Chapter Seventy | The Bells, the Bells
By Catherine's side Maria stood, a shiver working over her. Not from the cold of the rundown fishing hamlet they looked over, the chill sea wind making its way between the rotted homes and carving through their armour as if it weren't even there.
She shook from fear, from having to look upon the carnage she had wrought so many years ago.
They had ventured here from the clocktower, and if Catherine turned around she would see it, jutting out of the earth. Impossible. But everything in this place was.
The hamlet was grim, cast in darkness and the soft, trickling light of the red moon above. Barnacles, seaweed, and other things that reeked of brine crept up along the ankles of the buildings and bit at their waist. They snaked into cracks in the sodden wood, lacing up their length as vines would a lattice, and even here they could smell the stench of the sea and something rotting, pungent, beneath it all.
"You don't need to come with me."
"I must. I have to see this through, not only for my own retribution but for His. For all that He has suffered at my own hands."
In the distance a man stumbled and cried, his laments ringing out across the hamlet and shaking the cliff face that looked over it all. "Curse the fiends," he wailed. "Their children too. And their children, forever, true."
On and on he went, rattling a dull lantern before him, matted with seascum.
He was more fish than man, skin wet with oil and the shimmer of scales upon his knuckles. His neck. His clothes were nets, ragged twine and patchy cloth wrapped around him in layers, all limp with saltwater.
And he looked at them, through a face encrusted with gnawing scallops, with mussels that poked their rusty innards out to taste the air. Worms crept along his sodden flesh, squirming from the empty sockets where his eyes should be, and if Catherine looked deeper - past it all - she would see a singular, pulsing mass of eyes hidden deep within.
"Have you seen them?" Maria asked, unable to tear her eyes away from his hideous visage.
"Who?"
"The Hunter. The one who has been following you."
"I know of one. A companion of sorts. He took me here. To you."
"No." She shook her head. "Another. One for whom the bell-maidens toll. Or… perhaps I've muddied my thoughts." Maria chuckled quietly. "I'd spent so long in that room I'd forgotten what a wondrous view it is, to see the moon."
"I'm not particularly keen on the moon."
"No. I can't imagine you would be."
Glancing down at her weapon, Catherine studied it with new eyes. The arm of an infant God, all knuckle and sinew. It shimmered with magic, more a club than hammer, with its thick, twisted knot of blackened bone. Made to crush. To flay, with that hooked finger that listened to her own magic better than the swing of her arm.
"It's hideous."
"Isn't it?"
Maria nodded. "A fearsome visage you wear, with eyes of flame and that gnarled finger, a tool of slaughter. How surprising it is that you're the kindest hunter I have ever met."
"Ah. I'm sure there's someone out there nicer than me," Catherine jibed, smirking at the woman.
With that, they ventured forth, beginning the arduous task of scouring through the hamlet.
Thankfully, or regrettably, Maria still knew the way, even so long after her once and only visit to this wretched place. They slogged through muck and brine, a grim expression on Maria's face as she slaughtered villagers that had already tasted her blade. They were all gruesome things, soaked in the filth of the sea. Encrusted in coral, barnacles, and all manner of shelled creatures. Crabs scuttled across their shoulders, little things that glowed beneath Catherine's eldritch gaze.
But it was the Truth that spoke to her, not that fallow eye.
All the men and women of the hamlet reeked of misery. It clung to them like a second skin, almost that of a stench that she could not claw away. That stench pricked at her mind, at her very soul, and Catherine almost wished to have the chill of Dementors sweep over her in its place.
It drew on anger, drew on fear and hopelessness. A melancholy more thick and all-encompassing than those black-cloaked demons could ever hope to bear. Different, but no less torturous.
A shining thestral accompanied the two on their march, not the doe of her mother that Catherine had grown so familiar with since her third year. It glowed fiercely beneath the waxing moon, its light a bastion in the midst of so much cold, so much terror.
"What is it?" Maria asked. "That creature, I've never seen the likes of it, nor read of it in a fable."
Catherine wrenched her club out of the chest of a sputtering fishman, oily blood pouring across his festering lips.
"A thestral. They come from my world. My home. Magical beasts that only those who've seen death and understood what they witnessed may see." She sighed, lips pinched as she watched it chuff and paw at the ground. "Otherwise, they're invisible. She used to be a doe, you know?"
"What did?"
"My patronus. This spell. She… it makes sense that I've lost her, after all of this."
Looking away from her patronus, Catherine cast her gaze to the centre of the hamlet, a great well poking out of the thin lake that covered the entirety of the village. A hill ran up beyond it, leading towards the sea and where she assumed docks to be, the hamlet proper.
