Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Miserably back at the Dursleys for the summer, Harry hasn't yet received a single letter from his friends. But he hasn't sent any either, since his Muggle relatives won't let his owl, Hedwig, out to fly, and have kept all his magical books and supplies locked in the cupboard under the stairs. All Harry wants to do is get back to Hogwarts, but one day a house-elf named Dobby appears in his room and warns Harry that he must not return to school. (A house-elf is a magical creature bound to serve a family as a slave, unless that family sets it free by giving it a piece of clothing.) It turns out that Dobby has been intercepting all of Harry's letters from his friends, and when Harry won't promise to stay away from Hogwarts, Dobby gets Harry in trouble with the Dursleys to try and sabotage Harry's chance of returning to school.
Luckily, Ron and his twin brothers Fred and George show up in a flying car to take Harry to the Weasley house for the rest of the summer. The car comes in handy once again when Ron and Harry are mysteriously blocked from entering platform nine and three-quarters; instead they fly to Hogwarts alone. Unluckily, they crash-land into the Whomping Willow and get in major trouble before school even starts. But it's nothing like the trouble that begins when Harry follows a menacing voice no one else can hear to a mysterious message written on the wall: "The Chamber of Secrets Has Been Opened. Enemies of the Heir, Beware." The caretaker Argus Filch's cat, Mrs. Norris, hangs Petrified beneath this message. Professor Dumbledore says the juice from a full-grown Mandrake can cure a Petrified being, but it will take time for the Mandrakes to mature.
Soon the students learn the legend behind the Chamber: Inside it lurks a dangerous creature that only the Heir of Salazar Slytherin (one of the founders of Hogwarts) can control. Worse still, the creature specifically targets witches and wizards who were born to Muggle parents. After a student named Colin Creevey turns up Petrified and Harry involuntarily speaks Parseltongue (the language of snakes, spoken by Salazar Slytherin), most of the school believes Harry to be the Heir — and the person Petrifying everyone else! Meanwhile, Harry, Hermione, and Ron believe the Heir is Draco Malfoy. Working in an unused girls' bathroom haunted by a ghost named Moaning Myrtle, they brew a batch of Polyjuice Potion so Harry and Ron can transform into Slytherins Crabbe and Goyle, slip into the Slytherin common room, and hear what Draco himself has to say about the situation. Disappointingly, all they learn is that Draco is not the Heir, and that when the Chamber was last opened fifty years earlier, a student was attacked by the creature and died.
Shortly after this, Ron and Harry find a diary that belonged to Tom Riddle, a student at Hogwarts fifty years before. It appears blank, but Harry discovers that when he writes in it, the diary writes back! Tom Riddle transports Harry back to his time at Hogwarts, where he sees a confrontation between Tom and a student who turns out to be none other than Hagrid. Hagrid appears to be protecting a creature that Tom says is the cause of the recent student death, and it seems to Harry that Hagrid was the one responsible for opening the Chamber. He is fond of dangerous creatures and it would explain why Hagrid was expelled….
When Hermione is found Petrified with a mirror beside her, Harry decides it is time to use his Invisibility Cloak and sneaks off with Ron to see Hagrid. There, they witness Cornelius Fudge (the Minister of Magic) telling Dumbledore he must send Hagrid to the wizard prison Azkaban. Then Lucius Malfoy, Draco's father, arrives, announcing Dumbledore's suspension as headmaster of Hogwarts. Hagrid's parting words lead Harry and Ron to the Forbidden Forest to meet Aragog, a giant spider. Aragog is the beast Hagrid was protecting fifty years before; he is not, however, the creature hidden in the Chamber, and Hagrid was not the person who opened it.
Just as the Mandrakes are almost ready, Harry and Ron visit Hermione and find a crushed slip of paper in her hand. This tells them that the terrifying creature in the Chamber is a basilisk, also known as the King of Serpents, and that it has been traveling through Hogwarts via the pipes. They conclude the entrance to the Chamber is in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, as she was the student killed by the basilisk fifty years earlier. As they are about to investigate, Ron's younger sister, Ginny, is kidnapped and taken into the Chamber.
When the cowardly Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Gilderoy Lockhart tries to leave Hogwarts rather than rescue Ginny, Ron and Harry force him to accompany them into the Chamber of Secrets. A sudden rockslide separates Harry from the others and he must enter the Chamber alone. There he finds a barely-alive Ginny and the shimmering figure of Tom Riddle. Ginny found Tom's diary before Harry did and wrote all her dreams and fears in it; Tom grew stronger on the emotion she recorded, then possessed her in order to open the Chamber and set the basilisk free. It turns out that Tom Riddle is the 16-year-old Lord Voldemort, preserved in the diary for 50 years! When things look darkest for Harry, Dumbledore's phoenix Fawkes appears, bringing him the Sorting Hat and blinding the basilisk. Harry finds a sword inside the hat and kills the serpent. Finally, he destroys the diary — and Tom Riddle — by plunging one of the basilisk's poisonous fangs deep into the book. The Mandrakes fully grown, Mrs. Norris, Colin, and Hermoine become un-Petrified. The story ends with Harry tricking Dobby's master, Lucius Malfoy, into giving Dobby a sock and therefore setting the house-elf free.
