d the egg in his wet hands, and opened it. The
wailing, screeching sound filled the bathroom, echoing and reverberating off the
marble walls, but it sounded just as incomprehensible as ever, if not more so with
all the echoes. He snapped it shut again, worried that the sound would attract
Filch, wondering whether that hadn't been Cedric's plan - and then, making him
jump so badly that he dropped the egg, which clattered away across the bathroom
floor, someone spoke.
"I'd try putting it in the water, if I were you."
Harry had swallowed a considerable amount of bubbles in shock. He stood up,
sputtering, and saw the ghost of a very glum-looking girl sitting cross-legged on
top of one of the taps. It was Moaning Myrtle, who was usually to be heard
sobbing in the S-bend of a toilet three floors below.
"Myrtle!" Harry said in outrage, "I'm - I'm not wearing anything!"
The foam was so dense that this hardly mattered, but he had a nasty feeling that
Myrtle had been spying on him from out of one of the taps ever since he had
arrived.
"I closed my eyes when you got in," she said, blinking at him through her thick
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spectacles. "You haven't been to see me for ages."
"Yeah . . . well. . ." said Harry, bending his knees slightly, just to make absolutely
sure Myrtle couldn't see anything but his head, "I'm not supposed to come into
your bathroom, am I? It's a girls' one."
"You didn't used to care," said Myrtle miserably. "You used to be in there all the
time."
This was true, though only because Harry, Ron, and Hermione had found Myrtle's
out-of-order toilets a convenient place to brew Polyjuice Potion in secret - a
forbidden potion that had turned him and Ron into living replicas of Crabbe and
Goyle for an hour, so that they could sneak into the Slytherin common room.
"I got told off for going in there." said Harry, which was half-true; Percy had once
caught him coming out of Myrtles bathroom. "I thought I'd better not come back
after that."
"Oh ... I see ..." said Myrtle, picking at a spot on her chin in a morose sort of way.
"Well... anyway... I'd try the egg in the water. That's what Cedric Diggory did."
"Have you been spying on him too?" said Harry indignantly. "What d'you do,
sneak up here in the evenings to watch the prefects take baths?"
"Sometimes," said Myrtle, rather slyly, "but I've never come out to speak to
anyone before."
"I'm honored," said Harry darkly. "You keep your eyes shut!"
He made sure Myrtle had her glasses well covered before hoisting himself out of
the bath, wrapping the towel firmly around his waist, and going to retrieve the egg.
Once he was back in the water, Myrtle peered through her fingers and said, "Go
on, then . .. open it under the water!"
Harry lowered the egg beneath the foamy surface and opened it... and this time, it
did not wail. A gurgling song was coming out of it, a song whose words he
couldnt distinguish through the water.
"You need to put your head under too," said Myrtle, who seemed to be thoroughly
enjoying bossing him around. "Go on!"
Harry took a great breath and slid under the surface - and now, sitting on the
marble bottom of the bubble-filled bath, he heard a chorus of eerie voices singing
to him from the open egg in his hands:
"Come seek us where our voices sound,
We cannot sing above the ground,
And while you re searching, ponder this:
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Wove taken what you'll sorely miss,
An hour long you'll have to look,
And to recover what we took,
But past an hour- the prospect's black,
Too late, it's gone, it wont come back"
Harry let himself float back upward and broke the bubbly surface, shaking his hair
out of his eyes.
"Hear it?" said Myrtle.
"Yeah ... 'Come seek us where our voices sound .. .' and if I need persuading ...
hang on, I need to listen again...."
He sank back beneath the water. It took three more underwater renditions of the
egg's song before Harry had it memorized; then he trod water for a while, thinking
hard, while Myrtle sat and watched him.
"I've got to go and look for people who can't use their voices above the ground. . .
." he said slowly. "Er . . . who could that be?"
"Slow, aren't you?"
He had never seen Moaning Myrtle so cheerful, apart from the day when a dose of
PolyJuice Potion had given Hermione the hairy face and tail of a cat. Harry stared
around the bathroom, thinking ... if the voices could only be heard underwater,
then it made sense for them to belong to underwater creatures. He ran this theory
past Myrtle, who smirked at him.
"Well, thats what Diggory thought," she said. "He lay there talking to himself for
ages about it. Ages and ages . . . nearly all the bubbles had gone. ..."
"Underwater ..." Harry said slowly. "Myrtle . . . what lives in the lake, apart from
the giant squid?"
"Oh all sorts," she said. "I sometimes go down there . . . sometimes don't have any
choice, if someone flushes my toilet when I'm not expecting it...."