Maria glared at the well, her brow crumpled and knuckles white around the handle of her blade. Even the calming waves of Catherine's patronus did nothing to hinder her grief, evident in the shimmer of her eyes. Tears, ebbing up around the corners of them, yet held stalwart, never to fall.
"Are you alright?"
"Yes. I… I'm fine."
"Maria."
"I cast my blade down there. This," she said, holding up the strange twin-sword she wielded. "Yet it always seems to find me."
"Why?"
Turning to her, Maria shuffled her feet, shoulders squared. "Because of what I had done. I swore never to take up a blade again. Never to fight. Alas, here we stand, my blade in hand - and I wonder if I'll ever allow myself absolution."
"Give yourself ti-"
Never before had Catherine moved so quickly when, suddenly, a hulking beast came screaming out of the shadows. Twelve feet tall and covered in barnacles, swinging a ship's anchor as it rushed them.
"Move!" Catherine roared, leaping forward and pushing Maria out of the way, the woman still lost in her own consternation.
She didn't know if Maria would die permanently at the hands of such a thing, but Catherine refused to find out the hardest way possible.
A shocked gasp was pushed from Maria's lungs as she was knocked a few feet away, the anchor smashing into Catherine's chest and sending her in the opposite direction. Every one of her ribs cracked, her jaw shattered, and she felt more than heard her spine scream in protest as she crashed against one of the rickety shacks.
The wall blew open, Catherine rolling across the ground and soaking herself from head to toe in the filthy water. Pushing herself to her feet, her arms creaked, and Catherine already had a blood vial pouring through the now porous cover of her mask, a quick spell making it all but intangible.
Bright lights shot out of the shadowy pit of the shack, screaming across the surface of the water and exploding as they impacted the legs of the massive creature. It roared in pain when its ankle blew open, its weight far too much for the brittle bone as it snapped in two and its stump dragged across the earth, the water churning around it.
"Maria-!"
Already on the move, the woman jumped with deadly flourish, her blades dancing beneath her as she sailed over the top of the beast and ran them down its spine. Blood spurted along the thin lines, another earth shattering roar breaking the quiet solace they had been left in, looking over the ghosts of Maria's past. It reached around its back to grab Maria, who slashed at its fingers before she'd even touched the ground, steely eyes locked onto its every movement.
Brackish gray splashing around her feet, Catherine rushed towards the thing, claw whipping towards it at lightning speed. Her thoughts dictated its movement, the hooked end curling around its wrist and yanking back, taking its hand and weapon with it. The anchor made a dull clatter as it impacted the ground, punctuated by more bellows of pain.
Curling her arm, another light burst from the tip of her wand, a great spike spiraling towards the creature's throat and burrowing deep. It spun like a top, whirring rapidly as it dug deeper and deeper, a spray of thick blood flung out around it. The beast scrabbled at its throat with its one good arm, Maria already forgotten, until it died - choking and gasping - around the heavy spike half-buried in its windpipe.
Panting, Catherine nodded once at Maria. "You alright?"
"Fine. Those… I'd forgotten about them."
"How do you forget about that?" she asked, eyes wide as she surveyed the beast.
It was a frightful thing, made of thick corded muscle and even more anger. It still twitched, its wide maw full to the brim with teeth, so many that they had twisted its jaw. They poked out of its mouth in every direction, some buried deep, some close to falling out. Not the tidy rows of a shark, but something close to it. A lamprey, almost, if not for the hinged jaw that she knew, were it to bite into her, would cut Catherine clean in half - armour and all.
She thanked the stars that nothing like this existed in her own world, otherwise she and the rest of the contestants would have surely died, screaming, in the second task.
Waving her off, Maria dipped her blade into the water and shook it, the blood sliding away with ease. "It's been a long time. A very, very long time."
"I can't imagine… shall we?"
A grunt, and Maria jerked her head towards the hill. "Up the hill, into the village, and we'll find passage to the caverns below. From there… from there we journey to the cove. That's where we will find Him."
"How far?"
"Not very. This is a hamlet, not a city. And it's… smaller than I remembered."
Beckoned towards the hill, they began the trek upwards, painted in blood. Maria paused after a moment before resuming her march, lips pulled into something questioning.
"You mentioned Gehrman…"
"A frightful man."
"Is that what's become of him?"
"There are few people in this world that I hate with every fiber of my being. He's one of them."
"And a Doll, you said- he made one? Of me?"
