The Potter Twins and the Chamber of Secrets

XVI

We spent the rest of the day hanging around the castle, with Rose's bobble hat still on my head. Harry excused himself to go to the library, and Will and I went with the Weasley twins to spy on the Slytherin team's Quidditch practice.

I wish I could say that they looked easy to beat, but that was not the case. As nasty as they had been last year, they were now just as physical and probably fifty percent faster. It did not look promising, especially as Marcus Flint and the other two chasers appeared to have had growth spurts, so I wasn't particularly excited for a confrontation that would almost certainly be quite one-sided.

The only positive was that Malfoy didn't seem nearly as good of a seeker as Harry was - he took maybe twice the time as my brother did to find the snitch in practice. "Harry'll wipe the floor with him," George said with a satisfied nod. I nodded in agreement, but Will made a valid point. "If Harry sees the snitch, then all Malfoy has to do is follow him. And he can go faster."

"Yay, optimism," said Fred dully, and we headed inside.

Harry, Hermione and Ron were in the common room loudly discussing something when we entered. "What are you talking about?" Will asked, grabbing a handful of crisps from the nearest bowl.

"Harry met Nearly Headless Nick," Ron said, looking slightly sick.

"So?" I demanded.

"So," Hermione said eagerly, "he told him it was his five-hundredth Deathday Party on Halloween! Won't it be interesting? Oh, we must go!"

"I said, it sounded dead depressing," Ron argued. "I'd rather go to the feast, wouldn't you? Sam?"

Harry interrupted before I could reply. "I told you, we have to go. Nick saved me from Filch by getting Peeves to distract him and I said I'd come to his party. I can't let him down."

"We could go for, like, a minute," I suggested, and Harry shot me daggers. "He'd be really upset. We have to go." I shrugged. "You could go." Which I thought was quite a good idea.

"Idiot! I'm not going to visit a load of ghosts by myself. You're coming or I'll be throwing your deathday party, got it?"

Ron groaned. "Fine."

"I think it'll be fun," Hermione said.

"Well, that's another reason to avoid it," Ron snapped back. Will and I headed upstairs to do homework before they started fighting.

—————

Halloween came around surprisingly quickly. Wood got wind of the Slytherins' technological advancements and had us training harder and longer than ever. "You know more practice isn't going to speed us up, Oliver," George said one evening, and Wood promptly made him run (with no magic) around the pitch five times. Nobody argued after that.

I knew Harry was regretting his rash promise to go to the Deathday Party, but Hermione reminded us that a 'promise is a promise'. "I bet there aren't many living people who can say they've been to one of those. It'll be fascinating!"

So, at seven o'clock, we walked straight past the doorway to the packed Great Hall, which was glittering invitingly with gold plates and candles, and instead headed towards the dungeon. Ron gazed longingly at the stacks of food as we passed, but Hermione took a firm grip on his arm and steered him swiftly onwards.

The passage towards the party had been lined with candles too: however they had the opposite effect, casting a dim, ghostly look over our living faces. It felt like we had stepped into a freezer unit in Tesco (Dudley shut my head in one once, I know what it's like) and our breath curled in front of us in misty plumes. As I shivered and tried to cover all exposed skin with my robes, I heard what sounded like a thousand fingernails scraping on a blackboard.