Carmilla (11 page)

"Being myself wholly skeptical as to the existence of any such portent
as the vampire, the supernatural theory of the good doctor furnished, in
my opinion, but another instance of learning and intelligence oddly
associated with some one hallucination. I was so miserable, however,
that, rather than try nothing, I acted upon the instructions of
the letter.

"I concealed myself in the dark dressing room, that opened upon the poor
patient's room, in which a candle was burning, and watched there till
she was fast asleep. I stood at the door, peeping through the small
crevice, my sword laid on the table beside me, as my directions
prescribed, until, a little after one, I saw a large black object, very
ill-defined, crawl, as it seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and
swiftly spread itself up to the poor girl's throat, where it swelled, in
a moment, into a great, palpitating mass.

"For a few moments I had stood petrified. I now sprang forward, with my
sword in my hand. The black creature suddenly contracted towards the
foot of the bed, glided over it, and, standing on the floor about a yard
below the foot of the bed, with a glare of skulking ferocity and horror
fixed on me, I saw Millarca. Speculating I know not what, I struck at
her instantly with my sword; but I saw her standing near the door,
unscathed. Horrified, I pursued, and struck again. She was gone; and my
sword flew to shivers against the door.

"I can't describe to you all that passed on that horrible night. The
whole house was up and stirring. The specter Millarca was gone. But her
victim was sinking fast, and before the morning dawned, she died."

The old General was agitated. We did not speak to him. My father walked
to some little distance, and began reading the inscriptions on the
tombstones; and thus occupied, he strolled into the door of a side
chapel to prosecute his researches. The General leaned against the wall,
dried his eyes, and sighed heavily. I was relieved on hearing the voices
of Carmilla and Madame, who were at that moment approaching. The voices
died away.

In this solitude, having just listened to so strange a story, connected,
as it was, with the great and titled dead, whose monuments were
moldering among the dust and ivy round us, and every incident of which
bore so awfully upon my own mysterious case—in this haunted spot,
darkened by the towering foliage that rose on every side, dense and high
above its noiseless walls—a horror began to steal over me, and my heart
sank as I thought that my friends were, after all, not about to enter
and disturb this triste and ominous scene.

The old General's eyes were fixed on the ground, as he leaned with his
hand upon the basement of a shattered monument.

Under a narrow, arched doorway, surmounted by one of those demoniacal
grotesques in which the cynical and ghastly fancy of old Gothic carving
delights, I saw very gladly the beautiful face and figure of Carmilla
enter the shadowy chapel.

I was just about to rise and speak, and nodded smiling, in answer to her
peculiarly engaging smile; when with a cry, the old man by my side
caught up the woodman's hatchet, and started forward. On seeing him a
brutalized change came over her features. It was an instantaneous and
horrible transformation, as she made a crouching step backwards. Before
I could utter a scream, he struck at her with all his force, but she
dived under his blow, and unscathed, caught him in her tiny grasp by the
wrist. He struggled for a moment to release his arm, but his hand
opened, the axe fell to the ground, and the girl was gone.

He staggered against the wall. His grey hair stood upon his head, and a
moisture shone over his face, as if he were at the point of death.

The frightful scene had passed in a moment. The first thing I recollect
after, is Madame standing before me, and impatiently repeating again and
again, the question, "Where is Mademoiselle Carmilla?"

I answered at length, "I don't know—I can't tell—she went there," and
I pointed to the door through which Madame had just entered; "only a
minute or two since."

"But I have been standing there, in the passage, ever since Mademoiselle
Carmilla entered; and she did not return."

She then began to call "Carmilla," through every door and passage and
from the windows, but no answer came.

"She called herself Carmilla?" asked the General, still agitated.

"Carmilla, yes," I answered.

"Aye," he said; "that is Millarca. That is the same person who long ago
was called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Depart from this accursed
ground, my poor child, as quickly as you can. Drive to the clergyman's
house, and stay there till we come. Begone! May you never behold
Carmilla more; you will not find her here."

As he spoke one of the strangest looking men I ever beheld entered the
chapel at the door through which Carmilla had made her entrance and her
exit. He was tall, narrow-chested, stooping, with high shoulders, and
dressed in black. His face was brown and dried in with deep furrows; he
wore an oddly-shaped hat with a broad leaf. His hair, long and grizzled,
hung on his shoulders. He wore a pair of gold spectacles, and walked
slowly, with an odd shambling gait, with his face sometimes turned up to
the sky, and sometimes bowed down towards the ground, seemed to wear a
perpetual smile; his long thin arms were swinging, and his lank hands,
in old black gloves ever so much too wide for them, waving and
gesticulating in utter abstraction.

"The very man!" exclaimed the General, advancing with manifest delight.
"My dear Baron, how happy I am to see you, I had no hope of meeting you
so soon." He signed to my father, who had by this time returned, and
leading the fantastic old gentleman, whom he called the Baron to meet
him. He introduced him formally, and they at once entered into earnest
conversation. The stranger took a roll of paper from his pocket, and
spread it on the worn surface of a tomb that stood by. He had a pencil
case in his fingers, with which he traced imaginary lines from point to
point on the paper, which from their often glancing from it, together,
at certain points of the building, I concluded to be a plan of the
chapel. He accompanied, what I may term, his lecture, with occasional
readings from a dirty little book, whose yellow leaves were closely
written over.

