The second-floor girls' bathroom.
It was a gloomy, miserable place.
Beneath a big, cracked mirror streaked with stains sat a row of chipped stone sinks. The floor was always damp, and a few candle stubs burned low in their brackets, throwing off just enough light to make everything look creepy.
Each stall door was scratched-up and peeling; one hung crookedly from a single loose hinge.
Curfew had come and gone, so the place was empty.
Except for two very weird voices.
"Someone's here! Oh no, you're gonna get caught. And when they see you, they're totally gonna talk about you behind your back."
Sean recognized Peeves right away. Sure enough, a second later a ghost cautiously poked her head out.
She was a short, plump girl with a gloomy face half-hidden by straight, limp hair and thick, pearlescent glasses. The moment she spotted him, she jerked back inside like a startled ostrich.
Peeves snickered slyly. "He saw you! I bet he's already gossiping! Remember what they all call you?"
"Are you talking about me?"
Myrtle shot out of her stall, sniffling dramatically.
"No, I—" Sean started.
"Don't lie to me!"
Moaning Myrtle was already gasping and crying, tears streaming down her cheeks while Peeves cackled behind her.
"You think I don't know what people say when I'm not around? Fat Myrtle! Ugly Myrtle! Miserable, whiny, mopey Myrtle!"
"You forgot 'pimply,'" Peeves whispered loudly in her ear.
Myrtle let out a heartbroken wail.
Peeves started pelting her with little bits of gravel. "Pimply! Pimply!"
Everything happened fast. Sean just stared quietly at Peeves until that annoying face froze mid-laugh.
"Oh no—it's you—"
Peeves zipped away like a streak of smoke, yelling the whole time, "M'lord! Didn't see you there!"
The bathroom finally went quiet.
Only Moaning Myrtle was left, floating above the tank of one of the toilets, still crying.
Sean didn't say anything. He just waited.
Moaning Myrtle had been the first student Tom ever killed at Hogwarts.
She'd been treated unfairly in life, and even death hadn't given her any peace.
"Peeves won't come back," Sean said once her sobs had quieted a little.
"Maybe… probably… but this is the girls' bathroom. You're not a girl."
Myrtle eyed him suspiciously through her sniffles.
"I came to ask you something," Sean said. "How did you die?"
He knew that question would cheer her up.
Myrtle's whole attitude changed in an instant.
No one had ever asked her something that made her feel so important.
"Oh, it was awful," she said, clearly enjoying herself now. "It happened right here. I died in that stall over there—I remember it perfectly. Olive Hornby had been teasing me about my glasses, saying I looked like a four-eyed dog, so I came in here to cry. I locked the door and everything. Then I heard someone come in. They were saying something funny, in a weird language I didn't understand. What really annoyed me was that it was a boy's voice. So I opened the door to tell him to get out and go to his own bathroom, and then—"
Myrtle puffed out her chest proudly, glowing with the memory.
"I died."
The bathroom fell silent for a minute.
Outside, late-September rain drizzled down from a gray sky—not hard enough to rattle the windows, but steady enough to soak the sleeping castle.
"Who did it?" Sean asked.
"I don't know," Myrtle whispered, like she was telling a delicious secret. "I just remember seeing a pair of great big yellow eyes. My whole body seized up, and then I was… floating away…"
She stared dreamily at Sean.
"Then I came back, of course. I was determined to haunt Olive Hornby. Oh, you should've seen her face when she saw me—she regretted everything. So I let her off the hook… eventually."
She was practically beaming now.
"I know you didn't come here just to chat," she said, a little happier. "Nobody ever wants to talk to a miserable moaning ghost. But you made me feel better. Go ahead—ask whatever you want. I'll tell you."
Sean stayed quiet for a moment.
The centaur professor had been right: the innocent always get hurt first. It's been that way for thousands of years.
"Would it make you happier if the person who did it was found and punished?"
Myrtle looked surprised. "That's your question? Oh… oh… I mean, I only know how to cry. There's no happiness for me here—just sadness. Even now that I'm dead, people won't leave me alone. I just wish they'd stop talking about me behind my back. I have feelings, you know, even if I am dead."
"I'll help," Sean said simply.
"Oh! Oh, wow. I hardly ever meet people like you." She puffed up again, proud and a little flustered. "But you can't stop people's mouths from running! …Hey, what's your name, anyway?"
"Sean Green."
Myrtle clapped both hands over her mouth.
"Wait—you're that Sean Green? Oh my gosh!"
"What?"
"You're famous all over the castle! The house-elves call you 'Sir Knight,' the portraits won't shut up about how wonderful you are, and I've heard plenty of witches talking about you… the nice kind of talking…"
She actually blushed a little.
"I'm happy to help someone like you," she said shyly. "If you're looking for those eyes… they're probably right around there."
She waved vaguely toward the sinks in front of her.
Sean stepped closer and looked. The sink looked perfectly ordinary—until he leaned down and spotted it: a tiny snake etched into the side of one of the taps.
He'd found the entrance.
Now he just needed to find Harry. Unfortunately, Harry hadn't realized yet that he was a Parselmouth.
And it wouldn't be until Harry discovered he could speak Parseltongue that Dumbledore would first suspect he might be a Horcrux.