Stay - Mattheo Riddle

The Diary of Tom Riddle

EDITED

Harry sat on his four poster and flicked through the blank pages, not one of which had a trace of scarlet ink on it. Then he pulled a new bottle out of his bedside cabinet, dipped his quill into it, and dropped a blot onto the first page of the diary. The ink shone brightly on the paper for a second and then, as though it was being sucked into the page, vanished. 

Excited, Harry loaded up his quill a second time and wrote, "My name is Harry Potter." 

The words shone momentarily on the page and they, too, sank without trace. Then, at last, something happened. Oozing back out of the page, in his very own ink, came words Harry had never wrote.

"Hello, Harry Potter. My name is Tom Riddle. How did you come by my diary?" Harry thought back to the boy in his grade, the one that his sister seemed to be best friends with, Mattheo Riddle. Were they brothers? maybe they are cousins? They have the same last name so surely they have to be related right?

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 that were covered up. Things that 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 and do you know a Mattheo Riddle?" His heart was hammering. Riddle's reply came quickly, his writing becoming untidier, as though he was hurrying to tell all he knew. 

"I don't know a Mattheo Riddle but 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 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 forward; 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.