Fall into Darkness
Chapter 22: Ascendancy
After the completion of any difficult undertaking, there are mixed emotions. Accomplishment and relief. Sadness and depression. For a while everything was about the work, like an illness that consumed you and changed you. You locked yourself from the world and now you need to recover, learn to live without it. Find a way to crack open the door and let the light back in.
Such odd thoughts to have while going on a run, really.
Bellatrix couldn't shake the feeling that she had forgotten something. Something very important. In fact her entire mind was hazy. The dark witch had gotten forgetful and scatterbrained as of late, she felt. There was that annoying feeling of walking down the stairs and promptly having forgotten why she had done that in the first place. But that had become Bellatrix' entire life now. She'd blink and she'd be somewhere else with no idea how she got there or memory of why she had wanted to go there. It had come to a point that she had lost all awareness of time and all semblance of memory. Thus, she desperately tried to hold on to her routines. Cooking breakfast whenever she was near a stove, packing orders at Sorcerous Sundries, playing the guitar a bit or going on her morning runs. There was… very little else she did in her life, or perhaps she had just forgotten.
A morning run, it was then, as she took in the wonderful sights of Helena, with its blurred misty flat landscape, wispy tendrils of darkness in the distance underneath a faded sun in a lime-green sky. Just like England back home. And so she found herself running. No idea where she had started from and no idea where she was going, but she didn't question it.
She didn't question many things anymore these days.
One blink she was in the forest, another she was in the middle of Helena, running through the city center towards… whatever. She ran past a couple of storefronts. All of them were the same size, had the same things for sale and the same layout inside for some reason. Lots of mannequin stores had opened up recently. Why would so many people be interested in mannequins? Some strange new fad? Well, no originality left to the world these days. She kept running until… until…
Curious. A place called the Oh Deer Diner. That was… odd. Though her mind was full of molasses and cobwebs, she was reasonably sure that the Oh Deer Diner was not located in Helena. Perhaps the owner had started to branch out into a franchise?
Bellatrix didn't know why she was drawn to it so much. It was as if the door was a gaping mouth sucking her in. Why was this odd place so important to her?
Oh… oh yes… she went there with Hermione once.
Wait…
Who the bloody hell was Hermione?
Certainly no one of import, otherwise she would have remembered her.
Truth be told, Bellatrix had trouble remembering her own name these days. Odd name too. Bellatrix. Who named her Bellatrix? What's wrong with Sue? Or Jane? Or Mary? Bellatrix was such a pretentious name, really. Seriously, Sue Black. Nothing wrong with that name at all!
That was what her new name would be! Sue!
She stepped into the Oh Deer Diner. She knew this place. It was familiar, but… wrong, somehow. The first thing she noticed were the people. In fact, these were the first people she had seen in, well, ever. The streets of Helena had been so quiet as of late, after all. Still, they were strange… outlines of people. As if they weren't all there. Sue could swear she could see through them if she looked at them too long.
Everything had a surreal, dreamlike quality. She had a disturbing feeling of deja vu. Rose the waitress greeted her… Ah yes, her niece's new girlfriend.
Wait… did she even have a niece?
Oh, yeah! Sue Tonks. Interesting girl she was.
Rusty was there too. Good to see that his leg had healed. In the distance, that silly old bint Weaver was still peering into the dark. Sue was drawn to the dark corridor like a moth of a flame. She stepped past Rusty and passed two old wizards sat in a booth near the jukebox. "Oh, Bella!" spoke one of the men. "Would you do me a kindness and press C4 on the jukebox? I'd do it myself, but my legs… bad circulation, you see?"
"My name is Sue," said Sue, but still decided to help the old man. Or… did she? All she knew is that she was stood next to the jukebox while a peppy song about putting lime in a coconut played.
"Yes!" Odin started tapping along on the wooden table. "This is my jam! Thanks, Bella!"
"Sue," Sue corrected.
"Goddammit, Odin! You call yourself a fucking rocker?" said the other man.
