OMAKE: Molly Carpenter of the Astral Clocktower
Molly Carpenter remembered one day during church when she was seven. It was before communion, and while Father Forthill was speaking, she wondered how the original Blood had tasted. She wondered if it had been thick and powerful, and how strong It had echoed…
They said she had passed out in the pews, that her father had run out of the middle of Mass carrying her in his arms. That it had taken her a week to wake up in the hospital, all while her father, her mother, and the siblings she'd had at the time had worried, even the little ones who hadn't really understood what happened. Only that big sister was very sick, so sick she couldn't be home. Even for their limited comprehension, it was the stuff of nightmares.
She had awakened from strange dreams of blood and death to find that, in her sleep, she had unlocked the memories of her past life.
For the rest of the month, she had nightmares.
Such was the inauspicious beginning of the rebirth of Hunter Lady Maria, once of Cainhurst, formerly of the Healing Church.
When the month of nightmares began, she had tried to stifle her screams. After all, to show fear to the creeps that only children could see was to show you were prey, and she was vulnerable while she slept. A handful of salt was in her hand, taken from a small bag at her under her pillow, the contents of which came from the kitchen. The counters against them were strange, counter-intuitive and seemingly nonsensical, but it was what was stated in the awkwardly hand-written tome in her room that she had memories of writing and had given to her brother Daniel for safekeeping, and they were. Her youngest sister Alicia still stayed with their parents, and so she was alone in her room, with only the dark and the memories.
The nightmares were her recollections, familiar memories that had haunted her in her previous life. They were known and familiar, and in the cold light of day they held nothing but regret, guilt and shame.
By night, they gained claws and stalked her as assiduously as any beast. She walked the waters of the fishing hamlet, her Rakuyo in hand, and committed atrocity.
She held it in that first night after she returned from the hospital where they had tended her in her brain fever, even as she woke covered in sweat, feeling phantom injuries and craving blood. She held it in the second night, and the third.
On the seventh night, her screams woke the house, and the strange beasts that lived in her closet and under her bed feasted. The nightmares had grown vivid, and beasts that she had easily struck down memory were, in her nightmare, great and terrible…
She had awoken in her mother's arms, being held tightly while her father systematically checked her room, a bare sword in hand. He'd checked her closet, and even though he didn't see it, never saw it in all the times he'd looked before, the strange beast that dwelled her and whispered darkly at her seemed to shy from the blade, shy from the sharpness of his gaze. So had the beast with the long arms that dwelled under her bed.
Her mother alternated whispering platitudes in between what Mari– what Molly recognized as fragments of prayers beseeching the Great One her family worshipped, formulas repeated in ritual meant to draw the attention and sympathy of the formless, voiceless, omnipresent being. Molly for her part forced her mind to discipline and calm, even as she wished she had blood, or even her old friend…
They took her to the doctor once more, and they used their strange machines and asked her seemingly inane questions, but they could find nothing wrong with her. Nor would they. Her brain fever was passed, and all that ailed her were her own memories.
That night, she had refused offers to sleep in her mother and father's bed. she was a grown woman despite her body, and she was determined to see that she would not be driven from her own bed by her own memories. So her father sat in vigil at her bedside, and her bed was crowded with her two younger brothers and her mother. Little Alicia's cradle had also been moved into her room. For all that her brothers had proud they had gotten their own room and no longer had to share, they had said they would sleep next to Molly so that she would not be alone, to drive nightmares away. Each held a small handful of salt their parents pretended not to notice.
Despite all this, Maria fell asleep to the gentle murmurs of her mother's prayers to the nameless Great one and his Child of Blood…
She woke up to find herself on her father's lap, clutching the grip of his sword just under his hand. In the dim light of her nightlight, the sword, a long, heavy thing, seemed to glow, but she blinked to clear her eyes and it was just a normal steel sword.
"Molly?" he father said softly. "Are you all right?"
