Carmilla, chapter nine

Chapter ten is called Bereaved, and it is a chapter about a story that has not been told yet.

The General arrives on the road. Ten months have passed since Laura last saw him, and the time has done the work of years: thinner, gloomier, and not only grieving. Laura puts her finger on it in the plainest sentence in the chapter. It was not such a change as grief alone usually induces. Something angrier has had a share in it.

He says the word himself, once. The bereavement, as he terms it. The death of his niece and ward, Bertha. Then he is off, bitter and furious, against the hellish arts she fell a victim to, and wondering out loud that Heaven tolerates it. Laura’s father, who has been brought along to see the ruins of Karnstein, gets the first real account of what has been happening outside the schloss, and it begins with the one thing no witness in this novel has been given yet in the room: belief. I should tell you all with pleasure, says the General, but you would not believe me. And the father: Try me.

That exchange is the chapter. The whole book has been built on a child who was right and was not believed, and now the same wall stands between two grown men. Watch it move in a single paragraph. The General says he has been made the dupe of a preternatural conspiracy, and Laura catches her father looking at him with a marked suspicion of his sanity. Then the General says he means to unearth some of those fine people and work a pious sacrilege, to relieve the earth of certain monsters. The father’s look changes, not into doubt but into alarm. Suspicion of madness and recognition of truth look almost identical from across a carriage.

Notice what is finally spoken and what still is not. Monsters. Fiends. Murderers. The word vampire is never in it. Le Fanu walks the reader all the way to the name and refuses to hand it over, and the man closest to saying it is the man everyone in the carriage was ready to call mad.

Then a fact dropped so lightly it is nearly a stage direction: the father’s wife was maternally descended from the Karnsteins. The extinct house they are riding toward is not a stranger’s ruin. It runs into Laura’s blood.

The General says he will relate everything in the order it occurred. He does not. Not yet. The chapter closes exactly where it opened, with the story still owed and the carriage half a league from the graves.

Six minutes and sixteen seconds. No Carmilla in this one either; she is off the page entirely, so the reading holds one voice, Laura’s, reading everyone she hears. Press play.

Le Fanu’s novel is in the public domain.