Book Five, Chapter 77: A Nursery Rhyme

Even with my life on the line, I couldn’t stay in that little room filled with books forever.

I had to get out and stretch my legs. If there were some narrative thread that required me to be around, it almost certainly wouldn’t reach me if I was locked away behind a hidden bookcase.

Truth be told, I wasn’t so certain that my character was innate to the story. I might not even really have my own subplots the way that Kimberly and Antoine certainly did. I had checked the little film canisters I had been given for clues and came up empty.

That’s what it meant to be a Film Buff, though. I was a meta character, which meant that I was forever a side dish, never the entrée. But supposedly, in this story, anyone could be the main character.

So, who knew?

At the point that I finally found my way down the stairs into the basement to get another look at the caverns beneath the Manor—in case they ever came into play—I was confident that I was not going to be central.

After all, most of the research I had done seemed to revolve around secret lore or otherwise hidden history, which was not going to come up unless we found the trigger. And in truth, even if we did, it might be better for us not to pull it.

The only storyline we had done with secret lore had been butchered by it, and we really needed this storyline to go off without a hitch—and to score high points.

I made my way down to the dank caverns beneath the Manor with nothing but a Lantern and a small pea shooter I had picked up. There was really no use in me having a big gun when I didn’t have a big Mettle stat to go with it.

Sure, I could hit anything I aimed at because of my high Hustle, but the damage was going to be pretty similar no matter what gun I used.

Carousel always had its tricks to make sure that you played your role and lived with your choices, including your choice of where to apply your stat tickets.

The smell hit me again before I could even see Logan and Avery in their cages. As I walked into the clearing where they lay in their cots behind iron bars, I realized that I was not the only person there.

Egan Kirst himself sat in a chair next to a table in the room. He sat, and he stared at his son.

We were Off-Screen.

I wondered if he was just waiting for a Player to show up and run through a dialogue tree or something, or if perhaps he was here of his own volition, for his own purposes.

He wouldn’t tell me, even if I asked.

Whatever the case, as soon as I made it a few steps into the room, I went On-Screen. So, we were going to have our conversation—whatever it may be—in character.

Truthfully, his character was a glorified plot device, so I didn’t expect him to know a whole lot.

He had largely served his purpose, and as far as I knew, the only thing left for him to do was buy stuff if we asked him to. We had already run through a list of things that we wanted—things like grenades with bits of silver in them, or at least the supplies to make them. We wanted tranquilizer darts and everything we might need to set up traps.

His servant, the Butler—whose name I constantly forgot—was able to supply us with those things within a day—maybe less.

“I hope your research into the history of this manor has been fruitful,” Kirst said with a stern but melancholy tone.

“Surprisingly so,” I said. “I think we may have rediscovered a powerful weapon against werewolves.”

Kirst nodded but did not look excited. “How long until it is operational?”

“We’re putting all of our resources into it right now,” I said. Then, on a whim, I asked, “Have you, by any chance, heard of the term rolling silver?”

Kirst thought for a moment and then shook his head. “I’m afraid I haven’t.”

Somewhere, dice had just rolled, and I came up short.

“Supposedly, it has a powerful impact on any werewolf nearby. There’s a bit of a language barrier between us and the author of the text I’m reading, but once we overcome that, we should be able to have quite an effective weapon at our disposal.”

“Wonderful,” Kirst said.

The man was going through some depression. It was as if the performance he had put on for us had drained him, and now all that was left was for him to wait.

“In your research, did you learn anything about this Manor or the people that owned it?” I asked.

He took a deep breath.

“The Withers family,” Kirst said, “died out just over a hundred years ago. The house has been abandoned since until the town purchased it. I bought it directly from them. Supposedly, Witherhold Manor was plagued by werewolves for many, many years, and it is the setting for all sorts of campfire tales.”

His face was doing the acting. His heart wasn’t in it.

“I’m actually interested in one of those tales,” I said. “There’s an inscription on the fountain out front. It sounds like an epitaph for a child—a young woman or girl. Can you tell me anything about that?”

I was really pushing it. I didn’t know how much footage Carousel had of the fountain out front or of me reading it, but I felt it only logical that I would have this knowledge after snooping around the place long enough.

Kirst must have sensed that I was pushing boundaries because he gave me a look that didn’t belong to his character. A look that told me to be careful.

“Rumors only,” he said. “The young Clara Withers. A nursery rhyme. I barely remember it. I thought it was inconsequential, but it was in the information packet that I managed to acquire from various oral historians. I had no idea it might be useful. But then, I am dabbling in a field far out of my expertise.”

