Carmilla, chapter ten

Chapter eleven is called The Story, and it is the one the whole book has been withholding. The General agrees, with an effort, and then does the thing Laura’s father asked him for in the last chapter. He tells it.

It begins as a party. Count Carlsfeld’s schloss, six leagues past Karnstein, lamps strung through the trees, fireworks, an orchestra, a lake that answers back with voices. The night from which my sorrow dates, he calls it, and he only lets himself say that after he has made you see the lights. Grief in this novel always arrives dressed as something else.

Then the masked lady. She knows him. She names scenes he sat in years ago, houses, small incidents he had long stopped thinking about, and every attempt he makes to find out who she is gets parried, pleasantly, expertly. His own memory is being used as a key on him, and he enjoys it. That is the part that costs him later. He is flattered by the very thing that is hunting his ward.

And the ward. Bertha, dancing, no mask, and a young lady in a mask who will not stop watching her. He notices. He puts it in a sentence a man says at the time and cannot say afterward: had she not worn a mask, he could have been more certain whether she was really watching. Then the four words that are the whole chapter. I am now well assured that she was. Now. Everything in this account is told from after.

Le Fanu hides the answer in plain sight in a single clause. The mother calls her daughter Millarca. Millarca is Carmilla, rearranged. The book has been spelling the killer’s name in an anagram and letting you read past it, the same way the General read past a girl staring at his ward all night.

The masked lady will not take off her mask, and she gives her reason as a kind of accounting: you have no mask to remove, you can offer me nothing in exchange. No exchange. Nothing to trade. The guest who enters Laura’s life on those same terms refuses, at the very first meeting, to be known, and calls it fair.

Then the gentleman in black. Elegant, in plain evening dress, his face the most deadly pale the General ever saw except in death, and wearing no mask at all. He asks for a few words. The lady touches her lip for silence, promises to come back, and walks off with him into the crowd. She does not come back. Later the General will call that interview prearranged, every circumstance of it, worked with the profoundest cunning. He only knows that afterward.

Nine minutes and thirty-six seconds. No Carmilla in this one, and no name for her either, unless you turn Millarca around. One voice again, Laura’s, carrying the General’s. Press play.

Le Fanu’s novel is in the public domain.