The Long Night
Chapter 4: Dark Water
Getting back to Iosefka's clinic took a lot longer than either of them probably expected. The mobs in Cathedral Ward led them astray and had them dodging into alleys as they tried to navigate their way back, while the moon above warped the shadows into queer shapes that seemed to reach for them as they passed.
Eventually, the buildings and streets around them turned into deep woods with skeletal trees shrouded in mist. Lanterns were set up along the trampled pathways through the trees and cast their eerie glow over granite humanoid forms with mouths open in silent screams. As though Medusa had passed through here and left these victims in her wake.
"What the hell are these fucking insect people?" Sirius snarled quietly as the creature they'd been facing finally collapsed to the ground, its spindly arms and legs akimbo. These creatures had human bodies, but their oversized heads were that of a rotting, oversized fly with too many eyes to count.
The made it a few more minutes before another creature appeared behind a tree. Same humanoid body, pale and thin, but when Sirius was a second too slow to move his chair, what looked like a giant snail materialized from the top of his head and attached itself to Sirius scalp. Harry hurled a Cutting Curse at the creature's back and Sirius took advantage of its distraction to turn into his Animagus form and limp away.
"You okay?" Harry asked, dodging the creature's spray of glowing white light. It hit the ground at his feet, eating through the hard-packed soil like acid. Sirius swayed where he stood, one dirty paw over his eyes, and then Harry had to turn away as the creature charged again. With a sharp slash of his wand, he sent it careening into a tree half a yard away. 'Doesn't seem to be getting back up,' Harry thought, wilting a little in pure relief.
"Fuckin' – hurt -" Sirius mumbled, back in human form. When Harry tried to pull his hands from his head, he groaned in pain.
"Let me see," Harry said and when he finally managed to pry Sirius' hands away, his godfather's pupils were so wide the iris seemed to have disappeared. Harry spotted no injuries, but it could easily be something internal. 'And it probably is.'
"Stay here," Harry said, helping Sirius lean against a gnarled tree that should hide him from anything else that might come skulking through the night. A flight of stairs at woods' edge were leading down to where Harry could hear the sound of waves slapping against stone, and he sprinted down the cracked steps with his wand raised preemptively. 'I know I saw -' There. A door. Relatively unharmed, even. And for once not surrounded by any twisted beasts. At the bottom of the stairs was a wide stone platform that reached the edge of the waves he'd heard before. A reflection of the moon glittered in the sea beyond, and Harry caught a glimpse of the horizon. So far away, a straight line unbroken by either other islands or by ships. Like the sea was endless. Maybe in this world, it was.
Harry knocked on the door, listening for voices or inhuman howls. When only silence greeted him, he cast Alohomora on the lock. It clicked open and he was about to take a step in when something screeched behind him. Harry twitched hard at the sound, almost dropping his wand.
"Ascendio!" The spell pushed Harry back over the platform and he landed clumsily on his knees. His gaze jerked to the stone steps and there was Sirius, bent over and clutching his head. Another one of those creatures lay dead at his feet. Sirius' one leg was trembling and the stump twitched wildly. He looked half a breath away from collapsing.
With a spell his godfather had taught him not two hours ago, Harry put him to sleep. 'Goddamn. Merlin. Fuck.' His heart remained in his throat, thumping wildly before settling into an uneasy rhythm.
'This world seems to be affecting him more than me,' Harry thought briefly, unsurely. He levitated Sirius back down and pushed him through opened door.
Like it had been lying in wait, a giant rat leapt out of a shadow. Harry grit his teeth and dropped Sirius where he stood. The rat looked like it was carrying some kind of plague, eyes rolling wildly and froth gathering in the corners of its oversized mouth. It shrieked like a baby in pain when Harry felled it, and that was somehow the worst part. 'This damn wrongness,' he thought vaguely.
Harry glanced over the room quickly. Nothing else leapt out at him and he forced himself to relax a smidge. His head was pounding, and though he hadn't had much opportunity to try alcohol beyond what the Weasley twins had managed to sneak into Gryffindor tower, what he really wanted right now was a drink.
