Pomona stepped outside the entrance hall. The house-elves were busy, making the castle shine like new.
Normally, she should have joined them at this hour, but she was eager to return to her office and had no mood to linger—until she reached the wall that had once borne bloody writing.
Filch had used Mrs Skower's All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover, a cleaner capable of scrubbing away even ectoplasm, yet it had done nothing to the bloody words. At the time, the entire castle had been plunged into panic, and no one had paid much attention to them. Thinking back on it now, there was no way Ginny, an eleven-year-old girl, could have written those words.
"What are you looking at?" Nearly Headless Nick suddenly asked.
"Nothing," she said, lightheaded.
"I thought you heard Parseltongue again," Nick said. "That was the most terrifying sound I've ever heard."
With that, Nick drifted away. Pomona raised her head and looked at the wall again. After Harry destroyed the diary with a Basilisk fang, the bloody words had vanished on their own, but she always felt that the blood had seeped into the wall, leaving behind a stubborn stain.
As she dived deeper, the red liquid looked more and more like thick, viscous blood. Then that raspy Parseltongue sounded beside her ears again.
She could not understand what it was saying, but she swam in its direction anyway. Before long, the water cleared and grew colder.
She broke the surface, cautiously poked her head out, and discovered that she had somehow arrived in Hogwarts' boathouse.
The room was dimly lit, but she could still see it: the snake—Nagini—was floating inside a sphere of magical light, twisting and coiling like a snake trapped in a fishbowl.
"M-my Lord," Snape said blankly. "I don't understand what you