CARMILLA
by
J. Sheridan LeFanu

(1872)
PROLOGUE

Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has 
written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to 
his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates. 

This mysterious subject he treats, in that Essay, with his usual learning 
and acumen, and with remarkable directness and condensation. It will form 
but one volume of the series of that extraordinary man’s collected papers. 

As I publish the case, in this volume, simply to interest the “laity,” I 
shall forestall the intelligent lady, who relates it, in nothing; and after 
due consideration, I have determined, therefore, to abstain from presenting 
any precis of the learned Doctor’s reasoning, or extract from his statement 
on a subject which he describes as “involving, not improbably, some of the 
profoundest arcana of our dual existence, and its intermediates.” 

I was anxious on discovering this paper, to reopen the correspondence 
commenced by Doctor Hesselius, so many years before, with a person so clever 
and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much to my regret, however, 
I found that she had died in the interval. 

She, probably, could have added little to the Narrative which she 
communicates in the following pages, with, so far as I can pronounce, such 
conscientious particularity. 



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I


An Early Fright

In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or 
schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight 
or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have 
answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an 
English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and 
primitive place, where everything is so marvellously cheap, I real]y don’t 
see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, 
or even luxuries. 

My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and his 
patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate on 
which it stands, a bargain. 

Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight eminence 
in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of its 
drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat, stocked with perch, and 
sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white fleets of 
water-lilies. 

Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front; its towers, and its 
Gothic chapel. 

The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its gate, 
and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the road over a stream that 
winds in deep shadow through the wood. I have said that this is a very 
lonely place. Judge whether I say truth. Looking from the hall door towards 
the road, the forest in which our castle stands extends fifteen miles to the 
right, and twelve to the left. The nearest inhabited village is about seven 
of your English miles to the left. The nearest inhabited schloss of any 
historic associations, is that of old General Spielsdorf, nearly twenty 
miles away to the right. 

I have said “the nearest inhabited village,” because there is, only three 
miles westward, that is to say in the direction of General Spielsdorf’s 
schloss, a ruined village, with its quaint little church, now roofless, in 
the aisle of which are the mouldering tombs of the proud family of 
Karnstein, now extinct, who once owned the equally desolate chateau which, 
in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town. 

Respecting the cause of the desertion of this striking and melancholy spot, 
there is a legend which I shall relate to you another time. 

I must tell you now, how very small is the party who constitute the 
inhabitants of our castle. I don’t include servants, or those dependents who 
occupy rooms in the buildings attached to the schloss. Listen, and wonder! 
My father, who is the kindest man on earth, but growing old; and I, at the 
date of my story, only nineteen. Eight years have passed since then. I and 
my father constituted the family at the schloss. My mother, a Styrian lady, 
died in my infancy, but I had a good-natured governess, who had been with me 
from, I might almost say, my infancy. I could not remember the time time 
when her fat, benignant face was not a familiar picture in my memory. This 
was Madame Perrodon, a native of Berne, whose care and good nature now in 
part supplied to me the loss of my mother, whom I do not even remember, so 
early I lost her. She made a third at our little dinner party. There was a 
fourth, Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, a lady such as you term, I believe, a 
“finishing governess.” She spoke French and German, Madame Perrodon French 
and broken English, to which my father and I added English, which, partly to 
prevent its becoming a lost language among us, and partly from patriotic 
motives, we spoke every day. The consequence was a Babel, at which strangers 
used to laugh, and which I shall make no attempt to reproduce in this 
narrative. And there were two or three young lady friends besides, pretty 
nearly of my own age, who were occasional visitors, for longer or shorter 
terms; and these visits I sometimes returned. 

These were our regular social resources; but of course there were chance 
visits from “neighbours” of only five or six leagues distance. My life was, 
notwithstanding, rather a solitary one, I can assure you. 

My gouvernantes had just so much control over me as you might conjecture 
such sage persons would have in the case of a rather spoiled girl, whose 
only parent allowed her pretty nearly her own way in everything. 

The first occurrence in my existence, which produced a terrible impression 
upon my mind, which, in fact, never has been effaced, was one of the very 
earliest incidents of my life which I can recollect. Some people will think 
it so trifling that it should not be recorded here. You will see, however, 
by-and-by, why I mention it. The nursery, as it was called, though I had it 
all to myself, was a large room in the upper story of the castle, with a 
steep oak roof. I can’t have been more than six years old, when one night I 
awoke, and looking round the room from my bed, failed to see the nursery-
maid. Neither was my nurse there; and I thought myself alone. I was not 
frightened, for I was one of those happy children who are studiously kept in 
ignorance of ghost stories, of fairy tales, and of all such lore as makes us 
cover up our heads when the door cracks suddenly, or the flicker of an 
expiring candle makes the shadow of a bed-post dance upon the wall, nearer 
to our faces. I was vexed and insulted at finding myself, as I conceived, 
neglected, and I began to whimper, preparatory to a hearty bout of roaring; 
when to my surprise, I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from 
the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneeling, with her 
hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder, and 
ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on 
the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully 
soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two 
needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. 
The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped down upon 
the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself under the bed. 

I was now for the first time frightened, and I yelled with all my might and 
main. Nurse, nursery-maid, housekeeper, all came running in, and hearing my 
story, they made light of it, soothing me all they could meanwhile. But, 
child as I was, I could perceive that their faces were pale with an unwonted 
look of anxiety, and I saw them look under the bed, and about the room, and 
peep under tables and pluck open cupboards; and the housekeeper whispered to 
the nurse: “Lay your hand along that hollow in the bed; some one did lie 
there, so sure as you did not; the place is still warm.” 

I remember the nursery-maid petting me, and all three examining my chest, 
where I told them I felt the puncture, and pronouncing that there was no 
sign visible that any such thing had happened to me. 

The housekeeper and the two other servants who were in charge of the 
nursery, remained sitting up all night; and from that time a servant always 
sat up in the nursery until I was about fourteen. 

I was very nervous for a long time after this. A doctor was called in, he 
was pallid and elderly. How well I remember his long saturnine face, 
slightly pitted with smallpox, and his chestnut wig. For a good while, every 
second day, he came and gave me medicine, which of course I hated. 

The morning after I saw this apparition I was in a state of terror, and 
could not bear to be left alone, daylight though it was, for a moment. 

I remember my father coming up and standing at the bedside, and talking 
cheerfully, and asking the nurse a number of questions, and laughing very 
heartily at one of the answers; and patting me on the shoulder, and kissing 
me, and telling me not to be frightened, that it was nothing but a dream and 
could not hurt me. 

But I was not comforted, for I knew the visit of the strange woman was not a 
dream; and I was awfully frightened. 

I was a little consoled by the nursery-maid’s assuring me that it was she 
who had come and looked at me, and lain down beside me in the bed, and that 
I must have been half-dreaming not to have known her face. But this, though 
supported by the nurse, did not quite satisfy me. 

I remembered, in the course of that day, a venerable old man, in a black 
cassock, coming into the room with the nurse and housekeeper, and talking a 
little to them, and very kindly to me; his face was very sweet and gentle, 
and he told me they were going to pray, and joined my hands together, and 
desired me to say, softly, while they were praying, “Lord hear all good 
prayers for us, for Jesus’ sake.” I think these were the very words, for I 
often repeated them to myself, and my nurse used for years to make me say 
them in my prayers. 

I remembered so well the thoughtful sweet face of that white-haired old man, 
in his black cassock, as he stood in that rude, lofty, brown room, with the 
clumsy furniture of a fashion three hundred years old about him, and the 
scanty light entering its shadowy atmosphere through the small lattice. He 
kneeled, and the three women with him, and he prayed aloud with an earnest 
quavering voice for, what appeared to me, a long time. I forget all my life 
preceding that event, and for some time after it is all obscure also, but 
the scenes I have just described stand out vivid as the isolated pictures of 
the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness. 



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II


A Guest

I am now going to tell you something so strange that it will require all 
your faith in my veracity to believe my story. It is not only true, 
nevertheless, but truth of which I have been an eye-witness. 

It was a sweet summer evening, and my father asked me, as he sometimes did, 
to take a little ramble with him along that beautiful forest vista which I 
have mentioned as lying in front of the schloss. 

“General Spielsdorf cannot come to us so soon as I had hoped,” said my 
father, as we pursued our walk. 

He was to have paid us a visit of some weeks, and we had expected his 
arrival next day. He was to have brought with him a young lady, his niece 
and ward, Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt, whom I had never seen, but whom I had 
heard described as a very charming girl, and in whose society I had promised 
myself many happy days. I was more disappointed than a young lady living in 
a town, or a bustling neighbourhood can possibly imagine. This visit, and 
the new acquaintance it promised, had furnished my day dream for many weeks 

“And how soon does he come?” I asked. 

“Not till autumn. Not for two months, I dare say,” he answered. “And I am 
very glad now, dear, that you never knew Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt.” 

“And why?” I asked, both mortified and curious. 

“Because the poor young lady is dead,” he replied. “I quite forgot I had not 
told you, but you were not in the room when I received the General’s letter 
this evening.” 

I was very much shocked. General Spielsdorf had mentioned in his first 
letter, six or seven weeks before, that she was not so well as he would wish 
her, but there was nothing to suggest the remotest suspicion of danger. 

“Here is the General’s letter,” he said, handing it to me. “I am afraid he 
is in great affliction; the letter appears to me to have been written very 
nearly in distraction.” 

We sat down on a rude bench, under a group of magnificent lime trees. The 
sun was setting with all its melancholy splendour behind the sylvan horizon, 
and the stream that flows beside our home, and passes under the steep old 
bridge I have mentioned, wound through many a group of noble trees, almost 
at our feet, reflecting in its current the fading crimson of the sky. 
General Spielsdorf’s letter was so extraordinary, so vehement, and in some 
places so self-contradictory, that I read it twice over—the second time 
aloud to my father—and was still unable to account for it, except by 
supposing that grief had unsettled his mind. 

It said “I have lost my darling daughter, for as such I loved her. During 
the last days of dear Bertha’s illness I was not able to write to you. 
Before then I had no idea of her danger. I have lost her, and now learn all, 
too late. She died in the peace of innocence, and in the glorious hope of a 
blessed futurity. The fiend who betrayed our infatuated hospitality has done 
it all. I thought I was receiving into my house innocence, gaiety, a 
charming companion for my lost Bertha. Heavens! what a fool have I been! I 
thank God my child died without a suspicion of the cause of her sufferings. 
She is gone without so much as conjecturing the nature of her illness, and 
the accursed passion of the agent of all this misery. I devote my remaining 
days to tracking and extinguishing a monster. I am told I may hope to 
accomplish my righteous and merciful purpose. At present there is scarcely a 
gleam of light to guide me. I curse my conceited incredulity, my despicable 
affectation of superiority, my blindness, my obstinacy—all— too late. I 
cannot write or talk collectedly now. I am distracted. So soon as I shall 
have a little recovered, I mean to devote myself for a time to enquiry, 
which may possibly lead me as far as Vienna. Some time in the autumn, two 
months hence, or earlier if I live, I will see you—that is, if you permit 
me; I will then tell you all that I scarce dare put upon paper now. 
Farewell. Pray for me, dear friend.” 

In these terms ended this strange letter. Though I had never seen Bertha 
Rheinfeldt my eyes filled with tears at the sudden intelligence; I was 
startled, as well as profoundly disappointed. 

The sun had now set, and it was twilight by the time I had returned the 
General’s letter to my father. 

It was a soft clear evening, and we loitered, speculating upon the possible 
meanings of the violent and incoherent sentences which I had just been 
reading. We had nearly a mile to walk before reaching the road that passes 
the schloss in front, and by that time the moon was shining brilliantly. At 
the drawbridge we met Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, who 
had come out, without their bonnets, to enjoy the exquisite moonlight. 

We heard their voices gabbling in animated dialogue as we approached. We 
joined them at the drawbridge, and turned about to admire with them the 
beautiful scene. 

The glade through which we had just walked lay before us. At our left the 
narrow road wound away under clumps of lordly trees, and was lost to sight 
amid the thickening forest. At the right the same road crosses the steep and 
picturesque bridge, near which stands a ruined tower which once guarded that 
pass; and beyond the bridge an abrupt eminence rises, covered with trees, 
and showing in the shadows some grey ivy-clustered rocks. 

Over the sward and low grounds a thin film of mist was stealing like smoke, 
marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there we could 
see the river faintly flashing in the moonlight. 

No softer, sweeter scene could be imagined. The news I had just heard made 
it melancholy; but nothing could disturb its character of profound serenity, 
and the enchanted glory and vagueness of the prospect. 

My father, who enjoyed the picturesque, and I, stood looking in silence over 
the expanse beneath us. The two good governesses, standing a little way 
behind us, discoursed upon the scene, and were eloquent upon the moon. 

