The creaking of gears and wooden joists was quiet but, in its own way, subtly overwhelming. The central axle slowly rotated, spun by the gentle winds catching the windmill's arms, and the sound was deep. It made me feel small, more so than simply seeing the place did. I could barely see the way out on the other side, and my candle didn't produce nearly enough light to see up the multiple stories into the top of the windmill.
A gentle thud-thud, followed by a sharper one, caused my head to snap to the staircase. It flowed up along the walls, a series of shallow flights and platforms, and descending these stairs was a single huntsman. Clad in a long black duster coat, top hat obscuring my sight of his face in the darkness, he dragged an axe with him – the sharp rap of the head hitting the stairs was the third sound I'd heard, the first two being his leather-clad footsteps.
I snapped the saw spear open for some reach and darted up the stairs to meet him, affording him little room to maneuver. My weapon caught him in the ribs several times in quick succession as I battered him on both sides, though he was surprisingly sure-footed. The blood that sprayed from his wounds was an odd purplish color, and it had a strange coldness to it – not in temperature, but in metaphysical feel. It was as if the blood echoes had been placed in a refrigerator. After another couple of solid strikes (he was shockingly tough), he hunched in on himself and made a desperate noise. Instinctively anticipating another Gascoigne situation, I leapt back and covered close to a dozen steps downward.
On the upside, he didn't turn into a beast like Gascoigne had. On the downside, I had no idea what was happening. His neck bulged and the storm of purple blood made it impossible to tell if his head had exploded or otherwise been launched. Looming from where his head had been was a collection of serpents that stretched themselves out like a giraffe's neck, staring derisively down at me – or as derisively as a snake can manage, I suppose. More snakes dangled from his sleeves, the ones on his right arm wrapping around his axe, and the left-hand ones idly lashing and snapping toward me.
Blood echoes were memories. For the most part, as I understood it, Doll purged the excess of these memories so I could retain my personhood. With as many memories as I'd accumulated, they far exceeded those of my own short life. But many of the physical memories were passed along, to help me master weapons more quickly. I positioned my weight on my back foot, ready to juke back once again, and extended my right arm at full length. The deployed saw spear would serve as my rangefinder.
The snakes began preemptively striking, lashing toward me even before they could reach. I'd hoped that the eager savagery that afflicted the huntsmen would transfer to these creatures infesting his body, and I'd been correct. The snakes' jaws clamped down on empty air, and their bodies couldn't quite reach my hand. I loosened my grip on the spear and flourished it, watching with dark satisfaction as snake heads flew helplessly through the air. The central mass of snakes somehow shrieked and the creature recoiled. I advanced steadily, fearless, spear out in front of me.
The creature (for my own ease of recording, I'll continue referring to this mass of snakes in the guise of a human as a single being) weighed its options for a moment, then stormed forward, using its body weight to carry it down. It spread its arms to ensure I couldn't simply dodge: I lashed upward and caught the thickest snake in the jaw, nearly severing its head, but the thing kept coming. I received several bites, feeling their venom sinking into my body. As it bent in to capture me and do god-only-knows-what to me, I snapped up my left arm from where it had been waiting and unloaded a shot from Evelyn into its chest. The flinch was exactly what I'd awaited, and I drove my claw into its midsection. I could feel a strange sensation, in that the mass within the torso was simultaneously a human body and a mass of snakes. I could dwell on the freakishness of that concept later: I wrenched my claw and tore it open, watching the beast fall back. It shuddered, trying to rise, then collapsed and...melted away. It didn't fade into mist like my greater foes had, but bubbled like frying oil and then dissolved.
I gave a full-body shudder and retrieved an antidote tablet for good measure, popping it with my left hand while I shook out my right. For the first time in a while I let myself feel like a girl. "Ew, ew, ew!" I'd felt the snake bodies squirming around my hand, and simultaneously that had been the man's organs doing that.
If this thing had been lurking on the stairs, perhaps there was something it had been guarding. I headed up the stairs, winding my way around the exterior walls, slowly climbing multiple stories. Eventually my sharpened ears picked up noises. You don't grow up outside the richer section of Brockton Bay without encountering a drug addict at least once. Some of the more "functional" crack addicts would grumble to themselves, an entire diatribe in a caveman language understandable only by them. I heard this same kind of unintelligible drivel along with messy chomping and smacking of lips. It sounded like someone eating fried chicken or ribs off the bone. I focused and found that it was coming from a flight ahead, where washed-out overcast light leaked in through an open doorway. I folded shut the saw spear for close-range fighting.
I emerged out into the cold evening air, looking down from multiple stories up. The grumbling continued, though the smacking was reducing in frequency. Whoever or whatever this was, he was wrapping up his meal. There was theoretically a path upward, though it crossed several external gears whose teeth could crush me. Oh well, nothing ventured… To reach there would involve a number of elevation changes, and I hopped around the staggered rooftops. It was strange, almost as if the windmill had been built from multiple other buildings, but I couldn't see how that was possible considering the interior was purpose-built. I chalked it up to Yharnam weirdness as I leapt down to impale a random wolfman who'd been lurking isolated on another rooftop. The long-necked monster looked up at the last moment and got my spear directly between his eyes. My weight and the momentum from gravity carried us both into the shingles and he died upon impact.
"How did you get here?" I muttered to myself. "And why?" The grumbling was closer. Had this thing really been lured all the way here and gotten lost trying to find human prey? There was a ladder right there: was this creature so far gone that it couldn't figure out how to use it? I climbed the ladder and ended up on a small platform. The grumbling was coming from higher still, but there was no easy path there. Another door led back inside the windmill, so I took it. Crossed to the other side and kept moving, driven by a deep curiosity. Something compelled me to know what was talking to itself. As I made my way, something metallic caught my eye. Everything else out here was wood or ceramic, so the glint of dark steel stood out. I approached and found a sizable cylinder embedded in the wall, as if shoved through the building. I grabbed and pulled, and almost fell off the building when the object finally gave way!
It was thicker than my waist (though not saying much: while I was stronger, I was still worryingly twiggy) and collapsed on itself, but the ridges on it reminded me of a naval cannon. Less like the ornate mortar of down below, but more utilitarian. It had a built-in handle… Good lord, was this a man-portable cannon!? I holstered Evelyn and grabbed the handle, hefting the weapon up. With a little twist of my strong wrist, I felt something shift and click into place: the collapsed barrel extended to full length. Yep, this was the kind of gun that would be deployed from the side of a ship circa the golden age of piracy. Even to my empowered arm, this thing was a moose. Still, if I ran into something big enough...this would certainly make an impression. With a puff of effort I folded it up and tucked it behind me. I don't know how I knew, but somehow the thing caught on a strap of my belt and settled on the small of my back. It took a bit of walking to get used to the weight, but soon enough I could move normally.
This was good, because when I headed back up, the path forward was across the gears, and I didn't relish getting caught and squished. I gingerly hopped upward, using my long legs to take lengthy steps, and eventually came to another rooftop. What I saw there…
A shirtless man in ragged trousers, his head covered in bandages that even obscured his eyes, scrabbled in debris and a thick pool of blood. There were several corpses nearby, most stripped of flesh. The dead body of a man was the most intact, with visible bites taken out of the arms. What I presumed to be a woman was mostly stripped, and the small bones around this man's feet could only have belonged to a child. My fingers tightened around the saw spear until the handle creaked.
The grumbling stopped. The man stood bolt-upright and spun around. "Oh!" His face was oddly well-groomed, in that he had a ragged beard but no mustache – somewhat like an Amish man. "B-blimey, don't scare me like that, on a night like this…" His voice was surprisingly soft and almost demure. "Thank the stars, you're fairly normal. Was it you who put down that awful beast down there?" He nodded in the general direction of the wolfman I'd slain. "Ooh, that thing had me trembling, frozen in my boots...and then you come along. You're a hunter, aren't you?"
It had been my desperation to keep Iosefka safe that had allowed me to play-act to some degree, in addition to the door separating me and her imposter. I had neither of those advantages now. My eyes narrowed behind my goggles, body stiff. "What were you doing here?" My voice was flinty.
His narrow shoulders slumped. The man's body was disturbingly lean, rather like my own. "Th-this place has gone mad. With the door to Yharnam locked, there are only so many safe places, and fewer by the day. A poor beggar, surrounded by monsters, does what he must to survive."
He ate people. From the horrors I'd seen here, the nightmares of Yahar'gul and the blood-slathered village out in the Woods, I could almost have excused him. But he'd eaten the child, focused on it, cleaned its bones. He hadn't stripped the meat from the father, the biggest meal. He'd savored the tender meat, the death of the innocent.
He was faster than any ordinary person had any right to be. I was faster still. I closed the distance and slashed him across the chest even as he tried to juke back. He shrieked, but there was something behind it, a deeper basso. "What!? Have you got a screw loose? Or is it your...animal intuition?" His body hunched in on itself rather like Gascoigne, then there was an eruption of blood and some amniotic fluids. Standing up smoothly, calmly, was a monster.