Sue shrugged and returned to her path, leaving Sue and Sue Anderson to bicker. She walked right past Sue Weaver who spouted some warning about the dark. Well, Sue didn't fear the dark and simply made her way through the darkened corridor to the ladies, her legs moving as if she was wading through water. As she stood in the surprisingly clean ladies room, she ran a hand through her curly mane: she didn't particularly needed to go at the moment, so why was she even here?
Wait.
This is where it happened, where it all started. This is where Hermione was...
Her head started to hurt. Hermione… Suemione… she had to remember who Suemione was. It hurt her head to think.
Sue walked to the sink under the large mirror to splash some water in her face. Perhaps some cold water could help her remember. The moment she approached a mirror, a blinding flash of light shot through it as if someone was shining a lumos on the other side of the glass. A male voice, a concerned one, sounded from the mirror.
"Bellatrix."
She… she knew that voice.
"Zane?" asked Sue, immediately wondering how she knew that name. Zane… sounds a lot like Sue, even.
"Listen to me," said Sue Zane. "Go no deeper. Focus. You're losing yourself. I will try to help the best I can, but it's up to you to get out. Find a better point of contact."
Sue was confused. "Out? Contact? What do the bloody hell do you even mean? Get out of where? Out of what? You're not making any sense, Sue."
"I cannot hear you. Please, you're the one making all this happen. Beware miss…."
A loud ear-piercing unnatural shriek could be heard, loud enough to the enamel off her teeth. She covered her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened then, she saw… herself in the mirror. Usually, seeing yourself in the mirror wouldn't be strange, but she was quite sure that she wasn't wearing a sadistic and demented malicious grin on her face. Ah, whoa, she really needed to start taking better care of her teeth, if only to bury the cliche that Brits had awful smiles.
"And suddenly," spoke the face in the mirror. "Bellatrix Black found herself face to face with… herself…" A loud mocking cackle followed.
At the sight of herself, the dream suddenly became lucid. It was as if Bellatrix had just been dropped to the ground from miles up in the air. Her senses returned, her memories returned, her thoughts and reasoning returned. It was like waking up from a nightmare and sitting up straight in bed, catching one's bearing and realizing which reality was the real one.
The Dark Place. That was where she was. And she was in danger. She'd been looking for a way out, but the Dark Place would not let go of her that easily. Thoughts of Hermione returned: of course she remembered the love of her life. How could she forget? That lovely face with her soulful brown eyes made her smile briefly.
"You will need tools," said Zane as the image of herself was banished from the mirror and replaced by that of the diver. A muggle torch came floating from the mirror for Bellatrix to take. Curious. She had used one before, back at the ranch. She clicked it on and a beam of light appeared. "It's not the light itself, it's what it represents. You will need it."
A wand floated out of the mirror next. "This is not a wand. It is a tool in a logical process of elimination. Be careful. I will try to find a better point of contact."
The mirror's light disappeared, leaving Bellatrix with a torch and a wand in hand. None of this was real. All she saw, all she heard, all of it was part of the Dark Place. It was the interpretation her human mind had made from her alien transformative surroundings. Ideal forms given shape by her flawed perception. Bellatrix was now lucid enough to focus. She knew where she was, but knowing where she was wouldn't fix anything. Something had gone terribly wrong after she had written the end of the story.
The ground shook underneath her feet while a loud rumble almost blasted out her eardrums. Her head felt as if it was about to explode, but she held on to her real self: this place would not claim her mind a second time. Not while she had look for a way out of this mess. A signal. A point of contact. Could Thomas Zane possibly be any more vague?
First order of business was to get out of the diner and out of the dark. With torch in hand, she made her way out of the dark corridor and into the main hall of the diner. As she approached, she immediately noticed two things. First, all the people were gone. Second, beyond the windows she could see it was night time outside. It hadn't been night when she had entered.
Again that familiar cackle sounded as a disembodied voice… her voice… yelled out in glee. "The diner had become deserted. The diner had become deserted. Then the door was smashed off its hinges and Bellatrix Black had to fight for her life!" One last giggle followed until she was met with merciful silence.
"Do I really sound so bloody annoying?" Bellatrix muttered to herself as she strode towards the door leading to the streets beyond. Unfortunately, just as her hand reached for the handle, the sound of splintered wood came up from behind. Bellatrix snapped around and saw the remnants of a once proud door crash to the ground while a large man wreathed in shadows stepped through the newly created opening. In life, this man would have been a firefighter and he was certainly dressed the part judging from his helmet, his unwieldy yellowish jacket, the tank on his back and the rather large axe in his hands.