As was usual, the room was dusty and a hundred years out of date. A dirty armchair stood in a corner, and that would have to do for now. "Tergeo." Harry levitated Sirius, sans wheelchair, into the now much less dirty armchair and tried to think. They had to get back to the clinic. Sirius had a spell that showed roughly in what direction they had to move, but Harry didn't know the incantation.
The wind carried cackling laughter in through the closed door and Harry put his head in his hands. Screw getting back to the clinic, if Sirius hadn't been down and out he would have settled for a few hours' worth of peaceful rest. He heard Hermione's voice in the back of his mind, admonishing him about the importance of sleep and rest. 'Imaginary Hermione has a point,' Harry thought as he rubbed his temples. He sat down on a nearby table and stretched out his legs.
Half an hour later, Sirius woke. "My head feels like it's going to explode," he murmured. He looked, if anything, even more in need of rest than Harry felt. Perhaps being spelled to sleep wasn't the same as actually sleeping. "Where are we?"
"Ducked in through a nearby door a while ago," Harry said, combing debris out of his hair with his fingers. "We need to continue up to the right, I think."
Sirius smiled thinly, heaving himself upright in the armchair. "We also need to – not die, preferably."
Harry hesitated for a moment. "Is the leg bothering you?" He tried to be careful, to show some decorum, as Hermione would put it. But Sirius was supposed to have been a great duelist, so he had to ask. "Or… Azkaban really took a toll, didn't it?"
Sirius stilled so suddenly it almost looked like a flinch. Then he relaxed again, but even in the dim light, Harry could tell it wasn't natural. "Yeah. I guess it did." He shrugged gracefully.
Despite the flippant gesture, it was like he'd slammed a door shut in front of the subject and locked it. Harry was not the most observant person, but he wasn't so dense that he couldn't recognize a sore point. Casting about for something else to say, Harry pointed to an old bookshelf. "Looks well-stocked. I'll see if there is any information that may be of use." Not the most elegant of redirections, but Sirius immediately looked less stiff.
It was more ramblings about the Great Ones, which Harry had expected. Sirius needed to rest, but Harry doubted that his godfather would want to hear that right now. And they didn't really have time to wait around much longer. 'All this gloomy blathering about newborns and blessed wombs and moon rituals… I have a feeling Voldemort would have been interested in this world.'
"Anything useful?" Sirius asked a few minutes later. He'd regained a little color and slung his leg over an armrest.
"No, just more talk about rituals and moon phases and communing with Great Ones." Harry snapped the book shut with a thump. Sirius' nose crinkled in a grimace of disgust or disapproval.
"My mother had books on sacrificial moon rites," he muttered. "If she'd been born here she would undoubtedly have worshipped these 'Great Ones'. Anything for power, the Darker the better."
They sat in uneasy silence after that, but for the rattling of the windows when the wind pressed in. Finally Sirius started weaving a spell over his stump, and as Harry watched, the vague outline of a leg appeared in the air under his knee. It was wooden and not exactly a work of art, but as he attached it to the stump, Sirius seemed satisfied.
"Let's move on," said Harry finally, when Sirius didn't seem inclined to elaborate on what he'd just done. Sirius looked up and nodded briskly, looking like he'd briefly forgotten that they had somewhere to be. He was limping, but the wooden leg held his body upright. And it was better than constantly wasting magic on floating a chair around.
They made their way out and continued on along the side of the building, where the stone platform turned into a narrower walkway. The cold air bit at Harry's cheeks and he hitched up his shoulders against the howling wind. Ivy climbed up over the mortar foundation of the massive building to their right and reached for the dirty windows. Iron streetlights cast a flickering orange light over them as they passed, but Harry still had to squint to make out what was coming up ahead. There was a bridge or some kind of deck up above, but no easy way to reach it. More vines hung from beneath the thick stone piers that supported the bridge, trembling in the wind.
