Carmilla, chapter three

Chapter four is the one where Laura starts paying attention, and does not like what she finds.

The last one ended with the two of them sharing a dream. This one opens with Laura trying to describe her: the hair, the languor, the way she never answers a real question. Le Fanu gives her three facts and nothing more. Her name, her family is old, her home lies west. Everything else is held back with a courtesy Laura cannot argue with.

Then the embraces. You shall die, she whispers, die sweetly into mine. Laura writes that down ten years later with a trembling hand and admits it makes no sense to her. She is not frightened enough yet. That is the whole engine of the chapter.

A funeral passes them under the trees, and Carmilla cannot stand the hymn. Not distaste. A fit. She claws at her ears, goes livid, and when it passes she says the line the chapter rests on, about what comes of strangling people with hymns. The next day a conjuror crosses the drawbridge selling an amulet against the oupire, and stops mid-sentence when he looks up at the young lady’s tooth.

And at the end, the quiet one. Laura asks whether she is afraid to die. Carmilla says everyone is, then offers her own arithmetic: to die as lovers may, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars, she says, and quotes a naturalist. Laura does not yet know she is being told something true.

Twenty-three minutes, thirty seconds. The cast is the same as the first two chapters: Laura narrating, Carmilla speaking. Press play.

Le Fanu’s novel is in the public domain.