SECRETS

- CHAPTER 11 -

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In the following days throughout the school, it was all anyone talked about, among the corridors the rumours turned into little whispers when Harry, Ron, Hermione, or I passed by, it was strange, spine - chilling.

Besides the students even Filch was not in a good mood -- not at all. After the ruinous failure in trying to erase that writing on the wall he was furious, no student who transgressed the rules escaped him. It was said that the punishments were even worse than they were before.

And on top of this freaky situation there were also classes and the first exams to be given, the burden for school was taking its toll, not to mention practice, in a few weeks if not days the championship would begin... Oliver had increased the number of weekly practices, I'll let you imagine the struggling and fatigue doing almost four Quidditch practices a week, I was exhausted.

I was stretching my sore shoulder when Ron violently slammed the long parchment down on the table huffing. We had been in the library for hours, Hermione had been looking for a specific book and hadn't stopped searching through the high shelves since we had entered, Harry and I were going over some strategies Oliver had told us to study, I had tried looking for other books on Quidditch such as - The World Golden snitch, Strategies and Stratagems on the Field, Quidditch on the Various Continents - and I had found some interesting strategies, I was going to show them to Oliver in the afternoon before practice started.

Ron ... well Ron was trying to finish the at least one meter-long essay that Professor Binns had given us as a History of Magic assignment at least two weeks ago, and as always, he was getting late. I had finished it over the weekend after hours cooped up in the library, I didn't like so much History of Magic but I still managed to finish the parchment. Hermione had written one that was three meter long, the usual Hermione, always better than the rest of us...Ron had begged her for hours to read it for inspiration but she had refused, the scene was hilarious.

The class was always dull, no one made a sound, almost everyone was doing something else or sleeping. Professor Binns was, as it were, a historical figure in his own right... the story goes that one day after waking up from a nap his ghost quietly emerged from his body without noticing and entered the classroom as usual, leaving his body on a chair in the teacher's lounge. As boring and narcoleptic as his classes were, they were exam topics and I didn't want to fail just one subject, so, I did my best, taking notes was the only way to keep myself awake. Hermione was the most focused one usually but that day she had her gaze fixed on an indefinite spot on the table, she was immersed in her stream of thoughts. At one point I saw her snapping as she raised her hand.

"Yes... Miss...?" the professor reluctantly interrupted himself.

"Granger sir...I have a question, could you explain what the chamber of secrets is?" if the ghosts could whiten even more from their greyish complexion surely that would have been the occasion. The whole class seemed to awaken from eternal slumber by immediately taking notice of what was to come.