Lockhart stood beside the slowly closing Washstand with a strange expression. Everything before him astonished him.
"A little girl? And a Gryffindor girl at that?" Lockhart murmured.
"Should I tell Dumbledore? Hmm... better not. That doesn't seem to be among the tasks my teacher assigned me. Heh heh."
With that, Lockhart turned and left. Before he had even left the Washroom, his figure vanished again, turning transparent.
Ginny and Black Ginny, who had already descended into the pipe, had no idea that Lockhart, whom neither of them had taken seriously at all, had witnessed their every move.
Black Ginny was very confident in her Disillusionment Charm. As far back as fifty years ago, when she had still been male, she had been able to come and go freely throughout the Castle without any professor ever discovering her.
Sliding down the long pipe, Ginny reached an underground cavern far from the Castle.
"Th-this place... could this be... the Chamber of Secrets?" Ginny sounded rather surprised as she looked at the cavern before her. In a sense, she had already been here several times, yet she had no memory of it whatsoever.
"Yes, this is Salazar Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets!"
"What... is in here?"
"Well, probably nothing now. There used to be plenty of things, but someone has taken them all. A pity. Otherwise, it would have saved us a lot of trouble."
"Then why are we still coming here?"
"Heh, that... person linked my... our souls together. You probably feel much stronger, don't you? But I've become much weaker. This level of soul strength is no longer enough for me to carry out the next stage of my plan, so I have to strengthen it."
"Strengthen your soul? What are you going to do? I'm warning you, if you do anything