Carmilla (10 page)

"There could be no doubt, notwithstanding the slight inaccuracy, that
our young friend had turned up; and so she had. Would to heaven we
had lost her!

"She told my poor child a story to account for her having failed to
recover us for so long. Very late, she said, she had got to the
housekeeper's bedroom in despair of finding us, and had then fallen
into a deep sleep which, long as it was, had hardly sufficed to recruit
her strength after the fatigues of the ball.

"That day Millarca came home with us. I was only too happy, after all,
to have secured so charming a companion for my dear girl."

"There soon, however, appeared some drawbacks. In the first place,
Millarca complained of extreme languor—the weakness that remained after
her late illness—and she never emerged from her room till the afternoon
was pretty far advanced. In the next place, it was accidentally
discovered, although she always locked her door on the inside, and never
disturbed the key from its place till she admitted the maid to assist at
her toilet, that she was undoubtedly sometimes absent from her room in
the very early morning, and at various times later in the day, before
she wished it to be understood that she was stirring. She was repeatedly
seen from the windows of the schloss, in the first faint grey of the
morning, walking through the trees, in an easterly direction, and
looking like a person in a trance. This convinced me that she walked in
her sleep. But this hypothesis did not solve the puzzle. How did she
pass out from her room, leaving the door locked on the inside? How did
she escape from the house without unbarring door or window?

"In the midst of my perplexities, an anxiety of a far more urgent kind
presented itself.

"My dear child began to lose her looks and health, and that in a manner
so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly frightened.

"She was at first visited by appalling dreams; then, as she fancied, by
a specter, sometimes resembling Millarca, sometimes in the shape of a
beast, indistinctly seen, walking round the foot of her bed, from
side to side.

"Lastly came sensations. One, not unpleasant, but very peculiar, she
said, resembled the flow of an icy stream against her breast. At a later
time, she felt something like a pair of large needles pierce her, a
little below the throat, with a very sharp pain. A few nights after,
followed a gradual and convulsive sense of strangulation; then came
unconsciousness."

I could hear distinctly every word the kind old General was saying,
because by this time we were driving upon the short grass that spreads
on either side of the road as you approach the roofless village which
had not shown the smoke of a chimney for more than half a century.

You may guess how strangely I felt as I heard my own symptoms so exactly
described in those which had been experienced by the poor girl who, but
for the catastrophe which followed, would have been at that moment a
visitor at my father's chateau. You may suppose, also, how I felt as I
heard him detail habits and mysterious peculiarities which were, in
fact, those of our beautiful guest, Carmilla!

A vista opened in the forest; we were on a sudden under the chimneys and
gables of the ruined village, and the towers and battlements of the
dismantled castle, round which gigantic trees are grouped, overhung us
from a slight eminence.

In a frightened dream I got down from the carriage, and in silence, for
we had each abundant matter for thinking; we soon mounted the ascent,
and were among the spacious chambers, winding stairs, and dark
corridors of the castle.

"And this was once the palatial residence of the Karnsteins!" said the
old General at length, as from a great window he looked out across the
village, and saw the wide, undulating expanse of forest. "It was a bad
family, and here its bloodstained annals were written," he continued.
"It is hard that they should, after death, continue to plague the human
race with their atrocious lusts. That is the chapel of the Karnsteins,
down there."

He pointed down to the grey walls of the Gothic building partly visible
through the foliage, a little way down the steep. "And I hear the axe of
a woodman," he added, "busy among the trees that surround it; he
possibly may give us the information of which I am in search, and point
out the grave of Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein. These rustics preserve
the local traditions of great families, whose stories die out among the
rich and titled so soon as the families themselves become extinct."

"We have a portrait, at home, of Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein;
should you like to see it?" asked my father.

"Time enough, dear friend," replied the General. "I believe that I have
seen the original; and one motive which has led me to you earlier than I
at first intended, was to explore the chapel which we are now
approaching."

"What! see the Countess Mircalla," exclaimed my father; "why, she has
been dead more than a century!"

"Not so dead as you fancy, I am told," answered the General.

"I confess, General, you puzzle me utterly," replied my father, looking
at him, I fancied, for a moment with a return of the suspicion I
detected before. But although there was anger and detestation, at times,
in the old General's manner, there was nothing flighty.

"There remains to me," he said, as we passed under the heavy arch of
the Gothic church—for its dimensions would have justified its being so
styled—"but one object which can interest me during the few years that
remain to me on earth, and that is to wreak on her the vengeance which,
I thank God, may still be accomplished by a mortal arm."

"What vengeance can you mean?" asked my father, in increasing amazement.

"I mean, to decapitate the monster," he answered, with a fierce flush,
and a stamp that echoed mournfully through the hollow ruin, and his
clenched hand was at the same moment raised, as if it grasped the handle
of an axe, while he shook it ferociously in the air.

"What?" exclaimed my father, more than ever bewildered.

"To strike her head off."

"Cut her head off!"

"Aye, with a hatchet, with a spade, or with anything that can cleave
through her murderous throat. You shall hear," he answered, trembling
with rage. And hurrying forward he said:

"That beam will answer for a seat; your dear child is fatigued; let her
be seated, and I will, in a few sentences, close my dreadful story."

The squared block of wood, which lay on the grass-grown pavement of the
chapel, formed a bench on which I was very glad to seat myself, and in
the meantime the General called to the woodman, who had been removing
some boughs which leaned upon the old walls; and, axe in hand, the hardy
old fellow stood before us.

He could not tell us anything of these monuments; but there was an old
man, he said, a ranger of this forest, at present sojourning in the
house of the priest, about two miles away, who could point out every
monument of the old Karnstein family; and, for a trifle, he undertook
to bring him back with him, if we would lend him one of our horses, in
little more than half an hour.

