The Young Padfoot *Book One*

The Past in the Present

Every step that we took seemed to echo off the chamber walls, repeating several times over and over. I almost wished it were silent instead. Keyword being almost here. But the sound of us walking was quite honestly the least of my worries as we passed by the large carved serpents that ran along the Chamber walls. A greenish tint seemed to cover the entire infrastructure and slimy was growing around on the ground and the walls. Clearly, no one had been down to clean it since it was built, I would bet.

Heart beating fast, I muttered Lumos under my breath emitting a light from my wand as Harry and I walked down the chamber. He repeated my action and silently we continued our walk, prepared to squeeze our eyes shut in the presence of the Basilisk, who I was really hoping had either died in its sleep or gone on holiday for a while. But with our luck, neither seemed even remotely possible.

But where could the youngest Weasley be? With her hair so easy to stand out in the darkness of our surroundings, my heart was rising up to my throat as I failed to see her anywhere around us. As if noticing my nervousness, Harry grabbed onto my hand and walked alongside me, neither of us saying a word to each other at the risk of attracting any attention.

My eyes landed on the massive stone face at the end of the chamber of an older looking man who I presumed was Salazar Slytherin himself. How presumptuous to build not a statue of yourself but just your face, he must've really liked how he looked. But as I looked around the statue, my heart stopped when I saw a mop of ginger hair spread out across the floor.

"Ginny," Harry muttered beside me before we both ran towards her still body, to hell with being quiet.

Once we reached her body, with careful hands, we turned her over onto her back and I nearly burst into tears at the sight of how ill she really looked. Her face was so pale she was almost transparent and her skin so cold it was almost painful to touch. But her eyes... her eyes were closed so that meant she couldn't be Petrified but if she wasn't Petrified then that could only mean one thing.

"Ginny, please wake up," Harry said, as he gently shook her shoulders. "Please, don't be dead. Please, don't be dead."

"She won't wake," a voice said from the end of the chamber.

The voice made both Harry and I jump as we hadn't been expecting to hear any other voice. A tall, black-haired wizard was stood not too far from us, leaning casually against a pillar, watching us closely. But he seemed almost like he wasn't really here, all around him he was blurred and if I strained my eyes hard enough I'm sure I could probably look right through him.

"Tom—Tom Riddle?" Harry said, turning to the boy, while I lifted Ginny's head into my lap and started stroking her hair. The boy nodded in response; his eyes transfixed on Harry. "What do you mean she won't wake? She's not—she's not—"

"She's still alive," Riddle confirmed, making me breathe out a sigh of relief. "But only just."

"Are you a ghost?" Harry asked. Not really the most pressing of all matters right now, Harry.

"A memory," Riddle corrected. "Preserved in a diary for fifty years."

I looked down in Ginny's hands and saw them cold and pale and wrapped around the diary as though her life had depended on it.

"You've got to help us, Tom," Harry said, looking back over at me and Ginny. "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, help us ..."

Riddle didn't seem to be in any rush to move but with all this determination rushing through me, I wasn't going to let some memory/ghost person derail our plans. So along with Harry, I lifted Ginny up from her arms, intertwining my fingers together as I wrapped my arms around her so that I wouldn't drop her as Harry picked her legs up. Harry quickly went to pick up his wand but then we both noticed that his wand wasn't where he had dropped it before.