An awkward laugh bubbled in Catherine's gut. "Yes. It's odd for me too, looking at you and seeing her."
"You love her."
"Almost. I could, if I let myself."
"Why would you not?"
"I'm a Dreamer, Maria. She is of the Dream. No matter what we have, no matter how much I cherish it…" she sighed, going to brush her fingers through her hair and chuckling at herself when they met the comically wide brim of her hat. "It will end in tears, and I wish to save her from as much heartbreak as I can."
"And yet you're courting her all the same."
"I didn't say I wasn't selfish."
Her only response was a quiet laugh and a shake of the head, Maria patting Catherine once on the shoulder as they carried on.
More of the villagers met them on their path, fetid creatures stinking of rot. The giants, thankfully, were far and few between, and though it took even Catherine and her magic far more time than she thought necessary to puncture their steely hides, they died all the same.
Maria was like quicksilver as she danced around the beasts, there one second and gone the next. Her blade was a whirlwind, more a blur than any tangible thing - unable to be spied even with one good eye and the other tainted by the touch of something greater. As they stepped up the hill, more beasts pouring out of the woods as if an avalanche, Catherine dimly heard the tolling of a bell.
It was quiet, tinkling, a light noise that somehow flew above the focused din of crashing steel and the death knell of some manner of fishman. Her brow furrowed as it echoed, carrying on for far too long, as if the noise itself refused to die. It hung over the two of them as they stood over the few corpses they had sown, Maria's lips pinched together.
"The hunter."
"The one following me?"
"Perhaps," she muttered, not bothering to sheath her blade.
Still, the bell tolled, droning on and on until Catherine thought it might brand itself upon her eardrums and ring forever within her skull. Nervously, she pawed at the handle of her club, scraping it along the dirt and drawing a line through it, some primal part of her wondering if it would ward off whatever would answer the bell's call.
A shriek echoed out from the top of the hill, their heads snapping to face it.
It sounded like a man, not stricken by beast-plague or whatever fel power Kos had wrought within her worshippers - this village Her's, undoubtedly. Someone sane.
"Simon?"
Atop the hill was a shack, dimly lit by torches placed just outside its doors. From those doors walked a man clad in beast-skins, a faint ember flicker lighting upon his shoulders. Horns sprouted from the leathers atop his head, ragged trousers skimming over boots that once were the pinnacle of Yharnam finery, now stripped and scored through with bloodstains.
His entire outfit was oxymoronic, yet in the same motion it was Yharnam distilled. An elaborate suit painted with red and the black furs of a turned cleric thrown overtop.
"Do you know him?" Catherine grunted, rolling her thumb across gnarled bone.
"No."
The man sprang into motion in an instant, throwing himself through the air with a gleeful shout. It was animalism, pure and simple, and Catherine just barely jumped out of the way as he smashed the ground where she had stood with a short mace, wicked in its design and bearing spikes from handle to tip.
"Oh, you've still got your minds then, eh?" the hunter drawled, his voice so alike Simon's that Catherine nearly flinched. "Looking for secrets, are you?"
Not bothering to answer him, Catherine lashed out with her club, only catching air. Maria did the same, her blade barely skimming across his calf and the man looking none worse for wear as he hopped lazily out of the way.
"Who are you?"
"Don't recognize me? I thought you'd know me, little one."
Her wand flashed and his back bowed, leaning out of the way of the sawblade Catherine had conjured with feline grace. His foot hit the dirt and he disappeared the moment after he righted himself, an annoyed grunt echoing in Catherine's throat.
Maria cursed the same, vanishing in a whorl of dust, and the magic in her motion sang out to Catherine.
The same tactic, the same movement, yet this - this was familiar.
It was you they buried beneath the workshop, Catherine realized as she ducked out of the way of the hunter's mace, a furious shout escaping him as Maria slammed her feet into his back.
Magic flooded her veins and the world shifted into startling detail. Her legs flexed, and between one breath and the next Catherine had already leapt at the man and grabbed him by the throat, smashing him into the ground.
As he struck the ground he raised his mace, Catherine and Maria already jumping backwards to avoid his sudden swipe. Nothing met them, instead the man plunged the mace into his chest, the loud crack of ribs bouncing off the craggy hillside. Wrenching the mace from his bloodied guts, he revealed a massive morning star thick with crimson. It clung to the weapon like a second skin, a wicked mass of liquid steel that pulsed with his heartbeat, dripping onto the gravel.
"What is it?" he jibed, lashing out with his weapon, twice as large and twice as dangerous. "Aren't you going to kill me? Beg for my forgiveness? I thought you'd know me, Cat."