Madame Perrodon was fat, middle-aged, and romantic, and talked and sighed 
poetically. Mademoiselle De Lafontaine—in right of her father who was a 
German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical, and something of a 
mystic—now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was 
well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity. The effect of the 
full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it 
acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people, it had marvelous physical 
influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that her cousin, who 
was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, 
lying on his back, with his face full in the light on the moon, had wakened, 
after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features 
horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered 
its equilibrium. 

“The moon, this night,” she said, “is full of idyllic and magnetic 
influence—and see, when you look behind you at the front of the schloss how 
all its windows flash and twinkle with that silvery splendour, as if unseen 
hands had lighted up the rooms to receive fairy guests.” 

There are indolent styles of the spirits in which, indisposed to talk 
ourselves, the talk of others is pleasant to our listless ears; and I gazed 
on, pleased with the tinkle of the ladies’ conversation. 

“I have got into one of my moping moods to-night,” said my father, after a 
silence, and quoting Shakespeare, whom, by way of keeping up our English, he 
used to read aloud, he said: 

“‘In truth I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me: you say it wearies you;
But how I got it—came by it.’
“I forget the rest. But I feel as if some great misfortune were hanging over 
us. I suppose the poor General’s afflicted letter has had something to do 
with it.” 

At this moment the unwonted sound of carriage wheels and many hoofs upon the 
road, arrested our attention. 

They seemed to be approaching from the high ground overlooking the bridge, 
and very soon the equipage emerged from that point. Two horsemen first 
crossed the bridge, then came a carriage drawn by four horses, and two men 
rode behind. 

It seemed to be the travelling carriage of a person of rank; and we were all 
immediately absorbed in watching that very unusual spectacle. It became, in 
a few moments, greatly more interesting, for just as the carriage had passed 
the summit of the steep bridge, one of the leaders, taking fright, 
communicated his panic to the rest, and after a plunge or two, the whole 
team broke into a wild gallop together, and dashing between the horsemen who 
rode in front, came thundering along the road towards us with the speed of a 
hurricane. 

The excitement of the scene was made more painful by the clear, long-drawn 
screams of a female voice from the carriage window. 

We all advanced in curiosity and horror; me rather in silence, the rest with 
various ejaculations of terror. 

Our suspense did not last long. Just before you reach the castle drawbridge, 
on the route they were coming, there stands by the roadside a magnificent 
lime tree, on the other stands an ancient stone cross, at sight of which the 
horses, now going at a pace that was perfectly frightful, swerved so as to 
bring the wheel over the projecting roots of the tree. 

I knew what was coming. I covered my eyes, unable to see it out, and turned 
my head away; at the same moment I heard a cry from my lady-friends, who had 
gone on a little. 

Curiosity opened my eyes, and I saw a scene of utter confusion. Two of the 
horses were on the ground, the carriage lay upon its side with two wheels in 
the air; the men were busy removing the traces, and a lady, with a 
commanding air and figure had got out, and stood with clasped hands, raising 
the handkerchief that was in them every now and then to her eyes. Through 
the carriage door was now lifted a young lady, who appeared to be lifeless. 
My dear old father was already beside the elder lady, with his hat in his 
hand, evidently tendering his aid and the resources of his schloss. The lady 
did not appear to hear him, or to have eyes for anything but the slender 
girl who was being placed against the slope of the bank. 

I approached; the young lady was apparently stunned, but she was certainly 
not dead. My father, who piqued himself on being something of a physician, 
had just had his fingers on her wrist and assured the lady, who declared 
herself her mother, that her pulse, though faint and irregular, was 
undoubtedly still distinguishable. The lady clasped her hands and looked 
upward, as if in a momentary transport of gratitude; but immediately she 
broke out again in that theatrical way which is, I believe, natural to some 
people. 

She was what is called a fine looking woman for her time of life, and must 
have been handsome; she was tall, but not thin, and dressed in black velvet, 
and looked rather pale, but with a proud and commanding countenance, though 
now agitated strangely. 

“Who was ever being so born to calamity?” I heard her say, with clasped 
hands, as I came up. “Here am I, on a journey of life and death, in 
prosecuting which to lose an hour is possibly to lose all. My child will not 
have recovered sufficiently to resume her route for who can say how long. I 
must leave her: I cannot, dare not, delay. How far on, sir, can you tell, is 
the nearest village? I must leave her there; and shall not see my darling, 
or even hear of her till my return, three months hence.” 

I plucked my father by the coat, and whispered earnestly in his ear: “Oh! 
papa, pray ask her to let her stay with us—it would be so delightful. Do, 
pray.” 

“If Madame will entrust her child to the care of my daughter, and of her 
good gouvernante, Madame Perrodon, and permit her to remain as our guest, 
under my charge, until her return, it will confer a distinction and an 
obligation upon us, and we shall treat her with all the care and devotion 
which so sacred a trust deserves.” 

“I cannot do that, sir, it would be to task your kindness and chivalry too 
cruelly,” said the lady, distractedly. 

“It would, on the contrary, be to confer on us a very great kindness at the 
moment when we most need it. My daughter has just been disappointed by a 
cruel misfortune, in a visit from which she had long anticipated a great 
deal of happiness. If you confide this young lady to our care it will be her 
best consolation. The nearest village on your route is distant, and affords 
no such inn as you could think of placing your daughter at; you cannot allow 
her to continue her journey for any considerable distance without danger. 
If, as you say, you cannot suspend your journey, you must part with her to-
night, and nowhere could you do so with more honest assurances of care and 
tenderness than here.” 

There was something in this lady’s air and appearance so distinguished and 
even imposing, and in her manner so engaging, as to impress one, quite apart 
from the dignity of her equipage, with a conviction that she was a person of 
consequence. 

By this time the carriage was replaced in its upright position, and the 
horses, quite tractable, in the traces again. 

The lady threw on her daughter a glance which I fancied was not quite so 
affectionate as one might have anticipated from the beginning of the scene; 
then she beckoned slightly to my father, and withdrew two or three steps 
with him out of hearing; and talked to him with a fixed and stern 
countenance, not at all like that with which she had hitherto spoken. 

I was filled with wonder that my father did not seem to perceive the change, 
and also unspeakably curious to learn what it could be that she was 
speaking, almost in his ear, with so much earnestness and rapidity. 

Two or three minutes at most I think she remained thus employed, then she 
turned, and a few steps brought her to where her daughter lay, supported by 
Madame Perrodon. She kneeled beside her for a moment and whispered, as 
Madame supposed, a little benediction in her ear; then hastily kissing her 
she stepped into her carriage, the door was closed, the footmen in stately 
liveries jumped up behind, the outriders spurred on, the postillions cracked 
their whips, the horses plunged and broke suddenly into a furious canter 
that threatened soon again to become a gallop, and the carriage whirled 
away, followed at the same rapid pace by the two horsemen in the rear. 



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III


We Compare Notes

We followed the cortege with our eyes until it was swiftly lost to sight in 
the misty wood; and the very sound of the hoofs and the wheels died away in 
the silent night air. 

Nothing remained to assure us that the adventure had not been an illusion of 
a moment but the young lady, who just at that moment opened her eyes. I 
could not see, for her face was turned from me, but she raised her head, 
evidently looking about her, and I heard a very sweet voice ask 
complainingly, “Where is mamma?” 

Our good Madame Perrodon answered tenderly, and added some comfortable 
assurances. 

I then heard her ask: 

“Where am I? What is this place?” and after that she said, “I don’t see the 
carriage; and Matska, where is she?” 

Madame answered all her questions in so far as she understood them; and 
gradually the young lady remembered how the misadventure came about, and was 
glad to hear that no one in, or in attendance on, the carriage was hurt; and 
on learning that her mamma had left her here, till her return in about three 
months, she wept. 

I was going to add my consolations to those of Madame Perrodon when 
Mademoiselle De Lafontaine placed her hand upon my arm, saying: 

“Don’t approach, one at a time is as much as she can at present converse 
with; a very little excitement would possibly overpower her now.” 

As soon as she is comfortably in bed, I thought, I will run up to her room 
and see her. 

My father in the meantime had sent a servant on horseback for the physician, 
who lived about two leagues away; and a bedroom was being prepared for the 
young lady’s reception. 

The stranger now rose, and leaning on Madame’s arm, walked slowly over the 
drawbridge and into the castle gate. 

In the hall, servants waited to receive her, and she was conducted forthwith 
to her room. The room we usually sat in as our drawing-room is long, having 
four windows, that looked over the moat and drawbridge, upon the forest 
scene I have just described. 

It is furnished in old carved oak, with large carved cabinets, and the 
chairs are cushioned with crimson Utrecht velvet. The walls are covered with 
tapestry, and surrounded with great gold frames, the figures being as large 
as life, in ancient and very curious costume, and the subjects represented 
are hunting, hawking, and generally festive. It is not too stately to be 
extremely comfortable; and here we had our tea, for with his usual patriotic 
leanings he insisted that the national beverage should make its appearance 
regularly with our coffee and chocolate. 

We sat here this night, and with candles lighted, were talking over the 
adventure of the evening. 

Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine were both of our party. The 
young stranger had hardly lain down in her bed when she sank into a deep 
sleep; and those ladies had left her in the care of a servant. 

“How do you like our guest?” I asked, as soon as Madame entered. “Tell me 
all about her?” 

“I like her extremely,” answered Madame, “she is, I almost think, the 
prettiest creature I ever saw; about your age, and so gentle and nice.” 

“She is absolutely beautiful,” threw in Mademoiselle, who had peeped for a 
moment into the stranger’s room. 

“And such a sweet voice!” added Madame Perrodon. 

“Did you remark a woman in the carriage, after it was set up again, who did 
not get out,” inquired Mademoiselle, “but only looked from the window?” 

“No, we had not seen her.” 

Then she described a hideous black woman, with a sort of coloured turban on 
her head. and who was gazing all the time from the carriage window, nodding 
and grinning derisively towards the ladies, with gleaming eyes and large 
white eye-balls, and her teeth set as if in fury. 

“Did you remark what an ill-looking pack of men the servants were?” asked 
Madame. 

“Yes,” said my father, who had just come in, “ugly, hang-dog looking 
fellows. as ever I beheld in my life. I hope they mayn’t rob the poor lady 
in the forest. They are clever rogues, however; they got everything to 
rights in a minute.” 

“I dare say they are worn out with too long travelling— said Madame. 
”Besides looking wicked, their faces were so strangely lean, and dark, and 
sullen. I am very curious, I own; but I dare say the young lady will tell 
you all about it to-morrow, if she is sufficiently recovered.“ 

“I don’t think she will,” said my father, with a mysterious smile, and a 
little nod of his head, as if he knew more about it than he cared to tell 
us. 

This made us all the more inquisitive as to what had passed between him and 
the lady in the black velvet, in the brief but earnest interview that had 
immediately preceded her departure. 

We were scarcely alone, when I entreated him to tell me. He did not need 
much pressing. 

“There is no particular reason why I should not tell you. She expressed a 
reluctance to trouble us with the care of her daughter, saying she was in 
delicate health, and nervous, but not subject to any kind of seizure—she 
volunteered that— nor to any illusion; being, in fact, perfectly sane.” 

“How very odd to say all that!” I interpolated. “It was so unnecessary.” 

“At all events it was said,” he laughed, “and as you wish to know all that 
passed, which was indeed very little, I tell you. She then said, ‘I am 
making a long journey of vital importance—she emphasized the word—rapid and 
secret; I shall return for my child in three months; in the meantime, she 
will be silent as to who we are, whence we come, and whither we are 
travelling.’ That is all she said. She spoke very pure French. When she said 
the word ‘secret,’ she paused for a few seconds, looking sternly, her eyes 
fixed on mine. I fancy she makes a great point of that. You saw how quickly 
she was gone. I hope I have not done a very foolish thing, in taking charge 
of the young lady.” 

For my part, I was delighted. I was longing to see and talk to her; and only 
waiting till the doctor should give me leave. You, who live in towns, can 
have no idea how great an event the introduction of a new friend is, in such 
a solitude as surrounded us. 

The doctor did not arrive till nearly one o’clock; but I could no more have 
gone to my bed and slept, than I could have overtaken, on foot, the carriage 
in which the princess in black velvet had driven away. 

When the physician came down to the drawing-room, it was to report very 
favourably upon his patient. She was now sitting up, her pulse quite 
regular, apparently perfectly well. She had sustained no injury, and the 
little shock to her nerves had passed away quite harmlessly. There could be 
no harm certainly in my seeing her, if we both wished it; and, with this 
permission I sent, forthwith, to know whether she would allow me to visit 
her for a few minutes in her room. 

The servant returned immediately to say that she desired nothing more. 

You may be sure I was not long in availing myself of this permission. 

Our visitor lay in one of the handsomest rooms in the schloss. It was, 
perhaps, a little stately. There was a sombre piece of tapestry opposite the 
foot of the bed, representing Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom; and 
other solemn classic scenes were displayed, a little faded, upon the other 
walls. But there was gold carving, and rich and varied colour enough in the 
other decorations of the room, to more than redeem the gloom of the old 
tapestry. 

There were candles at the bed-side. She was sitting up; her slender pretty 
figure enveloped in the soft silk dressing-gown, embroidered with flowers, 
and lined with thick quilted silk, which her mother had thrown over her feet 
as she lay upon the ground. 

What was it that, as I reached the bed-side and had just begun my little 
greeting, struck me dumb in a moment, and made me recoil a step or two from 
before her? I will tell you. 

I saw the very face which had visited me in my childhood at night, which 
remained so fixed in my memory, and on which I had for so many years so 
often ruminated with horror, when no one suspected of what I was thinking. 

It was pretty, even beautiful; and when I first beheld it, wore the same 
melancholy expression. 

But this almost instantly lighted into a strange fixed smile of recognition. 

There was a silence of fully a minute, and then at length she spoke; I could 
not. 

“How wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Twelve years ago, I saw your face in a 
dream, and it has haunted me ever since.” 

“Wonderful indeed!” I repeated, overcoming with an effort the horror that 
had for a time suspended my utterances. “Twelve years ago, in vision or 
reality, I certainly saw you. I could not forget your face. It has remained 
before my eyes ever since.” 

Her smile had softened. Whatever I had fancied strange in it, was gone, and 
it and her dimpling cheeks were now delightfully pretty and intelligent. 

I felt reassured, and continued more in the vein which hospitality 
indicated, to bid her welcome, and to tell her how much pleasure her 
accidental arrival had given us all, and especially what a happiness it was 
to me. 

I took her hand as I spoke. I was a little shy, as lonely people are, but 
the situation made me eloquent, and even bold. She pressed my hand, she laid 
hers upon it, and her eyes glowed, as, looking hastily into mine, she smiled 
again, and blushed. 

She answered my welcome very prettily. I sat down beside her, still 
wondering; and she said: 

“I must tell you my vision about you; it is so very strange that you and I 
should have had, each of the other so vivid a dream, that each should have 
seen, I you and you me, looking as we do now, when of course we both were 
mere children. I was a child, about six years old, and I awoke from a 
confused and troubled dream, and found myself in a room, unlike my nursery, 
wainscoted clumsily in some dark wood, and with cupboards and bedsteads, and 
chairs, and benches placed about it. The beds were, I thought, all empty, 
and the room itself without anyone but myself in it; and I, after looking 
about me for some time, and admiring especially an iron candlestick with two 
branches, which I should certainly know again, crept under one of the beds 
to reach the window; but as I got from under the bed, I heard someone 
crying; and looking up, while I was still upon my knees, I saw you—most 
assuredly you—as I see you now; a beautiful young lady, with golden hair and 
large blue eyes, and lips— your lips—you as you are here. Your looks won me; 
I climbed on the bed and put my arms about you, and I think we both fell 
asleep. I was aroused by a scream; you were sitting up screaming. I was 
frightened, and slipped down upon the ground, and, it seemed to me, lost 
consciousness for a moment; and when I came to myself, I was again in my 
nursery at home. Your face I have never forgotten since. I could not be 
misled by mere resemblance. You are the lady whom I saw then.” 

It was now my turn to relate my corresponding vision, which I did, to the 
undisguised wonder of my new acquaintance. 

“I don’t know which should be most afraid of the other,” she said, again 
smiling—“If you were less pretty I think I should be very much afraid of 
you, but being as you are, and you and I both so young, I feel only that I 
have made your acquaintance twelve years ago, and have already a right to 
your intimacy; at all events it does seem as if we were destined, from our 
earliest childhood, to be friends. I wonder whether you feel as strangely 
drawn towards me as I do to you; I have never had a friend—shall I find one 
now?” She sighed, and her fine dark eyes gazed passionately on me. 

Now the truth is, I felt rather unaccountably towards the the beautiful 
stranger. I did feel, as she said, “drawn towards her,” but there was also 
something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of 
attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so 
beautiful and so indescribably engaging. 

I perceived now something of languor and exhaustion stealing over her, and 
hastened to bid her good night. 

“The doctor thinks,” I added, “that you ought to have a maid to sit up with 
you to-night; one of ours is waiting, and you will find her a very useful 
and quiet creature.” 

“How kind of you, but I could not sleep, I never could with an attendant in 
the room. I shan’t require any assistance— and, shall I confess my weakness, 
I am haunted with a terror of robbers. Our house was robbed once, and two 
servants murdered, so I always lock my door. It has become a habit—and you 
look so kind I know you will forgive me. I see there is a key in the lock.” 

She held me close in her pretty arms for a moment and whispered in my ear, 
“Good night, darling, it is very hard to part with you, but good night; to-
morrow, but not early, I shall see you again.” 

She sank back on the pillow with a sigh, and her fine eyes followed me with 
a fond and melancholy gaze, and she murmured again “Good night, dear 
friend.” 

Young people like, and even love, on impulse. I was flattered by the 
evident, though as yet undeserved, fondness she showed me. I liked the 
confidence with which she at once received me. She was determined that we 
should be very near friends. 

Next day came and we met again. I was delighted with my companion; that is 
to say, in many respects. 

Her looks lost nothing in daylight—she was certainly the most beautiful 
creature I had ever seen, and the unpleasant remembrance of the face 
presented in my early dream, had lost the effect of the first unexpected 
recognition. 

She confessed that she had experienced a similar shock on seeing me, and 
precisely the same faint antipathy that had mingled with my admiration of 
her. We now laughed together over our momentary horrors. 



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IV


Her Habits—A Saunter

I told you that I was charmed with her in most particulars. 

There were some that did not please me so well. 

She was above the middle height of women. I shall begin by describing her. 
She was slender, and wonderfully graceful. Except that her movements were 
languid—very languid— indeed, there was nothing in her appearance to 
indicate an invalid. Her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features 
were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her 
hair was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long 
when it was down about her shoulders; I have often placed my hands under it, 
and laughed with wonder at its weight. It was exquisitely fine and soft, and 
in colour a rich very dark brown, with something of gold. I loved to let it 
down, tumbling with its own weight, as, in her room, she lay back in her 
chair talking in her sweet low voice, I used to fold and braid it, and 
spread it out and play with it. Heavens! If I had but known all! 

I said there were particulars which did not please me. I have told you that 
her confidence won me the first night I saw her; but I found that she 
exercised with respect to herself, her mother, her history, everything in 
fact connected with her life, plans, and people, an ever wakeful reserve. I 
dare say I was unreasonable, perhaps I was wrong; I dare say I ought to have 
respected the solemn injunction laid upon my father by the stately lady in 
black velvet. But curiosity is a restless and unscrupulous passion, and no 
one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another. 
What harm could it do anyone to tell me what I so ardently desired to know? 
Had she no trust in my good sense or honour? Why would she not believe me 
when I assured her, so solemnly, that I would not divulge one syllable of 
what she told me to any mortal breathing. 

There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling 
melancholy persistent refusal to afford me the least ray of light. 

I cannot say we quarrelled upon this point, for she would not quarrel upon 
any. It was, of course, very unfair of me to press her, very ill-bred, but I 
really could not help it; and I might just as well have let it alone. 

What she did tell me amounted, in my unconscionable estimation—to nothing. 

It was all summed up in three very vague disclosures: 

First—Her name was Carmilla. 

Second—Her family was very ancient and noble. 

Third—Her home lay in the direction of the west. 

She would not tell me the name of her family, nor their armorial bearings, 
nor the name of their estate, nor even that of the country they lived in. 

You are not to suppose that I worried her incessantly on these subjects. I 
watched opportunity, and rather insinuated than urged my inquiries. Once or 
twice, indeed, I did attack her more directly. But no matter what my 
tactics, utter failure was invariably the result. Reproaches and caresses 
were all lost upon her. But I must add this, that her evasion was conducted 
with so pretty a melancholy and deprecation, with so many, and even 
passionate declarations of her liking for me, and trust in my honour, and 
with so many promises that I should at last know all, that I could not find 
it in my heart long to be offended with her. 

She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying 
her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “Dearest, your little 
heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of 
my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart 
bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your 
warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; 
as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and 
learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek 
to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.” 

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in 
her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my 
cheek. 

Her agitations and her language were unintelligible to me. 

From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I 
must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to 
fail me. Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my 
resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when 
she withdrew her arms. 

In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange 
tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a 
vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while 
such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, 
and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can make no other 
attempt to explain the feeling. 

I now write, after an interval of more than ten years, with a trembling 
hand, with a confused and horrible recollection of certain occurrences and 
situations, in the ordeal through which I was unconsciously passing; though 
with a vivid and very sharp remembrance of the main current of my story. 
But, I suspect, in all lives there are certain emotional scenes, those in 
which our passions have been most wildly and terribly roused, that are of 
all others the most vaguely and dimly remembered. 

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would 
take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; 
blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and 
breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous 
respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was 
hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, 
and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, 
almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for 
ever.” Then she has thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands 
over her eyes, leaving me trembling. 

“Are we related,” I used to ask; “what can you mean by all this? I remind 
you perhaps of some one whom you love; but you must not, I hate it; I don’t 
know you—I don’t know myself when you look so and talk so.” 

She used to sigh at my vehemence, then turn away and drop my hand. 

Respecting these very extraordinary manifestations I strove in vain to form 
any satisfactory theory—I could not refer them to affectation or trick. It 
was unmistakably the momentary breaking out of suppressed instinct and 
emotion. Was she, notwithstanding her mother’s volunteered denial, subject 
to brief visitations of insanity; or was there here a disguise and a 
romance? I had read in old story books of such things. What if a boyish 
lover had found his way into the house, and sought to prosecute his suit in 
masquerade, with the assistance of a clever old adventuress. But there were 
many things against this hypothesis, highly interesting as it was to my 
vanity. 

I could boast of no little attentions such as masculine gallantry delights 
to offer. Between these passionate moments there were long intervals of 
common-place, of gaiety, of brooding melancholy, during which, except that I 
detected her eyes so full of melancholy fire, following me, at times I might 
have been as nothing to her. Except in these brief periods of mysterious 
excitement her ways were girlish; and there was always a languor about her, 
quite incompatible with a masculine system in a state of health. 

In some respects her habits were odd. Perhaps not so singular in the opinion 
of a town lady like you, as they appeared to us rustic people. She used to 
come down very late, generally not till one o’clock, she would then take a 
cup of chocolate, but eat nothing; we then went out for a walk, which was a 
mere saunter, and she seemed, almost immediately, exhausted, and either 
returned to the schloss or sat on one of the benches that were placed, here 
and there, among the trees. This was a bodily languor in which her mind did 
not sympathise. She was always an animated talker, and very intelligent. 

She sometimes alluded for a moment to her own home, or mentioned an 
adventure or situation, or an early recollection, which indicated a people 
of strange manners, and described customs of which we knew nothing. I 
gathered from these chance hints that her native country was much more 
remote than I had at first fancied. 

As we sat thus one afternoon under the trees a funeral passed us by. It was 
that of a pretty young girl, whom I had often seen, the daughter of one of 
the rangers of the forest. The poor man was walking behind the coffin of his 
darling; she was his only child, and he looked quite heartbroken. Peasants 
walking two-and-two came behind, they were singing a funeral hymn. 

I rose to mark my respect as they passed, and joined in the hymn they were 
very sweetly singing. 

My companion shook me a little roughly, and I turned surprised. 

She said brusquely, “Don’t you perceive how discordant that is?” 

“I think it very sweet, on the contrary,” I answered, vexed at the 
interruption, and very uncomfortable, lest the people who composed the 
little procession should observe and resent what was passing. 

I resumed, therefore, instantly, and was again interrupted. “You pierce my 
ears,” said Carmilla, almost angrily, and stopping her ears with her tiny 
fingers. “Besides, how can you tell that your religion and mine are the 
same; your forms wound me, and I hate funerals. What a fuss! Why you must 
die— everyone must die; and all are happier when they do. Come home.” 

“My father has gone on with the clergyman to the churchyard. I thought you 
knew she was to be buried to-day.” 

“She? I don’t trouble my head about peasants. I don’t know who she is,” 
answered Carmilla, with a flash from her fine eyes. 

“She is the poor girl who fancied she saw a ghost a fortnight ago, and has 
been dying ever since, till yesterday, when she expired.” 

“Tell me nothing about ghosts. I shan’t sleep to-night if you do.” 