"Enemy ahead," Sirius called quietly and Harry stopped looking above to raise his wand against a humanoid creature with an engorged multi-eyed head and extra limbs sprouting from its back. Its jelly-like eyes gleamed pus-yellow and it lashed at them with spindly arms. Sirius put it down with a sharp slash of his wand. Its body twitched violently, tottering backwards and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap.
"There's something more back there," Harry whispered and pointed out a larger silhouette framed in a stone arch half a yard away.
Some kind of long limb lashed out from the stone arch and in its wake a ball of fire ripped through the air, briefly illuminating everything in its path. Sirius dodged left, Harry dodged right and though he still couldn't see exactly what they were fighting, he cast Deprimo in the direction of the thing and preemptively dodged away again.
"It's a scorpion, I think," called Sirius from a few steps ahead, panting. The prosthetic leg stuck out at an angle before he reached down and corrected it. "A scorpion with a damn flower instead of a stinger -"
And tons of teeth. Dirty, sharp teeth set in a vertical mouth along the creature's whole midsection. It leaked a bright fluid that smelled like raw sewage and Harry flicked his wand and catapulted the thing into the wide staircase at the far end of the walkway. It crumbled into itself in a swirl of glittering blue matter that made Harry's head spin. It looked like space, which was a strange thought to have. 'Space and a smattering of stars.' Harry rubbed his forehead, trying to dislodge the sudden vertigo.
A spot of light in the corner of his eye caught his gaze not a moment later. Sirius was bent over it, casting what Harry recognized as diagnostic charms. The thing was close to the water's edge and the spell-light glittered on the waves.
"What's that?"
"I'm not sure."
"I think there was a light like that over a book in the Workshop," Harry said. It was the same kind of flame, small and yellow. But this one didn't sing to him, didn't murmur sweet nothings into his ears and try to squirm inside.
"It's not a curse," Sirius said with a frown. Harry crouched down beside him, the salty wind ruffling his hair and biting his cheeks. "I don't even think it's Dark. But whatever it is, it registers as powerful."
"Let's not leave it here, then," Harry said, glancing out at the water uneasily. He had no doubt this great sea was filled with creatures that could give him nightmares for years to come. He flicked his wand over the flame to seal it in a bubble, but as soon as the spell enveloped it, it disappeared. The image of an opened skull flickered behind Harry's eyelids and he stumbled back. There was a light flowing from where the skull opened, bright and melodious and glittering.
"You alright?" Sirius asked, hand on his shoulder to steady him. "It didn't hurt you?"
"No – I – there was just a sense of – something falling away…" Harry shook his head rapidly. Sirius waved his wand over Harry's head for several minutes, until he was apparently satisfied that he was completely unharmed.
"Well, it doesn't seem to have done anything to hurt you. At least nothing that can be detected with magic," Sirius said, frowning. "Our kind of magic, anyway."
"I feel fine," said Harry, which was only half a lie. A part of him wanted to worry, but a stronger part wanted to get back to the clinic. The night was so long that he'd completely lost track of time. How long had they really been in this strange world? A full twenty-four hours? Forty-eight hours? It could be less than that, or even more. The moon was a static disk in the sky, bright white and gleaming like a polished plate.
The walkway ended abruptly, more bodies strewn about the cracked stone ground at the end of the wide flight of stairs. The black weeds that seemed to grow absolutely everywhere almost tripped him on the way up, nestled more thickly here than he'd seen before.
"There is a gate over there," said Sirius and Harry nodded. The gate was sitting underneath an arch supported by blocky pillars. Vines clustered over the ground at the gate's threshold, climbing laboriously up the leftmost pillar. There was another lever by its side, but before he could pull it, he noticed an open door in the building to the right.
'I'm pretty sure this is all just one enormous building,' Harry thought as he peered into the darkened doorway. Somewhere inside he spotted what looked like the faint outline of a staircase, climbing upwards and curving to the left. There were usually less hostile creatures inside the buildings, at least the ones with closed doors, so it was tempting to veer off into the doorway.