"Have you been long employed about this forest?" asked my father of the
old man.

"I have been a woodman here," he answered in his patois, "under the
forester, all my days; so has my father before me, and so on, as many
generations as I can count up. I could show you the very house in the
village here, in which my ancestors lived."

"How came the village to be deserted?" asked the General.

"It was troubled by revenants, sir; several were tracked to their
graves, there detected by the usual tests, and extinguished in the usual
way, by decapitation, by the stake, and by burning; but not until many
of the villagers were killed.

"But after all these proceedings according to law," he continued—"so
many graves opened, and so many vampires deprived of their horrible
animation—the village was not relieved. But a Moravian nobleman, who
happened to be traveling this way, heard how matters were, and being
skilled—as many people are in his country—in such affairs, he offered
to deliver the village from its tormentor. He did so thus: There being a
bright moon that night, he ascended, shortly after sunset, the towers of
the chapel here, from whence he could distinctly see the churchyard
beneath him; you can see it from that window. From this point he watched
until he saw the vampire come out of his grave, and place near it the
linen clothes in which he had been folded, and then glide away towards
the village to plague its inhabitants.

"The stranger, having seen all this, came down from the steeple, took
the linen wrappings of the vampire, and carried them up to the top of
the tower, which he again mounted. When the vampire returned from his
prowlings and missed his clothes, he cried furiously to the Moravian,
whom he saw at the summit of the tower, and who, in reply, beckoned him
to ascend and take them. Whereupon the vampire, accepting his
invitation, began to climb the steeple, and so soon as he had reached
the battlements, the Moravian, with a stroke of his sword, clove his
skull in twain, hurling him down to the churchyard, whither, descending
by the winding stairs, the stranger followed and cut his head off, and
next day delivered it and the body to the villagers, who duly impaled
and burnt them.

"This Moravian nobleman had authority from the then head of the family
to remove the tomb of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, which he did
effectually, so that in a little while its site was quite forgotten."

"Can you point out where it stood?" asked the General, eagerly.

The forester shook his head, and smiled.

"Not a soul living could tell you that now," he said; "besides, they say
her body was removed; but no one is sure of that either."

Having thus spoken, as time pressed, he dropped his axe and departed,
leaving us to hear the remainder of the General's strange story.

"My beloved child," he resumed, "was now growing rapidly worse. The
physician who attended her had failed to produce the slightest
impression on her disease, for such I then supposed it to be. He saw my
alarm, and suggested a consultation. I called in an abler physician,
from Gratz.

"Several days elapsed before he arrived. He was a good and pious, as well
as a learned man. Having seen my poor ward together, they withdrew to my
library to confer and discuss. I, from the adjoining room, where I
awaited their summons, heard these two gentlemen's voices raised in
something sharper than a strictly philosophical discussion. I knocked at
the door and entered. I found the old physician from Gratz maintaining
his theory. His rival was combating it with undisguised ridicule,
accompanied with bursts of laughter. This unseemly manifestation
subsided and the altercation ended on my entrance.

"'Sir,' said my first physician, 'my learned brother seems to think that
you want a conjuror, and not a doctor.'

"'Pardon me,' said the old physician from Gratz, looking displeased, 'I
shall state my own view of the case in my own way another time. I
grieve, Monsieur le General, that by my skill and science I can be of no
use. Before I go I shall do myself the honor to suggest something to
you.'

"He seemed thoughtful, and sat down at a table and began to write.

"Profoundly disappointed, I made my bow, and as I turned to go, the other
doctor pointed over his shoulder to his companion who was writing, and
then, with a shrug, significantly touched his forehead.

"This consultation, then, left me precisely where I was. I walked out
into the grounds, all but distracted. The doctor from Gratz, in ten or
fifteen minutes, overtook me. He apologized for having followed me, but
said that he could not conscientiously take his leave without a few
words more. He told me that he could not be mistaken; no natural disease
exhibited the same symptoms; and that death was already very near. There
remained, however, a day, or possibly two, of life. If the fatal seizure
were at once arrested, with great care and skill her strength might
possibly return. But all hung now upon the confines of the irrevocable.
One more assault might extinguish the last spark of vitality which is,
every moment, ready to die.

"'And what is the nature of the seizure you speak of?' I entreated.

"'I have stated all fully in this note, which I place in your hands upon
the distinct condition that you send for the nearest clergyman, and open
my letter in his presence, and on no account read it till he is with
you; you would despise it else, and it is a matter of life and death.
Should the priest fail you, then, indeed, you may read it.'

"He asked me, before taking his leave finally, whether I would wish to
see a man curiously learned upon the very subject, which, after I had
read his letter, would probably interest me above all others, and he
urged me earnestly to invite him to visit him there; and so took
his leave.

"The ecclesiastic was absent, and I read the letter by myself. At
another time, or in another case, it might have excited my ridicule. But
into what quackeries will not people rush for a last chance, where all
accustomed means have failed, and the life of a beloved object is
at stake?

"Nothing, you will say, could be more absurd than the learned man's
letter.

"It was monstrous enough to have consigned him to a madhouse. He said
that the patient was suffering from the visits of a vampire! The
punctures which she described as having occurred near the throat, were,
he insisted, the insertion of those two long, thin, and sharp teeth
which, it is well known, are peculiar to vampires; and there could be no
doubt, he added, as to the well-defined presence of the small livid mark
which all concurred in describing as that induced by the demon's lips,
and every symptom described by the sufferer was in exact conformity with
those recorded in every case of a similar visitation.