Chapter 3: The Ghost of Malarial Werwolf

Sleep offered no escape. It was a treacherous landscape populated by the faint, sick-sweet smell of ozone and the looping image of spirals being etched into pale, papery skin. Alex would jolt awake in his cramped apartment, heart hammering, the sheets soaked in a cold sweat. The detective's neat dismissal of the case—"psychosis," "cauterized"—echoed in his mind, a flimsy shield against the terrible truth he held in his hands.

The shoebox sat on his coffee table like a profane artifact. He’d spent the last two days poring over its contents, his own art projects and college assignments forgotten. The letters from Caroline Davis remained tied in their silk ribbon, a mystery he wasn't yet brave enough to unravel. For now, his focus was singular, obsessive. He had to find her. She was the only other person, besides his grandmother, who was connected to the nightmarish drawing that now lived on his desk, its blank face and spiral eyes a constant, silent accusation.

He booted up his laptop, the glow of the screen a lonely beacon in the pre-dawn gloom. He started with the basics, typing "Caroline Davis" into the search bar. The results were a digital flood of the ordinary: a real estate agent in Ohio, a high school soccer star in California, a dozen smiling, unfamiliar faces on social media. None of them were the right age. None of them felt right.

Frustration mounted. The name was too common, a needle in a haystack the size of the internet. He needed another variable, another piece of the puzzle to narrow the search. He thought back to the box. The girls in the photos were teenagers. He knew his grandmother’s birth year, so he could estimate Caroline’s. He tried again, adding birth years, potential hometowns gleaned from the postmarks on the envelopes. Nothing. It was like she had vanished from the face of the earth after writing those letters.

His gaze drifted to the photograph on top of the pile, the one of the two girls standing by the rustic, hand-painted sign. Welcome to Malarial Werwolf National Park.

The name was bizarre, almost comical, like something from a cheap horror novel. He’d never heard of it. On a whim, a last-ditch effort born of desperation, he typed a new query into the search bar, the words feeling alien under his fingertips:

"Caroline Davis" "Brittney Miller" "Malarial Werwolf"

He hit enter. The page refreshed, and the endless stream of irrelevant results vanished. It was replaced by a handful of terse, specific links. They weren't social media profiles. They were links to scanned documents, digital newspaper archives, and historical society web pages. His breath caught in his throat.

The top result was from the Clearwater County Chronicle, dated August 12, 1968. He clicked it. The image loaded slowly, a grainy, black-and-white scan of a newspaper page. The headline hit him like a physical blow.

TEENS BLAMED FOR MALARIAL WERWOLF BLAZE; ONE DEAD

Alex stared, his blood turning to ice. He leaned closer, his eyes devouring the text of the article, the words leaping off the screen and rearranging the entire history of the quiet, reclusive woman he had called his grandmother.

The article detailed a devastating forest fire that had consumed over five thousand acres of Malarial Werwolf National Park. It spoke of the week-long battle to contain the inferno, the loss of wildlife, the destruction of a historic ranger station. And then it named the four teenagers who had been discovered by firefighters near the fire’s point of origin, all suffering from smoke inhalation and what the article called “profound disorientation.”

His eyes found the names, listed in cold, indifferent type: Brittney Miller, 17; Caroline Davis, 16; Kyle Clifton, 17; and Robert Mitchell, 18.

His grandmother. She hadn’t just been a visitor to the park. She was a suspect. A teenage delinquent at the center of a tragedy. The quiet woman who baked lemon cookies and kept her apartment sterile had a past that was buried in ash and scandal.

He read on, his mind reeling. The official cause of the fire was listed as a suspected unattended campfire. A simple, stupid mistake. It felt hauntingly familiar, another neat, tidy explanation for something that felt monumentally wrong. The article then detailed the fates of the four teenagers.

Robert Mitchell had been pronounced dead at the scene, not from the fire, but from what the coroner had ruled a severe asthma attack complicated by smoke inhalation.

Caroline Davis… Alex’s heart seized. Caroline Davis had been released from the hospital into her parents’ care, but was found dead in her bedroom two weeks later. The cause of death was listed as an overdose of sleeping pills. An apparent suicide.

The word hung in the air, a poisonous echo of the detective’s verdict on his grandmother. A pattern. A horrifying, fifty-year-old pattern.

The third boy, Kyle Clifton, had fared no better. The article stated he was “unresponsive to questioning” and had been transferred from the county hospital to the Northwood Psychiatric Hospital for long-term care.

And finally, there was his grandmother. Brittney Miller. She had been questioned and released. No charges were ever filed against her or any of the others. She was the only one who walked away. The only one who went on to live a full life, or what passed for one.

Alex pushed back from his laptop, a wave of nausea rolling through him. This was it. The origin story. The fire wasn’t just a tragedy; it was the epicenter of the horror. His grandmother hadn’t just lost a friend that summer; she had survived something that had killed one friend, driven another to suicide, and shattered the mind of a third. She had survived, and she had kept it a secret for fifty years.

He picked up the charcoal drawing, his fingers trembling. This wasn't some fantasy monster. This was a sketch from the scene of the crime. The scorched trees in the background… they were the forests of Malarial Werwolf. The creature… it had been there with them that night. It was what they had found, or what had found them, in the woods.

The spirals weren't a symptom of his grandmother's madness. They were a ghost she had been carrying for half a century. The carving on her face wasn't a final act of insanity; it was the last, desperate message from a war that had started in fire fifty years ago. A war she had lost. And now, as the sole inheritor of her secrets, Alex had a terrifying, bone-deep certainty that the ghost of Malarial Werwolf had just been passed on to him.