Great.
By then Bellatrix had become quite adept at fighting these creatures, especially now that she had a wand. It didn't help that the creature was hyper-focused on killing her and not very bright. There was a large counter in the middle of the diner, from which Rose did all her waitress business and it was large enough for Bellatrix to continuously dodge the creature while it kept stubbornly trying to walk around it to get at her.
This was not so much fighting for her life, but trying not to fall asleep.
Eventually, Bellatrix simply dispatched the creature by burning away the dark with the muggle torch and then giving it a quick blast with her wand. Oh, sweet Merlin, it felt so good to have her wand back. As before, the dispatched creature dissolved into nothingness, leaving her stood alone in the darkened diner. Strange… she had fought dozens of these creatures before and while they certainly had a mindless quality to them, the creatures would cooperate, strategize and exploit the situation to their advantage. Bellatrix had been forced to constantly stay on her toes and adjust her own tactics to match that of the creatures.
This particular specimen seemed to be much… dumber than the earlier ones she had encountered.
Two areas of concern came to mind. First, that annoying disembodied voice had accurately predicted she would be attacked. Second, she had to find a 'signal' but had no idea where to even go to look for it.
As she turned back to the door she saw it was gone. All that was left was a single pane of glass beyond which beckoned empty darkened streets. Any attempt to break the glass, ranging from anything from a magical fireball from her wand or a frustrated chair-throw from point-blank range yielded no results. Bellatrix sighed and decided to look for another way out. She found it as she went past the broken door into the kitchen and found the emergency exit. The same route she had taken with Sarah Breaker when the town had been under siege. The moment she opened the door and passed through, she found herself looking at the middle of the forest rather than the expected beer-garden. Thick trees with even thicker underbrush obscured her vision, though there was an inkling of a winding path running through it.
The world had become twisted. These trees didn't belong here. She was still supposed to be in the middle of Bright Falls.
Well, the only way through was forward. Especially since the door she had come through had transformed into a solid concrete wall the moment she'd turned her back to it. Bellatrix followed the path as carefully and silently as she could, torch in one hand and wand in the other. It didn't take her long to figure out there were things in the wood. Many, many things. They chattered sentences once uttered in life, stuck in an endless loop of misery as they stalked the forest as shadows of their former selves. They also sounded uncomfortably close… closing in, even.
She gripped her wand even tighter when she stepped on a twig which snapped teeth-grindingly loud underneath her feet. It was impossible to not have heard that from the distance. Indeed, the voices were getting closer.
"No," sounded own disembodied voice. "That won't do…"
The torch and her wand exploded in her hands, causing Bellatrix to yell out in pain and surprise. The voices in the distance became shouts, attracted to the noise. More sounds. Many feet running.
Bellatrix regarded the painful burns on her hands, but more to the point, this had left her defenseless in the dark. They might be dumber, but that didn't matter if their numbers were overwhelmingly high. There was no way she could take on too many of them in this situation. So she ran. She focused on the path and ran as fast as her legs could carry them. Behind her she head the voices, getting ever closer. As branches whipped against her body, she desperately hoped it would lead to something, some form of salvation. Hope became reality as her thoughts had power in the Dark Place. The ideal form of safety was plucked from the air and before her materialised her salvation: the ranch she shared with Hermione back in Montana. It had no reason to be here, but yet here it was.
Bellatrix ran up the porch, shot through the door, slammed it shut behind her and pushed all the deadbolts. She pressed her back against the door and let magic flow to fortify it. The dark witch had expected the creatures to ram themselves into the door but nothing came. She listened and all was eerily silent. When she dared to look through the small side-windows next to the door, she was nothing but utter darkness outside.
