept over the crowd—heads ducked in fright—and vanished through an incautiously opened window on the first floor. At that very moment Flitwick and Snape burst out of the doors behind Harry and Draco’s lot—but it was already too late.       ‘Come on.’ Draco jostled the pensive Harry. ‘It’s over. The show’s finished. We really will be late.’       ‘I don’t think it matters,’ Harry replied—allowing himself, all the same, to be swept back into the building. ‘Look—the professor’s here as well.’       And indeed, Quirrell was among the shocked onlookers, standing a little apart from the rest—who had suddenly come back to life and begun talking and gesticulating with an energy that would have been far more useful earlier. The wizard in the ever‑present purple turban seemed to be suffering one of his epileptic fits again—or whatever the ailment was that, from time to time, racked him with brutal tics or left him frozen, staring blankly into space. There was every chance they would outpace him on the way to class, and the first‑years took it. Their lateness might have gone unnoticed, but, plainly, a Defence lesson was not destined to take place that day.       The crowd that poured after them—and partly overtook the younger Slytherins—suddenly began to bunch up, as if those ahead were coming up against an obstacle and stopping dead. The din rose, breaking into individual exclamations, not all of them within the bounds of decency. Someone squealed. Draco, like a small, fair‑haired ice‑breaker, drove forward; Harry squeezed himself into the thickening press in his wake—just in time, for the next moment he’d have been squeezed out. Without turning, Draco stretched a hand back; Harry caught his sleeve, and so—clinging to each other—they popped out of the suddenly ended throng.       There was no obstacle—at least, nothing physical. But the sight before them did make you stop—and contemplate eternity.       Round the corner of the corridor leading to Transfiguration class, at the entrance to the North Tower, scarlet letters shone on the wall, written right over the carving of apple trees heavy with fruit. They spelt out:       ‘Tremble, enemies of the Heir! The Chamber of Secrets is open again!’       Whoever had written it, it seemed, was keen to be taken seriously; by way of a calling card, he had left a body dangling in a noose, its twisted head nearly knocking the arch above the doorway, its feet a good two feet from the floor.       The body was Peeves.       ‘He’s messing about!’ someone shouted. Another voice, less optimistic, asked, ‘He… what’s wrong with him? Is he dead?’       ‘But he’s a ghost—can a ghost die?’ a third—female—voice wavered; a fourth called up, ‘Oi—Peeves! Oi there!’       A Stinging Hex shot from the crowd—but it had no effect on the figure hanging in the archway.       ‘Let me through! Do, please, make way!’ piped the high voice of the Charms professor from the rear, and they did do their best, so far as the crush allowed, so that before long he was crumpling his curly beard and studying the whole threatening composition in thoughtful silence.       Professor Snape arrived on his heels. He did not ask to be let through—but he was taller, and in any case, even the boldest preferred not to brush against him; thus he passed through the human sea as Moses through the Red Sea—dry‑shod and without delay.       ‘One moment,’ Flitwick said politely—and began muttering something in Gobbledegook, his wand pulsing to a steady rhythm. The Potions master drew his own, sent a non‑verbal spell at Peeves, frowned at the result, and set about weaving diagnostic charms too complex for Harry to follow—he gathered their general drift only from several repetitions of ‘Inspectio’.       Minutes ticked by; nothing much happened, and the students gradually tired of waiting. In ones, in pairs, in groups, they drifted off. It was then that Farley found Draco and Harry—and hurled thunder and lightning at their heads. Malfoy, left in charge, caught the worst of it—it turned out that, in the crush, Davis had bloodied her nose, and Bulstrode had been sick with fright. The last thing the first‑years saw as they were marched away from the scene—or, to call it what it was, the place of execution—was a long beard with bells braided into it and a claret hem embroidered with stars: the Headmaster had come to assess the school’s losses in person.       The Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson was completely cancelled. The students who turned up ten minutes before the end found the professor trembling in a corner. In a weak voice that kept faltering, he told them to read the set paragraph on their own—and packed them off. Truth to tell, it wasn’t so very different from his usual efficiency as a teacher.       It had to be admitted plainly that Quirrell wasn’t up to the job—he jumped at his own shadow; instead of explaining the topic at hand, he spouted twaddle—about vampires, about an African prince he claimed to have saved from zombies—and as for practical demonstrations, there was nothing to speak of. In three lessons the first‑years had not mastered even the one (and rather peculiar) hex he’d offered them—one that made the body expel copious quantities of phlegm.       