They sauntered together down the side aisle, opposite to the spot where
I was standing, conversing as they went; then they began measuring
distances by paces, and finally they all stood together, facing a piece
of the sidewall, which they began to examine with great minuteness;
pulling off the ivy that clung over it, and rapping the plaster with the
ends of their sticks, scraping here, and knocking there. At length they
ascertained the existence of a broad marble tablet, with letters carved
in relief upon it.

With the assistance of the woodman, who soon returned, a monumental
inscription, and carved escutcheon, were disclosed. They proved to be
those of the long lost monument of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein.

The old General, though not I fear given to the praying mood, raised his
hands and eyes to heaven, in mute thanksgiving for some moments.

"Tomorrow," I heard him say; "the commissioner will be here, and the
Inquisition will be held according to law."

Then turning to the old man with the gold spectacles, whom I have
described, he shook him warmly by both hands and said:

"Baron, how can I thank you? How can we all thank you? You will have
delivered this region from a plague that has scourged its inhabitants
for more than a century. The horrible enemy, thank God, is at
last tracked."

My father led the stranger aside, and the General followed. I know that
he had led them out of hearing, that he might relate my case, and I saw
them glance often quickly at me, as the discussion proceeded.

My father came to me, kissed me again and again, and leading me from the
chapel, said:

"It is time to return, but before we go home, we must add to our party
the good priest, who lives but a little way from this; and persuade him
to accompany us to the schloss."

In this quest we were successful: and I was glad, being unspeakably
fatigued when we reached home. But my satisfaction was changed to
dismay, on discovering that there were no tidings of Carmilla. Of the
scene that had occurred in the ruined chapel, no explanation was offered
to me, and it was clear that it was a secret which my father for the
present determined to keep from me.

The sinister absence of Carmilla made the remembrance of the scene more
horrible to me. The arrangements for the night were singular. Two
servants, and Madame were to sit up in my room that night; and the
ecclesiastic with my father kept watch in the adjoining dressing room.

The priest had performed certain solemn rites that night, the purport of
which I did not understand any more than I comprehended the reason of
this extraordinary precaution taken for my safety during sleep.

I saw all clearly a few days later.

The disappearance of Carmilla was followed by the discontinuance of my
nightly sufferings.

You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in
Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in
Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of
the Vampire.

If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially,
before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all
chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more
voluminous perhaps than exist upon any one other class of cases, is
worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence
of such a phenomenon as the Vampire.

For my part I have heard no theory by which to explain what I myself
have witnessed and experienced, other than that supplied by the ancient
and well-attested belief of the country.

The next day the formal proceedings took place in the Chapel of
Karnstein.

The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my
father recognized each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face
now disclosed to view. The features, though a hundred and fifty years
had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her
eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two
medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the
promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvelous fact that there was a
faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the
heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the
leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches,
the body lay immersed.

Here then, were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The
body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised,
and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a
piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from
a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a
torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head was
next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown
upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been
plagued by the visits of a vampire.

My father has a copy of the report of the Imperial Commission, with the
signatures of all who were present at these proceedings, attached in
verification of the statement. It is from this official paper that I
have summarized my account of this last shocking scene.

I write all this you suppose with composure. But far from it; I cannot
think of it without agitation. Nothing but your earnest desire so
repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that
has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and reinduced a shadow of the
unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my
days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific.

Let me add a word or two about that quaint Baron Vordenburg, to whose
curious lore we were indebted for the discovery of the Countess
Mircalla's grave.

He had taken up his abode in Gratz, where, living upon a mere pittance,
which was all that remained to him of the once princely estates of his
family, in Upper Styria, he devoted himself to the minute and laborious
investigation of the marvelously authenticated tradition of Vampirism.
He had at his fingers' ends all the great and little works upon
the subject.

"Magia Posthuma," "Phlegon de Mirabilibus," "Augustinus de cura pro
Mortuis," "Philosophicae et Christianae Cogitationes de Vampiris," by
John Christofer Herenberg; and a thousand others, among which I
remember only a few of those which he lent to my father. He had a
voluminous digest of all the judicial cases, from which he had extracted
a system of principles that appear to govern—some always, and others
occasionally only—the condition of the vampire. I may mention, in
passing, that the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenants, is
a mere melodramatic fiction. They present, in the grave, and when they
show themselves in human society, the appearance of healthy life. When
disclosed to light in their coffins, they exhibit all the symptoms that
are enumerated as those which proved the vampire-life of the long-dead
Countess Karnstein.

How they escape from their graves and return to them for certain hours
every day, without displacing the clay or leaving any trace of
disturbance in the state of the coffin or the cerements, has always been
admitted to be utterly inexplicable. The amphibious existence of the
vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave. Its horrible
lust for living blood supplies the vigor of its waking existence. The
vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence,
resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of
these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access
to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will
never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very
life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and
protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and
heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these
cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In
ordinary ones it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence,
and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast.