There’s a bit of recap, and then the new story starts: the Dursleys locked up all his stuff and of course they forgot his birthday. They’re going to have a work dinner and Harry must hide in his room. He received no letters from his friends and he misses them so badly, but wonders if they missed him at all (and he thinks of Malfoy as his archenemy :p)
Harry can’t eat until he has done all his work, in and around the house, and it’s a lot. Then he eats bread and cheese and hurrys to hide in his room for the night.
A weird creature shows up in his room, it’s Dobby the house elf. Dobby is very noisy, his family doesn’t know, and he says that Harry must not go back to Hogwarts because he’ll be in mortal danger. Dobby is the one who hid all the letters from Ron, Hermione and Hagrid! Dobby doesn’t give him the letters and runs out, ruining the dinner pudding, then an owl comes in with a letter and the guests run away because the wife is afraid of birds.
The letter is from the minister for using magic inside, and Vernon reads it. Now he wants to lock him up and never send him to Hogwarts again. Three days go like that, then at night Ron appears outside his window.
Ron was in a car in midair, with Fred and George. They break him out of the locked room, the twins pick the lock of the cupboard to take his stuff, then they fly away. They think Malfoy sent Dobby to stop him from going to school. They go to the Burrow, Ron’s home. Harry loves it. Mrs Weasley is furious with their sons but welcoming to him. Ginny sees him and squeals and runs.
He is welcomed by the whole family. When they need to buy for school, they travel by floo, Harry has never done that of course, and he stutters because of the powder and ends up in Knockturn Alley, a dark shop where enter Mr Malfoy and son. Draco keeps going on and on about the famous Potter and his stupid scar, his dad says he said that many times already, then he says Granger is the teachers favourite because she beat him at grades. Mr Malfoy wants to sell stuff at his house so that it won’t be seen if the ministry check the Manor. Outside, luckily Harry meets Hagrid who helps him to Diagon Alley.
They meet Hermione at the bank, with her parents to exchange muggle money for galleons. Weasley and Harry take money for school, the Weasley’s vault is very poor, Harry’s rich (well, nobody took a single coin in eleven years, while the Weasley took money for a house full of people (nine? there’s mom and dad, then Bill, Charlie, Percy, Fred and George, Ron and Ginny). They go to buy the books for the new year, Lockhart is signing books, he sees Harry and has pictures with him, gives him his books and announces he’ll be the new d.a.d.a. teacher. Then enter the Malfoys and insult Harry and the Weasleys. Mr Weasley and Malfoy fight then Hagrid pulls them apart. Malfoy gives Ginny a book back and goes away, then they all part and go home, Harry with the Weasleys by floo.
A happy month at the Weasleys, then they go to school on Weasley’s modified car, Ginny included because she’s now eleven. At the station, Ron and Harry are left behind but they can’t pass through to the platform, so Ron decides to take the car and fly following the train. They fly above the clouds, checking the train from time to time. They arrive near the lake, then car stops, Ron is driving, he misses the wall and then hit a tree. Ron broke his wand, then the tree starts attacking the car. The car restarts and they drive out of the tree but then the car is fed up with them, ejects them all and their stuff and goes away in the dark. They enter in time for the sorting.
They are commenting on everybody hating Snape when he appears behind them. They are in the Prophet, they were seen by muggles. He wants them expelled, McGonagall is angry, Dumbledore seems disappointed, but they are not expelled, only get detention. All other Gryffindors are cheering for such an entrance :p
At breakfast, Ron gets a howler, his mom is really mad for what they did (although to me it looks quite stupid to shout for everyone to hear how Mr Weasley could get in trouble…) Lockhart thinks he did it to have attention, after a taste of popularity being photographed with him. In Herbology they replanted young mandrakes.
He meets Colin Creevey, a new first year. He wants a picture signed by Harry. Malfoy hears and comes to mock him, then Lockhart arrives and lets him take a picture of Harry WITH Lockhart.
The first dada lesson starts with a test all on himself, Hermione aces it, then he frees some Cornish Pixies in the class and it’s a pandemonium, He tries to round them up again but fails, so cowers under the desk, then goes away leaving the trio to sort them out. Hermione still defends him.
Colin stalkes him, he’s very annoying. Fred and George are beaters, Alicia Spinnet, Katie Bell and Angelina Johnson are the chasers. Wood explains his tactics at dawn, still upset that they lost the quidditch cup last year because Harry was in hospital so they were a player short. Slytherin have a new seeker, Draco, and seven new brooms, the last model. Hermione says he bought his place in the team, and Draco calls her a filthy mudblood. Ron tries to hex him but his broken wand backfires and he thre
ows up slugs.