Bellatrix let out a deep sigh of relief before she let some soothing healing magic repair the burns on her hands before she sauntered into the living room beyond. It looked just like she left it, down to the crooked paintings on the wall she had sworn to fix when she'd get back from their vacation at Bright Falls. For the first in the long time, she felt like she could breathe easily. Rather than to plop onto the sofa and have a bit of a kip, she made her way into Hermione's area of the house: the library and workplace. As always, the library was immaculately clean and tidy. Not a book was out of place, not a speck of dust could be found and even the pens on her desk had been lain out meticulously. This is stark contrast to Bellatrix' perpetually messy kitchen or atelier.
Above Hermione's workspace hung a row of diplomas. Her Hermione was always learning something or other in her now chosen field. It had come to a point where Bellatrix had been encouraging her to start a practice from home. It would certainly broaden her horizons to have more patients than just the one.
Good memories flowed back to her. Laughing and talking together in this room, her teasing Hermione by deliberately switching books to the wrong shelves or simply sitting with her to draw or write in her diary as Hermione was curled up in her favourite reading corner.
So the single page lying haphazardly on the floor in the middle of the room was even more out of place.
Curious, the witch picked it up and quickly concluded that it was a page torn from her diary. The handwriting on the page was clearly hers, but it was erratic as if she'd been writing in a hurried panic. The words itself were jumbled to dreamlike fragments. "Reloading frantically, just a stone's throw away from the tent. The bed looked inviting, but it was just the radio. Hermione is the screwdriver. I am the gate. I ran to the house, but it was a giraffe."
Nothing on the page made sense. After she folded up the page to put into her pocket, she could swear she had the faint ringing of a phone. Hermione's phone, in fact. She had one of those annoying muggle popsong ringtones. Some silly lady singing about sweet dreams made of something and travelling the world and the seven seas. The ideal form of a signal was thick in the air and with her mind, she had made it come forth. In her hand formed Hermione's phone. The phone which she had lost when she had been taken to Hartman's lodge where it would have been undoubtedly destroyed with the rest of the building.
Bellatrix smiled. It was a piece of Hermione somehow, so she felt comforted by it. Though Hermione didn't like if whenever Bellatrix fiddled with her phone, especially since Bellatrix had once somehow managed to set the language to Swahili, she did understand the basics. For some reasons, the GPS system was working. Or... was it? Or was her mind making it work.
"Sweet dreams are made of these… who am I to disa…" sounded the phone again. Though startled, Bellatrix slid her finger over the screen. It silenced the damn song and revealed a familiar and comforting voice.
"Bellatrix? Bellatrix!" sounded Zane. "I'm trying to reach you. Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?"
"Yes," said Bellatrix.
"Good, good," said Zane in obvious relief. "You've become lucid enough to exploit the ideal forms. Listen, I can help you, but you are drifting deeper."
"Deeper into what?!" Bellatrix demanded.
Zane remained silent for a moment. "I cannot tell you. You must trust me. If I tell you directly, you will never escape. Not in your current state. Keep doing what you're doing, but you must come to me. Use the ideal forms to your advantage before she gains further control."
"She?"
Silence from Zane. "I've already said too much. Follow the signal."
The phonecall ended rather abruptly and Bellatrix was left staring at the phone. The working phone. It made no sense for the GPS system or even the phone itself to work, not in the darkness. No satellites would reach here. These were alien skies, but they were guiding her towards something. Towards... Zane?
Then, it came to her. This was a world of ideas and subjectivity, of metaphor and transience. Whatever was in her hand had taken form of something her mind could comprehend, which just happened to be Hermione's phone. It made sense in a way: this place was Hermione's, things of Hermione gave her comfort, thoughts of her Hermione brought her contentment.
Hermione. She was out. She was safe. But she had been here, in this Dark Place, for two weeks. This place altered itself to one's thoughts, moods and impressions. And to Hermione's logical mind, this had been a prison, an endless void. Two weeks of screaming in the dark, alone and tortured with no hope of finding a way out on her own. Tears welled up in Bellatrix' eyes as it became clear what the Dark Presence had put her Hermione through. But at least she was free now.
She looked up, to the ceiling, the sky and the imaginary surface of Cauldron Lake above. "I'm coming back, pet. I promise."
