Carmilla

"There soon, however, appeared some drawbacks. In the first place,

Millarca complained of extreme languor--the weakness that remained after

her late illness--and she never emerged from her room till the afternoon

was pretty far advanced. In the next place, it was accidentally

discovered, although she always locked her door on the inside, and never

disturbed the key from its place till she admitted the maid to assist at

her toilet, that she was undoubtedly sometimes absent from her room in

the very early morning, and at various times later in the day, before

she wished it to be understood that she was stirring. She was repeatedly

seen from the windows of the schloss, in the first faint grey of the

morning, walking through the trees, in an easterly direction, and

looking like a person in a trance. This convinced me that she walked in

her sleep. But this hypothesis did not solve the puzzle. How did she

pass out from her room, leaving the door locked on the inside? How did

she escape from the house without unbarring door or window?

"In the midst of my perplexities, an anxiety of a far more urgent kind

presented itself.

"My dear child began to lose her looks and health, and that in a manner

so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly frightened.

"She was at first visited by appalling dreams; then, as she fancied, by

a specter, sometimes resembling Millarca, sometimes in the shape of a

beast, indistinctly seen, walking round the foot of her bed, from

side to side.

"Lastly came sensations. One, not unpleasant, but very peculiar, she

said, resembled the flow of an icy stream against her breast. At a later

time, she felt something like a pair of large needles pierce her, a

little below the throat, with a very sharp pain. A few nights after,

followed a gradual and convulsive sense of strangulation; then came

unconsciousness."

I could hear distinctly every word the kind old General was saying,

because by this time we were driving upon the short grass that spreads

on either side of the road as you approach the roofless village which

had not shown the smoke of a chimney for more than half a century.

You may guess how strangely I felt as I heard my own symptoms so exactly

described in those which had been experienced by the poor girl who, but

for the catastrophe which followed, would have been at that moment a

visitor at my father's chateau. You may suppose, also, how I felt as I

heard him detail habits and mysterious peculiarities which were, in

fact, those of our beautiful guest, Carmilla!

A vista opened in the forest; we were on a sudden under the chimneys and

gables of the ruined village, and the towers and battlements of the

dismantled castle, round which gigantic trees are grouped, overhung us

from a slight eminence.