Clara Withers. Before Carousel, her name had been Clara Woolsey. I understood why Carousel had swapped it out. The Woolsey Manor didn’t have the same spooky vibes. Carousel had done the same thing to the Halles and probably the Geists.

“A nursery rhyme?” I asked. “Do you happen to remember it or still have the information on you?”

“No need for that,” Kirst said. “The poem is written on the back of the painting in the small dining room we ate in. You can go see it for yourself.”

“I will,” I said.

I kept my eyes on Logan and Avery, who were seemingly wasting away in their cages for reasons that hadn’t been established in the lore. Newly transformed werewolves were often quite energetic and erratic.

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“Are these two sedated?” I asked.

“No,” Kirst said. “Though most of the tunnels are collapsed now, they were originally dug for the safety of the Withers family. They lined the walls with silver powder. Imagine that.”

“Of course they did,” I said. “Werewolves are nose-blind to silver.”

“That is what I understand,” he said.

It was strange. You would think it would be the other way around—that werewolves would be intimately aware of any silver nearby. But that wasn’t the case when it came to their sense of smell.

So he kept his kid and his kid’s girlfriend down here to keep them safe from the wolves—or to weaken them in case the worst scenario occurred. Either way, Kirst was shaping up to be a largely pragmatic man by some definition.

Not long after we got to that point in the conversation, we went Off-Screen.

I decided to do a quick walk around of the remaining tunnels. Kirst was right. Most of them had caved in, and those that didn’t went in loops or led to dead ends or safe rooms.

I did learn an important lesson. Always explore the tunnels.

Actually, no. Most of the time, tunnels are dangerous. Never explore strange tunnels.

Except when you are fairly certain you will be safe.

When I was searching an empty stone room at the end of a long tunnel, I found something. I had gone On-Screen off and on long enough to establish I was snooping around. That told me there might be something down here.

I had my gun out, ready to bop a werewolf, but I didn’t find one.

Instead, I found a place where a wall was crumbling.

On-Screen.

“Not just silver powder,” I said.

Where the wall had fallen, several different items had been sealed in the wall. Silver platters, cups, and forks all closed up to keep the werewolves at bay. Talk about loot.

Those trinkets weren’t what concerned me.

It was the item in the mess that had a trope attached that I cared about.

I reached down into the pile of stone, mortar, and silver works and pulled out a large pure silver serving spoon.

The trope was called “Selective Sharpness,” and it had a remarkable effect. It prevented users from cutting themselves when wielding a bladed weapon and helped them perceive sharp objects on the red wallpaper.

And it was attached to a large, heavy spoon.

I stared at it for too long and remembered I was On-Screen.

“What in the world?” I whispered to myself.

I stared along the tunnels and saw that the walls were all lined with the same stone as the fallen wall. Had they covered the whole place with silverware and goblets? Just to hide their scent?

I smacked the spoon against my hand a few times to show its weight and possibly justify taking it out of the basement.

After I rounded the first corner, I was Off-Screen.

On my way back out, Kirst was still there, watching his son—or at least watching Logan, who was pretending to be his son.

Since we were Off-Screen, I decided to ask him a question just because it couldn’t hurt.

“Are you meta-aware?” I asked.

Dr. Halle had been, though I didn’t know if he was able to talk to me because we were off-screen or because we were both officially dead in the storyline we met.

Whatever the case, Kirst shot me a glance like he was not going to put up with my nonsense but otherwise didn’t respond.

I’d say he was meta-aware. If he weren’t, he would have responded in character.

From my conversation with Kirst, I learned some important things. I learned that the ill-fated daughter of the clan who built this Manor was indeed part of the story and not just part of secret lore.

I hated that I had to untangle things like that.

It was strange to think that before we discovered secret lore, the information that didn’t show up On-Screen would have been dismissed as fictional filler. Now, we knew the truth, but that didn’t do us much good until we could sort it out.

My next stop was the dining room, where we had been tricked and gassed. That was where the painting of young Clara Withers was. When I burst through the door, I was surprised to find that she had an admirer—an admirer who just happened to look a lot like her.

We were Off-Screen.

I didn’t even want to talk about the painting first; I had another pressing question.

“What did you find in the tree?” I asked as soon as I recognized her.

She had the answer slung over her shoulder: it was a camera bag or something similar, old leather, worn.

“Is that it?” I asked before she had a chance to answer my first question.

“This is it,” she said. “Wait, so you heard that entire conversation?”

“I heard the whole thing,” I said.

It was my first time using Quiet on Set, and while the trope didn’t work super well for anything that didn’t involve my fellow Players, it provided very clear and easy-to-understand audio from when my teammates were On-Screen.

She took the bag, set it on the table, and started opening it up. Inside was a camera and pictures.

“That’s what I thought you guys were talking about,” I said. “So this Sarah woman… she was staring at you?”

