Hagrid did not take being questioned well.
That was not because he was clever enough to conceal discomfort. Quite the opposite. Most people lied by reducing movement. Hagrid lied with his whole body. He informed the room at once that something had become dangerous.
They found him after supper in his hut. The kettle was too large for the fire. Fang was draped across the floor like a heavy, breathing rug. Canine despair had developed a distinct smell: damp fur and old bones. Rain struck the small windows in soft bursts. The hut felt warmer than the castle. Adrian felt a bead of sweat prickle at his hairline. It was an uncomfortably intimate heat.
Harry had insisted on leading. Ron had insisted on coming. Hermione had brought her face of severe purpose. Adrian came because the notebook in his bag had made adjacency impossible to maintain. It felt heavy against his hip. It was a cold, flat pressure.
Hagrid opened the door. He saw all four together and became defensive.
"Now then," he said. His voice was too loud. "This is a surprise."
"No, it isn't," said Hermione.
Hagrid blinked. "Well. No. Maybe not."
It was one of the more efficient summaries of Hagrid as a strategic actor. They sat where there was room. Harry explained things in careful pieces. Tom Riddle. The diary. The memory. Hagrid fifty years ago. A girl dead. The Chamber supposedly closed.
At Hagrid's name in Riddle's memory, the big man had gone still. He was too large for stillness in the ordinary sense. But something inside him stopped trying to move toward ease. Even Fang lifted his head.
"It weren't me," Hagrid said. The words came out rougher than his usual speech. "If that's what yeh've come for."
"No one said it was," Ron answered.
Hermione looked as though she wanted to say that evidence remained preferable to loyalty, but she chose mercy.
Harry leaned forward. "Then what was it?"
Hagrid looked at the fire. Then at the kettle. Anywhere except the four students now occupying his hut. Adrian noticed a small, jagged tear in Hagrid's sleeve. He watched the frayed threads dance in the draft from the door.
"I can't," Hagrid said.
It was not *I won't*. It was not *I don't know*. It was *I can't*.
"Because you promised someone?" Hermione asked.
Hagrid made a visible effort not to react. He failed.
"There yeh are," he muttered.
"Dumbledore?" Harry asked.
Hagrid looked at the fire. Adrian thought: yes.
Hagrid's silence did not feel protective. It felt inherited. It was a burden handed down and left to harden around a person too loyal to set it down.
They left with nothing formal and too much implied. Outside, the grounds had gone dark and wet. The castle lights wavered in the windows. Hermione was furious before they had gone twenty yards.
"He knows," she said.
"Yes," said Harry.
"And he's still not telling us."
"Yes," Adrian agreed.
Back inside the castle, Nearly Headless Nick intercepted them. The ghost looked particularly injured by life. He was drifting at a mournful angle. His ruff carried the proper emotional burden of posthumous exclusion.
"Harry Potter," he said. He had the solemnity of a man announcing death. "I trust you have not forgotten this evening?"
"Forgotten what?"
"My Deathday Party."
Harry agreed to come. He was fatally burdened by decency. Nick beamed with transparent gratitude. Adrian stood aside. He watched the scene acquire new levels of indignity.
Nick swept away toward the dungeon levels.
"We are not going," Ron said.
"We are," Harry replied.
"You agreed because you're incapable of saying no to dead people."
The Deathday Party itself took place three nights later.
Adrian did not attend. Nick had not asked him. He had no intention of forcing himself into underground ghost society. He remained above. He used the time to test the diary.
He went to a high, disused classroom. It smelled of chalk dust and old wood. When he opened the notebook, the page already held writing.
*You have been asking the wrong person.* Adrian sat. He wrote: *Hagrid.* The reply came almost immediately. *He was never very good at keeping monsters or secrets.* The sentence was so neat. It was so dryly superior. For a second, Adrian hated Tom Riddle as a person and not only as an object.
*What did he keep?* he wrote.
*Something that should not have been in a school. He loved it anyway.* Adrian looked out the high window. Somewhere below, Harry was watching a cake rot for social reasons. He wrote: *Was it the creature that killed the girl?* The notebook remained blank for a long time. Then: *Would I have tried so hard to stop him if it had not mattered?* Riddle never answered with flat information. He presented motive in a way that cast himself as responsible. The diary did not only convey memory: it argued character.
*You wanted to stop him. You also wanted to be believed,* Adrian wrote.
The page darkened at once. *Yes.* Then, words appeared unprompted. *Something is moving again tonight.* Adrian went cold. The Deathday Party below. Harry out of the usual routes. The school redistributed by event.
*What?* he wrote.
*Listen.* That was all.
Adrian closed the notebook. He stood so fast the chair scraped backward with a loud, hollow sound. He moved at once. Down one stair. Across the west bridge. The voice in the walls was moving again. Harry was in the dungeons. The school's witness lines had shifted.
Halfway down the marble staircase, he nearly collided with Professor Lockhart. The man was moving upward. He was adjusting his robes. He smelled of mildew and old food.
"Mr Vale," Lockhart said. "Why are you not abed?"
"I might ask the same."
Lockhart laughed. "No wandering, no heroics. Ghastly things happen in castles after dark."
Adrian went past him. The voice had not returned in words yet, but the direction remained wrong in the air. There was a tension crossing the school from below.
Near the second floor turn, he heard running feet. Harry, Ron, and Hermione. They came up from the lower staircase. The smell of deathday rot clung to their robes.
"It's here," Harry said.
Adrian nodded once. "I know."
The voice came through the wall to their right. It was clearer now than Adrian had ever heard it. It seemed to shape the air.
"...kill... tear..."
Ron went white. Hermione's face drained of expression. Harry moved first. He ran toward it. Adrian ran too. The school was about to produce another scene of witness.
The voice seemed suddenly triumphant. "...so hungry... for so long... kill..."
Then silence.
They rounded the corner. The corridor beyond lay in torchlight and water. A flood spread from under the girls' bathroom door. It smelled of old pipes and the sharp, chemical tang of fresh paint.
And there lay Justin Finch-Fletchley. Petrified.
Beside him, Nearly Headless Nick hung in the air. He was rigid. He was black and smoking around the edges as if a spell had failed to decide what category of deadness applied to him.
Hermione made a sound that was almost a scream. Then she saw the snake. It was a line of wet writing curving across the wall. There were no words this time: only the image. It was long, thin, and unmistakably deliberate.
Harry stood in the middle of the corridor. Water was soaking his shoes. The voice had chosen.
From somewhere behind them came the thunder of approaching adults.
"Not again," Ron whispered.
No, Adrian thought. Worse. The attacks had rhythm. The voice had a route. The Chamber was no longer only threatening blood and legend. It had chosen a witness twice. And one of the victims had heard it coming.
End of Chapter 27
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