Harry didn't retreat. He shoved the door open the rest of the way and stepped into the room, pulling the Invisibility Cloak off both of them before stuffing it into his robe pocket.
Lockhart spun around so quickly that he nearly knocked his trunk over. His face drained of colour when he saw Harry and Ron standing there.
"Are you going somewhere, Professor?" Harry asked.
"P-Potter! Weasley!" He fumbled for something on the desk, a photograph of himself, Harry noticed, which he clutched to his chest as though it might protect him. "What are you doing out of bed? It's terribly late. You should be…"
"We know you're running," Harry said flatly. "We heard you."
"Running? Running! No, no, you misunderstand entirely. I'm simply dealing with an urgent matter. Family business. Extremely pressing."
"What about my sister?" Ron asked angrily.
"Well, as to that, most unfortunate," said Lockhart, avoiding their eyes as he looked around the room. "No one regrets it more than I…"
"So you're just going to leave her down there and run," Ron said, disbelief edging into fury.
Lockhart's rehearsed smile vanished, leaving his mouth hanging open as he stared at them.
"Now, boys, let's be reasonable here. Nobody regrets what happened to your sister more than I do, but when I took this post, there was nothing in the job description about facing a lethal underground horror! You must look at it from my perspective."
"You wrote books about this!" Harry said, his voice shaking with furious disgust as he gestured towards the teetering stacks of autobiographies piled against the wall.
"You fought the Werewolf! You banished the Banshee! You told everyone in the Great Hall that you could defeat the monster!"
Lockhart let out a sharp, hysterical laugh that sounded more nervous than amused.
"My dear boy, use your common sense! Would anyone have bought my books if they knew an ugly old Armenian warlock had cured that village instead of me?"
"If they knew some reclusive hag in the Yorkshire Dales had performed the banishing ritual? Good heavens, no! It's an art, really. Hard work, Potter!"
Harry and Ron stared at him in stunned silence.
"So you lied about everything?" Ron choked out, his eyes blazing with rage. "You mean you didn't do any of it. None of it was you."
" You've just been taking credit for what a lot of other people have done?" said Harry incredulously.
"Harry, Harry," said Lockhart, shaking his head impatiently, "it's not nearly as simple as that. There was work involved. I had to track these people down."
"Ask them exactly how they managed to do what they did. Then I had to put a Memory Charm on them so they wouldn't remember doing it."
"Which brings us to our present dilemma," Lockhart said, his nervous smile returning. "I'm afraid I can't have you two ruining my livelihood. It's a dreadful pity, really."
His hand had already found his wand. "I am sorry about this. Truly. It's nothing personal . . ."
"Expelliarmus!" Harry roared.
The spell caught Lockhart mid-motion and threw him backward over his own trunk.
His wand spun end over end into the air; Ron snatched it out of its arc and hurled it straight out the open window without a second thought.
"Learned that one from Snape, if you can believe it," Harry muttered, nudging the fallen trunk out of his path.
His wand remained levelled straight at the man's chest. Lockhart looked up from the floorboards, all the handsome vanity stripped away, feeble and thoroughly terrified.
"What do you want me to do?" Lockhart asked weakly, raising his trembling hands. "I don't know where the Chamber of Secrets is. There's nothing I can possibly do."
"That's fine," Harry said, pulling him up by the collar of his robes. "We know where it is. And we know what's down there."
"We don't know where McGonagall is, and we don't have time to search the dungeons for Snape. You're the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, whether you're a fraud or not. You're coming with us."
They marched Lockhart out of his office and down the nearest stairs, along the dark corridor where the messages shone on the wall, to the door of Moaning Myrtle's bathroom.
They sent Lockhart in first. Harry was pleased to see that he was shaking. The room was dead silent. Even Moaning Myrtle was nowhere to be seen.
Harry and Ron hurried over and checked all the sinks. Lockhart was standing well back, a look of utter terror on his face.
They examined every inch of it, inside and out, including the pipes below. And then Harry saw it: Scratched on the side of one of the copper taps was a tiny snake.
"Harry," said Ron. "Say something. Something in Parseltongue."
He stared hard at the tiny engraving, trying to imagine it was real.
"Open up," he said.
He looked at Ron, who shook his head.
"English," he said.
Harry looked back at the snake, willing himself to believe it was alive. If he moved his head, the lighting in the room made it look as though it were moving.
<Open.>
Except that the words he heard were not what he had said. A strange hissing escaped his mouth, and at once the tap glowed with a brilliant white light and began to spin.
The next second, the sink began to move; the sink, in fact, sank, right out of sight, leaving a large pipe exposed.
Lockhart made a small, strangled noise.
Lockhart peered down into it, and his face turned even paler. "Surely," he said faintly, "there's no need for all of us to . . ."
"After you," Ron said, and shoved him forward.
Lockhart's yelp echoed all the way down as he vanished into the dark.
Ron stared down into the dark opening, his stomach lurching as he tried to see where it led. He swallowed nervously and glanced at Harry.
Harry looked at him for a second before going forward. He took a deep breath, then jumped in.
Ron followed immediately after him.
It was like rushing down an endless, slimy, pitch-black slide. Harry could see smaller pipes branching off in all directions, but none were as large as the one they were travelling through.
Their pipe twisted and turned, sloping steeply downward, and Harry realised they were falling deeper and deeper beneath the school.
Behind him, he could hear Ron thudding slightly against the walls whenever they hit a sharp curve.
And then, just as he had begun to worry about what would happen when he hit the ground, the pipe suddenly levelled out.
Harry shot out of the end with a wet thud, landing on the damp floor of a dark stone tunnel that was large enough for them to stand in.
Lockhart was getting to his feet a little way away, covered in slime and white as a ghost. Harry stood aside as Ron came whizzing out of the pipe and landed heavily on the damp floor.
"We must be miles under the school," said Harry, his voice echoing through the dark tunnel.
"Under the lake, probably," Ron replied, squinting around at the dark, slimy walls.
"Lumos," Harry muttered, and his wandlight bloomed weak and white as it illuminated the dark expanse of the tunnel they were in.
Lockhart made a whimpering noise and pressed himself against the nearest wall as though it might absorb him entirely.
"This way," Harry said, though he had no real idea if it was the right way at all, only that the tunnel sloped downward, deeper into the dark, and there was nowhere else left to go.
Deep in the Chamber, Ethan finally focused his attention on the door as he waited for them to arrive. His charm had been triggered, so he knew that three people had entered the tunnels.
***************************************************