Something moved in there. Coming straight for them. Harry backed up and glanced at his godfather, wand raised again. "Uh, Sirius?"
Her white robes flapped about her feet as she ran. On her head, covering her face, was a black cap with two tips that curled back like ram's horns. It gave the impression of a blindfold, though the lack of visibility didn't seem to bother her at all.
"I see her." Sirius swung his wand back like he was holding a whip. A Blasting curse knocked into the woman and sent her crashing through the darkness and from the sound of it, through a window. "Let's try going up. I want a better view of the area before we continue."
Harry frowned. "There might be more of those people still inside."
"Yeah, but they're not as difficult to deal with as the monsters. Lumos." Sirius stepped in through the door with his wand lit bright as a beacon. Harry stayed on his heels, though privately he thought he'd rather fight the creatures than humans. Killing monsters was one thing, but killing humans… if they were still human, that was to say… There was a sick feeling in his stomach at that idea.
As they entered what appeared to be some kind of enormous library, Harry was struck by the thought that Sirius perhaps thought every person "tainted" by the Dark should be put down. Perhaps that was what his upbringing had taught him. Not sure how to feel about that notion, he waved it away.
As in all buildings they'd entered in Yharnam, there was an atmosphere of desertion in the hall. Dust covered everything and books were strewn all about the floor. Three red leather sofas had been placed awkwardly in the middle of the room. Perhaps, a long time ago, students had been seated for study in those sofas. In various nooks and crannies stood circular shelves packed with collections of big jars. Most were covered, but Harry spotted one that had toppled over. From its mouth, dozens of eyeballs had rolled out over the floor. Silently and on the inside, Harry cringed.
Candles perched on the bookshelves lit the room just enough to give it an unnerving glow. The spiral staircase would have reminded Harry of Hogwarts, if some of the steps hadn't been stained by splotches of dark blood. The staircase towered over them, reaching for some floor up above. The light of Lumos didn't reach all the way up, and so it appeared as though the top of the stairs simply disappeared into darkness.
"Homenum Revelio," Harry murmured, just to be sure. The spell only revealed humans, of course, but it was better than nothing. He waited a moment. Nothing. 'That's something, at least.'
By wordless agreement, they started climbing the stairs. There was such a profound silence in the air that Harry couldn't keep his shoulders from tensing further. It had taken a while to get used to the screaming wind that seemed to reach everywhere out there, knocking on windows and doors and carrying with it nightmarish sounds. But now that he had gotten used to it, the silence felt unnatural. Like a trap.
The second floor was a mezzanine. It had probably been elegant, once upon a time. It was less messy up here, though just as dusty and empty. Heavy ornate bookshelves lined the walls in neat rows, and most of the books were still lining the shelves rather than scattered about the floor. A circular chandelier with a few candles still lit hung from the ceiling and cast light over the floor.
Sirius perused a shelf, pulling out books and single parchments and frowning. "'When the red moon hangs low, the line between man and beast is blurred. And when the Great Ones descend, a womb will be blessed with child,'" he read aloud and the words seem to echo in the room. Or maybe that was just a feeling Harry had, racing up his spine like a premonition.
'If Vicar Amelia was just a beast, what are these Great Ones?'
"There is a ladder over there, I think," said Sirius and pointed over at the other end of the mezzanine. Harry squinted, trying to make out the shape in the dim light and then made a noise of recognition. It was a solid iron thing, reaching up towards a third floor.
He peered around the area. "Wait, there is a door over there..." he said. Three stone steps led up to another set of double-doors on the other end of the mezzanine. Harry pointed his wand at the door and thought, Homenem Revelio.
Sirius frowned. "I still want to get up to the top floor and get an overview of the area outside."
"There is someone on the other side," Harry said, glancing warily at the door. "They're human. And not moving."
Sirius snorted. "That doesn't mean much."
"Maybe not. But maybe it'll be someone who knows this area. Or just a sane person, like Eileen." Harry was trying for a hopeful tone, but even to his own ears he sounded like he doubted the words coming out of his mouth. "It couldn't hurt to have another Hunter as backup?"
