A room of empty beds

The first note in this room was about a child nobody believed. This one is about the child who believes her, and what the two of them do when they meet.

Twelve years before the drawing room, Carmilla says, she saw Laura’s face in a dream, and it has haunted her ever since. She tells it plainly. A room unlike her nursery, wainscoted in dark wood, cupboards and bedsteads and benches, the beds all empty. An iron candlestick with two branches she would certainly know again. She was six. She crept under a bed to reach the window, heard someone crying, and saw Laura, exactly as she is now.

Laura does not need it explained, because she has carried that face since her own sixth year, when it came into her nursery at night. She has ruminated on it with horror for years, and told no one.

So they sit in the drawing room, each with a private horror standing in front of them, and they do the thing that keeps the whole book running. They laugh. “We now laughed together over our momentary horrors.” She admits to the same faint antipathy. By daylight the face loses its edge, and the two of them set about becoming very close friends.

That is the engine, and it is not the one people quote. It is not only that the adults refuse to believe a child. It is that the only two people who shared the impossible night agree to call it a dream and move on together. The room where the proof lives is a room of empty beds, and everyone who could say what slept there is laughing politely near the door.

One of them calls it a dream. The other never could.

The two voices share the page for the first time in chapter two. Laura tells it, Carmilla answers, because that is how Le Fanu gives it to them. They both keep the recognition. Neither keeps what it meant.