"Who are you?" she shouted, wand whipping and sending a barrage of spells his way.
The hunter dodged every one of them, swifter than even her, and Catherine's heart stuttered as she realized that this man put even the Crow of Cainhurst to shame. In the back of her mind Archibald shouted his protest, before returning to his usual maddened mutterings.
Whoever he was, he was quick. Frightfully so.
Maria came in from behind him once more, impaling the man on her blade which he all but shrugged off, wrapping his hand around the edge and punching her in the mouth, tossing Maria towards the hill wall, more a thin ravine that offered the slightest shelter from the seaside winds.
Plucking the blade from his gut he tossed it towards the fallen woman, who scrabbled back to her feet just as Catherine churned the earth beneath the hunter's feet.
He jumped again as the rocks leapt up to swallow him whole, laughing all the while. Catherine met him in the air, knocking aside his morningstar with the flat of her hand, ignoring how it chewed through her armour as if it wasn't even there. Instead she gripped it by its bloodied end, a spike driven through her palm, and plunged her other hand into his gut.
Still, the man laughed, blood flying from his lips as she gripped his heart and squeezed.
His cackles grew wet and Maria looked on as Catherine crushed the man's heart in an instant, the light in his eyes - most of his face hidden behind his beastly cowl - dimming.
"I'll be seeing you and your friend soon," came his taunt, just as the mist swept over his body and carried him away.
Cursing beneath her breath, Catherine cast one hurried glance towards Maria before rushing up the hill towards the shack. Her boots crashed against the gravel, kicking it up behind her with every step. Crashing into the door with her shoulder, she glanced around the dimly lit room, devoid of any furnishing except for the everpresent mildew that sank into every crack in the wood.
A hacking cough at her right caused her to whirl around, a gasp leaving her as Catherine stooped over Simon's bloodied form.
"Shit, shit, you need blood-" she stammered, patting at his torn leathers and trying to find the source of the bleeding.
His wounds were everywhere, it seemed, the man bludgeoned and carved until an inch of death. Catherine could hardly find a spot where he hadn't been bruised, hadn't had a blade dragged along his flesh.
"-Christ, Simon, talk to me."
"It's too late."
"I'm a bloody witch, Simon, just let me-"
He gripped her by the wrist, shaking his head. "No, I- I think it's my time. Don't, please."
Ripping off her mask, Catherine did her best to meet his gaze, his eyes still hidden behind bandages - now dripping red. "You want me to let you die?"
"I've made a botch of things. I've-" he coughed again, spattering his gloves in more blood. "After all my life, this is what I deserve most. To die at my own hands."
"To- you're mad, you've lost blood, let me-"
Simon batted her wand away, still finding enough strength in himself to deny Catherine her efforts. "Enough. Let me- gods, let me speak."
"You're an absolute twit, you know that, right?"
He laughed, glancing past Catherine as Maria pushed her way into the shack, shutting and barring the door behind herself. "If you knew… if you knew, you'd want me dead."
Huffing, Catherine waved her hand. "Even after all that, pushing me to Maria. Now you want to die?"
"I don't want to, no, but…" his breath rattled, and Simon pressed a hand to his chest, wrinkles forming around his nose as he shut his eyes tight. "With you here to fix the mess she made… I believe I might find comfort in it."
"Speak, Simon. I'm tired of riddles."
This time his laughter was uproarious, practically heaving with it, hacking and spitting as he doubled over. It took him a moment to catch his breath, patting dumbly at the floor beside him as Maria and Catherine watched him with furrowed brows.
"Riddles, eh? You'd think you'd know, wouldn't you? Thought you'd catch me in an instant, thought I'd die the moment I set eyes on you."
Trembling, Simon reached up to the gauze that wrapped around his head, plucking at it with feeble hands. "Would you- would you mind giving me a hand?"
Catherine nodded and took hold of the gauze, peeling it away to reveal… a middle aged man with tired eyes, red as the moon above and the blood that still streamed from his wounds.
"Am I supposed to know you? Why are you-"
"Look. Look at me," he rasped, taking her by the hand. Simon stared into her eyes, bags heavy beneath them. "Look at me and tell me what you see."
"What did he say?" came Maria's voice from behind her.
"What?"
"I don't- he's not speaking Yharmit. I don't understand him."
"He's not–?"
Her breath caught, a ragged breath dragged from her lips as she looked into his eyes and saw.
"Good lord."
"Catherine-"
She stuck her hand out, halting Maria. "This can't be possible."
