Chapter 70

"Whoever the Basilisk's eyes look at will die. But no one here is dead - because none of them directly look at it!"

At this point, Harry looked eagerly at the page in his hand, and the more he looked, the more his heart brightened.

"The rooster's cry is also fatal to it!" he read aloud. "Hagrid's roosters have been killed! Once the secret room is opened, Slytherin's heirs never want roosters near the castle!"

"But how can a basilisk crawl around?" said Ron. "An ugly snake, someone will see it!"

Harry pointed to the two words scribbled under the paper.

"Pipe!" he said. "Ron, it's moving in the pipe. I always hear that sound inside the wall..."

Ron grabbed Harry's arm.

"The entrance to the secret room!" he said hoarsely. "Maybe it's in a bathroom? Maybe it's --"

"Crying Myrtle's bathroom!" said Harry.

"That means," said Harry, "I'm not the only one who knows the snake in this school. So do Slytherin's heirs, so they can always control the snake."

"Oh, yes..." Ron was excited, but soon he changed into an angry and powerless expression.

"Yes, but even if we know this, what can we do... I think we have to go to Professor McGonagall."

"Yes, let's go to the faculty lounge," said Harry, jumping into the rain. "She'll be there in ten minutes. Class will be over soon."

"No matter who the heir is, it's not wrong to act first!" Harry said firmly.

Then they hurried downstairs.

They didn't want Professor McGonagall to find them wandering in another corridor and go straight into the empty staff lounge.

This is a big room with wooden boards all around. It is full of black wooden chairs. Harry and Ron paced up and down inside, too excited to sit down.

However, the bell didn't ring after class.

On the contrary, Professor McGonagall's voice echoed in the corridor, magnified many times by magic.

"All students return to their dormitories immediately, and all teachers return to the faculty lounge! Please act immediately!"

Harry turned abruptly and stared at Ron.

"Is something wrong again? At this time?"

"Marca! It must be him!" said Ron. "I'm going to find him!"

"Don't jump to conclusions, Ron," said Harry, looking around.

On his left was an ugly wardrobe full of robes worn by teachers in class.

"Hide in here. Let's listen to what's going on, and then tell them what we found."

They hid in the wardrobe and heard the footsteps of hundreds of people walking upstairs. Then the door of the faculty lounge was pushed open. Harry and Ron looked at the teachers who came into the room through layers of musty gowns, some confused and some scared.

Then Professor McGonagall arrived.

"Something's wrong again," she said to the silent teachers in the room. "A student was kidnapped by a monster. He was taken directly into the secret room."

Professor flavy let out a scream, and Professor spraot slammed his hands over his mouth.

Snape gripped the back of a chair and asked, "how can you be sure?"

"Slytherin's heir," said Professor McGonagall, who was very pale, "left another line. At the bottom of the last paragraph, it said: her bones will remain in the chamber of Secrets forever."

Professor flavy couldn't help crying.

"Who is it?" Mrs. Hodge sank into a chair with her knees soft. "Which student is it?"

"Ginny Weasley," said Professor McGonagall.

Harry felt Ron beside him and fell silently on the bottom of the wardrobe.

"We must send all the students home tomorrow," said Professor McGonagall. "Hogwarts is over. Dumbledore used to say..."

The door of the faculty lounge was knocked open again.

Ron, who fell on the bottom of the wardrobe, even thought it was Marca, but it turned out to be Lockhart, with a smile on his face.

"Sorry, I'm late..."

He didn't seem to notice that the other teachers stared at him with a kind of hatred.

Snape took a step forward.

"Here comes the man who solved the problem," he said. "That's the man. Lockhart, a girl was caught by a monster. She was taken into the secret room - the time for you to show your glory has finally come."

He had thought that Lockhart would panic, but to his surprise, Lockhart still maintained his bright and calm expression.

"Yes, of course... I'll go to the office to prepare." Lockhart smiled and left the faculty lounge in the strange eyes of the professors.