“I hope there is no plague or fever coming; all this looks very like it,” I 
continued. “The swineherd’s young wife died only a week ago, and she thought 
something seized her by the throat as she lay in her bed, and nearly 
strangled her. Papa says such horrible fancies do accompany some forms of 
fever. She was quite well the day before. She sank afterwards, and died 
before a week.” 

“Well, her funeral is over, I hope, and her hymn sung; and our ears shan’t 
be tortured with that discord and jargon. It has made me nervous. Sit down 
here, beside me; sit close; hold my hand; press it hard-hard-harder.” 

We had moved a little back, and had come to another seat. 

She sat down. Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified me 
for a moment. It darkened, and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands 
were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips, while she stared 
down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over with a continued 
shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to 
suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length 
a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her, and gradually the hysteria 
subsided. “There! That comes of strangling people with hymns!” she said at 
last. “Hold me, hold me still. It is passing away.” 

And so gradually it did; and perhaps to dissipate the sombre impression 
which the spectacle had left upon me, she became unusually animated and 
chatty; and so we got home. 

This was the first time I had seen her exhibit any definable symptoms of 
that delicacy of health which her mother had spoken of. It was the first 
time, also, I had seen her exhibit anything like temper. 

Both passed away like a summer cloud; and never but once afterwards did I 
witness on her part a momentary sign of anger. I will tell you how it 
happened. 

She and I were looking out of one of the long drawing-room windows, when 
there entered the courtyard, over the drawbridge, a figure of a wanderer 
whom I knew very well. He used to visit the schloss generally twice a year. 

It was the figure of a hunchback, with the sharp lean features that 
generally accompany deformity. He wore a pointed black beard, and he was 
smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in buff, 
black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I could 
count, from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a magic-
lantern, and two boxes, which I well knew, in one of which was a salamander, 
and in the other a mandrake. These monsters used to make my father laugh. 
They were compounded of parts of monkeys, parrots squirrels, fish, and 
hedgehogs, dried and stitched together with great neatness and startling 
effect. He had a fiddle, a box of conjuring apparatus, a pair of foils and 
masks attached to his belt, several other mysterious cases dangling about 
him, and a black staff with copper ferrules in his hand. His companion was a 
rough spare dog, that followed at his heels, but stopped short, suspiciously 
at the drawbridge, and in a little while began to howl dismally. 

In the meantime, the mountebank, standing in the midst of the court-yard, 
raised his grotesque hat, and made us a very ceremonious bow, paying his 
compliments very volubly in execrable French, and German not much better. 
Then, disengaging his fiddle, he began to scrape a lively air to which he 
sang with a merry discord, dancing with ludicrous airs and activity, that 
made me laugh, in spite of the dog’s howling. 

Then he advanced to the window with many smiles and salutations, and his hat 
in his left hand, his fiddle under his arm, and with a fluency that never 
took breath, he gabbled a long advertisement of all his accomplishments, and 
the resources of the various arts which he placed at our service, and the 
curiosities and entertainments which it was in his power, at our bidding, to 
display. 

“Will your ladyships be pleased to buy an amulet against the oupire, which 
is going like the wolf, I hear, through these woods,” he said dropping his 
hat on the pavement. “They are dying of it right and left and here is a 
charm that never fails; only pinned to the pillow, and you may laugh in his 
face.” 

These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic ciphers 
and diagrams upon them.

Carmilla instantly purchased one, and so did I. 

He was looking up, and we were smiling down upon him, amused; at least, I 
can answer for myself. His piercing black eye, as he looked up in our faces, 
seemed to detect something that fixed for a moment his curiosity, 

In an instant he unrolled a leather case, full of all manner of odd little 
steel instruments. 

“See here, my lady,” he said, displaying it, and addressing me, “I profess, 
among other things less useful, the art of dentistry. Plague take the dog!” 
he interpolated. “Silence, beast! He howls so that your ladyships can 
scarcely hear a word. Your noble friend, the young lady at your right, has 
the sharpest tooth,—long, thin, pointed, like an awl, like a needle; ha, ha! 
With my sharp and long sight, as I look up, I have seen it distinctly; now 
if it happens to hurt the young lady, and I think it must, here am I, here 
are my file, my punch, my nippers; I will make it round and blunt, if her 
ladyship pleases; no longer the tooth of a fish, but of a beautiful young 
lady as she is. Hey? Is the young lady displeased? Have I been too bold? 
Have I offended her?” 

The young lady, indeed, looked very angry as she drew back from the window. 

“How dares that mountebank insult us so? Where is your father? I shall 
demand redress from him. My father would have had the wretch tied up to the 
pump, and flogged with a cart-whip, and burnt to the bones with the castle 
brand!” 

She retired from the window a step or two, and sat down, and had hardly lost 
sight of the offender, when her wrath subsided as suddenly as it had risen, 
and she gradually recovered her usual tone, and seemed to forget the little 
hunchback and his follies. 

My father was out of spirits that evening. On coming in he told us that 
there had been another case very similar to the two fatal ones which had 
lately occurred. The sister of a young peasant on his estate, only a mile 
away, was very ill, had been, as she described it, attacked very nearly in 
the same way, and was now slowly but steadily sinking. 

“All this,” said my father, “is strictly referable to natural causes. These 
poor people infect one another with their superstitions, and so repeat in 
imagination the images of terror that have infested their neighbours.” 

“But that very circumstance frightens one horribly,” said Carmilla. 

“How so?” inquired my father. 

“I am so afraid of fancying I see such things; I think it would be as bad as 
reality.” 

“We are in God’s hands: nothing can happen without his permission, and all 
will end well for those who love him. He is our faithful creator; He has 
made us all, and will take care of us.” 

“Creator! Nature!” said the young lady in answer to my gentle father. “And 
this disease that invades the country is natural. Nature. All things proceed 
from Nature—don’t they? All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under 
the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so.” 

“The doctor said he would come here to-day,” said my father, after a 
silence. “I want to know what he thinks about it, and what he thinks we had 
better do.” 

“Doctors never did me any good,” said Carmilla. 

“Then you have been ill?” I asked. 

“More ill than ever you were,” she answered. 

“Long ago?” 

“Yes, a long time. I suffered from this very illness; but I forget all but 
my pain and weakness, and they were not so bad as are suffered in other 
diseases.” 

“You were very young then?” 

“I dare say; let us talk no more of it. You would not wound a friend?” 

She looked languidly in my eyes, and passed her arm round my waist lovingly, 
and led me out of the room. My father was busy over some papers near the 
window. 

“Why does your papa like to frighten us?” said the pretty girl with a sigh 
and a little shudder. 

“He doesn’t, dear Carmilla, it is the very furthest thing from his mind.” 

“Are you afraid, dearest?” 

“I should be very much if I fancied there was any real danger of my being 
attacked as those poor people were.” 

“You are afraid to die?” 

“Yes, every one is.” 

“But to die as lovers may—to die together, so that they may live together. 
Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally 
butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and 
larvae, don’t you see— each with their peculiar propensities, necessities 
and structure. So says Monsieur Buffon, in his big book, in the next room.” 

Later in the day the doctor came, and was closeted with papa for some time. 
He was a skilful man, of sixty and upwards, he wore powder, and shaved his 
pale face as smooth as a pumpkin. He and papa emerged from the room 
together, and I heard papa laugh, and say as they came out: 

“Well, I do wonder at a wise man like you. What do you say to hippogriffs 
and dragons?” 

The doctor was smiling, and made answer, shaking his head— 

“Nevertheless life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of 
the resources of either.” 

And so the walked on, and I heard no more. I did not then know what the 
doctor had been broaching, but I think I guess it now. 



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V


A Wonderful Likeness

This evening there arrived from Gratz the grave, dark-faced son of the 
picture cleaner, with a horse and cart laden with two large packing cases, 
having many pictures in each. It was a journey of ten leagues, and whenever 
a messenger arrived at the schloss from our little capital of Gratz, we used 
to crowd about him in the hall, to hear the news. 

This arrival created in our secluded quarters quite a sensation. The cases 
remained in the hall, and the messenger was taken charge of by the servants 
till he had eaten his supper. Then with assistants, and armed with hammer, 
ripping-chisel, and turnscrew, he met us in the hall. where we had assembled 
to witness the unpacking of the cases. 

Carmilla sat looking listlessly on, while one after the other the old 
pictures, nearly all portraits, which had undergone the process of 
renovation, were brought to light. My mother was of an old Hungarian family, 
and most of these pictures, which were about to be restored to their places, 
had come to us through her. 

My father had a list in his hand, from which he read, as the artist rummaged 
out the corresponding numbers. I don’t know that the pictures were very 
good, but they were, undoubtedly, very old, and some of them very curious 
also. They had, for the most part, the merit of being now seen by me, I may 
say, for the first time; for the smoke and dust of time had all but 
obliterated them. 

“There is a picture that I have not seen yet,” said my father. “In one 
corner, at the top of it, is the name, as well as I could read, ‘Marcia 
Karnstein,’ and the date ‘1698’; and I am curious to see how it has turned 
out.” 

I remembered it; it was a small picture, about a foot and a half high, and 
nearly square, without a frame; but it was so blackened by age that I could 
not make it out. 

The artist now produced it, with evident pride. It was quite beautiful; it 
was startling; it seemed to live. It was the effigy of Carmilla! 

“Carmilla, dear, here is an absolute miracle. Here you are, living, smiling, 
ready to speak, in this picture. Isn’t it beautiful, Papa? And see, even the 
little mole on her throat.” 

My father laughed, and said “Certainly it is a wonderful likeness,” but he 
looked away, and to my surprise seemed but little struck by it, and went on 
talking to the picture cleaner, who was also something of an artist, and 
discoursed with intelligence about the portraits or other works, which his 
art had just brought into light and colour, while I was more and more lost 
in wonder the more I looked at the picture. 

“Will you let me hang this picture in my room, papa?” I asked. 

“Certainly, dear,” said he, smiling, “I’m very glad you think it so like. It 
must be prettier even than I thought it, if it is.” 

The young lady did not acknowledge this pretty speech, did not seem to hear 
it. She was leaning back in her seat, her fine eyes under their long lashes 
gazing on me in contemplation, and she smiled in a kind of rapture. 

“And now you can read quite plainly the name that is written in the corner. 
It is not Marcia; it looks as if it was done in gold. The name is Mircalla, 
Countess Karnstein, and this is a little coronet over and underneath A.D. 
1698. I am descended from the Karnsteins; that is, mamma was.” 

“Ah!” said the lady, languidly, “so am I, I think, a very long descent, very 
ancient. Are there any Karnsteins living now?” 

“None who bear the name, I believe. The family were ruined, I believe, in 
some civil wars, long ago, but the ruins of the castle are only about three 
miles away.” 

“How interesting!” she said, languidly. “But see what beautiful moonlight!” 
She glanced through the hall-door, which stood a little open. “Suppose you 
take a little ramble round the court, and look down at the road and river.” 

“It is so like the night you came to us,” I said. 

She sighed; smiling. 

She rose, and each with her arm about the other’s waist, we walked out upon 
the pavement. 

In silence, slowly we walked down to the drawbridge, where the beautiful 
landscape opened before us. 

“And so you were thinking of the night I came here?” she almost whispered. 
“Are you glad I came?” 

“Delighted, dear Carmilla,” I answered. 

“And you asked for the picture you think like me, to hang in your room,” she 
murmured with a sigh, as she drew her arm closer about my waist, and let her 
pretty head sink upon my shoulder. “How romantic you are, Carmilla,” I said. 
“Whenever you tell me your story, it will be made up chiefly of some one 
great romance.” 

She kissed me silently. 

“I am sure, Carmilla, you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, 
an affair of the heart going on.” 

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless 
it should be with you.” 

How beautiful she looked in the moonlight! 

Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck 
and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in 
mine a hand that trembled. 

Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. “Darling, darling,” she murmured, 
“I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.” 

I started from her. 

She was gazing on me with eyes from which all fire, all meaning had flown, 
and a face colourless and apathetic. 

“Is there a chill in the air, dear?” she said drowsily. “I almost shiver; 
have I been dreaming? Let us come in. Come; come; come in.” 

“You look ill, Carmilla; a little faint. You certainly must take some wine,” 
I said. 

“Yes. I will. I’m better now. I shall be quite well in a few minutes. Yes, 
do give me a little wine,” answered Carmilla, as we approached the door. 
“Let us look again for a moment; it is the last time, perhaps, I shall see 
the moonlight with you.” 

“How do you feel now, dear Carmilla? Are you really better?” I asked. 

I was beginning to take alarm, lest she should have been stricken with the 
strange epidemic that they said had invaded the country about us. 

“Papa would be grieved beyond measure.” I added, “if he thought you were 
ever so little ill, without immediately letting us know. We have a very 
skilful doctor near this, the physician who was with papa to-day.” 

