Carmilla

A carriage comes down a forest road in Styria far too fast, by moonlight, and goes over in front of a lonely castle. Nobody is badly hurt. Out of the wreck step a handsome, commanding woman in black and her daughter, who has fainted. The mother explains that she is travelling on business of life and death and cannot stop for an hour. Might the girl be left here, with strangers, for three months? The master of the house is an Englishman and a gentleman. He says yes. The carriage is righted and gone within minutes, and the girl, when she wakes, gives her name as Carmilla.

She is not a figure of old folk belief, and nobody ever told her story by a peasant hearth. Carmilla was invented by the Dublin writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Her tale ran in four parts in a London magazine called The Dark Blue, from December 1871 to March 1872, and Le Fanu reprinted it that year in his collection In a Glass Darkly. He dressed it as a case from the files of a physician named Hesselius, a document written by a woman called Laura, who has since died. Le Fanu knew the reports of the vampire panics that had swept central Europe in the century before his own, most of them gathered into a famous treatise by the French abbot Augustin Calmet, and he took his rules from there. The countess is his.

Laura is the lonely daughter of that English gentleman, nineteen years old, raised in a castle with two governesses and almost no company. She has met her guest before. At six she woke in her nursery to find a beautiful young lady kneeling by the bed, who lay down beside her and soothed her to sleep, and then came a pain like two needles driven into her chest. The household called it a dream. Now the same face is asleep in the guest room, and Carmilla, on waking, claims that she dreamed of Laura as a child too.

For a while it is a happy arrangement. The guest is lovely to look at, slender and graceful, with large dark eyes and hair so heavy and long that Laura likes to let it down and feel the weight of it in her hands, dark brown with a thread of gold. She moves slowly, as if always a little tired. She rises at about one in the afternoon, drinks a cup of chocolate, and eats nothing. She locks her bedroom door at night. She tells nothing of her family beyond the facts that it is ancient and noble. A typical evening has the two girls in the drawing room by candlelight, Carmilla’s arm around Laura’s neck, her cheek against Laura’s, murmuring that the two of them belong to each other and always will, in a voice so fervent that Laura is charmed and uneasy in the same breath.

There are other signs. When a village funeral passes and the mourners sing a hymn, Carmilla shakes with fury and covers her ears. Girls in the cottages around the estate are dying of a wasting illness, each saying that something seized her by the throat in the night. A travelling pedlar notices that the young lady has one tooth as long and fine as a needle, and cheerfully offers to file it down. And when a crate of restored family portraits arrives, one of them, dated 1698 and labelled Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, shows Carmilla’s face exactly, down to the small mole on the throat. Laura’s own mother, it turns out, descended from the Karnsteins. That family is extinct, and its ruined village lies three miles away.

Then Laura’s nights change. She wakes to see something moving at the foot of her bed, a sooty black animal like a huge cat, four or five feet long, pacing back and forth with the restless tread of a caged beast. It springs onto the bed. She feels the two needles again, an inch or two apart, deep in her breast. When she screams and the candle is lit, a woman in a dark dress is standing there, perfectly still, and then is at the door, and then is gone, though the door is still locked from the inside. After that Laura grows pale and heavy-limbed, and comes to rather enjoy the sinking feeling. A doctor finds a small blue mark just below her throat and speaks to her father in private.

The truth arrives with an old friend, General Spielsdorf, whose own niece has just died. He tells how a girl named Millarca was left in his care by her mother after a masked ball, how his niece sickened, and how he hid in a dressing room with a sword and saw a black shape swell at the foot of the girl’s bed and fasten on her throat. He has come to find the tomb of the Countess Mircalla. In the roofless chapel of Karnstein, with the smell of damp stone around them, Carmilla walks in. The General goes at her with a woodman’s axe. She catches his wrist in her small hand, the axe drops, and she is not there any more.

The ending is paperwork and iron. A baron named Vordenburg, whose ancestor once loved the living Mircalla and hid her grave to spare it, produces the old plans and finds the tomb. An imperial commission opens it. The countess has been buried a hundred and fifty years, and her face is warm with colour, her eyes are open, and her limbs are supple. The lead coffin holds blood to a depth of seven inches, and she lies sunk in it. They drive a sharp stake through her heart, and she gives one piercing shriek. They cut off the head, burn body and head together, and scatter the ashes on the river. It works.

What she could do is set down with care. She walks abroad at certain hours and returns to the grave to renew herself, and no one can say how she leaves it without disturbing the earth. Locks do not hold her. She can be a cat, or a shapeless dark mass, or a girl in a white nightdress. Her hand is delicate and closes like a vice, and the limb it grips stays numb long afterwards. She kills most of her victims quickly, but now and then she fixes on one with a hunger that passes for love, and courts her slowly, by stages, wanting something like consent.

Her limits are just as exact. She must sleep in her own coffin, so whoever finds the tomb has found her. She is bound to her own name: every alias has to be built from the same letters, which is why Mircalla becomes Millarca and then Carmilla and never anything else. And she dies by the old method, stake and blade and fire.

A quarter of a century later Bram Stoker published Dracula, and his working notes first placed that story in Styria too. Carmilla got there first. Laura, writing years afterwards, admits that she still sometimes starts up from a daydream, sure she has heard a light footstep at the drawing room door.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Carmilla?

Carmilla is a female vampire and the title character of a novella by the Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. In the story she is really Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, a noblewoman of Styria who has been dead for a hundred and fifty years. She poses as a stranded young guest in order to feed on the daughters of the houses that take her in.

Is Carmilla older than Dracula?

Yes, Carmilla is older than Dracula. Carmilla was serialised in the magazine The Dark Blue from December 1871 to March 1872, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula appeared about twenty-five years later. Stoker’s working notes first set his own story in Styria, the same region where Carmilla takes place.

Is Carmilla based on a real legend?

No, Carmilla is a literary invention, not a figure from folklore. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu created her, drawing his vampire rules from reports of the vampire panics of central Europe, many of which were collected by the French abbot Augustin Calmet. No traditional tale of a Countess Karnstein existed before the novella.

Why does Carmilla use different names?

Carmilla can only use names made from the letters of her original name. She was born Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and she appears as Millarca to General Spielsdorf’s household and as Carmilla to Laura’s. The novella treats this as a fixed limit on the vampire.

How is Carmilla destroyed?

Carmilla is destroyed in her tomb in the ruined chapel of Karnstein. An imperial commission opens the lead coffin, drives a stake through her heart, cuts off her head, burns the body and scatters the ashes on the river. She can be found because she must return to her own coffin to sleep.

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