Chương 196: Book Five, Chapter 99: Clara- Part II

I heard speaking in the next room, so I quickly left, but I didn't find myself in the main hallway like I expected. It was another version of Clara's room. I had simply walked from one version to another. Inside of the second room, Clara sat staring forward as if she were in a coma with her eyes open. With nothing else to see, I continued moving forward out the other door, and I was yet again inside another version of Clara's room. This time, she had lost a lot of hair and looked terrible.

Agnes stood over her, spooning some strange concoction into her mouth.

"There, there, darling," Agnes said.

"This will make you feel stronger. Mother's love is the best cure." I left the room again, and in the next room, Clara was stronger. She was practically radiating youth and beauty. In the next room, she was sickly again but not comatose. The next room was once again filled with women who cried and applauded as Agnes detailed the level of care she had to give her daughter.

Agnes worked up a tear and told them again it was just a mother's duty—that she came from a long line of healers, truth be told, and that she always intended to pass her craft down to her daughter.

"But I never prayed for these horrible circumstances in which to teach her." In the next room, Clara was lying in bed, and a young woman sat at her side, reading a book to her. The young woman continued to read as Clara looked at me and said, "Mother and Father have always provided me with one of the servant girls to help me when I was sick. I'd gone through half a dozen by this point until, eventually, they picked her."

"You're not even paying attention," the young woman reading said with a smile. And I recognized the woman. It was Serena. Her long black hair, her striking eyes. I was never going to forget that face. Serena reached out a hand and grasped Clara's. Even though neither said anything, I could see that they were in love. They stared at each other as if they were dying to say those words.

Then they disappeared, and I went on to the next room to find Clara alone, painting a picture of the tree that stood outside her window.

"I never knew how I would feel the next day," she said as she saw me.

"Some days, I was as healthy as a normal woman, healthier, even. Other days, it was only my mother's medicine that kept me alive." I heard shouting from the next room, and when I walked through the door, I was yet again in Clara's room. This time, she and Agnes were having an argument.

"You're not making me better!" Clara said. She looked older now, maybe even an adult.

"You must be getting something wrong!"

"Who do you have to thank for being alive right now?" Agnes asked.

"I have been toiling over you incessantly. And this is the thanks I get?" The argument ended as the two disappeared, and I wandered into the next room to see Agnes blowing strange black smoke from an incense burner into Clara's face.

"This will help your treatment," Agnes said.

"Breathe it in." And strangely, Clara did breathe it in without argument. Her eyes were blank, dull, lifeless. In the next room, Clara was comatose again. In the one after that, she was bright and beautiful, doing her studies at a desk. I heard yelling from beyond that, and when I left, I wasn't in Clara's room again. I was in an office of some sort—perhaps it was Thomas'.

"She's going to the Mondale Sanatorium, and that is it!" Thomas yelled at Agnes.

"She needs sea air and a second opinion! She is a woman now and she is losing her best years to this." As soon as they were done speaking, I left the room and found myself walking out onto a vast green field next to the ocean. Clara was there in the distance, sitting under a tree on a picnic blanket. Serena was with her. I walked out to see them. Clara didn't speak to me directly this time.

She and Serena were engaged in a conversation that was muted, like many others—a secret between themselves that wasn't mine to hear. When I closed my eyes and opened them again, I was standing in the main room of the Manor house. Clara was walking through the door, home from the sanatorium, looking radiant and beautiful. Her father greeted her with a sincere hug, running his finger over the silver necklace, which was now filled not with clear water, but with the inky silver that I was used to seeing.

Agnes was not nearly as warm but did greet her daughter. I blinked again, and the room was empty, but I heard screaming outside. I went to the front door and saw Agnes calling for help in the distance. Serena must have heard her from the other side of the house and ran out to greet her, as did many other servants and eventually Thomas himself. I followed along until I was close enough to hear what Agnes was saying.

"She's been bit! One of those vile wolves I told you to have killed bit poor Clara!" she declared. The entire group ran in the direction Agnes pointed. There, we found Clara lying on the ground with a strange mark on her leg. Clara was asleep, having lost the radiant beauty she had attained at the sanatorium.

"Why was she out in the woods?" Serena screamed.

"She wasn't feeling well! Why did you not have me attend to her?" Agnes was having none of it.

"My daughter wanted to go on a walk to regain her health. Is a mother not allowed to assist her daughter on a stroll through the woods?" Serena stared at her, clearly suspicious. But more suspicious than Serena's look was the strange mark on Clara's leg. It wasn't a bite. If anything, it looked like a scratch—like a scratch that was almost completely healed. Agnes looked on with disbelief.

