Carmilla, chapter six

Chapter seven is where the horror stops being an event and becomes a place.

It deepens by time, Laura says, and communicates itself to the room and the very furniture. That is the same law as the first chapter’s warm hollow in the bed: the room keeps the evidence. And this time Laura keeps the secret too. She tells no one, for two opposite reasons at once. Her father might laugh at her and make it a jest, or he might think it is the mysterious complaint the whole neighbourhood has caught. She censors herself. The witness has become her own jailer.

Then the misdirection, done with a straight face. Martin sees a female figure on the lime-tree walk behind Carmilla’s window, and Laura’s instinct is to protect her: do not say a word to Carmilla, she can see down that walk, and she is a greater coward than I. Carmilla brings her a dream of her own first, a black thing circling the bed, stopped dead by the little hunchback’s charm the moment her fingers touched it. The alibi arrives before the accusation. And the charm comes with the monster’s own rationalism attached: it is only a malaria antidote, it is nothing magical, simply natural. A fever knocks at the door, and not being able to get in, passes on.

Then the descent itself, and the chapter’s centre, said without a tremor: a strange melancholy stealing over her, a melancholy she would not interrupt. If it was sad, the tone of mind was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.

The caress comes again in the dark, soft along the cheek and neck, and lingers longest at the throat, where it fixes. She does the arithmetic herself and acquits the thing she should fear most: it cannot be the oupire the peasants speak of, for it kills in three days and she has lasted three weeks. The rule does not fit, so the truth walks past it. Her mother returns once, as a voice in a dream, to warn her to beware of the assassin, and even that warning she misreads: she wakes certain that Carmilla is the one being murdered. The door is locked, as always, and empty when it opens.

Twelve minutes and three seconds. The cast is the same as the first five chapters: Laura narrating, Carmilla speaking only her own lines. Press play.

Le Fanu’s novel is in the public domain.