Book Five, Chapters 98 and 99

Here are Thursday's and Friday's chapters. I thought today's chapter would be the rewards chapter, but it didn't turn out that way. I may rewrite these again, but the gist will be the same.

I will still get the rewards chapter to you ASAP. It's going to be a long one.

*Warning: These chapters do involve nonlethal harm to a minor, but it is not physical or explicit. If you want to skip it, there will be a brief summary in the rewards chapter.

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~Kimberly~

I waited for the storyline to end, but it never did. The needle on the plot cycle said The End, but unlike normal, the needle never reset back to the beginning.

So there I stood, bleeding from my wounds, watching as the sun rose higher.

I was Off-Screen. Everything was Off-Screen.

In my heart, I knew what that meant.

Secret Lore.

When nothing started happening—when Silas never arrived with his red button—all I could do was begin to wander around. That was when I realized, from a distance, that there were no vehicles parked in front of the Manor house. There had been enough vehicles for each of us. I had a convertible, Antoine had a truck, and then there were several others, but none of them were there now.

The fountain, too, was gone. There had been a beautiful water feature of some kind—a statue of a woman—but it was also not there. As I observed that, my eye was drawn to the Manor house itself.

It was beautiful.

It was no longer the decrepit, dying place the teenagers would call haunted. It was new. None of the windows were smashed or boarded up.

With nothing else to do, the only thing I could do was walk toward the Manor. As I did, I began to hear music—but not the type of music I would expect to hear from a Manor like this. Instead, it was a combination of drums and singing in a language I had never heard before.

I stepped closer to the Manor and, determined to end the movie, I opened the door.

The inside of the house was missing.

It wasn't as though it had been stripped or burned out—no. When I opened the front door to the Manor, I was opening a door to another world completely—a world of bright colors and beautiful smells, of people dressed in a way I had never seen anyone dress.

They wore bright colors, brass chains, and jewelry.

There were booths set up, and people trading fish, clothing, and dozens of other different goods, some of which I couldn't even describe. I was in the middle of a bazaar—a magical market from a place unlike anything back on Earth.

As soon as I walked through the doorway, the door disappeared, and it was just me.

The people didn't seem to notice me—not at first. They shopped and told each other jokes, and went about their day. But then I heard a voice, a voice that sounded familiar to me but that I had never physically heard before.

"This is Susan," the voice said, and it took me a moment to realize that the voice wasn't inside my mind—that it was literally right behind me.

I turned, and I saw two young girls, maybe 15 years old. They did not dress in the style of the people of the bazaar. No, they had much more European or American sensibilities—or that was the closest I could compare them to.

One of them—the one who spoke—was smiling at me when I finally locked eyes with her. I knew who she was, even though I had never actually seen a proper picture of her.

It was Clara Woolsey. She had blonde hair, but otherwise, she didn't actually look that much like me. That was all for the storyline.

She smiled.

“This is Susan,” she repeated. “She was my first crush, but I didn’t know that back then.”

Susan talked to her energetically, but I couldn't hear what she was saying—it was muted. I could tell it was the type of talk that all 15-year-old girls were known for throughout time: secrets and dreams and so many exciting things.

"Come on, quick!” Clara said to me again, with Susan not hearing. “We have to go before my mother notices. Father is busy speaking with the sharecroppers about some business deal. Hurry!"

Though she was dressed like she was from 200 years ago, she spoke in a much more modern manner—almost as if she had been reincarnated a lot.

She and Susan began to run through the bazaar, stopping at stalls and trying on scarves and jewelry. No one got in their way. There were guards posted around the bazaar—guards that did not belong to whatever culture or country we were currently in.

This was occupied territory.

The girls ran, laughed, and bought food that looked delicious. It took everything from me to keep up. They were young; they were free in a faraway land. I would have been the same at their age.

They continued to run until they ran out of market to run through and found themselves in a place within the city that I didn't think they should be. But I knew better than to warn them—I was just a passenger in this story.

We were in a place like a cemetery or some type of churchyard from a religion that I could not understand.

As they turned a corner, they stopped suddenly, their eyes locked on something. I walked up behind them to get a better look.

It was the strangest sight I had ever seen, even in Carousel.

Before us was a large stone table of some kind, with a man chained to it, lying down with his arms and legs outspread, facing the heavens.

People were surrounding the man, grabbing onto his arms and legs, holding him still despite how much he struggled and spat and screamed at them in a foreign tongue—in many foreign tongues all at once. Making sounds that no one person should ever be able to make.

His screams sounded like stadiums of people screaming, and sometimes they sounded like a monster's roar.

At the head of the table was an ornately dressed woman who was clearly highly revered from the way that people looked at her.

She was speaking a language I didn't understand, but I could tell she was praying from the way she held her hands on high. She was sprinkling the man with some strange red dust as she said the words.

This was an exorcism, I realized.

She was trying to expel demons or whatever this place called demons.

Somehow, the woman knew that Clara and Susan were there. She turned her head and simply said, "You should not be here, young ones."

And she was right, because the man on the table seemed to notice the girls too. He stared at them, and after that one look, Susan ran, shoving me out of the way.

Clara, though—Clara couldn't take her eyes off the man.