Hagrid says Lockhart was the only choice for the job, the ONLY because the job is cursed, there are not many for it.
Detention for Harry is to help Lockhart answer his fanmail. Harry hears a voice talking about killing, but Lockhart can’t hear it.
It’s Halloween, Harry and his friends must go to Nick’s death party where the boy meets Myrtle, then they go away and Harry hear the voice again; following it he finds something written on a wall, and Mrs Norris stiffen, hanging from the wall. All the students find them and Filch too, then the professors. Filch is sure it was Harry because he saw a letter about him having trouble with magic, so now he says “he knows I’m a squib” which he didn’t, but now he told Ron and Hermione too… Dumbledore says the cat is not dead but petrified.
Hermione can’t find the book Hogwarts a history because everyone wants to read about the chamber of secrets, so in history of magic she asks professor Binns and insists until he tells them that the four founders started disagreeing on who should be allowed in school because Slytherin didn’t want muggles, and he built this chamber that only his heir could open, but he insists it’s only a myth because many had looked but never found it. Hermione thinks the heir might be Malfoy so she suggests morphing into three Slytherins to go to their common room and ask Malfoy about it, but they need a signed paper to get the book from the library.
The trio asks Lockhart for the signed paper, and he signs without even looking at the book they need, the moste potente potions. It will take a month for Hermione to make the polijuice potion.
It’s the Quidditch game against Slytherin. The bludger keeps turning and heading for Harry. Harry doesn’t want to stop, he wants to win the game, so they go on and the bludger hits him breaking his left arm, but he keeps at it and catches it before crashing. Unfortunately Lockhart wants to help and spells his arm boneless instead of repairing it. He removed the bones. The trio goes to Pomfrey, it’ll be painful. Hermione is still defending Lockhart at this point. That night Dobby appears at his bed, and he realise Dobby sealed the way to the platform to stop him from going to school, and he charmed the bludger too, so that he’d be sent home, injured maybe but not dead…
Colin has been petrified like the cat. Hermione’s potion is now halfway through. The school starts a new duelling club, taught by Lockhart and his assistant Snape… and Snape beats him right away with expelliarmus. Snape partners Potter with Malfoy, Hermione with Bulstrode and Ron with Finnegan.
Bulstrode and Hermione have a fist fight, sort of :p Snape stops the duels then they go again but they should learn how to block, but Malfoy summons a snake. Snape says he’ll get rid of it, but Lockhart moves first and enrages the snake, and Harry shouts at the snake to leave the kids alone. The snake stops.
Hermione and Ron take Harry away while everyone looks at him weirdly. Ron explains that he speaks parseltongue, another language nobody else understands, but Slytherin could as well… so the school will now think he’s the heir. He wonders if he might be… but he’s in Gryffindor… but the hat wanted to put him in Slytherin…
He hears some Hufflepuff saying he is after Justin because he is muggleborn, then Harry finds Justin and the ghost Nick petrified. Ernie keeps accusing him. McGonagall brings harry to Dumbledore.
Alone in the office, Harry wears the sorting hat again. It says again “you would have done well in Slytherin”.
Then the bird catches fire scaring Harry, but it’s a phoenix, died and reborn right away.
Hagrid tries to alibi harry but Dumbledore doesn’t suspect him. He asks if Harry has anything to tell him but Harry doesn’t.
For the holidays, many go home. The potion is ready. Hermione already took a hair of Bulstrode while they were wrestling. Ron takes Crabbe’s and Harry Goyle’s after putting them to sleep with cakes. They don’t know the way to the Slytherin dorm but after 15 min, sort of, Malfoy finds them and they go together. Malfoy badmouthed Mr Weasley and Granger, but doesn’t know who the heir is.
Hermione used cat hair, so they take her to Pomfrey. She stays there for weeks.
Harry and Ron find an empty diary that someone threw at Myrtle.
Lockhart makes valentine’s day decorations, Hermione gave him a card too. Percy and Malfoy there when one of Lockhart dwarves traps him to deliver a singing valentine…
Harry learns to talk to Tom Riddle using the diary. Tom says the last time the chamber was opened he caught the culprit who was suspended. Tom wants to show him his memories. Harry sees another headmaster of Hogwarts, professor Dibbet, then Riddle enters, he wants to stay at Hogwarts during the holidays, not go back to the muggle orphanage, but he can’t because of the recent attack and a girl’s death, so Riddle says, what if it stopped and the culprit was caught? He sees Tom catching Hagrid defending a monster and accuse him. Harry turns back out of the book and tells Ron it was Hagrid.
They know Hagrid’s love for dangerous animals and that he was expelled and the attacks stopped, so they don’t know what to think.
