Carmilla
“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.”
XV.
Ordeal and Execution
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.
XVI.
Conclusion
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.
The vampire is, apparently, subject, in certain situations, to special
conditions. In the particular instance of which I have given you a
relation, Mircalla seemed to be limited to a name which, if not her
real one, should at least reproduce, without the omission or addition
of a single letter, those, as we say, anagrammatically, which compose
it.
Carmilla did this; so did Millarca.
My father related to the Baron Vordenburg, who remained with us for two
or three weeks after the expulsion of Carmilla, the story about the
Moravian nobleman and the vampire at Karnstein churchyard, and then he
asked the Baron how he had discovered the exact position of the
long-concealed tomb of the Countess Mircalla? The Baron’s grotesque
features puckered up into a mysterious smile; he looked down, still
smiling on his worn spectacle case and fumbled with it. Then looking
up, he said:
“I have many journals, and other papers, written by that remarkable
man; the most curious among them is one treating of the visit of which
you speak, to Karnstein. The tradition, of course, discolors and
distorts a little. He might have been termed a Moravian nobleman, for
he had changed his abode to that territory, and was, beside, a noble.
But he was, in truth, a native of Upper Styria. It is enough to say
that in very early youth he had been a passionate and favored lover of
the beautiful Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Her early death plunged him
into inconsolable grief. It is the nature of vampires to increase and