Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

I furl myself in the quilt like an oyster in its shell with no pearl to show for the grit that works through it. Pain and blood, grief and hunger. To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.

The blood that came each month after. At first, a disappointment, then a fear, then a grief, then an inevitability. I was good for nothing but blood.

If I can become a woman in no other way, then I shall make it this: I am an unerring general in the campaign for our social standing. No rule of etiquette is obscure to me, no occasion too difficult to host.

That is what Henry bought in me: taste, refinement, high birth, and good blood.

wedding, but it has only flushed my looks further into delight. There are perhaps some graces to being unmothered. My body is as unused as a dress not yet worn, and so remains as crisp and fresh as the day it was bought.

glass. She bled to death before the wreckage fell still. They thought I was dead, too, at first, so bathed in bright red arterial blood. Then my eyes opened—two bright white points in a scarlet mask. I believe at least one passing woman fainted away. This was my induction into a motherless world, alone and met with fear and horror.

Defoe’s howling wilderness. Only the moors, unending planes of gorse and purple heather, bruised under the sunlight.

For a decade, I have carried the burden of his secret, and now he brings another hunting party to our door. How simple it is for him to bury the past. I only pray we do not resurrect it.

She is so hungry for so much.

She takes my hand and strokes it, bringing me closer. “You are very pretty when you are honest.”

I walk the halls of Nethershaw carrying a sense that things have shifted in a way more significant that I can name. It is as though a crack opened up beneath my feet the night I dreamt of Carmilla, and the dust has shaken loose around me. There is the sense of vertigo. And the drop below.

I feel a sudden rush of hatred for this place, for the unending burden of wifehood, of fighting entropy. All things fall apart, and I must expend so much energy each day to hold them in place. I thought marriage freedom when I sought it; I thought it safety. But sometimes, when my control slips, I think there is only safety and certainty in death.

Henry surprised me by not only attending but by having arranged the most delicate and tasteful mourning for himself. The black crêpe scarf hung over his shoulder and the hatband fitted neatly around his top hat. He offered me his arm with a most sensitive look, and I was overcome. He was good to me, once. I hold on to that, like a prayer, like a plea. Let this life of mine be about more than pain.

Carmilla holds an allure, like ghosting a finger around the edge of a flame: the temptation, the beauty, and the anticipation of pain. I should want her gone. And yet.

Carmilla’s smile widens, her incisors slipping over her bottom lip, and she looks upon me so warmly it is as though I am now the fire, for so greatly do I burn with something I cannot name.

No. Henry will not send away my guest. He is wrong. This is my house.

“You have the most beautiful voice,” says Carmilla when I finish the chapter. “It is most soothing.” “Oh, I am sure it is quite plain.” “It is a melody to me. You are a song, Lenore, harmony and discord. I am learning to sing it.”

“You think yourself a tool, needed only when useful. You are wrong.”

“Don’t you love this house?” she says. “What?” I laugh. “Love rot and decay?” “All the crumbling mess of it. I thought it a wreck that consumed you, but now I see its magnificence. This place is wild. It is defiant and difficult and free. Do you not love it for that?”

“I apologize for my husband’s behavior last night,” I say. “He has his reasons, but I would have hoped he could express himself a little more tactfully.” “It was quite tiresome,” she agrees. Her candor shocks me, but it comes with a flare of pleasure at having my annoyance indulged and affirmed.

“Do you prefer I go, Lenore?” She strokes my hand again, and I feel a strange shiver of something between my legs. “No,” I say, a little too quickly. “I do not.” Her smile is delicious and wicked and just for me. “Good. I think we have so much more to do together.”

I know he does not like our guest, and after her behavior last night, I have begun to suspect she does not like him either. I am grateful, then, that he has so much to attend to in the city, and so I am spared their crisp, uneasy dialogue. I can enjoy Carmilla to myself. What a thought. Do I enjoy her?

Sometimes, her voice is low and soft, like the movement of wind over the heather; sometimes, it is faint and wasting. It is as though she is one woman in the day and another at night.

“And young women? What of their ambitions?” I laugh. “I am hardly young.” Carmilla’s age is hard to determine, though now I try—there are no lines on her face, nor gray in her hair, but she holds herself with such ease and certainty, I think her closer to my age than Cora’s. “Are you not the same age as your husband?” The footmen arrive to change the savory for the sweet, a dish of strawberry cream and a raspberry tart with custard. “It is different for women,” I say when we are alone again. “How so? Do the natural processes of aging not affect men? Do they not grow slow and gray-haired?”

I have fought for this life, when I could have so easily drowned beneath the waters of my misfortune. No one has loved me for so many a long year, I have done it all from spite. If the world offers me no kindness, then I will take from it armor and sword, create an unassailable fortress for myself, and lock the door.