Quirrell’s incompetence, however, was not what concerned Harry just now. He barely managed to sit through lunch, answering Draco at random and ignoring the rest of the chatter at the table, which revolved—of course—exclusively around the Peeves affair.       Draining his tea, Harry whispered in Malfoy’s ear, ‘Please don’t look for me till dinner. If anyone else does—cover for me, will you?’ And, without waiting for an answer, he bolted.       Not far, though. The one he was so desperate to see had just stepped through the doors of the Great Hall and stopped—leaning against the wall with the air of a man who’d had an uncommonly successful day and was in a positively blissful humour. The crooked smile on his face told Harry everything before a word passed between them. A month in the Blacks’ library had plainly not been wasted.       ‘Necromancy is a secret, forbidden, and unnatural art,’ Harry proclaimed—without the slightest concern for whoever besides Tom might hear him at that moment.       ‘And therefore I studied it thoroughly,’ Tom returned. ‘If you keep talking to me like that, they’ll take you for a lunatic—you do know that, don’t you?’       Harry sighed heavily. He followed Tom out of the Hall and began the climb to the seventh floor—to the bare corridor with the tapestry of the fool who fancied teaching trolls ballet.       ‘Was that your “experiment”?’ he asked, unable to hold out till they reached their destination, good sense notwithstanding. ‘Killing a ghost?’       Tom grinned—with enormous self‑satisfaction.       ‘Of course not,’ he explained indulgently. ‘The experiment was something else. That was merely a struggle for breathing space. Practical considerations—nothing more.’       ‘What was the experiment, then?’ Harry was frankly alarmed.       ‘Whether the Imperius can be used on a bodiless spirit,’ Tom said, merry as you please. The capricious moving staircases seemed keen to oblige him—sidling underfoot and turning the right way of their own accord; Harry’s part was simply to keep up. He rubbed his forehead and asked the next of his burning questions—yes, he’d had to make himself a mental list.       ‘You made him burn the portraits?’       ‘Yes,’ Tom confirmed. Harry only shook his head.       ‘Merlin—why?’       ‘Think,’ Tom teased. Harry tried to think. Then he tried to think like Tom.       ‘You were… eliminating witnesses?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Right? They… knew you in life—or something of the sort—didn’t they?’       ‘Five points to Slytherin,’ Tom said—apparently he’d never stop smirking. ‘Naturally, I had to destroy a certain number at random as well—otherwise the pattern would have been far too easy to spot.’       A shiver went through Harry. Cautiously, he said, ‘They were… alive. Once.’       ‘Nonsense.’ Tom flicked the thought away. ‘They are but clever works of magic—mirrors of souls, not the souls themselves. To call them truly alive would be a gross affront to the truth.’       ‘But they’re like you,’ Harry persisted. ‘And you’re alive.’       ‘No,’ came the comprehensive reply, but after a brief pause Tom went on, ‘I am quite another matter—if only because a part of my soul is still with me. And to call me alive would be a lie as well.’       Harry let the argument drop—though he felt the moral right of it. Instead, he moved down his list.       ‘And the inscription—what was that for?’       ‘Ah’—Tom brightened again—‘that extra flourish was in your honour. Came out rather well, didn’t it? No need to thank me.’       Harry, who was in any case very far from showering thanks, kept his counsel. The staircase pirouetted under their feet; they stepped into the corridor of the seventh floor.       The Room of Hidden Things worked exactly as magic works at its core—by yielding to will and desire. This secret, Tom assured him, was known to no one but himself. Plenty of wizards—Draco among them—had blundered into the Room once in their lives, but no one had ever returned here twice, except Tom—and now Harry.       He paced back and forth three times before the tapestry—the trolls were thrashing their hapless instructor again—thinking with all his might of the place where Tom’s soul lay. A door budded from the wall and flashed a round, polished handle in welcome; Harry stepped through. Tom followed.       At first glance the Room astonished. Draco had good grounds for calling it a junk‑hoard: it looked as though generation after generation of Hogwarts folk had filled it with every kind of object—needful and needless, broken and whole, ordinary and enigmatic. It was like a rubbish dump, like a museum, like the shop of the world’s greediest second‑hand dealer—a wondrous universe of forgotten, discarded, stashed, and interred things.       ‘How can you seriously believe,’ Harry begged, seeing it for the first time, ‘that you alone know the secret of entry? Look how much there is!’       Tom gave him his favourite look—condescending and amused.       ‘Precisely,’ he agreed. ‘Look how much there is.’       And, seeing no sign of comprehension on Harry’s face, he added, ‘Do people bury hoards for archaeologists?’       