"Yeah. But no more side-tracking after this, though." Sirius rubbed his eyes. "I don't like wandering around at random in this damned place." He said 'damned' like he really did mean damned. Cursed, condemned, infernal. It probably was, Harry thought.
Sirius pushed the doors open with one great heave. They opened smoothly and quietly, despite the dust that had gathered over the puckered wooden surface. Cold air, tasting faintly of salt, rushed in and chased away the musty smell of old books.
Harry's eyes caught immediately on the dark sky: up above hung the moon, larger from this angle and pale as winter. It washed the wide stone shelf beyond the threshold in bright light. The shelf, or platform, protruded from the building but ended abruptly in a descending stairway some twenty steps from the doors. It looked like half a bridge to Harry's eyes, or a balcony with an easy exit for the suicidal. There was a drop of tens of meters down to the restless waters somewhere below, and there was no fence around the perimeter of the ledge to keep the unwary from falling.
'I think this is that platform I spotted down below,' Harry thought. It was quieter up here, the air so still that the moment felt suspended in time.
On the right-hand side, precariously close to the edge, somebody was seated in a high-backed chair. They were turned toward the moon, the light bleaching all features from their face this far away. Harry saw an outline of a staff, with a crown that branched out like a small tree, just behind their shoulder.
"Do you see what I see?" Sirius asked quietly, drawing his wand and tilting it forward.
"He – or she – isn't moving," Harry said, though he too had his wand ready. He wasn't optimistic enough to expect anything but a threat.
"Probably just waiting for us to come a little closer."
They crept closer, and there was no reaction from what Harry could now identify as an old man. An old man wearing what looked like a metal blindfold, with a hunk of some dark organic material perched on his head like a hat.
'Is he wearing a dress?' Harry thought inanely before the man came properly into view. The man's clothes reminded him of that frilly robe Ron had gotten from his mother in fourth year. Very decorative, with flowing sleeves and covered by a silver and blue outer robe. Intricate patterns were sewn into the borders. 'That weird hat doesn't fit with the rest of his clothes, but… he looks important. Or at least rich.'
And he'd yet to attack them. Or move at all. If not for the faint rise of his chest, Harry would have mistaken him for a newly made corpse. A corpse with a solid blindfold.
"Hello?" Sirius tried carefully, though he looked on the verge of attacking the man despite his stillness. Perhaps that would have been the better option, but Harry was still sort of relieved that his godfather didn't go straight for the kill.
"Ahh… Aa..." the man wheezed and the faint sound almost made Harry jump. He picked up his long staff and with the crown, he pointed out at the stairway. Or perhaps the water beyond? Or else the moon. He clearly couldn't see where he was pointing.
"Who are you?" Sirius asked, leaning into the old man's space. More wordless wheezing and pointing with the staff. Perhaps he couldn't speak. He didn't seem concerned with their presence, which was a tad strange. Then again, all the people here were at least half-way mad. Most were fully mad, even.
"Who are you?" Sirius asked again, sharper now. When he received no answer, he pointed at the man's chest. For a brief second Harry thought his godfather meant to kill him, even though he had no real cause to. But then: "Legilimens!"
Sirius expression changed from confusion to horror to fear so quickly that Harry didn't have time to react. And then he opened his mouth and screamed.
"Sirius!" Harry knocked the wand out of his hand and Sirius heaved a giant breath, stumbling back and gazing sightlessly into the air. His face was the color of curdled cream.
"Oh – Oh, fuck," Sirius mumbled and sat down heavily on the ground. "Harry? Harry!"
"I'm here, Sirius," Harry said. His godfather looked about himself blearily, too disoriented to notice how close Harry stood.
"They're not trying to summon those Great Ones, they've already succeeded!" Sirius rambled, even as Harry's insides turned to ice. "They've turned humans into those things, those monsters – they want to make themselves into that – they want to make all of us into those things -"
"Sirius, calm down. I'm listening, I believe you, but if you don't calm down one of those creatures might hear you." This didn't look like normal disorientation. Sirius eyes were wild and there was a horrible energy in him suddenly, like he'd been zapped by lightning. 'What was in that old man's mind?' Harry wondered, and shuddered. Sirius had never seemed truly scared before, even when he was weak.
