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 seven
Chapter eight is called Search, and the search is for the wrong girl.
It opens with the room, and the room is a lie: perfectly undisturbed except for our violent entrance. The door was locked, the windows were secured, and the woman they are looking for is not in it. Four o’clock passes and daylight brings no solution. By morning the whole chateau is turned over, the grounds walked, the stream about to be dragged, and Laura’s father is already living the tale he will have to tell the girl’s mother on her return. Then, at one o’clock, Laura runs up and finds her standing at her dressing table. Astounded. She could not believe her eyes.
Carmilla’s account arrives with every door accounted for and none of them explaining anything. She slept as usual with her doors locked, her sleep uninterrupted and dreamless, and she woke on the sofa in the dressing room, the door between the rooms open and the other forced. She is the lightest sleeper alive; a great deal of noise must have attended all of it, and she heard none of it.
Then the father supplies the chapter’s real horror, which is a theory. Sleepwalking. It is tidy, it is innocent, and it explains the room perfectly. He lists what it involves, in the negative: no drugging, no tampering with locks, no burglars, or poisoners, or witches. Every item on that list is exactly what it was.
Only one thing is allowed to see it. Carmilla’s eye follows him for a moment, with a sly, dark glance. She watches the alibi get built, and lets it stand.
And the cost is the sentence no one in the room reads. He looks from her to his own pale daughter, and wishes Laura looked more like herself, and sighs. They are hunting the missing girl while the missing girl is the one standing beside him. So the alarms end happily, and Carmilla is restored to her friends.
Restored. That is the chapter’s last word.
Seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds. The cast is the same as the first six chapters: Laura narrating, Carmilla speaking only her own lines. Press play.
Le Fanu’s novel is in the public domain.