And then it clicked. If a treasure lay undisturbed until it was dug up, its owner had never come back for it. The owners of the hoards stashed in this Room had left them here. Why? Because they’d been unable to find their way back. Tom, as usual, was absolutely right—no one in the wide world knew how this place truly worked.       No one but the two of them.       Tall cupboards and low sofas, pompous armchairs and shabby chairs, rough tables and carved commodes lay buried under smaller curios jumbled together any which way. The skeleton of a Quintaped stood cheek by jowl with a bust of an unknown wizard with a goatee; a dull, dented crown coexisted peacefully with a stuffed Lethifold, and all of them shared space with a teapot that had lost its spout and a set of wooden cups. And that was only in one sideboard, whose doors an old spill of acid had ruined beyond help—the varnish blistered into crazed bubbles.       You could explore the Room for months; in fact, Harry had already set about it. First and foremost, of course, he hunted books. So far the haul wasn’t large—a dozen volumes on the single shelf of a bamboo whatnot he’d dug out of the heaps—but Harry, with a treasure‑hunter’s itch, could feel the real finds still lay ahead.       The whatnot had become part of the patch they’d wrested from the local chaos—their secret headquarters. On the cleared bit they’d set up a nearly intact sofa—Reparo had dealt with most of the damage, and for the broken leg they’d substituted a large wooden chest, on whose lid a painted octopus was trying to drown a painted caravel. Beside the sofa stood a neat teak side table; on the other side, a big, soft armchair whose upholstery had once been nibbled by Doxies—Harry now recognised their traces at a glance. He couldn’t help noticing he was trying to re‑create the layout of the Black House library—evidently it had taken, somewhere deep down, the place reserved for the image of a cosy, tranquil nook.       ‘Tom!’ Harry flopped onto the sofa, luxuriating in the springiness under his weight. ‘You’ve no idea what Snape got up to in Potions today. Merlin’s beard, I didn’t expect…’ He launched into an animated, acted‑out account of the lesson, while Tom, ensconced in the armchair with Secrets of the Darkest Art across his knees, listened with reasonable attention, chuckling now and then.       ‘You’re wrong to accuse your Head of House of behaviour unbefitting a teacher,’ Tom summed up when Harry had finished. ‘No—he is teaching you carefully and well. You simply don’t quite grasp what and how.’       Harry, who had shucked his robe and shoes and curled up in the sofa’s corner, knees tucked under him, leaned forward, intrigued.       ‘Then I don’t grasp it, plainly. Give me a hint?’ he asked. Tom clicked his tongue and tilted his head.       ‘Just this once—I’ll hint. You say the words every day—more than once—when you enter Slytherin’s common room. A splendid tradition, by the way—such unconscious rote will leave something behind even in the densest skull.’       ‘I don’t know Latin,’ Harry confessed, abashed. Tom twitched a brow—he looked on the brink of another disquisition on the quality of Harry’s Muggle schooling, but all he said was, ‘Very well—I’ll translate: “We do not learn for school, but for life.” Do you see it now? I can tell you don’t. All right—think on this: those who came to Hogwarts for book‑learning settled under Rowena’s wing. Salazar’s lot came for something else.’       Harry hugged his knees and tried to make sense of it. Curious conclusions began to form.       ‘So Snape is teaching us… the absence of fairness and honesty, is that it? Or that one must always favour one’s own?’       ‘A bit of each—and something else besides. You’ll understand in time. Don’t sulk—I’m not fobbing you off; it’s simply not the sort of experience one can pass on in words. Now find yourself something to do.’ And Tom buried himself in his book.       Harry tried to follow suit, but his nerves were still jangling; his thoughts wouldn’t settle. With a sigh he got up and began rummaging in the endless piles round about—it calmed him.       ‘So I’ll have to open the Chamber of Secrets as soon as possible now, won’t I?’ he asked glumly, examining a pearl‑embroidered glove that had no mate.       Tom snorted without looking up from Secrets of the Darkest Art.       ‘On the contrary, I’d wait till Hallowe’en. You have no sense of timing. When they’ve decided you’ve botched it—then the effect will be at its height.’       Tom, it had to be admitted, had a taste for drama.       Which he confirmed neatly by turning a page and dropping, as if in passing, ‘By the way—are you aware there’s a Cerberus penned in the corridor opposite the library?’       Harry dropped the silver filigree mask he’d been toying with and, in a manner quite unbefitting the Heir of Slytherin, squeaked, ‘What?!’       Then, having got a grip, he managed in a calmer tone, ‘And how do you know?’       Tom shot him a chilly look over the top of the book.       ‘Do you seriously imagine,’ he enunciated, ‘that anything can be hidden from me in my school?’