Sirius pressed his hands into his eyes, hard enough that it looked painful. "His name - Willem - his mind is full of – I don't even know what it is. It's like it's in a language I can't decipher, even though I know it's English. He was going to 'ascend' by 'lining his brains with eyes'." Sirius coughed out a breath. "Oh, Merlin. Just touching his mind felt like dipping into a vat of acid."
"Uh, was that literal? The eyes-in-brain thing?" Harry asked, fist clenching around his wand so tightly his knuckles whitened.
"No, I think he was just being flowery. I think Willem meant he was going to commune with them, or do rituals or read … anything but using blood." Sirius shook his head rapidly, looking much like his dog-form. He was straightening, though his face was still deathly pale and his eyes seemed sunken in with fear. His pupils were pinpricks in his irises when he stared up at Harry. "He's afraid of the Old Blood. But he's so rapturously in love with the idea of ascending into some sort of godhood."
"So he's a crazy old coot," Harry said, trying and failing to force some humor into his voice. It wasn't funny. This felt like one of those big, overwhelming things. Like trying to visualize the enormity of the universe, or the span of human history from apelike to homo sapiens. The sort of thoughts that could give you vertigo if you thought too intently about them. 'Not transforming, but ascending into godhood… into monsterhood…' Harry thought, and swallowed hard.
There was the sound of tearing flesh. Harry whipped his head around to see Sirius with his wand raised, and the old man slumped over and dripping a silver liquid into his lap. 'He hadn't even done anything…' What had been inside the old man's brain hadn't scared Sirius, it had terrified him. Harry tried not to think badly of his godfather, he really did. Sirius wouldn't kill a person without good reason.
"He couldn't be allowed to live, Harry," Sirius murmured. He held his wand in a spastic grip, and he was looking out at the dark water. "One of them is down there."
"What?" Harry startled hard. "A Great One?" Suddenly the moonlight seemed like a harsh come-find-me beacon instead of illuminating, and the drop down to the sea, a lot less steep.
"Yes. The Vacuous Spider, Willem thinks of it as." Sirius sounded distant, like his mind was elsewhere.
There was a singing in Harry's head, suddenly. Wordless and welcoming. "Should we go down there?" he asked and then jerked back the moment the words escaped his mouth. He hadn't meant to say that. He'd meant to suggest they run and never look back. "Wait, no. We should probably go -"
Sirius shook his head tightly. "We should destroy it."
"If it's a sort of godlike being, wouldn't that be… kind of impossible?" Harry tried to imagine what a vacuous spider might look like, but anything he pictured did the opposite of setting his mind at ease. A thousand legs, towering over them… 'Ron would have hated it on principle alone.'
"I don't think it's a complete Great One," Sirius continued, though his brow creased with obvious uncertainty. "I think it's one of those that were human once…"
Harry bit the inside of his cheek. "Sirius, I don't think we should be fighting any god-monsters. Not even incomplete, formerly human god-monsters."
"I think we're meant to…" Sirius was staring at the sea again, and there was something unsettling in his eyes.
'Isn't there some old saying about how when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back?' Harry glanced sideways at his godfather. 'What was in the abyss of Willem's mind..?'
Sirius mumbled something Harry couldn't make out and then, like someone had flipped a switched inside him, he took off running. Straight toward the moon and the stairway that led into the open air. Harry flicked a jinx at his feet to trip him, but he'd reacted too slowly. Sirius dove off the edge and into the dark waters below.
Harry would never sit back and watch Sirius die. He shielded himself as best he could and he followed his godfather over the edge. 'To both our deaths,' Harry was quite certain, as the wind whipped about him and the scent of saltwater became overpowering. 'But so be it, then.'
A/N: That took a good while longer than I thought it would, but here you go. Tell me your thoughts!