……

When Lockhart hurried back to the third floor and opened the door of his office, the smile on his face immediately collapsed.

"Oh, my God!" he said to his desk as he closed the office door. "Do you really want me to go to the secret room to deal with that terrible snake monster... I mean, since you already know my secret..."

"In fact, I don't want to."

On the armchair beside the desk, an expressionless teenager was leaning on the back. The cuff of his left arm was rolled up, and there was a large scratch on his forearm, which was bleeding faintly at the moment.

The boy is holding a wad of cotton in his right hand with tweezers and is dipping in a light green liquid medicine to apply medicine to his wound!

"As you can see, the snake monster is really difficult to deal with, and finally let it slip away."

"But Professor Lockhart, you don't have to worry too much. Although the Basilisk can slow down its growth by sleeping, it doesn't stop growing after all," said the boy. "It's too old. Now it's still seriously injured. It's even blind. It won't be in much danger."

"... isn't this a novel material delivered to the door?"

Lockhart nodded with difficulty, but muttered again, "isn't there another eye..."

At this time, the boy put the tweezers on the table, took out a roll of bandage and wrapped it around his arm. He said as he wrapped it.

"You just go along. I need experimental materials, and you need novel materials, isn't that right?" he said. "You don't have to do anything. You don't need to read a spell to achieve your goal. Is there anything better than that?"

"Okay, okay! Even if you don't say so much, I have to do it..." Lockhart shook his head. "I can't believe you're only in grade two this year."

"As long as you concentrate enough," the boy put down his sleeve and looked up at Lockhart. "Your forgetting spell power must be master, isn't it?"

"But you haven't blocked it."

The boy went to the door and opened the door of the office.

"Because I focus on magic, and you focus on opportunism."

Then he left quickly.

Lockhart looked at the slowly closed office door and murmured, "Marca McLean... McLean, which ancient pure blood wizard family is it? Why don't you seem to have heard of it?"

……

Now, the dean of each college went to inform the students what had happened. Tell them that the Hogwarts Express train will take them home early tomorrow morning.

Other teachers should ensure that no student is left outside the dormitory.

The teachers stood up and left one by one.

It was probably the hardest day of Harry's life. He, Ron, Fred and George sat in a corner of the Gryffindor common room, and no one could say a word. In Percy's absence, he sent an owl to deliver a letter to Mrs. Weasley, and then locked himself in the dormitory.

No afternoon has passed so slowly as today, and the Gryffindor building has never been so crowded and silent as it is now.

When the sun was about to set, Fred and George could no longer sit still and went back to the dormitory to sleep.

"Ginny must know something, Harry," said Ron, the first time he spoke after they hid in the wardrobe in the faculty lounge. "That's why she was arrested... It has nothing to do with Percy's folly. She must have found something about the secret room... Maybe she met Marca! It must be so, that's why she --"

Ron rubbed his eyes desperately, and his face gradually became angry. "I mean, she's a pure blood. She couldn't have been her! There can't be any other reason!"

Harry could see the sun, red as blood, sinking below the horizon.

His heart had never been so sad as now. Even if they can do something. Whatever it is.

"Harry," said Ron, "do you think she might not have -- you know --"

Harry looked at Ron, angry and frustrated, and didn't know what to say.

Although Harry always felt that he could not easily doubt his friends without evidence. But Maka's various behaviors this semester were so suspicious that he had to have a feeling of suffocation.

"I think we should find Lockhart and tell him what we know," said Ron suddenly. "Isn't he going to enter the chamber of secrets? We can tell him where we think the chamber of secrets is and tell him it's a basilisk!"

Harry couldn't think of anything else, but he wanted to do something, so he nodded in agreement with Ron's proposal.

The Gryffindor students around them were sad and sad for the Weasley brothers, so no one tried to stop Harry and Ron when they got up and walked through the room and drilled through the portrait hole.

When they went downstairs to Lockhart's office, they found the corridor a little dark.

Night has fallen