Both voices are synthetic. I designed them, auditioned them against the text, and keep them; where the breath falls is directed here, line by line.
Carmilla, chapter eight
Chapter nine is called The Doctor, and the doctor is a relief for exactly as long as it takes him to look.
He is grave, spectacled, white-haired, and he does the most dangerous thing anyone has done so far: he believes Laura. He listens to the whole account, and as she proceeds he grows graver and graver. Then he asks her father to lower her dress an inch, and there it is, below the collar: a small blue spot, about the size of the tip of a little finger, at the exact point where she felt the two needles.
The mark is tiny. That is the horror. Whatever is happening leaves almost nothing to see, and everything it needs. Her father goes pale. The doctor looks at it with what Laura calls a gloomy triumph, the face of a man watching a theory come true and wishing it hadn’t.
And then the word is not said. Nobody says it. The doctor gives directions, orders a new arrangement of the household, promises to return at seven, and rides away eastward through the forest, and every part of it circles a name none of them will speak. This is where the novel’s greatest trick shows itself: everyone is looking directly at the evidence, and no one will say what it is.
Carmilla does not appear. Not once, not a line. She is shut in her room with a servant posted at her door, and the chapter is built from the voices of people talking about her in the next room. So the reading does something the series has not done before: it goes quiet in one throat. There is no guest to speak, so only Laura speaks. The house’s two voices drop to one, and it is not an accident of the text. It is the text.
Her father knows more than he will say. The letter from General Spielsdorf is late, and when it arrives he looks as if he wishes the writer at the bottom of the Red Sea. He refuses Laura’s questions with an irritation she has never heard from him. Then he orders the carriage for Karnstein, the ruined castle on the grounds the General is coming to see. The chapter that finally names the wound is also the chapter that starts walking toward where it was made.
Medicine described it. Nobody diagnosed it. And the girl it is happening to keeps not noticing, which is how the whole book works: Laura shows us everything and understands almost none of it, and we are the only ones reading over her shoulder.
Ten minutes and twenty-four seconds. One voice this time. Press play.
Le Fanu’s novel is in the public domain.