They must chose the subjects for their third year, and Hermione applies for everything.
Riddle’s diary seems to have been stolen from his room. The Quidditch game against Hufflepuff has been cancelled because of another attack, two girls have been petrified, one of them is Hermione, the other is Ravenclaw prefect Penelope.
If the attacks don’t stop, the school will be closed, and Harry will have to go back to the Dursleys, so they take the invisibility cloak and go to Hagrid. Dumbledore and the minister of magic Fudge are there, so the boys hide. Fudge wants to take Hagrid away, then Lucius Malfoy comes with an order of the governors to suspend dumbledore. He accepts but says that at Hogwarts help will always be given to who asks for it (while he’s looking at invisible Harry.)
Hagrid says to follow the spiders, before going with them.
The school is scared without dumbledore, but Malfoy is proud that his father had a part in it.
Lockhart says it’s over now that they took Hagrid away. In a greenhouse, they see spiders and that night Harry and Ron decide to follow them into the forbidden forest. They find the car again, then a spider huge as an elephant, Aragog, Hagrid’s old pet friend, says he attacked nobody, he was never let free around the school, but they blamed Hagrid and expelled him. After speaking, Aragog lets the other spiders on them, but the car comes to the rescue. Once safe outside the forest, the car goes away again. Now they know that it wasn’t Hagrid opening the chamber all those years ago.
Harry realises that the girl that died back then must be Myrtle.
Visiting Hermione in the hospital wing, they see a paper about basilisks in her hands, and she wrote pipes, so they understand a basilisk is moving around.
Ginny Weasley has been taken into the chamber, and Snape, backed by all professors, gives Lockhart the task to get rid of the monster.
Harry and Ron eavesdropped and want to do something, so they go to help Lockhart since they figured out the entrance must be in Myrtle’s bathroom. They go to him but find out that he is about to go away, escape, since the truth is that he stole other wizard’s accomplishments and erased their memories, he never did any of the incredible adventures he wrote about in his books. Now he wants to do the same to them, but Harry go expelliarmus on him.
Speaking parseltongue, Harry opens the passage and they force Lockhart to go with them, but Lockhart fights them, stealing Ron’s wand. He plans to tell everyone he stopped the monster but they lost their mind at the girl’s death, and he tries to obliviate them, but the broken wand backfires and explodes. Harry gets separated and can only go on alone past the giant snake skin.
After a long tunnel, Harry finds Ginny asleep, and a teenage Tom Riddle, a memory preserved in a diary for fifty years. Harry asks him for help. Tom plays with him, and slowly tells him that poor Ginny wrote to him in the diary, pouring her soul to him, making him stronger, until he poured a little of him in her, and basically she did it all, she opened the chamber of secrets, wrote the messages, strangled Hagrid’s roosters, etc, but she didn’t remember any of it, she thought she was going crazy, until she wanted to get rid of the diary and Harry found it. When she saw it, she stole it back. Tom Marvolo Riddle is actually an anagram for : I am lord Voldemort.
He asks Harry how did he survive the greatest wizard, Harry says the greatest is Dumbledore, then a bird appears, dropping something at his feet and stopping at his shoulder, singing. It’s a phoenix. It brought him the sorting hat, and Tom laughs. Tom has his wand.
Riddle set the basilisk on him but the phoenix attacks its eyes. Harry only has the hat so he asks for help and the hat releases a silver sword. He kills the basilisk with it but gets injured by a fang. He takes it out but is dying by its poison. Riddle mocks him and the phoenix cries for him… and it cries on the injury curing him. The phoenix drops the diary at Harry and he hits it with the basilisk fang. Riddle disappears.
Ginny wakes up apologetic, they go back to Ron and a Lockhart who remembers nothing and holding on to phoenix they fly off.
The phoenix leads them to McGonagall. Dumbledore is there, and the Weasley parents. Harry tells them all.
Lucius comes to ask why Dumbledore is back, and Dumbledore says that the governors called him back after hearing that Ginny was dead, and there are rumours of Lucius threatening them to suspend him.
Harry sees that Dobby is his house elf so he runs after him and gives him back the diary and one of his socks and Lucius throws it away in anger, and Dobby takes it. He is now free because there’s a sock in the diary and he says that the master gave him clothes so he is now a free elf, and now he can stop Lucius from hurting Harry!
There’s a feast all night long; Harry and Ron get 200 points each, and win the house cup. Malfoy is sulking, Lucius is no more one of the school governors.
The school year ends; Harry gives them his phone number then they all go home. On the train, Ginny reveals that she saw Percy kissing his girlfriend Penelope, that’s who he was writing to all the previous summer.