She remembered the dream she had woken from, of facing a giant of a beast that towered over her, wielding a spear and trying to swallow her whole. In memory, she had quickened away, before bringing it down to its knees and slaughtering it. In the dream, water had weighed down her feet, and she had been unable to quicken, unable to move fast enough, and it had grabbed her…
"It's nothing, dad," she'd said, chiding herself for silly imaginings. Why was she remembering it all wrong? "It's just a dream."
"That's my line," her father said gently, softly. "What kind of dream was it?"
She saw no reason to lie. After all, it was just a silly dream, for it was based on memories she had chosen to keep secret. "A whale-man monster was trying to swallow me whole. Like Jonah. He picked me up in his hand and was going to put me in his mouth. Then I woke up." She felt her father tense, actually felt the leather of the sword still under her hand move a little as his grip tightened on it. She gave him an admonishing look. "You should sheath that. You will ruin the point, and might be damaging the floor of my room."
He gave her a strange look. "Aren't you frightened? You were crying."
"It was just a dream. They aren't real. The marks on the floor will be," she said, sternly.
She sighed in diminutive exasperation as her father chuckled but actually did reach for the sheath next to him. "I'll put it back in." he said gently, "but you need to let go."
Maria almost did, but paused. She looked at her father intently.
"Well?" her father said, staring at her with too-black eyes that held no whiteness. "What are you waiting for?"
Molly ripped the sword from his hands and swung it–
She woke up to find herself on her father's lap, clutching the grip of his sword just under his hand. In the dim light of her nightlight, the sword, a long, heavy thing. She did not blink but stared at it intently. It was properly sheathed. There was no risk of ruining the point or the floor.
"Molly?" her father said, and she looked at his face intently.
"Are you real?" she asked, and thought her voice sounded childishly undignified.
"I'm real," he said, and there was a ring of truth to it.
Molly nodded gravely and, finding herself still clutching a small handful of salt, flicked some in his face.
He flinched, but carefully wiped it away. "Are you done?"
"Yes father," Molly said seriously and despite the indignity curled up to go back to sleep.
She heard her father humming something as he stroked her hair, her small hand still gripping the sword.
For the rest of the month, memories still plagued her, terrible recollections filled with guilt, atrocity and remorse, but whenever it started to become true nightmare, she had felt a heavy sword in her grip, and she had woken up…
That father was a hunter was a secret he and mother kept. Molly would not have realized without her memories of her previous life, from a world similar yet not like this one. It was in his eyes, his stride, his confidence. Ostensibly, her father was a contractor, which was a mason and carpenter and in general everything one needs to know how to build a house. Yet some days he would leave suddenly, riding off in his pick-up with the sword he favored, and mother would worry, though she would try not to show it.
Molly would try not to worry, and remind herself that her father had a good head for heights and sense and skill and supplies, and was unlikely to fall to beast or dog or poisonous swamp or accidentally rolling off a ledge into a long fall. And he was lucky, which made all those advantages even more potent.
Molly had tried to give him another advantage, trying to buy a gun for him, but the requirements for such were outrageous in this land, and her inquiries had been blocked, for she was merely 9 and considered too young.
"But I wish to help keep father safe," Molly had protested, feeling it unfair her efforts were being rewarded with sternness.
"Guns don't keep people safe," her mother had said. "God will keep father safe."
Always with the belief about the Great One interceding. Molly did not sigh. "That seems needlessly over-reliant," Molly said.
She been given chores as a result. So unfair. But then, the world wasn't fair, mother's claims about a Great One secretly making things fair notwithstanding.
When Molly Carpenter first met Harry Dresden, she had known she was looking upon a hunter. She suspected he was one of father's partners in the hunt. He was younger than father and seemed hotheaded and spoke more than was needed, betraying his relative inexperience. AND he carried a gun. Maria could vaguely make out the outline of it in his coat's pocket. Apparently he didn't think a Great One kept him safe. It was probably why mother didn't like him.
It was only later that Molly learned he considered himself a 'wizard', a knower of eldritch knowledge like the Choir, who conducted his hunts with arcane tools instead of blades.
Molly soon joined her mother's dislike. Father should distance himself from such a lunatic before he started obsessing about 'eyes on the inside'.