"No, there was a bite," Agnes insisted as she saw the faded wound.

"It was clear teeth marks. A wolf came from nowhere and bit her—took a gash out of her leg." She genuinely looked confused. All I could notice was the necklace—the silver liquid inside the vial. It was bubbling.

"We need to have a doctor called," Agnes said.

"A wolf bite can be dangerous. They say wolf madness can be found in these woods—there was a case just last year." I blinked and found myself back in Clara's room. Another doctor of some sort was standing there, speaking to Agnes and Thomas. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Again, I must say that the risk of exposure to wolf madness is extremely low. The bite has to break the skin in order to spread the disease, and I'm not seeing any piercing here on her leg. In fact, I can't tell where she was wounded at all. Perhaps you're being a bit overcautious because of Clara's medical history." Agnes was still terribly confused and refused to believe what was happening.

"No," she said.

"She has wolf madness. I'm sure of it. I need you to begin a course of treatment, or otherwise instruct me how to do it myself." The doctor looked at Thomas, and Thomas wrapped his wife in a hug and said, "My dear, Clara is in good health. She will recover. She merely had a fainting spell again." Then he continued speaking to her in a muted volume. I blinked again, and it was night. I was alone in the room with Clara when Agnes walked in carrying a lantern and a small book.

She walked right past me after closing the door and immediately grabbed the blankets, ripping them off Clara. Clara started to wake. Agnes then retrieved something from a pouch hidden on her person.

"Go back to sleep," Agnes said before Clara could tell what was happening. And Clara did go back to sleep almost immediately. Agnes held the lantern up to Clara's leg, completely unable to believe that there was no bite mark or gash—or whatever it was that she expected to be there. She took the object she had retrieved—a small cloth wrapped up in a bundle—and unraveled it, revealing a mixture that looked like seeds or spices.

She grabbed a pinch of it, held it over Clara's leg in the exact same spot where she had claimed there was a gash, and started to sprinkle it while chanting strange words. As the dust fell on Clara's leg, a gash began to form—a bite. I peeked over Agnes's shoulder to look at the book she had carried, to see the title of the page she was on. I couldn't read the words—they weren't in English—and Carousel wasn't translating them for me. But there was a drawing on the page. A drawing of a wolf.

As I watched this, a voice I had never heard before began speaking in a way that only I could hear. It was a man's voice. He had some kind of accent I couldn't place, but I could tell he was educated and intelligent. The werewolves of my youth were nothing like the creatures I encounter today. Then, the affliction—what we called wolf fever—was a pitiable illness, akin to leprosy or rabies. Victims suffered unnatural hair growth, feverish aggression, and madness during the full moon.

They were unmistakably human, suffering from a disease, not transforming into monsters. Now, I see something far darker. These modern werewolves abandon humanity entirely, their bodies reshaping into beasts under some unholy law. What caused this evolution? Has the curse itself grown and adapted, or has humanity changed in ways we do not yet understand? I cannot reconcile this shift, and the truth behind it feels more elusive with every passing year.

Yet my thoughts keep returning to Clara Woolsey, whose illness began not as lycanthropy but as a simple demonic jinx. Her symptoms defy explanation—emotional hollowness like the victims of voodoo zombification, an aversion to sunlight reminiscent of hexes from the Black Mountains, and a profound lethargy akin to the physiological rebound observed following the application of potent restorative compounds. These irregularities suggest something far more complex at work.

Rumors abound that Clara was the first of these new wolves, the origin point of this unsettling transformation. If true, her case is more than unique—it is pivotal. I must ascertain the connection between her affliction and the monstrous evolution of lycanthropy. In her story may lie the key to understanding, perhaps even undoing, this terrible curse. The voice stopped speaking. Clara was the first of the modern werewolves. We knew something like that.

"How is this happening?" Agnes cried to the heavens.

"What magic is this?" The wound she had just created on Clara's leg was healing again. Agnes could not believe her eyes. At that moment, she noticed—as I did—that the silver inky liquid inside the glass vial around Clara's neck was bubbling gently.

"That wretched thing," she said under her breath, "I thought its power was long spent." Agnes reached up to the necklace and swiftly yanked it off Clara's neck. That was a huge mistake.

"Come here," a voice called from behind me, and I turned to see the younger Clara standing there in the doorway while the adult Clara lay in the bed. The adult Clara didn't quite look human anymore. She was beginning to look like a werewolf. Agnes took note and screamed. I listened to the younger Clara and followed her out of the room.

"We have to hide from Mother," Clara said. She took me by the hand and ran with me until we were upstairs. She ran further down the hall to the bookcase that I knew slid out to reveal a hidden room.