Trying not to think about Moaning Myrtle zooming down a pipe to the lake with
the contents of a toilet. Harry said, "Well, does anything in there have a human
voice? Hang on -"
Harry's eyes had fallen on the picture of the snoozing mermaid on the wall.
"Myrtle, there aren't merpeople in there, are there?"
"Oooh, very good," she said, her thick glasses twinkling, "it took Diggory much
longer than that! And that was with her awake too" - Myrtle jerked her head
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toward the mermaid with an expression of great dislike on her glum face -
"giggling and showing off and flashing her fins.. .."
"Thats it, isn't it?" said Harry excitedly. "The second tasks to go and find the
merpeople in the lake and ... and ..."
But he suddenly realized what he was saying, and he felt the excitement drain out
of him as though someone had just pulled a plug in his stomach. He wasn't a very
good swimmer; he'd never had much practice. Dudley had had lessons in his
youth, but Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, no doubt hoping that Harry would
drown one day, hadn't bothered to give him any. A couple of lengths of this bath
were all very well, but that lake was very large, and very deep . . . and merpeople
would surely live right at the bottom. . . .
"Myrtle," Harry said slowly, "how am I supposed to breathe?"
At this, Myrtle's eyes filled with sudden tears again.
"Tactless!" she muttered, groping in her robes for a handkerchief.
"What's tactless?" said Harry, bewildered.
"Talking about breathing in front of me!" she said shrilly, and her voice echoed
loudly around the bathroom. "When I can't. . . when I haven't. . . not for ages ..."
She buried her face in her handkerchief and sniffed loudly. Harry remembered
how touchy Myrtle had always been about being dead, but none of the other
ghosts he knew made such a fuss about it.
"Sorry," he said impatiently. "I didn't mean - I just forgot. . ."
"Oh yes, very easy to forget Myrtle's dead," said Myrtle, gulping, looking at him
out of swollen eyes. "Nobody missed me even when I was alive. Took them hours
and hours to find my body - I know, I was sitting there waiting for them. Olive
Hornby came into the bathroom - Are you in here again, sulking, Myrtle?' she
said, 'because Professor Dippet asked me to look for you -' And then she saw my
body . . . ooooh, she didn't forget it until her dying day, I made sure of that...
followed her around and reminded her, I did. I remember at her brother's wedding
-"
But Harry wasn't listening; he was thinking about the merpeople's song again.
"We've taken what you II sorely miss." That sounded as though they were going to
steal something of his, something he had to get back. What were they going to
take?
"--and then, of course, she went to the Ministry of Magic to stop me stalking her,
so I had to come back here and live in my toilet."
"Good," said Harry vaguely. "Well, I'm a lot further on than I was. . . . Shut your
eyes again, will you? I'm getting out."
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He retrieved the egg from the bottom of the bath, climbed out, dried himself, and
pulled on his pajamas and dressing gown again.
"Will you come and visit me in my bathroom again sometime?" Moaning Myrtle
asked mournfully as Harry picked up the Invisibility Cloak.
"Er . . . I'll try," Harry said, though privately thinking the only way he'd be visiting
Myrtle's bathroom again was if every other toilet in the castle got blocked. "See
you. Myrtle... thanks for your help."
"Bye, 'bye," she said gloomily, and as Harry put on the Invisibllity Cloak he saw
her zoom back up the tap.
Out in the dark corridor, Harry examined the Marauders Map to check that the
coast was still clear. Yes, the dots belonging to Filch and his cat, Mrs. Norris, were
safely in their office . .. nothing else seemed to be moving apart from Peeves,
though he was bouncing around the trophy room on the floor above. ... Harry had
taken his first step back toward Gryffindor Tower when something else on the
map caught his eye . . . something distinctly odd.
Peeves was not the only thing that was moving. A single dot was flitting around a
room in the bottom left-hand corner - Snapes office. But the dot wasn't labeled
"Severus Snape" ... it was Bartemius Crouch.
Harry stared at the dot. Mr. Crouch was supposed to be too ill to go to work or to
come to the Yule Ball - so what was he doing, sneaking into Hogwarts at one
o'clock in the morning? Harry watched closely as the dot moved around and
around the room, pausing here and there. ...
Harry hesitated, thinking . . . and then his curiosity got the better of him. He turned
and set off in the opposite direction toward the nearest staircase. He was going to
see what Crouch was up to.
Harry walked down the stairs as quietly as possible, though the faces in some of
the portraits still turned curiously at the squeak of a floorboard, the rustle of his
pajamas. He crept along the corridor below, pushed aside a tapestry about halfway
along, and proceeded down a nar