Book Five, Chapter 98: Clara- Part I

~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 that teenagers would call haunted. It was new. None of the windows were smashed or boarded up.

With no other path clear to me, 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 lively shades of orange and blue, along with 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 a 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 many times.

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.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

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 had instead of 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.