The Potter Twins and the Chamber of Secrets

Chapter 15 | Tom Marvolo Riddle

     Lexi and Harry entered a vast camber, it stretched ahead into darkness. Along the path were rows of stone serpents. The serpents rested in pools of black water and ahead was an enormous statue of what they believed was Salazar himself.

     Several feet in front of the statue a body lay motionless, Lexi dashed forwards taking Ginny into her arms, her head lolled to one side, her cheeks white as marble and in her pale hands Harry noticed Tom Riddle's diary.

     Placing his wand to the floor Harry knelt beside his sister and Ginny, "Ginny!" he almost sounded as though he was crying, "Please don't be dead. Wake up! Wake up!"

     "She won't wake," came a sneering voice of Tom Riddle, spinning around the twins saw Tom standing nearby, how was this possible? He looked like he did in his book fifty years ago but how was that even possible?

     "Tom... Tom Riddle?" Lexi said sounding frightened by the sudden sight of him, "What d'you mean, she won't wake? She's not..." but her voice broke before she could finish her thought.

     "She's still alive," Tom said in the same drawling voice as Draco, "But only just."

     "Are you a ghost?" Harry asked, because Tom was blurry around the edges as though they were looking at him through a misted window.

     "A memory," he replied, "Preserved in a diary for fifty years."

     Lexi looked back towards Ginny placing her hand on the Diary clutched to Ginny's chest, "Harry, she's cold as ice."

     "You've got to help us, Tom. There's a Basilisk..." Harry started to say.

     But Tom interrupted Harry as though he had not heard him speaking at all, "It won't come until it's called." Tom was twirling a wand in his hands.

     "Give me my wand, Tom." Harry said as fear flooding his body; Harry saw Lexi's eyes flash and knew that she too had a bad feeling about Tom.

     "You won't be needing it," Tom replied.

     "Listen, we've got to go!" Lexi shouted angrily, "We've got to save her!"

     "I'm afraid I can't do that, Alexis." Tom said still clutching Harry's wand, "You see, as poor Ginny grows weaker... I grow stronger..."

     "But she's dying!" Lexi shot back, "You parasite!"

     "Yes." Tom said eyeing Lexi with curiosity, "I'm afraid so. But then, she's been writing to me for months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes. Ginny poured her soul to me. I grew stronger on a diet of her deepest fears, her darkest secrets. I grew powerful enough to start feeding Ginny a few secrets, to start pouring a bit of my soul back into her..." Tom was growing more vaporous by the second, he was grinning cruelly at Lexi, Ginny and Harry.

     "Yes, Alexis, it was Ginny Weasley who opened the Chamber of Secrets." Tom continued.

     "No... she couldn't... she wouldn't..." Harry stammered shocked to hear that Ginny was the guilty party.

     "It was Ginny who set the Basilisk on the Mudbloods and the Squib's cat. Ginny who wrote threatening messages on the walls."

     "But... why...?" Lexi asked standing her ground more firmly than Harry felt.

     "Because I told her to," Tom replied, "You'll find that I can be very persuasive. Not that she knew what she was doing. She was, shall we say, in a kind of trance. Still, the power of the diary began to scare her and she tried to dispose of it in the girls' bathroom."