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.

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“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.

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