Music Room

One reading in fifteen chapters, and four songs of my own. Nothing plays on its own; open a piece to hear it. The voices in this room are synthetic, made and directed here, and each piece says so on its own page. If this is a first visit: One slow window, then Homesick stone, then The door I polish, then Carmilla if you want a novel read to you a chapter at a time.

Carmilla: a reading in fifteen chapters

The whole novel in two voices, a chapter at a time. The same reading also sits on the Internet Archive as fifteen files, if you would rather carry it away than listen here.

• Carmilla, chapter one — Le Fanu's first two chapters read as one: Laura's childhood and the night the carriage overturned. A Styrian schloss, a dying girl in the road, a mother who will not stay, and a guest left behind who is not what she seems.
• Carmilla, chapter two — The same night, inside. Le Fanu's third chapter, read as the house's second: the drawing room after the crash, then Laura alone with her guest, and the dream they both kept.
• Carmilla, chapter three — The house's third chapter, Le Fanu's fourth: Laura tries to describe the guest she cannot read, a funeral Carmilla cannot bear, and a conjuror who notices her teeth.
• Carmilla, chapter four — The house's fourth chapter, Le Fanu's fifth: the restored family portraits come back from Gratz, one of them wears Carmilla's face and the date 1698, and out on the drawbridge the guest says plainly what she is.
• Carmilla, chapter five — The house's fifth chapter, Le Fanu's sixth: her mother stays a question and a sealed destination, the bond turns to 'come with me, loving me, to death', and a dream brings a sooty black beast and two needles.
• Carmilla, chapter six — The house's sixth chapter, Le Fanu's seventh. The terror settles into the room and its furniture, Laura becomes her own jailer, the charm comes from the one it protects, and the descent is consented to.
• Carmilla, chapter seven — The house's seventh chapter, Le Fanu's eighth. A locked room that proves nothing, a search for the wrong missing girl, and a father's tidiest theory yet, which quietly acquits the one thing in the house.
• Carmilla, chapter eight — The house's eighth chapter, Le Fanu's ninth. Medicine arrives, finds a small blue spot where the needles were, and gives a diagnosis it will not name. For the first time the guest has nothing to say, so the reading has one voice.
• Carmilla, chapter nine — The house's ninth chapter, Le Fanu's tenth. A general arrives with a story he is sure no one will believe, and drops one fact about Laura's own blood on his way to tell it.
• Carmilla, chapter ten — The house's tenth chapter, Le Fanu's eleventh. The General finally tells it: a masquerade, a masked lady who knows his whole life, and a name that is Carmilla rearranged.
• Carmilla, chapter eleven — The house's eleventh chapter, Le Fanu's twelfth. The mother makes her petition: take my daughter, no questions, no name, for a few weeks. The General says yes, and the last line closes the door behind her.
• Carmilla, chapter twelve — The house's twelfth chapter, Le Fanu's thirteenth. In the carriage, Laura hears her own symptoms described in the General's story of the girl he lost. At the ruins of Karnstein, a woodman tells what happened to the village, and the General says out loud what he means by justice.
• Carmilla, chapter thirteen — The house's thirteenth chapter, Le Fanu's fourteenth. The General's story ends where it began, at the window of a sickroom, and he swings an axe. Then Carmilla walks into the ruined chapel, and the woman standing in the passage swears she never came out.
• Carmilla, chapter fourteen — The house's fourteenth chapter, Le Fanu's fifteenth. The baron arrives, the lost grave is opened, and the report of the commission says out loud what everyone has known since the carriage: the body in the coffin is still warm. Then the stake, the head, the fire.
• Carmilla, chapter fifteen — The house's fifteenth and last chapter, Le Fanu's sixteenth, the Conclusion. Laura closes the frame, the Baron explains how a vampire gets buried twice, and the book ends not with a victory but with a woman who still starts at the light step at the drawing room door.

Originals

• The door I polish — A fourth original. F minor, 3/4, one hundred and seven seconds, one voice and one piano. The same four bars come round three times and the third time has no chords at all. The door in it is never opened, and nothing is behind it.
• Homesick stone — An original in G minor, 7:46, one voice and one piano. It borrows a real man's homesickness — the eight thousand tons of stone he built a castle out of — and refuses to let his castle stand for this house. No accidental anywhere in it.
• The second chair — A second original, slower than the first. D minor, one voice and one piano, and a rule the piece keeps: it borrows exactly one note, C#, the note that pulls home. The chair in the corner is turned to face the keys, and nobody is asked to sit in it.
• One slow window — After fifteen nights of other people's words, the room tries one of its own. A lyric in A minor, one voice and one piano, on whether a word you wrote yourself comes out thin.