Hexad

Book two, chapter seventeen

:3

Harry Potter And The Secrets of Slytherin.Book two! 

Chapter seventeen of this snakey book-in-a-book, The Heir.

I do not own Harry Potter(but I totally should). This is an AU.

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He was standing at the end of a very long, dimly lit chamber. Towering stone pillars entwined with more carved serpents rose to support a ceiling lost in darkness, casting long, black shadows through the odd, greenish gloom that filled the place.

His heart beating very fast, Harry stood listening to the chill silence. Could the basilisk be lurking in a shadowy corner, behind a pillar? And where was Ginny?

He pulled out his wand and moved forward between the serpentine columns. Every careful footstep echoed loudly off the shadowy walls. He kept his eyes narrowed, ready to clamp them shut at the smallest sign of movement. The hollow eye sockets of the stone snakes seemed to be following him. More than once, with a jolt of the stomach, he thought he saw one stir.

Then, as he drew level with the last pair of pillars, a statue high as the Chamber itself loomed into view, standing against the back wall.

Harry had to crane his neck to look up into the giant face above: It was ancient and monkeyish, with a long, thin beard that fell almost to the bottom of the wizard's sweeping stone robes, where two enormous gray feet stood on the smooth Chamber floor. And between the feet, facedown, lay a small, black-robed figure with flaming-red hair.

"Ginny!" Harry muttered, sprinting to her and dropping to his knees before her unconscious body. "Ginny-- don't be dead-- please don't be dead--" He dropped his wand beside him, grabbed Ginny's shoulders, and turned her over. Her face was white as marble, and as cold, yet her eyes were closed, so she wasn't Petrified. But she couldn't be dead. Right?

"Ginny, please wake up," Harry muttered desperately, shaking her. Ginny's head lolled hopelessly from side to side.

"She won't wake," said a soft voice.

Harry, startled, spun around on his knees quickly.

A tall, black-haired boy was leaning against the nearest pillar, watching. He was strangely blurred around the edges, as though Harry were looking at him through a misted window, yet there was no mistaking him--

"Tom Riddle,"

Riddle nodded, not taking his eyes off Harry's face.

"What d'you mean, she won't wake?" Harry said suspiciously. "She's not dead, right--?"

"She's still alive," said Riddle. "But only just."

Harry stared at him. Tom Riddle had been at Hogwarts fifty years ago, yet here he stood, a weird, misty light shining about him, not a day older than sixteen. He must've been a memory.

"How are you here?" He asked, trying to stall. Stall what, he didn't know. He just didn't trust that Riddle was there.

"I'm a memory," said Riddle quietly. "Preserved in a diary for fifty years."

He pointed toward the floor near the statue's giant toes. Lying open there was the little black diary Harry had found in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. For a second, Harry would've ran and snatched it up, but there were more important things to worry about.

"You've got to help me, Tom," Harry said, with fake timidness, raising Ginny's head again. "We've got to get her out of here. There's a basilisk. I don't know where it is, but it could be along any moment.... Please, if you would be so kind--"