“I’m sure he is. I know how kind you all are; but, dear child, I am quite 
well again. There is nothing ever wrong with me, but a little weakness. 
People say I am languid; I am incapable of exertion; I can scarcely walk as 
far as a child of three years old: and every now and then the little 
strength I have falters, and I become as you have just seen me. But after 
all I am very easily set up again; in a moment I am perfectly myself. See 
how I have recovered.” 

So, indeed, she had; and she and I talked a great deal, and very animated 
she was; and the remainder of that evening passed without any recurrence of 
what I called her infatuations. I mean her crazy talk and looks, which 
embarrassed, and even frightened me. 

But there occurred that night an event which gave my thoughts quite a new 
turn, and seemed to startle even Carmilla’s languid nature into momentary 
energy. 



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VI


A Very Strange Agony

When we got into the drawing-room, and had sat down to our coffee and 
chocolate, although Carmilla did not take any, she seemed quite herself 
again, and Madame, and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, joined us, and made a 
little card party, in the course of which papa came in for what he called 
his “dish of tea.” 

When the game was over he sat down beside Carmilla on the sofa, and asked 
her, a little anxiously, whether she had heard from her mother since her 
arrival. 

She answered “No.” 

He then asked whether she knew where a letter would reach her at present. 

“I cannot tell,” she answered ambiguously, “but I have been thinking of 
leaving you; you have been already too hospitable and too kind to me. I have 
given you an infinity of trouble, and I should wish to take a carriage to-
morrow, and post in pursuit of her; I know where I shall ultimately find 
her, although I dare not yet tell you.” 

“But you must not dream of any such thing,” exclaimed my father, to my great 
relief. “We can’t afford to lose you so, and I won’t consent to your leaving 
us, except under the care of your mother, who was so good as to consent to 
your remaining with us till she should herself return. I should be quite 
happy if I knew that you heard from her: but this evening the accounts of 
the progress of the mysterious disease that has invaded our neighbourhood, 
grow even more alarming; and my beautiful guest, I do feeI the 
responsibility, unaided by advice from your mother, very much. But I shall 
do my best; and one thing is certain, that you must not think of leaving us 
without her distinct direction to that effect. We should suffer too much in 
parting from you to consent to it easily.” 

“Thank you, sir, a thousand times for your hospitality,” she answered, 
smiling bashfully. “You have all been too kind to me; I have seldom been so 
happy in all my life before, as in your beautiful chateau, under your care, 
and in the society of your dear daughter.” 

So he gallantly, in his old-fashioned way, kissed her hand, smiling and 
pleased at her little speech. 

I accompanied Carmilla as usual to her room, and sat and chatted with her 
while she was preparing for bed. 

“Do you think,” I said at length, “that you will ever confide fully in me?” 

She turned round smiling, but made no answer, only continued to smile on me. 

“You won’t answer that?” I said. “You can’t answer pleasantly; I ought not 
to have asked you.” 

“You were quite right to ask me that, or anything. You do not know how dear 
you are to me, or you could not think any confidence too great to look for. 
But I am under vows, no nun half so awfully, and I dare not tell my story 
yet, even to you. The time is very near when you shall know everything. You 
will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more 
ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come 
with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me. and 
hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in 
my apathetic nature.” 

“Now, Carmilla, you are going to talk your wild nonsense again,” I said 
hastily. 

“Not I, silly little fool as I am, and full of whims and fancies; for your 
sake I’ll talk like a sage. Were you ever at a ball?” 

“No; how you do run on. What is it like? How charming it must be.” 

“I almost forget, it is years ago.” 

I laughed. 

“You are not so old. Your first ball can hardly be forgotten yet.” 

“I remember everything it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what 
is going on above1 them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent. 
There occurred that night what has confused the picture, and made its 
colours faint. I was all but assassinated in my bed, wounded here,” she 
touched her breast, “and never was the same since.” 

“Were you near dying?” 

“Yes, very—a cruel love—strange love, that would have taken my life. Love 
will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. Let us go to sleep 
now; I feel so lazy. How can I get up just now and lock my door?” 

She was lying with her tiny hands buried in her rich wavy hair, under her 
cheek, her little head upon the pillow, and her glittering eyes followed me 
wherever I moved, with a kind of shy smile that I could not decipher. 

I bid her good night, and crept from the room with an uncomfortable 
sensation. 

I often wondered whether our pretty guest ever said her prayers. I certainly 
had never seen her upon her knees. In the morning she never came down until 
long after our family prayers were over, and at night she never left the 
drawing-room to attend our brief evening prayers in the hall. 

If it had not been that it had casually come out in one of our careless 
talks that she had been baptised, I should have doubted her being a 
Christian. Religion was a subject on which I had never heard her speak a 
word. If I had known the world better, this particular neglect or antipathy 
would not have so much surprised me. 

The precautions of nervous people are infectious, and persons of a like 
temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them. I had adopted 
Carmilla’s habit of locking her bedroom door, having taken into my head all 
her whimsical alarms about midnight invaders and prowling assassins. I had 
also adopted her precaution of making a brief search through her from, to 
satisfy herself that no lurking assassin or robber was “ensconced.” 

These wise measures taken, I got into my bed and fell asleep. A light was 
burning in my room. This was an old habit, of very early date, and which 
nothing could have tempted me to dispense with. 

Thus fortifed I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone 
walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make 
their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths. 

I had a dream that night that was the beginning of a very strange agony. 

I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep. But 
I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as 
I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as 
I had seen it last, except that it was very dark, and I saw something moving 
round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately 
distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled 
a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about four or five feet long for it 
measured fully the length of the hearthrug as it passed over it; and it 
continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe, sinister restlessness of a 
beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was 
terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and 
darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but 
its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached 
my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, 
an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream. The room 
was lighted by the candle that burnt there all through the night, and I saw 
a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little at the right side. 
It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its 
shoulders. A block of stone could not have been more still. There was not 
the slightest stir of respiration. As I stared at it, the figure appeared to 
have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then, close to it, the 
door opened, and it passed out. 

I was now relieved, and able to breathe and move. My first thought was that 
Carmilla had been playing me a trick, and that I had forgotten to secure my 
door. I hastened to it, and found it locked as usual on the inside. I was 
afraid to open it—I was horrified. I sprang into my bed and covered my head 
up in the bedclothes, and lay there more dead than alive till morning. 



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VII


Descending

It would be vain my attempting to tell you the horror with which, even now, 
I recall the occurrence of that night. It was no such transitory terror as a 
dream leaves behind it. It seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself 
to the room and the very furniture that had encompass the apparition. 

I could not bear next day to be alone for a moment. I should have told papa, 
but for two opposite reasons. At one time I thought he would laugh at my 
story, and I could not bear its being treated as a jest; and at another I 
thought he might fancy that I had been attacked by the mysterious complaint 
which had invaded our neighbourhood. I had myself no misgiving of the kind, 
and as he had been rather an invalid for some time, I was afraid of alarming 
him. 

I was comfortable enough with my good-natured companions, Madame Perrodon, 
and the vivacious Mademoiselle Lafontaine. They both perceived that I was 
out of spirits and nervous, and at length I told them what lay so heavy at 
my heart. 

Mademoiselle laughed, but I fancied that Madame Perrodon looked anxious. 

“By-the-by,” said Mademoiselle, laughing, “the long lime-tree walk, behind 
Carmilla’s bedroom-window, is haunted!” 

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Madame, who probably thought the theme rather 
inopportune, “and who tells that story, my dear?” 

“Martin says that he came up twice, when the old yard-gate was being 
repaired, before sunrise, and twice saw the same female figure walking down 
the lime-tree avenue.” 

“So he well might, as long as there are cows to milk in the river fields,” 
said Madame. 

“I daresay; but Martin chooses to be frightened, and never did I see fool 
more frightened.” 

“You must not say a word about it to Carmilla, because she can see down that 
walk from her room window,” I interposed, “and she is, if possible, a 
greater coward than I.” 

Carmilla came down rather later than usual that day. 

“I was so frightened last night,” she said, so soon as were together, “and I 
am sure I should have seen something dreadful if it had not been for that 
charm I bought from the poor little hunchback whom I called such hard names. 
I had a dream of something black coming round my bed, and I awoke in a 
perfect horror, and I really thought, for some seconds, I saw a dark figure 
near the chimney-piece, but I felt under my pillow for my charm, and the 
moment my fingers touched it, the figure disappeared, and I felt quite 
certain, only that I had it by me, that something frightful would have made 
its appearance, and, perhaps, throttled me, as it did those poor people we 
heard of.” 

“Well, listen to me,” I began, and recounted my adventure, at the recital of 
which she appeared horrified. 

“And had you the charm near you?” she asked, earnestly. 

“No, I had dropped it into a china vase in the drawing-room, but I shall 
certainly take it with me to-night, as you have so much faith in it.” 

At this distance of time I cannot tell you, or even understand, how I 
overcame my horror so effectually as to lie alone in my room that night. I 
remember distinctly that I pinned the charm to my pillow. I fell asleep 
almost immediately, and slept even more soundly than usual all night. 

Next night I passed as well. My sleep was delightfully deep and dreamless. 
But I wakened with a sense of lassitude and melancholy, which, however, did 
not exceed a degree that was almost luxurious. 

“Well, I told you so,” said Carmilla, when I described my quiet sleep, “I 
had such delightful sleep myself last night; I pinned the charm to the 
breast of my nightdress. It was too far away the night before. I am quite 
sure it was all fancy, except the dreams. I used to think that evil spirits 
made dreams, but our doctor told me it is no such thing. Only a fever 
passing by, or some other malady, as they often do, he said, knocks at the 
door, and not being able to get in, passes on, with that alarm.” 

“And what do you think the charm is?” said I. 

“It has been fumigated or immersed in some drug, and is an antidote against 
the malaria,” she answered. 

“Then it acts only on the body?” 

“Certainly; you don’t suppose that evil spirits are frightened by bits of 
ribbon, or the perfumes of a druggist’s shop? No, these complaints, 
wandering in the air, begin by trying the nerves, and so infect the brain, 
but before they can seize upon you, the antidote repels them. That I am sure 
is what the charm has done for us. It is nothing magical, it is simply 
natural. 

I should have been happier if I could have quite agreed with Carmilla, but I 
did my best, and the impression was a little losing its force. 

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same 
lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed 
girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would 
not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that 
I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of 
me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. 
Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it. 

I would not admit that I was ill, I would not consent to tell my papa, or to 
have the doctor sent for. 

Carmilla became more devoted to me than ever, and her strange paroxysms of 
languid adoration more frequent. She used to gloat on me with increasing 
ardour the more my strength and spirits waned. This always shocked me like a 
momentary glare of insanity. 

Without knowing it, I was now in a pretty advanced stage of the strangest 
illness under which mortal ever suffered. There was an unaccountable 
fascination in its earlier symptoms that more than reconciled me to the 
incapacitating effect of that stage of the malady. This fascination 
increased for a time, until it reached a certain point, when gradually a 
sense of the horrible mingled itself with it, deepening, as you shall hear, 
until it discoloured and perverted the whole state of my life. 

The first change I experienced was rather agreeable. It was very near the 
turning point from which began the descent of Avernus. 

Certain vague and strange sensations visited me in my sleep. The prevailing 
one was of that pleasant, peculiar cold thrill which we feel in bathing, 
when we move against the current of a river. This was soon accompanied by 
dreams that seemed interminable, and were so vague that I could never 
recollect their scenery and persons, or any one connected portion of their 
action. But they left an awful impression, and a sense of exhaustion, as if 
I had passed through a long period of great mental exertion and danger. 
After all these dreams there remained on waking a remembrance of having been 
in a place very nearly dark, and of having spoken to people whom I could not 
see; and especially of one clear voice, of a female’s, very deep, that spoke 
as if at a distance, slowly, and producing always the same sensation of 
indescribable solemnity and fear. Sometime there came a sensation as if a 
hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm 
lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my 
throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my 
breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a 
sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, 
in which my senses left me and I became unconscious. 

It was now three weeks since the commencement of this unaccountable state. 
My sufferings had, during the last week, told upon my appearance. I had 
grown pale, my eyes were dilated and darkened underneath, and the languor 
which I had long felt began to display itself in my countenance. 

My father asked me often whether I was ill; but, with an obstinacy which now 
seems to me unaccountable, I persisted in assuring him that I was quite 
well. 

In a sense this was true. I had no pain, I could complain of no bodily 
derangement. My complaint seemed to be one of the imagination, or the 
nerves, and, horrible as my sufferings were, I kept them, with a morbid 
reserve, very nearly to myself. 

