“Myrtle, there aren’t merpeople in there, are there?”

“Oooh, very good,” she said, her thick glasses twinkling, “it took Diggory much longer than that! And that was with her awake too”—Myrtle jerked her head toward the mermaid with an expression of great dislike on her glum face—“giggling and showing off and flashing her fins . . . ”

“That’s it, isn’t it?” said Harry excitedly. “The second task’s to go and find the merpeople in the lake and . . . and . . . ”

But he suddenly realized what he was saying, and he felt the excitement drain out of him as though someone had just pulled a plug in his stomach. He wasn’t a very good swimmer; he’d never had much practice. Dudley had had lessons in his youth, but Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, no doubt hoping that Harry would drown one day, hadn’t bothered to give him any. A couple of lengths of this bath were all very well, but that lake was very large, and very deep . . . and merpeople would surely live right at the bottom . . .

“Myrtle,” Harry said slowly, “how am I supposed to breathe?”

At this, Myrtle’s eyes filled with sudden tears again.

“Tactless!” she muttered, groping in her robes for a handkerchief.

“What’s tactless?” said Harry, bewildered.

“Talking about breathing in front of me!” she said shrilly, and her voice echoed loudly around the bathroom. “When I can’t . . . when I haven’t . . . not for ages . . . ”

She buried her face in her handkerchief and sniffed loudly. Harry remembered how touchy Myrtle had always been about being dead, but none of the other ghosts he knew made such a fuss about it.

“Sorry,” he said impatiently. “I didn’t mean—I just forgot . . . ”

“Oh yes, very easy to forget Myrtle’s dead,” said Myrtle, gulping, looking at him out of swollen eyes. “Nobody missed me even when I was alive. Took them hours and hours to find my body—I know, I was sitting there waiting for them. Olive Hornby came into the bathroom—‘Are you in here again, sulking, Myrtle?’ she said, ‘because Professor Dippet asked me to look for you—’ And then she saw my body . . . ooooh, she didn’t forget it until her dying day, I made sure of that . . . followed her around and reminded her, I did. I remember at her brother’s wedding—”

But Harry wasn’t listening; he was thinking about the merpeople’s song again. “We’ve taken what you’ll sorely miss.” That sounded as though they were going to steal something of his, something he had to get back. What were they going to take?

“—and then, of course, she went to the Ministry of Magic to stop me stalking her, so I had to come back here and live in my toilet.”

“Good,” said Harry vaguely. “Well, I’m a lot further on than I was . . . Shut your eyes again, will you? I’m getting out.”