More ideal forms were floating around the room and she imagined it was Hermione helping her somehow. One ideal form of defense floated in front of her and she only had to reach out for it. The idea materialized in her hand in the form of a muggle flaregun. She'd hoped for a wand, obviously, but this was something she had used before even if her aim hadn't been all that fantastic. She pocketed the flaregun and sensed more ideal forms back in the living room. On her way there, the world was blasted apart as a massive shockwave passed through her. Her head once again felt as if it was about to explode.
She grit her teeth and steaded herself against the doorframe in an attempt to keep standing despite the hot needles still piercing her brain. It hurt at first to even open her eyes. When she did, the ideal forms she had sensed were gone. As was the front door and most of the living room. Under the circumstances, her safe sanctuary didn't feel so safe anymore. Still staggering somewhat, Bellatrix grunted as she forced herself to keep standing. Beyond the now broken walls, she could see the darkened streets of Bright Falls and the forests and mountains beyond.
Her ranch wasn't in Bright Falls and certainly not opposite to the Oh Deer Diner across the street, that much was certain. The Dark Place had shifted again.
Bellatrix set foot into the cold night. The streets were… wrong, somehow. Cars were left haphazardly abandoned on the road, windows were darkened, streetlights were off and she was completely and utterly alone. Had this been outside of the Dark Place, it would have seemed as if the entire town had been deserted in a hurry. Here, it seemed more by design, as if this was a stage set up for her benefit… or detriment as it turned out.
As she slalomed around the haphazardly abandoned cars, her own disembodied voice sounded again, this time even more unhinged than before. "The entire town turned against Black! Cars thrown! It crushed bone, it tore muscle! Hate! It wanted her dead!"
Bellatrix really started to hate that damn voice. Especially when the cars around her started shaking. Living darkness infected the vehicles, pick-ups and family cars, floats and station-wagons, making them shake and rise up into the air. Bellatrix knew what was coming next and started dashing forward just in time to avoid the first car flinging itself in her direction. It smashed against the wall of a storefront, sending bricks and glass flying from the impact. In the background, she could hear the disembodied voice cackling like a madwoman. By Merlin, how she started to hate the sound of her own voice.
Bellatrix managed to raise a shield of magic just in time to catch a mini rocketing towards her. Yet, the force of the impact was enough to stagger her, costing her precious moments. More cars were rising off the ground, more than she could handle. Even more worrying was the fact that a large petrol-truck was started to shake in the distance. Bellatrix looked frantically for a place of shelter as another car, a station-wagon this time, flung itself towards her and only narrowly missed her because it snagged against a telephone pole, changing its trajectory enough to miss her by a hair.
She found salvation in what looked to be a hardware store. Bellatrix ran inside, threw the door close behind her and ran as far into the store as she could in anticipation of one of the cars flying in through the bloody window. Yet, all was silent outside and Bellatrix allowed herself a moment to breathe a little easier. Examining her surroundings, she had found herself in a store, stacked with anything a hillbilly would love: Guns, ammo, tools and junkfood. It reminded her of some of the stores back in Helena, where Hermione had told her that these kinds of small stores also acted as a sort of social gathering place. Working at Sorcerous Sundries had taught her as much.
Going out into the streets was not an option, but the hardware store did seem to have a back door. The only way through was forward. It was then that the phone rang again. Bellatrix picked up and Zane was immediately talking. "I cannot keep up. You're going too deep!" he replied, a sense of worry and frustration in his voice. "Follow the signal," he stressed again.
"Don't you think I'm trying, Zane?!" Bellatrix hissed back. "You try to make sense of this fucking place! Especially when some complete cunt is tossing bloody muggle cars at you!"
"You're being herded," sounded Zane. "Don't let yourself be tricked. She wants you go to deeper!"
Another shake, another shockwave and another fierce pain throbbing through her skull. The pain was so intense that she dropped to the floor and grasped at her head. When the pain finally subsided, she had the feeling she was recovering from passing out. The phone was no longer ringing and she was again in the now completely silent hardware store.
She…
Zane had mentioned 'She' a couple of times now.