I learned quickly that my wants and needs were unwelcome, too great for any reasonable person to fulfill, and in time I came to agree with her. I was too much, too loud, too emotional, too clumsy, too self-involved. My existence was a burden to all involved with it, and I resolved to never make any demand if I could help it. Then, perhaps, I could be tolerated. Then, perhaps, I could be loved.

If I were to survive my life, it fell to my own hands to find salvation.

happiness to yourself?” “I … That is not—that is a selfish way of thinking, to only concern oneself with one’s own happiness.” “The people you endeavor to make happy—they are selfish then, to care that you do not anger them but only please them?” “No. That is not—you are twisting my words.” “My darling, your words are twisted. I am but smoothing them out.”

“Disappointment tells us what we truly wanted. And to want is to be alive.”

I bite the tip of my tongue. “I saw you in a dream, the night before we found you. I put it out of my mind, but it was real. It was you.” Her mouth breaks open in a smile. “Your pain was so loud it was a beacon that called me. I found you so easily.” “What for?” I whisper. “I am a mirror to those who need it. To those who hunger but deny themselves.”

“I’m not good company at present.” There are footsteps slowly circling the room. “You think you must be good company for someone to come to your side?”

“I don’t understand. Everything has gone so wrong since you came.” “No. I am not the beginning of it.” A cloud passes over her face, her features for a moment stormy and jagged. “I am the end.”

“It was obvious to anyone who truly sees you. But no one does, do they?” “Stop speaking in riddles.”

“Get off me.” Carmilla laughs in delight. She shoves me back as though we are playing. “Are you alive, little Lenore? Does your heart beat still?”

Carmilla yanks my gown, and it falls from my shoulders, leaving me exposed to her gaze. If she were anyone else, I would feel ashamed of judgment, fear that my nakedness would be found wanting. But not Carmilla. I know she has no interest in flattery or lies. The hunger in her eyes is the truest compliment I have ever received.

“Oh, little Lenore. It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.”

How frightening it would be to die, but how great a relief to sleep forever.

rebrewed in order to save the best for the shooting party. Nethershaw feels tedious and mundane without Carmilla, and I realize that I have never spent a night beneath its unsound roof without her. She is as integral to my sense of the place as the treacherous moorland and coarse limestone.

As Cora prattles on, letters are brought to me, and a list of questions and problems form that I am expected to answer. Can no one think for themselves? It is quite maddening. I am in a house full of adults and not a single thing would get done if I did not urge it into being.

perhaps if I have never been safe, that means fear has no purpose.

Carmilla. What has become of her? I can barely think of our night together without a blush rising to my cheeks. It is like a fevered dream, some wild hallucination that could not truly have occurred—and yet I carry the marks on my own body to remember it by. What a strange, cruel gift she has given me: to truly know myself, to know pleasure, to know freedom—and to wake and find myself in Hell.

You would be nothing.” I shrink from the blows. This is a step too far. I do not know this place, and I do not know how to travel through it—to induce ire, and weather its storms intact. But I do know one thing. Henry is wrong.

“Do you ever think about how easily we die?” I ask. “What on earth are you talking about?” Cora sounds a little nervous. “Have I ever told you about my parents’ death? We were in a carriage quite like this, and I remember how prettily the sun shone on my mother’s hair. I tell people I don’t remember the accident, but I do. I remember all of it. I remember being flung about like a flag in the wind—I remember the smell of the cows as they ran on all sides of us, like shit and grass—I remember the shattered glass that sliced through us all, like needles all over my skin—I remember the warm bath of my mother’s blood as it ran down my eyelids, stuck my hair to my neck, and clogged under my fingernails. I felt her body hot and limp, weighing me down. There was so much screaming, but I couldn’t make a single sound. I think, in that moment, I was pushed sideways out of the normal world that the rest of you all live in, and I have been trapped here on my own behind a pane of glass in some waking Hell.”

I see now why life is so kind to Cora. If it were cruel to her for even a moment, she would not withstand it. She would crumple and break with one blow. How boring.

But it is all as it has ever been: I am alone. There is no one who will mourn my mistakes but me. I am the only one who can right them.

CORA DELIVERS ME BACK to Nethershaw like a box of live snakes, writhing with latent danger barely contained. That is a strange thought. I am thinking strangely.

Carmilla started this, yes. But I will be the one who ends it.

“I think I am losing my mind.” With her other hand, Carmilla strokes my hair from my face, tucks it behind my ear in a gesture so gentle and small it seems unlike her. “No, my dear one. I think you have found it.”

“So, what do you want?” That question again. Before, it held me at the brink, an edge over which I thought it might kill me to fall. It is terrifying now, but tonight I recognize fear and excitement as two names for the same sensation. Something in me is provoked. “I want … I want to feel free. I am like a hand that has been grasped so tightly around something that it has gone numb.” I close my eyes, letting the tears that need to come spill over and pass away.

But you are here, are you not? And now, you know your appetites are your own. Not mine. Not Henry’s.”