Someone was shouting—a young man, his voice shrill with barely contained excitement. Hagrid did not stop. He ran. His body was too large and too heavy; as he thundered up the stairs, he was like a startled bison, every step making the staircase tremble. His boots slipped several times, and his knees slammed into the edges of the steps, making him grimace in pain, but he did not stop.
When he reached the second floor, people were already ahead of him. They had not come up the stairs; they had emerged from the corridor. Several of them wore school robes and held wands. Their faces flickered in and out of the torchlight, and Hagrid recognized some of them—prefects, older students, people who usually greeted him with a "Hagrid" when they passed him in the corridors.
Now, they looked at him without their usual politeness. There was only an expression he had never seen on their faces before. It was an expression he only learned to recognize later—the look people gave a criminal.
Hagrid stopped. Not because he wanted to, but because he was blocked in. There were people in front of him and behind him, on the stairs and in the corridor; even people were running toward him from the branch passage behind him that led to the second floor. He was surrounded in the middle of the staircase, like a clumsy, oversized prey animal too slow to escape a ring of hunters.
His chest heaved violently. He was still carrying that empty wooden box, gripping it so tightly that the boards made faint cracking sounds, as though they might split apart.
"That's him." The voice came from behind the crowd, neither loud nor soft, neither hurried nor slow. Tom Riddle stepped out from among them, dressed in a neatly