"Come on," she said. I followed her and helped her move the bookcase out of the way. Inside, there weren't stacks of books like there had been in the storyline. Instead, it was a little girl's playroom filled with dolls and toys.

"Come on, hurry! I don't want my mother to see," young Clara said. I followed her inside, and we closed the bookcase behind us. We sat there in the darkness while roaring and screaming commenced downstairs.

"What's happening?" I asked.

"This is secret lore, right? This is what really happened." Clara didn't answer. She just shushed me. So I waited and waited in the darkness until, in a moment, I wasn't in the darkness anymore. I was back in Clara's room. Much of it had been destroyed, but she was lying back in bed, wearing her necklace again, with her father and mother looking at her in disgust and fear. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I understood enough—they were terrified of her. And then things began to speed up.

Serena broke into her room while Clara was inside alone, alone. She begged Clara to run away with her, but Clara was clearly terrified of herself and told her no, that she was only a danger to Serena. Then Clara turned to me and said, "And that was the moment that changed my world." Because that was the moment Serena grabbed Clara and kissed her. I watched with tears in my eyes. Still, Clara would not go with Serena, though it clearly pained her. She wanted to protect Serena from the wolf.

From there, all I got were flashes: Clara being hauled underground and stuck in a room in full darkness, hardly fighting it at all. Serena, on the next full moon, transforming. After all, we knew she had gotten the curse from a kiss—just as Kirst had tried to curse us with one little prick of werewolf saliva. Serena ran, and if I understood, she ran and didn't return for months. The seasons had changed. She couldn't find Clara. Clara lay still, night after night flashing before me.

I could see her there in her underground chamber, all alone. Serena searched and searched, both as a wolf and as a woman, but she could never discover where Clara had been put. The nights flashed by as Clara went from a beautiful, if cursed, young woman to nothing but the dried-up body I had seen in the fake crypt from the storyline. Clara's body remained lying on the bed in an underground room. Forever. And then it was all over. ~-~ I wasn't at the Manor anymore.

I was standing in front of the diner in southeastern Carousel. People were around. This wasn't the 1980s version—it was the modern one, a more real one that didn't feel so rural or out of the way. There were crowds of people and all kinds of tacky tourist shops lining the streets next to the motel, the diner, and all the other locations I recognized. I was in Carousel proper again, and yet the plot cycle had not reset. Was the secret lore story over?

"Kimberly," a woman called out behind me, and I turned to see her. I recognized her.

"Clara," I said. She was all grown up. She was beautiful and dressed like a normal modern woman.

"What's happening?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said.

"It's over. I was supposed to chase you around as a wolf, but I couldn't really do that since you were technically me, right? Isn't that what you said?" She laughed.

"You said you would protect me during the storyline, so I protected you." I had felt fear during the storyline--her fear--and I had said I would protect her, but that was impossible. I couldn't do anything to help her. I couldn't help myself—I was crying at seeing what she had gone through.

"Your mother cursed you," I said.

"She was the one that kept you sick." Clara nodded.

"She never quite let my curse go away, and sometimes she would add something to it—something to make me more obedient, to make me less emotional, more dependent on her. Sometimes she would go too far and have to heal me—to make me beautiful again, to restore my youth. And then, in the end, when she saw that I was outside of her grasp, she tried to give me wolf fever."

"It was the amulet, wasn't it?" I asked.

"It created a new kind of werewolf. A true werewolf." She smiled, but more to comfort me than anything else.

"The necklace took in all the magic that my mother had used on me, and it combined it into one thing. The wolf fever was the last straw. All the good spells and the bad spells combined and created something new." That was the secret. Why did it matter to the game at Carousel? I had no idea.

"I'm sorry that happened to you. And now that you're here, it's just going to keep happening over and over again," I said. She didn't speak for a while, but she did smile in an odd way, like she knew something I didn't.

"Yes, it might," she said.

"But I think things are looking up." How could she think something like that?

"How? How can anything get better? There are no happy endings in Carousel," I said. She smiled again and hugged me, then started stepping away down the street.

"You're right. There are no happy endings here; you are absolutely right," she said with a small smile as she stared around the street, looking at the people and, the stores, and the sky.

"There are no endings at all in Carousel. Not really." She turned and kept walking until I saw where she was headed. A tall, black-haired woman, Serena, was down the street waiting for her. When Clara caught up to her, they clasped hands. They walked away together, fading into the crowd. At that moment, the plot cycle reset. The story had ended, and I dropped to my knees. I was back in the field by the Manor. It was over.