Kimberly took the pictures and showed them to me one at a time. This woman, Sarah, seemed to have an obsession with Kimberly, even back in her teenage years.

At that moment, Kimberly looked like she was about to say something—and I’m sure she was—because before she could, we went On-Screen. Carousel wanted to keep us on our toes.

Kimberly was pretty good on her toes.

I thumbed through the pictures and said, “So, you’re thinking that this woman might have been a werewolf already when you were attacked?”

“Am I overreacting?” she asked. “Isn’t it a huge coincidence that this person just happened to survive a werewolf attack? And in these pictures, she looks like she is very interested… and not in a friendly way.”

I thumbed through the pictures again. It was my job to push back on Kimberly’s theory so that she could fight for it in front of the audience.

“I don’t know. I think maybe she has a crush. Did you think of that?” I asked.

“Maybe… It’s just, I just have this feeling,” Kimberly said, “that maybe there was a reason I survived. If she was a werewolf, maybe that’s the reason. Maybe she didn’t want me killed.”

“Come on, Kimberly. I know your story. You think I didn’t come across it in my research for my documentary? If a werewolf was interested in you romantically, the first thing she’d want to do is kill you. She’d eat your heart and liver and cross her claws that you would come back to life and roam the wilderness forever with her.”

“I know how it sounds,” she said, “but I can’t think of any reason that they would have spared me.”

There was a moment of silence as I pretended to perceive the desperation in Kimberly’s voice, and Kimberly became withdrawn and thoughtful.

“Well, I can think of another reason,” I said, pointing to the painting on the wall. “Have you noticed that you happen to be the spitting image of the ill-fated Clara Withers?”

She looked back at the painting.

“I did notice,” Kimberly said. “How does that fit into this? Do you think the werewolf knew this woman, whoever she was? They do live a long time.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My grandma always believed that people had lived lives before their current lives—reincarnation, something like that. But then my grandma was also very suspicious of squirrels, so take that with a grain of salt.”

I couldn’t waste a scene where we were On-Screen, so I moved toward the painting and grabbed it. It was larger than the original Omen had been, but it was still small enough for me to handle with one hand. I held it out in front of me and then looked from the painting to Kimberly and back to the painting.

“I don’t know. Maybe Grandma was on to something,” I said. “Then again, all blondes do look a little alike.”

“Hush,” Kimberly said. She grabbed the painting from me. “Look at this.”

She turned the painting around and set it down on the table, picture side down. As promised, there was a cross-stitched piece of fabric attached to the back of the painting with a simple nursery rhyme on it.

“This is what I had come in here to check,” I said. “Kirst said it was related to the woman who lived here around the time that the werewolf legends started.”

Clara, Clara, where’d you go?

Mother’s cure was far too slow.

Golden hair and silver bright,

Now, a wolf that haunts the night.

Howls at dusk, her eyes aglow,

If she is lost, no one knows.

Was the cure she got too late,

Or was it meant to seal her fate?

Beneath the rhyme was another line:

“To my dear cousin Clara, wherever you may be. May you find peace in the beyond—if indeed you are truly gone.”

-Agatha Withers, May 1st, 1866

~

Kimberly and I stared at each other.

“Do you think Clara may still be alive?” she asked. “Isn’t that what this rhyme is saying?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“It certainly would throw a wrench into my reincarnation theory,” I said.

There was a pause as we stared at the nursery rhyme.

Off-Screen.

Finally. We hadn’t had time to plan anything out for that scene, and I had to be careful about what I said because I didn’t want to reveal secret lore and mess up everything accidentally.

Kimberly stared down at the nursery rhyme.

“1866,” she said. “Isn’t that a little late?”

“It sure is,” I said. “It’s about 50 years after Clara passed—or disappeared, if you believe that.”

“Maybe they knew each other as girls, Agatha and Clara,” Kimberly suggested.

“Or maybe Agatha wanted to make a quick buck by hyping the family legend. That would be about the time that the Withers family ran out of luck financially.”

Kimberly thought for a moment. “Haven’t you and Andrew been researching the Manor? Do you know anything about Clara or the legend?”

I actually laughed.

“Not only do I know the legend,” I said, “I know some of what actually happened.”

“What do you mean, ‘what actually happened’?” she asked.

“Secret lore, or maybe a hidden subplot, or something,” I said. “I’m pretty sure this story has secret lore anyway. At the very least, there’s an underlying truth to be revealed. I don’t know how to trigger the cutscene or whatever it is, but I’m fairly certain I’ve learned stuff about it.”

“So, what did actually happen?” she asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” I said, “but I do know a lot. Come with me. I’ll show you the journal.”

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