Catherine had seen that face so many years ago. Younger, full of anger, full of contempt. She had seen that face as it stood over the body of Ginny Weasley and taunted her, even as she bled from the fang buried in her forearm and a venom like no other flooded her veins.
"I'm afraid it is," Simon- no, Tom, chuckled, this time in Yharmit, Maria's scowl nearly wiped away at the familiar tongue.
"You, you," she growled, throwing off his hand and pointing her wand in his face. "I should keep you alive. I should torture you for what you've done. Keep you trapped in this hell for all eternity."
"I dare say I w- would deserve such a thing, wouldn't I?"
"How."
"That's… now that's the real question, isn't it? I spent my life running from Yharnam, I imagine. I wouldn't know, I was just a diary, wasn't I?"
"How?"
Breathing heavily, he waved his hand again, head rolling on his shoulders. "The Nightmare's hold was far stronger than I thought, foolish child that I was. I made my first… made myself with-"
"Myrtle Warren."
"Yes… Myrtle. The poor girl."
"Don't… don't speak as if you-"
"What? As if I don't regret it? I don't-" Tom wheezed, choking on his own blood. "As if I don't regret my folly? As if being sent back to Yharnam upon my destruction, I didn't rally against the world itself? I died, Potter, at your hands, only to wake in the world I shattered my very soul to avoid. Do you think me incapable of learning? Unable to better myself when the Gods of our world deigned to show me the sins that I had committed?" His words caught in his throat, a wet gasp escaping him as he hammered at his chest, forcing the blood from his lips. "That- that when unhindered, I would bring our nation to within an inch of ruin?"
"Then you're… the youngest. The first."
"Aye, and- and the one that gave me these…" Tom paused, gesturing weakly at his crippled body. "He's the oldest of us."
"How many more?"
"I've only met the one, but… I've- I've heard of the others, scattered through time we were, but all of us returned here, to Yharnam. To sow ruin and destruction. You've found them all, the horcruxes, haven't you? Even… even him? The one that still lives?"
"No."
For a second Tom looked crestfallen, before he wrapped up his expression in an iron mask. "I still live..."
"Not for long."
"Good. That's good…"
"How is that good for you? Really, Tom. Voldemort. How is that good for you at all?"
His grin was bloodthirsty, more red than white, an animalistic snarl. "I'm the youngest of us. The only one who still remembers that we were human, once upon a time. That we… that we weren't always a monster. I came- I came back here and I learned. I studied. I saw my place in Yharnam and I fought for standing, for a better-"
"That's where I recognize you from," Maria interrupted, her jaw hanging open. "You were with us. Here. One of the scholars."
"I wanted to see where it all began."
"You could have stopped me! Stopped all of us!"
"Time travel is finicky at best, my Lady. I could not have stopped you from butchering Kos the- the same as-"
His words were cut short as Maria plunged her blade into his throat, fire in her eyes and teeth bared. "Enough," she growled, twisting her sword and hissing as Tom only laughed around the steel buried in his trachea. "Quiet!" she roared, dragging the blade out of the side of his neck and watching with rapturous fury as his blood poured onto the shack floor, seeping into the gaps in the wood.
"Maria-"
"No!" She whirled around and threw her sword at the wall, burying it in the wood. "I won't listen to his- to his poison!"
"Maria."
Slowly, she turned to face Catherine, her features cast in stone. "Do not dare to reprimand me."
"I'm not. I…" Catherine laughed hoarsely. "If you hadn't killed him, I would have."
"Why?"
"He's the reason I'm here. He's the reason I'm cursed. Why I'm an orphan, why my life…" Sighing, she shook her head. "My life has not been easy, by any means. Everything that has ever happened to me… every blame lies at his feet."
The crinkle of leather met Catherine's ears as Maria's fingers curled, tightening into fists. "Could he have stopped it?"
Stopped me? Lay the unasked question, grief on her lips and death in her gaze.
"No. No he could not."
"Then… the other? What about him?"
"He'll die at our hands. That, I promise you."
Slowly, Maria inclined her head, plucking her sword from the shack wall with a grunt.
Catherine turned to face the still warm corpse of Tom Marvolo Riddle, eyes glassy and his lips still twisted into a smirk.
"Did you truly redeem yourself?" she asked, her voice solemn. "Or did you just convince yourself that you had?"
Still he stared, and never would he answer. Not as a ghost in her mind, nor as the corpse that lay bloodied against a beam of rotten wood.
Forever would Tom stay silent. Forever would he rot.