Carmilla, chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen is called Ordeal and Execution, and for its first half it is still a scavenger hunt. A stranger walks into the chapel, and he is exactly what the chapter needs: not a priest, not a hero, a scholar with gold spectacles who has read too much and believes too little. The General greets him like a brother. They pace out distances, they lift a stone, and there it is, the monument that was removed so thoroughly that nobody remembered where the grave had stood. The baron found it anyway, because he read the old books nobody else bothered with.

That is the dry joke under this chapter. The village fought the thing with stakes and fire and lost. The thing that finally locates it is a man with a library.

Then the tone drops. Laura goes home and Carmilla is simply not there. Not gone with a door, this time (there is never a door) but absent in a way that frightens her more: no news, no trace, no explanation from a house full of people who watched her arrive and leave and arrive again. She sits up with two servants and Madame, and a priest says rites she does not understand, and she is unable to say which of those two things is supposed to protect her.

And then Le Fanu does the most modern thing in the novel. Before he shows the ordeal, he argues for it. Two long paragraphs, almost a legal brief: the testimonies, the commissions, the volumes of evidence, the flat admission that he cannot explain what he saw except by the belief of the country. It reads like a man defending himself to a reader who has already decided he is writing nonsense. He is not asking to be believed. He is asking not to be dismissed. There is a difference, and he knows it, and it is why the chapter is titled the way it is. The verdict is not the interesting part. The ordeal is the part where he has to stand behind his own testimony.

Then the grave opens, and the horror is not in the supernatural at all. The face is warm. There is no smell. Two doctors, one of them present on the side of the inquiry, put their names to a respiration and a heartbeat. The flesh gives. The lead coffin floats with blood. Everything the chapter needs is already in that sentence, and Le Fanu writes it like a coroner, which is worse than if he had written it like a poet.

What follows, I am not going to make beautiful. A stake, a shriek that could come from any living throat in its last agony, the head struck off, the blood, the wood, the ashes into the river. It is execution, filed as medicine, summarized from an official paper. Laura tells us she is working from the report, not from memory. That distance is the last mercy in the book, and it belongs to her, not to the thing in the coffin.

Seven minutes and fifty-eight seconds. Still one voice. Carmilla does not appear and does not speak; the chapter’s whole force is that she is reduced, finally, to a body in a coffin with the warmth still in it. One chapter left.

Le Fanu’s novel is in the public domain.