Carmilla

by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

makes us cover up our heads when the door cracks suddenly, or the flicker of an expiring candle makes the shadow of a bedpost dance upon the wall, nearer to our faces.

pluck open cupboards;

At our left the narrow road wound away under clumps of lordly trees, and was lost to sight amid the thickening forest.

Over the sward and low grounds a thin film of mist was stealing like

smoke, marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there we could see the river faintly flashing in the moonlight.

tapestry opposite the foot of the bed, representing Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom;

I saw the very face which had visited me in my childhood at night, which remained so fixed in my memory,

There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling melancholy persistent refusal to afford me the least ray of light.

In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine.

soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.

I now write, after an interval of more than ten years, with a trembling hand, with a confused and horrible recollection of certain occurrences and situations,

which our passions have been most wildly and terribly roused, that are of all others the most vaguely and dimly remembered.

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.”

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish.

“I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.

Thus fortifed I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

There was not the slightest stir of respiration.

It seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition.

At this distance of time I cannot tell you, or even understand, how I overcame my horror so effectually as to lie alone in my room that night.

I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me.

The narcotic of an unsuspected influence was acting upon me, and my perceptions were benumbed.

myrmidons

I hope, by God's blessing, to accomplish a pious sacrilege here, which

will relieve our earth of certain monsters, and enable honest people to sleep in their beds without being assailed by murderers.

incredible a few months since.” My ...

The night from which my sorrow dates

“I became more and more curious to ascertain who she was, every moment. She parried my attempts to discover very adroitly and pleasantly. The knowledge she showed of many passages in my life seemed to me all but unaccountable; and she appeared to take a not unnatural pleasure in foiling my curiosity, and in seeing me flounder in my eager perplexity, from one conjecture to another.

escutcheon,

They proved to be those of the long lost monument of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein.

The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin.