Carmilla

"What?" exclaimed my father, more than ever bewildered.

"To strike her head off."

"Cut her head off!"

"Aye, with a hatchet, with a spade, or with anything that can cleave

through her murderous throat. You shall hear," he answered, trembling

with rage. And hurrying forward he said: "That beam will answer for a seat; your dear child is fatigued; let her

be seated, and I will, in a few sentences, close my dreadful story."

The squared block of wood, which lay on the grass-grown pavement of the

chapel, formed a bench on which I was very glad to seat myself, and in

the meantime the General called to the woodman, who had been removing

some boughs which leaned upon the old walls; and, axe in hand, the hardy

old fellow stood before us.

He could not tell us anything of these monuments; but there was an old

man, he said, a ranger of this forest, at present sojourning in the

house of the priest, about two miles away, who could point out every

monument of the old Karnstein family; and, for a trifle, he undertook

to bring him back with him, if we would lend him one of our horses, in

little more than half an hour.

"Have you been long employed about this forest?" asked my father of the

old man.

"I have been a woodman here," he answered in his patois, "under the

forester, all my days; so has my father before me, and so on, as many

generations as I can count up. I could show you the very house in the

village here, in which my ancestors lived."

"How came the village to be deserted?" asked the General.

"It was troubled by revenants, sir; several were tracked to their

graves, there detected by the usual tests, and extinguished in the usual

way, by decapitation, by the stake, and by burning; but not until many

of the villagers were killed.

"But after all these proceedings according to law," he continued--"so

many graves opened, and so many vampires deprived of their horrible

animation--the village was not relieved. But a Moravian nobleman, who

happened to be traveling this way, heard how matters were, and being

skilled--as many people are in his country--in such affairs, he offered

to deliver the village from its tormentor. He did so thus: There being a

bright moon that night, he ascended, shortly after sunset, the towers of

the chapel here, from whence he could distinctly see the churchyard

beneath him; you can see it from that window. From this point he watched

until he saw the vampire come out of his grave, and place near it the

linen clothes in which he had been folded, and then glide away towards

the village to plague its inhabitants.

"The stranger, having seen all this, came down from the steeple, took

the linen wrappings of the vampire, and carried them up to the top of

the tower, which he again mounted. When the vampire returned from his

prowlings and missed his clothes, he cried furiously to the Moravian,

whom he saw at the summit of the tower, and who, in reply, beckoned him

to ascend and take them. Whereupon the vampire, accepting his

invitation, began to climb the steeple, and so soon as he had reached

the battlements, the Moravian, with a stroke of his sword, clove his

skull in twain, hurling him down to the churchyard, whither, descending

by the winding stairs, the stranger followed and cut his head off, and

next day delivered it and the body to the villagers, who duly impaled

and burnt them.