It could not be that terrible complaint which the peasants called the 
oupire, for I had now been suffering for three weeks, and they were seldom 
ill for much more than three days, when death put an end to their miseries. 

Carmilla complained of dreams and feverish sensations, but by no means of so 
alarming a kind as mine. I say that mine were extremely alarming. Had I been 
capable of comprehending my condition, I would have invoked aid and advice 
on my knees. The narcotic of an unsuspected influence was acting upon me, 
and my perceptions were benumbed. 

I am going to tell you now of a dream that led immediately to an odd 
discovery. 

One night, instead of the voice I was accustomed to hear in the dark, I 
heard one, sweet and tender, and at the same time terrible, which said, 

“Your mother warns you to beware of the assassin.” At the same time a light 
unexpectedly sprang up, and I saw Carmilla, standing, near the foot of my 
bed, in her white nightdress, bathed, from her chin to her feet, in one 
great stain of blood. 

I wakened with a shriek, possessed with the one idea that Carmilla was being 
murdered. I remember springing from my bed, and my next recollection is that 
of standing on the lobby, crying for help. 

Madame and Mademoiselle came scurrying out of their rooms in alarm; a lamp 
burned always on the lobby, and seeing me, they soon learned the cause of my 
terror. 

I insisted on our knocking at Carmilla’s door. Our knocking was unanswered. 
It soon became a pounding and an uproar. We shrieked her name, but all was 
vain. 

We all grew frightened, for the door was locked. We hurried back, in panic, 
to my room. There we rang the bell long and furiously. If my father’s room 
had been at that side of the house, we would have called him up at once to 
our aid. But, alas! he was quite out of hearing, and to reach him involved 
an excursion for which we none of us had courage. 

Servants, however, soon came running up the stairs; I had got on my 
dressing-gown and slippers meanwhile, and my companions were already 
similarly furnished. Recognising the voices of the servants on the lobby, we 
sallied out together; and having renewed, as fruitlessly, our summons at 
Carmilla’s door, I ordered the men to force the lock. They did so, and we 
stood, holding our lights aloft, in the doorway, and so stared into the 
room. 

We called her by name; but there was still no reply. We looked round the 
room. Everything was undisturbed. It was exactly in the state in which I had 
left it on bidding her good night. But Carmilla was gone. 



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VIII


Search

At sight of the room, perfectly undisturbed except for our violent entrance, 
we began to cool a little, and soon recovered our senses sufficiently to 
dismiss the men. It had struck Mademoiselle that possibly Carmilla had been 
wakened by the uproar at her door, and in her first panic had jumped from 
her bed, and hid herself in a press, or behind a curtain, from which she 
could not, of course, emerge until the majordomo and his myrmidons had 
withdrawn. We now recommenced our search, and began to call her name again. 

It was all to no purpose. Our perplexity and agitation increased. We 
examined the windows, but they were secured. I implored of Carmilla, if she 
had concealed herself, to play this cruel trick no longer—to come out and to 
end our anxieties. It was all useless. I was by this time convinced that she 
was not in the room, nor in the dressing-room, the door of which was still 
locked on this side. She could not have passed it. I was utterly puzzled. 
Had Carmilla discovered one of those secret passages which the old 
housekeeper said were known to exist in the schloss, although the tradition 
of their exact situation had been lost? A little time would, no doubt, 
explain all— utterly perplexed as, for the present, we were. 

It was past four o’clock, and I preferred passing the remaining hours of 
darkness in Madame’s room. Daylight brought no solution of the difficulty. 

The whole household, with my father at its head, was in a state of agitation 
next morning. Every part of the chateau was searched. The grounds were 
explored. No trace of the missing lady could be discovered. The stream was 
about to be dragged; my father was in distraction; what a tale to have to 
tell the poor girl’s mother on her return. I, too, was almost beside myself, 
though my grief was quite of a different kind. 

The morning was passed in alarm and excitement. It was now one o’clock, and 
still no tidings. I ran up to Carmilla’s room, and found her standing at her 
dressing-table. I was astounded. I could not believe my eyes. She beckoned 
me to her with her pretty finger, in silence. Her face expressed extreme 
fear. 

I ran to her in an ecstasy of joy; I kissed and embraced her again and 
again. I ran to the bell and rang it vehemently, to bring others to the spot 
who might at once relieve my father’s anxiety. 

“Dear Carmilla, what has become of you all this time? We have been in 
agonies of anxiety about you,” I exclaimed. “Where have you been? How did 
you come back?” 

“Last night has been a night of wonders,” she said. 

“For mercy’s sake, explain all you can.” 

“It was past two last night,” she said, “when I went to sleep as usual in my 
bed, with my doors locked, that of the dressing-room, and that opening upon 
the gallery. My sleep was uninterrupted, and, so far as I know, dreamless; 
but I woke just now on the sofa in the dressing-room there, and I found the 
door between the rooms open, and the other door forced. How could all this 
have happened without my being wakened? It must have been accompanied with a 
great deal of noise, and I am particularly easily wakened; and how could I 
have been carried out of my bed without my sleep having been interrupted, I 
whom the slightest stir startles?” 

By this time, Madame, Mademoiselle, my father, and a number of the servants 
were in the room. Carmilla was, of course, overwhelmed with inquiries, 
congratulations, and welcomes. She had but one story to tell, and seemed the 
least able of all the party to suggest any way of accounting for what had 
happened. 

My father took a turn up and down the room, thinking. I saw Carmilla’s eye 
follow him for a moment with a sly, dark glance. 

When my father had sent the servants away, Mademoiselle having gone in 
search of a little bottle of valerian and salvolatile, and there being no 
one now in the room with Carmilla, except my father, Madame, and myself, he 
came to her thoughtfully, took her hand very kindly, led her to the sofa, 
and sat down beside her. 

“Will you forgive me, my dear, if I risk a conjecture, and ask a question?” 

“Who can have a better right?” she said. “Ask what you please, and I will 
tell you everything. But my story is simply one of bewilderment and 
darkness. I know absolutely nothing. Put any question you please, but you 
know, of course, the limitations mamma has placed me under.” 

“Perfectly, my dear child. I need not approach the topics on which she 
desires our silence. Now, the marvel of last night consists in your having 
been removed from your bed and your room, without being wakened, and this 
removal having occurred apparently while the windows were still secured, and 
the two doors locked upon the inside. I will tell you my theory and ask you 
a question.” 

Carmilla was leaning on her hand dejectedly; Madame and I were listening 
breathlessly. 

“Now, my question is this. Have you ever been suspected of walking in your 
sleep?” 

“Never, since I was very young indeed.” 

“But you did walk in your sleep when you were young?” 

“Yes; I know I did. I have been told so often by my old nurse.” 

My father smiled and nodded. 

“Well, what has happened is this. You got up in your sleep, unlocked the 
door, not leaving the key, as usual, in the lock, but taking it out and 
locking it on the outside; you again took the key out, and carried it away 
with you to some one of the five-and-twenty rooms on this floor, or perhaps 
upstairs or downstairs. There are so many rooms and closets,so much heavy 
furniture, and such accumulations of lumber, that it would require a week to 
search this old house thoroughly. Do you see, now, what I mean?” 

“I do, but not all,” she answered. 

“And how, papa, do you account for her finding herself on the sofa in the 
dressing-room, which we had searched so carefully?” 

“She came there after you had searched it, still in her sleep, and at last 
awoke spontaneously, and was as much surprised to find herself where she was 
as any one else. I wish all mysteries were as easily and innocently 
explained as yours, Carmilla,” he said, laughing. “And so we may 
congratulate ourselves on the certainty that the most natural explanation of 
the occurrence is one that involves no drugging, no tampering with locks, no 
burglars, or poisoners, or witches—nothing that need alarm Carmilla, or 
anyone else, for our safety.” 

Carmilla was looking charmingly. Nothing could be more beautiful than her 
tints. Her beauty was, I think, enhanced by that graceful languor that was 
peculiar to her. I think my father was silently contrasting her looks with 
mine, for he said: 

“I wish my poor Laura was looking more like herself”; and he sighed. 

So our alarms were happily ended, and Carmilla restored to her friends. 



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IX


The Doctor

As Carmilla would not hear of an attendant sleeping in her room, my father 
arranged that a servant should sleep outside her door, so that she would not 
attempt to make another such excursion without being arrested at her own 
door. 

That night passed quietly; and next morning early, the doctor, whom my 
father had sent for without telling me a word about it, arrived to see me. 

Madame accompanied me to the library; and there the grave little doctor, 
with white hair and spectacles, whom I mentioned before, was waiting to 
receive me. 

I told him my story, and as I proceeded he grew graver and graver. 

We were standing, he and I, in the recess of one of the windows, facing one 
another. When my statement was over, he leaned with his shoulders against 
the wall, and with his eyes fixed on me earnestly, with an interest in which 
was a dash of horror. 

After a minute’s reflection, he asked Madame if he could see my father. 

He was sent for accordingly, and as he entered, smiling, he said: 

“I dare say, doctor, you are going to tell me that I am an old fool for 
having brought you here; I hope I am.” 

But his smile faded into shadow as the doctor, with a very grave face, 
beckoned him to him. 

He and the doctor talked for some time in the same recess where I had just 
conferred with the physician. It seemed an earnest and argumentative 
conversation. The room is very large, and I and Madame stood together, 
burning with curiosity, at the farther end. Not a word could we hear, 
however, for they spoke in a very low tone, and the deep recess of the 
window quite concealed the doctor from view, and very nearly my father, 
whose foot, arm, and shoulder only could we see; and the voices were, I 
suppose, all the less audible for the sort of closet which the thick wall 
and window formed. 

After a time my father’s face looked into the room; it was pale, thoughtful, 
and, I fancied, agitated. 

“Laura, dear, come here for a moment. Madame, we shan’t trouble you, the 
doctor says, at present.” 

Accordingly I approached, for the first time a little alarmed; for, although 
I felt very weak, I did not feel ill; and strength, one always fancies, is a 
thing that may be picked up when we please. 

My father held out his hand to me, as I drew near, but he was looking at the 
doctor, and he said: 

“It certainly is very odd; I don’t understand it quite. Laura, come here, 
dear; now attend to Doctor Spielsberg, and recollect yourself.” 

“You mentioned a sensation like that of two needles piercing the skin, 
somewhere about your neck, on the night when you experienced your first 
horrible dream. Is there still any soreness?” 

“None at all,” I answered. 

“Can you indicate with your finger about the point at which you think this 
occurred?” 

“Very little below my throat—here,” I answered. 

I wore a morning dress, which covered the place I pointed to. 

“Now you can satisfy yourself,” said the doctor. “You won’t mind your papa’s 
lowering your dress a very little. It is necessary, to detect a symptom of 
the complaint under which you have been suffering.” 

I acquiesced. It was only an inch or two below the edge of my collar. 

“God bless me!—so it is,” exclaimed my father, growing pale. 

“You see it now with your own eyes,” said the doctor, with a gloomy triumph. 

“What is is?” I exclaimed, beginning to be frightened. 

“Nothing, my dear young lady, but a small blue spot, about the size of the 
tip of your little finger; and now,” he continued, turning to papa, “the 
question is what is best to be done?” 

Is there any danger?“ I urged, in great trepidation. 

”I trust not, my dear,“ answered the doctor. ”I don’t see why you should not 
recover. I don’t see why you should not begin immediately to get better. 
That is the point at which the sense of strangulation begins?“ 

Yes,” I answered. 

“And—recollect as well as you can—the same point was a kind of centre of 
that thrill which you described just now, like the current of a cold stream 
running against you?” 

“It may have been; I think it was.” 

“Ay, you see?” he added, turning to my father. “Shall I say a word to 
Madame?” 

“Certainly,” said my father. 

He called Madame to him, and said: 

“I find my young friend here far from well. It won’t be of any great 
consequence, I hope; but it will be necessary that some steps be taken, 
which I will explain by-and-by; but in the meantime, Madame, you will be so 
good as not to let Miss Laura be alone for one moment. That is the only 
direction I need give for the present. It is indispensable.” 

“We may rely upon your kindness, Madame, I know,” added my father. 

Madame satisfied him eagerly. 

“And you, dear Laura, I know you will observe the doctor’s direction.” 

“I shall have to ask your opinion upon another patient, whose symptoms 
slightly resemble those of my daughter, that have just been detailed to 
you—very much milder in degree, but I believe quite of the same sort. She is 
a young lady—our guest; but as you say you will be passing this way again 
this evening, you can’t do better than take your supper here, and you can 
then see her. She does not come down till the afternoon.” 

“I thank you,” said the doctor. “I shall be with you, then, at about seven 
this evening.” 

And then they repeated their directions to me and to Madame, and with this 
parting charge my father left us, and walked out with the doctor; and I saw 
them pacing together up and down between the road and the moat, on the 
grassy platform in front of the castle, evidently absorbed in earnest 
conversation. 