Quickly she grasped the phone and found the signal again. At least she was headed in the right direction. The GPS signal was supposed to guide her to Zane, but the shifts were interfering with it. She had to keep trying. She wouldn't survive alone, that much was clear. With every tremor, where ever she was got more and more hostile towards her. This became evident when she stepped through the back door and found the town to be in utter ruins. The changes were becoming more violent. The streets weren't so much ripped apart as they were missing. The landscape had been broken up by large chasms, parts of the roads were missing with pits without visible bottom carved right through them. Everything seemed to be missing parts. No, not missing... unfinished parts. Half of buildings cut cleanly in half, chasms where a road should be, mountains and forests in the distance which seemed to be flat like billboards.
Everything felt... unstable. Unreal. Off.
Bellatrix raised her phone to see if she was still going in the right direction. She dared to jump over a narrowed chasm to get to the other side of town in hopes of getting a better vantage point. Whatever this fake world was, it had it in for her.
The phone rang again. A now frustrated Bellatrix answered immediately. "I am trying to find you, alright?! But that signal leads nowhere! If I read this right, it's somewhere that doesn't exist."
"The Dark Place is playing tricks on you," said Zane. "You're still going deeper. I'm trying to guide you, but it's hard!"
"That's not what you said last time! Last time you said it was 'She' who was herding me, not the Dark Place itself. What is going on, Zane?! Tell me!"
"I can help you if you just stop sinking!" replied Zane, obviously ignoring the question. "You're deeper than I have ever been and… It's happening again, brace yourself!"
Bellatrix barely had time to brace herself before the shockwave hit her again. Pain racked through her body, her joints and her head, but… it seemed to be less worse than the last one. Though she was still momentarily blinded and deafened, when she opened the eyes the world was unchanged.
"Good, good," said Zane. "You weathered that one far better. I can see you now. Follow the lights."
Apparently, some streetlights were still on. Or… again on? At least the path of light ahead would give her some protection. Still, it was ridiculous. Going deeper? But she felt... different. Like she was being hindered by an unseen force she couldn't fight. All she could do was keep going while reality around her was starting to come apart like a frayed carpet. Another it had taken her a while to notice was that there was absolutely no sound. No wind, no crickets, no rustling of leaves, no dogs barking in the distance, no birds, no cars, not even the sound of water splashing against the docks. The absence of any ambient sounds made her footsteps and her breath deafening by comparison.
With phone in hand, she followed the trail of streetlights through this nonsensical broken world, often jumping over small gorges and climbing over the odd fence. One fence which should have logically led into someone's backyard instead led to a park's children's playground, neatly enclosed by a wooden fence. It was honestly a depressing sight: rusted, rotten playground equipment, a slide which looked about to collapse under its on weight, a big caterpillar-shaped tunnel and some merry-go-rounds which were only good for teaching kids the joy of getting a tetanus jab.
She almost groaned in frustration when she heard that annoying voice again. "The playground! Bellatrix' pathetic memories of being a little girl and crying over why her parents never spent time with her came bubbling to the surface. Then the slide rose up, eager to cave in her head!"
"I wasn't thinking that at all!" Bellatrix protested, but darkness started to wreath the playground rides regardless and, like with the cars earlier, they started to shake and rise off the ground. Great, this was just getting intolerable. Attacked by possessed playground equipment. This was bad comedy. Bad comedy she certainly didn't have patience for. Bellatrix reached into her coat and pulled out the flaregun. In this close confine, she didn't even need to aim. The flare shot into the ground and exploded into light. The possessed equipment screamed their metallic screams and disappeared into nothingness. The state of the playground with only some twisted metal mounting bars left sticking out managed to be somehow even more depressing than before.
She pocketed the flaregun and found a gate in the fence. Said gate led into a parking lot at the edge of town. Beyond the parking lot sprawled endless forest. From this angle, the forest seemed more 'real' than those trees in the distance. Perhaps things were looking up. That was, until she noticed a figure standing on top of a parked van.
"Well, well, well, well!" sounded the annoying voice of herself. In fact, herself was standing on the van, cackling wildly. The woman looked to be ten years younger, clad in the same battle-armour she had warn during the attack on Hogwarts back in 1998. Wild hair, spiteful eyes and a grin revealing rotten teeth. This was the woman she had seen when she'd been with Zane, no doubt. "Good to see that I aged so gracefully in body. Shame I can't say the same about my mind."