"I had never seen anything like it before," she said to me. "A man possessed. A man going through true suffering. I lived a sheltered life, and that was the first time I had ever seen something so horrifying. But not the last."

The man continued to struggle against his chains and against the people holding him down while screaming profanities into the air.

Somehow, through a great burst of strength, the man managed to get one of his arms free from the chain, breaking it away from the stone table and pointing directly at Clara. He said some arcane words that seemed to travel through the air and wrap around Clara's throat.

She fell back onto the ground.

Out of instinct, I dropped down to try to help her, but the moment I did, all the sounds of the market in the distance disappeared. The sounds of the man on the table with his obscene tongue were gone in an instant.

We were back in the Manor house.

Clara was lying in bed, sickly ill, chunks of her hair missing.

A man stood over her, checking her eyes and skin. Behind him, a man and a woman stood holding each other. On the red wallpaper, they were known as Thomas and Agnes Woolsey—Clara's mother and father.

The man had good news.

"This is far less dangerous than it seems. It is a simple curse, as it were, and a simple herbal remedy is all that is required as a cure."

He took out a notebook and began writing down a list of ingredients. Then he went over to Agnes Woolsey and began describing to her how to administer the herbal treatment.

I still stood next to Clara.

"Father was ashamed," she whispered to me, "of himself, of having brought us to that foreign land. Whenever I was sick, he couldn't stand to look at me. Mother began to treat my curse herself. She became such an attentive mother."

In an instant, the room I was standing in was empty, and I could hear talking out in the main room of the Manor house.

I followed the sound and found a group of high-society women sitting around a large collection of chairs. Clara was among them, seated in a large chair that towered over her. She was washed and dressed in her best clothing, but it was still clear she was under the effects of the curse that possessed man had given her.

"You poor young child," one of the women said. "You are so blessed to have a mother who could take care of you."

"Oh yes," another said. "Most would not be so knowledgeable. My family has long forgotten our traditional remedies."

The women continued to talk until one asked how it was that the curse had been cast upon Clara. Clara stayed silent. She was completely out of it, an empty shell.

"Well," Agnes Woolsey said in a sickly whisper, "one of the local tribeswomen caught her husband staring at Clara and cast a curse upon her."

"Oh goodness!" one of the women said.

The other women reacted similarly, telling Agnes how they would never bring their children to another land, to an uncivilized place like that. Agnes assured them that she had fought against it, but her husband had overruled her—and he never would again.

The women continued to talk and to cast praise upon Agnes for her ability to keep her daughter alive.

Agnes liked that praise—it was so clear.

She reached out to hold Clara's hand, summoning the closest thing to a tear that she could, and confessed to them, "It is a mother’s purpose, after all, isn’t it? To care for her children?"

Suddenly, an image of a woman holding a one-hole punch filled my mind.  I wasn’t sure what that meant. I didn’t have time to give it thought.

Once again, the people in the room disappeared. Instinctually, I ran back into Clara’s room, where I found Thomas, Agnes, and Clara together again.

"I bought you this from overseas. It is a powerful relic—an amulet that is said to have the capacity to contain any curse," Thomas said as he wrapped a silver necklace around Clara’s neck.

She wasn’t an empty shell on this day, so she thanked him and admired her beautiful necklace.

It was a glass vial filled with clear water from the look of it, on a silver chain. Not quite how it looked in the picture. Not quite how it looked when it was worn by Clara’s corpse. There was no silver liquid inside. It was just clear.

"Now," Thomas said, "I trust that this illness will end. Can you promise me that?"

Clara looked at him, confused, but she said that she promised.

Then she turned to me and said, "I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back, I think my father doubted that I was still sick. He thought I was faking it. Maybe that’s what he had to think—that this curse wasn’t continuing to haunt me over a year after I had contracted it. That my poor state of health wasn’t his fault."

As I watched, the glass vial on the necklace—the crystal-clear water—started to darken just a little bit as Clara wore it.

"She will wear the necklace every day until this wretched curse is gone. Is that clear?" Thomas said.

"Yes," Agnes said, clearly bothered by it. "I suppose that when she’s cured of it, we will have you to thank."

"Darling," Thomas said, "I know that it is your healing hands that have kept our daughter from oblivion, but this amulet is said to be very powerful. There’s only one like it. The water inside is from a holy spring. Surely, it will only help in your efforts."

Agnes pursed her lips.

And then things began to get weirder.

I heard speaking in the next room, so I quickly left, but it wasn’t the main hallway like I expected. It was another version of Clara’s room. I had simply walked from one to another.

Inside of the second room, Clara sat staring forward as if she were in a coma.

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’s.

"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 screaming 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.

“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 supposed demonic curse. 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.

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. 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, but I had a little wiggle room. You protected me during the storyline, so I protected you.”

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 the new kind of 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.

“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.

“Yes, it might,” she said. “But I think things are looking up.”

How could she think something like that?

“But there are no happy endings in Carousel,” I said.

She smiled again and hugged me, then started walking away down the street.

“There are no endings at all in Carousel,” she said with a small smile. “Not really.”

She kept walking until I saw where she was headed. There was a tall, black-haired woman down the street waiting for her. When Clara caught up to Serena, they clasped hands.

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.