Chapter Text
The mirror had been covered.
Harriet wasn't sure when that happened.
She turned her eyes from the stained sheet hiding the mirror to the black-garbed doctor kneeling by her bed. She pointedly kept her sight on his face as he plunged a needle, filled with some pinkish substance, into her forearm.
It had been weeks since Harriet's adult children brought her to the grand cathedral, Yharnam's beating heart, for a disease that left her with an ever-weakening body and a struggling breath. She started out in a bed on the ground floor, only to be moved to the upper floors — to a place she had overheard the doctors and nurses call the research hall.
Once a day, at least one or two of her children would visit, but ever since her transferral, she hadn't seen them. According to one of the doctors, anyone not a patient or part of staff was strictly forbidden from entering the upper floors.
"Doctor," Harriet said, after the doctor removed the needle from her arm.
"Yes?" he said, standing.
"I've a terrible pressure in my head," she told him, placing her hand on the top of her head for emphasis. "Like when one lays with their head hanging upside down."
The doctor stared down at the now empty needle in his hands. "That is merely a side effect of the medicine," he said. "It will pass."
Two days passed, and the pressure in Harriet's head persisted.
She knew she shouldn't think ill of the Healing Church, as they were practically miracle workers, but… well… as her stay in the grand cathedral stretched on, she found herself wishing she were anywhere else.
Harriet could hardly get more than a few minutes of sleep at a time, with doctors and nurses checking on her at all hours, and even when she did sleep, it was fraught with dreams all confined to her sickbed. The area immediately around said bed was protected by privacy screens, but they couldn't keep the sounds out. Cries from the other patients, footsteps, the creak of wheelchairs sorely in need of an oiling… inhuman howls from even further above, and the sound of… water, like something was leaking.
"A leak, you say?" her doctor said. "I will have someone look into it."
But the sound only grew, as did the pressure in her head, until it felt as if a whole ocean was churning within the confines of her skull.