The doctor did not return. I saw him mount his horse there, take his leave, 
and ride away eastward through the forest. 

Nearly at the same time I saw the man arrive from Dranfield with the 
letters, and dismount and hand the bag to my father. 

In the meantime, Madame and I were both busy, lost in conjecture as to the 
reasons of the singular and earnest direction which the doctor and my father 
had concurred in imposing. Madame, as she afterwards told me, was afraid the 
doctor apprehended a sudden seizure, and that, without prompt assistance, I 
might either lose my life in a fit, or at least be seriously hurt. 

The interpretation did not strike me; and I fancied, perhaps luckily for my 
nerves, that the arrangement was prescribed simply to secure a companion, 
who would prevent my taking too much exercise, or eating unripe fruit, or 
doing any of the fifty foolish things to which young people are supposed to 
be prone. 

About half an hour after my father came in—he had a letter in his hand—and 
said: 

“This letter had been delayed; it is from General Spielsdorf. He might have 
been here yesterday, he may not come till to-morrow or he may be here to-
day.” 

He put the open letter into my hand; but he did not look pleased, as he used 
when a guest, especially one so much loved as the General, was coming. On 
the contrary, he looked as if he wished him at the bottom of the Red Sea. 
There was plainly something on his mind which he did not choose to divulge. 

“Papa, darling, will you tell me this?” said I, suddenly laying my hand on 
his arm, and looking, I am sure, imploringly in his face. 

“Perhaps,” he answered, smoothing my hair caressingly over my eyes. 

“Does the doctor think me very ill?” 

“No, dear; he thinks, if right steps are taken, you will be quite well 
again, at least, on the high road to a complete recovery, in a day or two,” 
he answered, a little dryly. “I wish our good friend, the General, had 
chosen any other time; that is, I wish you had been perfectly well to 
receive him.” 

“But do tell me, papa,” I insisted, “what does he think is the matter with 
me?” 

“Nothing; you must not plague me with questions,” he answered, with more 
irritation than I ever remember him to have displayed before; and seeing 
that I looked wounded, I suppose, he kissed me, and added, “You shall know 
all about it in a day or two; that is, all that I know. In the meantime you 
are not to trouble your head about it.” 

He turned and left the room, but came back before I had done wondering and 
puzzling over the oddity of all this; it was merely to say that he was going 
to Karnstein, and had ordered the carriage to be ready at twelve, and that I 
and Madame should accompany him; he was going to see priest who lived near 
those picturesque grounds, upon business, and as Carmilla had never seen 
them, she could follow, when she came down, with Mademoiselle, who would 
bring materials for what you call a picnic, which might be laid for us in 
the ruined castle. 

At twelve o’clock, accordingly, I was ready, and not long after, my father, 
Madame and I set out upon our projected drive. 

Passing the drawbridge we turn to the right, and follow the road over the 
steep Gothic bridge, westward, to reach the deserted village and ruined 
castle of Karnstein. 

No sylvan drive can be fancied prettier. The ground breaks into gentle hills 
and hollows, all clothed with beautiful wood, totally destitute of the 
comparative formality which artificial planting and early culture and 
pruning impart. 

The irregularities of the ground often lead the road out of its course, and 
cause it to wind beautifully round the sides of broken hollows and the 
steeper sides of the hills, among varieties of ground almost inexhaustible. 

Turning one of these points, we suddenly encountered our old friend, the 
General, riding towards us, attended by a mounted servant. His portmanteaus 
were following in a hired wagon, such as we term a cart. 

The General dismounted as we pulled up, and, after the usual greetings, was 
easily persuaded to accept the vacant seat in the carriage and send his 
horse on with his servant to the schloss. 



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X


Bereaved

It was about ten months since we had last seen him: but that time had 
sufficed to make an alteration of years in his appearance. He had grown 
thinner; something of gloom and anxiety had taken the place of that cordial 
serenity which used to characterise his features. His dark blue eyes, always 
penetrating, now gleamed with a sterner light from under his shaggy grey 
eyebrows. It was not such a change as grief alone usually induces, and 
angrier passions seemed to have had their share in bringing it about. 

We had not long resumed our drive, when the General began to talk, with his 
usual soldierly directness, of the bereavement, as he termed it, which he 
had sustained in the death of his beloved niece and ward; and he then broke 
out in a tone of intense bitterness and fury, inveighing against the 
“hellish arts” to which she had fallen a victim, and expressing, with more 
exasperation than piety, his wonder that Heaven should tolerate so monstrous 
an indulgence of the lusts and malignity of hell. 

My father, who saw at once that something very extraordinary had befallen, 
asked him, if not too painful to him, to detail the circumstances which he 
thought justified the strong terms in which he expressed himself. 

“I should tell you all with pleasure,” said the General, “but you would not 
believe me.” 

“Why should I not?” he asked. 

“Because,” he answered testily, “you believe in nothing but what consists 
with your own prejudices and illusions. I remember when I was like you, but 
I have learned better.” 

“Try me,” said my father; “I am not such a dogmatist as you suppose. Besides 
which, I very well know that you generally require proof for what you 
believe, and am, therefore, very strongly predisposed to respect your 
conclusions.” 

“You are right in supposing that I have not been led lightly into a belief 
in the marvellous—for what I have experienced is marvellous—and I have been 
forced by extraordinary evidence to credit that which ran counter, 
diametrically, to all my theories. I have been made the dupe of a 
preternatural conspiracy.” 

Notwithstanding his professions of confidence in the General’s penetration, 
I saw my father, at this point, glance at the General, with, as I thought, a 
marked suspicion of his sanity. 

The General did not see it, luckily. He was looking gloomily and curiously 
into the glades and vistas of the woods that were opening before us. 

“You are going to the Ruins of Karnstein?” he said. “Yes, it is a lucky 
coincidence; do you know I was going to ask you to bring me there to inspect 
them. I have a special object in exploring. There is a ruined chapel, ain’t 
there, with a great many tombs of that extinct family?” 

“So there are—highly interesting,” said my father. “I hope you are thinking 
of claiming the title and estates?” 

My father said this gaily, but the General did not recollect the laugh, or 
even the smile, which courtesy exacts for a friend’s joke; on the contrary, 
he looked grave and even fierce, ruminating on a matter that stirred his 
anger and horror. 

“Something very different,” he said, gruffly. “I mean to unearth some of 
those fine people. I hope, by God’s blessing, to accomplish a pious 
sacrilege here, which will relieve our earth of certain monsters, and enable 
honest people to sleep in their beds without being assailed by murderers. I 
have strange things to tell you, my dear friend, such as I myself would have 
scouted as incredible a few months since.” 

My father looked at him again, but this time not with a glance of 
suspicion—with an eye, rather, of keen intelligence and alarm. 

“The house of Karnstein,” he said, “has been long extinct: a hundred years 
at least. My dear wife was maternally descended from the Karnsteins. But the 
name and title have long ceased to exist. The castle is a ruin; the very 
village is deserted; it is fifty years since the smoke of a chimney was seen 
there; not a roof left.” 

“Quite true. I have heard a great deal about that since I last saw you; a 
great deal that will astonish you. But I had better relate everything in the 
order in which it occurred,” said the General. “You saw my dear ward—my 
child, I may call her. No creature could have been more beautiful, and only 
three months ago none more blooming.” 

“Yes, poor thing! when I saw her last she certainly was quite lovely,” said 
my father. “I was grieved and shocked more than I can tell you, my dear 
friend; I knew what a blow it was to you.” 

He took the General’s hand, and they exchanged a kind pressure. Tears 
gathered in the old soldier’s eyes. He did not seek to conceal them. He 
said: 

“We have been very old friends; I knew you would feel for me, childless as I 
am. She had become an object of very near interest to me, and repaid my care 
by an affection that cheered my home and made my life happy. That is all 
gone. The years that remain to me on earth may not be very long; but by 
God’s mercy I hope to accomplish a service to mankind before I die, and to 
subserve the vengeance of Heaven upon the fiends who have murdered my poor 
child in the spring of her hopes and beauty!” 

“You said, just now, that you intended relating everything as it occurred,” 
said my father. “Pray do; I assure you that it is not mere curiosity that 
prompts me.” 

By this time we had reached the point at which the Drunstall road, by which 
the General had come, diverges from the road which we were travelling to 
Karnstein. 

“How far is it to the ruins?” inquired the General, looking anxiously 
forward. 

“About half a league,” answered my father. “Pray let us hear the story you 
were so good as to promise.” 



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XI


The Story

“With all my heart,” said the General, with an effort; and after a short 
pause in which to arrange his subject, he commenced one of the strangest 
narratives I ever heard. 

“My dear child was looking forward with great pleasure to the visit you had 
been so good as to arrange for her to your charming daughter.” Here he made 
me a gallant but melancholy bow. “In the meantime we had an invitation to my 
old friend the Count Carlsfeld, whose schloss is about six leagues to the 
other side of Karnstein. It was to attend the series of fetes which, you 
remember, were given by him in honour of his illustrious visitor, the Grand 
Duke Charles.” 

“Yes; and very splendid, I believe, they were,” said my father. 

“Princely! But then his hospitalities are quite regal. He has Aladdin’s 
lamp. The night from which my sorrow dates was devoted to a magnificent 
masquerade. The grounds were thrown open, the trees hung with coloured 
lamps. There was such a display of fireworks as Paris itself had never 
witnessed. And such music—music, you know, is my weakness—such ravishing 
music! The finest instrumental band, perhaps, in the world, and the finest 
singers who could be collected from all the great operas in Europe. As you 
wandered through these fantastically illuminated grounds, the moon-lighted 
chateau throwing a rosy light from its long rows of windows, you would 
suddenly hear these ravishing voices stealing from the silence of some 
grove, or rising from boats upon the lake. I felt myself, as I looked and 
listened, carried back into the romance and poetry of my early youth. 

”When the fireworks were ended, and the ball beginning, we returned to the 
noble suite of rooms that were thrown open to the dancers. A masked ball, 
you know, is a beautiful sight; but so brilliant a spectacle of the kind I 
never saw before. 

“It was a very aristocratic assembly. I was myself almost the only ‘nobody’ 
present. 

“My dear child was looking quite beautiful. She wore no mask. Her excitement 
and delight added an unspeakable charm to her features, always lovely. I 
remarked a young lady, dressed magnificently, but wearing a mask, who 
appeared to me to be observing my ward with extraordinary interest. I had 
seen her, earlier in the evening, in the great hall, and again, for a few 
minutes, walking near us, on the terrace under the castle windows, similarly 
employed. A lady, also masked, richly and gravely dressed, and with a 
stately air, like a person of rank, accompanied her as a chaperon. Had the 
young lady not worn a mask, I could, of course, have been much more certain 
upon the question whether she was really watching my poor darling. I am now 
well assured that she was. 

“We were now in one of the salons. My poor dear child had been dancing, and 
was resting a little in one of the chairs near the door; I was standing 
near. The two ladies I have mentioned had approached and the younger took 
the chair next my ward; while her companion stood beside me, and for a 
little time addressed herself, in a low tone, to her charge. 

“Availing herself of the privilege of her mask, she turned to me, and in the 
tone of an old friend, and calling me by my name, opened a conversation with 
me, which piqued my curiosity a good deal. She referred to many scenes where 
she had met me— at Court, and at distinguished houses. She alluded to little 
incidents which I had long ceased to think of, but which, I found, had only 
lain in abeyance in my memory, for they instantly started into life at her 
touch. 

“I became more and more curious to ascertain who she was, every moment. She 
parried my attempts to discover very adroitly and pleasantly. The knowledge 
she showed of many passages in my life seemed to me all but unaccountable; 
and she appeared to take a not unnatural pleasure in foiling my curiosity, 
and in seeing me flounder in my eager perplexity, from one conjecture to 
another. 

“In the meantime the young lady, whom her mother called by the odd name of 
Millarca, when she once or twice addressed her, had, with the same ease and 
grace, got into conversation with my ward. 

“She introduced herself by saying that her mother was a very old 
acquaintance of mine. She spoke of the agreeable audacity which a mask 
rendered practicable; she talked like a friend; she admired her dress, and 
insinuated very prettily her admiration of her beauty. She amused her with 
laughing criticisms upon the people who crowded the ballroom, and laughed at 
my poor child’s fun. She was very witty and lively when she pleased, and 
after a time they had grown very good friends, and the young stranger 
lowered her mask, displaying a remarkably beautiful face. I had never seen 
it before, neither had my dear child. But though it was new to us, the 
features were so engaging, as well as lovely, that it was impossible not to 
feel the attraction powerfully. My poor girl did so. I never saw anyone more 
taken with another at first sight, unless, indeed, it was the stranger 
herself, who seemed quite to have lost her heart to her. 