It towered above me, at least ten feet in height. Covered in shaggy black-blue hair rather like the Darkbeast, it had more in common with the classic Wolfman from the old horror movies than the lupine beasts of Yharnam. The inner arms, its knees, palms, and its chest and belly were hairless and leathery. Disturbingly intelligent eyes blazed red above a mouth of jagged, blunt teeth. Craggy spikes lanced out of its shoulders, back and head – less like the antlers of the bridge monster and Amelia, and more like osteoliths. "It doesn't even matter," the monster rasped, voice thick with saliva and reverberating in its massive barrel chest. "You hunters have even more blood on your hands," he muttered as he lunged. Electricity crackled across its claws, its fur undulated from the static surrounding it. I juked back and cursed the small area upon which I had to fight. It couldn't be more than twenty feet long and barely ten wide. And this thing probably had a wingspan of ten feet. The claws dug into the roof and arced lightning from the impact. "Oh," the creature chuckled as it sniffed the air, "you are a sick puppy. You drink the blood of half the town and now this? And you dare to talk of beasts!? You hunters are the real killers!"
Words left me as I bent my back, holstering Evelyn. I'd need something with more kick. Before I grabbed my new acquisition, I remembered Alfred's flame paper. Almost in a taunt, I held the saw spear out before me and sharply drew the paper across it, igniting the bladed teeth. As I hefted the cannon, the Abhorrent Beast snarled.
The monster fought far more like a person than I was comfortable with. It kept me at a distance with light jabs, then wound up for heavier strikes. Apparently it was hesitant around the cannon, because threatening to draw a bead led to it charging me. I used that to bait its attacks, lunging forward into a baseball slide to hack at its legs. It whirled and caught me in the back, sending me sprawling as electrical burns charred my shoulder blades. A snarling laugh, more enraged than amused, ripped from its throat as it slammed both hands into the floor before it and conjured an electrical tornado.
I stood implacable even as the localized dust devil whipped my hair around me. When the beast strode through the storm, I shot it in the face with the cannon. It staggered but shrugged off the hit and came thundering toward me. I charged to meet it, stretching my leg in front of me as if to slide again. I successfully baited the monster, and it bent forward to catch me: instead, I used my back leg's supernatural strength to launch myself into the air and hacked at its back as I flew over it. I quickly grabbed a molotov and smashed it into the thing, needing to burn it away. I ended up standing on the mother's corpse, crushing its ribcage…
"Die!" the monster screamed as it whirled on me, that blunted human face and all-too-human red eyes glaring out at me from behind the veil of electrically-charged fur. "Die, die!" The lightning grew even more intense, arcing out from its body. A rope of electricity snapped at my coat and I flinched. It rushed me and I was cornered: I shot it in the face with the cannon once again, then in a desperate gambit I launched myself at it and slammed my shoulder into its chest. I'd leapt with enough force that I caused the already-staggered beast to teeter, and I spun to the side to get around it. My saw bit into its arm in a passing slice while I moved to gain distance. "Hunters are killers, nothing less! And you call ME a beast? A beast!? What would you know!?"
I didn't reward the creature with a reply, simply taking a moment to inject myself with a blood vial and reignite my saw. It leapt at me and I rolled past, swapping places yet again. The monster called up another tornado, this time launching it at me. I looped around the whirlwind and met it head-on, saw striking against claw. Its other hand came up just a second faster than I could ready the cannon, shearing through my coat and digging past my ribs. I hit the ground hard, bouncing several times. I coughed up blood and drew Adella's blood vial, injecting myself with the dark blood. "I didn't ask for this…" The creature's words were laced with an undercurrent of sadness, but I had no mercy for it. I could feel the nun's advanced blood working within me, girding me against further damage even as it healed. It made me bold.
My first sound of the fight was a berserker roar that seemed to shake the windmill. I moved faster than before, putting all of my power into bringing down this abomination. We impacted, my saw in its face and its claws in my chest. Then my cannon bellowed into its chest, and the monster fell back. As its claws slid from my chest, Adella's blood closed the wounds.
The beast was not so lucky. It hit the roof with a meaty thud and struggled to rise. "Rancid beasts," it rasped. "Every last one of us…" Its last words sounded human again as it burst into blood and dissolved as my great prey tended to do.
I'd seen many horrors in Yharnam, but this...it was oddly intimate, personal. An evil man, trying to justify his evil even as he preyed on the innocent. I stood before the brutalized family. They didn't have eyelids to close.
I hadn't been religious in a long time. Maybe never. But something like this… I had to hope there was something better. I knelt and prayed for their souls to whatever might be listening.
The moon above, glittering and opalescent, radiated down comforting crystalline light.