The Girl Who Hid | ✓

|48| Golden Egg

"Come seek us where our voices sound,

We cannot sing above the ground,

And while you're searching ponder this:

We've 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 won't come back."

Closing our eggs, both of us floated up and bounced ideas off each other.

"I've got to go and look for people who can't use their voices above the ground," Harry said slowly. "Er— who could that be?"

"That would mean they can use their voices under the ground," I mumbled. "How would it be possible to talk under ground?"

"Underwater," Harry said slowly.

"Like water creatures?" I questioned.

"What lives in the lake, apart from the giant squid?"

"The lake— anything that had human voices? Obviously, we can understand them if we're underwater but there aren't any people who can live under—"

"Merpeople," Harry and I gasped.

"That's it, isn't it?" said Harry excitedly. "The second task's to go and find the merpeople in the lake a-and..."

"How in the bloody hell are we going to breathe underwater for an hour?"

"I think that may be the task," he said.

"Not only do we have to find some kind of treasure, but we'll also have to figure out a way to breathe under the water or an hour— maybe even more!" I sighed and sank into the foamy water.

"We've taken what you'll sorely miss."

"I hope it's not a person," I mumbled. "I'm not very strong, more or less be able to trudge someone through the water."

"Let's go," Harry said. "We can ask Hermione and Ron tomorrow morning during lunch."

Getting out of the water and drying ourselves off, we got into dry nightclothes and made our way back to Gryffindor Tower. Harry and I examined the Marauder's 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. We had taken our first step back toward Gryffindor Tower when something else on the map caught Harry's eye.

Peeves was not the only thing that was moving. A single dot was flitting around a room in the bottom left-hand corner — Snape's office. But the dot wasn't labeled "Severus Snape"... it was Bartemius Crouch.

"Harry, no," I whispered harshly, trying to pull him towards the tower, but he pulled me towards the dot.

Harry pulled me 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 our pajamas. I kept glancing over at the map, paranoid of getting caught this late at night. And then halfway down the stairs, too worried about getting caught, my leg suddenly sank right through the trip step Neville always forgets to jump. I gave an ungainly wobble, and the golden egg slipped from my hands. Harry lurched forward to try and catch it, but too late; the egg fell down the long staircase with a bang as loud as a bass drum on every step— the Invisibility Cloak slipped— Harry and I snatched at it, and the Marauder's Map fluttered out of his hand and slid down six stairs, out of reach from us. Harry could grab it, but if he were to move from my side, the Invisibility Cloak would fall off me and I'd be seen.