“In the meantime, availing myself of the licence of a masquerade, I put not 
a few questions to the elder lady. 

“ ‘You have puzzled me utterly,’ I said, laughing. ‘Is that not enough? 
Won’t you, now, consent to stand on equal terms, and do me the kindness to 
remove your mask?’ 

“ ‘Can any request be more unreasonable?’ she replied. ‘Ask a lady to yield 
an advantage! Beside, how do you know you should recognise me? Years make 
changes.’ 

“ ‘As you see,’ I said, with a bow, and, I suppose, a rather melancholy 
little laugh. 

“ ‘As philosophers tell us,’ she said; ‘and how do you know that a sight of 
my face would help you?’ 

“ ‘I should take chance for that,’ I answered. ‘It is vain trying to make 
yourself out an old woman; your figure betrays you.’ 

“ ‘Years, nevertheless, have passed since I saw you, rather since you saw 
me, for that is what I am considering. Millarca, there, is my daughter; I 
cannot then be young, even in the opinion of people whom time has taught to 
be indulgent, and I may not like to be compared with what you remember me. 
You have no mask to remove. You can offer me nothing in exchange.’ 

“ ‘My petition is to your pity, to remove it.’ 

“ ‘And mine to yours, to let it stay where it is,’ she replied. 

“ ‘Well, then, at least you will tell me whether you are French or German; 
you speak both languages so perfectly.’ 

“ ‘I don’t think I shall tell you that, General; you intend a surprise, and 
are meditating the particular point of attack.’ 

“ ‘At all events, you won’t deny this,’ I said, ‘that being honoured by your 
permission to converse, I ought to know how to address you. Shall I say 
Madame la Comtesse?’ 

“She laughed, and she would, no doubt, have met me with another evasion—if, 
indeed, I can treat any occurrence in an interview every circumstance of 
which was pre-arranged, as I now believe, with the profoundest cunning, as 
liable to be modified by accident. 

“ ‘As to that,’ she began; but she was interrupted, almost as she opened her 
lips, by a gentleman, dressed in black, who looked particularly elegant and 
distinguished, with this drawback, that his face was the most deadly pale I 
ever saw, except in death. He was in no masquerade—in the plain evening 
dress of a gentleman; and he said, without a smile, but with a courtly and 
unusually low bow:— 

“ ‘Will Madame la Comtesse permit me to say a very few words which may 
interest her?’ 

“The lady turned quickly to him, and touched her lip in token of silence; 
she then said to me, ‘Keep my place for me, General; I shall return when I 
have said a few words.’ 

“And with this injunction, playfully given, she walked a little aside with 
the gentleman in black, and talked for some minutes, apparently very 
earnestly. They then walked away slowly together in the crowd, and I lost 
them for some minutes. 

“I spent the interval in cudgelling my brains for a conjecture as to the 
identity of the lady who seemed to remember me so kindly, and I was thinking 
of turning about and joining in the conversation between my pretty ward and 
the Countess’s daughter, and trying whether, by the time she returned, I 
might not have a surprise in store for her, by having her name, title, 
chateau, and estates at my fingers’ ends. But at this moment she returned, 
accompanied by the pale man in black, who said: 

“ ‘I shall return and inform Madame la Comtesse when her carriage is at the 
door.’ 

“He withdrew with a bow.” 



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XII


A Petition

“ ‘Then we are to lose Madame la Comtesse, but I hope only for a few hours,’ 
I said, with a low bow. 

“ ‘It may be that only, or it may be a few weeks. It was very unlucky his 
speaking to me just now as he did. Do you now know me?’ 

“I assured her I did not. 

“ ‘You shall know me,’ she said, ‘but not at present. We are older and 
better friends than, perhaps, you suspect. I cannot yet declare myself. I 
shall in three weeks pass your beautiful schloss, about which I have been 
making enquiries. I shall then look in upon you for an hour or two, and 
renew a friendship which I never think of without a thousand pleasant 
recollections. This moment a piece of news has reached me like a 
thunderbolt. I must set out now, and travel by a devious route, nearly a 
hundred miles, with all the dispatch I can possibly make. My perplexities 
multiply. I am only deterred by the compulsory reserve I practise as to my 
name from making a very singular request of you. My poor child has not quite 
recovered her strength. Her horse fell with her, at a hunt which she had 
ridden out to witness, her nerves have not yet recovered the shock, and our 
physician says that she must on no account exert herself for some time to 
come. We came here, in consequence, by very easy stages—hardly six leagues a 
day. I must now travel day and night, on a mission of life and death— a 
mission the critical and momentous nature of which I shall be able to 
explain to you when we meet, as I hope we shall, in a few weeks, without the 
necessity of any concealment.’ 

“She went on to make her petition, and it was in the tone of a person from 
whom such a request amounted to conferring, rather than seeking a favour. 
This was only in manner, and, as it seemed, quite unconsciously. Than the 
terms in which it was expressed, nothing could be more deprecatory. It was 
simply that I would consent to take charge of her daughter during her 
absence. 

“This was, all things considered, a strange, not to say, an audacious 
request. She in some sort disarmed me, by stating and admitting everything 
that could be urged against it, and throwing herself entirely upon my 
chivalry. At the same moment, by a fatality that seems to have predetermined 
all that happened, my poor child came to my side, and, in an undertone, 
besought me to invite her new friend, Millarca, to pay us a visit. She had 
just been sounding her, and thought, if her mamma would allow her, she would 
like it extremely. 

“At another time I should have told her to wait a little, until, at least, 
we knew who they were. But I had not a moment to think in. The two ladies 
assailed me together, and I must confess the refined and beautiful face of 
the young lady, about which there was something extremely engaging, as well 
as the elegance and fire of high birth, determined me; and, quite 
overpowered, I submitted, and undertook, too easily, the care of the young 
lady, whom her mother called Millarca. 

“The Countess beckoned to her daughter, who listened with grave attention 
while she told her, in general terms, how suddenly and peremptorily she had 
been summoned, and also of the arrangement she had made for her under my 
care, adding that I was one of her earliest and most valued friends. 

“I made, of course, such speeches as the case seemed to call for, and found 
myself, on reflection, in a position which I did not half like. 

“The gentleman in black returned, and very ceremoniously conducted the lady 
from the room. 

“The demeanour of this gentleman was such as to impress me with the 
conviction that the Countess was a lady of very much more importance than 
her modest title alone might have led me to assume. 

“Her last charge to me was that no attempt was to be made to learn more 
about her than I might have already guessed, until her return. Our 
distinguished host, whose guest she was, knew her reasons. 

“ ‘But here,’ she said, ‘neither I nor my daughter could safely remain for 
more than a day. I removed my mask imprudently for a moment, about an hour 
ago, and, too late, I fancied you saw me. So I resolved to seek an 
opportunity of talking a little to you. Had I found that you had seen me, I 
would have thrown myself on your high sense of honour to keep my secret some 
weeks. As it is, I am satisfied that you did not see me; but if you now 
suspect, or, on reflection, should suspect, who I am, I commit myself, in 
like manner, entirely to your honour. My daughter will observe the same 
secrecy, and I well know that you will, from time to time, remind her, lest 
she should thoughtlessly disclose it.’ 

“ She whispered a few words to her daughter, kissed her hurriedly twice, and 
went away, accompanied by the pale gentleman in black, and disappeared in 
the crowd. 

“ ‘In the next room,’ said Millarca, ‘there is a window that looks upon the 
hall door. I should like to see the last of mamma, and to kiss my hand to 
her.’ 

“We assented, of course, and accompanied her to the window. We looked out, 
and saw a handsome old-fashioned carriage, with a troop of couriers and 
footmen. We saw the slim figure of the pale gentleman in black, as he held a 
thick velvet cloak, and placed it about her shoulders and threw the hood 
over her head. She nodded to him, and just touched his hand with hers. He 
bowed low repeatedly as the door closed, and the carriage began to move. 

“ ‘She is gone,’ said Millarca, with a sigh. 

“ ‘She is gone,’ I repeated to myself, for the first time —in the hurried 
moments that had elapsed since my consent— reflecting upon the folly of my 
act. 

“ ‘She did not look up,’ said the young lady, plaintively. 

“ ‘The Countess had taken off her mask, perhaps, and did not care to show 
her face,’ I said; ‘and she could not know that you were in the window.’ 

“She sighed, and looked in my face. She was so beautiful that I relented. I 
was sorry I had for a moment repented of my hospitality, and I determined to 
make her amends for the unavowed churlishness of my reception. 

“The young lady, replacing her mask, joined my ward in persuading me to 
return to the grounds, where the concert was soon to be renewed. We did so, 
and walked up and down the terrace that lies under the castle windows. 
Millarca became very intimate with us, and amused us with lively 
descriptions and stories of most of the great people whom we saw upon the 
terrace. I liked her more and more every minute. Her gossip without being 
ill-natured, was extremely diverting to me, who had been so long out of the 
great world. I thought what life she would give to our sometimes lonely 
evenings at home. 

“This ball was not over until the morning sun had almost reached the 
horizon. It pleased the Grand Duke to dance till then, so loyal people could 
not go away, or think of bed. 

“We had just got through a crowded saloon, when my ward asked me what had 
become of Millarca. I thought she had been by her side, and she fancied she 
was by mine. The fact was, we had lost her. 

“All my efforts to find her were vain. I feared that she had mistaken, in 
the confusion of a momentary separation from us, other people for her new 
friends, and had, possibly, pursued and lost them in the extensive grounds 
which were thrown open to us. 

“Now, in its full force, I recognised a new folly in my having undertaken 
the charge of a young lady without so much as knowing her name; and fettered 
as I was by promises, of the reasons for imposing which I knew nothing, I 
could not even point my inquiries by saying that the missing young lady was 
the daughter of the Countess who had taken her departure a few hours before. 

“Morning broke. It was clear daylight before I gave up my search. It was not 
till near two o’clock next day that we heard anything of my missing charge. 

“At about that time a servant knocked at my niece’s door, to say that he had 
been earnestly requested by a young lady, who appeared to be in great 
distress, to make out where she could find the General Baron Spielsdorf and 
the young lady his daughter, in whose charge she had been left by her 
mother. 

“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.” 



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XIII


The Woodman

“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 
spectre, 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 blood-stained 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 
travelling 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 
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. 



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XIV


The Meeting

“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 leaned 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 honour 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 apologised 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. 

“Being myself wholly sceptical 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 spectre 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 mouldering 
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 brutalised 
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.” 



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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 side-
wall, 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. 

“To-morrow,” 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 Servia, 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 
recognised 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 marvellous 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. 



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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 marvellously 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 enumeranted 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 vigour 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, discolours 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 favoured lover of the beautiful Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. 
Her early death plunged him into inconsolable grief. It is the nature of 
vampires to increase and multiply, but according to an ascertained and 
ghostly law. 

“Assume, at starting, a territory perfectly free from that pest. How does it 
begin, and how does it multiply itself? I will tell you. A person, more or 
less wicked, puts an end to himself. A suicide, under certain circumstances, 
becomes a vampire. That spectre visits living people in their slumbers; they 
die, and almost invariably, in the grave, develop into vampires. This 
happened in the case of the beautiful Mircalla, who was haunted by one of 
those demons. My ancestor, Vordenburg, whose title I still bear, soon 
discovered this, and in the course of the studies to which he devoted 
himself, learned a great deal more. 

“Among other things, he concluded that suspicion of vampirism would probably 
fall, sooner or later, upon the dead Countess, who in life had been his 
idol. He conceived a horror, be she what she might, of her remains being 
profaned by the outrage of a posthumous execution. He has left a curious 
paper to prove that the vampire, on its expulsion from its amphibious 
existence, is projected into a far more horrible life; and he resolved to 
save his once beloved Mircalla from this. 

“He adopted the stratagem of a journey here, a pretended removal of her 
remains, and a real obliteration of her monument. When age had stolen upon 
him, and from the vale of years, he looked back on the scenes he was 
leaving, he considered, in a different spirit, what he had done, and a 
horror took possession of him. He made the tracings and notes which have 
guided me to the very spot, and drew up a confession of the deception that 
he had practised. If he had intended any further action in this matter, 
death prevented him; and the hand of a remote descendant has, too late for 
many, directed the pursuit to the lair of the beast.” 

We talked a little more, and among other things he said was this: 

“One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand. The slender hand of 
Mircalla closed like a vice of steel on the General’s wrist when he raised 
the hatchet to strike. But its power is not confined to its grasp; it leaves 
a numbness in the limb it seizes, which is slowly, if ever, recovered from.” 

The following Spring my father took me a tour through Italy. We remained 
away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events 
subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with 
ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; 
sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a 
reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the 
drawing-room door. 


THE END